On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow Object Lessons By a nice coincidence, two exhibitions which address themselves to the question of the real in its relationship to art have settled into the Museum of...
...They do not direct his mind nor call up trusted cores of experience, but lead him to the point where he must evaluate his own peculiar responses...
...The spectator is not given symbols, but facts, to make of them what he can...
...Guest director E. C. Goossen has mounted a large show of minimal style painting and sculpture under the title, "The Art of the Real...
...and what was once the outside—the meaning of its forms—has been turned inside...
...Francois Mauriac, looking like an impeccable mummy that refuses to die) are treated with no more reverential clarity than the faces of the unknown...
...Goossen, a critic sympathetic to current reductive modes, is chairman of the art department of Hunter College and a former professor at Bennington College in Vermont, one of the early and active seats of the type of realism he champions...
...The new work of art is very much like a chunk of nature, a rock, a tree, a cloud, and possesses much the same hermetic 'otherness.'" This "otherness" is not only apparent in relation to the forms of nature, but to the former conventions of painting and sculpture as well...
...But it is more than the historical record of the events of our day, definitive as that record appears in retrospect, that makes his photographs valuable...
...the painter Georges Rouault looking like a timid rabbit in a frumpy suit, his dark easel in the studio background forming a shadowy cross...
...The forms of this new work tend to be aggressively blunt and factual...
...For he has been able to capture such events?a scene and the people in a scene —at just the moment when the human implications were ripest and the formal elements most provocative...
...She seems to impose upon us, by her expression, a terrible knowledge of her condition as she descends—out of life and into the grave...
...The radically simplified forms—tightly closed boxes, open cubes, monochromatic canvases—are those with which younger artists have attempted to displace subjectivism and illusionary realism...
...In Goossen's words, we are in the presence of the "simple, irreducible, irrefutable object...
...With these new forms of abstraction, however, one begins to suspect that the equation itself may no longer be applicable...
...One ought to let Goossen himself explain what this new art is up to in its dealings with reality...
...Goossen's explanatory text does not give us a firm definition of the new reality, but it does provide a very useful account of the mechanics of the style: "The new attitude has been turning art inside out...
...In their belligerent simplicity, Judd's wall-hung stack of galvanized iron boxes and Robert Morris' open square made of 15-foot aluminum I-beams effectively demonstrate the artists' dissatisfaction with the artful complexities of more conventional sculpture...
...The ample bodies and sprawling food of a bourgeois picnic on the banks of the Marne measures the well-fed girth of a way of life...
...As she stands at the head of the stairs, she fixes the photographer (and the viewer) with a look that is unforgettable—a look of pity and apprehension...
...The second exhibition, arranged by director John Szarkowski of the Museum's department of photography, is a show of 150 photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson...
...For the art that occupies the Modern's first floor galleries and spills out into the sculpture garden is severely abstract and impersonal...
...In the same vein John McCrack-en's There's No Reason Not To, a 10-foot slab of polyester resin painted a beautiful baby blue and leaning against the gallery wall, sports its "otherness" from painting and sculpture...
...Two exhibitions...
...Having given the mere descriptive features of a minimal object, one finds oneself discussing not the work, but its stance in relationship to other forms and periods of art...
...In dead-center of the picture, a large white cross is inscribed, "Jesus is Coming Soon...
...The new style is not without sensitivity—particularly in the importance it gives to sheer color {e.g., Frank Stella's rainbow-hued shaped canvases, Ellsworth Kelly's checkerboard wall of colored squares), but it presents a world ruled by a rigorous asceticism, a world of giant metal cubes or a 28-foot expanse of raw canvas decorated only by a slender ribbon of blue and a few dashes of red...
...His assignments and his own inclinations have placed him in the right places at the right times—in France, at the time of its defeat and surrender...
...Both the exhibition and the book present a handsome selection of his recent efforts, along with earlier pictures that had appeared in the Modem's 1947 exhibition and in The Decisive Moment, a previous volume of photographs...
...Among Cartier-Bresson's .photographs of the Coronation Parade of King George VI, for instance, there is a remarkable shot of two burly, aging Englishmen holding their Mom imperiously aloft...
...Specific objects" is the term one of the artists, Donald Judd, has applied to the forms he and his colleagues are making...
...The gesture, and its casualness—telling us that art can be made out of such minimal intentions—is as important as the reductive form...
...two startlingly opposed but valid engagements of the real...
...in India, when Gandhi was assassinated...
...Consequently, the very means of art have been isolated and exposed, forcing the spectator to perceive himself in the process of his perception...
...Cartier-Bresson's career has been a succession of such moments...
...Ever since Oscar Wilde's famous remark that nature does nothing but imitate art, it has been obvious that the term art, in the equation between art and life, has been accorded superior status...
...In conjunction with the Modern's exhibition, the Viking Press has brought out a stunning anthology of the photographer's work (The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson, 210pp., $14.00...
...In his best photographs, the formal structure often provides an ironic commentary on his subjects—de Gaulle orating at provincial women, his head enshrined by a Gothic arch...
...The photographs have their more genial aspects...
...Like the rriinimal art, Cartier-Bresson's photographs display a form of objectivity...
...and most recently in Paris, during the student revolt...
...Behind them, the interminable rows of their gleaming automobiles are baking in the sun...
...There are moments of artiness, when it is obvious that the photographer's vision has been influenced by certain paintings or styles of painting—figures darting through the Cubist architecture of a Mediterranean village, supple Balinese girls, posing a la Gauguin, in their flowered sarongs—but those moments are scarce indeed...
...ON ART By James R. Mellow Object Lessons By a nice coincidence, two exhibitions which address themselves to the question of the real in its relationship to art have settled into the Museum of Modern Art...
...A few pages later there is an apocalyptic view of an automobile junk heap beside a blossoming tree...
...In writing about them, one finds there is a good deal more to be said about Cartier-Bresson's subjects than about the minimal forms in "The Art of the Real...
...instead of perceptual experience being accepted as the means to an end, it has become the end in itself...
...By contrast, "Cartier-Bresson: Recent Photographs," moves into the premises that modern painters and sculptors have been so eager to vacate: the forms and objects of life—people, places, political events...
...Cartier-Bresson's dictum is predictable: "We must take greater care than ever not to allow ourselves to be separated from the real world and humanity...
...Cartier-Bresson is an internationally famous photo-journalist whose work has been appearing for several decades in mass-circulation magazines here and abroad...
...the contemporary artist labors to make art itself believable...
...in China, when the Communists assumed power...
...That title, taken from Cardinal de Retz' remark that there is nothing in this life which does not have its decisive moment, was particularly apt...
...A centenarian lady in a Swedish old peoples' home has a face as wizened as an old apple...
...Thus, what was once concealed within art—the technical devices employed by the artist—is now overtly revealed...
...With the photographs, one is drawn immediately to the particulars—this face, that gesture—falling back upon those "trusted cores of experience" which Goossen informs us aTe no longer applicable...
...The Renaissance artist labored over perspective in order to create an illusion of space within which he could make believable the religious and philosophical ideals of his time...
...The faces of the great (Colette, frowsy-haired, her features a beautiful ruin...
...It is noteworthy that Goossen's text ends on a cautionary note: "Whether this kind of confrontation with the actual can be sustained, whether it can remain vital and satisfying, it is not yet possible to tell...
...Admittedly he is working in difficult terrain...
...In the Viking book, a shot of a stadium in Milwaukee shows row upon row of spectators...
...Many of the works by the 33 American artists Goossen has selected are not, strictly speaking, paintings or sculpture, but a new category of work that combines features of both...
...Nor is it only the human condition that catches the photographer's eye: A group of Dutch pigs, greeting the day in the front yards of their tidy brick pens, is an amused commentary on fastidiousness...
...In both the literal and the punning sense, Goossen's exhibition is an exercise in objectivity...
...In that genteel triangle, with mother at the apex, we have been given a striking symbol of the basic structure of British society on the eve of World War II...
...In India, the ruffled beauty of a white peacock confronting a heap of village rubbish becomes an image of the splendors and miseries of a nation...
...It speaks volumes about the four-wheeled infrastructure of American society...
...The photographer has obviously learned a great deal from his early training as a painter, yet ordinarily the forms of his pictures are structured out of the moment and not arranged to achieve a preconceived style...
...The American photographs are equally instructive...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 16
