Volume 13, Number 1 · July 10, 1969
Catching Up with the Avant-Garde
By Francis Haskell
Art News Annual, XXXIII "The Academy: Five Centuries of Grandeur and Misery from the Carracci to Mao Tse-Tung"
edited by Thomas B. Hess, edited by John Ashbery
distributed by McGraw-Hill, 176 pp., $6.95
Art News Annual, XXXIV "The Avant-Garde"
edited by Thomas B. Hess, edited by John Ashbery
distributed by McGraw-Hill, 176 pp., $6.95
Art Forum, March 1969 "Manet's Sources—Aspects of His Art, 1859-1865"
by Michael Fried
Art Forum, 51 pp., $2.00
Word and Image: Posters from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Museum of Modern Art
distributed by New York Graphic Society, 160 pp., $15.00
Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the USSR
by John Berger
Pantheon, 192 pp., $1.95 (paper)
There is some fascination to be derived from watching a change in artistic taste, or at any rate an artistic revival, taking place—so to speak—under one's very eyes. Hidden qualities are discovered in pictures hitherto despised or ignored; commercial pressures are applied by the dealers, and speculative buying begins 'as an investment'; a cult that was once 'camp' soon seems to be merely eccentric and then rather dashing; scholarly articles are written because there is nothing new to be said about established favorites; color supplements spread the good news to a wider public. From some combination of these and other factors a new taste develops, and when the great 'machines' from the nineteenth-century Salons are once again displayed in the Louvre and the historians come to write the history of their 'rediscovery,' as we now investigate the revival, of interest in Botticelli or El Greco, they will look back to the last fifteen years or so as being of crucial importance. In one way or another all the books here under review help to throw light on the phenomenon.
Review, 3447 words
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