Word: hartfords
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hartford frankly represents a public to whom modern painting is not intelligible. And his writing reflects a resentful bewilderment. He never tries to understand or to analyze. Instead, as he says, "I am angry." He argues, in effect, "I see nothing in abstract art because there's nothing to see. Any one who claims to see anything in it is either a faker or a dupe...
...Although Hartford never quite proves the critics' malicious intent in promoting abstract art, he hits home when he denounces the gibberish with which they promote it. Early in the book he quotes Art News's comments on a De Kooning "Woman:". "she could have been outside a house as well as inside," babbles the magazine, "or in an inside-outside porch space. This state of anonymous simultaneity (not no-specific-place, but several no-specific-places) is seen more clearly in the few objects which appeared, then disappeared around the seated figure." Art News concludes that "Ambiguity, exactingly sought...
...Hartford's main target is not the critics, the dealers, or even the painters in general; it is Pablo Picasso. He dislikes almost everything Picasso has done since the Rose Period and claims that "Picasso's work has had the effect of wiping out almost all the gains that have painfully and step by step been made in painting during the last five hundred years." Hartford considers Picasso a potentially great painter who never developed, but chose instead to create "by means of mental gymnastics such as those glorified in IQ tests...
...Perhaps Hartford has a point. Perhaps one could legitimately reshape his idea and say that Picasso is a great painter who has painted very few, if any, great pictures. He is certainly a man whose innovations, and whose career as a history of innovation, have been more significant than his individual works. Hartford refers at one point to the great retrospective exhibit of Picasso's paintings held at London's Tate Gallery in the summer of 1960. Viewing this exhibit, which included paintings done by Picasso from the age of twelve right up to that year, one was greatly impressed...
...Hartford never finds time, in his condemnation of Picasso, to mention the artist's surrealistic paintings. Hartford likes surrealism. He thinks Salvador Dali is the greatest painter of contemporary times. He even forgives the surrealist painter, Tanguy, for not painting recognizable objects, because Tanguy's paintings are so meticulously three-dimensional. But what does Hartford think of Picasso's surrealism? How does he resolve the combination of his pet ogre of the twentieth century with his pet movement of the twentieth century? He shouldn't keep the answer to himself...