Purity : The Cleansing of the Arts in Postwar America by Rebecca Fisher

Expressionist Painting: City Landscape City Landscape depicts a nonrepresentational scene.8 A sense of entrapment (or a means of escape) is felt as the applied and colorful paint appears to leak out from the central part of the support. Loosely constructed geometric shapes recall a rock-like surface, which enclose and frame the color within and assist the eye inward toward the colorful scene. Excess paint drippings, seen in various colors, move downward crossing over patches of stained and solid color, while the rock-like structures are once again emphasized with the intrusion of the colorful drippings. Separation of the Arts The emphasis placed on the formal element of color in City Landscape forces the viewer to 6 Varnedoe, 4. 7 Greenberg, 778. 8 Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1988), 32. focus strictly on the material used in painting. The lack of subject matter especially separates this painting from the art of literature. According to Greenberg, literature dominated the art of painting in the past. Renaissance painters like Giovanni Bellini, for example, transformed narratives into visual stories. The subject matter contained in paintings, like Saint Jerome Reading in a Landscape (1505), placed the art of painting in a subservient position as the inclusion of literature distracted the viewer from focusing on the unique qualities attached to painting.9 The avoidance of rendering recognizable objects therefore became one of the major characteristics portrayed in this new art.