He Says It's Spinach

John Canaday deplores most abstract expressionist art--and that opinion fuels a bitter feud. For Canaday is art news editor of the U.S.'s leading newspaper, the New York Times, and abstract expressionism is the U.S.'s most important school of art. Last week the feud, smoldering for months, broke into flame.

Canaday, 54, came to the Times in 1959 after a career of teaching (University of Virginia, Tulane) and heading up the educational activities of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Almost from his first column, he infuriated the abstract expressionists, chiefly by the wicked suggestion that although what they painted might be art, it could also be fraud. He lamented the school's influence, questioned its competence, doubted its goals, even predicted its eventual demise.

One night last fall, 14 artists, critics and friends were gathered at the apartment of Abstract Expressionist John Ferren, and after getting themselves into a suitably angry mood by reading old Canaday columns, they decided to strike back. Last week they did so in a letter to the Times, denouncing Canaday for insinuating that they had the motives of "cheats, greedy lackeys or senseless dupes."

A Little Domestic Service. The letter, which had been gathering signatures for weeks, bore 50 of the top names among today's artists, collectors, critics and art professors.* In hurt tones, it quoted a series of excerpts from Canaday's columns. He had written, for example, that "the bulk of abstract art in America has followed the course of least resistance and quickest profit," that it "allows exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception," and that "critics and educators have been hoist with their own petard, sold down the river. We have been had." He said that abstract expressionism's disciples at universities and museums are guilty of "brainwashing." and the whole situation is "fraud at worst and gullibility at best." This, stormed the angry protesters, "is the activity not of a critic but of an agitator."

When read as a whole and over a long period of time--as they are meant to be--Canaday's comments are not all onesided, but his attitude is clear. More alarmed than gratified by the proliferation of galleries and painters in the U.S., he once acidly, if jokingly, suggested that all painters stop work for a while and get other jobs--as domestic servants, for instance. On another occasion he reproduced a blob of pigment in the Times, then proceeded to subject it to the kind of analysis that an avant-garde critic might use about a genuine abstraction: "The huge central element, generally globular in shape, is the very apotheosis of the inertness of matter." It was an amusing satire on the prevalent gobbledygook, and by implication at least, it lumped all abstract expressionism together as one big hoax.

A Little Knuckle-Rapping. To the more neutral, spirits in the field, Canaday's main fault is that he sometimes seems to prefer to harangue in generalities than to come to grips with this or that particular artist. But this kind of knuckle-rapping is not always out of order with a group that can be as pretentious and self-righteous as some of the abstract expressionists. They in their turn have not been notable for their broad-mindedness toward their opposition--to which a legion of first-rate artists belong. "John Canaday," said Realist Edward Hopper in a letter to the Times this week, "is the best and most outspoken art critic the Times has ever had." Added Sculptor William Zorach in another letter: "He is an outspoken and healthy asset to the art world."

*Among them: Abstract Expressionists Ferren, James Brooks. Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning; Sculptors David Smith and David Hare; Critics Alfred Frankfurter and Thomas Hess of Art News; Fine Arts Professors James S. Ackerman (Harvard) and Meyer Schapiro (Columbia).

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