To the Editors:
The New Criterion’s self-imposed mandate to bring overrated reputations down to size has suddenly sunk a whole flotilla with a single bomb. I am speaking of “Pollock and Company” by Jed Perl (November, 1987).
While not every Abstract Expressionist work deserves a devotional icon rating, Mr. Perl’s wholesale demotion—“I continue to believe that the Abstract Expressionists are each and every one of them overrated . . .”—makes me wonder if the subject could ever have gotten a fair shake by this writer.
Closer to home, I feel that he grossly misrepresents an entire generation of art viewers with the statement, “But for many of us who were children in the Fifties the ugliness and the strangeness of Abstract Expressionism was never to be a part of our experience.” (He is referring to Clement Greenberg’s observation that “all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.”) I cannot lament with Mr. Perl on generational grounds. What is it, precisely, which has so crippled our perception of art from an earlier, only slightly earlier, time? Did we have to be there to really get it?
As someone who was born in 1950 and developed a serious interest in Abstract Expressionism in the early Seventies, I did not find the works so clouded by the perfume of museum certification or compromised by proximity to origin as Mr. Perl. I saw them on my own two feet. I was profoundly impressed and continue to be affected, like