To the Editor:

We all know time’s law of disparagement: whoever has been up in our estimation for a certain time, will—after a certain time—have to come tumbling down. I suppose there is no escaping this law, and no use protesting that it should not apply to Meyer Schapiro since it applies to everyone else.

So it is not because I would like to defend an old friend from the rigor of time’s law that I feel obliged to protest the manner, at once crude and cavalier, with which William Barrett has discussed Schapiro in “The Painters’ Club” [January]. Let me here recall Mr. Barrett’s remarks:

I knew that Clem [Greenberg] had a primary and direct response to visual works of art that most intellectuals and some art critics do not enjoy. The two other art experts in our immediate circle were Harold Rosenberg and Meyer Schapiro, and I doubt that they had the capacity for visual immediacy that Greenberg did. I once went to the Museum of Modern Art with Meyer Schapiro, an erudite and brilliant scholar in the history of art, and the experience was exhilarating; but there came a moment when I could not help thinking: if only the man would stop talking for a bit, if only that spellbinding flow of words would cease, and some painting or other would stop him in his tracks and make him go silent. I had the feeling that the work of art was noticed only as a springboard to his discourse, a mere stimulus to set the verbal machinery going. But Clement Greenberg could be stopped in his tracks by the sheer visual impact of a painting, and let it work on him in silence. . . .

The clear implication here is that Meyer Schapiro could not be “stopped in his tracks” by the impact of a painting and “let it work on him in silence.” From this comes Mr. Barrett’s conclusion that Schapiro lacked what Greenberg eminently has, namely, “visual immediacy.” But what I should like to be informed about is this: how does William Barrett know that Meyer Schapiro never looks at a painting with enough interest to be silenced by it? Mr. Barrett says he went once to the Museum of Modern Art with Schapiro, and on this one occasion Schapiro talked brilliantly about the paintings they both looked at. Now these were no doubt paintings that Schapiro had seen many times before, paintings which, so to speak, he knew by heart. It is of course difficult to have an experience of visual immediacy when you are looking at paintings you have already carefully analyzed, just as it is difficult to have a feeling of verbal immediacy about even the greatest lines of verse if one has treasured them in memory. Mr. Barrett’s cavalier misjudgment of Schapiro in this regard reminds me of a misjudgment by the late Harold Clurman of a French audience at the Comédie Française. Clurman of course made his misjudgment the very point of his story. He was watching a performance of Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire, a play he had never before seen done by French actors. As he told me, he thought the play the funniest he had ever seen, and what mystified him was that the audience hardly laughed. At the curtain, Clurman asked a Parisian sitting next to him who had not laughed once: “Didn’t you think the play amusing?” “It’s a masterpiece of humor,” the man replied. “Then why didn’t you laugh?” Clurman asked. “And why didn’t others laugh?” “This is a French audience,” the Parisian replied. “We know the play by heart.”

That Schapiro may often have looked at paintings in silent meditation is clear to me from the fact that he has so often been able to point to elements in pictures which other art historians and critics have not seen at all. Thus John Russell, the art critic for the New York Times, in reviewing Schapiro’s essays on modern art, singled out for particular praise Schapiro’s searching glance, his visual grasp of the art he has studied. Now I do not want to suggest any lesser opinion of Clement Greenberg as an art critic than William Barrett has expressed. I have not visited museums with Greenberg and so I cannot say whether or not he has to any great degree what Mr. Barrett calls “visual immediacy.” Perhaps he is just as gifted in this regard as Mr. Barrett surmises. I do know this, however: the art criticism which has made Greenberg famous and of which, by the way, Schapiro has spoken in the most generous terms to me, is most notable for the boldness of its value judgments and much less so for the perception of elements in painting invisible to others until the critic’s text.

Lionel Abel
New York City

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To the Editor:

William Barrett’s memoir, “The Painters’ Club,” proves him to be a fine raconteur, but it also proves him to be a man writing about artists and art he does not quite understand. Mr. Barrett’s continual depiction of the cosmopolitan, academy-educated Willem de Kooning as “childlike,” his fondness for quoting de Kooning’s utterance of the mild expletive, “Gee” (as if the mark of a true literary intellectual is total avoidance of such a word), and his general, albeit disguised, air of condescension toward the artists about whom he writes, compel such a conclusion. Mr. Barrett’s tale of his attempt to give a talk—presumably an intellectual one—to the Club, including his observation that artists are somehow better off staying away from abstract ideas (allegedly because their minds are too “concrete,” whatever that may mean), underlines his inability to see serious artists through anything but the same old romantic haze of Moulin Rouge, Lust for Life, The Agony and the Ecstasy, et al. Forgotten once again is the artist’s full, vital way of knowing the world and life, and in its place once again is the picture of the artist as a tipsy, lovable naïf.

This picture, in turn, leads Mr. Barrett into his heavy-handed attack on formalist theories, as if they were intoxicants in the hands of junior-high-school students. At their worst, such theories are indeed, in almost narcissistic fashion, more fascinated by their own power than the work of art in question. But even at less than their best, formalist theories help one grasp that part of art which is art, namely, that part which is beyond mere illustration. Mr. Barrett, on the other hand, believes at bottom in illustration. He tells us, for instance, that de Kooning was so fascinated by a man on horseback painted by Velázquez that he said, “Gee, I’d like to do something like that,” and went off to spend several fruitless days trying to draw men on horseback. “Notice, however,” Mr. Barrett writes, “that it was the arrogant beauty of a man on horseback and not the pattern of light and shadow that had gripped his imagination.” How, I ask, do we “notice” this? Certainly not from anything Mr. Barrett reports de Kooning to have said. On the contrary, an artist’s imagination is far more likely to be lured into another artist’s “pattern of light and shadow” than into the mere subject matter to which it was attached. The “something like that” to which de Kooning referred was probably the Velázquez in Velázquez rather than a mere equestrian picture.

Mr. Barrett’s implication is that de Kooning has lived, unfortunately and unknowingly, in a time in which all he has left to him is his abstraction; were he to have lived in Velázquez’s time he would, Mr. Barrett insinuates, have been free to pursue what is really art, that is, figuration. Hidden beneath Mr. Barrett’s seemingly chummy prose is an a priori dislike of abstraction and the belief that such painting is a pastime appropriate for the grown children of the Club. Hidden beneath de Kooning’s charming Dutch accent, however, is a profound, ambitious, fully adult soul deliberately, if intuitively, probing the realm of abstract painting.

Laurie Fendrich
Durham, North Carolina

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To the Editor:

I wish I had known William Barrett at the time of the Eighth Street Club, about which he writes with so much perception.

. . . I too have many memories of the Club: that shabby old building; the creaking floor of the clubroom . . .; the panel discussions—I can remember particularly one evening when John Ferren, Herbert Ferber, John Cage, and the ill-fated poet Frank O’Hara spoke, and my late husband, Ary Stillman, moderated. . . .

In the mid-40’s, when Stillman broke away from traditional painting, it was not to replace it with the Cubist tradition or with a purely formalist conception. With him, as with so many creative persons of the time, the break was a reaction to the enormity and horror of World War II; it meant forsaking a world in which they had grown up but which had now collapsed. Artists like Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko used an intellectual approach in seeking a method of expression that would fit with the new world. Stillman, on the other hand, felt he had to approach the problem intuitively, and he decided to delve into his subconscious and bring forth whatever he had accumulated in his years of travel and creativity, fragments of visual and emotional impressions, from many lands and many cultures. Thus, kind as Clement Greenberg was, he could not fully approve of Stillman’s type of nonrepresentational painting. For, as Alfred Werner said of Stillman’s work, no matter how nonrepresentational it might be, one felt that “man had been there.”

That, in a nutshell, is what I feel is lacking in so much contemporary painting. It is what William Barrett feels too, I gather from his article. . . . Ary Stillman’s method of working from memories stored in the subconscious resulted, as Mr. Barrett would put it, in “the past coming to life again in another form in the present.” This is what I hope will evolve as present-day artists contemplate their world.

Frances Stillman
Houston, Texas

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William Barrett writes:

Lionel Abel seems to me too solemn and contentious. I related an incident (a trip to a museum); the far-reaching implications he builds around it are his own construction.

Laurie Fendrich is mistaken: childlike is not childish. Childlike refers to that marvelous freshness of vision granted to some artists, and is not inconsistent with depth or profundity, quite the contrary. Also, I am not in the least opposed to abstract art, but to the view that it is the only valid art for our time, and the only valid point of view for looking at works of art.