The Flow of Art: Essays and Criticisms

ArtForum, March, 1998 by Peter Plagens

The man who did tell thousands of equally disingenuous folks about modern art, and who was arguably the most astute chronicler of the modernism that eventually conquered nearly every precinct of American high culture, hardly looked the part. A tall, balding, bespectacled gentleman with an aristocratic bearing, McBride was fairly conservative in politics and dress, and he wrote (as above) in a fussily conversational style echoed today - albeit with less sympathy for the art of his times and much less humor - by the crustacean critic Hilton Kramer, who added the new foreword for this reissued collection. McBride, for instance, often used the term "motors" for "cars."

On the other hand, McBride wasn't a stuffy academic, just a nice guy who originally came to New York from Pennsylvania to be an artist and didn't make it. He did, however, study under John Ward Stimson, an American admirer of William Blake, which probably gave him some essential understanding of artistic weirdness. And he taught studio classes at the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side (with Abraham Walkowitz and Jacob Epstein among the students who passed his way), which probably gave him some essential understanding of artistic grit, the other leg of modernism. Then, in 1913, when he was already forty-six years old, he fell into the job of art critic at The New York Sun. McBride later recalled: "I was obliged . . . to shift my brow into 'high.' I was . . . made responsible for the activities of about a hundred art galleries. It was then that the calendar speeded up and the whole week melted into a succession of [deadline] Thursdays." (McBride later wrote for the great literary magazine The Dial, edited by the poet Marianne Moore, and Creative Art, where his column was mawkishly called "The Palette Knife." Pieces from all three have been collected in The Flow of Art.) Simply put, McBride wrote and wrote and wrote until he was almost ninety. He died at ninety-five in 1962, after having declined a request to sit for a long, oral-history-ish interview. McBride thought the written record sufficient to give an accurate picture of what he thought and felt about art. It is, and it paints a pleasing portrait.

A few months after McBride took the job at The Sun, the Armory Show descended on New York and planted the seeds of what we in Gotham today mean by the term "the art world." (Unfortunately, The Flow of Art includes nothing by McBride on the Armory Show itself, only its aftermath.) He was quick to go to bat for the avant-garde, whose art he often defended simply by employing a little reasonableness. In 1914, he wrote of a Brancusi sculpture: '"Mlle Pogany's ear is a droll ellipse and may worry beginners in modern art study, but the same individual who will be astonished at such an ear in modern art admires exactly the same sort of art convention in a Chinese jade." In 1928, he pointed out that a Miro painting "looks, at first glance, like the writings upon a cobalt canvas of a particularly lazy Indian. But the laziest Indian never paints a picture without putting himself in communion with the unseen powers, and so it is with Miro." But McBride never swallowed anything whole; he knew you could go overboard in accepting everything the avant-garde threw your way. In 1920, the wealthy Duchampophile Walter Arensberg showed him "Marcel's latest," a strange little glass container. "'It's air from Paris,' said my host, 'hermetically sealed at a particular street comer in that city.'" With a perfect facetious touch (and one that doesn't necessarily peg him a philistine, given the generally lackluster reception of Duchamp in critical circles), McBride added, "I'm not a bourgeois, so I didn't have a fit." And, although he wrote early (for a noninsider) and appreciatively (especially for a guy in his eighties who'd cut his aesthetic teeth on Cezanne) about some of the Abstract Expressionist painters, he didn't buy the entire program. In a nice observation about Pollock (an artist whom, rather presciently, he liked), McBride noted in 1949: Previous works by him which I had seen looked as though the paint had been flung at the canvas from a distance, not all of it making happy landings."

What really worried McBride - and what possibly exceeded his concern about the lack of American public acceptance for aesthetically progressive artists - was the corrosive effect on an artist of deliberately playing to a mass audience. After a withering dismissal of some murals by the reactionary artist/critic Kenyon Cox, McBride philosophized about the public's part in their creation: "I consider that he should not have allowed himself to have been persuaded into the making of the long series of joyless mural paintings, but after all the real blame for this lies upon us, upon you who were smiling just now and upon me, because for years we have been permitting all the Western Senates in the land to acquire them without protest." Seventeen years later, in 1932, McBride turned his attention to Thomas Hart Benton and his particular tactic (the opposite of Cox's moribund academicism), a pandering, pseudofolky vulgarity. "There is no denying the fact that vulgarity is a part of life and even has a necessary place in life," he wrote, "but it is by no means the whole of life. Quite evidently the artist thought, in all this, that he was being broadminded, like the Walt Whitman who accepted everything, who was the poet for 'the foolish as much as the wise,' who was 'stuff'd with the stuff that is course [sic] and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine'; but, alas, in accepting only the vulgarity of life one is far from being broadminded. If Mr. Benton will take another look at the 'Leaves of Grass' he must discover that Whitman balances every ugly thing with a beauty, every ignoble thing with something that is noble; that, in short, he keeps the balance."