Soho: The Artist in the City by Charles R. Simpson (review)

Book Reviews 65 phenomena of the times" (p, xiii). Overall, the study fulfills this aim quite well. It develops an historical analysis which itself becomes more interesting to the reader and therefore encourages an appreciation of "the history of art criticism". The book begins with a brief, perhaps too sketchy, analysis of the political background that preceded Abstract Expressionism, and the 'progressive' or 'radical' criticism that accompanied the movement and served to unify it. The analysis continues with an examination of radical criticism through the forties, fifties and sixties, mainly, as this criticism centres around Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the 'schools' of criticism they generated, and the works of art they selected as the closest approximations to the ideals of their theoretical models. A central chapter in this work, "The Philosophy and Function of Criticism", attempts to distinguish a "philosophical model" of art criticism-one that expresses "an ideal notion of how criticism should work"-from an "historical analysis" of "how criticism did work"; however, the general distinction is not fully developed before the author returns to the specific critics of Abstract Expressionism. The distinction does appear again in the final chapter, where Foster contrasts two "idealistic" attempts to comprehend the critics of Abstract Expressionism, on the one hand, with the "history of criticism" approach he espouses. "The [art criticism] historian wants to explain why it was written in such a way. He is interested, not in the justification of such criticism, but in the reasons which account for its existence" (pp. 98-99). Or, "the question then becomes, what were these critics trying to do, and why were they trying to do it. With this shift in questions, the complexion of the problem changes from a primarily philosophical one to an historical one" (p. 100). This final chapter should also have been developed more fully and cogently. By following two major 'schools' of art criticism in interaction, as these, in turn, dynamically interacted with art objects and artists during an experimental period, Foster has provided an interesting and intelligent demonstration of the historical approach to art criticism. By showing that a form or model of art criticism selects works of art that are representative of its own premises, and that it may enjoy a longevity greater than the particular art objects it offers as exemplars, Foster shows that art criticism has a lifeof its own, and in this basic way, his work supports the validity and value of the 'history of criticism'. On American Art During '30s and '40s. Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years. Robert Carleton Hobbs and Gail Levin. Cornell University Press, Ithaca,1981. 140 pp., iIlus. Cloth. ISBN: 0-8014-13656 . Reviewed by S. I. Clerk" Originally published in conjunction with a travelling exhibition organized in 1978 by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, this book has now been reissued in cloth and paperback editions by Cornell University Press in cooperation with these museums. Overall, this is a fairly comprehensive study of the New York School in the thirties and the forties, which offers a different angle of examination of the various artists involved and significantly correlates their works. Robert Carleton Hobbs, Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Cornell University and Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, offers a well-studied essay on some important facets of Early Abstract Expressionism: A Concern with the Unknown Within (the title of his essay). Abstract Expressionism is not a movement in the usual sense of the word: it has no manifesto and the artists concerned are all highly individualistic. At the same time the artists may be regarded as a group which initiated a post-modernist movement. They had much in common. Thus, for instance, "many early Abstract Expressionists' works reflect a journey within." They were not interested in the visual world but strove to penetrate the world within themselves. They differed from Cubists in that they ignored the analysis of the world outside them and emphasized subjects suggestive of interior states. Hobbs further explains the involvement of Abstract Expressionism with peripheral vision (which "renders something one knows without seeing it directly, something one...