Two Clear Ones

Modern art and "traditional" art have both been championed for years in such inflated terms and with such agitated voodoo that intelligent men may well be bored with the whole controversy. Most artists are. Supercilious esthetes and professional scoffers being alike discredited, the most promising movement in art criticism is toward a simpler, less pretentious and closer examination of the facts of art. The past fortnight was notable for turning up two clear books of this sort.

Anti-theory. Thesis of Christine Herter. in Defense of Art-- is that much contemporary art is a product of theorizing rather than creative activity. She sees the lesser moderns as more or less buffaloed by intellectualizations which were slightly screwy in the first place, and proceeds to punch neat holes in the writings of eminent estheticians.

She takes up Herbert Read, the English enthusiast, on an incautious statement that "academic'' art began in the 14th Century with "the desire to reproduce in some way exactly what the eye sees." Analyst Herter has an easy time proving that this was no more true of the 14th than of the ist Century, that great artists never wanted to be copyists of nature, but were imaginative and expressive, that Mr.

Read's false definition leads to a false antithesis: resentational"' art between and traditional as nontraditional "rep as ''non-representational" art. Analyst Her ter thinks this is the root of modern confusion.

On various other verbal flights by Critics Roger Fry, Thomas Craven, et al., Author Herter turns a cold and logical eye. Her shrewdest stroke is in showing up the common legend that the Cubists got their program from a famous sentence of Cezanne. The actual sentence: "You must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone. . . ." It is not recorded that Cezanne ever in his life referred to the "cube." yet by what Author Herter takes to be a monumental feat of autosuggestion, many writers on art misquoted him to include it, the artist's interest in essential geometry thereby becoming the cliche of a school.

Widow of William Sergeant Kendall, dean of the Yale School of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1922, severe Author Herter lives a retired life at Hot Springs, Va.. far from the fevered world of exhibitions and studios. Although her book stimulates readers to think for themselves, it also shows her grave limitations: lack of contact with, and a prim insensitivity to. the genuine achievements of the movement whose misadvertisement she abhors. Few lovers of art will agree with her acid comments on Grand Old Man Henri Matisse, some of whose recent paintings and drawings, including Rumanian Blouse (see cut), pleased visitors last week at the Manhattan Gallery of Son Pierre Matisse.

Exposition. In Primitivism in Modern Painting-- Fine Arts Instructor Robert J.

Goldwater of New York University has done a more scholarly job of keeping his eye on the ball, shows more intimate knowledge of modem pictures than Christine Herter. The Primitivist kickoff came during the last century, when Europeans began to envy the free life of savages, began to see something valuable in their art.

Author Goldwater shows that Paul Gauguin, who pursued the primitive to Tahiti, was not the first artist to make a touchdown: "artists' voyages after his time lessened rather than increased in extent." Furthermore. Romantic Primitivism. the conscious desire to convey the fundamentals of life, arose among various 19th-Century artists before much, if anything, was known of aboriginal art. The Fauves ("Wild Beasts") in France around 1905 found African sculpture an exciting curiosity, but shared Vlaminck's amusement at the pompous way their followers took it.

Goldwater shows that Derain. Vlaminck and Matisse themselves borrowed little from such art.

Likewise enlightening are Instructor Goldwater's careful analyses of different kinds of Primitivism in the two great groups of pre-War experimenters in Germany: Die Bruecke ("The Bridge") and Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider").

Like the Fauves, the artists of "The Bridge" aimed, with some notable successes, to produce an immediate emotional effect by broad, simple, rough painting.

"The maximum of emotion," says austere Author Goldwater, "has not always been conceived in terms that necessitated formal simplification or the reduction of technical means, as witness the baroque." His exposition of later refinements of Primitivism is detached but informed, makes out a compelling case for their sincerity and importance.

* Harper ($3).

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