Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse by John O'Brian (review)

humanities 451 recuperating an interesting Canadian literary figure while also uncovering historical moments with famous people. Diary of a European Tour, 1900 is more serious in tone than the lighter, pithier Famous People Who Have Met Me. While these two books are very different in style and rhetoric, Jean O'Grady's literary historical work recovers worthwhile figures from a period of Canadian literature and history too often overlooked. (JENNIFER CHAMBERS) John O'Brian. Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse University of Chicago Press. 284; 87 illus. US $45.00 In Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse, John O'Brian offers a fascinating account of the ideological pressures that shaped the emergence of artistic modernism in American culture and criticism. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed, it may well seem that the message of O'Brian's carefully argued and well-written text partly belies its smart production values. For many years now, what art historians term `the social art history' has sought to demystify much of the idealism attached to traditional accounts of the rise of modernism. The case of Matisse, O'Brian suggests, offers a particularly challenging opportunity, for here was an artist whose works B at once cerebral, erotic, and bordering on the abstract B might not seem easily to yield to such a project. To consider only Matisse's reception in the United States, nothing could be further from the case. For as O'Brian suggests, Matisse's purposeful rejection of political content in his art helped assure its critical role in postwar American debates about the nature, purposes, and ethics of modernism. Cultivating in his own persona a reassuring portrait of middle-class probity, Matisse helped establish his work as a touchstone for good, right, or bourgeois modernism, in effect easing the passage into modernist art of a new collecting class. Perhaps no previous study of artistic reception has demonstrated such sensitivity to the different instruments of publicity and reputation: across two decades and hundreds of collectors, journalists, museum curators, directors, and dealers, O'Brian offers a portrait of an age. His command of this cultural terrain is extraordinary, allowing him to discriminate between different audiences and institutions and hence avoiding the tendentious generalizations that too often plague accounts of artistic reception. On the contrary, modernism in America was an at once shifting and unstable discourse , the terms of its formation varying from city to city, from museum to museum, and from collector to collector. Of particular interest in this regard was the prominent role played by public exhibitions. In the case of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of 452 letters in canada 1999 Art, directors and curators found themselves entrusted with extraordinary but also highly conflicted cultural responsibilities. Trying to reshape American taste without at the same time offending their local boards and communities, curators and directors staged Matisse's work with extreme care and precision, clamping down on all possibilities for misinterpretation. Those curators and directors stand out as early doctors of spin, working the media and its instruments to assure that their Matisses promoted the right message. Not that Matisse himself watched from the sidelines as these diverse interpretive communities fought over the meaning of his art. Those who take exception to O'Brian's kind of analysis might claim that Matisse's reception bears little relation to the true nature of his art B that Matisse's art differs from its social effect. But O'Brian will have none of this, and let it be said he makes a very strong case. Matisse emerges from these pages as at once manufacturing and controlling his own reputation, critically intervening in a shifting field through the works he allowed to be sold, through his choice of subject, and through his carefully scripted appearances in the New World. As for O'Brian himself, the social art history has often been practised as a form of political criticism, a process of laying bare the structure and machinery behind art's ideological complicity with dominant groups and cultures. O'Brian offers nothing so crude, but we find a trace of this emancipatory impulse in the plaintive note that...