The Work of Art
The Age of the Avant-Garde.
by Hilton Kramer.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 565 pp. $15.00.
The explosion of artistic talent in this country in the 1940's and 50's, with the accompanying thrill of America's suddenly finding itself at the center of the art world, raised an especially acute question as to the proper role in all this of the art critic. The two major critical responses to the new American art have been those of Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, and they are diametrically opposed in their approach.
Harold Rosenberg's fervent partisanship of the “action painters”—he coined the term—is well known. For Rosenberg, the work of these painters is a kind of touchstone of the cultural Zeitgeist, radical acts of artistic will which succeed in collapsing aesthetic form and distance upon the personality of the artist. The artist's presence completely fills and monumentally simplifies the formerly complicated space within which painting has traditionally subsisted. And the consequences of this for criticism are subversive. “. . . Anything is relevant to the new painting. Anything that has to do with action. . . . Anything but criticism. The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, form—as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas—is bound to seem a stranger.” The job of the critic is to become the voice of the artist, a new kind of agent, making available in words the private and mysterious traumas that are art's existential substance.
Clement Greenberg's criticism rests precisely on the opposite premise—that, whatever the artist's motivations, the “certain kind of object” he produces is always susceptible of formal and stylistic analysis. For Greenberg, modern art is an epic of progressive sophistication in pictorial form. Whatever the social or psychological meanings of a work, its properly artistic meaning is to be found exclusively within its own boundaries. Art and Culture, the book Greenberg is best known for, is a series of glosses upon this critical axiom; the thrust of his criticism—“what counts first and last in art is quality; all other things are secondary”—is nowhere more pronounced than in his rigorously formal discussions of “American-Type Painting,” the very artists who, for Rosenberg, had rendered this kind of criticism obsolete.
Rosenberg's criticism, then, is of the studio, Greenberg's of the museum. For Rosenberg criticism takes its cue from the artist, and is essentially empathetic; for Greenberg, it takes its cue from the work itself and forever retains its critical distance.
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With The Age of the Avant-Garde, Hilton Kramer impressively establishes his succession to Greenberg, and establishes himself also as perhaps the most intelligent critic writing in America today. The Age of the Avant-Garde is a collection of reviews and essays written between 1956 and 1972. It is a rich and comprehensive anthology, ranging from Turner and Impressionism to the very latest “return” to realism. Kramer, who is art critic of the New York Times, warns at the outset that most of the pieces were produced hastily, under the pressure of newspaper deadlines, but his book is, in fact, a kind of ad hoc history of modern art, successful almost because it does not aspire to be systematic. Kramer's discussions of modern sculpture deserve special notice, and some of his longer essays—particularly those on Corinth, Matisse, and David Smith—are critical reappraisals of the first order.
The kind of criticism Kramer writes originates, like that of Greenberg, in meticulous observation; indeed, Kramer's argument with some of his colleagues is based precisely upon the blatant disparity he sees between the confident theoretical pronouncements of sophisticated critics and the actual works of art they appeal to for evidence. The excited critic, imposing on a work claims which it cannot sustain, succeeds only in substituting an exaggerated aesthetic theory for the work itself; for Kramer, criticism must provide an approach, not an obstacle, to the work, and as a result of adhering to this principle his own criticism is at once more flexible and more exigent than that of his more ideologically inclined colleagues. But if the critic is not a theoretician, neither is he merely a reporter; the refreshing perceptual candor of Kramer's criticism is worlds removed from naiveté Impressively erudite, Kramer is instructive without being academic, literate without being pretentious. The “workaday mode of criticism” which he professes is meant to investigate the artist's “objective accomplishment and its aesthetic commerce with historical precedent.” In the practice of this mode Kramer successfully transcends the pigeonholing nature of much critical discourse to arrive at a subtle understanding of the manifold influences on modern art.
But if Kramer resembles Greenberg in his insistence on disinterested analysis and interpretation, he does not share Greenberg's historicist theory of art. In his excellent essay on Greenberg, he writes that Greenberg's “habit of pronouncing all judgments as if they were objective readings of history” is ultimately “a refusal to allow one's personal experience of art to affect one's final judgment of it until that experience can be completely assimilated to historical principles,” Kramer champions the free and private space of the artist against any attempts to reduce it to aesthetic or historical teleologies; this for him is an article of faith, apparent in the many portraits he sketches in this book.
This is not to say that Kramer's work is itself lacking in historical consciousness. On the contrary, his individual assessments are set against the background of a particular perspective on the historical career of the modernist movement. That perspective is best seen in the title essay of his book (which originally appeared in COMMENTARY, October 1972). This essay is not only a thoughtful and provocative statement of a revisionist view of avant-garde art, but offers a comprehensive theory of modern culture as well, Kramer contends that the monolithic character of the modernist movement is a myth, albeit one that was required for the movement's heroic self-image. Beginning with an argument first advanced by Meyer Schapiro in 1936 (in an essay on “The Social Bases of Art”) and taking it a step further, he maintains that modernism was marked from the beginning by a deep ambivalence which was in turn rooted in the ambivalence of modern bourgeois society. “The bourgeois ethos may be said to have both a ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ side”—on the one hand the notorious philistinism of the middle classes which the avant-garde Consistently denounced, on the other hand the commitment to liberalism and to freedom of expression which lay at the heart of bourgeois society and to which the avant-garde owed its very existence.
A closer look at the art which developed within this simultaneously suffocating and fecund atmosphere reveals, not surprisingly, that it was marked by similar divisions. Within the ranks of the avant-garde were to be found both the votaries of dissension and revolt, such as the Dadaists and the Surrealists, and the votaries of harmony and tradition, such as Matisse and Picasso.
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For the revolutionaries, art was a medium of decisive historical consequence, and the artist a figure of primary social and political importance. Focusing upon the already debilitating tensions of modern society so as further to exacerbate them, these artists dedicated their energies to a ruthless assault upon all that was venerable, the practice of art itself not exempted. Yet the radical ideological commitments of the Futurists, for example, ended by playing a role in the coming to power of a political system—fascism—which made the practice of art unthinkable. “What the Futurists failed to perceive,” Kramer comments, “was the contingent and suicidal nature of their own impulse.”
The revolutionary activities for which modern artists are notorious, however, were confined for the most part to the political sphere, and remain a sub-plot in the history of modern art. “The principal avant-garde action of the period—the main plot, if you will—was being prepared elsewhere with no public attention to speak of, hence without scandal or violence, in the studios of Matisse and Picasso. . . .” The ironic fate of the revolutionaries was that, whenever they turned their energies to the making of serious art, they were forced to confront the patient, apolitical achievements of their more “traditional” contemporaries; the art produced by the Futurists is for Kramer a kind of footnote to the monumental achievements of the Cubists.
For those in the “main plot,” tradition lay at the very center of artistic consciousness, it was the condition of artistic innovation. But this was tradition in the sense which T.S. Eliot intended in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” for Kramer the classic statement of the modern conception of the artist as someone who harnesses the energies of the past even as he goes about undermining its authority. According to Kramer the essence of modernism lay in the attempt to change the old relation of culture to power by freeing culture of its ornamental status and making the artist answerable solely to his own convictions and heritage.
It was the relativistic character of this view of tradition which was most decisive for the development of our contemporary cultural situation. The substitution of “individual talent” for the authority of the past had the unwitting and anarchic effect of undermining art's seriousness. Thus Kramer writes that “the ‘tradition’ of the avant-garde turned out to be something not really transmissible as tradition after all. . . . Picasso's Cubism may retain its blood ties to Cézanne, whereas a ‘ready-made’ by Duchamp, although it takes its cue from Cubist construction, deliberately orphans itself from the tradition in which it has its genesis.” And so, no longer bound to even the most rudimentary principles of aesthetic decision, the artist's choices become arbitrary.
Thus was the avant-garde hoist by its own petard. A look at the contemporary art world makes abundantly clear that the vaunted animosity between the peintre maudit and his society has been replaced by a very profitable accommodation—in Greenberg's phrase, by “an umbilical cord of gold”—among the artist, his dealers, and his public. And in the meantime, art is still being enlisted in all sorts of causes. In a polemical essay written in 1970, Kramer notes with dismay the “politicization of the art scene,” the “noisy chorus of radical affirmation” sung by “political amateurs” whose realm of competence is limited to aesthetic innovation.
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For Kramer all this is bad history repeating itself. Although politics can turn the avant-garde into kitsch, the only service the avant-garde can offer in the political realm is to provide totalitarianism with a culture. The mere fact that history is recurring so quickly is a demonstration of the extent to which the avant-garde has burnt itself out. Every joke has been made, every tradition negated, every crime perpetrated, every perpetration rewarded. Is it not time, then, for art to begin taking itself seriously again? This, in the end, is the main thrust, and the great value, of Kramer's work: his criticism is a challenge to contemporary art to pull itself together, to recover its self-respect. Having lived through the nihilistic consequences of its own recklessness, modern art is now in a position to attempt a new beginning—one in which innovation and lack of direction will not be mistaken for richness of aesthetic experience, and in which the work of art can once again carry its own weight in the world.
