Art Under the Spotlight
GEWEN, BARRY
ART UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT BY BARRY GEWEN John Mueller, a professor of film studies at the University of Rochester, with generous assistance from his publisher, Knopf, has produced a book the world...
...Although a beautifully designed coffee-table objet, Astaire Dancing is essentially a reference work, yet with none of the dry neutrality one might expect from such a volume because the author never shies away from offering vivifying evaluations along with the descriptions...
...When people compliment him, he thinks they are merely being kind, and he occasionally spoke about giving up dance for something he could do well...
...What makes Kramer perplexing, though, is his unwillingness to give up the avant-garde after singing its elegy...
...One could ask for no better guide through the thickets of the contemporary art scene...
...If everyone, Mueller included, perceives a falling-off in the years after Rogers, it is because Astaire lost his subject...
...Admittedly, it is still rather odd to think of Astaire as a ma-j or 20th-century artist, and Mueller is obviously self-conscious in asserting his judgments...
...Hilton Kramer is a writer who has consistently and vigorously drawn our attention to the demise of the avant-garde, accepting the fact of postmodernism while subjecting it to rigorous scrutiny in an effort to winnow the wheat from the chaff during a period of esthetic hedonism and confusion...
...It is as if he had set out to sea in search of new lands, and then retreated back to shore after glimpsing the immensity of the ocean...
...Astaire belongs in the company of these outstanding American creators...
...It risks, ultimately, faulty criticism and worse art...
...I, for one, thought he was right on target in his estimations of David Hockney, Ansel Adams and Anthony Caro, to pick some random examples, off base with regard to Bonnard and Philip Perlstein, yet I profited from all of these pieces...
...Cutting across schools, Kramer can praise Pierre Bonnard in one breath, the utterly different Max Ernst in the next...
...He wrote his autobiography himself, without the assistance of a ghost writer, and, oh yes, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin considered him the best singer of their songs...
...In the end, of course, Astaire's contribution rests with his dancing, most notably in the nine films he made with Ginger Rogers in the 1930s...
...Modernism," he declares, "remains a touchstone of quality...
...One of the joys of this book is learning about his incredible competence...
...It cannot do justice to entertainer-geniuses like Fred Astaire...
...Both writers stress the drama of the couple's numbers...
...The dances are not abstract or escapist...
...his work is neither abstract nor formally innovative...
...That case can be summed up by a story Mueller tells...
...Kramer is a wonderfully receptive critic who responds to a painting or sculpture on its own terms, employing, asbesthecan, only his experience, his erudition and his articulateness, not his preconceptions...
...a vital force in the life of art today—in my view, its most vital force...
...Rogers was Astaire's best partner, Mueller writes, because she "conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience possible...
...He is almost aggressively hostile to ideology in art, and can spot political cant from the next county...
...The comparison is not farfetched, for like the German master Astaire has been expert in every phase of his art...
...The pages glow with the warmth of infectious enthusiasm...
...If the praise of one's most eminent peers is a sign of excellence, then Astaire is nonpareil—up there at the top, in Cole Porter's words, with Mickey Mouse and cellophane...
...While the dance analyses constitute the bulk of the book, the most important section is the Introduction, where Mueller makes his case for Astaire's position in cultural history and looks at the man's overall achievement...
...He derives satisfaction from modernism's decline because he views it in part as the death of one more constricting dogma...
...The term "genius" isnormallyre-served for the titans of the avant-garde—Stravinsky, Joyce, Picasso—figures with whom Astaire has little or nothing in common...
...He actualized the metaphor "walking on air...
...He violates practically every standard associated with modern art: He is enormously popular, and was interested in pleasing an audience (without condescending to it...
...Mueller, incidentally, is very good on showing how arrogant auteur directors of the '60s like Francis Coppola destroyed what Astaire had created...
...ART UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT BY BARRY GEWEN John Mueller, a professor of film studies at the University of Rochester, with generous assistance from his publisher, Knopf, has produced a book the world genuinely needed...
...This is crucial, necessary work, and Kramer is, in most respects, very good atit...
...Baryshnikov and Margot Fonteyn call him a genius...
...He plays the piano, drums and accordion, composes music, and had a hit tune during the '30s...
...If, like Mueller, we remain slightly tentative in our claims for him, it is because the influence of modernism has not fully receded...
...To label him a genius, therefore, is to perform an act of critical revisionism...
...In an especially apt formulation, Croce calls the nine films a single epic featuring two characters named Fred and Ginger...
...Half a century after their release they are vitally, emotionally alive—and will undoubtedly continue to live for as long as people believe in the idea of romantic love...
...Or perhaps he felt he needed a slingshot to use against the rampaging Philistines, whose hordes, he believes, have violated even the sanctuary of the museum...
...A reader need not share his tastes to appreciate such open-mindedness...
...He observes, for example, that despite the "Bojangles" routine in Swing Time, Astaire was not a great admirer of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson...
...His insouciant movie persona was the result of a huge amount of vcr\ hard work...
...Besides performing in an amalgam of styles from tap to ballet, Astaire did his own choreography, dubbed the sound tracks himself, helped arrange the music, participated in auditions and script conferences, even got involved in marketing his films...
...Balanchine just said the same thing...
...These are significant points, I believe, for they explain not only the pair's enduring popularity but also the nature of Astaire's art: He overcame the artificiality of the dance, making it" real'' for a modern audience by using movement to display what was possible between a man and a woman in love...
...The New Yorker critic Arlene Croce has already examined these pictures in her own sprightly The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, and Mueller largely shares her assessment, building upon it and correcting occasional factual errors...
...Although his self-chosen task of defending "seriousness" in art is an honorable one (most gracefully done, someone might remind him, with a dash of irony), the modernistic distinction he makes between (good) high culture and (bad) popular culture is both passe and debilitating...
...All of this gives his writing a refreshing unpredictability...
...Once, when the New York City Ballet Company was touring the Soviet Union, Jerome Robbins, in response to a reporter's question, said Astaire was the dancer who had most influenced him...
...The newspaperman looked shocked, and Robbins asked why...
...It closes off whole realms of experience that are especially important ones in a society with a democratic ethos...
...Well," came the reply, "Mr...
...He is a legendary perfectionist who would spend weeks getting a routine just right...
...We have learned that lasting and significant art has been created out front, under the spotlight as it were, bypeople with names like JohnFord, Howard Hawks, Walt Disney, Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, Bob Dylan...
...One happy effect of this change is that work no longer tends to be dismissed merely because of popularity...
...He had complete control over the shooting of his numbers, and his editing revolutionized the movie musical...
...He is a nice guy who finished first...
...Balanchine, in another context, equated him with Bach...
...Thirty years ago, when a modernist perspective dominated criticism, and a sniffy disdain was considered the only proper stance toward popular culture or anything that smacked of entertainment, few would have dared to number Astaire among the century's giants...
...His dances became exercises in technique, and gimmicky...
...they have a definite subject—romance...
...Readers, in any case, will probably have difficulty understanding how Kramer can have it both ways, and by the end of the volume may come to suspect that—contrary to the very thing which is outstanding in his work—he is using the standards of modernism to beat up on recent developments he dislikes...
...Gene Kelly has said: "The history of dance on film begins with Astaire...
...Tastes began to change in the '60s, and for some time now writers have been describing a profound alteration in our sensibility, brought on by the patent exhaustion of the avant-garde...
...Mueller is enough of an enthusiast for Astaire's complete oeuvre to cause us to want toseeorre-seethe later pictures, yet nothing will change the fact that the films with Rogers are the ones that assure Astaire his place in history...
...Nurey ev settles for the "greatest American dancer in American history...
...But there is much that is puzzling about him, and a collection of his articles, The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972-1984 (Free Press 455 pp., $25.00) reveals just how puzzling...
...Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films (440 pp., $45.00) is a detailed account of every dance sequence ever filmed by the Hollywood star the author calls "one of the master artists of thecentury...
...Yet Astaire is astoundingly modest, almost insecure, about his accomplishments...
...By Mueller's reckoning, of the 212 musical numbers covered, at least 75 are masterpieces or near-masterpieces...
...Perhaps that lack of confidence was necessary to drive him...
...Lavishly illustrated with photographs, publicity stills and over 2,000 frame enlargements, it proceeds encyclopedia-like, movie by movie, dance by dance, through 31 films—from Dancing Lady in 1933 to Finian's Rainbow in 1968...
Vol. 68 • December 1985 • No. 16
