432
PARTISAN REVIEW
PRONOUNCEMENTS FROM LIMBO
SEEING AND KNOWING. By Bernl!rd Berenson. Ml!cmilll!n. $3.50.
If
Bernard Berenson seems to us a figure out of another
life, it is because he has spent half a century mobilizing his considerable
talents against allowing the modifications of history to make a dent in
his thinking or sensibility. This would not be a handicap if he had
allowed his reputation to rest on his achievements as a scholar and con·
noisseur of Italian art. But it does mean that he is badly equipped for
the new role he has envisaged for himself in the last decade or so: as
a critic and elder statesman of modem culture. The truth is that the
factuality of the present is barbarous to him, and he long ago adjusted
his sensibility into an instrument which could transfonn the present
into figments of the past, as discontinuous with experience as one of
his precious madonnas.
The notion that Mr. Berenson is to be taken seriously in
this
role
seems, unhappily, to have gained some currency. It received a sizable
boost a couple of years ago when the Readers' Subscription urged
Rumor
and Reflection
upon its members. Critics who welcomed that work for
its channing habit of discussing the Second World War, the Nazis, the
Greek historians and Racine with equal detachment and poise failed to
notice how untouched the author had been by concrete events; the only
way Mr. Berenson could make anything of his experience as the most
secure and comfortable Jewish D.P. in Europe was to translate it into
images of the past. But this "past" is more mythical than historical
im·
agination: it removes everything from time, it annihilates the integrity
of historical fact, and spreads over all ideas and events a thick syrup of
personal vagary. (How really different, too, from Gide's
Journals,
to
which
Rumor and Reflection
was compared, which are so alive to the
brute factuality of the present.)
Mr. Berenson's latest publication should go a long way toward
showing up his essential philistinism and the irrelevance of his opinions
on modern culture.
Seeing and Knowing
is an essay of 40 pages, ac·
companied by 88 plates;
if
it can be said to have a single coherent
subject,
it
is about the uses of landscape and figure motifs in the whole
range of Western art. But Mr. Berenson's observations on this subject
(none of them noteworthy in themselves) are all pressed into the service
of disparaging the artistic achievements of the last fifty years. Thus,
Picasso is "the most remarkable draughtsman still alive (who) has
taken every advantage of his skill to hide his true gifts. Perhaps
in
deepest secret he draws in orthodox fashion everything he bedevils
