ART CHRONICLE
A SURFEIT OF THE NEW
One takes for granted that any detailed review of a New
York art season is unmanageable. Even after adopting the double limita–
tions that arise almost automatically-in time only a section of a season
just begun, and
in
space only a concentration upon a relatively small
number of the city's three hundred fifty galleries-there remains an
im–
mense and by now immensely dispersed activity with some claim to
attention.* Since the middle of September, I have counted some forty
one-man exhibitions, about a third of them of sculpture, that could
be
said to "deserve" comment of some sort, and there surely have been
others which a routine of rounds has overlooked.
Such unremitting production, all offered for examination in much
the same fashion, minimizes the impact of any given exhibition. Unjust
as the effects of saturation may be to the individual artist, there is no
escaping them. Since the early days of the French and English Salons,
artists have employed a variety of devices to arrest public attention;
in
the old days chiefly size and topical subject-matter, more recently also
striking changes of manner and materials. Nowadays the critic of a
certain age must guard against matched weaknesses. He must not rest
in the comfort of styles so familiar that he occasionally indulges in the
illusion that he has himself helped to create them (he should beware
of the indulgent politeness of his artist friends), and he must avoid
losing himself in the excitement of the new merely because history has
warned him that the future, which is to say the true present, always
I,
belongs to revolt.
Nevertheless, I do not think it is any cautions of this kind that
*
A partial list of these would include: Bourdelle, Gonzalez, Matisse,
Arp,
Chagall, Albers, Beauchamp, Caron e, Cicero, Conner, Daphnis, Heiliger,
Frankenthaler, Hiquily, Jenkins, Kell
y,
Lekakis, Lindeberg, Lipchitz, Louis,
Marca-Relli, Pavia, Rauschenberg, Vi eira de Silva, David Smith, Soulages,
Stahly, Sugerman, Takis.
