Art’s Critical Eye Unleashes a Wild Beast Lurking Inside

Acritic’s life is a lonely one; his ethics prohibit him from keeping close company with those he criticizes, yet his intellectual being is in their world.

Since their pens can destroy reputations and careers, critics are feared and despised. They are loved only when they praise.

Sometimes the briefest review can be devastating. As Dorothy Parker wrote of a New York play, “ ‘The House Beautiful’ is the play lousy.”

The actor Geoffrey Steyne is remembered only because critic Heywood Broun once described him as “the worst actor on the American stage.” Steyne sued, but the case was dismissed. In his next review, Broun did not mention Steyne until the last sentence, which read: “Mr. Steyne’s performance was not up to his usual standards.”

Critics, in turn, have often felt the scorn of their victims. Most often, they are accused of criticizing what they cannot do. The 17th-Century poet John Dryden wrote:

They who write ill, and they who never durst write,

Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

Though he himself was an astute critic of manners and morals, Mark Twain dismissed criticism as “the most degraded of all trades.”

Nelson Algren called criticism “the avocation of assessing the failures of better men.”

The French wit Tristan Bernard compared critics with “a virgin who wants to teach Don Juan how to make love.” And the mischievous Irish playwright Brendan Behan said: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.”

Today, when paintings of the Impressionist, post-Impressionist and Fauves periods bring many millions of dollars at auction, it is interesting to discover how critics appraised these works earlier in the century.

Roy Fenstermaker of Lakewood has sent me copies of two reviews from the Art World of April and May, 1917. One could hardly hope to find more vivid examples of the vituperative critic’s style.

Oddly, neither of the reviews is signed. The first considers a turbulent landscape by Gauguin, which the critic calls “a degenerate work of art.” He accuses the artist of pursuing an obsession to be different “until the most idiotic singularity is mistaken by him for originality.

“Gauguin was one of these possessed persons,” he goes on. “His life was a continuous movement from mild peculiarity to practical dementia. . . . He was simply stupidly different, intellectually degenerate and artistically vulgar. The reader need only examine carefully this ‘Landscape’ to see how far away from nature the forms were made in order to reach a ‘style’ that should be sufficiently ‘different’ from everything any one else ever dreamt of, to satisfy the egomaniacal hunger of Gauguin for notoriety. . . . “

The critic lets himself off easy by concluding: “We will not dignify this work by making even a superficial analysis of its stupidity.”

Van Gogh’s self-portrait is also called a “degenerate work of art,” perhaps by the same critic. He excuses himself at the outset: “Here we have a work of art which is so self-evidently a degenerate work by a degenerate artist that we need scarcely say anything about the inept creation.”

He does not want to let Van Gogh escape that easily, however: “It is safe to say that if we were to meet in our dreams such a villainous looking jailbird with such a deformed Neanderthal skull, degenerate ears . . . hobo beard and insane glare, it would certainly give us a nightmare.”

Evidently the critics’ opinions of these two paintings were not based on observation of the paintings themselves, but on photographs in “a sumptuously published” book of their work. Oddly, the two reviews appeared in the art magazine in 1917, years after both Van Gogh and Gauguin had exhibited their work in Paris to enthusiastic acclaim, at least by other artists.

The Van Gogh critic charges that the book of photographs is being “hawked about by dealers in ultra-modernistic art for the purpose of showing what these modernistic ‘masters’ are doing to glorify life and art and who call themselves ‘Les Fauves’--’The Wild Beasts!’ ”

While Gauguin and Van Gogh influenced the Fauves (Matisse, Braque, Dufy and others) with their brilliant use of pure color, they did not call themselves Fauves. Both were dead when Fauvism burst on the Paris scene in 1905 and a critic dubbed the painters Les Fauves. (By the way Fauves paintings will be on exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art later this month.)

Degenerate or not, Gauguin’s and Van Gogh’s paintings are now worth millions of dollars. The Getty Museum is said to have paid something more than $50 million for Van Gogh’s “Irises.” Ironically, though he painted hundreds of pictures, Van Gogh sold only one in his lifetime. In despair, he shot himself to death at the age of 37.

Of course there is something degenerate about Van Gogh’s self-portrait. Maybe that’s what makes it a masterpiece.