We
got mail!
Bleary-eyed
or not ...
Time is on our side
Former Time Magazine Art Critic Piri Halasz
recently wrote to NW Scuttle Arts Editor Jeff Jahn; heres
an excerpt:
Dear Jeff,
I've now read all
of your articles online, back to the very beginning, though
I have to confess I am rather bleary-eyed at the moment, so there
may have been some things that I missed. I found your entries
very clear and interesting and it certainly seems as though there's
a gallery scene in Portland, as well as a museum scene.
I did my dissertation on painting in New York, so
I hope you'll excuse me if I disagree with you about New York
becoming the art capital of the world during World War II. Certainly,
the future abstract expressionists weren't yet producing world-class
art: they were still in their formative stages, but on the other
hand, an awful lot of very distinguished and/or meaningful Parisian
artists did leave Paris and settle in New York, and Motherwell
wasn't the only one who benefited from this exposure. True, neither
Picasso nor Matisse moved to the U.S. during the war, but both
of them were ancient history as far as Paris was concerned anyway,
having made their real contributions prior to or during World
War I (fauvism in 1905, cubism between 1907 and 1917). The artists
who did come to the U.S., however, represented most of the next
generation of leaders, the artists who had come of age in Paris
between the two world wars, including Masson, Matta, Tanguy, Ernst,
Dali and Mondrian (the last-named having pointed out to Peggy
Guggenheim in one of her group shows at Art of This Century that
he thought this young guy named Pollock had talent). Also in the
U.S. during World War II were Andre Breton, Duchamp, Dali and
Leger, as well as Stanley William Hayter, who was less well known
than any of others, but as I see it far more important for Pollock
than any of them, either. I'm convinced that Pollock learned more
about surrealist automatism and the use of poured paint to express
it at Hayter's graphics workshop than anybody (especially Greenberg)
was ever willing to admit (I did an article on this for Arts in
1984).
One other comment, on Freud: I don't think the postmodernists
or post-structuralists have any exclusive claim to him, as you
suggested in one of your reviews. I quite agree that as they use
him, they don't add much to the dialogue, but there are lots of
other ways of using him, and I happen to feel that mine is neither
postmodernist nor counterproductive.
Finally, it's funny to read you talking about the
baby boomers in ways that suggest you see them as fat and middle-aged
and smug or whatever. For you, as a Gen Xer, they must seem that
way. You also perhaps think that I as an Old Person (member of
the Silent Generation, prior to the boomers) look upon the baby
boomers as dangerous radicals only because I am older, and think
of them in terms of how radical they were in the '60s. You may
be tempted to assume that it was these radical boomers who have
gotten fat and smug with age. Sure, that's part of it, but the
other part, which I've discovered by reading a number of books,
and observing a number of people, is that the radicals of the
'60s were only one small segment of the boomer generation as a
whole, and that most of their contemporaries weren't politically
involved in the '60s either. That second, much larger segment
of the boomer generation never wanted anything much but the good
life anyway, so that's what they got and what you're more aware
of now. The radical boomers from the '60s, on the other hand,
have often stayed committed in one way or another, though less
conspicuously so. I have a younger cousin who was and is one of
them: she has put in a career teaching mostly nontraditional female
students (i.e. working-class women) English in a community college
in the Chicago area.
Ah well, enough of that. If you ever get to New
York, I'd be glad to have coffee with you and offer any suggestions
you might welcome on shows or artists whose work you might like
to see. Like you, I feel that 99 percent of what goes on in the
New York galleries is dull stuff, but that's the 99 percent that
gets the publicity. I also think there's one percent of much better
work being done that gets ignored.
Best,
Piri
New York