A sign, an orange stain and then ... February 1997 - Cahiers d'Art
The size and the expressive power of American painting after World War II, called Abstract Expressionism, was characterized by the search for a universal symbolic language. Formed by the works of many artists working during the war years and all the fifties in New York, this current will be recognized as distinctly American painting. He then began to speak, for the first time, an art, "American" who was finally freed from the history and traditions of European art and works of many artists of the first generation "heroic" era-would be enough to cite all Pollock, Franz Kline and Rothko- offer to this theory, intentionally or not, the valuable support.
But at the same time, forced the grueling search for a universal symbolic language "American" also reveals the ease of its futility in academic styles and hedonism that finally emptied the works of all creative power-the same fate will happen in those years in Europe during the informal. " Once again a style subtracting energy for creativity. But the cultural gigantism which was put in motion to support and publicize this painting finally "Americana", concealed the feet of clay and stifled any doubts. It was the generation that followed in chronological order, the so-called "second" generation New York School, who, seeking to continue the research begun by the previous painting, he began to notice and had to bear the consequences for a development to find their own way. How could pass in silence the turning point of Phillip Guston, between 1959 and 1960, after a trip to Italy, in Umbria to see the frescoes by Luca Signorelli, when he stopped painting pictures typically "abstract expressionism" (with which had become known) to arrive at a figurative painting with a strong accent and autobiographical comics? It was the betrayal of a hero of the first generation to be held in private or striking signal of a crisis that would be agreed and been better not to advertise?
is possible that the only Frank O'Hara, writer, art critic and poet-in his article in the magazine Art News in 1962, had noticed the real reason for the turn of Guston? A crisis of values \u200b\u200bthat sharply Kimber Smith acknowledged in an interview published in 1975 at Art Press. Smith, another star of the second generation, from his exile in Paris had the chance to look with more distance and coldness to the problem: "... There was a movement known in New York history, Abstract Expressionism, he began a painting without a clear idea ... only a sign ... an orange stain ... and then adds the artist, he said, adding not be satisfied until it is finished ... and the result, the picture is a kind of history "as you make a picture" ... or the art of making a painting as a readable book ... At that time, all painted in more or less this way ... there were those who managed better than others, but all the painters were influenced by 'Abstract Expressionism ... Then comes the Pop Art painters and many have changed to make Pop Art now ... others have waited a bit to find the latest in the Op Art .. but so many were those who worked on an Abstract Expressionism style ... and I think that everything has stopped too early and that has never used the maximum of this method ... '.
example of the desire for freedom from schedules and the desire to reconnect to the history and traditional themes of painting still-light, color, space, gesture, performance, etc.. etc. .- is the work of two other New York artists of the fifties, not coincidentally close friend of O'Hara, Michael Goldberg and Norman Bluhm. Just
developed in the works since the late seventies until now by Mike Goldberg, who, choosing to live as well as in New York, half of the year in his home studio in the hills of Siena, arrives to paint the abstract paintings of plant surface of which combine a gestural painting of the sign still "action-painting", with obvious memories of the fourteenth-century frescoes of the Sienese school of painting masters or by the atmosphere of the Florentine Renaissance Mannerism. Or, even more striking, in the gigantic paintings by Norman Bluhm, after a period of producing paintings in a traditional style "Abstract Expressionism", shuns every academy to reach over the past two decades to paint pictures from the installation of color and form highly baroque . In his youth he had carefully observed and studied the stained glass windows of the French cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dame in Paris, but it was the meeting in Venice with the cycle of frescoes by Tiepolo who made reappearance in his imagination the distant origins of the Russo-Georgian. A mixture
which gave rise to the many, amazing, colorful paintings he made during the eighties.
Two of the many artists who are still far away from the noise of the jet and the record, to work on the fundamental values \u200b\u200bof painting and his troubled, tangled history and roots.
Norman and Mike and their paintings' inexorable product of my time, "as they would still set their friend Frank, if the days he had not gone too fast.
RP (Text published in the journal Cahiers d'Art Italy No. 19, January-February 1997)
three exhibitions on Japan: Ineffable Perfection, Araki and especially Gutai. 
guess these young artists in the post-war Japan, hurt and shocked, that reconstruct their imagination and re-invented its forms, that plunge in the colors (literally, as did some of them) or that - again bringing into play with their own bodies - rip the canvas. I guess women who are part of the movement, I see their works, the lights of the bells Atsuko Tanaka, cans of red lacquered Tsuruko Yamazaki (one of the few members of the group still alive and active), I seem to feel the vibrations of their creative activity. 
