art without need of literary occasion

Stuart Preston, art critic.

This entry wanders a bit, first dealing with a show featuring geometric and non-representational paintings, but then moves to the state of surrealism in the U.S. in 1960. Before I wander, let's begin with a deceptively simple summary statement about surrealism written for Poetry in 1960 by the long-time Bennington College teacher and critic of French modern lit, Wallace Fowlie:

Poetry is the power to create, to confer a new meaning on an object... The surrealist contribution to the theory of poetics ranks high today among the movement's major contributions. The poet, they say, borrows nothing that is foreign or unfamiliar to himself. He takes back what was his to begin with--those things, precisely, in which he recognizes himself... They spoke constantly of the state of poetry as something that is lived and thought of as an interrogation, as quasi-discovery.

Okay, let's go elsewhere first....to the Galerie Chalette, where in the spring there was a compehensive exhibition entitled "Construction and Geometry in Painting--from Malevitch to 'Tomorrow.'" In other words, a show of non-objective paintings. A typical canvas was Victor Vasarely's "Citra" (1955-59): the canvas is divided in half, top background dark, bottom light. Shapes (squares, diamonds, bold polygons of all kinds) are arranged together in color-relief against the background, right triangle poking out at exactly 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock, like a spiny, squat top.

Preston* noted that these works "sacrifice too many human impulses in achieving their ends and can only be considered completely satisfactory works or art in a limited sense." The paintings here, he said, "exist[...] on their own without need of literary or emotional occasions."

Since I'm interested these days in the situation and reputation of surrealism in 1960, I am intrigued by the way Preston manages the transition between sections of his Times review - moving from one exhibit to the next. Here he's moving from the non-objective show to Kurt Seligman's recent paintings which were then showing at Fine Arts Associates. No need of a transition, of course; readers used to the "what's going on at the galleries" round-up can shift gears quickly. But Preston writes this:

The 'pure' basis of geometrical art is absolutely repudiated in surrealism's pact with the unconscious....

The main difference between Vasarely's inhuman non-literariness and Seligman's "dense thickets of myth and fantasy" is that the former doesn't partake of mystery in the least and the latter was...well here's Preston's awkward term that he got passed NYT's editors..."one of modern art's foremost mystifactors."

The key for Preston is the imagination. Non-objective art doesn't have it, surrealism does.

Surrealism in the U.S. seems to have had three big moments in 1960: (1) Wallace Fowlie's essay (quoted at the outset of this entry), "Surrealism in 1960: A Backward Glance," published in Poetry in March issue; (2) the publication of Anna Balakian's important book, Surrealism: The road to the Absolute (Noonday--reviewed variously in April); and (3) a show at D'Arcy Galleries featuring 58 surrealist painters and sculptors put together by Marcel Duchamp and Maurice Bonnefoy (owner of the gallery) at the end of November. (I'm focused on American happenings here, so I won't count a fourth big surrealist moment that year. Back in January, in Paris, crowds flocked to the Eighth International Exposition of Surrealism. The theme that year was eroticism. Apparently, though, gallery-goers were not sufficiently shocked. "For the truth is," one critic wrote, "surrealism's erotic symbols and visual jokes [e.g. the fur-lined teacup at New York's Museum of Modern Art show in 1936] have ceased to shock or enrage the bourgeois."***)

Later entries here will surely return to the three above-mentioned American surrealist moments, but let me add a word here about the Duchamp show. When reviewers showed up at the gallery to find out about the show in advance of the opening, they found Duchamp waiting for the delivery of three live chickens, standing outside 1091 Madison Avenue. The fowl were to participate in the show. (They were set off in a corner near a sign that read "Coin Sale.") A pair of half-burned logs were set neatly on andirons against a wall in which they was no fireplace.

The premiere was held on Saturday night, November 28. The opening was a benefit for the Damon Runyon Fund for Cancer Research.

The 58 pieces Duchamp and Bonnefoy chose were meant to be more representative of the surrealist movement "from 1913 to today." In one gallery five electric clocks hung from the ceiling. There was also "an ancient typewriter" and an old time clock with which guests at the premiere punched their invitations upon entering. There was a length of garden hose, to be spread around "as a good-natured hazard." A toy electric train circled a track set up in one of the gallery's Madison Avenue windows, pulling cards marked with the names of the surrealists in the show.

My favorite part of the exhibit: From concealed speakers set up around the galleries, came a recording...of a child's piano practice, mistakes and all.**

Another report**** says that the show was organized by Andre Breton, who of course wrote the first surrealist manifesto in 1924 and still by then presided over surrealism's followers in Paris.

Recent painters whom we don't normally call surrealist were included in the show: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg. The New Yorker***** critic said somewhat oddly of Rauschenberg: "surely a Dadaist, if I ever saw one."

Generally critics in 1960 either gloated over the fact that surrealism no longer shocked the middle classes or tsk-tsk'ed that "what once seemed sick now seems strangely sane."

What interests me about the state of surrealism in 1960 is the conclusion drawn with such certainty by the New Yorker critic: "[I]t might be said that instead of Surrealism's taking over America, America took over the Surrealists."

* "Questions of Meaning," NYT, Apr. 10, 1960, p. X13. ** NYT, Nov. 28, 1960, p. 36. *** Newsweek, Jan. 18, 1960, pp. 87-88. **** Time, Dec. 12, 1960, p. 81. ***** New Yorker, Dec. 10, 1960, p. 200.

did Lowell mean himself to be "raw" or "cooked"?

Robert Lowell's book Life Studies, published in 1959, was given the National Book Award of poetry in April 1960. The party celebrating the awards - for Lowell as well as Philip Roth in fiction for Goodbye, Columbus and Richard Ellmann for his James Joyce biography - was held at the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Astor. the jury said that Lowell's poems were "of fierce and immediate compassion...[striking] through the private dimension to document the pressures of an age." Not the individual mania but "the age."

Lowell's acceptance speech made a distinction between the kinds of contemporary poetry - raw and cooked. More about that in a moment. A journalist at the Astor party approached Lowell and asked him to enlarge on the distinction between raw poetry and cooked. "I'm not going to comment on something I haven't actually said yet," replied Mr. Lowell. Then Lowell, "his Yankee jaw stiffening," smiled and "even cracked a couple of homely jokes, for all the world like a Harvard Will Rogers."

The main address of the evening was given by Dr. Mason W. Gross, president of Rutgers University, who warned his audience that civilization was going to drown soon in a sea of increasingly meaningless words - presumably, though those gathered, he didn't mean Roth's, Lowell's or Ellmann's. Gross became and assistant professor of philosophy in '46 after fighting in the war, and moved quickly up through the administrative ranks, having become president in 1959, not quite a year before delivering this speech. But his gloomy prediction that we would drown in meaningless words might have struck some at the Astor as odd coming from the man who in the late 40s and mid 50s was widely known from his role as a panelist on the TV quiz show, Think Fast (1949-50) and the show Two for the Money (1952-55). This was the man worried about being awash in a sea of meaningless words?

Here is part of Lowell's speech, with his "raw/cooked" comment:

Our modern American poetry has a snarl on its hands. Something earth-shaking was started about fifty years ago by the generation of Eliot, Frost and William Carlos Williams. We have tried a run of poetry as inspired, and perhaps as important and sadley brief as that of Baudelaire and his successors, or that of the dying Roman Republic and early Empire. Two poetries are ever competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, hugh blood-dripping goblets of unseasoned experience dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal. I exaggerate, of course. Randall Jarrell has said that the modern world has destroyed the intelligent poet's audience and given him students. James Baldwin has said that many of the best writers are as inarticulate as our statesmen. / Writing is neither transport nor technique. My own owes everything to a few of our poets who have tried to write directly about what mattered to them, and yet to keep faith with their calling's tricky, specialized, unpopular possibilities of good worksmanship...."

Lowell is semi-coherently referring to the Beats (those who can only declaim their poetry - raw) and the so-called New Formalists (producers of New Criticism-friendly, wrought verse). And he clearly wanted to stand apart from these two schools, obviously concerned that the alleged directness and psycho-emotional frankness of Life Studies might lead folks to put him with the former, while also wanting the book to declare his separation from the merely academic qualities of the latter. Yet in saying this in so quick and dirty a form - and this is the reason why I like to read such occasional speeches - he reveals a sense of his poetics with respect to the major modernists. The clever "yet" in the final sentence quoted above is thick with meaning not quite fully intended.