SENSE ON ART
Getlein, Frank
Sense on Art Embattled Critic. Views on modern art, by John Canaday. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. 238 pp. $4.50. (Paper, Noonday Press, $2.45) Toward Reality. Essays in seeing, by John Berger....
...But the rhetoricians have lost the absolute command they exercised for a decade over artists and attitudes, institutions and individual collectors...
...Art criticism of that decade was carried on by a process of free association in which, apparently, the rhetorician went into a kind of trance before the painting and took notes on where his fancy could lead him and still maintain some tenuous connection with his starting point...
...Most of these essays appeared in New Statesman, where Berger operates as a critic, but they have been "edited to make an argument...
...His arrival in that position, in 1959, stirred up a violent storm of protest on the part of those who assumed, at the end of the Fifties, that the future of American art criticism, like that of American art, belonged exclusively to the rhetoricians and to the artists they discovered, promoted, theorized about, and got ecstatic over...
...Knopf...
...From the point of view of American art rhetoric of the fifties, there were many things wrong with John Canaday...
...John Canaday has played a great part in furthering the inevitable breaking of the rhetoricians' spell on the American art community...
...There are enough black-and-white pictures to illustrate the text without making it an art book...
...Unlike the Times man, Berger shuttles back and forth between art and reality, particularly social reality, to make his "argument" cultural in the widest sense...
...Like Canaday, Berger is appalled by the total irrelevance of much contemporary art to contemporary life...
...With command gone, the game is up...
...Reviewed by Frank Getlein The appearance of these two collections of short art essays within a few weeks of each other is one more sign, if one is needed, that the age of pure rhetoric in this field is at an end...
...At times, indeed, interest became capital gains...
...The starting point was not the painting before him but the imagined physical and psychological processes of the painter in painting it...
...More important, the criterion justifies itself in his application of it to selected masters of the Renaissance and the succeeding centuries, including our own...
...He assumed that most painting does, or ought to, mean something, too...
...Finally he subscribed to the principle that "in his professional capacity it is unethical (and even in his personal one, unwise) for a critic to recommend one gallery or one painter over another to a prospective purchaser...
...John Canaday is the art critic of the New York Times...
...The appeal is to the intellect, and it evokes response...
...To our ears today this is an odd criterion, yet it shaped much of our American art in many fields in the Thirties, and much of that art survives today enhanced, not diminished, by time...
...He writes, "The question I ask is: Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights...
...The celebrated letter of denunciation signed by forty-nine art people is reprinted, as is a selection, overwhelmingly pro-Canaday, of the letters it provoked...
...Every one of these principles, asSumptions, and modes of operation is an affront to the rhetoric of the Fifties...
...The primary critical qualification was said to be "interested sympathy" and the interest sometimes led to the confusion of the two roles of critic and salesman...
...Contrived unintelligibility and its rhetoric both continue, just as salon-style painting continued well into our own century though its pretensions had been shattered by 1870...
...As the painters favored by the rhetoricians rigorously discarded drawing, composition, and visual reality so as to be unencumbered for their "encounters" with their enormous blank canvases, so the rhetoricians discarded syntax, grammar, unity, coherence, and emphasis in preparation for their own encounters with blank sheets of paper...
...The continuing theme in his book, taken from his Times' pieces and from articles in Horizon, is the intelligent examination of past and present art...
...In writing about art he tended to describe what he saw when he looked at it...
...John Berger, too, conceives of art criticism (in Toward Reality) as a function of the intellect...
...His own critical intellect derives much light from Marxist theory, which is not to be confused with Twentieth Century Soviet theory and practice of art and art criticism as instruments of the state's overriding purposes...
...His sentences had subjects and predicates and were intended to mean something, to communicate...
...As a sub-theme appears his convincing exposure of nonsense in action painting and action rhetoric...
...He wrote in English, the grammar of which he understood...
...Like the tulip craze in Holland, this aspect of the painting of the Fifties is beginning to die of its own basic market contradictions: eventually there is nothing left to do that has not been done, no place left to go except back to intelligibility, a road back which has been attracting more and more travelers in each of the last several art seasons...
...Embattled Critic takes its title from the public attack on him which followed his dispassionate analysis of what had been going on in the Fifties in American painting...
...Berger explains it away from propaganda and justifies it in theory...
...It lasted a full decade, and while it was on no one like either Canaday or Berger was published in hard covers...
...233 pp...
...That rhetoric assumed that beauty was in neither the art object nor the eye of the beholder, but in the mental agility of the practicing rhetoricians...
Vol. 26 • September 1962 • No. 9
