The New Yorker responded handsomely. Its architecture critic was Lewis Mumford, the philosopher of urbanism whose concern for humane values shaded the epochal triumph of modernist styles, which he well understood, with prophetic compunctions. Imagine Rockefeller Center’s towers reduced from seventy to thirty-two stories. On a revisit to the complex, Mumford declared that that would have made a good project great by bringing it into overall harmony with pedestrian experience. Think about this the next time you’re there. (I have, and I get it.) Think also, at any of the city’s postwar housing projects, of the baleful legacy of Le Corbusier’s beau ideal, the “vertical garden city.” (When genius blunders, the future weeps.) The New Yorker’s architecture coverage in the forties spelled out ideas and broached issues that resound to this day.
Meanwhile, a handful of mostly impoverished painters downtown were revolutionizing the aesthetics of modern art and would soon wrench world leadership from the war-groggy School of Paris. The magazine’s art critic at the time, Robert M. Coates, gave the movement its name. In his regular column, The Galleries, in the issue of March 30, 1946, Coates called the German-émigré painter and teacher of painters Hans Hofmann “one of the most uncompromising representatives of what some people call the spatter-and-daub school of painting and I, more politely, have christened abstract Expressionism.” (He must have performed the baptism in conversation; no earlier printed citation has been found.) But the critic fretted, adding that he would have been willing “to dismiss [Hofmann’s paintings] as sheer nonsense” but for certain formal qualities that marked Hofmann as a fairly, truth be told, compromising member of the avant-garde. To his credit, Coates had noted the volcanic talent of Jackson Pollock from the start, but, as late as 1949, he found the artist “curiously baffling.” And he maintained a mysterious hostility to the all-around best New York painter, ever: Willem de Kooning.
Still, Coates is an intriguing figure. A Yale man, he became a fixture of the Lost Generation of expatriates in Paris in the twenties. He may have introduced his friends Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to each other, on a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens. (Accounts differ.) Coates wrote novels tinged with the influences of Dada and Surrealism. His The Eater of Darkness (1926) remains a tangy read. Simply, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, shake off his deference to European culture. He accurately detects Abstract Expressionism’s trace elements of Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, but misses its transcendence of them. Meanwhile, he reflects the provincial crouch of a local art world, still insular and crabby, in which intellectual boldness could blow up your social life. In column after column, Coates gingerly pats the heads of not entirely bad artists whose names today glow dimly, if at all.
The crown jewel of the magazine’s arts coverage in the forties, for me, is a breathtaking epic of reportage: the three-part “The Beautiful Spoils,” detailing the wartime German looting—a “scramble for beauty”—of Europe’s art treasures and the campaign of a ragtag U.S. Army unit to recover them. By Janet Flanner, the magazine’s luminous Paris correspondent for nearly fifty years, it reads like a thriller, indelibly, and it anatomizes the aesthetic passions that so weirdly attended Nazism’s monstrousness. Flanner zeroes in on the pillager-in-chief, Hermann Göring, whose “easy, vulpine smile” at his Nuremberg trial may come to haunt you, Cheshire fashion, as it now does me. The Reichsmarschall’s ravening connoisseurship—often in sneaking competition with that of Hitler, who was likewise smitten but otherwise distracted—made him probably the most prodigious art collector of all time, though with merciful brevity. We meet, in his company, a rogue’s gallery of silky crooks and fawning collaborators. And we all but smell the grunge on the ill-provisioned dozen soldiers of the U.S. Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives group as they rushed around France and Germany to save a continent’s patrimony, not least from souvenir-craving G.I.s.
Flanner puts us in the boots of thunderstruck young Americans a mile deep in the gleaming caverns of a salt mine near Salzburg, which was packed with art, including well over five thousand Old Masters, intended for a museum in Hitler’s hometown of Linz. They noticed particular crates labeled “Marble, Don’t Move.” These contained explosives which, but for a last-minute disobedience of S.S. orders, would have destroyed everything. By the reckoning of certain Nazis, likely including the jovial Göring before he cheated the hangman with a cyanide capsule, we were barbarians undeserving of joys so high and pure.
ROBERT M. COATES
DECEMBER 23, 1944
There’s a scattering of one-man and group shows this week—Kurt Seligmann at Durlacher, David Burliuk at the A.C.A., a modern French collection at Pierre Matisse, and an American one at the 67 Gallery—and although they are all pleasant enough to see, they’re as difficult to describe, consecutively, as a patchwork quilt. I was a little disappointed in the new Seligmanns, to begin with him, and I think the color he employs in his current set of paintings is at the root of the difficulty. To be sure, he has never been particularly noteworthy as a colorist. It’s that queer half-Surrealist, half-medieval mythology he has created, with its tatter-demalion knights, bony and distorted, cavorting against backgrounds of ruins, that chiefly arouses the interest, and I have frequently felt that he does rather better in his etchings and other black-and-whites than he does in his paintings.
Until now, his color has never seemed greatly to interfere with his artistic intentions, but in the group of paintings at Durlacher there is a kind of candy-coated brilliance, a gaudy mingling of reds and greens and yellows, that just gets in the way all the time. Seligmann’s philosophy always has been essentially a sombre one. What he paints is the poetry of decay, of a world going tortuously downhill, and the trouble is that the bright coloration he applies to his pattern irresistibly suggests quite another mythology, that of the child’s story book, in which knights and other medieval characters are also depicted but in which the whole line of thought is on a lighter, more cheerful plane. Mr. Seligmann may have some deliberate plan behind this incongruity. Looking at his Quattuor and Full Daylight, I almost thought so, for in both these there is a cold glare about the color that enhances the design. But in a number of others, such as Isis, Acteon, Alaska, and Apparition, the conflict between pigment and portent produces only confusion. In effect, you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry, to clap your hands childishly or think deeply, and the effort to decide detracts a good deal from the power of his painting. Perhaps the most important requirement set upon any artist, abstract, representational, or otherwise, is that he must control the emotional response of his audience.
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By contrast, David Burliuk, at the A.C.A., goes on in the same delightful fashion, as always, of just being Burliuk. He still paints in at least four styles at once—naïve, Dutch realist, Expressionist, and Surrealist—and in spite of this wild disparity in techniques he still manages to give each picture a quality that stamps it as unmistakably his. This is not as easy a trick as it sounds. I can think of at least a dozen other artists, though I name no names, as well known as or even better known than Burliuk, artists who, if they varied an inch from their established methods and content, would almost certainly drop instantly into anonymity.
Burliuk’s identity, however, shows through all his work, and although it is difficult to say straight off why, I think the reason is to be found in the quality of innocent earnestness that runs through it. In that sense, no matter what style he uses, he is always naïve. Whether he offers you Surrealism, as in his portrait of Nicolai Cikovsky, or switches to primitivism, as in his meticulously detailed Village on the Sea, whether he paints realistically, as in his jolly, bucolic little Montauk Bar, or expressionistically, as in his big, swirling Two Flowers, he is always trying to tell you something. And though it may seem at first glance paradoxical, Burliuk, with his four styles, is no different from naïve painters who have only one or none; there is the same reaching-out quality about them all. It’s a lovely quality to have, and I for one hope that Burl
iuk goes on and on having it.
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The group show at the Pierre Matisse is called Hommage au Salon de la Libération, by which is meant the 1944 Salon d’Automne, held in Paris hardly more than a month after the freeing of the city from the Germans and in which the outpouring of art (most of it, by its very nature, detestable to the Fascists) was an even realler symbol of the independent spirit of the French than the outcropping of flags, equally long-hidden, which greeted the entering Allied troops. There are twenty-eight painters and sculptors in the show. One, Chaim Soutine, is dead, nine are in France, and the remainder are in this country, and the total effect is at once an indication of the dispersion of French artists because of the war and a testimonial to the strength of the tradition behind them. I found it an unexpectedly moving exhibition, and I think you may find it so too. At any rate, disentangling the artistic from the political, let me recommend the Soutine study of a red-vested valet de chambre called Peinture, the brilliant Ma Vie Blanche et Noire by Yves Tanguy, the slightly precious but still touching memento of the flight from Paris, by Eugene Berman, called Les Enfants Perdus sur la Route, and the solidly painted, securely Impressionist still life by Bonnard, also called Peinture.… There’s a style of painting gaining ground in this country which is neither Abstract nor Surrealist, though it has suggestions of both, while the way the paint is applied—usually in a pretty free-swinging, spattery fashion, with only vague hints at subject matter—is suggestive of the methods of Expressionism. I feel some new name will have to be coined for it, but at the moment I can’t think of any. Jackson Pollock, Lee Hersch, and William Baziotes are of this school, and you will find all three in the show at the 67 Gallery, in addition to some forty other contemporaries, all of them in the by now hallowed Abstract or Surrealist manner. Except for Pollock’s work, which frequently shows real power, I can’t say that I am quite up to this new school yet; it still seems too aggressively undisciplined to me. But there it is, and it has to be taken into account. In addition, there are a nice Mark Rothko abstraction (listed simply as “Untitled” in the catalogue), as well as an extremely delicate painting on glass by I. Rice Pereira, called “Interpenetrating Planes,” and a pleasant little “Dancers” by David Smith.
APRIL 9, 1949
Georges Braque, the subject of a really massive retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and Pablo Picasso—who, between them, are generally recognized as the founders of the Cubist movement—were practically inseparable almost from the time they first met, in 1907, in Paris, through the six or seven years that their friendship lasted. It is unlikely that in the history of art any other two such dissimilar personalities were ever brought into such an intimate, productive relationship. The stocky, swarthy Picasso—passionate, volatile, aggressive, brilliantly imaginative and creative—was very nearly the exact opposite of Braque, who was tall, slow, sparely built, elegant, and rather retiring. They quarrelled, over some minor matter, just before the First World War, and after that saw little of each other. It is significant that the period of their friendship was that of Cubism’s greatest development, and the pair of them, working together, did far more to formulate, express, and expound that theory than they possibly could have done apart. Their association not only covered but defined an era, and I have always believed that one reason for its dissolution was that they no longer had any artistic need for each other.
Braque, at the beginning of their friendship, was twenty-five, having been born in 1882, in Argenteuil, down the Seine from Paris, and as the earliest canvases in the exhibition reveal, he was still a bit insecure in his style. The Port and Port at Antwerp, for instance, done in 1904 and 1906, respectively, are both rather Fauve in manner (the latter, a charming little painting, is extremely reminiscent of the early Dufy), while Landscape at l’Estaque, also of 1906, shows an equally strong Cézanne influence. It is the Large Nude, of 1907, that marks the change. This was, incidentally, the year Picasso completed his Demoiselles d’Avignon, often called the first Cubist picture, and the similarity of approach in the two canvases is startling. In this case, I feel that although Braque was undoubtedly influenced by Picasso’s design, no plagiarism was involved, and that it is simply an early evidence of the curious capacity the two men were to develop for thinking and painting alike.
Braque, like Picasso, had only partly awakened to the possibilities of Cubism, and for a while (see Houses at l’Estaque and Port in Normandy) he vacillated between it and his old styles. Guitar and Compote Dish, dated 1909, seems to me the first picture in the show in which Cubist principles are fully realized—in which a group of small objects, chosen for their pictorial opportunities rather than for any literal affinity, have been set down together and really studied, in an attempt to break up and then recombine their forms in a firmer and more durable relationship.
Braque, again like Picasso, did a great deal of such studying from then on, and this large show (which includes oils, drawings, prints, and sculptures) gives a comprehensive account of his progress and achievements. The first definite development of the movement was “facet” Cubism, and there is a roomful of pictures in that style, the most noteworthy being the oval Battleship, Still Life with Playing Cards, Glass and Violin, Still Life on Table, and the beautifully organized Man with a Guitar. These are dated from 1910 to 1913, in the period of Braque’s close relation with Picasso. After that ended, their paths diverged, in Braque’s case toward a looser, gentler, and at the same time more elegant abstract style, of rugged outlines and simple forms and subdued though richly harmonious colors, in which textures, too, played an increasingly effective part, so that now they have become as important as the forms delineated.
Still-lifes predominate, and there are some excellent pieces in this section of the show, covering the years from 1914 to 1930—the fine, angular The Musician, the small Still Life with Grapes, the slightly Juan Gris-ish Café-Bar, the handsome On the Table, The Mantelpiece, and Still Life: The Table. One of the handicaps of the Cubist style had been that it tended to limit itself to “arranged” subjects, such as still-lifes and portraits, and, beginning with “Nude with Basket of Fruit,” of 1924, Braque has tried occasionally to break these bonds, by attacking less static material. He has not always been successful, and among the few real failures in the show must be listed Painter and Model and Woman with a Mandolin, as well as his formalized landscapes (Cliffs and Fishing Boat, The Cliffs, and so on), which are basically inept. Unquestionably, it is chiefly as a painter of still-lifes that Braque will survive, and of these the show contains a rich assortment. I was especially interested in some of the latest examples, in which again, though he’s now nearly sixty-seven, he appears to be seeking new modes of expression. Note, for instance, the rather realistically handled The Stove, of 1944, as contrasted with the practically Expressionistic The Sunflowers and The Chair, of 1946 and 1947, respectively—a final fillip to show that the Old Master can still throw his weight around.
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The complaints about abstract and non-objective painting have ranged from the perennial “Let them learn how to draw” to statements that the artists involved are obviously subversive. But almost the only complaint that ever held water is that they model their styles too closely and unimaginatively on those of the great originators, such as Braque, Picasso, Mondrian, and Kandinsky. Even this tendency is dying out, if the current annual exhibition of the American Abstract Artists, at the Riverside Museum, can be taken as evidence. Some influences are apparent, to be sure. Mondrian appears here and there, as in Ilya Bolotowsky’s very fine Prairie Window, and Kandinsky in Joseph Meierhans’ cheerful Sun Bow, among others. But classic French Cubism, slavishly applied to American subjects, is happily absent, and the emphasis instead is on that new type of “abstract Expressionism” that seems, on the whole, to be better rooted in this country. All this makes for a lively showing, and the fact that this year a number of guest artists have been included gives extra breadth to the collection. I liked p
articularly Eleanor de Laittre’s gray-and-white Steel and Plastic, Fannie Hillsmith’s large, fluently designed Table with Object, Charles Shaw’s Composition, and Serge Chermayeff’s colorful Barn Dance. Among the sculptures, Peter Gripp’s Symbolic Figure and Ward Bennett’s gracefully handled Fish are the most notable.
LEWIS MUMFORD
MAY 4, 1940
Nine years ago, Rockefeller Center was still on the drafting board. Mr. Rockefeller was referring hopefully to the possibility of giving the buildings an Egyptian touch. Some directors of the Metropolitan Opera House were talking hopefully about a new home. The Center’s publicity men, dreaming of larger and more magnificent headlines, had collaborated with the late Raymond Hood to concoct one of the most insipid ideas the project has been afflicted with: hanging gardens. More romantic than anyone else, Mr. Rockefeller’s financial advisers were talking hopefully about producing even more rentable space than would be required to create an income on which Columbia University could live in the style to which it was accustomed. About the last thought that occurred to anyone was that a group of office buildings ought to be efficiently designed as offices.
In spite of all these handicaps, Rockefeller Center has turned into an impressive collection of structures; they form a composition in which unity and coherence have to a considerable degree diminished the fault of overemphasis. In other words, they get by. Now, when the project is complete, one can see that the worst mistakes were made at the beginning and that as the decade wore on, the architects, at least, gradually achieved a more rational conception of their problem. But the most gigantic blunders had already been made. Among those blunders one must include the seventy-story R.C.A. Building, because of its seventy stories, the sunken plaza, the hanging gardens, and the—alas!—superfluous motion-picture theatre.
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