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garde now has a respectable tradition, whereas the bad-faith traditions of their
traditional enemies have been dissipated.
It
is now a "museum culture. "
Kramer reinforces this transformed status by arguing, for example, that
Turner is the true father of modern painting; he is, in fact, a museum man
himself, with a strong tendency to argue from the painting or the exhibition
before him to the general history of painting. He is always instructing us, and
perhaps the painters too . The recent London exhibition of Symbolist art
induces him to suggest that Puvis de Chavannes must be got out of the
necropolis into the museum , there to be joined by Redon, and possibly by
Simeon Solomon. The history of modern painting thus becomes something
Yeats would have understood seventy years ago .
One ofKramer 's basic skills is to provide, in briefcompass , a clear idea of
an entire oeuvre , as for instance of Feininger or Beckmann . He is especially
good on what Samuel Johnson would have called " idea-d " artists , like
Kandinsky ; and he is capable of severity in such discussions, as when he
reproves Mohol-Nagy: "The world is changed, alas, only by political action,
and philosophers of design who refuse to face this harsh truth consign
themselves to a permanent state of self-deception. " I found him interesting
on those early Soviet artists John Berger has made known in England; the
years when an alliance between radical politics and avant-garde art seemed
possible he characterizes sadly as "a tender historical moment," which he
remembers again when condemning those displays of reconstructed works by,
say, Tatlin , as the "repellent" operations of " contemporary museology."
The typical strategy of a Kramer piece is a sort of rhetorical peripeteia. If
Henry Moore looks modernist he will turn out to be a representative of the
English pastoral tradition . If Bourdelle looks like a belated Romantic he
nevertheless belongs , "undeniably, to modern sculpture." Kramer is always
straightening out bent judgments and bent history : "we are only at the
beginning of an era in which the ' little masters' of the School of Paris are
going to be looked at
~s
individuals rather than as legendary .. . protagonists
in the heroic saga of modern art." He finds in Clement Greenberg' 'a fear of
the personal element in art ," a devotion to his own version of' 'the impersonal
process of history ," yet in a sense he might be accused of the same tendency .
Well aware of the danger of premature history (see his strictures on Sam
Hunter's study of Pollock) , he is nevertheless quite quick to tell us we must see
Motherwell against the background of ' 'a rich and complex history ' ' ; similar
issues come up in the essay on Hofmann. He is also aware of the primary need
for the personal response and the valuation that precedes historical
judgment; this is well illustrated in his writing on Frank Stella. But he has
nevertheless a strong predilection for history , which induces in him a mildly
apocalyptic sadness ; we have moved out of a period in which avant-garde art
