Page 59 - Studio International - July August 1973

Supplement Who needs a critic? I've ever seen can teach me how this is to be
done. I am alone with this thing, and it is up
Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-
Summer 1973: Century Art by Leo Steinberg. 436 pp & viii. to me to evaluate it in the absence of available
standards. The value which I put on this
Illustrated. New York: Oxford University
new and Press 1972. £5 painting tests my personal courage.' (p. 15).
There were a number of options open to him.
Leo Steinberg is Professor of art history at the
recent art books City University, New York. He is also a critic. He could have rejected Jasper Johns's work as
either rubbish (those coat-hangers, targets, the
Other Criteria is a collection of his articles, US flag, etc.) or as out-of-date Dadaist stuff.
papers and reviews covering the last twenty `One way to cope with the provocations of
years. Some of them are rather slight, and, novel art is to rest firm and maintain solid
though they usually contain an apt remark or standards. The standards are set by the critic's
two, might have been omitted without loss. long-practised taste . . . All else is irrelevant'.
Perhaps these remarks could have been isolated 63).
and published as obiter dicta. Sample: (Of Or he could have pretended to like the work,
De Kooning) 'His Woman is distorted ? either because it was fashionable or because
Distorted from what norm ? She is no more anything which challenges existing standards is
distorted than a lightning bolt is a distorted by that very fact worthy of serious
arrow, or a rainstorm a distorted shower bath.' consideration. Again, he could 'hold his
He has more substantial articles on Picasso criteria and taste in reserve' and suspend his
(Picasso's Sleepwalkers', 'The Skulls of judgement until 'the work's intention has come
Picasso' and 'The Algerian Women and into focus.' This would not necessarily have
Picasso at Large'), and on Rodin and Gonzalez. involved approval, but rather feeling 'along
But by far the most interesting and important with it as with a thing that is like no other.'
part of the book centres around the theme of This is the course he took in the case of Johns's
the title: the problem of being a critic in a world work.
where values, standards, concepts and styles Three years later Steinberg published a long
in art are continually changing. and detailed analysis of Johns's paintings. This
The problem seems to have first forced itself article, with some revisions, is included in the
on his attention when he encountered the work present book. It gives an interesting insight into
of Jasper Johns in 1958: the workings of a critic's mind when he is faced
`My own first reaction was normal. I disliked with disturbing novelties.
the show, and would gladly have thought it a Steinberg returns to the theme of the
bore. Yet it depressed me and I wasn't sure why. perplexities of the critic in a lecture delivered
Then I began to recognize in myself the classical in 1968, which gives the book its title. Here
symptoms of a philistine's reaction to modem he examines the factors which prevent a critic
art. I was angry with the artist, as if he had from coming to terms with new manifestations
invited me to a meal, only to serve something in art, in particular, the factors which prevented
uneatable, like tow and paraffin. I was irritated American formalist critics in the late 5os from
with my friends for pretending to like it - but taking Pop Art seriously.
with an uneasy suspicion that perhaps they did Steinberg diagnoses two related factors. The
like it.' (p. 12). first is an attempt to isolate aesthetic quality
Incidentally, his reference to the 'classical at the expense of meaning, iconography,
symptoms of the philistine's reaction' has to be culture, etc. The ideal critic 'proceeds
understood in the context of the paper from undistracted, programmed like an Orpheus
which the quotation has been taken making his way out of Hell.' Secondly, the
`Contemporary Art anti the Plight of its formalist critic sees the 'mainstream' of modem
Public' (1962). In it he argues that the philistine art as a progression from realist art which
public is not some uncouth mass, ignorant of and conceals art to modernismwhich uses art to
insensitive to art, but all those, including draw attention to art.
artists, who reject a new movement in art. With the first of these two factors Steinberg
When Signac wrote of Matisse's The Joy of is brief - too brief. 'Our experience indicates',
Life: 'Matisse seems to have gone to the dogs'; he says, 'that quality rides the crest of a style,
when Matisse rejected Picasso's Demoiselles and that when a movement or style as such is
d'Avignon as a hoax; when the cubists rejected resisted, the qualitative differences within that
Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase - in style become unavailable'. He deals with the
each case they were behaving as a philistine second factor at length and convincingly,
public towards a new movement. pointing out, with the use of many telling
The reason for the reaction is not difficult to illustrations, that far from wishing to conceal
understand. These new pictures did not 'look art, many of the Old Masters were as anxious
like art'. Moreover, they offered a challenge to as our contemporaries are to draw attention to
the critic. He could not fall back on established it - as when a battle scene on a Vatican wall
standards. As Steinberg says: curls up at the edges to become a fake tapestry
`Whatever experience of painting I've had in the or prophets lean out of the corners of a
past seems as likely to hinder me as to help. I Crucifixion (attributed to Niccolo di Pietro
am challenged to estimate the aesthetic value Gerini) to point to the scene.
of, say, a drawer stuck into a canvas. But nothing In 'The Eye is a Part of the Mind' (first

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