Word: maxed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perkins was a rather conservative fellow of solid Yankee stock, and Berg wisely uses accounts of Max's relations with his writers to tell the story. Berg gives the basics of Max's upbringing and personal life but perceives that these can go only so far toward answering just why he demonstrated such an uncanny ability for spotting and remaining faithful to the young men and women who went on to become some of America's finest writers...
...wisdom of hindsight, it is simple enough to cast the young Perkins as the great innovator; and yet, Perkins did not completely share the enthusiasm of writers like Hemingway and Pound for building all literature anew. Perkins, above all, was searching for what Fitzgerald called "the real thing," for Max clung to no dogmatic view of literature and asked only for writing that would vicariously bring readers a little closer to real life...
Above all, Max mistrusted the dry, academic approach to literature. Wolfe, who in You Can't Go Home Again provided the best portrait of Perkins before Berg's book, tells of a conversation Max has with one of his daughters...
...hindsight, one can easily see where they got their language: how Gorky's spidery, fluent line emerged from Miro, how the bulging shapes of early de Kooning derive from '30s Picasso, what Rothko got from Max Ernst and Pollock from Kandinsky, and how deeply Adolph Gottlieb's pictographs were influenced by Victor Brauner. But that is perhaps of secondary importance. What counts most in this show is the spectacle of those obscure but desperately committed artists painting as though art had the power to change life, as though culture itself depended on their efforts: which...
...Max Miller plays organ works in the Thursday Noon Recital Series at the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Call 495-2317 for info. free...