'A Man Named Jed'

NATIONAL REVIEW May 22, 2006

'A Man Named Jed'
a review of 'New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century,' by Jed Perl (Knopf, 656 pp., $35)

by James Panero

THE last time I saw Jed Perl, he was bounding down the long ramp of New York's Guggenheim Museum, just as I was hoofing it up. The occasion was the press preview for "David Smith: A Centennial." In my bag, I happened to be carrying Perl's massive new book, New Art City: a Sisyphean labor of a read, the type of book you curse for its length as you turn the page for more. Hauling it up the endless spiral of Frank Lloyd Wright's museum, I found the moment appropriately poetic.

"Love the book, Jed," I panted.

"Ten years of work," he smiled, shifting down to second gear. "And if you see me dead in the street, you know whom to suspect ..." This was a reference to Perl's latest art-world polemic, which had just then appeared as a cover story in The New Republic. The suspect in question was the main target of the article: Glenn D. Lowry, the organization-man director of the Museum of Modern Art.

The exchange on the ramp reminded me that Perl's preferred mode of discourse--and, indeed, his best mode--has always been the confrontational. New Art City may be a sociological history, a reanimation of an art scene 50 years past, but its arguments muscle their way right on through to the world we read about in Perl's criticism for The New Republic. Just as at the birth of modernism Alois Riegl identified a Kunstwollen, or "will to form," here we find the Jedwollen--or Jed Perl's will to confront the orthodoxies of today's art establishment.

The book is freighted with confrontation. Beneath its breathy excitement, it presents what Perl's supporters might call an account of the decline and fall of the modernist empire--and what his detractors might well denounce as a conservative history of modernism. "Conservative" is admittedly a strange word to apply to Perl: While he cut his teeth at magazines such as Hilton Kramer's New Criterion (where I work), Perl is no political conservative. His conservatism--like that of some others on the political left--is an aesthetic one, concerned with the defense of modernism's constructive practices, and of argument and aesthetic discrimination as opposed to vacuous toleration and nihilism. Perl's war is against the art world's refusal to fight. From mid-century on, this passive-aggressive sentiment has crept in to become art's dominant disposition; in New Art City, Perl sets out to distill the combative qualities he sees as the essence of modernism.

The mid-century modernism discussed in this book is about challenge--and the book can itself be a challenge to its readers. Here one is presented with spiraling thematic chapters that describe the "living theater" of New York, where "everybody believed that to get together and talk was to participate in this play whose scenes and acts took place in real time and real space." Perl attempts "a searching description, one by one, of the dramatis personae, of the proliferation of actors, each with his or her particular sense of things," but in so doing he describes the 1950s in what seems like real time.

There are endless quotations, discursive asides, and milling hordes of personalities. In just a few pages of Chapter 6, "A Splendid Modesty," one encounters such cultural touchstones as Meyer Schapiro, Harold Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky, Thomas Hess, Lionel Trilling (on Henry James's Princess Casamassima), Mary McCarthy, Peggy Guggenheim, Dwight Macdonald, Krishnamurti, and Black Mountain College--where "the creative act was an act that grew and flourished amid a flurry of crosscurrents and competing ideas and ideals.... Willem and Elaine de Kooning were there, and Merce Cunningham and John Cage and the sculptor Richard Lippold and Buckminster Fuller." At times New Art City becomes what Randall Jarrell said of Andre Malraux's Voices of Silence: "not art history, exactly, but a kind of free fantasia on themes from the history of art."

In Perl's wear-you-down, last-man-talking, overly-hyphenated-and-alliterated prose style, the artists of the 1950s do not just "talk": They "talk and talk." Rather than "many artists," we read about "many, many artists." It's not "Picasso, Miro, and Matisse," but rather "Picasso and Miro and Matisse." Nor is this authorial flexing incidental to Perl's book: It goes to the heart of his esteem for modern art at its most muscular, chaotic, and sporting. As a writer Perl inhabits the qualities of his subject matter.

Arthur C. Danto remarked, in the magazine Bookforum, that Perl writes of the mid-century as if he "himself had lived that history--instead of the history he actually lived, wishing it had never happened." But this remark is unfair. Perl's history of modernism is the one we continue to live through, certainly in today's New York, if often in its negation. It also explains how, to take one example, the mid-century sculptures of the tough-minded David Smith can still take on what Louis Mumford called an "audacious failure" of a space for art--designed by another tough-headed modernist, Frank Lloyd Wright--and produce something new. In one of Smith's constructivist Cubi flexing up through the heart of the Guggenheim Museum, one finds a triumph that is very much of our own time: Smith's development as a sculptor, from surrealist to constructivist, demonstrates quite precisely the push-pull of modernism that Perl describes.

In New Art City, Perl picks up the story of art where his 1988 book Paris Without End left off. The title of art-world capital was New York's spoil following World War II, and with it came modernism's contradictory impulses of construction and annihilation. This tension developed at first, in what Perl calls the "paint-happy 1950s," into the vernacular of Abstract Expressionism. Here constructive forces produced two great urban academies for modern art, first the Hans Hofmann School and, later, the New York Studio School, which remains a presence in the city. "For Hofmann," writes Perl, "push-and-pull was a dream of what life could be, a dream simultaneously rooted in the dynamic relationship between one form and another, and in the dynamic relationship between a person and an environment." Perl extends the tension of the picture plane to include the theater of urban life.

The exposition of the "dynamic relationships," or "dialectics," comes two by two. But often the distinctions turn into hagiographic haze, as, for example, when Perl says that "the closer you look at the artistic thinking of the 1940s and 1950s, the more overlapping dialectical dynamics you will see--whether the dialectic involved [in] the relationship between the artist and tradition, or between the artist and the world beyond the studio, or the push-and-pull of forms in a particular painting or sculpture." Sometimes "overlapping dialectical dynamics" can be better understood as simply "stuff happening."

Perl's story heats up when modernism enters the 1960s. Commercialism, along with art's entry into the popular consciousness, brings Sears, Roebuck and other corporations into the art business. (The actor Vincent Price, strange as it may sound, was Sears's chief curator.) Meanwhile the Museum of Modern Art becomes "a kind of central committee for the cause of modern art," overriding the artistic individualism of the previous decade. "The museum that had become famous by reporting on the making of history," Perl writes, "was coming dangerously close to faking history." Similarly, in the Zen-like work of the young Frank Stella, "academic discourse brought about a new development in painting." Red-bloodedness was fast becoming passe, and "by 1960 the art world was entering its own Age of Criticism." In response, modernism's abstract legacy formed the "foundation for a newly forceful representational art." Empirical painters like Fairfield Porter, and the artists of New York's silver age of modernism, turned from the muscular heights of abstract expressionism to revel in the smaller glories of the domestic and everyday.

Yet even by the early 1950s, against the backdrop of the constructive developments taking place, New York had already been making way for the pernicious reintroduction of what Perl calls the "to-hell-with-everything gestures" of Dada, a minor movement from the early part of the century. This included the rediscovery of its slippery figurehead, Marcel Duchamp. "In my estimation," Duchamp told Newsweek in 1952, "there's no hope for the future of art at least for the next 25 years." The words proved prophetic; Duchamp's future came even sooner than expected. Perl writes: "The story of Duchamp's apotheosis in the decade leading up to his death in 1968 cannot be understood except in the context of the new audience for art.... Younger artists embraced Duchamp and even, sometimes, got to know him, beginning with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, those two cheerfully self-absorbed nihilists, who were quickly followed by a generation of whatever-the-market-will-bear nihilists, the generation of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein."

Duchamp's orthodox nihilism has insinuated its way into the contemporary art world, not by engaging the arguments of modernism, but by avoiding the conversation and mocking its terms of debate. In doing so, Dada's legacy has--as Thomas Hess wrote of Duchamp himself in 1965--"consolidated a position that is practically invulnerable to serious criticism."

Perl's account of the mid-20th-century art world is, in spite of its stylistic excesses, fascinating and instructive. In much of contemporary art, the push-and-pull forces of modernism have long since pulled away from the artistic struggle. New Art City is here to make sure we remember the fight.

'Art Czar'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Writer's Block

Art Czar
By JAMES PANERO
April 29, 2006

a review of 'Art Czar' By Alice Goldfarb Marquis, MFA Publications, 321 pages, $35

The scene is an evening at Peggy Guggenheim's apartment in 1947. One of the guests is Clement Greenberg, art critic and champion of Abstract Expressionism, particularly of the artist Jackson Pollock, who is on the cusp of national fame. (Life magazine will come calling two years later.) The predominantly American-led movement is threatening to usurp Europe's longstanding domination of the art world, and as it happens a European Surrealist, the German Max Ernst, is also at Guggenheim's gathering. Apparently provoked by Greenberg's preaching on art (it didn't help that the critic had it in for the Surrealists), Ernst dumps an ashtray over Greenberg's head.

In "Art Czar," her bracing biography of Greenberg, Alice Goldfarb Marquis describes how "the critic leaped up to throttle Ernst." But a young Surrealist, Nicolas Calas, "took a roundhouse swing" and knocked Greenberg to the floor. His date for the evening, writes Ms. Marquis, "rushed to press two aspirins and water on Greenberg, who gratefully swallowed the pills. However, seconds later, he remembered his aspirin allergy and roared that he had been poisoned."

Ah, the good old days. For art criticism, it was an age of titans. Chief among them was Clement Greenberg, whose career fortunes were as volatile as his private life, soaring in the 1940s and 1950s and declining into near obscurity in the last decades of his life. Ms. Marquis traces this path with economy and precision, leaving intact the contradictions of Greenberg's life: son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, secularist, Marxist, anticommunist, advocate of the avant-garde, and conservative counterweight to politically fashionable trends. In doing so Ms. Marquis has produced a biography that reads more like a novel, one that will no doubt excite and unnerve many readers -- not least those who still feel passionately about Greenberg's legacy, true believers and apostates alike. As for the old arguments, the ones Greenberg himself felt so strongly about, those likely will remain unresolved.

It speaks to Greenberg's power as a critic that he continues to provoke a dozen years after his death -- in 1994, at age 85 -- and nearly a half-century after the publication of his most important collection of writings, "Art and Culture" (1961). That slim volume included trenchant essays on established modern painters such as Klee and Cézanne. Perhaps most notably, the book also reprinted a piece called "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), Greenberg's defense of high culture from mass taste. The entire volume defined the sensibility -- highbrow, severe -- that informed Greenberg's views of Abstract Expressionism. The book also presaged his advocacy in the 1960s -- as the Pop and conceptual art he detested rose to prominence -- of the "post-painterly abstraction" of Color Field artists such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

A new element in the Greenberg story -- notably absent from Florence Rubenfeld's "Clement Greenberg: A Life" (1997), a chatty biography that referred to its subject as "Clem" -- is a collection of letters from Greenberg to Harold Lazarus, a friend since childhood. Ms. Marquis has read the letters closely and woven them into a rich, if chilling, narrative of Greenberg's intellectual development.

In Ms. Marquis's presentation, one element predominates: Greenberg's lifelong contempt for his Jewishness. Writing from a camp in the Pocono Mountains, where he was a counselor one summer during college, Greenberg complained of "squalling Jew bastards from the very best homes in Long Island." Of his Jewish editors at the influential journal Partisan Review (which first published "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"), he wrote: "[They] make me sick. Preserve culture from the Jews. Hitler's almost right."

Greenberg's torn emotions and conflicted feelings, Ms. Marquis contends, drove him away from serious personal relationships. He embraced instead booze, pills and a form of radical psychological therapy that, we're told, "insisted that the patients sleep with a different partner every night and sever all close ties."

Yet his restlessness also spurred Greenberg, Ms. Marquis says, to flee the Marxism of his youth for the liberating freedoms of modern art. Do we have a bruised psychology to thank for creating this great American art critic? Maybe, maybe not. Ms. Marquis can be at times too quick to identify Greenberg's personal demons as the catalysts for his intellectual achievements.

Then there is the issue of political determinism. Ms. Marquis too casually attributes the rise of Abstract Expressionism (and of Greenberg's own profile) to the machinations of Cold War propaganda. She is right that the freedoms inherent in modernism were trumpeted by American cultural campaigns targeting the Soviet Union, but Ms. Marquis seems to have fallen for the standard left-wing academic line that this fact somehow discredits the art itself.

What does come through in this biography is Greenberg's intellectual complexity. It is true that a kind of radical and even Marxist theory was part of his critical apparatus -- Greenberg felt abstraction to be the end of a historical dialectic in art -- but he was hardly revolutionary in his approach to critical judgment. "Championing the new art of his time," writes Ms. Marquis, "he exercised discrimination, following the best of traditional art critics." In short, aesthetic values mattered to Greenberg as much as form.

An artist could have no better fan, no worse enemy. Sometimes he was both: In Greenberg's 1945 obituary for the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky in the Nation magazine, he said that "for a short period of time, Kandinsky was a great painter," but then wrote him off, claiming that Kandinsky "in the last analysis remains a provincial" and "the example of his work is dangerous to younger painters."

The power of critics such as Clement Greenberg in art or Edmund Wilson in literature -- both did much to shape elite and popular taste in the mid-20th century -- is hard to imagine today. Contemporary art is self-parodic and insulated against Greenberg's style of criticism, and art-world success is now determined almost exclusively in the marketplace, not on the printed page.

And yet in the precincts where art -- and thinking about art -- still matters, Greenberg is "indispensable," as Ms. Marquis notes. In an age when much art criticism is "conducted in a self-referential mumble," she says, "his rhetoric remains a benchmark for persuasive prose in the field of aesthetics." Her biography is a benchmark as well, for discussions of the life and legacy of Clement Greenberg.

'Seeing it his way'

NATIONAL REVIEW
November 21, 2005

'Seeing it his way'
a review of 'Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954,' by Hilary Spurling (Knopf, 544 pp., $40)

by James Panero

`The creators of a new language," said Henri Matisse, "are always fifty years ahead of their time." Matisse insisted on seeing the world on his own terms--and that choice, which he followed dutifully and doggedly, put him at odds with just about everyone and everything in his native country: the theorists, the politicians, the establishment, the avant-garde, and especially his fellow artists.

Matisse was the 20th century's great colorist; this we know. But what we did not know, until now, is that the abundant joys in his work emerged out of an armored spirit. "What I want is an art of balance, purity, an art that won't disturb or trouble people. I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my paintings." Luxe, calme, et volupt‚: For this France lined up against him.

These revelations are the take-away of the second volume of Hilary Spurling's life of Matisse, the sequel to her 1998 Unknown Matisse. Matisse once described his paintings as "the energy of a drowning man whose pathetic cries for help are uttered in a fine voice." Such cries were ridiculed by the Paris art world when they were not simply ignored; the solace Matisse did find, outside of his work, came from collectors and critics in Russia, England, and the United States. (Late in life he regretted never relocating to New York, and encouraged American artists to stay put rather than come to Paris. The eclipsing of Paris and the rise in the 1950s of the New York School, which would be so influenced by Matisse, proved it was good advice.)

Spurling writes that "the longstanding, at one time almost universal, dismissal of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century as essentially decorative and superficial is based, at any rate in part, on a simplistic response to the poise, clarity, and radiant colour of Matisse's work that fails to take account of the apprehensive and at times anguished emotional sensibility from which it sprang." We now have two thoroughly researched volumes as a corrective to these failures--by a British biographer who eschews both academic nonsense and art-world prejudice.

Matisse begins Volume II in 1909 as a beast--a fauve--in the eyes of the French establishment. "Harmony--the goal Matisse desired more passionately than any other--was the last thing his art conveyed to his contemporaries . . . [His work] violated every sacred Beaux-Arts precept enshrined in the flawless public nudes that filled the Paris salons." By 1954, Matisse is dismissed by a younger generation for having become a "spent force," lumped "with the reactionaries" because he refused to embrace the theories of the times. "From Bloomsbury's point of view, the wrong people liked him." In Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Matisse "emerges as a fictive monster of insufferable vanity, banality, and pretension." At one moment he is held in contempt "on the grounds that anyone not lined up alongside the Cubists or the Futurists was against them." At another, French Communists are promising, once in power, to turn his Catholic chapel at Vence, for which he designed the stained-glass windows, into a dancehall. Battered from all sides, Matisse almost never caught a break.

One has come to expect the story of modern art to be solid left-wing territory, but the evidence does not always bear this out. As uncovered by Spurling through an unprecedented array of primary sources, the story of Matisse--one of our greatest modern masters--is less Marxism than Reaganism. Matisse suffered for his politics, specifically because he had none: "Art for him had no political dimension." Matisse was driven by a temperament that was deeply conservative, deferential toward the art of the past. From Byzantium to North Africa to Old Believer Russia, not to mention Poussin, Courbet, Renoir, and C‚zanne, Matisse cultivated the essential qualities of lost aesthetics. His colorist style, stitched together by pattern and ornament, became a personal art academy far more academic than the salon styles of Beaux-Arts.

Matisse did not carry on liaisons with his models; he painted them. He did not live la vie de BohŠme; he moved his family to the Paris suburbs. In Tangier, "none of the standard forms of addiction or debauch could hope to match the risk and lure of painting." Matisse's drive to see his vision realized was often interpreted as madness by his contemporaries, and became a cause of desperation among his wife and children--his wife Am‚lie left Matisse in old age, finally broken by a lifetime of abandonment for art's sake. But Matisse was not fundamentally radical. He was, if anything, radically fundamental.

Matisse thoroughly repudiated the "international avant-gardes," group artists who terrorized talent when not painting by numbers. Cubist thugs were known to spray-paint anti-Matisse graffiti throughout Paris. (It should be noted that Picasso himself stayed above this; he knew Matisse was on to something, and he used their friendship to discover, for himself, what it was.) Matisse chose to work and live "without a theory"-and, therefore, without a following.

The results left Matisse open to persecution, both political and aesthetic. In addition to his offence-at Vence--of aligning art with the Church, Matisse once said of the art wonders of the Soviet Union: "I'm ready to paint as many frescoes as you like, only remember, it's no good asking me to paint hammers and sickles all day long." At the turn of the century, when polite Parisian society was shunning this fauve, two Russian businessmen became active supporters of Matisse's vision. One of them, Sergei Shchukin, commissioned some of the master's best-known canvases, including "The Dance" and "Music." So well known was this collection in Russia that Lenin himself had it confiscated during the Revolution. The paintings were "designated a teaching aid to demonstrate the decadence and corruption of the West" before being locked away from public view entirely.

Regrettably, in her extraordinary coverage of Matisse's life, Spurling gives short shrift to the life around him, and at times distracts us from his work. The real life of Matisse is what you find in his painting and sculpture. Spurling labors both to defend and to overcome the image of Matisse as a proper gentleman, but he was, in the end, a perfectly proper gentleman--one who created astonishing paintings. Where Spurling endeavors to describe every model who walked into Matisse's life, and every liaison that wasn't, the book runs long--particularly in the early chapters on the artist Olga Meerson. The narrative here also does not benefit from Spurling's at times florid language: "he responded like a man coming back to life again, or a lover receiving the advances of an irresistibly seductive mistress."

It is the highlights of Matisse's production--the Barnes murals, the Vence chapel, and the paper cutouts--that keep us on our toes. Confined by illness, Matisse spent his final bed-ridden years cutting and pasting bits of colored paper. What was thought to be madness led to some of his greatest work. This is the history of Matisse we must know.

Spurling's curatorial work may be the most rewarding aspect of her biographical research: To comprehend a great painter, one really must see the great paintings. Spurling has obliged by creating an eye-opening exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which ran this summer. Titled "Matisse, The Fabric of Dreams: His Art and His Textiles," the show paired Matisse's paintings with his collection of textiles--he was the son of weaver, born in a weavers' town in northern France. The results of this completely original show not only demonstrated the influence of textiles on Matisse's art, but suggested how the patterns and colors of textiles encouraged this artist to see the world his own way. Fifty years after his death, we are just learning to see it that way too.