print February 1968

Problems of Criticism IV: The Politics of Art, Part I

I CAN IMAGINE, IN THESE days of global intercourse and indiscriminate CIA subsidy, a cultural summit meeting at a health spa outside of, say, Montevideo. Here South American revolutionaries, who might be underpaid intellectuals by day and guerillas by night, could sunbathe with their Yanqui opposite numbers, former Trotskyites who now contribute to the mass media, discussing cultural problems of mutual interest. Eventually it might hit home that American culture, and in particular American art, the commodity lately found most useful in selling the American way of life, is as unwanted and as

print November 1967

Washington Scene

It’s hard to believe that the sleepy Southern town that was Washington, D.C., before the Kennedys sparked a cultural renaissance has emerged during the styleless LBJ era with a certain style of its own. Not the least of the new stylishness is the small but definitely percolating art scene. The scene had its start in the fifties when Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland both lived and worked in the Capital and Clement Greenberg was a frequent visitor. Things began to happen with Alice Denny’s brief tenure at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, where she scheduled one of the first Pop art shows in

print November 1967

The New York Painter

So little data linking the various generations of American artists exists that an exhibition like The New York Painter, which documents such connections, is indeed welcome. Representing a capsule survey of American art, the exhibition, a benefit for the N.Y.U. art collection, assembles an entirely respectable if not exactly overwhelming group of works. The main point of the show is to establish relationships between teachers and students. For this purpose a useful chronological chart is made available, which provides us with a few interesting historical footnotes, such as, for example, that

print November 1967

George McNeil

George McNeil manages to avoid falling into either of the two major pitfalls that plagued late Abstract Expressionism: poor color and the lack of coherent structure. His color—predominantly the complementary hues of red and green, orange and blue, is adroitly set off by touches of black and white. Because his palette is so conventional, the paintings don’t mean much as a color experience, but the brilliance of the hues does manage to keep the paint lively and healthy looking and to compensate for the deadness that naturally issues from overpainting. The best pictures—Cassandra and Clarabel—tend

print November 1967

Brice Marden, David Novros, Paul Mogensen, Ralph Humphrey and Peter Gourfain

To cross the street from the Wise Gallery to the Bykert is to experience a disorienting cultural shock. McNeil’s violent images and strident palette couldn’t be farther from the muted withdrawal of the younger generation displaying their works in a Group Show at the Bykert. Seeing the works juxtaposed is to see illustrated two diametrically opposed world views.

There is no question that the paintings by Brice Marden, David Novros, Paul Mogensen, Ralph Humphrey and Peter Gourfain at the Bykert aspire to be radical art. All are more or less “minimal” in that they are monochromatic or close to it.

print October 1967

Abstract Illusionism

PERHAPS THE MOST STRIKING FEATURE about the recent work of several leading abstract painters is what appears to be a return to illusionism. Accomplished through a variety of illusionistic devices including the use of two-point perspective, orthographic drawing, and warm-cool color contrast, a new type of illusionism may well be the single common denominator linking the most advanced painting being done today. It has been obvious, for the past year at least, that a shift in focus from the acknowledgment of the flatness of the picture support which characterized the abstraction of the early sixties

print October 1966

Nakian at the Modern

WHEN GASTON LACHAISE DIED in 1935 he left American sculpture bereft of a major talent. There were, however, two young men who showed great promise. One was David Smith, and the other was Lachaise’s apprentice, Reuben Nakian. Now, in the sixties, large, quasi-retrospective showings of each force an evaluation of how they used that promise as mature artists. Nakian’s recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art makes it clearer than ever that although the two represent opposite poles of American sculpture, Nakian is perhaps the only sculptor of his generation whose work bears comparison with

print October 1966

An Interview with Robert Murray

B. R.: When did you begin to find the conditions of the studio unsatisfactory and begin to work with commercial or industrial processes?

R. M.: I started out as a painter. I have never actually studied sculpture. During the summers of 1957 and 1958 I worked in city planning offices in Regina and Saskatoon. The people in Saskatoon told me of their intention to commission a piece of sculpture for the grounds of the City Hall and at the time I recommended a sculptor in Regina. A year later they wrote to me in Mexico asking if I had any interest in the commission and I decided to have a go at it.

print Summer 1967

Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Machines

CLAES OLDENBURG, IS THE SINGLE Pop artist to have added significantly to the history of form. In order to perceive this, however, one must look beyond the Rabelaisian absurdity of his grotesque imagery to the inventiveness of his shapes, techniques, and materials. These are sufficiently original to identify Oldenburg, not, as he has erroneously been seen, as a chef d’ecole of Pop art, but as one of the most vital innovators in the field of contemporary sculpture, whose vision has affected the work of many other young artists of his generation.

Every major artist dreams of reconstructing the world

print Summer 1967

Ellsworth Kelly as Sculptor

ALTHOUGH HE IS CELEBRATED primarily as the painter of elegant hard-edge abstractions, Ellsworth Kelly deserves equal renown as the creator of some of the best sculpture done in the sixties. Covering the full range from reliefs to free-standing floor pieces, Kelly’s sculptures are intimately tied to his paintings in their forms, colors, and precise, sharp contours. It is, in fact, as a resolution of certain problems raised by the paintings themselves that the sculptures may be seen.

In his most recent paintings, a series of monochrome panels shown last March at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Kelly has

print April 1967

The Value of Didactic Art

1. THE ARTIST AS TEACHER

ANDY WARHOL IS LIKE CÉZANNE in only one way: he is the primitive of a new art. Along with Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Ad Reinhardt and Marcel Duchamp, whose activity provides the closest parallel with his own, Warhol is one of the principal didactic artists of our time. All valid art, of course, teaches something; but until the fifties, Duchamp was the only major artist to consider each art object he produced primarily a lesson in esthetics.

I am defining didactic art as art whose primary intention is to instruct. Within the terms of this definition, Jasper

print November 1966

The Show

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM HAS COME a long way since Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney institutionalized her collection in 1931, and most of it has been downhill. The inaugural exhibition in its sleek new Madison Avenue quarters, Art of the United States: 1670–1966, is no exception to the general decline. Up from the storerooms have come all the standbys of a legion of Whitney annuals: Bernard Karfiol, Leon Kroll, Eugene Speicher, Abraham Rattner, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, et. al. The 19th-century works (borrowed for the occasion, since the Whitney long since dumped their own collection in order to buy

print January 1966

An Interview with Jack Youngerman

Q: Were your early paintings, in Paris after the war, geometric?

A: No, not really. When I started painting, I hadn’t seen anything that was happening in America. I’d been to the Modern Museum once and that was all. I went straight from Kentucky to Paris by way of the Navy, because in 1947 all the art schools in New York were full. In Paris I really wasn’t in the art world. I lived in a fantastically removed way. I knew a few American painters like Ellsworth Kelly and Bob Breer. At that moment, two kinds of abstract painting were being done in Paris a soft kind of abstract impressionism—by Bazaine

print November 1965

How to Murder an Avant-Garde

Artists, in a frontier society like ours, are like cockroaches in kitchens—not wanted, not encouraged, but nevertheless they remain.

—John Sloan, The Gist of Art, 1939

You have been asked to come not because you are the greatest artists of the land, although in the judgment of those who made up this guest list, you may have been.

—Lyndon B. Johnson, White House Festival of the Arts, 1965

THIS SUMMER IN NEW YORK, several museum exhibitions raised crucial questions about the way in which American art is currently interpreted. How they dealt with it is a painful reminder of what the American artist

print September 1965

The Second Generation

TOWARD THE END OF THE FIFTIES, talk that the de Kooning style had hardened into a transmissible manner was an issue of such importance that Art News ran a two-part symposium in 1959 on the subject “Is There a New Academy?” Those who offered opinions included veteran abstractionists John Ferren, George McNeil and Jack Tworkov, figure painter Alex Katz, and second-generation New York School painters Milton Resnick, Ray Parker, and Friedel Dzubas. Not surprisingly, since painters don’t like to be pinned down, there were few direct answers. The most out and out negative response came from Frieden

print Summer 1965

Donald Judd

Born 1928.

Lives In New York City.

BECAUSE, ON FIRST ENCOUNTER, DONALD JUDD’S SCULPTURE is likely to look gratuitously self-generated, a discussion of his work ought to begin with a search for its sources and proper context. Since Judd’s highly rational and calculated approach is hardly apt to have results that are arbitrary or capricious, these ought not to be hard to locate. But looking for the roots of Judd’s work in sculpture alone is liable to end in frustration: like everything that is genuinely original, the pieces when viewed for the first time seem to exist without precedent. In Judd’s

print May 1965

Filthy Pictures: Some Chapters in the History of Taste

IT IS SURPRISING THAT Sir Kenneth Clark, in his “The Nude, A Study in Ideal Form,” confines his discussion of the most obvious category to which the nude belongs, the erotic, to a few remarks in the opening chapter, in which he differentiates the naked from the nude. Pausing only to dispute the Victorian notion that the nude as a subject should not arouse erotic desire in the viewer, he contends instead that “no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow––and if it does not do so, it is bad art and

print April 1965

Beyond Vertigo: Optical Art at the Modern

IN AN OMNIBUS EXHIBITION called “The Responsive Eye,” the Museum of Modern Art has housed together in one amorphous (and hence relatively meaningless) category examples of nearly every kind of non-painterly painting done in the West since the war. (Also included were some glass, plastic and metal objects, descendants of Constructivist and neo-Plastic sculpture.) Within this category, which, I take it, was meant to be comprehensive but ultimately was only confusing, were: 1) works by the various European visual research groups (the Spanish Equipo 57, the German Group Zero, the French Groupe de

print February 1965

Looking at American Sculpture

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM’S ANNUAL EXHIBITIONS OF AMERICAN ART, which show painting one year and sculpture the next, have been easy to dismiss for some time (like the Carnegie and Guggenheim Internationals) as serving up the same predictable hash of the academic and the second-rate, garnished with a few masterpieces that always seemed to have gotten in by mistake. But recently things have been looking up at the Whitney (and one can only be thankful to whomever put the burr under the old walrus). Last year’s painting Annual was relatively interesting, and the current sculpture show is certainly a fair

Barbara Rose