On Art

...I gathered that his work had been confined to his free time in the evenings and I had a picture of him, in dingy surroundings, poring over illustrations, deciding what was grist for his mill...

...Buttoned-up in his frayed best, a large black scrap-book tucked under his arm, he had the rumpled, run-down appearance of someone who has spent a good deal of his life in rooming-houses...

...It is fashionable to denigrate reviewing...

...there's no need for magazines like yours...

...Pointillism, Cubism, Futurism were systems...

...It seemed a good problem to send to their doorstep...

...The movement's hold over New York's most influential galleries was firm...

...He never disclosed the secret of his calculations...

...The history of art is a battleground of such systems...

...That all of these isms, and some that were not so successful, have now entered the history of art is testimony to their usefulness, but not their validity...

...His system of approach is continuously being challenged by the actual...

...Abstract Expressionist painters and their second-generation followers had pretty well established themselves as the Establishment in art...

...that, in fact, I was rather hostile to the idea...

...With the 1960s, the New York art scene broke open in an entirely unexpected way...

...It is usually considered a job for newcomers, girls fresh from Bennington or Barnard, struggling artists trying to make a few part-time bucks...

...Like all systems, they had their dogmatists for whom no other system (at the time) was acceptable...

...But, in the words of the comedian, them is the conditions that prevails...

...Without the slightest trace of humor, he informed me that he had had to devise a special method for analyzing Miss Alabama (whose measurements I don't recall), since she was more curvilinear than most objects he came across in his researches...

...He asked me why I wasn't interested in his work when, obviously, he had made a major discovery...

...There are critics who feel unhappy about reviewing, who prefer the occasional essay on specific developments or seasoned artists to reporting upon the results of their weekly safaris through the galleries...

...Don't you understand," he said in a rising, rasping voice, "there's no such thing as esthetics...

...If they had been eternal verities, they would not have been replaced...

...Feeling a bit waggish about the whole thing, I suggested he try the Journal of Aesthetics...

...After years of study, he had arrived at a method, a system of measurement, by which he could determine good art from bad art...

...Its influence has begun to wane (though not so quickly as I had expected), yet it did have a salutory effect...

...The person confronted with an exhibition of this kind is hardly in a position to know what those nearly monochromatic canvases, those blunt, unadorned shapes, are all about unless he has seen two or three earlier exhibitions by the same artist or by his colleagues who have been addressing themselves to similar formal problems...

...Amid this pluralism, it seems to me, the reviewer's work has become more valuable...

...In my own case, though I am still not enamored of the style, Pop Art proved to be a good deal more durable than the mere fad I had taken it to be when it first appeared...

...Without the magic yardstick of the man from Brooklyn, he is often sure to be wrong...

...It was beginning to make itself felt, with only occasional and decreasing resistance, in the art departments of Midwestern universities...

...But even though the man from Brooklyn was hostage to an idea, he did represent a fragmented truth about esthetics...

...This demonstration of solutions may be less than the viewer (or the reviewer) expects of art...

...Since there was no cohesive opposition to the school, it seemed that it would be ensconced for years...

...By the mid-'50s...

...Reviews of art exhibitions, carrying information and argument about the style, began to have the currency of reviews of plays and books...

...We all have systems, rules-of-thumb, methods by which we interpret and evaluate art—or, for that matter, morals and experience...

...Impressionism was a system decked out with optical theories about how the eye perceives...

...For the reviewer (as distinct from the critical essayist), it is usually a thankless task to cram into each short review a description of the work under consideration, a brief history of the artist, an analysis of a particular work, a discussion of its relationship to current trends and, if possible, an evaluation of the exhibition together with the reasons for declaring it good or bad...

...What one could not have foreseen, given the strength and the credentials of the movement, was that even during the height of its influence, there were already young artists working in styles opposed to it...

...It is a situation for which most artists, at least, can be thankful...

...Things either measure up or they don't...

...if they don't, they're bad...

...An additional boon for the movement was that it connected itself with a widespread and developing interest in art in general...

...These are problem-solving modes of art, committed to working out—systematically, from one work to the next, from one exhibition to the next—all of the possible solutions to a given problem...

...With that he became visibly agitated and began to squirm in his seat...

...In American art, a decade or more ago, the going method was Abstract Expressionism...

...In the modern period, the most successful forms of art have been those able to claim the virtues, however loosely practiced, of a systematic approach...

...I told him, as politely as I could, that I didn't believe that art, or the evaluation of art, could be reduced to such a system...

...The advocates of Abstract Expressionism were a convinced and convincing crew: Their words counted in the offices of vanguard magazines and in curatorial quarters...

...Every man to his own system...

...For the character of much contemporary art is such that the reviewer, trudging through his weekly roster of exhibitions, is the person most advantageously placed to discuss it...

...Each season brought forward a new school: Pop Art, Op Art, Hard-Edge and Color-Field painting, and Primary Structuralism followed each other in rapid succession...

...There were artists of other persuasions who continued to show, artists who painted nice watercolors of summer scenes, Magic Realists, latter-day Cubists, a few old-line neo-plasticist and geometric painters, but it was a foregone conclusion that they would never gain a foothold in the galleries that mattered...

...As a confirmation of their point of view, they could always point to the surprising international vogue the style was having abroad...

...He was on his way, he told me, to measure a Tiffany vase at the Museum of Modern Art, and he wondered if I wouldn't be interested in doing a story about his research...

...It was the first of the new movements to break open the exhibition scene...

...It has been the ability of such systems to be convincing that has secured their influence, for longer or shorter periods of time, over the way art was made or considered acceptable in being made...

...When, finally, he asked if I would be interested in doing a story, I told him I didn't think so...

...It became apparent, as he flipped through the pages of his scrapbook, that his view of art was a generous one, for the scrapbook included illustrations of everything from works of art to bathing beauties and automobiles...

...On that note, he slammed his scrapbook shut and stormed out of the office...

...Those galleries which a decade ago, with a certain shrewdness, showed only Abstract Expressionists and surefire European modern masters, now run the gamut of contemporary styles...

...The whole problem of esthetics, it seemed to me, was much too complicated to be resolved so easily...

...Critics who had had to deal with the yearly refinements of the Action School suddenly found themselves confronted with a welter of new movements whose intentions had to be explained and analyzed...

...There are obvious things wrong with the way it is practiced: the improbable task of making judgments, by the week or month, without sufficient time to let an experience ripen, the embarrassing short-term evaluations that have to be revised later...

...I assumed he was afraid of having his discovery stolen...

...Finally, there is the specific nature of some of the newer forms like minimal sculpture and Color-Field painting...

...He is often the first to deal with not only the advent of a new style, but the erosion of its values when a horde of second- and third-rate followers begin to flock to it...

...How he was able to determine, with any degree of certainty, the measurements of Greek statues and Italian murals from reproductions, I don't know...

...If the Tiffany vase did not measure up properly that afternoon, he must have become the problem of the Museum of Modern Art...

...In most instances, the reviewer cannot wait for two years to give his considered judgment on a phenomenon like Pop Art and its viability...

...On that wave of interest, it rode into the mass media—into television, the slick mass-circulation magazines, and even the smaller weeklies that had never paid a great deal of attention to art...

...If they do, they're good art...

...He is forced to be in contact with the realities of a scene that is a good deal less tidy than a general essay is likely to indicate...