The 40s: The Story of a Decade (92 page)

A NOTE BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

“M
anhattan—great unfilleted sole spread out on a rock—is no good except along the backbone; the edges are slums,” Le Corbusier had written in 1935. The words appear in the majestic Profile of the architect, published in three issues of
The New Yorker
in 1947, by Geoffrey T. Hellman, who was the magazine’s extravagantly sophisticated reporter on New York institutional culture and high society. The quote is germane to a furious debate about where to put the United Nations buildings, which ranged Le Corbusier, who endorsed the East River site, against Robert Moses, who—grumping, “What do these foreign fellows know about our foundations, our hard-rock problems?”—plumped for Flushing Meadows. Those were dramatic days in the edifice game. Having added nothing much to the skyline for more than a decade, New York suddenly found itself the capital city of planet Earth, with wealth and bursting ambition to match. Dynamite thumped, bulldozers howled, and cranes bristled. No one knew that the first major International Style skyscrapers would remain, for all time, the best. Briefly, power could seem at one with poetry, in stanzas of steel and glass.

The New Yorker
responded handsomely. Its architecture critic was Lewis Mumford, the philosopher of urbanism whose concern for humane values shaded the epochal triumph of modernist styles, which he well understood, with prophetic compunctions. Imagine Rockefeller Center’s towers reduced from seventy to thirty-two stories. On a revisit to the
complex, Mumford declared that that would have made a good project great by bringing it into overall harmony with pedestrian experience. Think about this the next time you’re there. (I have, and I get it.) Think also, at any of the city’s postwar housing projects, of the baleful legacy of Le Corbusier’s beau ideal, the “vertical garden city.” (When genius blunders, the future weeps.)
The New Yorker
’s architecture coverage in the forties spelled out ideas and broached issues that resound to this day.

Meanwhile, a handful of mostly impoverished painters downtown were revolutionizing the aesthetics of modern art and would soon wrench world leadership from the war-groggy School of Paris. The magazine’s art critic at the time, Robert M. Coates, gave the movement its name. In his regular column, The Galleries, in the issue of March 30, 1946, Coates called the German-émigré painter and teacher of painters Hans Hofmann “one of the most uncompromising representatives of what some people call the spatter-and-daub school of painting and I, more politely, have christened abstract Expressionism.” (He must have performed the baptism in conversation; no earlier printed citation has been found.) But the critic fretted, adding that he would have been willing “to dismiss [Hofmann’s paintings] as sheer nonsense” but for certain formal qualities that marked Hofmann as a fairly, truth be told, compromising member of the avant-garde. To his credit, Coates had noted the volcanic talent of Jackson Pollock from the start, but, as late as 1949, he found the artist “curiously baffling.” And he maintained a mysterious hostility to the all-around best New York painter, ever: Willem de Kooning.

Still, Coates is an intriguing figure. A Yale man, he became a fixture of the Lost Generation of expatriates in Paris in the twenties. He may have introduced his friends Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to each other, on a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens. (Accounts differ.) Coates wrote novels tinged with the influences of Dada and Surrealism. His
The Eater of Darkness
(1926) remains a tangy read. Simply, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, shake off his deference to European culture. He accurately detects Abstract Expressionism’s trace elements of Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, but misses its transcendence of them. Meanwhile, he reflects the provincial crouch of a local art world, still insular and crabby, in which intellectual boldness could blow up your social life. In column after column, Coates gingerly pats the heads of not entirely bad artists whose names today glow dimly, if at all.

The crown jewel of the magazine’s arts coverage in the forties, for me, is a breathtaking epic of reportage: the three-part “The Beautiful Spoils,”
detailing the wartime German looting—a “scramble for beauty”—of Europe’s art treasures and the campaign of a ragtag U.S. Army unit to recover them. By Janet Flanner, the magazine’s luminous Paris correspondent for nearly fifty years, it reads like a thriller, indelibly, and it anatomizes the aesthetic passions that so weirdly attended Nazism’s monstrousness. Flanner zeroes in on the pillager-in-chief, Hermann Göring, whose “easy, vulpine smile” at his Nuremberg trial may come to haunt you, Cheshire fashion, as it now does me. The Reichsmarschall’s ravening connoisseurship—often in sneaking competition with that of Hitler, who was likewise smitten but otherwise distracted—made him probably the most prodigious art collector of all time, though with merciful brevity. We meet, in his company, a rogue’s gallery of silky crooks and fawning collaborators. And we all but smell the grunge on the ill-provisioned dozen soldiers of the U.S. Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives group as they rushed around France and Germany to save a continent’s patrimony, not least from souvenir-craving G.I.s.

Flanner puts us in the boots of thunderstruck young Americans a mile deep in the gleaming caverns of a salt mine near Salzburg, which was packed with art, including well over five thousand Old Masters, intended for a museum in Hitler’s hometown of Linz. They noticed particular crates labeled “Marble, Don’t Move.” These contained explosives which, but for a last-minute disobedience of S.S. orders, would have destroyed everything. By the reckoning of certain Nazis, likely including the jovial Göring before he cheated the hangman with a cyanide capsule, we were barbarians undeserving of joys so high and pure.

ROBERT M. COATES

DECEMBER 23, 1944

T
here’s a scattering of one-man and group shows this week—Kurt Seligmann at Durlacher, David Burliuk at the A.C.A., a modern French collection at Pierre Matisse, and an American one
at the 67 Gallery—and although they are all pleasant enough to see, they’re as difficult to describe, consecutively, as a patchwork quilt. I was a little disappointed in the new Seligmanns, to begin with him, and I think the color he employs in his current set of paintings is at the root of the difficulty. To be sure, he has never been particularly noteworthy as a colorist. It’s that queer half-Surrealist, half-medieval mythology he has created, with its tatter-demalion knights, bony and distorted, cavorting against backgrounds of ruins, that chiefly arouses the interest, and I have frequently felt that he does rather better in his etchings and other black-and-whites than he does in his paintings.

Until now, his color has never seemed greatly to interfere with his artistic intentions, but in the group of paintings at Durlacher there is a kind of candy-coated brilliance, a gaudy mingling of reds and greens and yellows, that just gets in the way all the time. Seligmann’s philosophy always has been essentially a sombre one. What he paints is the poetry of decay, of a world going tortuously downhill, and the trouble is that the bright coloration he applies to his pattern irresistibly suggests quite another mythology, that of the child’s story book, in which knights and other medieval characters are also depicted but in which the whole line of thought is on a lighter, more cheerful plane. Mr. Seligmann may have some deliberate plan behind this incongruity. Looking at his
Quattuor
and
Full Daylight
, I almost thought so, for in both these there is a cold glare about the color that enhances the design. But in a number of others, such as
Isis, Acteon, Alaska
, and
Apparition
, the conflict between pigment and portent produces only confusion. In effect, you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry, to clap your hands childishly or think deeply, and the effort to decide detracts a good deal from the power of his painting. Perhaps the most important requirement set upon any artist, abstract, representational, or otherwise, is that he must control the emotional response of his audience.

· · ·

By contrast, David Burliuk, at the A.C.A., goes on in the same delightful fashion, as always, of just being Burliuk. He still paints in at least four styles at once—naïve, Dutch realist, Expressionist, and Surrealist—and in spite of this wild disparity in techniques he still manages to give each picture a quality that stamps it as unmistakably his. This is not as easy a trick as it sounds. I can think of at least a dozen other artists, though I name no names, as well known as or even better known than Burliuk,
artists who, if they varied an inch from their established methods and content, would almost certainly drop instantly into anonymity.

Burliuk’s identity, however, shows through all his work, and although it is difficult to say straight off why, I think the reason is to be found in the quality of innocent earnestness that runs through it. In that sense, no matter what style he uses, he is always naïve. Whether he offers you Surrealism, as in his portrait of Nicolai Cikovsky, or switches to primitivism, as in his meticulously detailed
Village on the Sea
, whether he paints realistically, as in his jolly, bucolic little
Montauk Bar
, or expressionistically, as in his big, swirling
Two Flowers
, he is always trying to tell you something. And though it may seem at first glance paradoxical, Burliuk, with his four styles, is no different from naïve painters who have only one or none; there is the same reaching-out quality about them all. It’s a lovely quality to have, and I for one hope that Burliuk goes on and on having it.

· · ·

The group show at the Pierre Matisse is called Hommage au Salon de la Libération, by which is meant the 1944 Salon d’Automne, held in Paris hardly more than a month after the freeing of the city from the Germans and in which the outpouring of art (most of it, by its very nature, detestable to the Fascists) was an even realler symbol of the independent spirit of the French than the outcropping of flags, equally long-hidden, which greeted the entering Allied troops. There are twenty-eight painters and sculptors in the show. One, Chaim Soutine, is dead, nine are in France, and the remainder are in this country, and the total effect is at once an indication of the dispersion of French artists because of the war and a testimonial to the strength of the tradition behind them. I found it an unexpectedly moving exhibition, and I think you may find it so too. At any rate, disentangling the artistic from the political, let me recommend the Soutine study of a red-vested valet de chambre called
Peinture
, the brilliant
Ma Vie Blanche et Noire
by Yves Tanguy, the slightly precious but still touching memento of the flight from Paris, by Eugene Berman, called
Les Enfants Perdus sur la Route
, and the solidly painted, securely Impressionist still life by Bonnard, also called
Peinture
.… There’s a style of painting gaining ground in this country which is neither Abstract nor Surrealist, though it has suggestions of both, while the way the paint is applied—usually in a pretty free-swinging, spattery fashion, with only vague hints at subject matter—is suggestive of the methods of
Expressionism. I feel some new name will have to be coined for it, but at the moment I can’t think of any. Jackson Pollock, Lee Hersch, and William Baziotes are of this school, and you will find all three in the show at the 67 Gallery, in addition to some forty other contemporaries, all of them in the by now hallowed Abstract or Surrealist manner. Except for Pollock’s work, which frequently shows real power, I can’t say that I am quite up to this new school yet; it still seems too aggressively undisciplined to me. But there it is, and it has to be taken into account. In addition, there are a nice Mark Rothko abstraction (listed simply as “Untitled” in the catalogue), as well as an extremely delicate painting on glass by I. Rice Pereira, called “Interpenetrating Planes,” and a pleasant little “Dancers” by David Smith.