On Art

...During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was considered acceptable to copy from the pattern-book or to adopt a new style in Madonnas from types developed by Leonardo and Raphael...

...Marcel Duchamp makes a small traveling museum of his own works, scaling them down to fit within a 16 x 14 inch valise...

...However, in producing one more exhibition and an introductory text (albeit brief), Swenson seems to have gone against his own prescription and trapped himself in a logical error...

...Wesselmann's paintings would declare their indebtedness to Matisse's superb line without explicit references...

...Failing an effective moratorium?The problems, in any event, would be enormous...

...Unfortunately, in his show at the Modern, Swenson has chosen to promote the fun-and-games aspect of what otherwise might have been an interesting and provocative exhibition...

...Emanuel Leutze, who painted that ubiquitous image of our schooldays, Washington Crossing the Delaware, provided the stimulus for Larry Rivers' dissolve-version of the painting, represented in the exhibition by a preparatory study...

...Would the cops be kept busy raiding dimly-lit art speakeasies...

...In opting for a less than serious approach to his subject, he has produced only another light entertainment...

...That art is a mirror of life, reflecting the customs, values, Weltanschauung of an age, is an old cliche in the business...

...the Douanier Rousseau, confronting one of Cezanne's unfinished landscapes, claims????with all the self-confidence of an amateur????that he could perfectly well finish off what the Father of Modern Art neglected...

...Wessel-mann's drawing for The Great American Nude #50 includes quotations from Cezanne, Redon, Renoir and Wesselmann...

...Would the Museum of Modern Art and the Stedelijk submit to international inspections...

...As it is, the works he has selected are either minor or merely fashionable...

...It was a case of instant art history...

...The painting-in-process on his easel is an interior view with a pot-bellied stove...

...To anyone interested in the acrobatics of such situations, he supplies a daring example of escape...

...One wishes Swenson had taken the trouble????it might have provided some additional insights into the modern temperament...

...Picasso, in his later years, has taken over not only Delacroix but Velasquez...

...In Sheeler's The Artist Looks at Nature, the artist has set up his easel in a corner of a sunny and spacious landscape...

...Swenson suggests a happy alternative...

...When Pop Art appeared on the horizon, he was one of the first critics to knock on the artists' studio doors, tape-recorder in hand...

...Further on, he concludes: "A moratorium on photographs, literature about art, even exhibitions might refresh us and make us responsive again...

...It appears that at various stages on its journey to abstraction and the flatness of the picture plane, modernist painting has found it useful to appropriate the formal structures????and in some cases, the actual paintings????of artists from the past...

...Manet, in his famous Dejeuner sur I'Herbe, represents a more direct steal from the past, combining a passage from a Raphael cartoon with Giorgione's Fete Champetre and 19th century haberdashery to shock his Parisian audience...

...but sensitivity and passion have their limits, and so, even, does art...

...Swenson's vaudeville trio only told me more about Warhol, Rauschenberg and Duchamp...

...Nor do all of the painters take an aggressive stance toward the work they appropriate...

...Swenson does suggest that it might be a touch of hubris, but it seems more like chutzpah, something far less dramatic...

...Rene Magritte, attempting to solve the riddle of the forest and the trees, nestles a framed Magritte landscape of a forest in a jungle of obliterating leaves...

...Cezanne, it is true, does not present the clearest example of such borrowing: What he held to in Poussin was not the literal style nor a specific pictorial structure, but the example of classical order which he hoped would shore him up amid the uncertainties of his own arduous "method...

...Not all of the artists subjected to renovation are in the master class...

...Duchamp affixes a mustache and goatee to the Mona Lisa, combining high art and low humor in one successfully scandalous gesture...

...The gist of his critical remarks in the short essay for the catalogue is that artists, critics, and bourgeois audiences are all inclined to take art too seriously: "A good number, perhaps a majority, of artists and critics have been proclaiming art as a religion...

...an exhibition that would view art through the eyes of artists...

...By far the most favored artist to get the treatment is Leonardo, whose Mona Lisa turns up in Warhol's silver-screen blow-up, Rauschenberg's transfer drawing and Duchamp's mustachioed version...

...Rauschenberg," he claims, "may clarify the myth of Leonardo, and Lichtenstein the cliches surrounding Picasso, thereby improving our focus on painting of both the past and the present...

...In his case, one assumes it is jealousy of their reputations as well as the strictest admiration for the works he has fastened upon...

...None of these seminal paintings, however, appears in the Modern's exhibition, and Swenson does not discuss the issues they raise: Is there, for instance, a timely connection between such artistic quotations and Eliot's liberal use of literary quotations in The Wasteland...

...When he affixes a Matisse still-life to one of his canvases, it might be a simple acknowledgment of the French master or some wild Pop association between Matisse oysters and bikinied nudes...

...I have to report that the therapy did not work in my case...

...The phrase 'We are all too sensitive,' might make a healthy punch line for many of the tales told about art...

...Tn the Modern's exhibition, Manet's painting has been re-staged and blown up into colored half-tone dots by Alain Jacquet, thus perpetuating the original theft...

...Roy Lich-tenstein translates Picasso's Femme a Chapeau into the funny-paper idiom????not, apparently, as a comment upon Picasso's early addiction for the Katzenjammer Kids, but as a further aggrandizement of his own Ben Day dot-style in search of subject matter...

...Old-fashioned remedies interest me and the idea that a few leeches, judiciously applied to the over-sanguine body of contemporary art, might have a tonic effect seems charming...

...In Suzi Gablik's Pastoral, a photographic reproduction of a woodland scene is finished off with some hand-painted tropical foliage out of Rousseau...

...The scales did not fall from my eyes...

...At least one painting makes no raids upon the art of the past, but provides a witty comment upon the sources of an artist's inspiration...

...It might have helped if Swenson had been less sparing in his critical insights...

...Picasso sets himself like a dog on the voluptuous rhythms and suave forms of Delacroix" Femmes a" Alger, tugging at the structure until it tumbles down into something like Cubist carnage in a harem...

...The selected works of Miro, Picasso and Morris Hirshfield cover over the efforts of equally forgettable artists...

...Joseph Cornell, in turn, stations in the center of his unfinished painting a reproduction of Magritte's famous canvas of a locomotive proceeding out of a parlor fireplace...

...What is it, for instance, that tempts an artist to tackle the heroes of art...

...That it is often a mirror of art itself????an attempt by painters to remake, refurbish and even, sometimes, dismantle, the work of their predecessors????is the subject of an exhibition currently installed at the Museum of Modern Art...

...The art Swenson has collected moves in very devious ways to perform its therapeutic wonders...

...Among the moderns, nothing is exactly sacred in the long history of art...

...Adolph Gottlieb's Gottlieb pictographs superimposed upon postcard reproductions of Turner, Reynolds and Watteau may have attempted, a decade later, a similar defacing of grand old men, but they look more like the activities of an artist on a dull Sunday afternoon when he is scratching around for something better to do...

...His interviews with Pop figures like Andy Warhol, Jim Dine and Roy Lichtenstein were effective in establishing the ruling ideas (or the lack of them) circulating around a controversial new style...

...Robert Indiana's paintings are in the time-honored musical tradition: variations upon themes by Charles Demuth and Joseph Stella...

...Arranged and selected by critic G. R. Swenson, the show includes 41 paintings, drawings and collages, most of them harvested from recent crops of Pop Art, but with a few precursory items by Schwitters, Picabia, Picasso, Miro and Magritte...

...Leonardo was not restored to me in a flash of exquisite clarity...

...Miro, in the late '20s, went to school under the influence of the old Dutch genre painters whom he admired...

...That seems to be the case with Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing, an odd collaborative effort between the action painter and the second generation artist done (or undone, in this instance) in 1953 when de Kooning provided a valuable drawing at Rauschenberg's request and Rauschenberg scrubbed it out with an eraser...

...Moreover, it has always been part of an artist's training to submit to the influence of present masters or the art of the past...

...Swenson, whose writings have appeared in most of the major art periodicals, is not precisely a swinging critic, but he is decidedly '"with it...

...Would the testing of Underground movies be permissible if they were really underground...

...But there is a distinction to be made between influences of this kind and the self-conscious borrowing that occurs in modern painting...