The Joys and Sorrows of Recent American Art

What the book under review demonstrates more than anything else is the durability of the interpretation of modem art that sees everywhere an antecedent contest between classical precision and romantic power. In this conception there are paired opposites all along the way: Ingres and Delacroix, Seurat and Van Gogh, Mondrian and Kandinsky, Sheeler and Marin. Besides the tendency towards pure formalism there flows a strong current tending to absolute subjectivity. If one conceives of these tendencies as streams analogous to actual rivers, one must think of them as meandering alongside one another in a common voyage from Impressionism to the present. Sometimes they are parallel, sometimes they link and pool, sometimes they are so far apart as to seem entirely unrelated. What Allen Weller has done is map their intertwinings in the single delta of recent American art. Not that the author actually uses the dualist metaphor. As befits the Dean of Urbana's College of Fine and Applied Arts, he thinks in terms much more like those that artists themselves are apt to use. But still, one is struck by the dualism. He sees, for instance, machinery's domination of our culture reflected in Stankiewicz's materials and in Bontecou's forms. The violence for which America has become notorious turns DeKooning's brush into an instrument of aggression and is the theme for the otherwise impersonal style of Roy Lichtenstein. Weller's criticism, then, is the marriage of antinomiesmind versus heart, carefulness opposing immediacy, logic blurring feeling. As for the characterizations of specific art objects, no one familiar with contemporary art need bother reading them, except to relish a certain felicity of expression. For the reader who has but slight acquaintance with modem art Weller's descriptions will be valuable; they may very well form the basis for a genuine appreciation of the given works and their pertinence to our milieu. In this connection, the book has but one defect: Its cautious specificity although having the merit of ordinary truthfulness is disadvantaged by sometimes seeming to overlook an entire tradition even while recognizing every precedent. Surely, that was not true of the De Young Lectures from which The Joys and Sorrows of Recent American Art has been distilled. Unfortunately, certain points the author says he tried to make in the lectures have either disappeared or been much reduced in the printed form. From the publisher's point of view, what is unessential is unnecessary; from my point of view, another fifty pages of text would have made the book worth half again its present cost. I have always detested reviews which evaluate no real book but praise an imaginary volume that the reviewer thinks might have been written instead of what his author wrote. Such sly boastfulness is not the sponsor of what follows. The fact is that if one wishes to establish the potential scope of this book he is compelled to amplify what Weller has scarcely touched upon in print. For instance, Weller notes the prevalence of masked figures in twentiethcentury art. The connection he stipulates is to the esoteric nature of an art which, in disguising its meanings, reveals the sense of estrangement common

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