The Compleat Art Critic

...Taken together, the essays and reviews form an extremely vivid account of the time...

...These sections are the best, let me emphasize, of a book that never sags into the mediocre, that never loses the vitality of a sustained, alert and creative awareness...

...William Hazlitt sometimes did, and Baudelaire and, perhaps more than anyone else, John Ruskin...

...I wrote in praise of Ruskin and Proust, in explanation of Read, and in criticism of Malraux and other French critics who in my view appeared to consider the vatic voice more important than the visual impact transmitted...

...author, "Dawn and the Darkest Hour" BEING DEVOTED to those tangible objects wherein a culture most memorably expresses itself, I have during my long career as a man-of-letters occasionally served in the role of art critic...

...the unusually perceptive group of essays on Central European painters from Lovis Corinth to Vasily Kandinsky...

...At first sight, the book seems an unfortunate kind of presentation...

...individually, each piece records an experience, an actual room filled with paintings or sculptures or photographs, and a mind's eye coursing over them, always aware of what Kramer calls "the compelling element of sensibility" that asserts itself despite style or manner or period...

...Herbert Read, who saw in art a form of education that would bloodlessly bring about the anarchist millennium, and Andre Malraux, who regarded it as the supreme means by which man might assert himself in defiance of an absurd universe, were notable end-products of the essentially moralistic fervor that inspired the so-called esthetic movement...

...Pater, for example, let La Giocoitda provoke him into a literary dream...

...I developed this theme in a number of long essays for the review Arts, at the time that its editor was Hilton Kramer...

...the discussions of American painters between the wars...

...the brilliant exposition of the relationship between Cubism and Constructivism...

...Some of the pieces included are considerable essays...

...I noted down many that might be remembered with profit, but I have no intention of ending this review with a "Sayings of . . ." Instead, let me point to what I consider the especially attractive sections of The Age of the Avant-Garde: the opening essay, which presents the historical argument clearly and concisely...

...But The Age of the Avant-Garde is not merely a theoretical exposition nor simply a historical chronicle...

...And often, while seeking to define my own criteria, I have fabricated an image of the Compleat Art Critic—which I did not even approximate, since I never pursued the role relentlessly enough...

...Modern art," Kramer tells us, "before it became a campaign for 'the future,' was thus first of all an effort to recapture and build on the most vital links with the past...

...It is as though Gibbon, finding no publisher willing to take The Decline and Fall in all its lengthy grandeur, had reconciled himself to becoming a journalist and writing a bit of history twice a week, apparently haphazardly and in response to immediate impulses, yet with the underlying belief that one day he would be able to fit everything together so that out of the mosaic his larger vision would emerge...

...Only infrequently, when their messianism loosened a little, would they allow their eyes to glimpse a work, to see it in all its reality, and share that vision with the reader...

...Hence he constantly stresses that the basic aim of modernism's rebellious experimentalism was to renovate the tradition...

...Most readers, unless they are committed and emotional adherents of a writer, incline to shy away from a volume of newspaper reviews because they suspect it is a collection of mere ephemerae...

...After Ruskin and Proust, however, the line grew thin...

...I suspect this was due less to the advent of photography than to the influence of the esthetes—Walter Horatio Pater especially and also Oscar Wilde—who turned art into a kind of pentecostal cult and, in stressing its redemptive qualities, forgot what it looked like...

...This coalescence of the immediate and the extended vision has resulted in an aphoristic style that is one of the more attractive features of Kramer's writing, filling his essays with quotable sentences that often condense into a single admirable statement the essential quality of an artist or the kernel of a theoretical question...

...My own first reaction was: "Why didn't he leave all this to his literary executor, and develop the ideas the book contains into a history of the rise and fall of the modern movement in art, which is his real theme...

...others are brief reports tied to particular exhibitions...

...This is precisely what happens in The Age of the Avant-Garde...

...the assessments of fellow critics, notably Clement Greenberg (praised) and Harold Rosenberg (damned...

...I became a critic of art critics, in effect, as I tried in a humble way to convey my own direct perceptions of oriental and primitive arts...

...Such feats are of course possible only if the critic constantly bears in mind, even at the moment of noting his immediate reactions, an essential and consistent philosophic view of art...

...The essential cohesive principle is Kramer's unfashionable and indeed antifashionable realization that an avant-garde is by definition part of the army it precedes, and that if it loses contact it is destroyed...

...Then there was Ruskin's great disciple, Proust, whose vast novel contains page after page of the most admirable writing on the visual and the tactile arts...

...In fact, now that the fragments have been assembled they read in a completely new way, and a genuine historical pattern becomes evident, introduced by the especially prepared title essay...

...the masters of the School of Paris did not reject the old masters but restated their themes and rejuvenated their forms to meet the changed vision of a new age...

...he never viewed it as a painting...

...Nonetheless, it seemed to me the Compleat Art Critic must first of all be endowed with an eye, and be able in some way to reflect in prose what his eye might perceive...

...The more than 150 pieces, most of them written for special occasions, are remarkably consistent in their underlying attitudes...

...The reader is led from the 19th-century precursors, through the great decades of the modern movement, down to the 1960s when it could clearly be seen that, whatever was to come, a great cycle of art had ended...

...The lightness of theory and sense of history rescued its contents from the ephemeral fate of most art criticism, yet it is the character of the separate pieces—combined with the continuing vision they exemplify —that saves the volume as a whole from the kind of academic detachment from its real subject one so often encounters in art histories...

...The answer is that Kramer, possessing a deep historical sense of the nature of the modern movement, as well as a highly developed visual perceptiveness, from the beginning wrote his regular reviews as if he were preparing a history...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature...

...No matter how utterly obvious that may sound, rarely in my reading of art critics did I encounter any who convinced me—by evoking an image in my mind's eye—that they had really been looking at a picture...

...The earlier and longer ones were written mainly for Arts, as I well remember, but the majority have been produced during Kramer's long incumbency as art critic for the New York Times, and are brief and highly compacted to fit their place of publication...

...And he laments that "nowadays we tend to lose sight of the creative reciprocity that obtains between convention and innovation...

...The eye looks at the objects, assessing their pictorial qualities, and then the mind behind it blends these moments of esthetic awareness in the annealing process of correlation to factors beyond the purely esthetic...

...All this would be old history?since Arts eventually turned into a different magazine than it was under Kramer and I ceased to write for it—except now, after so many years, I find myself reading the massive volume entitled The Age of the Avant-Garde, comprising Kramer's own art criticism from 1956-72, and discovering that he comes closer than any other contemporary writer to my image of the Compleat Art Critic...