I have just done about 60% of a task that I have not been looking forward to for a few months.

So now, a few more thoughts about the whole and the parts.

One artist in the mid 60s decided that painting on a rectangular shape was an activity that pre-disposed the parts of what was painted to be more dominant than the whole. The answer, therefore was to work with coloured three dimensional objects � which might offer a non-European experience of wholeness.

This was the last straw for Patrick Heron and he began to write critically about US attitudes to art pointing out that, when Abstract Expressionist work arrived en masse in the UK, he and his contemporaries were strongly supportive.

� I was instantly elated by the size, energy and originality, economy and inventive daring of many of the paintings. Their creative emptiness was a radical discovery as was their flatness or spatial shallowness.�

This generation of UK artists were the first audience outside the USA to acknowledge the importance of this work � certainly ahead of the French for example. In this way the Brits helped launch the global reputation of the AbsEx.

Heron observed in the mid 60s that this first generation of AbsEx just kept on painting stuff which was broadly similar to the works which generated their reputation in the first place. Whereas UK artists � him included � adapted their styles to go further forward on the basis of the innovations that the AbsEx had created. But their chosen direction � back into pictoral complexity � was not appreciated in New York. For Heron the path he and his British contemporaries took involved �certain European resources of sensibility and instinct.� Heron saw the US artists who came after the AbsEx as �dominated by the sheerly conceptual, by exclusively intellectual or systematized ways of working.�

Heron has to be right on that concepts and systems had taken over. One of the early exhibitions that pulled together the new art in mid-60s New York was called �Systemic Painting�. The catalogue essay for the exhibition highlights the importance of Barnet Newman. Did I mentioned that BN exhibited in the early 1950s in New York and got a rough ride? So he didn�t show any more work until the late 1950s � and his work didn�t go to London in 1956. When he was work was finally shown again in New York some artists realised that it was painting of a �rigour previously unknown� � works �which could not be analysed in terms of small parts� � �without subdivison or placement problems� � �where the total field is the whole meaning�. Or at beast that�s how his work looked to the critic who set out to explain Systemic Painting . From his point of view the extraordinary importance of Newman is as �the saddle-point between art based on expression and art as an object�. In the latter case �meaning flows from the presence of the work of art and not from its capacity to signify absent events or values.�

These aspirations and explanations really are a mix of the neutral and the extreme - to use a phrase I quoted yesterday. You have to admire a culture/locality that has the bottle to formulate any kind of collective enterprise on this basis in the face of all the hostility and incomprehension it is bound to generate. You won�t want me to list all the things that were happening musically in the same place at the same time.

When I was on holiday, I glanced at a review of an exhibition in Edinburgh of Julian Schnabel. In a nutshell, he was amongst a wave of US artists who emerged in the 1980s and who seemed to be going back to painting � after all that conceptualism. The interesting thing to me was the way that reviewer felt free to pour scorn and derision on his work. I got the feeling that the underlying justification for the hostility in the reviewer�s mind was political. The US had ceased to stand for any credible universal values, had lost its integrity. These weaknesses and contradictions were evident in the way that one of the leading artists had developed over a decade or so.

Perhaps we are talking about cultural confidence � a set of conditions which not only supports artists stepping some way out into the unknown but also disposes others, not at the centre of the culture, to start by giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Judd and Stella have the confidence in the first half of the 60s to do extreme things to find an art which is fundamentally non-European and committed to the experience of unity or wholeness. Enough people in the US and elsewhere are prepared to buy into that to do the hard work of trying to understand what they are getting at. (This morning I listened to a taped interview with a British sculptor who was part of a generation who in the early 70s were prepared to take even more radical steps with art-objects. He was so pleased to be working with just lines and circles - forms that stretched throughout human history. Maybe more of that another day.

Some time I also need to write about the cultural climate in Britain in 1956 � one of the few books I read in July was about Angry Young Men.

AYMs were into New Orleans jazz.

For over a year I have wished I could make some piece of music that had the force and coherence of a Newman painting.