Harold Rosenberg The Tradition Of The New Pdf Books

April 30, 1972, Page 6 The New York Times Archives Of all the critical voices raised in protest against vanguard American art, Harold Rosenberg's is at once the most passionate and persuasive. It is by now a commonplace to say that the avant‐garde is dead—in the sense that there are no esthetic risks left in a society that supposedly accepts everything but Rosenberg manages to repeat it in essay after essay, each time more compellingly than the last.

He even manages touch of slapstick humor, rare in art criticism, a field where morbid sobriety is the rule. Here is his favorite jingle: By Harold Rosenberg. New York: Horizon Press. Art movements in decline Produce nouveau design. Heavy‐footed, yes, but there, somewhat defiantly. Once the defender and spokesman of the vanguard in the 1940's and early 1950's, Rosenberg has turned increasingly to the attack.

His early books ('The Tradition of the New,” “Arshile Gorky') were proclamations in behalf of the new art. With “The Anxious Object” he began to turn away from what he saw. Now, in “The De‐definition of Art,” he reaches a peak—or abyss—of defamation. The time we live in, says Rosenberg, is nothing less than “Post‐Art” because there is no one left, least of all the artist or critic, who is able to define “art.” It is a difficult thesis to define in itself and difficult to defend, on literal, step‐by‐step grounds. But Rosenberg's ideas are too thick and knotty, his tone too vehement, for traditional exposition. All of these essays (with one exception) were loosely transferred from The New Yorker, where the complexity of his thinking has been given ample room to unwind. Often he winds back again, rebuking in the last few paragraphs arguments he defends with great vigor elsewhere.

Advertisement This is the intense, athletic view of art for which the early New York school—and Rosenberg, its spokesman—is known. The seductiveness of the Action Esthetic has kept Rosenberg in thrall ever since. He tolerates no alternatives, least of all the cool impersonality maintained by the Pop artists (“I want to be a machine,” Warhol once said; instead of attacking the canvas with a brush, he and his assistants laid silkscreens upon it). This is the quality in Pop that bothers him more than any others. Rosenberg loathes detachment. He adores open, personal commitment—a hangover, no doubt, from his political concerns.

The death of art is a tragedy, he says, for individual fulfillment: “Art is the one vocation that keeps a space open for the individual to realize himself in knowing himself.”. Pop and vanguard art, the enemy of the self, is assailed with masochistic delight. Rosenberg comes most to life when he is detailing the inanities he sees in gallery after gallery. “The post‐art artist carries the dedefinition of art to the point where nothing is left,” he writes. “Instead of painting, he deals in space; instead of dance, poetry, film, he deals in movement; instead of music, he deals in sound.” Robert Morris goads him into excited flights: “His [Morris's] ‘reality’ art has traversed Jasper Johns's ‘thing’ paintings, Minimalist cubes, boxes, Ibeams, antiform arte povera accretions, process art (tree seedlings in a greenhouse at the Museum of Modern Art exhibition), earthworks, events reported on film, and (momentarily) the renunciation of art in favor of political action. Morris is the leading theoretician‐practitioner of an art that could be made by anyone and appreciated through hearsay.” Rosenberg's stance is open to contradiction on several telling counts.

He belabors the Happening movement for social and political indifference but admits that it influenced the street‐peace demonstrators in Paris and Berkeley. He constantly and rightly maintains that art grows out of itself, each artist answering the other in work after work, but criticizes Frank Stella for doing precisely that, in a brilliant little painting entitled “Jasper[Johnsl's Dilemma.” He assails the shifting stylistic dynamism in American art yet admits he prefers it to the ordered calm of Europe.

In one essay he mocks over‐educated artists who approach their work as “problem‐solving” but elsewhere recommends university education over the knownothing professional art school. He attacks the vanguard time and again for failing to speak out clearly against political injustice, then belabors museum directors who‐ do, as though it besmirched their saintly calling. He even charges Pop Art with the one sin it has thus far escaped — turning away from the world (this from the champion of abstraction!). Finally, in a cruel distortion, he links the Russian Constructivists with Stalin, the very man who persecuted and finally destroyed his avant‐garde in behalf of State Realism. There is more than mere esthetic dissuasion here.