Jed Perl’s project as an art critic has been reformulated and reiterated over a long period. He currently writes a column on art in The New Republic, and has contributed for many years to such publications as the British magazine Modern Painters, Vogue, and indeed The New Criterion. His new book[1] is not his first collection of his essays in book form, and the very act of gathering together what were originally journalistic pieces implies that in sum they offer something more than a casual, passing commentary on gallery and museum shows.

Perl is deeply sceptical of the art he sees being promoted by the major international art institutions, and he champions certain less acclaimed artists whom he thinks deserve more attention. Their work suffers neglect, he feels, largely because of the prevalent tastes and prejudices of the “official” art world. He posits the existence of an alternative, largely invisible art world where substantial artistic concerns, traditions, researches, and developments are being stoically kept alive in the studios of painters and sculptors. These artists have often the respect of colleagues, and of a few collectors and critics, and sometimes they are supported by smaller museums and university galleries. But they frequently have to content themselves with showing at artist-run cooperative spaces, and the long-term effects of being deprived of a wider audience are demoralizing. They face the “nightmare,” as he puts it, of achieving that hard-won artistic breakthrough in their work, only for it to be greeted with disregard, dismissed as inconsequential.

Hence the “crisis” of Perl’s subtitle. The institutional art machine, including both the powerful public museums and the major commercial galleries, and by implication the critics, collectors, and intellectuals who essentially serve the system, tends to promote a postmodern art that is explicitly ideological and “issue based” (and often politically correct) in content and that trades on technical novelty and fashionability. It favors an instant visual impact which, while it may be theorized about at length, demands little time to contemplate and ponder. The very skills required to appreciate, and by implication to create, a work of visual art in the tradition of Chardin, Manet, Picasso, and Mondrian are dying of neglect. Art colleges no longer nurture them, and an accelerated world of consumer media no longer has, in any sense, time for them.

Not all of the present book is spent arguing this case directly. There are sections here on Léger, on Calder and Aalto, on African art, and on the opening of the Getty Museum in California where Perl has no special axe to grind. These are common-sensical and readable musings on Corot and Chardin, and artists such as Balthus, Fairfield Porter, Jean Hélion, Leland Bell, R. B. Kitaj, and Leon Kossoff—all of earlier generations than his current favored names, but offering certain precedents for them. Perl has, essentially, his own version of a now well-recognized “alternative” tradition of modernism of the sort Leland Bell (a major influence on Perl) promoted strenuously during his lifetime. Bell insisted on the importance, alongside accepted heroes such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Mondrian, of Corot, of Derain (who adulated Corot), of Giacometti and Balthus (who adulated Derain), of Vuillard, of Porter (who adulated Vuillard), and of Hélion (who like Derain turned from avant-garde styles to a tradition-aware figuration). The expansive and crystalline still lifes, portraits, and landscapes of Louisa Matthiasdottir, Bell’s wife, and the poetic-prosaic figuration of their daughter Temma Bell, are both celebrated in the present book.

Perl is sometimes criticized for promoting an insular group of artists, identified with a limited number of galleries (among them Salander-O’Reilly, Tibor de Nagy, and the Bowery Gallery), and for being too defensively resistant to the fashionable or new to be able to recognize what might be the equivalents to the Picassos or Cézannes that he so loves from former epochs. He is sometimes seen, in other words, as a partisan conservative. But these criticisms are not really damaging or relevant. The identification and promotion of a fairly cohesive or interrelated group of artists is one of the valid roles of a critic, and the great artists of any era were often a tightly knit group with fiercely partisan promoters. Anyway, Perl’s favored figures are varied enough, stylistically, within the media of painting and sculpture. He is careful, as well, not to be too unequivocal in his approbations and dismissals. So he will confess that certain Kossoff portraits seem clogged and closed down technically and certain cityscapes merely wobbly rather than pulsating with energy, though he clearly rates the painter highly. He distinguishes Temma Bell’s landscapes, which he considers artistically highly informed yet individual, from those of another “traditionalist” practitioner, Stuart Shils, which he might have been expected to support, but which he feels are formulaic. Likewise he will admit that Alex Katz’s paintings can have wit and panache, even though ultimately Perl thinks his paintings amount to little more than “ingeniously personalized wall decor.” He takes seriously Bill Jensen’s paintings and Jeff Wall’s staged light-box photographs, thus demonstrating that he is not drawn only to art that lacks “official” sanction. And in pieces in the book on Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, on Nan Goldin’s ciberchromes of daily life in the age of AIDS, and Bruce Nauman’s disturbing videos, Perl also allows himself to entertain the possibilities of their work, before finally finding it symptomatic of the main malaise. That malaise is characterized by an ironic detachment from the notion of an expressive brushstroke building to an organically composed, complex whole, and a preference for the quick and literal shock or thrill of emotive images, ripe for critics to transform, through theoretical interpretation, into art.

Rather than wishing for a greater display of open-mindedness and breadth of interest in this book, one might in fact wish for an even greater focus on the painting and sculpture of which Perl really approves. His attempt to show that he is in principle open to video and performance (he recently claimed to find merit in the work of the British Goldsmith-generation video artist Sam Taylor-Wood) usually ends up with a predictable reassertion of his preference for his own roster of names—for Trevor Winkfield’s schematic quasi-allegories, Gabriel Laderman’s elaborate figure compositions, Barbara Goodstein’s plaster reliefs of figures and landscapes on plywood panels, Stanley Lewis’s Giacomettiesque studio interiors. However accurate Perl’s indictments of mainstream art-world machinations and mores, the continual setting of his approved artists against the hyped trends and stars of the international scene, and the arguing of their case as victims of institutionalized prejudice and neglect, ultimately does them no favors. Even if true, it ends up sounding unlikely, and a little like special pleading. Also, the book seems caught at the level of polemic, with too little space left for celebrating its true heroes. It is at times as if the attack on the avant-garde establishment is of more real interest than the supposedly better works that are excluded from establishment taste.

What is required, surely, is a non-defensive, non-combative argument for the virtues of the contemporary artists Perl admires, in terms of the slow critical reading which he demonstrates well in the discussion of a single painting by Chardin towards the end of the book. Yes, there are a few paragraphs here on a landscape by Temma Bell, on studio paintings by Winkfield and Stanley Lewis, on some work of Jensen and Joan Snyder. These are the better moments in the book, but they do not go nearly far enough in trying to draw the reader into an appreciation of those works’ virtues. If the skills of close, considered contemplation of paintings have been lost, then we need to be re-initiated into them by the critic. If works such as these are unfashionable, then the critic will need to argue compellingly for their relevance and urgency, case by case, picture by picture, passage by passage. If such examination of works is difficult in the confines of art journalism, there would have been nothing to stop Perl rewriting these pieces, upping the critical engagement (and perhaps cutting some of the more facile journalistic swipes at the opposition) for the more lasting format of a book.

Many readers who share some of Perl’s enthusiasms for earlier painters like Hélion, Derain, Balthus, or Matthiasdottir will be perfectly ready to be persuaded of pleasures and complexities that might be eluding them in Goodstein or Lewis or Winkfield. But there is not enough in this book to win such readers over. Nor is it simply greater detail and specificity that is required in the description of the work. Perl needs to make comparisons with related paintings. To make a compelling argument for an artist’s value, one which leaves the reader convinced by, or at least respectful of, the critic’s considered opinion, it is important to imagine what the reasonable objections to the work in hand are likely to be, and then to try to demonstrate why they do not pertain here, as they might to seemingly similar work. One has to envisage the best possible case against one’s subject, and defend against that case. Perl briefly affirms Winkfield over the superficially similar and more widely celebrated painter Larri Pittman, but we need an image from both, and a talking-through of why Winkfield is not only more involving and sustaining, and more resistant to easy postmodern relativism than Pittman (and why that is a good thing), but also why it would be wrong to read Winkfield as whimsical or fussy, his technique bland, his mix of abstraction and figuration overfamiliar from Stuart Davis or Gerald Murphy. It would be helpful along the way to know how Perl compares Winkfield to other painters of similar technique such as Adami, or Patrick Caulfield, or the British sub-pop artist Douggie Fields.

The place for in-depth defense of artists is finally perhaps the monograph, and just as this review goes to press there has appeared a handsome volume devoted to Louisa Matthiasdottir, edited and authored in part by Perl.[2] Here at last the author of Eyewitness, who recently protested at a public interview that his motive for writing was a love of art, not controversy, may have the forum to spell out lovingly the visually embodied meanings of this painter’s work, pull viewers into the thrilling logic of her painterly performances and demonstrate why the experience of her work is vital, contemporary, and one of expansive artistic consciousness and intelligence. Worryingly though, on his first page, he laments that this artist whose work he considers a “defining achievement of postwar American art” is not in any major New York museums due to  

the sorry state of the contemporary art establishment in the United States, which is dominated by people who have been running after overpriced cheap thrills for so long that they can’t recognize the real thing, even when it’s staring them in the face.

However true that may be, it seems a wrong note on which to begin a much-needed first monograph on a painter, just as it seems a wrong note in Eyewitness when Perl says that Matthiasdottir

may be misunderstood as cautiously conventional. But if you tune into what Matthiasdottir is doing, you may end up thinking that if this isn’t part of the mainstream, then the mainstream can go to hell.

Perl knows that the “real thing” never in fact stares us self-evidently in the face. It always requires critical explication and its very value is to some extent actively constituted through that critical explication. That is not to imply (as may some postmodern theory and some postmodern art supported by it) that meaning and value do not inhere at all in the art object, that they are entirely the products of the commentaries that accompany it. But finally, the critic will best serve the work by giving as full an account as possible of its merits. And such an account, while necessarily drawing the viewer into the artist’s world, will not require total and uncritical immersion in it (letting alternative views of art “go to hell”). Genuinely good works of art will not demand, either, such untriangulated assent. They will signal a consciousness of and a testing of their own limits and conventions. We are some way away, in Eyewitness, from getting such criticism, to persuade us that we are in the presence of such work.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis, by Jed Perl; Basic Books, 384 pages, $35. Go back to the text. Louisa Matthiasdottir, with essays by Jed Perl, Martica Sawin, John Ashbery, and others, was recently published in Iceland. The book will be published in the U.S. in September by Hudson Hills Press (198 pages, $65). Go back to the text.

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