Gates

There seems some change in preoccupations here. For one thing, the gates —or more truly the gate, since the images come from one factual gate, as the titles make clear—are a new presence in the ico-

nography. Too, they, along with the trees (which are also new arrivals), are referred to as "forms to hang paintings on." But that is nothing so remarkably new, thinking of the robes and hearts. Often the image has been used as a constant, repetitively, to permit the painting to move as freely in its experience as impulse and recognitions might permit. Insofar as the phrase refers to gates and trees, that sense of "to hang paintings on" is inevitably interesting. One is sure it was no casually determined expression.

"The Crommelynck Gate" can be found at 172 rue de Grenelle, Paris, which is the address of Aldo Crommelynck, master engraver and printer, who with his brother has collaborated in a singular range of etchings, from those of Picasso and Matisse to Jasper Johns and Dine himself, with whom he has worked on several projects in recent years. This gate is the entrance to the atelier and residence. The place has a grand and imposing air, somewhat like a hospital or official residence. Dine must have passed through this particular gate many times, to sit at an immaculate work bench, attended by very specific provision and respect, to make art , as is said. So these gates (or gate) have an unexpected parallel to those gates most common in American habit possibly, those of a factory. The other gates one thinks of quickly are the cemetery's (or heaven's).

Whatever might prove the case, the fact that this image has a literal source is useful. One supposes that most of Dine's images are so founded, but again the accessible fact of this one gives means to recognize the particular modes of investment and change he works with. It is interesting that the image is intently centered, that one sees that much of it which would be commonly seen walking toward it from some short distance away. One is reminded of a cinematic device or focus, curiously, as though one were the 'eye' of a camera.

In quite another sense, a poem of Thomas Hardy's recounts the awesome terror of approaching such a gate—the gate to death itself—to see on its other side the ghoulish objects of despair and terminus beckoning. Then he asks, were it simpler to pass through and have done, rather than to live knowing one will one day come again? These images depend on an almost elegant insistence of tracery upon a vast emptiness of opened space. The formal fascinates because it is all that is there to hold any concept, any possibility, of place. But there is nothing seemingly behind it, but "Fog," but blackness. Even at home ("Vermont") it remains ambiguously inviting.

Is one to stop here? All art would wish to remain at one with its

human limit, to be so contained. Clearly there is to be an end. But here one cannot know whether this is its sign, or simply the thing we see, waiting.