THE COVER: “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. In this case, you should judge this book by its cover because the cover was designed by Willem de Kooning. The book’s title, ”The Tradition of the New”, is in the top half in white lettering on a black background. It uses a variable font style that is difficult to read at first and resembles those graphic text jumbles used in computers to prove that you are a human and not a bot. Below this is “by Harold Rosenberg” in bold red lettering across the middle of the cover. It is in a heavy style that is immediately readable, presumably to prevent losing any sales. At the bottom you can see de Kooning’s signature floating in a sea of highly stylised letters.
I bought this book as a companion to a book by Clement Greenberg
Art and Culture: Critical Essays
. These were the two outstanding art critics of the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, particularly in respect to the new American painting called Abstract Expressionism. My first impression was that the essays were well written, accessible and easy to read. There was no pretentious obscure language. My problem was that sometimes I did not understand them. Many of them had previously been published in magazines (1) before being collected into this book and magazine articles tend to the current. Thus, there are sometimes references to events that are sixty years in the past.
THE BOOK: This is a collection of essays gathered together as a book. It is divided into four parts. Part 1 is “American Painting Today”. This contains some classic essays such as “Parable of American Painting” (2), “The American Action Painters” (3) and “Revolution and the Concept of Beauty” (4) and “Virtual Revolution” (8). Part 2 is “The Profession of Poetry” and contains four essays. Part 3 is “War of Phantoms” and contains four essays. These include “The Resurrected Romans” (9) and “The Heroes of Marxist Science” (10). Part 4 is “The Herd of Independent Minds”. It contains five essays, starting with “The Fall of Paris” (5) to introduce the later essays about recent (at the time of publication) American intellectual history.The penultimate essay is “Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism” (6) followed by “The Orgamerican Phantasy” (7).
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(1) For many of the essays there is no indication where and when they were first published. However, on the last page of the book is a short paragraph titled “Acknowledgements”, which lists the magazines where the essays first appeared: Art News, Commentary, Dissent, Encounter, Midstream, Partisan Review, Prospectus, View, The Symposium. The essays were collected into “The Tradition of the New” in 1959.
(2) In “Parable of American Painting”, 1954, Rosenberg created a metaphor based on the American Revolutionary War with the new Americans being the coonskin trappers whose knowledge of their terrain enabled them to pick off the British soldiers (Redcoats). "Redcoatism" was a symptom of the old European world's rejection of the new. In the same way, the new American art was making profound break with the traditions of European art.
(3) “American Action Painters” was published in Art News in 1952. This article introduced the term "action painting". It is still recognized as a seminal article.
(4) "Revolution and the Concept of Beauty", 1959, proposed that artists become revolutionaries (in the artistic sense) not because they were part of any movement but, paradoxically, because they didn't want to be revolutionary. Art should concern itself with art itself, not politics.
(5) “The Fall of Paris” was first published in 1940 in Art News at the time of the fall of Paris to the Nazis. The “Fall” was both political and artistic. Europe could no longer be the cradle of modern culture.
(6) Rosenberg is not impressed by critics taking kitsch as their subject. He says “The common argument of the mass-culture intellectuals that they have come not to bathe in the waters but to register the degree of its pollution does not impress me.”
(7) This is a rap on the non-fiction books on alienated American man in the 1950s. Some of these books are still read today. They include Riseman -
The Lonely Crowd
, Whyte -
The Organisation Man
, Mills -
White Collar
, Packard -
The Hidden Persuaders
and Spectorsky -
The Exurbanites
.
(8) “Virtual Revolution” is an essay based on a review of Dr Susanne K. Langer’s book
Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key
, where she proposes a central idea around the concept of the “art symbol”, “a creation, an appearance or semblance in which the thought, passion and craft of the creator take on a transformed life”.
(9) “The Resurrected Romans” is an essay based around Karl Marx’s
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
.
(10) “The Heroes of Marxist Science” is about certainties of belief held by Communists (née Bolsheviks). “The Communists belongs to an elite of the knowing. Thus he is an intellectual. But since all truth has been automatically bestowed upon him by his adherence to the Party, he is an intellectual who need not think”.
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他の国からのトップレビュー
Mac McAleer
Essays from the 1950s
2018年7月18日に英国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
