Criticism as an Abstract Art

Harold Rosenberg is a brilliant critic whose most telling perceptions derive more easily from an organizing of ideas than from observation and description. He invented the name “Action Painting” for the currently fashionable American style that began after the war and now influences all painting from Indonesia to Warsaw and London. Like “impressionism” the name describes a movement as a whole much more accurately than any example. As a name it helps to determine style, giving it a place as an incarnation of American Pragmatism.

Arshile Gorky was the pseudonym of Vosdanig Adoian, a Turkish-Armenian refugee who came to this country in 1920 at the age of fifteen, and set about to create his own being. The pain...