Selected Art Writings. - Review - book review

culled Art Writings, by James Schuyler edited by means of Simon Pettet, Santa Rosa, Calif., Black Sparrow Pres 1998; 310 pages, $30 woven fabric $17.50 paperback.

I was fairly serviceable friends with Jimmy (no individual who knew him called him James) Schuyler for more [i]or[/i] less 20 years, up until he died of a hit in 1991. Being a friend of Jimmy's meant being party to his many times excoriating wit ("Jimmy, someone just called me an evil elderly bitch!" "My dear, you're not old!") to his numerous frightening nervous breakdowns, to his impossible crushes upon men 30 years his junior and, increasingly toward the extreme point to his simultaneous literary apotheosis and physical decline--in the company of caring friends, colleagues and sycophants--as single of America's rare poetic geniuses.

Schuyler finally won the Pulitzer Prize for his verse in 1981. But he was also, until his later years, an art critic of no mean gifts. He came to prominence, after all, in a midcentury of recent origin York that saw the rise--and rule--of Abstract Expressionism, and in which he was able to work for an ARTnews that was at the time the last word, journalistically, upon that same avant-garde.

The magazine's erudite, elegant editor, Thomas Hess, encouraged all sorts of arcane and experimental ruminations from his reviewers. Schuyler for his part, felt that author of poemss had a special calling to art: "New York author of poemss except I suppose the color-blind, are affected greatest in quantity by the floods of paint in whose crashing breakers we all scramble," he wrote at the beginning of a statement in Donald M Allen's landmark 1960 anthology The novel American Poetry.

All the younger poet/reviewers who came down the ARTnews pike a certain quantity of years later--in the '60s, Bill Berkson, Peter Schjeldahl, Carter Ratcliff, myself, the late T Berrigan (who, it is still rumored, was fired for not bothering to diocese a show he reviewed)--knew that author of poemss Jimmy Schuyler, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara [see p 116] had gotten there first, and were now the obliging (or, sometimes, not thus obliging--poets are prickly people) earlier born statesmen of our dual vocation.

on the contrary I, at least, didn't know at the time what a formidable critic Schuyler was, and in what way he had, almost by invert osmosis, infiltrated the art writing of all us jeune arrivistes. Now, at last, we have trial of the potency and pliancy, the wisdom and wile, of Schuyler's criticism in The pick outed Art Writings. The editor, author of poems Simon Pettet, tells us in his roundly readable introduction that the work was judiciously winnowed down from 600 pages to 300--evidence that Schuyler was (for this art critic) an unthinkably peripatetic author who took in his art present to views as if on roller skates.

And what an author! Jimmy wrote about the art of the '50 and '60 (and the '70 and the '80 sometimes for Art in America) from the organ of vision of the storm, as it were, as none previously had and not many then could, or can any more. The range alone is astonishing: from an incandescent, chatty occasional piece like "Alex Katz Paints a Picture" to understated raves for Jackson Pollock to an appreciation of the sublime niceties of painting by dint of Schuyler's mentor and later-in-life protector, Fairfield Porter, to a highly pensive article (for the sadly deceased Craft Horizons) on the high-art weavings of Lenore Tawney. Also included are many, many shorter pieces upon "had-been's," "were-to-be's," "still-are's" and "never-were's" like George McNeil, Ronald Bladen, the late Joe Brainard (Schuyler's intimate and real talented friend), Seymour Remenick, Felix Pasilis, Mark Rothko Paul Burlin, Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus and many others.

All were welcomed to the high-art banquet. on the other hand it is the quality of the writing, apart from its range, that stimulates greatest in quantity Schuyler wrote poetically, yes, on the contrary not in the sense of "having a sensibility." Instead, he squarely drew on a poet's tools--metaphor, synecdoche, simile, everything short of rhyme and meter--to send for up the work under discussion, to the expansion that the readers sometimes find themselves reading certain determinations even passages, over again as if to commit them, as maxims, to memory. Of Fairfield Porter: "[His] art is single that values the everyday as the ultimate, the greatest in quantity varied and desirable knowledge. What these paintings celebrate is not ever treated as an archetype: they are concentrated instances." upon early Jane Freilicher: "The organ of vision goes over the surface as admitting a distant view had swum forward, its colors thinly condensing, all available. The colors are cartographic, the delicate accuracies that locate the places of the world." About Leland Bell: "[A] breakthrough might be defined [here] as finding what you didn't know you were looking for." It was Schuyler's slightly inscrutable gift to be single of the great art-describers, in line with his friend Fairfield's dictum that "The best criticism is simply the best description."

In aggregate amount Schuyler felt that art criticism should in some way be as good, on its be in possession of verbal merits, as the art work it deals with--as engaging, as intimate or heroic, as splashy or fine, as "readable." A suggestion of this can be rest in his own words: "[T]he reality of a painting does not lie in the nearness or absence of subject on the other hand in conviction." Jimmy was convinced of his opinions; he one time helped others, as he now will again, to trust their convictions. It was a special act of be fond of for which--along with the numbers and the infamous, addictively readable diary--he will without doubt be widely remembered.