BWW Reviews: Arts Criticism at Its Most Bracing in ART IN AMERICA 1945-1970

A revolution in American art began after the Second World War. But from where we are now, it is often difficult to understand the real breadth of the upheaval--and easy to forget how exciting and uncertain it all was. Art didn't have to end up this way, with the long ascendancy and even longer canonization of Abstract Expressionism, then the steady and subversive rise of Minimalism and Pop Art. Fortunately, Art in America: 1945-1970 is here to remind us exactly how much was at stake. Published by the Library of America and edited by fine arts essayist and journalist Jed Perl, this volume plays out as chorus of clashing, competing voices--dozens upon dozens of painters, sculptors, critics, novelists, poets, and patrons of the arts, each one attuned to what Perl calls "the sense of confidence and authority" that marked American art at midcentury.

Frankly, this is not the structure I had expected. Standard art history courses and popular exhibitions--I'm thinking especially of the Jewish Museum's almost-classic survey Action/Abstraction--have boiled the rivalries of the '40s, '50s, and even '60s down to a standoff between two critics of gargantuan influence. Those would be Clement Greenberg, a master of rigorous distinctions and incisive, epigrammatic descriptions; and Harold Rosenberg, a proponent of existentially charged art writing, a creator of essays that aspire to their own kind of secular scripture or prose poetry. In Art in America, Greenberg gets only thirty-odd pages to himself, Rosenberg about the same. The volume doesn't necessarily deny the scope of their influence--if anything, it gives the reader the chance to discover exactly how far Greenberg's and Rosenberg's ideologies reached. Try pairing Rosenberg's poetry-inflected criticism against the essays of much-venerated poets--Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery in particular--that are included here. Try also to find echoes of Greenberg's methods in the entries by Greenberg disciples--particularly Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss--who applied their master's techniques, teachings, and prejudices to everybody from Donald Judd to Andy Warhol.

For a certain kind of reader, the author-and-topic pairings in Art in America are nothing short of exhilarating; reading these is basically the art-buff equivalent of watching John F. Kennedy debate Ronald Reagan, or of watching Iron Man fight the Incredible Hulk. "Tennessee Williams on Hans Hofmann, Ralph Ellison on Romare Bearden, Jack Kerouac on Robert Frank" are a few of the match-ups that are advertised on the dust jacket and in the promotional materials. The stunner, though, is Randall Jarrell's essay "Against Abstract Expressionism", which begins by discussing a painting by Georges de la Tour, then compares the average Abstract Expressionist to "a chimpanzee at the Baltimore Zoo," then finishes with the kind of dauntlessly broad critique that would make most art scholars fear for their careers: "Man and the world are all that they ever were--their attractions are, in the end, irresistible; the painter will not hold out against them long." Though I barely agree with half of what Jarrell's essay has to say, I can't help admiring the eloquence it took to say it this well--and the intellectual risk it took Jarrell to say it at all.

In Perl, the Library of America has found the ideal editor for such a polemical volume. A longstanding art critic at The New Republic, Perl is a writer of seemingly endless erudition and of intimidating concision and clarity; his introduction accomplishes in seven pages what most writers would be hard pressed to accomplish in forty-seven. He has also picked bizarre fights over the years, expended a lot of breath and brainpower attacking Jeff Koons, graphic novels, rich people, and other art world inevitabilities that are best shrugged off as amusing and dumb. Earnest, ambitious, divisive, learned, flawed--Perl would have fit right into 1945-1970. To argue, with this crowd, is to belong.

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