American Art : A Quartet of American Artist-Rebels

In America, art and Christmas have this in common: Both raise hopes of personal freedom and peace and--in the same moment--fears that we’ll allow these to be preempted by a power elite, to its profit. The holiday art book excites such feelings even as it soothes them. It is a glossy, consumer thing costing as much as most messiahs and artists may have to spend on a month’s rent. But also, suitably for the season, it is a truce of sorts in the old shoving match between commerce and independent vision.

Four of the big illustrated books offered this year spread a banquet for thought on these themes. They concern, respectively, four prominent artists whose careers span the century and a half in which our country has built its artistic identity. Each one has been self-consciously an American, making his public progress by that national path that leads from obscure rebellion to engagement of important enemies to the captivation of commercial powers. In short, in his time each has been an avant-gardist and then a star.

WHISTLER: A Retrospective (Hugh Lauter Levin Associates/Macmillan: $75; 378 pp.) is the work of Robin Spence, a scholar at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews and co-author of the standard catalogue of James MacNeill Whistler’s paintings published in 1980. This new book will be equally useful to art historians since it is organized around an anthology of mostly contemporaneous writings (some never before published) by and about that “fighter . . . who supported the fight for true art.”

At first glance, this sedate, elegantly designed volume gives no hint of the turmoil attending Whistler’s long London career. Verbally, this volume bristles with irritation, ambition and ideas. Beginning with excerpts from a journal of his family’s visit to Russia in the 1840s where young “Jemmie” first took drawing lessons, and ending with posthumous appreciations by Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender and others, it is an assembly of letters, articles and arguments with literary and cultural as well as art historical, interest.

Whistler had strong literary enthusiasms and was himself, in James Laver’s phrase, “an acrobat of words” whose satire of the art establishment and tongue-lashing of critics helped him “make a success of his own notoriety . . . as a radical outsider.” The book is a pleasure to read, not least for the Proust, Baudelaire, Mallarme and George Moore included. Its plates of etchings, sketches and paintings are less satisfying: The hues in many of the works are subtle; the printing is sometimes muddy; and the aesthetic purpose seems today, ironically, too polite.

THOMAS HART BENTON: An American Original (Alfred A. Knopf: $60; 357 pp.) is the work of Henry Adams, curator of the Thomas Hart Benton retrospective exhibition mounted this year in Los Angeles, New York and Detroit. His book is colloquial in concept and style, and a superb consolation for those who missed the exhibit or stubbornly cherished this painter through decades of neglect by critics and art institutions. Adams writes perceptively about the youth from Missouri who learned delicious wickedness, aesthetic and otherwise, as an art student in Paris. Once back home, he became a leader of the Regionalist School, the most theatrical and gifted of the 1930s muralists and, in time and Harry Truman’s esteem, “the best damned painter in America.” Detractors said that Benton was “a fascist, a communist, a racist and a bigot” and that his work deserved “more laughs than Popeye.” The ingenious structure, powerful use of modeling and scale, and high-colored humanity of the murals and easel paintings handsomely reproduced here are retort enough.

At the height of his fame in the ‘40s, Benton bungled the buy-out he was offered (by Walt Disney and advertising) and went his own way, completing his last mural in 1971 at age 85, in acrylics. This book is rich in personality and insights into Benton’s time as well as his art’s influence and novel techniques.

JACKSON POLLOCK ((Harry N. Abrams: $67.50 until Jan. 1, 1990, $75 thereafter; 272 pp.) is by Ellen G. Landau, a professor of art history who has been studying Pollock (and the painter Lee Krasner, who married him) for at least a decade and has now produced what her publisher calls, doubtless correctly, “the definitive work on this supremely daring latter-day Prometheus.” The characterization reflects Landau’s idea of this artist as a culture hero “who advanced the course of art . . . through his willingness to teeter on the edge of disaster.”

In the 1950s, publicity made Pollock’s pour-and-splatter paintings and laconic but explosive persona the very apotheosis of incomprehensible “modern art” in the eyes of most Americans. Landau gets behind this opaque legend and, in a lively, graceful style, describes the actual man, his work and context in rare detail. Pollock’s Wyoming origins, his likeness to film heroes Marlon Brando and James Dean, his studies under Thomas Hart Benton (a keen teacher), his involvement with Jungian psychology, occultism, Navajo sand painting (which moved him to pour paint onto a horizontal plane, instead of brushing it on a vertical one) and Krasner’s vital role in his success are a few of the issues explored. The book’s illustrations are equally rewarding: a beautiful selection of what Ivan Karp called “sustained paroxysms of passion,” revealing an amazing range of ability and imagery that the legend has eclipsed for too long.

ROBERT LONGO (Los Angeles County Museum of Art/ Rizzoli: $45; 208 pp.) is by Howard N. Fox with essays by Hal Foster, Katherine Dieckmann and Brian Wallis. Fox is the curator of the “midcareer survey” of 36-year-old Longo’s art now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the occasion for this publication. Foster, Dieckmann and Wallis are, respectively, an art critic, a journalist/videoist, and an art editor who have written about or worked with Longo in the past. From opening paeans by the museum’s director and by exhibition sponsor AT&T; to final chronologies that name scores of people the artist has met, dated, played basketball with and involved in his projects, this book emits the steady roar of a well-oiled, big art-world machine.

Longo’s most visible gifts herein are energy, earnestness and a managerial drive not seen since the rise of that other, very different artist-executive, Judy Chicago. He employs many media and throngs of “collaborators,” from foundry workers to professional draftsmen, to execute his big-ticket ideas which, in the book, fall into three principal categories--”drawings and combines,” film and video works, and performances--each with an interpretive essay. A center section of plates illustrates the wall-size “drawings” (worked-up photographs) and the looming public or corporate size installations that exploit some of the traditional techniques and formats of painting and sculpture but eschew sensibility.

Color is muted. Materials include cast bronze, cast aluminum, Durotran, wooden baseball bats, Cor-ten steel, chrome plate, gold leaf and dollar bills. The imagery of these pieces derives from the military/industrial world, and from life as glimpsed in the boardroom, the horror film and the medical insurance literature. The essays by Foster, Dieckmann and Wallis are tortured deconstructivist tracts yielding, however, some insights. In his introduction, the artist’s longtime friend Fox is lucid, sensitive and often interesting on the works’ underlying moral and social intent. “I make art for the public,” Longo has said “. . . work that goes beyond simple private moments.”

Longo is our very latest model of the artist rebel: in the pocket of the commercial and institutional establishment nearly from the start, dependent on its wealth, methods and networks and . . . as fitting one in such a filial position--chastely politic and insidious.