Word: canaday
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...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...
...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...
...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...
What to Do? In a reply to Timesman Canaday last week, Tastemaker Barr tried to explain that his "rather garbled remark" had been "eagerly misinterpreted as an obituary. It was not. American abstract expressionism, in its robust middle age, is going strong"-despite "the hostile attitude of the head critics of the leading New York newspapers." But what caused Barr real pain was his unwanted reputation as the most powerful taste-maker in America. "I am more than embarrassed," he wrote, "I am dismayed. Any influence I may have is largely dependent upon the institution where I work...