Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America & Ambition and Love in Modern American Art - Book Review

MATTHEW BAIGELL

Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America

fresh York: Cambridge University Press, 2001 294 pp; 47 b/w ills. $7500; $2800 paper

JONATHAN WEINBERG

Ambition and have affection for in Modern American Art

of recent origin Haven: Yale University Press, 2001

Matthew Baigell and Jonathan Weinberg present two radically different versions of the 20th-century American artist. In composite, Baigell's artist is a white, heterosexual male painter (or Georgia O'Keeffe) searching for fact in nature and the self Mold by means of environment and experience, inspired by the agency of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Baigell's authentic American artist is political, patriotic, alienated, self-creating, self-transcending, philosophical, and moral. He finds meaning in the conditions and conflicts of contemporary life and falls short, or fails, whenever he forgets that more is at stake than nothing else but personal artistic expression. He has no sex life and no erotic desires.

328 pp; 175 b/w ills. $3500

Weinberg's artist is a a great deal of messier entity. Male, female, white, black, mainstream, marginal, heterosexual, and gay, this artist may paint, scrawl graffiti upon urban walls, use a camera, or piece together a memorial quilt. This artist is anxious, voracious exploitative, competitive, self-serving, self-absorbed, necessitous envious, and amoral. Never exclusively a formalist, this artist is enmeshed in and driven by the agency of a complex web of personal and social relationships. Succes and failure hinge upon achieving personal artistic fulfillment and public acclaim. Sexuality and erotic experience make up the core and substance of this artist's life, work, and reception. Irreconcilably different, these sum of two units artists both lay claim to being modem and American. To which single should go the palm?

We might ask the same question about the sum of two units authors, though we may not find a clear answer. Baigell's volume is a collection of historical essays and art criticism written above a period of thirty years. Arranged in chronological following the chapters reflect the author's sustained engagement with the question of novel American art as the production or synthesis of environmental and experiential factors, from the early modernists of the Stieglitz circle to Edward Hopper the American display Abstract Expressionism, and the increasingly fragmented art world of the later 20th hundred Baigell examines competing conceptions and definitions of "American," in particular the periodical claim of one class, individual tradition, or one region to stand for all. Broadly speaking, the artists Baigell considers fall into sum of two units groups: those who in an Emersonian fashion look after to escape the past in order to attain intellectual and spiritual increase or those who, suffering a los of intention and commitment, have "no reason to make art othe r than to make art" (p 9) At the extremity of the century, he dioceses redirection and redemption in the emerging see the verb of minority group art circles, whose importance lies in getting art "out of the furrow of the aesthetic and back into life" (p 254) Although Baigell uses a wide range of sources, he accords primacy to the words of critics and of the artists themselves, as well as the voices of philosophers, bards and social theorists ranging from Hippolyte Taine to Wylie Sypher, who defined fresh malaise in his 1962 research Loss of Self.

Baigell's fine essay "Thomas Hart Benton and the Left" showcases his approach. He leads up to the Benton chapter with a discussion of rising nationalism and xenophobia in the 1920 and 1930 when artists and critics alike sought to discover and celebrate stainless American values and subject matter drawn from public experience, couched in a realistic manner of writing and based in the Midwest, where the "taint of Europe was les sinewy than in the East" (p 90) Of the so-called American show painters identified with these goals, none was more visible or more belligerently polemical than Benton, whose paintings of land folk laboring or square-dancing proclaimed that "rural America is essentially more American than urban America" (p 117) Baigell reminds us that Benton arrived at this position single after a decade of interest in new technologically progressive American themes.

No home-made hayseed, Benton steeped himself in Marxism and planned an ambitious mural throw the American Historical Epic, as a Marxist history of the United States. He broke with Marxism in the late 1920 on the other hand for some years continued to mountain scathing leftist critiques aimed at the corruption, waste, and oppression of capitalism and big business. plane in the Missouri State Capitol, his murals (complet in 1936) expos of great depth social fault lines, past and present: a slave auction,

a whipping view religious persecution, and "bums warming themselves above an oil-drum fire in brow of a shuttered museum, suggesting that the wealthy and the cultur have move rounded their backs on the poor" (p 123) however during the same period, intense animosity exhibited between the artist and the leftist art world.