Bob had been headed south from Paris toward Morocco, when, passing through Barcelona, he first heard about Ibiza, a small island off the Spanish Mediterranean coast. He continued to North Africa, but several weeks later, for no particular reason—it was cheap, it was warm, it was said to be peaceful —he ventured out to the dry, barren island. In subsequent years Ibiza (pronounced "E-bē-tha" by native Castilians) became known as something of an artist's colony, a winter resort, but during the season Irwin spent there, it was still utterly remote. On the edge of a barren peninsula, Irwin installed himself one day in a small rented cabin and then did not converse with a soul for the next eight months.
Artists who came to abstract expressionism with a literate pictorial bias, Irwin feels, were especially unprepared to confront these physical issues. This was particularly the case with the European abstract expressionists, he argues, steeped as they were in the tradition of post-Renaissance pictorial expression. Paradoxically, one artist who exercised a pivotal fascination for the young Californian, particularly in terms of his mastery of those physical laws, was a contemporary European, but not one of those who is usually considered an abstract expressionist. "The Italian painter Giorgio Morandi captivated a lot of us," Irwin recalls, "and we eventually even staged a small show of his paintings at Ferus" (in 1961). "Now, here was a painter whit been repeating the same subject, the same theme, over and over again, for year.
In his studio, he had a collection of bottles and jars, and he painted them continuously: small paintings of groups of these bottles on his table, a kind of still life.
So in one sense they seemed extremely traditional, extremely formal. They still had a subject matter in the most classical sense, the simplest, most direct kind of subject matter, unloaded in any way. This especially seemed the case when you compared Morandi with some of his bold, gestural contemporaries, say, someone like Pierre Soulages, with his modernist imagery, the strokes and slashes and all that.I mean, someone with a conceptual, literate eye, oriented toward looking at the imagery, would certainly think of the Soulages as the modern painting and the Morandi as the old-fashioned one. But if you looked at them on the physical level, in terms of how they actually dealt with the time and space relationships within the painting per se, the Soulages was pre-cubist, almost floating in like a seventeenth-century space, with its sense of distinct figure and ground; whereas the Morandi was essentially the same as a de Kooning or a Kline, with its intimate interpenetration between figure and ground. In Morandi they were never really separate. In fact, even with the figurative elements, there were cases where his ground actually got in front of the figures or in many cases couched them so intimately that there was no separating the two. Physically he carved a space for each one of these elements, where the amount of space left by the so-called ground was exactly that which the object occupied, so that it was as if the air had taken on substance. They were really good paintings.
"But anyway, my discovery was that from one hundred yards away—this was just one of those little breakthroughs—that from this distance of one hundred yards, I looked over, and that goddamn Guston.... Now, I'm talking not on quality, and not on any assumption of what you like or don't like, but on just pure strength, which was one of the things we were into. Strength was a big word in abstract expressionism; you were trying to get power into the painting, so that the painting really vibrated, had life to it. It wasn't just colored shapes sitting flat. It had to do with getting a real tension going in the thing, something that made the thing really stand up and hum.... Well, that goddamn Guston just blew the Brooks right off the wall.
"Now, by all overt measures—size, contrast, color intensity that shouldn't have happened. Everything was in favor of the Brooks. But the Guston blew it right off the wall. Just wiped it out. Not on quality, just on power. The Brooks fell into the background, and the Guston just took over. And I learned something about... some people call it 'the inner life of the painting, all that romantic stuff, and I guess that's a way of talking about it. But shapes on a painting are just shapes on a canvas unless they start acting on each other and really, in a sense, multiplying.
A good painting has a gathering, interactive build-up in it. It's a psychic build-up, but it's also a pure energy build-up. And the good artists all knew it, too. That's what a good Vermeer has, or a raku cup, or a Stonehenge. And when they've got it, they just jump off the goddamn wall at you. They just, bam!"