REVIEW OF BOOKS
Richard Luckett on a critic of the modern
Solicitude for a critic is almost always Misplaced, though few critics are likely to reject it; nevertheless it is hard to think Without a certain sympathy of the lot of the art critic. The music critic, because he treats of concerts, necessarily deals largely in the Music of the past, and for the same reason is often able to discuss interpretation rather than to evaluate the music played. The literary critic has the advantage of working in the same medium as his subjects, and many of the works that he deals with make no claim to originality; in any case publishers have already had to perform acts of discrimination Which, however elementary, serve as a context for his remarks. The dictates of commerce are conditioning here, but they work in terms of a market that is almost as predictable as it is depressed. But the art market is something altogether different, a world of its own with a sector in which uncertainty is firmly enshrined as a fundamental principle, and in which the odour of poverty and the aroma of money are wafted on the same breeze. There is both a lack of all landmarks and a strong danger of collusive criticism. Critics who escape the threat of collusion run ,.an almost equally serious risk of succumbing `o auto-intoxication; even to quote from a catalogue may prove sufficient provocation for the Pseuds' Corner vigilantes. Hilton Kramer, the art critic of the New York Times, has the atlantic between him and that genial pillory. For all that, it is a funoamental merit of his book that nothing in its 650 pages would qualify for inclusion.* Some the pieces were originally substantial essays, Whilst others were no more than brief notices, but all have in common the same qualities of shape and clarity. More important, they exhibit a quite extraordinary consistency. When Diaghilev commanded Cocteau to 'astonisli'i him he merely made explicit what had 'Ong been a tacit clause in the contemporary Contract between artists and patrons. But it Would be hard to astonish Mr Kramer, except Perhaps by a demonstration of unaffected genius. If would pass him by, because he has already learnt the lessons; his head is firmly On his shoulders, and his eyes are on the picture.
The clue to his stance is to be found in the ,an-angement of the book. His method is hoslorical, taking us through the nineteenth Century to twentieth century Germany. tWentieth century Paris, America, and finally' °Pr contemporaries. This chronological Progression is prefaced by a study of what he alls 'the Age of the Avant-Garde,' in which attempts to define how it was that "the I. ourgeoisie became the first ruling class in
history to suffer the loss, the alienation, as We say, of its highest cultural constituency."
*The Age of the Avant-Garde Hilton Kramer (Secker and Warburg £6.50) He uses Eliot's essay on 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' to show how the very artists who were most aware of the artistic achievements of the past "liquidated its authority in the very process of harnessing its energies." Eliot, of course, had proposed his notion of tradition both as a justification and as a warning, and he does not seem to have grasped the effect of his prescriptions. The outcome was typified by, on the one hand, the attitude of Malraux, blandly manipulating the contents of his universal museum and, on the other, the antics of Ezra Pound, alternatively swinging from the chandeliers or playing at Ali Baba in a Chinese vase. To put it in Mr Kramer's terms, general culture became a laboriously acquired personal culture, which "could easily be by-passed in favour of those properties of 'style' to which a later generation of artists swiftly reduced all artistic inheritances."
It is at this point that Mr Kramer himself comes in. He has both the historical vision and the eye for style necessary if order is to be made out of chaos, and he is sufficiently certain of the accuracy of his chart to know where to add the new discoveries as they appear. When he tells us that 'Sharp-Focus Realism could be better described as 'Pop Art: Phase II' he is not simply plotting latitude and longitude; he is also making a critical point. .Yet there are times when his categorisation can seem relentless, and the relation between his perception of the forces at work in a painter's or a sculptor's work and his own reaction to the finished product becomes unclear. For instance, in discussing the American painter Fairfield Porter he observes that our sense of the historical scale changes. It may even be that a certain attitude — such as the one common a few years ago, that Bonnard was a good painter, but limited by his affiliations with late impressionism — can itself be seen as historical, as defining a period. History shapes our taste and goes on shaping our taste, and the general history of painting in the past hundred years "offers us few persuasive arguments for believing that an accommodation of the tastes and practices of the past can yield anything but an obstacle to authentic expression." Nevertheless we are perfectly familiar with works which attain to "authen tic expression," despite the fact that they run counter to all the stylistic tendencies of a particular age. The assertion is Mr Kramer's, and it is surely true. It also indicates the chief difficulty created by his astonishingiense of historical perspective.
Mr Kramer, in other words, communicates judgements rather better than he does feeling, and his judgements depend on a view of the history of art which is limited precisely because it is historical. Though all his writing is occasional, and most of it for a mass audience, it is entirely free from anything extraneous to the task in hand — there is nothing to shock, tease, or annoy. This is proper and enviable, but it has the odd consequence that anything which communicated a narrowly personal attitude would be welcome; we need to be reminded that he is not a committee. He ends one of the few pieces in which he allows himself to sound angry — an attack on the sculptor George Segal — by saying that "the success of his work, the taste that it flatters, and the influence it wields tell us a great deal about what has happened to our capacity to discriminate an authentic artistic vision from a vulgar counterfeit." Quite so, but the use of "we" here, though it is perhaps no more than a concession to literary decorum, raises a vital question. If one is committed to a faith in the conditioning process of art history, and makes judgements which in large measure depend on it, what is the logical basis for this kind of observation?
The answer must be the assertion of the artist's autonomy and the practice and demonstration of critical autonomy. In the case of Mr Kamer independent and personal judgements are observable, but emerge indirectly. His view of avant-garde aesthetics makes it impossible for him to disregard what is fashionable (in the sense of its becoming a fashion amongst artists) but it does allow him to draw a clear distinction between the chic and the fashionable. When he discusses the chic he thus feels free to speak out, and the result is a neat and comical discrimination between Cecil Beaton and David Hockney, in favour of the latter. What is of greater significance is that when he describes representative painting, particularly of the expressionist period, his whole terminology becomes richer, and his criticism less a matter of enlightening and clever analysis and more a communication of emotion. His essay on the Austrian painter Lovis Corinth is an example; he quickens to his subject in a way that demonstrates that for him painting is a great deal more than the arrangement of pigment on a plain surface.
Yet the painting of the last seventy years (the sculpture too) has exhibited more and more what Wyndham Lewis once described as "exasperated interest in media and the shop side of painting," and indeed the whole art has moved increasingly into the studio. A museum is a place where exhibited objects (any objects) become defined as 'works of art.' A patronising body such as the Arts Council is expected to finance, and in fact does finance, 'experiments' and 'events' that have far more to do with an imaginedly 'artistic' state of mind than anything durable. Of all this Mr Kramer is an acute observer, but his sharp nose for the academic disguised as the avant-garde doesn't make his final position less ambiguous. The perils of art as 'activity,' which is essentially the workshop notion, and of art as 'therapy,' which beguiled even so able a critic as Adrian Stokes in his last years, insidiously relate to art as evasion. This was all diagnosed a long time ago, and again in terms of Eliot's essay, by Yvor Winters. His subject was literature, not art, but his critique has an authority that Mr Kramer's lacks. To say this is to judge Mr Kramer by the highest standards; as it happens, his concerns and his expression of them demand that he be so judged. But he is, finally, more interesting as barometer and guide than as critic. He is imitable, fallible, and probably often wrong.
At the same time he is extraordinarily intelligent, consistently readable, and deeply serious about the art he discusses and describes. I can think of no one else who could do his difficult job so well, and few critics in any field who share his gift for assimilating and making comprehensible the new.
Richard Luckett is a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and a lecturer in English at that university.
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