Artists Second
Andrews, Wayne
Artists Second American Art Since 1900: A Critical History, by Barbara Rose. Illustrated. Praeger. 20 pp.3 $7.50. Reviewed by Wayne Andrews If you happen to believe that American artists are...
...Miss Rose is not at her best when sketching the background of American history...
...Henry James and Edith Wharton are no longer on hand to defend themselves, but it does seem safe to say that James never regretted reading Balzac from beginning to end...
...Whether she succeeds in giving us an idea of the world The Eight and other artists lived in is another matter...
...This should be an exciting moment...
...While it is true that John Sloan and Robert Henri earned a well-deserved reputation for recording the everyday aspect of Theodore Roosevelt's America, Arthur B. Davies, who was just as much a member of The Eight as they were, preferred the dream-world of his nymphs to laundry on the line...
...And there are times when Miss Rose is the victim of a passion for compiling categories...
...What is perhaps more important, they are charming the connoisseurs in 1968...
...There is scarcely an American artist worth remembering who is not given a compliment or two...
...But perhaps the saddest moment in American Art Since 1900 is the one in which Miss Rose describes the international recognition accorded the abstract expressionists in the late 1940s...
...She has seen success close at hand, but fails to understand that the enduring triumphs are usually the possession of those who have been schooled by failure...
...As for Edith Wharton, she was guilty of reading not only French literature in the original, but even German and Italian...
...That comment makes this abstract expressionist sound like a banker who has been happily obliged to retire from a board of directors he has graced for too many years...
...Here is a book almost without bias...
...For Thomas Cole and his friends who haunted the Hudson River Valley nearly 150 years ago could also be congratulated, in Miss Rose's words, for having evolved "a native style consonant with the American experience...
...It isn't, possibly because the author is so much of her own time that she cannot imagine an age when American art prices were not fluctuating with the brilliant uncertainty of Xerox...
...Similarly, when she comes to the Great Depression, the best she can do to make the New Deal come to life is to cite Lewis Mumford, who called out at the Artists' Congress that "the time has come for people who love life and culture to form a united front...
...So The Eight were not the first to qualify under Miss Rose's nationalistic classification, and you might even ask whether they could qualify at all...
...No one could guess from reading her account of the 1920s that John Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe lived like hermits—at least when compared with our own Andy Warhol...
...This is apparent on the first page, where we are told that "American literature renounced European models in the Nineteenth Century...
...Nor is she always arresting when dealing with the individual artists...
...This is a debatable point...
...Reviewed by Wayne Andrews If you happen to believe that American artists are meant to be Americans first and artists afterward, this generously illustrated book by Barbara Rose, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is a contributing editor to Art in America, may satisfy your every need...
...Kind as she is to almost everyone, Miss Rose seems to be searching for artists so American as to be uncon-taminated by the Old World...
...She does quote Malcolm Cowley on the decade, but it is doubtful whether his summons for "a more passionate apprehension of life" will make any particular impression even on the now middleaged men and women who once followed his book reviews in The New Republic...
...Almost...
...And when not lost in that dreamworld, he liked nothing better than to dynamite the complacency of his generation by showing the best modern work from Europe...
...Because of his erudition," we are told, Robert Motherwell "was able to take a large view...
...He was, after all, the arch-instigator of the 1913 Armory Show which displayed Europe's avant garde to America...
...Miss Rose is obviously an admirer of all of The Eight...
...Having touched, fortunately lightly, on the topic of what is American about American literature, Miss Rose goes on to argue that "the first American artists to aim programmatically at founding a native style consonant with the American experience called themselves The Eight," in the first decade of this century...
...Miss Rose is nothing if not comprehensive...
...This is a curious statement...
Vol. 32 • April 1968 • No. 4
