Word: rodman
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That simple question, to which almost any layman would answer yes, gets a fast and furious no from many of today's esthetes. Even to ask it in arty circles is to sound like a hick or a troublemaker. Selden Rodman, who is neither, uses it to kick off one of the most provocative art books in years (The Eye of Man; Devin-Adair; $10). His own answer-affirmative-rattles the lattices of a hundred ivory towers...
...Rodman's thesis, in brief, is that modern art has turned its back on content, and therefore on the public-and that it's a great pity. "Content" Rodman defines as "a projection through tangible symbols of the artist's attachment to values out side art itself." To draw the shutters on all values except formal ones, and paint pictures of nothing at all, demeans art to the status of mere decoration. And art is being so demeaned, right and left...
...showing the ceremonial feeding of a sacrificial cock-composed with brilliant simplicity. Only 22, and hungry for further knowledge of art, Bigaud leads the field in Haiti. He borrowed his not-at-all-primitive stipple technique ready-made from a book of Van Gogh reproductions that U.S. Critic Selden Rodman gave him last summer...
...rrand Gourgue specializes in pictures of black magic, painted in a silk-smooth, sharply detailed manner. His Marine Landscape is a nightmare spread of swimming things with animal and human heads. In a highly authoritative book on Haiti out last week (Haiti: the Black Republic; Devin-Adair; $5), Critic Rodman rightly says that Gourgue, like Bigaud, "can be called a primitive only in terms of his origins and lack of formal training. If, as he now tells clients, Gourgue was tormented by demons until he painted them, he has a good and very convincing memory...
...John R. Rodman, Memphis, Government and Philosophy...