326
PARTISAN REVIEW
This rather interpolated concern of Greenberg's with Mira's per–
sonality seems to me the one serious flaw in a monograph that is other–
wise, both in its text and choice of reproductions, one of the best sum–
maries of a modern artist of which I know.
Weldon Kees
ARTWARE AND HARDWARE
ART AS THE EVOLUTION OF VISUAL KNOWLEDGE. By
Chorles
Biedermlln. $15.00. ·
It is not uncommon these days for individuals to fabricate
all-embracing perspectives in support of their own particular solutions.
Biederman certainly deserves a medal of some sort-he has taken more
space (660 pp.) and contrived more historical distortions than any of
his predecessors. It might be added that his style admits of no dialectic;
every statement, presented with the utmost pomposity
a~d
scant substan–
tiation, is put forward as an incontrovertible fact.
Biederman sets out to demonstrate that we have reached the dawn
of a new day for which "Constructionism" comes as the one and only
logical expression. In the process of furnishing evidence, he drags us
through the entire history of art from the "scratchings of paleolithic man
to television"; he smothers us in quotations,
t~es
us miles off the track,
and eventually makes it evident that he will elicit any device to further
the following thesis: Art was always, from earliest times, a desire to
imitate Nature as accurately as possible. Now that we have the camera,
this end has suddenly become superfluous, so the artist is up against a
grave decision. Biederman
does
concede that color-photography isn't
perfect yet (perfection means as clear as a mirror), but it won't be long
now, and then no one should ever have an excuse to look a Raphael in
the face again. Furthermore, the critic is a ninny who thinks past artists
for a moment tried to do anything that a camera couldn't do better
today; it was ·only "regressions," usually brought on by priests, that
brought about such fiascos as Byzantine art. Every sculptor after Dona–
tello was also a flop ("Michelangelo and Rodin made the error of using
sculpture, their works were actually those of frustrated painters")
be–
cause sculptors, when it came to downright realism, found they couldn't
compete with painting. It would be interesting to ascertain what a visit
to Mme. Tussaud's Waxworks might do to this facet of Biederman's
visual knowledge.
Such debatable points are as nothing, however, compared to actual
