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PARTISAN REVIEW
Warhol, and Lichtenstein are usually better than their paintings and
sculptures. Minimal art has a clean simplicity of design, even if it is
bland and repetitive and rarely shows any feeling for proportion. I
find that Duane Hanson's sculptures have a creepy fascination akin
to a feeling I get in a wax museum, and some of the photo-realists do
sensitive watercolors. William Wegman is a good stand-up comic.
But even the very best examples of the trends seldom go beyond the
minor, the odd, the cute, or a good basic design-at the level of, say,
a good
New lOrker
cover, a good stage set, or an imaginative window
display. In fact, these areas of applied and commercial art regularly
produce things that have more real dignity, taste, invention, and
sensitivity than the "fine" art featured in our salons. And salon
modern has been getting worse. The best art is hardly seen at
all
anymore in the salons, and the current trend-punk, new wave, or
neoexpressionist painting-is a kind of choked and muddied
nastiness, worse than pop ever was.
But if our salon epoch is an especially decadent one, we must
keep the central point in view: it has
all
happened before-at least in
scheme, in general outline. The most blatant and well-known
instance offashionable art's obscuring the best new modern art is, of
course, France in the last half of the nineteenth century. Never was
new art greater and never was it more difficult to see. This art,
impressionism and postimpressionism, unfolded over several
generations and half a century, between Manet and Matisse. It
involved a score of major figures, many of them friends, and
all
of
them influencing each other's work. They created an art of great
force, refinement, and range. Yet at no time in the nineteenth
century were they considered more than a minor trend by Europe's
art establishment.
Today's art world thinks itself too sophisticated to be fooled
again. It is now dominated by open-minded liberals who want
novelty and are broadly pluralistic. But an accepting liberalism isn't
really any more sophisticated an attitude toward innovative art than
a rejecting conservatism is. Only connoisseurship, comparative
evaluation, is useful here, and connoisseurship reports that there is a
nearly exact parallel between today's contemporary art and that of
the late nineteenth century. We, too, have a bold new modern art,
full of life and color, that is being diminished and obscured by the
very big, very bad art of the salon.
For almost forty years our best contemporary art has been our
best abstract art. Here is the cutting edge, the true avant-garde, the
