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while painting, as I have been assured Joyce wrote out in plain King's
English what he fricasseed for his printed prose." He characterizes
Joyce's writings as "polyglot etymological puns and soap-bubbles" and
cannot understand why a literary review, "supposed to be one of the
most authoritative in Great Britain," should compare
Finnegans Wake
to "the deepest Shakespeare." And
if
anyone still wonders why the
carvings of Negro Africa made a crucial impression on Picasso and his
generation, Mr. Berenson clears up that matter, too: they were all
duped by "a genius of mercantile propaganda" who arrived in Paris
with something to sell.
As these examples indicate-and they scarcely begin to exhaust
the astonishing amount of foolishness the author has managed to
crowd into so few pages-Mr. Berenson's essay is fixed in a posture of
certitude which can only be sustained by a complete immunity to the
actual events of the art world. Yet, however lamentable we may find
his supercilious attitudes and the unfortunate disjunction between schol–
arship and intelligence which they represent, there is something more
to be regretted here: that is, that we really have no critic of the kind
Mr. Berenson pretends to be. We seem to have reached a crisis in
Western art; the museumization of art (with or without walls) to which
Andre Malraux has written his great tribute-or is it an elegy?-may
already be passing into a phase where it no longer liberates, but actually
smothers, the imagination. It is the artists and not the critics who will
resolve this crisis, of course, but it would certainly be useful to have a
critic who could bring the current impasse into focus. But such a critic
would have to be firmly attached to contemporary actualities as well
as to history;1 the kind of intellectual limbo from which Mr. Berenson
issues his pronouncements tells us nothing.
Thus, it is sheer coincidence that Mr. Berenson's plea for a revital–
ization of representational art comes at a moment of crisis when such a
plea, properly articulated, might have had some relevance.
Seeing and
Knowing
was written in 1948, but it might have been written thirty
years earlier or ten years later, so unattached is it to the vicissitudes of
art history. In this connection, it is worth noting that the painter Joseph
Czapski, in the March number of
Encounter,
stated in a few paragraphs
the insight that Mr. Berenson has been unable to master throughout his
many pronouncements: that modern abstraction may be passing into a
decline, as the great styles of the past have done, that, as Mr. Czapski
1 Without succumbing, it must be added, to the kind of historical tempta–
tion which has created a widespread notion in America that European culture
is washed up and the next important achievements will be American.
