Art: He Knows What He Dislikes

The U.S. art world last week had a good, squabblesome book to squabble over. Its publication was celebrated by a gay party at Manhattan's Downtown Gallery. Surrounded by highly explosive canvases, Duke Ellington and Kansas City's boogie-woogie specialist Pete Johnson smote the piano while esthetic arguments added to the clamor. The book: Samuel M. Kootz's New Frontiers in American Painting (Hastings House; $5).

Kootz, 44 and a Virginia-born lawyer, is a testy critic who knows what he does not like as well as what he does. Sometimes he slips into the morass of pompous nonsense that is a feature of the modern critical landscape (Picasso "frees us from materiality—our bondage to nature—and provides us with an ultimate reality"). But more often than many modern art critics Kootz writes clearly—and he has strong opinions to offer on the whole field of contemporary painting.

Nationalists. Kootz, who once cracked in the New York Times that "Cézanne made an apple important; Benton ... a lynching trivial," makes another attack on Thomas Hart Benton and his fellow U.S. nationalists. Says Kootz: "Benton and Wood, Curry and Marsh . . . went American so raucously, so insistently, that they provided and inspired an enormous flood of dull, routine anecdotes. . . . Each of the nationalist lads has his own little counter to set up trade. From it he dispenses post cards, heavy with facts, guaranteed to counteract any itch that jeopardizes a continued comfort."

Of Benton's lurid anti-Axis paintings (TIME, April 6, 1942), Kootz declares: "[They] proved embarrassing because the imagery was from stock molds and the sentiment descended to cheap melodrama."

Surrealists, Class-Strugglers. Kootz whales away at surrealism in general as "an aspect of frustration" and evidence of "the decay of France." He admires the earlier work of Giorgio di Chirico. But of Salvador Dali he says: ". . . Each new showing evidences an hysterical attempt to provide the spectator with a different shock than that of the preceding exhibit." Of a Max Ernst show in 1941 he remarks: "Here, just the right amount of peep-show pornography ... to provide final fashionable acceptance to an audience thrilled by its chichi eroticism."

Of the U.S. "class struggle" painters (of whom William Gropper is best known), Kootz says: "Gropper, for instance, has never been able to invent a plastic language of his own. . . . The plain fact of the matter is that the radical pattern of this school is as dull esthetically as the reactionary pattern of the nationalist school. Both schools trade in local incidents, the class-struggle boys bellyaching that nothing is good enough, the nationalists insisting that it was good enough for Pop and it is good enough for them. . . . Slice it any way you want and it still comes out a literary tract."

Expressionists, Abstractionists. The work of Kootz's own modern favorites is derived from the "expressionists [who] use the psychology of color ... to express a moody, mystic Weltschmerz." He singles out Abraham Rattner, Walter Quirt, Paul Burlin. Of Rattner (see cut), he remarks: