"ARE ARTISTS GOING MAD?" HEADLINED AN
article in the brand-new newsmagazine TIME in 1923. The twentieth century gave art critics a rough ride as they struggled to make sense of the latest and greatest of avante-garde artists, from Picasso, Dali, and Pollock to Haring, Warhol, and Basquiat. Here are some highlights from our coverage of modern art over the years.
Mr. Chesterton here discusses the artists of the 'newer schools,' for whom he sees little hope—unless the rest of the world goes mad as well.
From Are Artists Going Mad?
Mar. 24, 1923
Paris studios boiled with the revolutionary ideas of the Fauves (Wild Beasts) and no intelligent young painter could ignore them. Modigliani quickly exhausted his Italian academism, delved into the cubism and Negro sculpture which preoccupied his new friends, Picasso, Matisse, Derain and Braque.
From Modigliani's Mode
Nov. 11, 1929
While modernistic art may or may not be valuable, it is undeniably fashionable in the U. S., and this is due in no small measure to the increasing publicity and support given it by U. S. art critics.
From "Sterile Modernism"
Mar. 10, 1930
Harvard University sponsors were surprised some years ago when they arranged an exhibition of Sandy Calder's work, sent a truck to carry the statues to the exhibition hall and found no one at the station but Sculptor Calder with a pair of pliers in his pocket, a roll of wire over his shoulder.
From Stabiles and Mobiles
Mar. 1, 1937
Flying like a shuttlecock between the esthetic debaters of two continents, the very name of Picasso has been a symbol of irresponsibility to the old, of audacity to the young.
From Art's Acrobat
Feb. 13, 1939
Like Icarus, Matisse has flown close to the sun; his most recent pictures are so richly dazzling that beside them such bold 19th Century colorists as Renoir and Van Gogh fade to dimness.
From Beauty & the Beast
Apr. 5, 1948
Willem de Kooning is the sort of painter who gives most people a pain: superficially his pictures look like scribbles any kid could do.
From Willem the Walloper
Apr. 30, 1951
Advance-guard painting in America is hell-bent for outer space. It has rocketed right out of the realms of common sense and common experience. That does not necessarily make it bad.
From The Wild Ones
Feb. 20, 1956
Hans Hofmann is 80, and his claim to a place in the top ranks of American painters is secure....In painting a picture, he approaches the canvas as if it were a door to be broken into to reveal the hidden life beyond.
From Push Answers Pull
Mar. 17, 1961
Anyone who is older than an Eagle Scout can remember the scandal. There was a grown man, a dreamer in denims named Jackson Pollock, tacking canvas to the floor and dribbling paint onto it.
From Beyond the Pasteboard Mask
Jan. 17, 1964
Now, with the '60s rage for pop, who should turn up to be the grandada of the new generation but Marcel Duchamp, at 77 the century's most indestructible enfant terrible.
From Pop's Dado
Feb. 5, 1965
Lichtenstein's first pop paintings were derided as belonging to the 'King Features school,' and a bad joke. Today, it's all the way to the bank.
From Kidding Everybody
Jun. 23, 1967
Today Abstract Expressionists enjoy the status, both esthetic and financial, of old masters. And like old masters, they have been declared dead by the brashest of the avantgarde. But they changed the course of art. Whether for better or worse is arguable; that they did, is incontestable.
From The New Ancestors
Jun. 27, 1969
If Pollock was John Wayne, the likes of Haring 'n' Basquiat resemble those two what's-their-names on Miami Vice: cute cops, a designer avant-garde whose 'newness' has all the significance of a goat-cheese pizza.
From Careerism and Hype Amidst the Image Haze
By Robert Hughes
Jun. 17, 1985
The hard lesson of the past decade is that liquidity, to many people, may be all that art means. The art market has become the faithful cultural reflection of the wider economy in the '80s, inflated by leveraged buyouts, massive junk-bond issues and vast infusions of credit.
From Sold!
By Robert Hughes
Nov. 27, 1989
Because contemporary art was the most inflated area of speculation, one may assume that for certain artists of the '80s, no bottom is yet in sight. But anyone who thinks the market decline will instantly produce saner relations between art and the public ought to think again.
From The Great Massacre of 1990
By Robert Hughes
Dec. 3, 1990
If Picasso was the artistic Prometheus of the century, then Pop artist Andy Warhol was its Pan. Pop is the realm where American art gave up its spiritual reach in exchange for the bounty of commerce.
From Publicist, Prankster, Parvenu
By Steven Henry Madoff
Jun. 8, 1998
There have arguably been just two moments of final consequence to art's mainstream in the past half-century: Abstract Expressionism, with its reinvention of the spiritual; and its brazen opposite, Pop, whose smart, smirking celebrations of Brillo boxes, billboards and Mickey Mouse smiled into the heart of postwar America and found it made of chrome.
From Creative Chaos
By Steven Henry Madoff
Nov. 22, 1999
We all know the terms of their face-off. Matisse the color-infatuated voluptuary, Picasso the spiky engineer of Cubist space. Matisse the consoler, Picasso the bomb thrower. Matisse the man who once called for 'an art of balance, of purity and serenity,' Picasso the one who said, 'In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions.'
From When Henri Met Pablo
By Richard Lacayo
Feb. 24, 2003
It might not seem like a good thing to re-emerge as the original media whore, but there's no denying Dali's role in making showmanship an art-world career tactic.
From Dali Goes to Rehab
By Richard Lacayo
Feb. 21, 2005
You can't really add to an armor-plated canister like the one he provided in Denver. So Libeskind's addition is a freestanding structure. It connects to the Ponti with a glass bridge, a gray-toned exterior and a willingness to think differently but with happier results.
From As Sharp As It Gets
By Richard Lacayo
Sep. 03, 2006
Here's the best evidence I know of that the past 10 years have witnessed a revolution in architecture. Diller and Scofidio are getting work. For decades the husband-and-wife designer team of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio was known mostly--make that entirely--as architectural theorists, deadpan funny conceptual artists and intellectual bomb throwers.
From First Thinking, Then Building
By Richard Lacayo
Nov. 26, 2006
The ellipses were steel plates, 13-ft. high, that had been formed into twisted ovals you could enter through a gap on one side. With these Serra wasn't merely addressing space; he was creating space of a new kind. Literally new. At one point Serra and his attorney thought of having the form trademarked.
From Richard Serra's Big Show
By Richard Lacayo
May. 24, 2007
The Glass House, as it's now known, very quickly became one of the most widely published and talked-about American homes since Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, completed 12 years earlier. Until now the Glass House has also been a place that only a lucky few have seen up close. But long before he died two years ago, at age 98, Johnson had set plans in motion for the house and its 47-acre surroundings[EM]where over the years he added a number of other high-concept buildings[EM]to be opened to the public after his death.
From Splendor in the Glass
By Richard Lacayo
Jun. 28, 2007
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