Volume 25, Number 12 · July 20, 1978
Good Grief!
By Robert Towers
On Moral Fiction
by John Gardner
Basic Books, 214 pp., $8.95
In Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay there is a painter named Casimir Lypiatt much given to denouncing the pusillanimity of modern art. Evoking the passionate titans of the past, seeing himself as a suffering, latter-day Michelangelo surrounded by trifling artists and petty critics, he endlessly proclaims the nobility of his own vision and writes about it at length in a preface to the catalogue of his latest show. The problem, of course, is that Lypiatt is a pathetic figure, a painter of singular ineptitude.
Review, 2255 words
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