The Basic Debate

Has the artist any obligation to weigh human values or to communicate through his art a vision of spiritual truth?

That simple question, to which almost any layman would answer yes, gets a fast and furious no from many of today's esthetes. Even to ask it in arty circles is to sound like a hick or a troublemaker. Selden Rodman, who is neither, uses it to kick off one of the most provocative art books in years (The Eye of Man; Devin-Adair; $10). His own answer--affirmative--rattles the lattices of a hundred ivory towers.

Rodman's thesis, in brief, is that modern art has turned its back on content, and therefore on the public--and that it's a great pity. "Content" Rodman defines as "a projection through tangible symbols of the artist's attachment to values out side art itself." To draw the shutters on all values except formal ones, and paint pictures of nothing at all, demeans art to the status of mere decoration. And art is being so demeaned, right and left.

Critics who deplore this trend and hope for better things are often laughed at. Laughter, in turn, can make for bitter or even bigoted criticism. Rodman, aware of the danger, does not hesitate to belabor some people in his own party. Among others, Rodman sideswipes A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford, who last summer took full-page ads in six Manhattan dailies to exhort against modern art and supine art critics (TIME, June 20). Hartford, he complains, "was asking that art define truth rather than express it--and then defining it himself in the narrowest terms . . . To demand of art a specific 'moral answer' is just as unreasonable as to insist, as some formalist critics do, that the artist have no morals at all, that he create in a vacuum."

The main contribution of The Eye of

Man lies not in such blameless refereeing but in Rodman's heartfelt reinterpretation of art history, past and present. In a succession of loosely connected essays he shows that art has always been two-faced. Giotto knew how to make the two faces--form and content--merge into one. So did Rembrandt and every other great painter. But artists who try to get around the problem by sacrificing form to content (like the academicians) or content to form (like the most extreme of the moderns) have always fallen flat between the two.

To profile the two faces. Rodman organized a loan exhibition at Manhattan's Gallery G last week. One side of the gallery was devoted to pictures emphasizing form, and the other side to those in which content came first. Leaning over backward to be fair, he made abstractions the show's better half. Actually his thesis was better illustrated by other works currently showing. Items:

P: Hans Hofmann, 75-year-old prophet of "Abstract Expressionism," exhibited (at the Kootz Gallery) big canvases thickly smeared with what seemed to be mud, blood and cud. "Pictorial life," as Hofmann tried to explain in the exhibition catalogue, "is not imitated life; it is, on the contrary, a created reality based on the inherent life within every medium of expression. We have only to awaken it. Color .metabolism preconditions the continuity of color development towards a plastic and psychic realization." P: Willem de Kooning, 51, showed (at the Martha Jackson Gallery) more of the monstrous "Women" that have obsessed him for the past five years. Because he paints figures half dissolved in an angry sea of paint, De Kooning has long been called the man most likely to succeed in creating a new synthesis of figure-painting and abstractionism. But the best picture in last week's show was altogether abstract--the sea had closed over the figure. As diffident as he is famous, De Kooning says painting is "like shooting dice. I shoot ten and then try again. I just keep throwing until I get what I want." P: Isabel Bishop, 52, showed (at the Midtown Galleries) the shimmery brown pictures of working girls that are her self-appointed province. A meticulous realist, Bishop comes down hard on content but escapes academicism on two counts. First, her paintings are paintings, not mere pictures. She sinks her subjects not into an angry sea like De Kooning but into a forest pool of paint, delicately manipulated. Second, she paints them as human beings, never mere flesh and bone. "I use the most awful criterion for my own work," Bishop says. "I ask, 'Is it so?' A thing may be just as nicely rendered, just as well composed, as can be, and yet be completely un-so!"

P: No less than 165 contemporary American painters strutted their stuff in a thoroughly disheartening cross-section show at the Whitney Museum. Mainly, it was a hullabaloo of large, loud abstractions signifying little more than the artists' desire to be noticed. Doubtless from the same desire, a young (32) academician named Larry Rivers exhibited a vast, vulgar painting of a naked couple, lifesize. It was smudged at the feet, which are hard to draw, but the more central parts got full treatment. In such drear company the few brilliant pictures--Ben Shahn's Everyman, Charles Sheeler's Western Industrial and Jack Levine's little Judah--looked a lot less thin than they actually are.

Through thick and thin, Shahn, Sheeler and Levine, along with Isabel Bishop, remain the sort of painters whom Rodman describes as being "less concerned with art than with life . . . [They] set their backs against the tide of fashion and seek to introduce expressive content into art without sacrificing form."

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