In her essay 'Good Boys and Dead Girls' Mary Gordon identifies the 'American innocent'. She tracks him - young, restless and bad news for women - through the novels of Faulkner, Dreiser and Updike. 'All that matters is that his heart must be pure, and he must move forward to the quest which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search for the unfettered self.' The 'unfettered self', or rather its expression in paint, was exactly what the makers of Abstract Expressionism in the Forties and Fifties pursued. Robert Motherwell was one of them, and his collected writings - a revealing gloss on artists of the School of New York and on modern painting in general - reflect one of history's ironies.

LRB 25 March 1993 | PDF Download