The Art Critics —! How Do They Serve the Public? What Do They Say? How Much Do They Know? Let’s Look at the Record!
The World-Telegram employs a Miss Genauer, who is probably instructed to bear continually in mind that she is writing for housewives. Hence her articles are chatty, folksy, and for obvious reasons opposed to any art-forms that might disturb a home-loving audience. Her report on the Museum of Modern Art Abstract Show shows this approach as well as the modest limits of her esthetic range. She begins jauntily:
In any event, and regardless of how accustomed to or experienced and educated one is abstract art, gird your loins, buckle on your smoked glasses, and slip your tongue in your cheek before starting the long trek…The ridiculous comes perilously close to the sublime in this show, however, and it comes as a relief, too.
New York World-Telegram, March 7, 1936
Miss Genauer is possessed of a certain caginess. She rarely puts her neck out very far, and most of her statements are left in the air or gently qualified. The above ends the article as cheerily as it began:
…Or Piet Mondrian’s and Moholy-Nagy’s assorted compositions, which appear to be so many simple commonplace patterns for bathroom tiles. Or, most amazing of all, Malevich’s “White and White” which is the reduction ad absurdum into which all such preciosity as this must lead, or which is may be just a grand joke on the part of the painter. It is big sheet of canvas painted white, with a square of ivory-white painted on top of this. That’s all there is. There isn’t any more. And that’s all, there doubtless will be many to say, that there is to abstraction and cubism in Art, too.
Ibid
Occasionally a Review
All New York criticism, to be sure, has not been on the level of the above. The New York Sun, through its art editor Henry McBride, achieved immortality in 1913 as being the only paper which did not completely excoriate the Armory Show. And McBride has subsequently made a serious attempt to appraise many abstract exhibitions (we assume that he is not responsible for his assistant Melville Upton) And R.M. Coates of the New Yorker has likewise taken time to analyze modern art-movements.
Blank Pages
The American art magazines are shallow and colorless to the point of negligibility. The Art News is the most dignified, but it attempts little that is beyond the range of the professional trade journal. The Art Digest quotes mostly from the newspaper critics with corresponding results. Parnassus has for some time largely given up discussing non-objective exhibitions. Time and Life should not escape notice as the most potent champions of the American scene, with the expected attitude toward anything which conflicts with their chosen field.
Should the Reporter Be Accurate?
The entire collection of Life’s color-plates have been gathered into what is probably the most tasteless art-volume to appear since the Barr-Cahill survey of 1935. We refer to American Art Today by Peyton Boswell, Jr., who tells us that these United States are starting to produce the greatest art since the Italian Renaissance. His nationalistic enthusiasm becomes almost religious in its fervor:
Then like a clap of thunder came the now famous Midwest Trinity of American scene painters—Curry of Kansas, Benton of Missouri, and Grant Wood of Iowa.
Abstract art can obviously not compete with a reincarnation of Trinity. In fact, it is barely mentioned; we must take Mr. Boswell’s word for the following:
The wave of French modernism had spent its force by late 1929; its leaders were already turning from abstract experiment to more conservatice representation; and America, for once, saw the handwriting on the wall…
Because of our Anglo-Saxon heritage American art is a literal three-dimensional art. There is little room in its pattern for such purely aesthetic detours as cubism or nonobjective painting. Synonyms for the American spirit are easily found, but none so quickly suffices as the electric word: dynamism.
After such ambitious and positive assertions it is rather anticlimactic to find Mr. Boswell ending his book almost apologetically:
The reader will notice in these pages a conspicuous dearth of aesthetic evaluation, no flights of art criticism. That has been left to the critics and aestheticians; it is not the province of the reporter to dwell in these upper zones.
To Newspaper-Owners and Publishers:
As much as possible we have allowed the critics to tell their own story—not only their attitude toward our work but what they thought of various preceding stages in modern art between Cézanne and abstraction. Perhaps it is not entirely their own fault; their superiors are doubtless responsible as well for the dreary mediocrity. Is it too much to ask that such vast organizations as the New York Times and Herald-Tribune should take into their employ at least one critic with a modest schooling behind him of recent plastic developments? Let the Messrs. Jewel, Cortissoz, Klein, etc. feel free to make trip only to those exhibitions where they may feel at home, to surroundings they can penetrate. We know from experience that there are young writers (out-of-town papers like the Springfield Republican have made good use of some already) who have received instruction on the subject as a part of their education and who would rejoice at the prospect of such a job.
American Artists:
In closing let us state that we realize we are in no sense alone. Not only painters an sculptors in our particular traditions, but artists generally, including musicians, writers, and architects are challenged by the deplorable level of American criticism. If any one is to raise this it must be those most directly concerned—the artists themselves.