Volume 2, Number 3 · March 19, 1964
American Realism
By Michael Fried
American Tradition in Painting
by John W. McCoubrey
Braziller, 128 pp., $4.95
The chief impulse behind the writing of American Tradition in Painting seems to have been Professor McCoubrey's desire to counteract the tendency implicit in formal criticism to relate Abstract Expressionist painting to artistic developments in Europe during the first four decades of this century, and to place it instead, firmly and unmistakably, in the context of a uniquely American tradition that goes back virtually to the first paintings done on American soil. Professor McCoubrey does not deny the importance of what had been achieved in Europe: but he maintains that Abstract Expressionism 'was born…in the American shape,' and that 'it is imbued with 'the material poetry of the country' and is part of a native visual tradition that it both continues and illuminates.' His book, consisting of an Introduction and five short chapters, is an attempt to characterize this tradition, largely by means of comparisons with roughly concurrent events in European painting, and to demonstrate its relevance to our understanding of paintings by Pollock, Tomlin, Gorky, De Kooning, Kline, Motherwell, and Rothko.
Review, 2255 words
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