Art in America 1945–1970 (3)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism, edited by Jed Perl.

Elie Nadelman, High Kicker, c. 1920, cherry wood, 29 ½ x 13 ½ x 6 inches, © Estate of Elie Nadelman, photo: Paul Mutino, courtesy of the Bruce Museum (source)

Maybe I’m primed by my overall disappointment with Tolstoy’s What Is Art?, but my tolerance for writers getting art wrong has grown thin, and there were a few of them in this week’s stretch of Art in America 1945–1970. I won’t bother with the excerpt from the novel based on Hans Hofmann, particularly not with the words of Hofmann himself coming up in the next section. As for Parker Tyler’s treatise on Pollock, this is the kind of thing that makes people hate art writing: “What are his dense and spangled works but the viscera of an endless non-being of the universe?” Bleah.

I am fascinated at the mere existence of an essay on Hofmann by Tennessee Williams, but give me a break:

It is a relief to turn from the reasonably confident and even gifted painters who paint as if their inspiration were drawn from Esmeralda’s Dream Book¹ to this bold and clear-headed man who paints as if he understood Euclid, Galileo and Einstein, and as if his vision included the constellation of Hercules toward which our sun drifts.

Plenty of writers got excited by art, but few had the literary equipment to hang words upon the experience of looking at art. The thrill of art is unlike other thrills, and the ability to capture the difference distinguishes good critics from good authors more generally.

The chief item of interest this week is the 1948 essay on Elie Nadelman by Lincoln Kirstein. Kirstein was a central figure in a group that I once characterized (admittedly overly broadly) as “polyamorous homosexual aesthetic reactionaries” in a review of an exhibition of Luigi Lucioni. Kirstein disdained abstract art but not so much that he couldn’t appreciate Nadelman’s modernism. I’ve thought about Nadelman in relation to my recent work, in the respect that the formally reductive aspect of modernism and the formally reductive aspect of folk art are compatible projects if one regards them thus.

Kirstein was primarily a dance critic, and his analysis of Nadelman’s Tango (ca. 1920-24) is especially astute.

Swallow-tailed, sheathed in their own sweeping movement, the two dancers converge with a tension which almost anticipates a sharp electrical flash, if and when they should touch. They do not touch; it is the Tango, yet noli me tangere; the provocation, the piquancy, the steady flirtation; balance, as on a tight-rope, is maintained at finger-tip length.

In contrast to Williams, who knew Hofmann but likely didn’t have the slightest idea how to make an abstract painting, Kirstein wrote in intimate detail about Nadelman’s materials and processes. He understood, among much else, that Nadelman worked out certain ideas in plaster before committing them to hardwood, and that the artist abandoned many ideas at the plaster stage. This is basic, but I’m convinced that germane knowledge of the material aspect of art-making anchors critics against flying away into “viscera of an endless non-being of the universe” territory. It enables them to hit literary high notes without squeaking. As evidence I offer Kirstein.

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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.

1. I can’t locate this reference.