American Sculpture in Process: 1930/1970 by Wayne Andersen (review)

Books 343 philanthropic and governmental activities it is not surprising that no common behavioral pattern emerges for the group. All of them are (or were) good company men (including Goodrich, Lowry, Ransom and Thompson, who did not work for companies as such). They were obliged to satisfy their directors, stockholders or other constituents, and in most instances this obligation severely limited the range of their creative initiatives. The one individual who clearly succeeded in stamping his views on the institution, instead ofsubordinating his views to the institution, was McNeil Lowry ofthe Ford Foundation. During his long tenure at Ford, Lowry put the emphasis on direct support of individual artists. He refused to give money for buildings and decried using the arts for social, economic or any other ulterior purpose. Lowry, of course, had the great advantage over most ofthe others of not having to show a profit for his shareholders. Still, Lowry's achievement is impressive, since he successfully resisted becoming simply one more cultural bureaucrat. More typical are executives like Stanton, Donovan, Jovanovich and Lieberson who used their talent for innovation to secure new markets for their companies. But judging from the evidence presented here, there was little in these undertakings that contributed perceptibly to higher cultural standards or to the furtheranceofthe arts in theU.S.A..Whatevercreative, artistlike skills these men possessed have been used in behalf of the growth and profitabilityofthe respective corporations they have served. In the process these skills became technical skillscreativity was subsumed by technique. Frank Stanton of CBS is typical. One of the few men in the higher echelons of broadcasting to earn a Ph.D., Stanton was an expert on statistics. Not long after joining CBS he became head of research, which enabled him to develop new statistical methods to measure audience response to programming. These proved so successful that CBS in time became the leader in its field and Stanton became president of the company. Turner Catledge, who became Executive Editor of The New York Times was more concerned with efficient re-organization within the Times' operation. He appears to have been a very able and conscientious executive whose main talent was management. The story is somewhat different, of course, for Goodrich, Thompson, Ransom and Lowry. Since none of these men were engaged in profit-making enterprises, they were free of the constraints on their skills imposed by the market. But Lowry and perhaps Thompson (in a different way) are the only ones in the group who seem to have iniated genuinely new policies in their fields. Ransom, Chancellor of the University of Texas System, and Lloyd Goodrich, Director ofThe Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, appear to be capable professionals but do not register strongly in Burns' account. Somehow they seem not to have excited her interest. Perhaps she was inevitably attracted to the flashier personalities. Frank Thompson, on the other hand, is impressive, one of the unsung heroes in the ongoing battle for the arts in the U.S.A. A relatively obscure Congressman from New Jersey, Thompson did much of the early spadework in Congress to effect the legislation that ultimately resulted in the National Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Burns has written an interesting book, but it would have been a better one had she stuck more closely to her original intent of demonstrating the 'awkward embrace' between artists and cultural managers. Her book also suffers from an uncertain structure and prolix style. Instead ofconsidering each ofher nine subjects separately,she jumps continuously from one to the other in a manner that seems arbitrary. She is addicted to long quotations, not only from her subjects, but also from secondary sources. The latter often seem of only tangential interest. It is a book that requires tenacity on the part of a reader, but it contains chunks ofinteresting information if one is willing to dig them out. African Art in Motion. Robert Farris Thompson. Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, Calif., and London, 1974. 275 pp., illus. £11.00. Reviewed by Gerald Moore* *School of African and Asian Studies, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BNI 9QN, England. Few readers would think ofconsulting a book on African art to...