PARTISAN REV lEW
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the masses, prevent a painting from being a masterpiece?
The light-hearledness of the avant-garde was a philosophical dec–
laration. Given the elements of modern life·, including its art and its
pieties, its basic message ran, every affirmation has a hollow core
which the enlightened consciousness reflects in a grin or a grimace.
The Dandy of modernism not only gets the joke but personifies it in a
species of lyricism.
Carpe diem.
Unfortunately, it is the fate of all vanguards
to
acquire a sense of
historical role, to locate themselves in the foreground of the human
drama as leaders and transformers of the masses, to transpose them–
selves into a Proletariat in the missionary sense.
At this point their light-heartedness peters out, and their aes–
thetics of parody is converted into plain aesthetics. Comic-lyrical crea–
tions, such as Cezanne's "A Modern Olympia," Matisse's "Joy of
Life," Brancusi's "Bird," are designated as formal "breakthroughs,"
as if they provided a cure for diabetes. Copies of picnics on the grass, or
just dribbles of greel) paint in fields of canvas, are promoted as master–
pieces. Louis Bonaparte, with his dead stare and carefully calculated
dignity, is transformed into a Marxist professor, who gives blackboard
demonstrations of the historical processes that determine which paint–
ings at the Salon des Independents have achieved QUALITY.
For myself, I have been repeatedly struck by surprise and em–
barrassment when an avant-garde artist (be it anyone - Picabia, Man
Ray, Pollock) began to take himself with utter seriousness. Let me say
in defense of the artists that they would never have fallen for this game
had it not been for the art public, particularly for the art-historica l
screamers in it. Pollock, for example, had a sly side glance that said he
knew that you knew he was putting one over.
(No, for God's sake! I am not saying that vanguard masters are
not great artists. I am saying that they are ruined when the inescapable
frivolous element is deleted.)
•
•
•
• •
Duchamp and
M.
Teste.
Valery invented Duchamp as his emissary
to
New York.
In his early days Duchamp disrupted the settling down of art into
a trade. The tradesmen shrieked, Charlatan! Lately, this cry has been
