Craven on Moderns

Thomas Craven, 45, is a red-haired Kansan capable of tornadoes of indignation on the subject of art. When he published Men of Art the entire U. S. art world paid respectful attention to his caustic evaluation of painters from Giotto to Rivera (TIME, April 27, 1931). Last week it had occasion to heed him again when he published his long-awaited sequel Modern Art.* Critic Craven's second book, like his first, is a series of brilliant biographies ornamenting his chief theme: true art should be representational and born of a passion to interpret life. Such a standard automatically condemns abstractionists like Picasso or Braque whom Mr. Craven damns with glee. Most readers will find his statements as exhilarating and convincing as a homerun. Art dealers and Francophile connoisseurs will be less pleased with what he has to say. Examples : ". . . After 60 years of exploitation, the best examples of Impressionism [Manet, Seurat, Whistler, Pissarro, Monet] are controlled by the original underwriters, Durand-Ruel, which firm slowly releases its enormous stock at propitious moments. . . . Actually they are worth from $25 to $50, but they are sold in terms of old masters--according to scarcity values. "It is talk that keeps Picasso's pictures alive; and when the talk ceases, his art will cease to exist. Its vitality is verbal." Matisse is a "rug maker," a "pattern maker," a painter of "lolling odalisques in diapered interiors." "When we say that his emotion is but another name for bourgeois well-being and that a fraction of it, equally distributed, informs his designs, we have said all that can be said of the content of his painting." "Scratch a patron or a collector, and you find a dealer." Modern Art brings forward for public inspection Mr. Craven's sincere belief and hope that an "explicitly native art" is now growing in the U. S. He finds indications of it in Muralist Thomas Benton (see cut), "one of the few living artists, in any department, with a first-rate mind.'' Says Critic Craven of this Missouri artist: "To the conservatives he is a Red; to the radicals he is a Chauvinist. His art is too specifically real, too deeply impregnated with what I shall risk calling the Collective American Spirit to touch the purists, Methodists and doctrinaries. . . . Benton's art, apparently, is a direct and unblushing representation of American life." Architect Frank Lloyd Wright meets with Critic Craven's approval. One of the few art writers of today to uphold George Grey Barnard and his vast vaporings in stone, Mr. Craven recalls that no less a person than Rodin once openly envied this aging U. S. sculptor. Of Jacob Epstein's 100-odd "masculine" bronzes, he says: "There is not a dead one in the lot. . . . One of the most original styles in all sculpture." He advises Jose Clemente Orozco to return to Mexico if he wants to preserve the representative sun and shadow of his native land.

Praise in lesser degree he has for John Sloan, Boardman Robinson, John Steuart Curry, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, William Cropper. He plays with the suggestion that Communism may prove the regeneration of art but only if the idea of Communism produces art, not if art is propaganda for the ideas of Communism.

Galleryites who have tired of the French and their U. S. imitators will welcome his assurance that the "snob spirit" which made native painters "ashamed of their heritage and environment" is passing, will be inclined to agree with his prophecy of the return of representationalism:

"During the next decade, before a proper balance has been struck between subject and composition, we shall be deluged with horrible story pictures. I can bear it. They will be better than the dry bones of abstractionism."

*Simon & Schuster, $3.75.

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