Plain and Fancy

...I confess to a similar addiction for museum catalogues...

...Whereas the old-style catalogue really did give one a more or less stable factual footing amid the quicksand of rhetoric and ballyhoo surrounding artistic events, the new catalogues often sink the reader in an even deeper mire or verbal and intellectual extravagance...

...Ben Shahn is thus, predictably, described as a "Social Realist," though the single painting reproduced has about as much to do with Realism, "Social" or otherwise, as a political caricature...

...In his survey, every painter is neatly fitted into a stylistic notcheven, alas, when part of his work has to be lopped off to make him fit...

...But then, the problem of establishing the history of American art in this century establishing, that is, its exact shape, values, and governing talents represents a far more difficult task than is commonly supposed...

...To say the approach is methodical would be an understatement: Every artist is treated to a short historical and biographical introduction, and then each of his pictures represented in the Met's collection is written up separately, accorded a small but clear reproduction, and provided with detailed references to the historical literature, previous ownership and exhibitions, etc...

...By unduly inflating the occasion, he has not only distorted his subject but provided another example of how basic museological functions are now being undermined by bogus intellectual ambitions...

...But the result gives one a clearer picture of the vicissitudes of American painting from 1730 to the mid-19th century than most volumes which are free to draw upon the entire output of this period...

...There is something obviously factitious in the notion that the relative permanency of lexicographical definitions provides a meaningful respite from the hurly-burly of polemic and ordinary verbal subterfuge, yet one understands well enough why such respite is sought...

...Faith persists that beneath the swarmy surface of misused words some abiding points of reference remain fixed and immutable...

...This catalogue too is put together with the same fastidious attention to detail, but as American sculpture of any real esthetic interest can hardly be said to exist before the 20th century, it is attention lavished mainly on ephemera...

...Even the Met's 20th-century holdings are a mixed bag, to say the least...

...Published at $7.50 each, these books are distributed by the New York Graphic Society...

...It is in this volume that Gardner reveals a real deficiency of both critical taste and art-historical imagination...

...As it is, Geldzahler would have been well advised to produce a more modest document that simply spelled out the limited nature of the collection...

...Under such unpropitious circumstances, he has chosen to downgrade the purely documentary aspects of his survey, and write instead a potted history of the subject which simply invokes examples from the Met's holdings wherever they are appropriate...

...It is against this background that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has, at long last, begun issuing catalogues of its vast American collections...

...Henry geldzahles/s American Painting in the Twentieth Century, impaled as it is between its obligation to document this odd lot of goods and its author's somewhat freer-wheeling perspective on the whole subject, could scarcely escape a certain intellectual schizophrenia...

...most of them will surely end their days in a dust-laden cellar, and ought not to have been dignified by inclusion in a catalogue of this sort...

...But any future history worthy of our attention the less said about histories of American art currently available, the better will, I am sure, be built along the lines of their researches...

...Not, I hasten to add, for those fancy publicity brochures more the product of the graphic designer's ingenuity than of the scholar's precision which have lately come to displace the older, "duller," disinterested inventories, replete with details of provenance and fussy bibliographies, that used to be the standard fare of museological publishing...

...Though one of the virtues of their catalogue is the way it refuses to skimp minor figuresand some of them are very minor indeed the reader is never left in doubt about where the real achievements are to be found...

...The writing is uniformly spare and lucid...

...Perhaps...

...If the Met's collection of modern American painting were a really distinguished one, it might be worth putting up with this intellectual jigsaw puzzle to read about it...

...It is worth adding, too, that since many of the paintings in this period are portraits, these notes also provide an interesting social history of the principal subjects...

...A catalogue, even a catalogue as fastidiously assembled as Gardner and Feld's, is not, of course, a history...

...One of the attractions of the Gardner- Feld volume is the way it holds itself aloof from facile stylistic categorization, leaving it to the reader to make connections between individual artists and individual styles wherever they seem most apt...

...The least interesting is the catalogue of American Sculpture, written by Gardner himself, while the oddest is the volume called American Painting in the Twentieth Century, by another Associate Curator, Henry Geldzahler, who has produced a kind of hybrid catalogue- history which doesn't really satisfy the demands of either...

...No, I mean precisely those dry assemblages of facts which the new generation of museum curators, anxious to launch every publication as if it were an avant-garde broadside and given to writing in a style best described as academic hipster-ese, has pretty much abandoned...

...And as the Met owns important pictures by all these artists, the notes on individual works fill out the historical panorama very effectively...

...They also give us some insight into the historiography of American art...

...The temptation has been to accept the publicity of each generation at its own valuation, and thus to write a series of encomiums more or less ratifying this publicity...

...Three volumes have now been published on the occasion of the current exhibition, "Three Centuries of American Painting" (see "A World of Shadows," NL, April 2 6 ) , and thus afford an interesting glimpse into the way our most venerable and conservative museological establishment has set about coping with this curious problem...

...The fact is that Geldzahler lacks the gifts literary, intellectual, and estheticto bring off the kind of tour de force he has attempted, and the book, as written, is of little use...

...Actually, Avery's style was in full flower in the '30s, and its quality was widely recognized at the time...

...Unexciting...

...The Gardner-Feld volume is a catalogue in the grand tradition, devoid of intellectual pretension and packed solid with exactly the kind of hard detail the interested reader needs in making his way through the esthetically sparse but object-cluttered labyrinth of our early period...

...It opens with an entry for John Smibert (1688-1751) and closes with Joseph Kyle (1815- 1863), and includes a short appendix on four pictures formerly thought to be American but now attributed to European artists...

...To place his work alongside that of Larry Rivers, as Geldzahler does, is a grotesque distortion of history...

...The best of these volumes, American fanning: Painters Born by 1815, by Albert Ten Eyck Gardner and Stuart P. Feld, respectively the Associate and Assistant Curators of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Met, is the first installment of what will eventually be a three-volume survey of painters born by 1875...

...Still, the question remains: Is this book a history or a catalogue...

...This seems to me precisely the kind of critical diffidence most in keeping with the compilation of a definitive catalogue...

...We know from our study of language that this faith is not always justified, but, like other forms of faith, it is often a comfort all the same...

...Then there is the overly clever device of adopting the term "Hard Edge," only lately in use to describe abstractionists like Ellsworth Kelly, to cover a large assortment of painters Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Lyonel Feininger, among others whose careers, styles, and esthetic loyalties vary greatly from each other...

...That, give or take a few pictures, has been the basis of the Met's own collection of modern American painting, and the result is the dismal assemblage of which the 20th-century section of the "Three Centuries of American Painting" exhibition has given us a fresh glimpse...

...Feininger's painting, Church at Gehneroda, can scarcely be considered an American work in any case...

...Gardner's volume on American Sculpture could not, in the nature of things, be of comparable interest...

...Culling "hard" information from such documents often takes on the aspect of solving a mystery...

...Geldzahler's approach is quite the opposite, however...

...Gardner and Feld are, moreover, keenly aware of who the important painters are...

...Thus the work of Milton Avery is included under "Figurative Painters of the Forties and Fifties," apparently for no better reason than that the Met happens to own two Averys dated 1945 and 1954, respectively...

...With the catalogue aspect of the volume removed as the principal consideration, it was but a short step to include a few works outside the Met's collection in order to give the book a more cogent shape than it could otherwise have...

...Nor does Geldzahler display any intellectual initiative in handling the more workaday categories taken over from his seniors...

...Copley, identified as "America's foremost painter of the 18th century," is vividly established in a few economical paragraphs, as are Gilbert Stuart, Washington Allston, Thomas Sully, Thomas Cole and George Caleb Bingham...