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Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. - book reviews

Art Journal, Summer, 1996 by Martica Sawin

What do the following have in common: Rauschenberg on roller skates in his dance piece Pelican, Pollock in his famous stretching crouch, Elizabeth Murray, brush in hand on a paint-spattered stepladder, Christo shouting and gesturing from a rubber raft in Biscayne Bay, and Joseph Beuys drawing on a blackboard while intoning into a microphone? Answer: they are all components of a montage on the dust jacket of Jonathan Fineberg's Art since 1940: Strategies of Being. Remember when one painting, most often Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon or Robert Delaunay's Sun Discs, sufficed for the cover of a book on twentieth-century art? For the later part of the century no mere artwork will do. Instead a cluster of artists in action, taking their cues from Namuth's Pollock, are shown "strategizing being." The jacket, quite properly, is a clue to the strategy of the author, who has conceived his book as a collection of "heroic narratives," which is to say that he focuses on the artist as an individual, rather than on stylistic groupings, theoretical constructs, or judgmental hierarchies.

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I started reading Art since 1940 from the standpoint of a teacher looking for a viable book for use in courses in later twentieth-century art. Having struggled for thirty years to guide students through the frenetic art production of the last half century without benefit of adequate texts and reproductions, I welcomed the clamorous montage on the dust jacket, envisioning an end to illegal photocopies, to arbitrary choices based on available slides and reproductions, and to wrestling with my conscience over personal biases in matters of contemporary art. Fineberg did not disappoint me, as have several earlier, less graceful and less knowledgeable attempts at getting the art of the last fifty years into a manageable volume. Everything one could need for a semester's gallop through the accelerating changes of the past five decades is contained between the covers of this lively book: more than six hundred illustrations, a generous number of them in high quality color; a deft interweaving of ideas and issues with descriptions of the artworks that direct the eye to the adjacent images; salient biographical facts and a sprinkling of anecdotes that help personalize the procession of names; and a breaking up of the survey format through the interspersing of longer sections focusing on key individuals, such as the fourteen pages on Jasper Johns. Best of all, although it is clear that the author is thoroughly conversant with all the influential theories in recent art criticism, his own lucid, readable prose will not pose stumbling blocks for the average undergraduate.

Soon, however, I stopped reading with my mind on the fifteen-week semester, the syllabus, or the various ways of involving students with the book. Instead I became immersed in leafing backwards and forwards through a half-century's art production, clarifying my own imperfect recollections of how things had happened, reading the illuminating sections that treat certain artists in depth, and reliving the years of headlong change reflected in the artworks. I can think of no better way, short of flipping through five hundred issues of Artnews of the 1940s and 1950s and Artforum or Art in America of later decades, and maybe not even then, to more efficiently and compactly review the ambitious, ingenious, irreverent, and sometimes exasperating art of our time.

A dynamic layout, occasional photographs of artists in action, and dramatic juxtapositions keep eye and mind moving and engender a sense of open-endedness quite different from a "this led to that" survey format. Nor is the art treated as hermetic, a progression of styles existing in a vacuum; events in music and dance as well as in the political arena intersect with the artworks in a variety of ways. Although the material is tightly organized under clear topic headings that will facilitate student use of the book, one does not get the sense that a lot of recalcitrant artworks have been crammed into an arbitrary structure for the sake of a textbook format. In short, while it could be helpful to someone reviewing for comprehensive exams, this is a good book for the general art public reaching middle age who would like to see where they've been, as well as for students who need to know how we got where we are.

Fineberg starts out by fitting Courbet into the role of prototype for "a paradigm of the modern artist as someone whose aesthetic runs counter to the normalizing force of tradition" (p. 17). He thus sets the stage for his series of "heroic narratives," playing up the importance of the individual creative act rather than telling his story as a sequence of movements. It is an approach that would have met with the unqualified approval of Harold Rosenberg, who the author acknowledges as "one of the three great teachers of my life" (p. 11). The lack of a compulsion to label and the freedom from "ism-itis" come as an enormous relief in a book destined for the classroom where so often memorizing the right designation is regarded as equivalent to understanding. With Art since 1940 the student directly confronts the artist and the artwork - both come to life in the provocative arrangement of its pages - and learns to handle what the author describes as "the baffling and inconclusive experience of art."

Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. - book reviews

Art Journal, Summer, 1996 by Martica Sawin

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