PAUL GOODMAN
lifted a wee bit the veil that hides the arcana of power, but has told
us at the same time that this was all just good clean fun and he really
didn't mean to offend. He deserves a place of honor in the Establishment.
Lewis Coser
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTI ST
ARSHILE GORKY, THE MAN, THE TIME, THE IDEA.
By
Horold Rosen–
berg . Horizon Press. $3.75.
This subtle and modest little book has a
CUrIOUS
double
dialectic. On the one hand, Gorky's biography, which Harold Rosenberg
calls an "exemplary fable of the artist of our time," is fully developed as
a working out of the world-history and art-history of 1920-1950; but on
the other hand, the undercurrent and finally main current of argument
is that the artist achieved his best work at the end quite outside of
that
history and very much like an artist of any age. I think that these two
strands are contradictory. This does not prevent their both being im–
portantly true, since the paradox of being trapped and therefore repre–
sentative and indeed existing at all, and of escaping and becoming one's
self and realizing some value, is in the (nature of things.
If
Harold
Rosenberg is here paradoxical, it is that he is wise; yet I doubt that he
sees the contradiction altogether clearly, for he seems to identify with
Gorky's weaknesses more than is necessary, and he takes the crazy details
of current history too seriously as real history: they are real enough in
that they may do us in, but they do not much recommen,d themselves for
humane discourse. (One has the impression, too, that a kind of bio–
grapher's piety restrains the author from his fun, his pathos, and his
indignation; this is too bad. And he is very sparing with "merely" personal
information, though he gives enough, and frankly, for his purposes.)
Gorky is presented to us as a "modem" who dedicates himself
to
the development of the new style and styles as such, because" 'real'
art
belongs to ... communions destroyed by our revolutionary age ... but
art is deathless and actually arises to new heights in becoming nothing
else than the artist's experience of it." This, with its corollary of the
looting of history and the international world, is "the basic premise of
