What The Artists Wrote: Two New Books, Revealed In “The Book”

As I mentioned here last October, The New Republic planned to start a new web page called The Book to “rush in and fill the vacuum in book criticism that is being left by the carnage in American newspapers.” Now it has. The Book made its debut on Jan. 11. Have a look.

In the visual arts, Jed Perl has led off with a joint review of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov and The Journals of Grace Hartigan: 1951-1955 in which he discusses the realm of books about the Abstract Expressionists and their near-contemporaries/next-generation artists.

I can’t say I’m going to run out to buy these books, but that has nothing to do with Perl’s review: He liked them. And I enjoyed Perl’s observations on them, including (verbatim):

There is a fine passage in Tworkov’s journal, when Elaine de Kooning has commented that LÃ©ger’s work “makes everything done here look neurotic,” and Tworkov begins to worry that his own work “seems very neurotic,” and then reflects that the same can be said of “CÃ©zanne, Soutine, El Greco, Watteau, Giacometti.”
It is clarifying to read the takedowns of Clement Greenberg by Tworkov and Hartigan, who remind us of the healthy skepticism with which his imperious statements were often received. “The influence of Greenberg’s criticism,” Tworkov writes in 1959, “hurts the position of every artist who believes in painting, who believes that a work of art is something lived thru and not merely perpetrated.”

These books give a startlingly immediate sense of all the local infighting and backbiting, as when Greenberg is quoted by Hartigan saying of Alfred Barr, the brilliant director of the Museum of Modern Art, that “everyone knows Barr is a fool and knows nothing about art.”

What emerges [from Hartigan’s journals] is a complex portrait of a woman in the New York art world in the 1950s, a time and a place when, so we have all too often been told, women were little more than helpmates and accessories. Hartigan was anything but a victim….she was a rising star, exhibiting at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, albeit initially as George Hartigan, apparently less a subterfuge than a gesture that mingled a salute to George Eliot and George Sand with an element of “high camp” disguise.

In February 1959, Tworkov had dinner with Mary McCarthy and a number of other people. “Mary,” he writes, “…holds [that] artists ought not to write, that they are inarticulate as she said, ‘Artists can only point.’ ” …After you have read a few pages by Jack Tworkov or Grace Hartigan, there will be no doubt in your mind that painters are among the most articulate people on earth.

I’ve seen evidence of that myself.

Read the review here.