What if I met Pissarro in his own time - say, when he was fifty, a man of unique talent and with a unique position in the art world? What if I watched him slowly growing older, slowly falling under the influence of the younger men? Would I understand better how an idea takes over in the world of art - be in a better position to see the profound irony of idea as opposed to life? In Pissarro's century it was discovered that Nature is not a fixed ideal, but a thing to be reconstructed according to the personal vision of the artist. With this thought begins modernity. And with this thought modernity ends. Where the pre-modernists had pursued nature in terms of its omniscience (i.e., that to become one with nature one had to paint like a god), modernity found its omniscient metaphor in process.

Pissarro appears not to have understood or had the gift for invention, or rather for that "literary rightness" so characteristic of modernity. The broken brushstroke to which he finally capitulated - the Pointillism of the younger men - was actually after a literary fact rather than a painterly one. Pointillism, after all, is an idea about painting. An idea extracted from the sensory experience, but nevertheless an idea. Impressionism itself is a literary idea, as opposed to an artistic rightness. The modernist is magnificently literary always. This is not to detract from his genius; nevertheless it is a practical genius. How could it be otherwise, when escaping from the status quo of nature? A grand plan must be made ready for this escape, and above all - a practical plan!

Pissarro did not know that for the young the emotion of being on the barricades is enough. He did not know that the young do not have responsibility - only audacity. Like Cezanne, he was under the illusion that truth was to be found in the process. Unlike Cezanne, he did not create his own process. And so he failed. It is important for us to understand his failure - more than their successes. We need his failure, for it contains a human element that hardly exists in Modernity.

Just as the Germans killed music, the French killed painting, by bringing into it the literary clarity that had produced a Stendhal - whose motto, you will remember, was "To be clear at all costs". But in painting you cannot decide a priori what is going to be clear. That's why Fragonard, who aimed at an artistic rightness, looks so much more ridiculous than Delacroix, who has the whole literary apparatus holding him up. One has only to look at a Delacroix to see that ideas are almost literally holding the painting together!

I have always thought this reliance on the literary arose quite naturally out of European culture, in the constant pull between the religious and the esthetical. The esthetical, of course, is traditionally defensive because of the religious. Painting, literature, none of the arts could deal with abstract thought, could be conceived of abstractly; they had to present ideas with which to fight this other Idea.

To understand Cezanne, we must realize that if he was not of his own time, neither was he really of ours. He is understood too much by his influence. In essence, his idea is directly opposed to that of the modernist. With Cezanne it is always how he sees that determines how he thinks, where the modernist, on the other hand, has changed perception by way of the conceptual. In other words, how one thinks has become the sensation.

Cezanne creates a special problem for us because he was so attuned to the process that he actually mistook it for life. We do not know whether the monumental coldness we feel is coming from the man or from his process. Like Manet, Cezanne gave us the "painting as a painting", but he also gave us our last great revelation about nature. This is what makes his "analytic" approach so extraordinarily moving. For Cezanne the means had become an ideal.

In modernity we find all Cezanne's preoccupation with process - without this ideal. But without an ideal one can only view life like a social scientist.

Nature, of course, is not life. A symbol, a metaphor - at most a moral. Used as a subject, it is a painfully literary as anything else. Yet to be obsessed with its secrets brought about an ambition, a virtuosity we do not find in modernity. We have only to compare the virtuosity of Picasso with that of Botticelli to see how true this is.

Modernity reveals itself slowly - there is a stutter within its ironies. It is as fearful of success as it is of failure. And it is so audience-oriented that an Andy Warhol can finally be taken as seriously as a Picasso. Picasso himself, the Arch Modernist, the man in whom the whole movement culminates, lets his audience in on everything, uses them almost as a third eye. Cezanne is not responsible for Picasso. But Picasso is responsible for Warhol.

It is painful to observe that modernity's most advanced ideas, its most adventurous works, are so often academic - if not in practice, then in theory. People who criticize modernity fail to realize that everything they want - all the didacticism, all the super-logic they long for - are all right there. In all the search of a Proust, or even of a Cezanne, all their penetrating analysis of nature and human nature, what lingers is but this analysis. If something else is wanted from these men, we must skirt the edge of a Cezanne canvas, where his touch is free from purpose, or go to the very end of Proust, where metaphor can no longer protect him.

With modernity the painter no longer had to make that perilous transition from one world to another called "He has only to "relate" each area, and each idea. Yet it was in this transition, in this journey, that the artist learned a swiftness, a surety, a Nijinsky-like utterance of his limbs, an incredible utilization of sight, that we associate now "only with the art of the past. This total involvement, this total coordination of the sense, this complete sensual experience has only very recently been captured again in Abstract expressionism. Here, in reaction to modernity, there is an insistence that one can no longer take refuge in ideas, that thought is one thing and its realization another, that real humility does not lie in all this super-rationality, but again, in trying to paint like a god.

To fully grasp the significance of passage it may help to think of it in terms of music. In late Schubert, for instance, the transition from one musical idea to another is "not" only apparent, but even too apparent. Like a bad poker player, Schubert always shows his hand. But this very faultiness, this very failure is his virtue. In it we see all the ingenuity, all the genius of the artist. In other words, we hear the bravura in a Schubert sonata as clearly as we see it in the lace sleeve of Vel‡zquez. In Beethoven, on the other hand, we feel a more powerful reserve. In Beethoven we don't know where the passage begins and where it ends; we don't know we are in a passage. His motifs are often so brief, of such short duration, that they disappear almost immediately into the larger idea. The overall experience of the whole composition becomes the passage.

Cezanne carries this idea even further into an extraordinary concept of one's whole life work as the passage. This is why his paintings are not objects like the paintings of Manet, who simply finishes one and begins another. Isn't it true that Cezanne makes everyone else look like a caricature of "the artist at work"? Doesn't he make it clear that it is a self-deception on their part to think they can "begin" or "finish" anything? Cezanne of course is not the first. Don't we also feel in Piero della Francesca and Rembrandt that the whole continuity of their work is the passage? Not until Mondrian do we discover this again. For the life of me, I can't tell which Mondrian succeeds and which fails - they are all so much part of the same thing.

It is rather strange how continually Mondrian's world touches that of the painters of the New York School in the fifties. Looking at the facts, Mondrian not only embraced Cubism when he first came to Paris, but embraced it with all the zeal of the convert; in fact he even clung to it after everybody else had given it up. If Cezanne "solidified" Impressionism, it was Mondrian who gave Cubism fluidity. It is hard today to realize how momentous Cubism was at that time. It had taken over the world of art to an extraordinary degree. So much so that it's quite surprising to see the perfect ease with which both Picasso and Braque left it. "We gave up Cubism because we loved painting", was Braque's casual explanation. Very witty - very French - but he forgot that all the others had given up painting because they loved Cubism. Only in Europe do you find men like that - men who make a whole revolution, guillotine anybody and everybody who disagrees with it, and then change their mind.

The irony of Mondrian is that, like every Messiah, he was Messianic about things that cannot be transmitted. We must be grateful, however, that Mondrian the Messiah failed, for that failure gave us Mondrian the painter. It was because, in his own words, he was, involved with "total sensuousness -total intuition" that Mondrian finally felt his way out of Cubism.

Though to the end of his life he went back to those first principles that had taken so great a hold over him in those Paris years, there is an almost "indeterminate" aspect in Mondrian. Not in relation to the placement of his square, but in how he painted toward it. Mondrian did not begin with the square. He slowly arrived at it, arrived at it not as a consummate idea (this came only toward the end of his life), but as antagonist as well as protagonist. In effect Mondrian is fighting the square - resisting it. He erases - he paints on it - he paints over it -bypasses it - ignores it - destroys it. It was only toward the end of his life that the square itself began to do what his brush did earlier. He realized then (as Pollock did in his own way) that a totally pure rhythm cannot be articulated by the sensuous brushstroke. Mondrian's final leap was out of the idiom - out of the classic enigma of painting altogether. Where earlier he couldn't get close enough to the canvas, in these last canvases it is as if he stepped out into the life that surrounded him. No wonder he once said to Max Ernst. "It is not you but I who am the Surrealist."

Of course it is the polemical work that becomes the spokesman for any age - like John Cage today, who many people feel speaks for me. But what was really interesting about the Abstract Expressionists was the singularly non -polemical environment they created. One must understand this point; it is crucial to understand that Abstract Expressionism was not fighting the traditional historical position, not fighting authority, not fighting religion. This is what gives it that uniquely American tone; it did not inherit the polemical continuity of European art. If Mondrian was a fanatic in the European tradition, Guston is merely a compulsive - quite another thing. Mondrian wanted to save the world. You have only to look at a Rothko to know that he wanted to save himself.

We think of Rothko, of Mondrian as simplifying the problem of painting, not realizing that they added a still further complication. How could anything that never existed before be considered simple? How could a process that did not reveal itself be meaningful, at a time when process is how we have come to understand art?

What links Mondrian, Rothko and Guston? An unyielding tenacity that suggests nature more than man's inventiveness. What keeps their work from becoming a self-contained object is that each painting gravitates toward the other, either in memory or in anticipation. Again as in nature the experience is in depth, and not a surface to be seen on a wall. We will come back to this thought again a little later.

In my own field, music, the high points have come when a compromise was effected between the horizontal and the vertical, as in Bach and then in Webern. Perhaps this is also true of Piero della Francesca and Cezanne. Mondrian, closer to this simultaneous perfection, seems to want to erase it by constantly disturbing the picture's degree of visibility. Yet the visibility of the picture was his only concern. So much so that he hid the brushstroke. But this only revealed even more clearly the touch, the pressure, the unique tone of his "performance". It is for this reason that his paintings seem to be painted from afar, but must be looked at so closely as not to see the edge of the canvas.

Rothko gives a totally opposite sensation. There is virtually no distance between his brush and canvas. One views it from a vast distance in which its center disappears.

Guston, neither close nor distant, like a fleeting constellation projected on the canvas and then removed, suggests an ancient Hebrew metaphor: God exists but is turned away from us.

What is the intelligence behind such work that can make the leap without the need of organizational principle into the successful orchestration of a work of art? In music that leap is between tone and sound. Tone being that which we relate - sound that which follows not by logic, but by affinity.

We are taught to think of music as an abstract language - not realizing how functional it is, how related to that other spirit, whether it be literary or a literary metaphor of technique. Can we say that the great choral music of the Renaissance is abstract? Quite the opposite. Josquin, who had a genius for making a gorgeous musical coloration around a devotional word, uses music to convey a religious idea. Boulez uses it to impress and dazzle the intellect by representing what seems to be the mountain peaks of human logic. One takes it for granted that Beethoven's Grand Fugue is composed of abstract components making a magnificently abstract musical whole. It was only recently that I really began to hear it for what it is: a very literary stormy hymn - a march to God. Music can't be so very abstract when it serves such different and such definite functions!

The abstract, on the other hand, is not involved with ideas. It is an inner process that continually appears and becomes familiar like another consciousness. The most difficult thing in an art experience is to keep intact this consciousness of the abstract.

In the interest of clarity, perhaps we had better separate the word "abstract" as I am now using it from what it usually implies. The abstract in the sense I use the term has appeared in art all through the history of art - an emotion the philosophers have failed to categorize. To make it perfectly clear that it is this uncategorized emotion that I wish to describe, we had better call it the Abstract Experience. We would like to surrender to this Abstract Experience. We would like to let it take over. But we must constantly separate it from the imagination, or rather, that aspect of the imagination that is in the world of the fanciful. In my own work I feel the constant pull of ideas. On the one hand, there is the inconclusive abstract emotion. On the other, when you do something, you want to do it in a concrete, tangible way. There is a real fear of the Abstract because one does not know its function. The imagination is so many things; it can go so many ways. Paul Klee attests to the infinite possibilities of the imagination. The abstract, or rather the Abstract Experience, is only one thing -a unity that leaves one perpetually speculating. The imagination builds its speculative fantasy on known facts. Facts that have their basis in a very real, a very literary world. Even when it is irrational, it can be measured in terms of the rational - like Surrealism. The imagination provides answers without a metaphor. The Abstract Experience is a metaphor without an answer. Whereas the literary kind of art, the kind we are close to, is involved in the polemic we associate with religion, the Abstract Experience is really far closer to the religious. It deals with the same mystery - reality - whatever you choose to call it.

Some years ago, Guston and I made plans to have dinner together. I was to meet him at his studio. When I arrived he was painting and reluctant to leave off. "I'll take a nap", I told him. "Wake me up when you are ready."

I opened my eyes after an hour or so. He was still painting, standing almost on top of the canvas, lost in it, too close to really see it, his only reality the innate feel of the material he was using. As I awoke he made a stroke on the canvas, then turned to me, confused, almost laughing because he was confused, and said with a certain humorous helplessness. "Where is it?"

A blind person who works with the knowledge of the confines he moves in might, because of some slight unexpected shock, momentarily lose that all-important sense of the space around him. The simple fact that I woke up at that moment had much the same effect on Guston. It was as though he himself awoke - awoke to a sudden sense of the danger of what he was doing. Yet the painting itself is not a representation of that danger - of that ambition. That collision with the Instant which I witnessed is the first step to the Abstract Experience. And the Abstract Experience cannot be represented. It is, then, not visible in the painting, yet it is there - felt. In the same sense that Kierkegaard said the religious "dethrones" the esthetical, one can say that the Abstract Experience in Guston's painting dethrones the visible masterpiece before us.

I suppose it would have been fitting if Frank and I had met on the train coming to New York, like in a Russian novel. Actually I'm not certain when my personal memories of him begin. Let's just say he was there, waiting for us all.

What I remember is mostly what he said about myself or one of the others. He never talked about his own work; at least, not to me. If ever I complimented him on something he had done he would answer, all smiles, "well - thank you". That was the end of it. As if he were saying, "Now, you don't have to congratulate me about a thing. Naturally, everything I do is first rate, but it's you who needs looking after."

He admired my music because its methodology was hidden. Yet he admired other music too, whose method was unashamedly exposed. Though he understood and appreciated my particular position in regard to virtuosity, he did not share it. Frank loved virtuosity, loved the pyrotechnics of it. He was, in fact, able to love and accept more difficult kinds of work than one would have thought possible. It is interesting that a in circle that demanded partisanship above all, he was so totally accepted. I suppose we recognized that his wisdom came from his own "system" - the dialectic of the heart. This was his secret. That was what made it possible for him, without ever being merely eclectic, to write so beautifully about both Pollock and Pasternak, to dedicate a poem to Larry Rivers one day and to Philip Guston the next. Nobody I knew resented Frank's love for an irrelevant genius like Rachmaninoff. We all know it was not Rachmaninoff who was our enemy, but the second-rate artist who dictates what art should be.

His intense involvement with so many different levels of work, so many different kinds of artist, naturally created great demands on his personal loyalties. But it was part of O'Hara's genius to be oblivious to these demands, to treat the whole thing as if it were some big, frantic, glamorous movie set. To us he seemed to dance from canvas to canvas, from party to party, from poem to poem - a Fred Astaire with the whole art community as his Ginger Rogers. Yet I know if Frank could give me one message from the grave as I write this remembrance he would say, "Don't tell them the kind of man I was, Morty. Did I do it. Never mind the rest."

The sense of unease we feel when we look at a Guston painting is that we have no idea that we must now make a leap into this Abstract emotion; we look for the painting in what we think is its reality - on the canvas. Yet the penetrating thought, the unbearable creative pressure inherent in the Abstract Experience, reveals itself constantly as a unified emotion. The more it does this, naturally, the more distant it becomes from the imagery that it conveys. In this sense, it is not one painting we are looking at, but two. This is what I meant earlier when I described Guston's painting as neither close nor distant - not confined to a painting space but rather existing somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves. Let me try to make my meaning clear. In Cezanne's late painting, perspective appears almost obliterated. The plane is pushed so close to us that it is almost hard to see. Yet it keeps intact the reality of a painting painted on a canvas. Cezanne invented a way to paint something where Guston invented something to paint. Because of this the play of light and dark no longer takes place on the canvas per se. It becomes visible only when you perceive that it is not on the canvas.

What does one say about Rothko? Mondrian and Guston give us at least a dilemma. This attracts us, gives us something to hang on to, if nothing else. But we cannot climb those big smooth Rothko surfaces. Last year in Los Angeles a certain lady told me about a lecture Frank O'Hara once gave on the New York School. When he put on the slide of a Rothko painting, he gave a long sigh, said "It's so beautiful - next slide please." The lady was indignant. "O'Hara came all the way to Los Angeles arid that's all he had to say", she complained. I asked whether she liked Rothko's painting. She didn't, which explained everything.

Rothko is closer to life, yet seems to be without the dilemma of life. And how are we to understand life except in terms of its dilemma? As we all know, if life doesn't give us dilemma? As we all know, if life doesn't give us dilemmas we invent them. Where with Mondrian arid Guston one must leap into the abstractness in order to experience the painting (and we can make the decision to make that leap), with Rothko we must find a way out of it.

Guston once said that at a certain point of involvement, the time it takes to touch his brush to the palette, pick up some paint and bring it back to the canvas, is too long for him. Years ago there were procedures, questions of what you were going to put in arid what you were going to leave out. Today there is no ritualistic way to "get there". It has to happen. It's the immediacy that counts. Whether that immediacy takes ten minutes or ten years is irrelevant. The leap into the Abstract is more like going to another place where the time changes. Once you make that leap there are no longer any definitions.

It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no existing set of conditions on how to begin a work of art. One can begin with practically anything. This is just a matter of impetus, of energy, or wanting to "do something". It is no longer even important how much work you put into it, how long you sit on the egg, so to speak, before it hatches. In a sense, work is just another aspect of art's polemic with the religious. Work is used to justify art - give it some degree of legitimacy. The main thing now is not where you begin, or even what you put into it. The main thing really is when is it finished.

Guston tells us he does not finish a painting but "abandons" it. At what point does he abandon it? Is it perhaps at the moment when it might become a "painting?" After all, it's not a "painting" that the artist really wanted. There is a strange propaganda that because someone composes or paints, what he necessarily wants is music or a picture. Completion is not in tying things up, not in "giving one's feelings", or "telling the truth". Completion is simply the perennial death of the artist. Isn't any masterpiece a death scene? Isn't that why we want to remember it, because the artist is looking back on something when it's too late, when it's all over, when we see it finally, as something we have lost?

Mondrian, Rothko, Guston - all of them seem to have come to art by another route, a route abandoned and forgotten by modernity, yet, to my mind, the path that has really kept art alive.