Color in Art: A Tribute to Arthur Pope by James M. Carpenter (review)

Books 79 themes invented as a kind of deus ex rnachina for odd assortments of slick writings. Among other credits, Rosenberg is distinguished by a style of literary commentary that has inspired a host of art writers aping his mannerisms, seldom his depth of perception. An ingredient in Rosenberg’s style is the well-turned phrase, the gift of abbreviated, metaphoric expression. As will happen in a careless moment, style sometimes dominates content and the metaphors become things in themselves, merely hip aphorisms that are impressive but essentially meaningless. For example: (1) ‘The American woman is an odalisque who has reduced the aspect of privacy and converted absent-minded immobility into busyness.’ (2) ‘An artist is a person who has invented an artist.’ Where such slickness is most prevalent, the articles are least interesting. The majority of these appear to have been published in Vogue magazine during the middle 1960’s. Perhaps that both explains and forgives. Rosenberg is seen at his feeling and intellectual best in a section titled, ‘Pledged to the Marvelous’, all essays here on Jewish identity in art, culture and theology. The article, ‘Letter to a Jewish Theologian’, is an impeccable and moving counter-argument. When Rosenberg is serious he writes clearly, thinks lucidly and abandons the commercial writer’s trick of generalizing from particulars. His critical acumen is well pronounced in the several essays of commentary on sociological and anthropological approaches to political and cultural analysis. ‘Community, Values, Comedy’ and ‘The Anthropologist’s Stone’ are especially incisive in this respect. Too frequently, as occurs in the disappointing section, ‘The Geography of Modern Art’, Rosenberg is inclined to assume an oracular stance that renders incomplete or obscures his many sensitive insights into contemporary art, its practices and its system of politics. For readers who are of the period and location, his essay, ‘Tenth Street’, written in 1954, will raise nostalgic memories of an era whose site, unhappily, was not ‘swallowed in the yawn of a steam shovel’, but moved further downtown and called itself Soho. Recollections of significant articles by Rosenberg that are missing from this collection come easily to mind. A New Yorker publication on WPA art of several years ago is surprising for its absence. Rosenberg is an important commentator and deserves better editorial discrimination than is provided by Discovering the Present. The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 19561972 . Hilton Kramer. Secker & Warburg, London, 1974. 565 pp., illus. f6.50. Reviewed by Alan C. Birnholz* This book contains 141 essays written between 1956 and 1972 by the art critic of The New York Times on topics ranging from Courbet and Turner to most recent developments . The selections are quite brief-500-1,000 words for the most part-and thus ideas demanding greater elaboration often fail to get it. But the book is filled with so much common sense and clear thinking (and clever prose) that it is a very useful book indeed. Kramer aims his criticism at four main targets: overrated artists, formalist painting and sculpture of the 19603, contemporary critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, and the public at large. I shall examine these in turn. Kramer can be quite refreshing simply because of his iconoclasm. He doubts, for example, the real achievement of Pollock. Duchamp receives little of the reverence so widespread these past few years. .Instead, Kramer praises an artist like Philip Pearlstein, because for Kramer art must involve more than a dialogue with the making of art itself. Art must be emotional, humanist, in touch with the grand tradition of the history of art-as well as a testament to technical and aesthetic capability. As a *Dept. of Art History, 325 Foster Hall, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14214, U.S.A. result of this belief, Kramer spends much time rescuing several figures from art-historical oblivion (e.g. Saul Baizerman). The attack on 1960’s formalism is hardly surprising. ‘The visual arts today’, he wrote in 1969, ‘are so devoid of moral intelligence, so totally sealed off from any problem, idea, or emotion that reaches beyond the dialogue that art conducts with itself, that a mind like Beckmann’s seems more...