The Innocent Wisdom
Helen Levin
Back in the very early 60s, painter William Baziotes used to tell his students that 57th galleries pushed the Pop art movement to rev up sales. Likewise, in this new compendium-like book, dealing with the 40s, 50s and 60s, Perl brings this point home. In the book we learn that when young Andy Warhol caught wind of Lichtenstein’s comic book images at Leo Castelli’s this was the catalyst for his seizing the moment and morphing his own successful commercial art career into "fine art" representation and his relationship with big name galleries like Kootz, Janis and Castelli. Indeed, Madison Avenue knew the public was ripe for the recipe of soup cans, celebs and the sophisticated commercial techniques, i.e. the Warhol menu du jour, to take hold and replace abstract expressionism.
According to Perl, much of the deluge of what followed, still follows, in all variations, beginning in the 60s right up to the present day, stemming back to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades and the philosophy therein: "Art is what you dare to call it." This is not just according to Perl, but iterated by Arthur Danto at a recent talk at School of Visual Arts. However, "meaning" as the new esthetic is a whole other conversation.
Suffice it to say that New Art City is the book to bring us into the zeitgeist just before that deluge on New York turf. In addition, no matter how one may respond to practitioners of subsequent events or movements, the point here is that the age of innocence for western art was clearly pulling down its curtain by the beginning of the 60s. The implications were greater than meets the eye. How did all this happen and more importantly, why?
Jed Perl’s New Art City explains that by the 1950s New York City secured its place as the hub of the international art world, where the action was, both literally and figuratively. This tour de force was brought on by a series of events that date as far back as the turn of the century, as for example the arrival of Hans Hofmann to the US, bringing his passion and influence as a teacher and painter to the city. "The lectures that Hofmann gave in Manhattan in the late 30s attracted an extraordinary roster of young New Yorkers, including Arshile Gorky and Clement Greenberg…his underground fame was spreading very fast," writes Perl.
New York-bred an ambience for the ferment of ideas. Like those developing downtown with the Artist’s Club, cooperative galleries on Tenth Street and the Cedar Tavern, along with such progressive poets as Wallace Stevens, critics like Frank O’Hara and the avant-garde in dance, music and literature both here and abroad.
In the late 20s, the Guggenheim Museum had already opened its doors with its sizeable collection of Kandinskys. Perl recognizes as the foremost spokesperson and artist of that milieu, Willem (Bill) de Kooning, but also points out the signature role played by gallery owners Levy, Peggy Guggenheim, Parsons, Janis and Kootz, in promoting those artists. This was true because at the time, according to Perl, "they (the gallery owners) were…idealists, for they believed that contemporary painting and sculpture was an aspect of the American experience that a growing public was ready to embrace."
The body of artists that surfaced in New York in the first round of what Perl refers to as the "golden" and then "silver" ages of that period–Kline, Reinhardt, Motherwell, de Kooning, Pollock, Rauchenberg, Kelly, Rothko, Guston, Pavia, Blaine, Rivers, Passlof, Matter, Macca-Relli, Bell, Resnick, Held and countless others–all espoused the work ethic of the studio artist. To be specific, learn your drawing and painting skills through hard work done in the studio and then participate in spit and grime shows in the Tenth Street co-ops. In short, "facile" was a dirty word.
New Art City is a reminiscence of the ebullience of those years that surrounded the second World War. However, he reminds us that artists, like the public, served in the armed forces and had then to withstand the backlash of regionalism and resistance to anything resembling an international style by the average "Joe." Many of the art stars were from abroad; Hofmann, of course, Gorky, Albers, Matta and the infamous Duchamp (that relic of Dadaism whose pronouncements had a laser-like resonance with that undercurrent of what Perl considers nihilism that was to enjoy a resurgence on the heels of Ab-Ex artwork, most notably Jasper Johns). Serious regionalism was D.O.A with anybody but the hoi polloi and abstraction did prevail, while nihilism was put on hold.
For the most part, New Art City offers encomiums to the art of mid-century. Perl loves the sculpture of David Smith, Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly, as he does Edward Steichen’s photography. He also devotes considerable space to the influence of Mondriaan (dealt with superficially, sad to say) and the experimental milieu that characterized all the arts, including music, dance and poetry. Unfortunately, he does not get deep enough into the central issue of plasticity, a set of ideas, which were signature in concept and revelation to all that was going on in the visual arts.
Of course, this aesthetic was at the core of the entire panoply of Western art since antiquity. That is, it was a total synthesis of the past. At the same time, it was the focus of the New York School, despite the seesawing concerns about what the populous regarded as romantic or classic. This omission and its philosophic rubric for the esthetic experience, so much on the tongue of artists at that time, is not even giving a cursory glance, possibly because the ideas are more difficult to grasp.
Perl gives credit to the wonderfully evocative artworks of Joseph Cornell, despite his association as a protégé of Duchamp and a natural product of his influence. Unlike Duchamp, however, Cornell was more of a collagist and seemed to be much more devoted to the world of image and memorabilia, not to mention his whole oeuvre of Surreal films that prefigured the work of Maya Deren, another titan in my mind. Besides his encompassing of the incredible pluralism in art, Perl is also an unabashed admirer of some lesser-known artists like Earl Kirkam, and the quietly poetic imagist Louisa Mattiasdottir.
As a matter of fact, it was Leon Wielseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who during an interview with Jed Perl at the 92nd Street Y this year remarked that the book had elements of "defiance of the general post war narrative." Its general reductiveness is attributable to art critics who tend to relegate the obscure artists to oblivion. Here Perl is laudable, as when he gives respectful attention to women artists, such as Joan Mitchell although he seems less impassioned with her work than say, with Nell Blaine’s or others who in my opinion are less deserving. So when he describes the latter’s "hot colors," "drunken yellows" and "voluptuous reds," or paintings that are "blazingly sensual," these terms seem to me to apply more aptly to Mitchell than to Blaine.
Last, but not least, New Art City contains some interesting discussions about art critics and curators. Although the author is a bit weak about the enormous contribution of Clement Greenberg, Perl brings our awareness to important figures of the time and looks at how they advanced the art of the period. A case in point is Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern art, who seemed to single handedly make museum going the populist experience it is today, for better or for worse.
Perl signifies his affinity for critic John Ashbery. who during the 60s was prescient about the tendency for the figurative in painting and sculpture to reassert itself, and one senses in all this that Perl, like Ashbery, was not in the end overly infatuated with abstract expressionism. I find this puzzling because it is not the elan of the period or the glamour of the art world that would draw his readership. To me, it was what these artists and their contributions stood for. In addition, as we look at all their works, particularly in context of what artists are doing today, including the arena of new media, we may begin to encounter the deep threads of continuity, possibly to open a new dialogue with the aesthetic; the what is and what is not good that may have its resurgence.
