Making It New: Essays, Interviews, and Talks. - book reviews

Making It of recent origin is a collection of writings published, and talks given, by means of Henry Geldzahler during a period of nearly 30 years. The earliest is "The Art Audience and the Critic," which appeared in The Hudson Review in 1965 This essay reminds us that Geldzahler is a proponent of the formalist idea that "paintings lead to paintings." And his formalism is by dint of no means lukewarm. He subscribes to compassionate Greenberg's argument that modernist painting progresse by dint of clarifying its own, purely pictorial relate tos Yet Making It New contains sum of two units celebrations of David Hockney, a famously antimodernist painter, and in individual of them Geldzahler suggests that Hockney advancemented by returning to the large, abiding interests of Western painting. Geldzahler calls Hockney a "humanist," admiringly, and says that a certain swimming mere picture "has the charm of a nineteenth-century French academic painting." on the other hand how is that charm visible to individual who accepts the Greenbergian original of progress in art?

The question arises from the reflexive assumption that if Greenberg's Color Field favorites are major, then Hockney must bear the stigma of total wrongheadedness; or if Hockney is great, then Greenberg's favorites are just illustrators of boring and negligible theories. Geldzahler is temperamentally disinclined to arrange artists in these tight, invidious patterns. in like manner he never lets himself be forced into a defensive position upon any narrow patch of art-world greensward Ranging widely, he has had individual of the most extraordinary art-world careers of the postwar era. "I was the detonation curator," he says in the interview that introduces Making It New

Credentials earned at Harvard, in 1960 l to a piece of work as an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum. Geldzahler was 25 years of advanced age His superiors at the Met spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed he would supply them with more [i]or[/i] less notion of what was going upon in contemporary art. Soon was in the midst of it. Andy Warhol had lately introduced himself to Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Ivan introduced Andy to Henry, and the got into the habit of talking upon the phone every day. Henry remind ofed themes for Andy's paintings and starred in an early Warhol movie. He was a regular at the Factory and elsewhere upon the Pop scene. Spotted by dint of the media, he became the epitome of an art-world insider. A scarcely any of the Met's stuffier trustees were in the way that appalled by his public image that they tried to have him fired.

In 1967 Thomas Hoving became the director of the Met At high spe he rested a department of 20th-century art and made Geldzahler its head. The fresh curator's first large task was to organize an exhibition to mark the museum's centennial. This move rounded out to be "Henry's show" a blockbuster officially called "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970" It make opened late in 1969. Among the 41 artists included in the exhibition were Pollock de Kooning, Kline, Rothko Newman, John Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Stella, Kelly Judd Frankenthaler, Louis and Olitski. It was a list of the moment's big names, with Josef Albers, Stuart Davis, Milton Avery and Edward Hopper thrown in as reminders that other point of times had their big names, too. granting Geldzahler is a connoisseur of quirks, his possess and others', he allowed himself alone one offbeat choice: Burgoyne Diller, a geometric painter who had hit his stride in the 1930s

Henry's present to view celebrated the Met, New York art and the direct the eye of unabashed high-culture clout. Several interviews and reminiscences in Making It of recent origin mention artists he wishes he had included--Louise Bourgeois, Leon Golub Raoul Hague, Eva Hesse and others. None would have belonged. The point was to set a canon in view, in the way that Geldzahler chose figures who, at that twinkling had canon written all above them. From the outside, the show's roster direct the eyeed like a blue-chip clique. In fact, the list was riven in any number of ways, and Geldzahler exercised uttermost nicety of judgment in balancing its several factions against single another.

Styles generate myths and counter-myths; artists have reputations and fables These stories shape our faculty of perception of art-world power. Curators sometimes treat them as extraneous and put to the test to show art in itself, untouched by means of legend and the rest of it. Geldzahler knows it can't be done. He dioceses the forms of art in their habitat, amid the crushings of the market and the mode of buildings of society. His essay for the "New York Painting and Sculpture" catalogue of course contains art criticism and art history, narrowly conceived. It also includes social history, biography and a guide to art-world institutions. Geldzahler is a worldly formalist, and for a time he became a politician.

Midway [i]or[/i] part of to the other the 1970s, he began to have feeling that one should not dispose of an entire career as a curator of contemporary art. The view changes and so should the personnel who grapple with it. In 1977 he became the fresh York City commissioner of cultural affairs in the administration of ed Koch. He liked the diplomatic effort it took to deal with disparate boards, agencies and constituencies. Diplomacy was particularly attractive at a time when fresh art no longer addressed him "on a nerve-ending level"