A hundred pages shorter than André Malraux's "Voices of Silence," which surveyed art from its first traces in caves up to the present as of 1953, and a hundred pages longer than Robert Hughes's "Shock of the New," which in 1981 took on modern art from Cézanne to Pop, Op, Happenings and Earthworks, Jed Perl's "New Art City" claims on its dust jacket to cover only "Manhattan at midcentury." This is not a coffee-table art book; its illustrations, though numerous, are small, and black-and-white. A dense text rules the textbook-sized pages - 557 of them, not counting notes, acknowledgments and index. Can there be that much to say about so concentrated a space and span of time? Have no fear: Perl, the art critic for The New Republic, is a fiercely fluent word-spinner, and he comes laden with a staggering knowledge of American artists and their critics from, say, 1948, when Willem de Kooning had his first one-man show and Jackson Pollock began to drip in earnest, down to 1982, when Donald Judd began to colonize the flat wilderness of Marfa, Tex., with 100 same-sized aluminum boxes.
By Jed Perl.
Illustrated. 641 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
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The book could have been called "Abstract Expressionism and Its Aftermath," except that the Abstract Expressionists themselves are given relatively curt treatment, as if the author doesn't dare look at the sun too long. Perl devotes the bulk of his philosophically intricate and aesthetically subtle considerations to the second-generation "colonizers rather than explorers" (in B. H. Friedman's paraphrase of W. H. Auden) whose fate it was "to live in an Age of Silver, or maybe of Lead." This book's roll call tends to proceed two by two; it opens with de Kooning and Hans Hofmann, a pair of mature immigrants with an Old World passion for brushed paint, and ends with Fairfield Porter and Donald Judd, an unlikely duo of Silver Age "empiricists" - that is, in Perl's terms, practitioners more concerned with the reality before them than with any romantic role in the historical progression of art styles.
The thesis of the book, to be blunt about it, is that art in Manhattan passed in midcentury and beyond from the nighttime creations of existential, heroic, romantic, art-history-minded revolutionaries hardened in the 30's to the daytime works of empirical, eclectic, unheroic, relatively theory-free individualists who had ripened in the shadow of the action-painting giants. These giants are evoked here and there in the book - Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman toward the end - and not always in worshipful terms. Pollock, Perl tells us, "was an artist with a fine-tuned, rather small lyric gift" graced by a big support system and a ton of publicity; by the end of the 40's "the technique of dripping or flinging the paint, which Pollock originally borrowed from the Surrealists . . . soon became repetitive, a maze of lines that lock up the canvas all too efficiently." Concerning another paint-flinging giant, Franz Kline, Perl admires his famous personal charm and the "buoyant, open-ended, angst-less void" expressed by his whites but complains that "Kline's swaggering black-and-white abstractions can have a perfunctory look - they suggest a too easily existentialized romanticism." Perl's least qualified and most strenuous praise is for such relatively undersung achievements as Joan Mitchell's scrubbily brushed abstractions, Nell Blaine's nearly naïve still lifes, Leland Bell's heavily simplified nudes and the obscure Earl Kerkam's worried, often incomplete nudes and self-portraits, expressing "a quieter kind of yearning" as opposed to de Kooning's "gonzo, exhibitionistic romanticism."
Well, in our anarchic post-Silver age, we are all free to like what we like, and patience with the lesser lights is what an art critic is paid for. Perl's long trek through the Silver Age galleries, however, is a wearying one. His pace enthusiastically picks up with such distinctive artists as David Smith, Joseph Cornell, Alex Katz and the abstract, pre-cartoon-brut Philip Guston, but our overall impression of being buried in an avalanche of reworked art reviews is reinforced by the inclusion of more and more quotation of other critics, at greatest length Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Perl prefers the more doctrinaire Greenberg. He accuses Rosenberg of seeming to be "riffing on Greenberg's ideas, giving his formalist sense of tradition an existentialist zing" and of composing an essay that is "all glittering bits - a hot-air construction."
