Art: Boost for the Natives

In Europe it has been customary for the art critics of each country to boost native artists. U.S. critics have long declined to do the same, but now they are changing. Sign of the trend: George Braziller Inc. last week published six monographs on U.S. artists, to sell at $3.95 in hard cover and $1.50 in Pocket Book. The low prices were achieved by gambling on large sales and by ordering big first printings—10,000 hard cover, 50,000 paperbacks. The editions are identical inside, carry more than 80 plates each, with 16 in color (drawn partly from the files of TIME). Texts range from excellent on down.

¶ Thomas Eakins, by Fairfield Porter, views the greatest of American masters through a reducing glass, calls him “outside of his time, because his intuition was hindsight,” and yet is a consistently brilliant and fascinating offbeat analysis.

¶ Albert Pinkham Ryder, by Lloyd Goodrich, is a scholarly and perhaps unnecessarily kind approach to an eccentric, ill-trained genius, notes that his art, being individualistic and emotional in the extreme, “seems more contemporary to us than it did to his own generation.”

¶ Winslow Homer, also by Goodrich, reverently explores the austere, hermit master, who wrote to a would-be biographer: “I think that it would probably kill me to have [a biography] appear, and as the most interesting part of my life is of no concern to the public, I must decline to give you any particulars in regard to it.”

¶ Stuart Davis, by E. C. Goossen, traces the logic that leads Davis to paint as he does. Davis’ sharp, brassy, eye-hurting brand of abstraction is something all his own, however, and not easily analyzed.

¶ Jackson Pollock, by Frank O’Hara, extravagantly lauds the late drip painter. Pollock was no demigod nor even a prophet, simply an original and forceful decorative artist on the grand scale.

¶ Willem de Kooning, by Thomas B. Hess, discusses De Kooning’s harsh, fast, and fluorescent brand of abstract expressionism in elaborately sophisticated terms, is occasionally apt, often provocative.