Hilton Kramer, well known as perhaps the most perceptive, courageous, and influential art critic in America, is also the founder and co-editor (with Roger Kimball) of The New Criterion. This comprehensive book collects a sizable selection of his early essays and reviews published in Artforum, Commentary, Arts Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Times, and thus constituted his first complete statement about art and the art world.
The principal focus is on the artists and movements of the last hundred years: the Age of the Avant-Garde that begins in the nineteenth century with Realism and Impressionism. Most of the major artists of this rich period, from Monet and Degas to Jackson Pollock and Claes Oldenburg, are discussed and often drastically revaluated. A brilliant introductory essay traces the rise and fall of the avant-garde as a historical phenomenon, and examines some of the cultural problems which the collapse of the avant-garde poses for the future of art. In addition, there are chapters on art critics, museums, the relation of avant-garde art to radical politics, and on the growth of photography as a fine art.
This collection is not intended to be the last word on one of the greatest as well as one of the most complex periods in the history of the artistic imagination. The essays and reviews gathered here were written in response to particular occasions and for specific deadlines--in the conviction that a start in the arduous task of critical revaluation needed to be made, not because a critical theory prescribed it but because our experience compelled it!
Author(s): Hilton Kramer, Roger Kimball
Publisher: Transaction Publishers, Routledge
Year: 2009
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
PREFACE
I. The Age of the Avant-Garde
II. The Nineteenth Century
1 The Turner Revival
2 The Radicalism of Courbet
3 Late Monet
4 The Conscience of Impressionism
5 Degas as Expressionist
6 Neo-Impressionism I
Neo-Impressionism II
7 Odilon Redon: "The Medium of Mind"
8 Medardo Rosso
9 Simeon Solomon: Preview of a Revival
10 The Pre-Raphaelite Revival
11 Rediscovering Puvis de Chavannes
12 Aubrey Beardsley: The Erotic and the Exquisite
13 The Erotic Style
14 Whistler: Choosing London over Paris
15 Whistler in the Seminar Room
16 Mary Cassatt: An American in Paris
17 The Stratagems of Realism
III. The Twentieth Century
Germans and Other Northerners
1 Lovis Corinth
2 Edvard Munch
3 The Rebellion of Oskar Kokoschka
4 Egon Schiele
5 Nolde: An Aggrieved Solitary
6 Kirchner and Expressionism
7 Feininger: A Visionary Cubist
8 George Grosz: A Moral Recoil
9 Poet and Pedagogue: Paul Klee
10 Max Beckmann: "The Quality of Pulsating Life"
11 Kandinsky: Theosophy and Abstraction
12 Kandinsky: The Last Decade
13 Mondrian's Freedom
14 Moholy-Nagy
15 Rodchenko: Art in the Service of Revolution
16 Thinking about Tatlin
17 "The World of Art" in Exile
18 Oskar Schlemmer's Abstract Universe
19 Walter Sickert and the Malaise of English Painting
20 Epstein in London
21 Barbara Hepworth: From the Avant-Garde to the Establishment
22 Henry Moore: A Very English Romantic
The School of Paris
1 Matisse: The Paintings
2 Matisse: The Sculpture
3 Bourdelle: The Age of Innocence
4 Vuillard
5 Bonnard's Drawings
6 Picasso's Radical Inventions
7 Picasso's "Guitar"
8 Were These Braque's "Great Years"?
9 Juan Gris
10 The Conversion of Julio Gonzalez
11 Laurens: "The Ripening of Forms"
12 Lipchitz's Eloquence
13 Chagall
14 Soutine and the Problem of Expressionism
15 Modigliani: Reconsidering a "Little Master"
16 Miró: Enchanted Objects
17 Arp: Purity of Heart, Purity of Form
18 The Two Archipenkos
19 Late Léger
20 Duchamp: Resplendent Triviality
21 Dali
22 Picabia's Dada Holiday
23 Torres-Garcia: Scenario of Exile
24 Giacometti
Americans
1 Reflections on Lachaise
2 Prendergast
3 Marsden Hartley: The Return of the Native
4 The Loneliness of Arthur Dove
5 The Ordeal of Alfred Maurer
6 Introducing H. Lyman Sayen
7 Man Rays Self-
Portrait
8 Arnold Friedman: "He Is Not a Pleasant Painter"
9 Charles Sheeler: American Pastoral
10 The Return of John Storrs
11 The Legendary John Graham
12 Walkowitz
13 Edward Hopper: An American Vision
14 The Sculpture of Saul Baizerman
15 Romaine Brooks
16 Arshile Gorky: Between Two Worlds
17 The Confidence of Milton Avery
IV. Contemporaries
1 The Sculpture of David Smith
2 The Jackson Pollock Myth I
The Jackson Pollock Myth II
3 Robert Motherwell I
Robert Motherwell II
4 Willem de Kooning I
Willem de Kooning II
5 Ad Reinhardt
6 Jean Dubuffet: Playing the Primitive
7 Hofmann in Perspective
8 Albers
9 Louise Nevelson
10 Joseph Cornell's Baudelairean "Voyage"
11 Balthus
12 The Problem of Francis Bacon
13 The Comic Fantasies of Saul Steinberg
14 Isamu Noguchi
15 "Homage to Trajan"
16 José de Rivera
17 Helioni Returning from the Absolute
18 Helen Frankenthaler: "The Landscape Paradigm"
19 Mark di Suvero
20 Anthony Caro
21 Frank Stella I
Frank Stella II
22 Robert Morris: The Triumph of Ideas over Art
23 An Art of Boredom?
24 Claes Oldenburg
25 Matta: Style vs. Ideology
26 Prague: 1969
27 Jean Ipousteguy
28 Nicolas de Staël
29 Fairfield Porter: Against the Historical Grain
30 Expressionism plus Objects: The Art of Jim Dine
31 Lindner's Dream
32 The Futurism of Ernest Trova
33 Plebeian Figures, Banal Anecdotes: The Tableaux of George Segal
34 Philip Pearlstein
35 Ellsworth Kelly
36 Mary Frank
37 Richard Hunt
38 Leland Bell: Painting in the Shadow of the Museum
39 Dude-Ranch Dada
40 Anne Arnold's Peaceable Kingdom
41 Alex Katz
42 Comedies of Manners: Cecil Beaton and David Hockney
43 The Sculpture of William King
V. The Art of Photography
1 The Classicism of Henri Cartier-Bresson
2 Edward Weston's Privy and the Mexican Revolution
3 Paul Strand
4 Bill Brandt
5 Walker Evans and Henri Carder-Bresson
6 From Fashion to Freaks: Diane Arbus
VI. Critics
1 A Critic on the Side of History: Notes on Clement Greenberg
2 The Contradictions of Herbert Read
3 The Strange Case of Harold Rosenberg
VII. Into the Seventies
1 "Information"
2 Art and Politics: Incursions and Conversions
3 Avant-Gardism
4 And Now . . . Pop Art: Phase II
5 William Bailey and the Artifice of Realism
6 Andy's "Mao" and Other Entertainments
7 The Return of "Handmade" Painting
8 Documenta 5: The Bayreuth of the Neo-Dadaists
INDEX
