Richard Florsheim: The Artist and His Art by August L. Freundlich (review)

168 Books other large ventures. Those who come to the book seeking some final gesture toward a tighter organization of thought (projecting retrospectively the solemnity of Rosenberg's death) will be disappointed. Those seeking more of the vitality and values that typified Rosenberg's writing"will be heartened, for in structure Barnett Newman is not significantly distinguished from the much less imposing Arshile Gorky (1962). Rambling and rhetorically resourceful, Rosenberg was not one for deductive construction of ideas. In his first sentence he launches into a universe of assumptions: 'The outstanding metaphysical painter of the postwar era, Barnett Newman wascompelled from the beginning to cope with the negative reflexof modernism to lofty ideas and exalted passions.' Nowhere subsequently are the author's concepts of the terms 'metaphysical painter' or 'modernism' defined. Rather, a wide inclusivegesture is made and, if one was captured by the promise of that first statement, then with Rosenberg one might leap from notion to notion within an intellectual terrain wholly unpredictable as to magnitude of value or of direction or of development. Yet, many followed Rosenberg's invitation in his regular New Yorker magazine columns and in numerous books, for his values were not suspect nor their source in a deep empathy for a narrow circle of art and artists he championedvery successfully. His allegiances were steadfast and in time his choices will probably be vindicated to the extent he would have wishedthough criticismis not scored by hits or misses,being essentiallya form ofliterature and not of philosophy, a premise Rosenberg's writings confirm. Literary in exposition, recurring themes lace his work and Rosenberg took the occasion of his last book to fix more securelythe vision he carried of recent nonfigurative art; he reasserted his well-known conception of Action Painting, arguing-perhaps implausibly on the surface merits of the casethat Barnett Newman wasanother example of this tendency, that Newman's first painting in his mature style, 'Onement', 'was something he had done, not conceived' (p. 49). Without clarification , it is difficult to say if such a statement cedes or denies to artists art as a form of cogitation-writing as the arena in which writers think, only painting for painters. The distinction between doing and thinking does not finally seem sufficientto distinguish Newman from other artists whose work might superficially resemblehis and that 'Newman wasjustified in regarding himself as closer to the action painters than to the "purists'''. The difference between the paintings of Newman and of Mondrian, for example, is vast; it is even arguable that Newman's art could have sprung from the New York School had there never been a Mondrian, but the closelyreasoned argument that might sustain such a position cannot be found within the writings of Rosenberg . Sometimes this lack of precision isvexing,as in his frequent quotes from Newman's writings that go unfootnoted-so no chronological senseof Newman's theoretical development can be constructed from the citations. And if Rosenberg disagrees with Hess on the role of religious, specifically Jewish iconographic, content in Newman's paintings (p. 81), at the same time his most passionate, eloquent and articulate exposition in the book is of the concept of makom (place, in Hebrew). Rosenberg's descriptions of Newman's sculptures is not closely analyzed and constitutes little more than a list of preferences within the body of the work. Yet the book as a whole does serveas a generous trove of information from which future studies and documentation may grow and for that one's gratitude should be unstinting. In addition to Rosenberg's text, the book contains reproductions of almost all of Newman's paintings, most of his drawings, watercolors, prints, sculptures and his model for a synagogue. There is a detailed chronology with documentary photographs, also an appendix of Newman's writings and letters, a comprehensive list of his exhibitions and a bibliography. What truly distinguishes the book is its physical package, a striking book that is the principal candidate for the most beautiful production in the entire line of Abrams art books. The copious color plates, 131 of the total 270, are stunningly rich; the quality of color reproduction-by which this project would succeed or fail...