the Expense of Observation

...What the '30s did produce, as the work of Shahn, Hirsch, Levine, and others in the Bowdoin show makes clear, was a slick form of illustration, tricked out with all sorts of "modernistic" gimmickry, which traded heavily in socially pious sentimentality...

...Eakins thus bestowed upon his Negro subjects the same penetrating attention he lavished on everything that passed into his art —his watercolor, Whistling for Plover (1874), from the Brooklyn Museum, is surely one of the masterworks of the medium—and thereby set a standard by which one might legitimately judge the other "portrayals" in this survey...

...The result is that one's response—say, to Eakins' Portrait of Henry O. Tanner (c...

...Called "The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting," it consists of 80 paintings from the period 17101963 and includes some of the greatest names in the history of American art...

...No theme, moreover, has offered a greater challenge to those of our artists who, as the very basis of their esthetic ideology, have sought to show us things as they really are...

...Painting in a period when Realism was itself a revolutionary style, he was able to bring a pressure of observation, feeling and technical finesse to his art which his heirs—including Henry Tanner himself, a Negro artist who was his student and who is also included in the Bowdoin show—have been unable to repeat...

...Insofar as this statement means to suggest that these artists are actually the artistic heirs of Homer and Eakins—and Kaplan has so utterly confused the esthetic and the sociological in this remark that one cannot really be sure he means this at all—I must hasten to point out that nothing in the Bowdoin exhibition lends visual support to this contention...

...Though not unresponsive to modernist expression, they nonetheless object to the elaborate intellectual transactions required for establishing even a hypothetical relation between contemporary art and life— transactions which deprive art of its immediacy, relegate it (not always intentionally) to the realm of the symptomatic, and end, more often than not, by making the art itself subordinate to commentaries ostensibly designed to clarify it...

...ON ART By Hilton Kramer The Expense of Observation For many sophisticated people, who in other respects do not feel alienated from modern taste and are by no means hostile or indifferent to esthetic values or artistic quality, the most dismaying aspect of the art of our time is its apparent distance from common, observable experience...

...The five other Homers in the exhibition, though superior to much else that is shown, exist at a considerable drop in the esthetic temperature owing to the fact that they are oils rather than watercolors, for it was only in the latter medium that Homer could exercise his great talent with complete freedom...

...There may have been good reason to overlook the egregious vulgarity of such work in the thick of the Depression—though, in truth, the real artists of the '30s found this work utterly phoney even at the time, and went their own way—but it is appalling to have it palmed off on us once again, in the '60s, on the occasion of a serious exhibition...

...As an introductory text for the catalogue of this exhibition, the Bowdoin Museum has invited Professor Sidney Kaplan of the University of Massachusetts, an authority on the history of the American Negro rather than an art historian, to provide a commentary relating this esthetically disparate survey to the changing vicissitudes of Negro life...

...And as Roye, an Ohio-born Negro who emigrated to Liberia and became its Chief Justice and President, was an extraordinarily handsome man, the portrait is one of the most memorable of Sully's long career...

...It scarcely needs emphasizing that no subject-matter could be more relevant at the present moment...

...There are also pictures of high quality—those of John Singleton Copley, George Ropes, Thomas Moran and George Inness—which have, frankly, only a marginal interest in the history of the "Portrayal of the Negro," though they are certainly pleasurable to see on any occasion...

...Following Eakins and Homer, Realism flourished once again in the work of Henri (represented at Bowdoin by an inferior picture) and his friends among "The Eight," and thereafter went into eclipse...

...Indeed, the most depressing aspect of this whole exposition is the way it dramatizes the fact that the habit of observation has suffered a total atrophy in these living artists...

...1900)—is at once to a compelling subject and to the means by which it has been realized...

...Neither polemical nor allegorical nor given to easy anguish or high-minded piety, these pictures are disposed—by virtue of both their style and the humane values which determined that style—to reporting the concrete and the particular...

...Apart from Wyeth, who is a special case in having consciously appropriated Homer's watercolor technique (and whose accomplishments are, in my view, wildly overrated in any case), the contemporary artists included in this show exhibit crudities of method and vulgarities of feeling that are lightyears removed from the forthright honesty and technical mastery of the two great 19th-century painters...

...I mean those painters, of whom Ben Shahn and Jack Levine are the best known, whose work openly avows its dedication to themes of social conflict, satire, and "conscience...

...A remarkable exhibition organized by Marvin S. Sadik, Curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, and on view this summer at the Bowdoin campus, is a case in point...

...Criticism may address itself to this dilemma, but only art—an art confident in its ability to encompass common experience, and thus quite unlike most of what one sees at the present time—can effectively answer it...

...Speaking of Thomas Hart Benton, Joseph Hirsch, Raphael Soyer, Ben Shahn, and Andrew Wyeth, Kaplan writes: ". . . they make clear that the bright tradition of Homer and Eakins is in the hands of painters who are responding as artists and men to the troubled present, whose vision of humanity, both black and white, must be part of the future...

...The great pictures in the Bowdoin exhibition are those of Thomas Sully, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins in which individual physiognomies and personalities are rendered with a scrupulousness of craft and feeling that carries them beyond a parochial "Portrayal of the Negro" into a vivid portrayal of life itself...

...The main interest of such pictures in the present context lies in the clarity with which Negro figures are depicted even though this clarity is rarely transmuted into compelling artistic expression...

...on the whole, his "Notes" are a refreshing change from the rhetorical flim-flam one usually encounters in museological prose...

...Yet the unhappy news of this exhibition is that, whereas American painters of the 19th-century Realist school (and even some of the earlier Colonial period) at least looked at the Negroes they chose for their subjects, modern painters of liberal persuasion have eschewed such visual scrutiny for the dubious pleasures of symbolism, allegory, and vulgar caricature...

...By so doing, they refrain from soliciting in the spectator any emotion which the artist himself has not reconstituted, and thus made objective and communicable, in executing his painting—and least of all those purely conventional public emotions which have their sources outside the painting altogether...

...Kaplan has many interesting things to say...

...The style is not detachable from its subject, nor the subject from its realization, because, for the artist, it never existed as a separate entity to be "applied," as in most of the modern works, as piety required...

...There are, in the Bowdoin exhibition, a large number of pictures, perhaps the majority, which are of purely documentary value— work by William Sidney Mount, James G. Clonney, Eastman Johnson, and others...

...Eakins, though not represented throughout this exhibition by uniformly superior work, dominates it all the same, for he is, with Copley, our greatest portraitist and the single most accomplished artist of the Realist school...

...The oil which most closely approaches the probity of Eakins' Tanner is Sully's Portrait of Edward James Roye (1864...

...But where he ventures at times upon esthetic ground, the results are not happy, and in one crucial instance they are clearly insupportable...

...Almost equal to the best of Eakins is the magnificent Homer watercolor of a young Negro boy called Taking a Sunflower to Teacher (1875...

...One has the sense that they have never really looked at their subjects, preferring instead to produce symbols and designs that generalize, and vulgarize, their ostensible motifs practically out of existence...

...We have, of course, a native school of painting which explicitly, even smugly, boasts of its success in this mission...

...One of the myths of American art history has it that the '30s was a great period of Social Realism, but this was not in fact the case...

...But the crippling deficiencies of this school—its facile mannerisms, always indulging "style" and design at the expense of observation, and its fatal reliance on emotions which can be quickly elicited in its audience without ever being truly created in its art—induce a certain despair among many observers (of whom I am one) over the very possibility that art will ever regain its capacity to deal significantly and persuasively with public issues and the common life...

...Though more romantic than Eakins' painting, Sully's has a power and toughness which shine through its polished manner and genteel inflections...