To the Editors:
I feel sure that I am not alone in having been disturbed by Deborah Solomon’s review of Eleanor Munro’s book Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter in the September issue of The New Criterion. What could it have been about this delightful book to have caused such venom? I shall comment, however, only on that part in which Miss Solomon says that Art News, under Alfred Frankfurter’s direction, was “notoriously hostile to the Abstract Expressionists” before the late 1940s. It is perfectly true that Frankfurter was not the first to have championed them, but Miss Munro did not say he was the first. It must be remembered, also, that in the 1940s there were few opportunities to see their work. I myself was writing for Art News beginning in December 1949. By then the gallery scene was beginning to change, and the work of the Abstract Expressionists—a term not then in use—was finding its way into galleries. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say, as Miss Munro says, that under Frankfurter’s direction Art News “became a catapult lifting the Abstract Expressionists to fame.” Milton Brown said as much to me in the mid-1950s. Specifically, what he said was that Art News by then had become the Wall Street Journal of the New York avant-garde. And we should not overlook the attention the magazine paid to other phases of art history. Frankfurter had contacts with collectors, scholars, and museum directors throughout the world. He was an imaginative editor. Also, the magazine did not neglect the best of American artists who had themselves been the avant-garde of the 1930s. A review of what were known as the “techniques pieces” will turn up many names thought to have been placed permanently on the shelf. I am not saying that Art News was alone. I remember Belle Krasne, the editor of Arts—earlier The Art Digest—who, like Art News, was employing artists to write reviews. Art News was already doing this by the mid-19405. Dore Ashton was doing a lot of work for Arts also. Indeed, Arts made an important contribution. Am I being prejudiced when I say that in the same period Art News had a certain panache? Painters, sculptors, and poets were writing feature articles for it. Bradbury Thompson was responsible for the layout, and had been doing it since the mid-1940s. It was really a new kind of art magazine. For this we must thank Alfred Frankfurter.
Lawrence Campbell
New York, NY
Deborah Solomon replies:
Mr. Campbell obviously harbors great affection for Art News magazine. He remains impressed by its one-time editor Alfred Frankfurter who, he tells us, knew everyone in the art world, valiantly promoted Thirties abstraction long after it went out of vogue, and invested the magazine with “a certain panache” by hiring poets and artists to write for it. All of this is very nice, but none of it bears the slightest relevance to the issue at hand—the issue, that is, of whether Art News deserves credit for lifting the Abstract Expressionists into fame. In my review of Eleanor Munro’s book, I challenged her assertion that Frankfurter was “critical to the movement’s success.” As I pointed out, Frankfurter was in fact hostile to Abstract Expressionism until the late 1940s, when Thomas Hess joined his staff and convinced him to change his tune. Now along comes Mr. Campbell, who claims that Frankfurter failed to support the Abstract Expressionists in the Forties only because there were so few chances to see their work. That may have been the case if one were living in Timbuctoo, but not in Manhattan, where one could regularly see the latest work of Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell, et al. at Peggy Guggenheim’s celebrated gallery, Art of This Century, and at other places too. How did Art News review these shows? In 1948, when Pollock exhibited his first “drip” paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery, the magazine’s reviewer concluded: “Despite Pollock’s crashing energy, the work is lightweight . . . monotonous.” Abstract Expressionism, like most major art movements of this century, did not succeed because of Art News but despite it.