Word: canaday
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This week the doubts went down on paper. After traveling to Ottawa, where "The Controversial Century" is on exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, New York Times Art Critic John Canaday concluded: "Within this large and fine exhibition there is secreted a second and smaller one in which pedigrees are nonexistent or dubious, and attributions are arbitrary to such an extent that, the stylistic evidence being what it is, one must question them...
Questioned Canaday: "Why should a pleasant but not at all exceptional sketch of a young girl, a sketch with no signature, no date, shaky pedigree, and so far as I can see no direct kinship to a Degas, be offered as a Degas?" Why should "an only moderately proficient painting called Le Trompeur and a pleasant but unexceptional still-life, without dates, signatures or certifications, be offered as Manets when the best you can say for them with certainty is that in a weak way they share certain characteristics of Manet's art? And when a painting is recognizable...
...Susan Canaday...
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...
...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...