Hisrq o/European Ideas, Vol. II. pp 481-491. 1989 Printed in Great Britam

0191~6599/89 $3.00 + 0 00 0 1990 Pergamon Press plc

THE ATTACK ON VALUE IN 20TH CENTURY ART

ROBERT E#OYERS*

In the Victorian era a whole variety of cultural critics launched debates which continue to resonate in our time. Responding to conditions which have not improved in the last hundred years, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold sought to defend high culture from the predatory types to whom he assigned the epithet ‘Philistine’. The so-called ‘barbarian’ aristocrats he described more mildly as ‘children of the established fact’ who could respond only to art and ideas that were soothingly familiar. The emergent and increasingly numerous middle-class of bourgeois philistines he described as ‘stiff-necked’ in their resistance to anything that had pretensions to being really serious or demanding. In fact, Arnold’s criticism is chiefly directed not at the idle rich or at the poor and uneducated but at the middle-class, who had opportunities and advantages but in effect wasted them. Writing in Culture and Anarchy in 1867, Arnold wondered why it should have been so hard for the philistines to accept that certain things were better than others, that it was possible to erect standards by which to evaluate quality in art and in experience generally.

Arnold had good reason to believe that the middle classes of his day had no use for serious art, and that they regarded with contempt persons who dedicated themselves to producing first-rate paintings and poems. But those of us who grant much of what Arnold says are generally reluctant to accept his definition of culture as the ‘study of perfection’. Like other ideas, ‘perfection’ in our time is thought to have more to do with the eye of the beholder than with the intrinsic virtues of a particular painting or poem. Maybe-so we have been taught to feel-the resistance to any idea of a best painting, or a best poem or play or sculpture, is a healthy resistance. Maybe the contempt Arnold had for people who read ‘crap’ instead of Jane Austen, who responded more warmly to commercial illustrations than to the paintings of Turner, was no more than an expression of Arnold’s elitism. Maybe the fuss and bother about masterpieces was only the effort of certain people-like Arnold-to make themselves feel important at the expense of others.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Though the museums in New York and Boston and Paris and London are packed with middle-class culture vultures determined to soak up masterpieces, there is a strong sentiment on behalf of the new, the raw, the uncooked, the defiantly imperfect and even unworthy, which dominates the scene today. Arnold’s Philistine no longer exists in the way Arnold described him. Today, Arnold would direct his criticism not at a newly affluent person with no patience for serious art but at a reasonably well educated person who has been conditioned to deny that there are masterpieces or that it is

*Department of English, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, U.S.A. 481

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worthwhile to discriminate between one painting and another by invoking exalted standards. Such a person might well be able to rattle off the names of dozens of famous painters and demonstrate an acquaintance with the permanent holdings of the Met, the Tate, the Louvre and the Uffizi. But that acquaintance would not inspire any special reverence for the ideal of perfection in general or for the ravishing merits of particular paintings. The successor to Arnold’s Philistine would be stiff-necked in a new way, resistant not to the necessity of looking and learning but to the idea that it is spiritually and intellectually beneficial to make distinctions expressed in the vocabulary of value. Arnold today would direct his attack at those who feel they are too sophisticated to discriminate by using terms like ‘flawed’, ‘ easy’, ‘glib’ or ‘pandering’. It’s okay today to like one thing more than another, but it’s not okay to believe you’re right to like it, or to feel that your preferring Julian Schnabel, say, to Lucian Freud or Anselm Kiefer is somehow a sign of an essential vulgarity or deficiency in you. Arnold often stressed the importance of a conscience in intellectual and aesthetic matters, so that a person might actually feel ashamed of responding to something unworthy. Today, anyone who felt ashamed that way would be a candidate for therapy, and would promptly find a therapist who’d tell him to abandon guilt and love himself for liking whatever he liked.

Of course any question of value is always bound to be fraught with difficulty. Even an old-fashioned, unrepentant Arnoldian knows it can be hard to get someone to share your premises. But you face another kind of dilemma entirely when you confront someone who tells you that standards are a screen or cover by means of which a dominant class attempts to control the market or set the terms of cultural debate. Why has Rembrandt for long been considered a great painter? Ignorant souls may have thought his reputation had something to do with various kinds of technical mastery combined with the painter’s mysterious capacity to individualise his subjects, to make them breathe their own air, assume their own space, even think their own idiosyncratic thoughts. Not so, we are lately instructed by an eminent art historian named Svetlana Alpers, herself a distinguished specimen of the contemporary type Arnold would mistrust. In a book entitled Rembrandt’s Enterprise, MS Alpers tells us that what we had been foolish enough to regard as the unique individual presence achieved by Rembrandt’s subjects was nothing special after all. It was just another marketable effect, ‘the individuality “effect” ‘, as MS Alpers calls it. Rembrandt was thus not a great painter with an extraordinary vision. He was a salesman, like everyone else, and what he was selling just happened to be a product-‘the

individuality “effect” ‘- which would-be bourgeois individualists have especially coveted for more than three hundred years. Rembrandt may have been more skillful in achieving the desired effect than others who aimed at it, but to think of his paintings themselves as therefore entitled to special esteem is ridiculous. To use those paintings as standards by which to judge other works would be to fall for the ideas of beauty, mysterious sufficiency, and visionary intensity which may no longer be permitted to tempt us.

The problems we confront when we talk about value today are, then, different from the problems with which earlier generations have grappled. The English writer John Ruskin in 1843 made a case for the painter J.M.W. Turner which shocked some of their contemporaries, and there is no doubt that Ruskin’s attack

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on traditional conceptions of artistic value has had far-reaching consequences. But it’s hard to draw a straight line from Ruskin to Svetlana Alpers or, indeed, to many young painters on the scene today. Ruskin argued that artistic rank could not be established by judging the quantity of errors or faults in a painting. It was no more reasonable to condemn a landscape by Claude Lorrain because of obvious errors in the handling of perspective than to condemn the poems of Shakespeare because he couldn’t spell. When it came to the late paintings of Turner it was necessary not only to forgive obvious errors but to perceive ‘a beauty in the failure which none are able to equal’. To appreciate the ‘perfection’ of Turner was, for Ruskin, to abandon narrow ideas of value and accomplishment. The obvious failings in late Turner paintings were to be regarded as signs of ‘impatience and passion’ belonging to a supreme artist ‘who feels too much, and knows too much, and has too little time to say it in’. One could not excuse slovenliness in paintings generally, or make a general virtue out of impatience or uncontrollable feeling. But one could work to see what was fine and special in a particular case, and then conclude that the flaws in this case were somehow inextricably bound up with the achievement. The perfection of Turner was to be seen in his sense of priorities. The value one attributed to his late paintings had everything to do with his vision and his intensity and his determination to express the inexpressible. A sense of value more focussed on the niceties of ordinary execution would be unable to make a case for a great painter like Turner.

In our own century the most innovative and radical assault on the idea of aesthetic value was launched by Marcel Duchamp. This assault was made possible by Duchamp’s invention of the work of art as ‘a machine for producing meanings’, quite as Octavia Paz has described it. So persistent was Duchamp in his effort that he entirely redirected attention away from the art object as the sensuous embodiment of values and towards the object as a critical idea. Think,

for example, of a Duchamp ready-made. By presenting anonymous objects as works of art, Duchamp initiated the critique of aesthetic value which remains so important a part of the art scene today. Duchamp did not want his urinals or bottle racks to be appreciated for their charm or grace or symmetry. He wanted his objects to make a statement, to demonstrate that anything could be made to seem acceptable if it became familiar, and that modern art could be useful only if it refused to appeal to values or to constitute a value in itself. The ready-mades were to be seen as critical gestures, expressions of an ironic disdain for ordinary aesthetic values and for the refinements of sophisticated taste. They were to signify the artist’s freedom from all conventions of value, craftsmanship and inspiration.

Such a project obviously represents a considerable development beyond anything to be found in Ruskin. Duchamp in effect argues not only that craftsmanship and technique have nothing to do with value, but that value itself-especially aesthetic value- is nothing more than an empty convention. His works refuse to be wonderful or unique or valuable in themselves, and so insist that their viewers reconsider what art is. If art is not a tradition of intrinsically valuable objects, what is it? That is the question Duchamp implicitly proposes again and again. Denying ordinary aesthetic ends, he denies the prospect of any satisfactory incarnation of an emotion or an idea. The project is

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visionary in detaching us from relation with ordinary works of art that celebrate themselves and the acts of creative imagination that bring them into being. The only quality valued by Duchamp is the ability to say no, the idea of a criticism which mocks everything to which value had previously been assigned.

However one feels about Duchamp or about the capacity of his objects to express his purposes, there is no doubt that he had a tremendous impact on the course of twentieth century art. But what has followed in his wake has neither the freshness nor the authority nor the lofty purpose that was so much a part of Duchamp’s irony. The contemporary art world especially has wanted to adopt Duchamp’s irony about values and, at the same time, to market it, to make criticism itself into a commodity. Where Duchamp refused to play the market game, refused to create a succession of ‘valuable’ objects, contemporary artists have thought they could adopt a superior, knowing, coolly Duchampian stance while continuing to flood the market with ironically self-deflating objects. Duchamp had the courage of his convictions. Many successful artists of the last thirty years have neither conviction nor courage nor originality. They say no to value in art and thus to art itself only because they think they will thereby turn the heads of gallery owners and publicity agents. Their work criticises nothing, since they take nothing seriously to begin with and know their audience too well to suppose they are more serious about aesthetic values than the artists themselves. An art world which for three quarters of a century has trashed artistic values cannot expect its latest wunderkind to be regarded as a brave and invigorating force simply because he or she is performing yet another variant of the tired deflationary routine. People who don’t give a damn about art or value ought to sell stocks or open a boutique. The resulting clarification would be useful for them and also for the serious artists who continue to feel they have work to do.

In the wake of Duchamp’s revaluation of values and the rush of many artists to climb aboard the avant-gardist bandwagon, most artists and critics were knocked off their feet. Of those who kept their balance the most influential was the critic Clement Greenberg. It is not surprising that for many years he has been viciously attacked as an authoritarian figure with an inflexible view of the arts. In the current art scene anyone bold enough to discriminate between the false and the authentic, to make value judgments and to support them by referring to aesthetic standards is bound to seem an authoritarian ‘generalissimo’, as one critic put it. To make matters worse, Greenberg has had the audacity to claim that there is such a thing as educated taste, and that people who have it are more likely to make reasonable judgments than people who don’t.

Greenberg’s aesthetics have been widely debated, and I want here only briefly to stress a dimension of his thought. Greenberg kept his balance and remained a living force because he stood for something-not one single, narrow thing, but a view flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of artworks while decisively rejecting others. Those artists who were rejected often accused him ofpromoting a particular kind of art, and saw in his refusal to encourage Jasper Johns or Frank Stella an unmistakable blindness. Now I happen to believe that Greenberg was largely right about Johns and Stella and others whose allure he resisted, but Greenberg’s opinions are not nearly so important as the fact that he always made clear the ground of his judgment and in so doing formulated aesthetic values which others could take up, repudiate or adjust. Greenberg took art seriously

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and always insisted that to do so it was necessary to think about values. No one could think that exactly the same values informed his appreciative responses to Piet Mondrian, on the one hand, or Jackson Pollock, on the other, or that he valued Paul Klee exactly in the way he valued Willem de Kooning. To read Greenberg is to read someone for whom art matters and for whom failure in art also matters. In the contemporary art scene this is no small thing.

But what precisely are some of the values formulated by Greenberg? Sometimes they are familiar in the sense that we associate them with earlier approaches to art. So Greenberg can speak of a painting by Barnet Newman as keeping ‘within the tacit and evolving limits of the western tradition of painting’, suggesting that Newman’s value for US has much to do with his sense of the tradition. In a discussion of Matisse Greenberg can invoke qualities like ‘simplification, broadness, directness’, going on in other essays to apply these values to a very different painter like Renoir who, viewed in this way, will inevitably seem too picturesque, too concerned with worked-up effects. The point to be stressed here is the combination of firmness and tact with which Greenberg applies and defends his values. Matisse is not to be used as a bludgeon with which to beat Renoir, whose paintings are rightly said to put us in mind of other values which may cause us to subordinate the values we approved as we came to appreciate Matisse.

Somewhat more elusive to explain is the value system operating in Greenberg’s treatment of Georges Roualt, an artist of whom he fundamentally disapproves. Why? Because the work is essentially dishonest. The judgment, mounted in explicitly aesthetic terms, has an obvious moral component. A typical painting by Roualt, says Greenberg, ought to inspire ‘distaste*, quite in the way that I feel distaste when I see someone pretending to be a cool Duchampian ironist when I know he’s only trying to make a cool, dishonest buck. Greenberg indicts Roualt’s dishonesty by considering the work itself, not by speculating vaguely about motives. To follow his argument we need only look at a characteristic painting like The Old King. We see a figure in profile, rather blocklike in its solidity, and we register the fact that, despite its several luminous colors, the painting achieves rather remarkable pictorial unity. This we readily attribute to Roualt’s method of compartmenting his colors, encasing his shapes in heavy black borders which are clearly intended to call to mind Gothic stained glass windows. The viewer may not care to read in the old king’s face the ‘mood of resignation and inner suffering’ that means so much to textbook writers like H.W. Janson, but we will feel there is a heaviness in the figure which gives the painting an aura, a mood. To come to terms with the painting we must consider the purpose of the mood it creates.

Greenberg seems to say of the mood that it is a function of the ‘artistic personality’ embodied in the work, and that Roualt’s personality should inspire distaste. Consider the obvious intervention of black or brown borders and their calling to mind stained glass windows. Then ask what is the use to which Roualt puts these elements. Greenberg’s connoisseur can be counted upon to know that the ‘interventions.. . offer a safe way of guaranteeing the harmony of other colors’. He should go on to see that Roualt offers himself as an artistic original with a traditionalist religious orientation, while in fact he simply sought and found an easy way of unifying his surface. Roualt, Greenberg argues, only

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‘seemed to be settling the conflict between pattern and illusion in favor of the immediate, sensuous effect of the former’, which is the ‘correct’ choice for a self- respecting modern artist to make. If you live with Roualt’s paintings for a while you will see that ‘the unifying conception.. . remains oriented toward a standard illusion in depth, and the result, for all its ornamental accents, remains essentially conventional’. Thus, Greenberg rejects Roualt because he ‘masks a conventional sensibility behind modernist effects’.

Now I think that a defense of the painter can be mounted in the very terms Greenberg uses to dismiss Roualt, but I must also believe that Greenberg opens up the work in an extraordinarily helpful way. By introducing us to values generated by his encounter with the work, Greenberg demonstrates how art can inform us and help us to think about the difference between what is genuine and what is not. To continue to think highly of Roualt after reading Greenberg is to struggle to meet the critic’s objections and to take Roualt seriously in a degree that would have been harder before. Working with values associated with terms like ‘unifying conception’, ‘pattern and illusion , ’ ‘conventional’, and ‘modernist effects’, Greenberg shows us one important way of making art consequential.

If I have not already indicated the final purpose of my remarks on the subject of value, let me come to the point without further ado. I contend that the visual arts are at present in a state of unhealthy turmoil which far exceeds in gravity the condition of the other arts. I contend that the attack on value which is general in our culture has gravely affected not only the production of painting and sculpture but the entire climate in which works are received, appraised and institutionalised. The result is an art scene in which virtually anything can come to seem important for a month or a year, and in which the premium put on novelty, no matter how meretricious, has displaced every other aesthetic value. Why this should matter is apparent the moment you consider that the present climate cheapens everything and ensures that certain kinds of art, often the most rigorous and demanding, may not be attended to-and precisely because it is rigorous and demanding.

Consider the case of the English painter Lucian Freud, who has suddenly become an artist of some reputation. Is Freud’s reputation based on a spate of new paintings which have decisively altered the direction he has been taking for many years? Not at all. In fact, Freud is today receiving recognition for paintings exhibited and politely reviewed over the course of forty years. For most of those years Freud’s reputation as a portrait painter, albeit a rather unorthodox one, virtually ensured that he not be taken seriously by the mainstream critics championing the tradition of the new or by the legion of artists whoring after false gods. Freud’s emergence today represents nothing in the way of a general improvement in the art scene. It simply reflects a new set of ephemeral circumstances in terms of which it is at least briefly possible to suppose that an artist making portraits may be curiously or quaintly interesting-not for long, but for a season or two. Nothing in Freud’s work may be permitted even for a moment to call into question the assumptions governing post-modern art. Nothing in the way of value may be attributed to a body of paintings which belong to the illusionistic dark ages when ‘ignorant’ artists believed that paintings might be made by looking, perceiving, evoking as well as by constructing and inventing.

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Freud’s paintings, after all, move even the marginally sympathetic viewer to think about their subject, about the relation between sitter and painter, about the psychology of domination and exploitation inherent in the domain of portraiture. At the moment, one can raise such issues without seeming to be unduly literary or academic, where twenty years ago one was sure to be laughed out of most studios if one dared to move in that direction. But as to value? Freud’s paintings may seem valuable to a few venerable English critics like John Russell and Lawrence Gowing, but in the main, if he is accorded extended attention in the American scene, that attention will be pitched quite as if its object were a fashionable piece of trivia -a photograph by Cindy Sherman, perhaps, or a box construction by Donald Judd. In today’s scene, there is no chance that most self-respecting artists or critics will want to take seriously a Freud painting in the way such a painting demands. HOW many will accept as a criterion of value, for example, Freud’s determination to use to maximal advantage every inch of his canvas, or his determination to deprive his subjects of the pretensions and disguises of their social existence, or ‘his determination to eliminate any self- esteem from the way he looks at himself’ in the great self portraits?

At its most modest, unassuming, gentle, the contemporary scene offers us as alternative the box constructions of Donald Judd. An art of elementary ideas and uncomplicated surfaces, Judd’s work presents itself in such a way as to provoke neither contempt nor resistance. Who can feel contempt towards something so unassuming, so willing to yield to the suggestion that anyone might plausibly do just as well? Who would bother to resist a work so without defensive irony, so perfectly content to be regarded as a merely acceptable item as indifferent to censure as to praise? As Judd’s defenders say, in the contemporary scene, why shouldn’t a metal or plywood crate be regarded as a work of art? And who would want to be so solemnly judgmental as to apply serious standards to something so innocent, so defenceless?

As if in response to the Judds of our period other painters have presumed to make a different claim on us. The best known and by now the most envied and hated of these is Julian Schnabel. Schnabel is of course associated with the recent movement known as Neo-expressionism, a movement said to embrace painters as various as Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino. But Schnabel’s work surely inspires a feeling that exceeds in virulence anything inspired by the others. The critic Suzi Gablik, in her book Has Modernism Failed?, plausibly speculates that it is the intrusion of religious and mythical elements in Schnabel which chiefly irritates his detractors. Are these elements in Schnabel to be taken seriously? ‘Is Neo-expressionism a true renaissance of sacramental vision. . .? Or is it just another demythologising tactic of postmodernism, one more form of eclectic pastiche, that merely recycles old, metaphysically picturesque images into yet another new salable genre ?’ Look at any Schnabel canvas, Gablik recommends, getting past the trademark broken plates or the antlers hanging on the wall. How can you determine whether the religious or mythic elements are genuine? What determines not so much the function as the value to be placed on these clearly central elements, ranging from images of Christ on the cross to heads of monumental statuary? To some it seems that Schnabel does truly aspire to some sort of large statement. The trouble is that the statement is never clarified, the interpretation of symbolic elements remaining always a more or less

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arbitrary business. The work itself, for all its grandiose pretensions, seems not an embodiment of determinate value or content or vision but a gesture seeking approval simply because-as Gablik has it -it is a ‘new aesthetic style’which can temporarily ‘[shift] around parameters in the art world’. To be taken seriously, to constitute either an aesthetic or spiritual value, symbols in art must signify with some precision and they must seem to embody meaning with unmistakable conviction. The fit between signifier and signified must seem a matter of intuitive rightness. When the relationship seems made up, or utterly conventional, or arbitrary, then the work itself seems not to believe that its own elements or intentions are finally consequential. The idea of intrinsic value is thus once again denied, Again one looks at paintings only to feel oneself privy to the drama of a painter whose aim is simply to make waves.

A far more satisfactory instance of the sort of thing Americans have hoped to find in Schnabel is the work of the German painter Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer is a sometimes theatrically brash artist who has a subject, an identifiable point of view, and a visionary ambition which together make Schnabel seem puerile by comparison. One knows that value is everywhere invoked in a Kiefer painting because it consistently encourages us to measure its reach against its achievement, its vision against the means employed to articulate it. A Kiefer painting works or it doesn’t work, and the stakes involved are always considerable, the goals assigned each painting always those of an artist who takes seriously his ideas and his art. When Kiefer fails, he fails because he has not found a way to objectify his response to his subject. But he has, even in failure, a sense of the magnitude of his vocation which is exemplary in the current scene.

There is fascination for the viewer in the enormous scale of many of Kiefer’s paintings and in his use of paint in a way that may call to mind Jackson Pollock. But Kiefer often incorporates into his surface straw, lead, shellac, photographic negatives and other alien materials which may surprise or disconcert. Ultimately, of course, one is interested here not just in the medium as medium but in the expressive range of the medium. Kiefer’s subject is nothing less than German identity in the wake ofthe holocaust. Drawing upon literature, myth, official and unofficial history, Kiefer dredges up the most painful aspects ofthe German past and thereby seeks to reopen wounds which many would prefer to leave alone. Not Germanness alone is Kiefer’s subject, but the understanding of what Germans share with others and what is uniquely and indivisibly German.

In the 1983 painting Sulumith, for example, Kiefer gives us a mixed media composition, part woodcut, part photographic emulsion, part straw and shellac. The work depicts the interior of a cavernous funeral hall envisaged by the Nazis as a resting place for German soldiers. The name Sulamith, actually inscribed in the painted surface, refers to the Jewish woman in a poem by the poet Paul Celan who survived the death camps and whose language informs a number of Kiefer’s works. The Sulamith painting clearly means to identify the destroyed Jewish community with those who destroyed it and, in so doing, destroyed themselves. One critic claims that Kiefer’s ‘funeral hall becomes a monument to the irreparable loss of the Jewish contribution to German history’, and whether or not this does fully come through in the painting proper, it is clear that Kiefer’s work has intentions that go beyond shallow excitement. The austerely mournful

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element of the work is at least as important to its effect as its size, its impressive handling of receding interior space and its violated texture.

More obviously thematic is the early (1973) painting Resurrexit, with its evocation of what would appear to be the Buchenwald concentration camp, with its autumnally menacing landscape-complete with slithering foreground serpent -and its elevated steps leading at once to heaven and to the crematoria where Jewish bodies were reduced to ash. The handling in this early work is not such as to place it much beyond the reach of other modestly gifted painters, and the illustrational approach to the subject causes US to feel that we aren’t learning or feeling anything here which we haven’t been given elsewhere. The work is consequential in the sense that it clearly takes seriously a particular content, but that is as much as one would claim for the painting.

A more successful work is the 1983 canvas entitled Znnenraum, which the critic Sanford Schwartz rejects as overly ‘illustrational’ just as I have criticised the earlier Resurrexit. Though Schwartz seems to me wrong about the quality of the painting, his description is quite helpful: ‘This essentially black, white and brown painting shows an immense room that has dark, imageless panels on the walls, a gridded floor, and a gridded ceiling. We believe we are in a once grand stateroom that was always forbidding and is seen here in the moment before it will collapse or go up in flames.’ The trouble with the painting, however, at least as Schwartz sees it, ‘is that we register [everything in it] too quickly. We’re too immediately reminded of the chilling and ugly grandeur of fascist architecture; Albert Speer’s Inside The Third Reich has a photograph of the reception hall of Hitler’s Chancellery (which he designed), taken after the hall was destroyed-it was clearly the basis of Kiefer’s painting.’ Now I do not see quite how Schwartz can conclude that we register the effects of the painting too quickly or that we’re too immediately reminded of the ‘chilling and ugly grandeur’. In the first, place the words ‘chilling and ugly’ do not say all there is to say of the impression produced by Kiefer’s image, particularly the pleasing quality of the light suffusing the upper reaches of the image. Neither does the association with fascist architecture exhaust the range of feelings and ideas liberated by the painting as a thematic statement. Schwartz writes as if the painting were immediately reducible to a simple statement, but it isn’t. If Schwartz were more willing to think about the various tensions built into the painting-the tension between theatricality and melancholy, for example, or between the considerable scale of the painting and the disquieting tightness of the perspective -he would perhaps be less ready to reduce it to an illustrative content.

In any case, nothing Schwartz says about Znnenraum challenges the contention that there is value in Kiefer’s painting, that like other genuine works of art it is about value and itself an embodiment of aesthetic values. If Kiefer’s work sometimes seems grandiloquent, it is never less than a thoughtful man’s effort to come to terms with ideas and feelings. In no sense can it be taken for an expression of the current art market.

But there are problems associated with Kiefer which, in closing, we should confront. If Kiefer is in some ways an exemplary painter, an artist of great originality and vaulting ambition, he is at the same time not the only kind of painter worth attending to. There is a danger that, in recoiling from the sleazy

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consumerist artifacts glutting the market, we’ll have no patience for anything less exciting, less provocative than the all-out bravura effects generated by a driven figure like Kiefer. Consider, again, what Sanford Schwartz also says of Kiefer’s landscape paintings: ‘In their presentation of a gashed and violated earth, those primarily black and rust brown pictures had a poetic and psychological depth that no recent American landscape painting could match.(They made you wonder why American landscapists have been meek and blandly lyrical and impersonal for so long.)’ In other words, Kiefer makes it even harder than it has been for some years to take seriously a kind of painting which in particular instances may be very good indeed. Is it not hard to summon enthusiasm about a Morandi still life when you’ve come fresh from an encounter with Picasso’s Guernica or with one of Boccioni’s lurid effusions? Even a very accomplished and moving American landscape painter may seem somehow ‘meek and blandly lyrical’ to a viewer who wants to believe that only a major and audacious ambition can turn things around in the contemporary art scene.

Though it is now possible for respectable galleries to exhibit landscape paintings, there is little willingness on the part of critics or artists to think about these paintings outside the terms taken over from Abstract Expressionism, colorfield painting and Duchampian avant gardism. Though, here and there, you hear a spokesman talking about ‘the themes of the spiritual landscape and human emotional drama’ that intrigued earlier landscape painters, in the main such ideas seem so remote from our world that few sophisticated viewers can take them seriously. Impatient with the very idea that paintings might really express a feeling for landscape or an infatuation with nature as a source of spiritual renewal, most observers regard such paintings as ‘simple pictorial strategies’, interesting if at all for the way they create ‘tensions between flatness and space’ or ‘[manipulate] color for purely optical effect.12 Even the landscape artists themselves are loath to assign even modest spiritual ambition or consequence to their work. Rather, they are content to be tolerated and marginalised by an art establishment that always has bigger, if not better, fish to fry.

The most metaphysically austere, accomplished and cunning of contemporary landscape painters is Richard Upton, whose recent sequence of 150 Italian landscape paintings will be exhibited for the first time later this year. In their way as seemingly modest and unassuming as Don Judd’s fashionable box constructions, Upton’s paintings challenge us in a way that Judd can never do, challenge us to think about the difference between too much and too little, about the proper tension between representation and abstraction, design and illusion, control and feeling, austerity and plenitude. These are living issues in Upton’s work, and they engage us as we look at each painting. Engaged in this way, we do not relegate to subordinate status the pictorial strategies or the optical effects associated with color variations. But we take on these issues as part of a more total response. The modesty of Upton’s work is not a pose geared to denying value or to pretending that there are no really serious questions for persons in the know. The diminutive scale of the paintings, along with the relative quiet oftheir surface effect, may not be permitted to obscure the magnitude of the issues with which Upton contends or his demand that the paintings be evaluated as if success or failure mattered. No more than with Morandi or with the late landscape

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paintings of Cezanne can the options weighed in each Upton painting be regarded as safe options. The sense of scruple one feels operating in these paintings, the sense of consequence accorded even to minor details, make us feel that our capacity to respond to Upton, to see what the paintings amount to and what they are worth, says something important about us. And that is what value in art is all about.

Robert Boyers Skidmore College. Saratoga Springs, N. Y.

NOTES

1. See Nicholas Penny on Freud in London Review @‘Books (31 March 1988), pp. 12-13. 2. See Eric Gibson on ‘Dim Horizons’ in The New Criterion (November 1985), pp. 62-66.