Avant-Garde Worship

...It is only necessary to deplore the sentimental horrors of long-deflated pompiers like Delaroche, Cogniet, Couture, Tassaert, and Bouguereau to prove one's point...

...The fact that recent books and major exhibitions of such kitsch have been taken seriously by people desperate to find something—anything—to counter the stranglehold of the avant-garde is no excuse for heresy-hunting and making an icon out of a moribund ideology...

...Rosen is too good a writer and too sensitive a critic to lend himself to this reactionary enterprise...

...Had they dealt with period artists of comparable stature—Goya, Rodin, Wagner, even Daumier or Van Gogh—the result might have been different...

...Once bogged down there, the only way out is to spend one's life separating the Good Guys from the Bad Guys (all French, of course...

...That, however, is not the case...

...Nevertheless, the book was written with so much feeling that it was a delight to read...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "Artists in Tune with Their World," "The Eye of Man" In 1973 Charles Rosen, the pianist and scholar, published a book about Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven that told us as much about the music of the three composers as anyone ever has, with the possible exception of Sir Donald Francis Tovey...

...Probably it was a mistake to go to France and get involved in that typically French snobbism, the mystique of the avant-garde...

...One could argue that the heroes of Romanticism and Realism—Courbet, Manet, Delacroix, David, Ingres, and Bewick—are pygmies compared to the three giants discussed in The Classical Style, and that the authors are therefore hard pressed to generate enthusiasm, much less passion, for what survives mainly in the histories of art...

...But their choices were dictated by the thesis, the very tired thesis, around which they seem to have felt compelled to construct their polemic: namely, that art—at least of the 19th and 20th centuries—lives by how fervently its practitioners have embraced the concept of the avant-garde...

...Entitled The Classical Style, it was somewhat difficult for the layman because all the illustrations were excerpts from the scores: One had to be familiar with the entire body of work of those masters to properly appreciate it...

...Using this standard, Courbet's incredibly dull, pedestrian "Burial at Ornans" and Delacroix' theatrical melodrama "Sardanapalus' Death" become masterpieces...

...It would be pleasant to be able to report that Rosen and his co-author Henri Zerner, a Harvard professor and curator of prints at the university's Fogg Museum of Art, have now done as much for 19th-century painting...

...Although the task would seem to be easier here, since most of the works discussed are present in complete form as black-and-white reproductions, the volume is inconclusive, ambiguous and boring...