Volume 5, Number 4 · September 30, 1965
The Breakup
By Francis Haskell
Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World
by Harrison White, by Cynthia White
John Wiley, 167 pp., $5.50
If one could find a representative art critic of today and then transport him back by time machine to any period before 1800 (the first would probably be more difficult than the second), the chances are that he would generally agree with any well-informed amateur whom he happened to meet about the relative merits of all the leading artists of the period into which he found himself projected. There would be shifts of emphasis, but astonishingly little fundamental disagreement. Put him on the advisory boards which helped to establish any of the great European art academies between 1550 and 1800, and he would vote with the majority. But some time during the nineteenth century this dialogue between the past and the present broke down. It is possible to read books written by highly sensitive and intelligent critics during that century which lavish the most enthusiastic praise on artists whose works (and often whose names) are totally unfamiliar to us. The early neglect of the Impressionists, Van Gogh, and others is now the stuff of popular film biographies.
Review, 1932 words
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