1r

Daniel A. Siedell

Editor's Introduction

This publication is the result of a project that was originally con-ceived by Stephen C. Foster and initially funded by the Cultural Affairs

Council at the University of Iowa in 1992. The council was interestedin sponsoring a project that demonstrated the virtues of interdisci-plinary approaches to the study of the arts and humanities. It is in thiscontext that Foster, Professor of Art History and Director of the Mod-ern Studies Program at the University of Iowa, proposed Weldon Kees

as a suitable subject. Foster sought to explore Kees's varied forms ofcreative activity by focusing particular attention on his involvementin the visual arts. Dr. Pamela 1/Vhite Trimpe, Curator of the Universityof Iowa Museum of Art, secured NEA funding for the project's initial

stages, which included convening an advisory meeting with variousstakeholders in the Weldon Kees literature, planning for an exhibitionof his visual art, and a publication.

My involvement with Kees began in 1993 while I was a doctoralstudent under Foster's direction. Because the issues that Kees's art

activities raised bore significantly on the focus of my dissertationtopic, I was asked to contribute an essay on Kees's role in the midcen-

tury art world. While the project progressed in fits and starts for thenext few years, fighting for attention amidst a dizzying array of otherscholarly projects among most of the participants, I completed mydissertation and was appointed curator of the Sheldon Memorial ArtGallery and Sculpture Garden at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.Not only is Lincoln home to the Weldon Kees Papers (at the Bennett

Martin Public Library), the Sheldon owns four of Kees's paintings andtwo collages. My fortuitous move from Iowa City to Lincoln provided

a jump-start to the project. An exhibition of Kees's paintings andcollages opened in January 1998 at the Sheldon, consisting of twenty-

1r

Viii DANIEL A. SIEDELL Editor's Introduchon ix

seven paintings and seven collages, which traveled to the University of (B. H. Friedman's essay in this volume is adapted from a paper heIowa Museum of Art in the fall of 1998. While at the Sheldon, several originally prepared for the conference at the Sheldon in 1979. )activities were planned to celebrate Kees's diverse aesthetic interests.

These activities included a reading of Kees's poetry, a screening of twoof his experimental films, Hotel Apex and The Bridge, and a perfor-mance of his music. A symposium was also convened, entitled "TheStudy of American Art at Midcentury," featuring art historians IrvingSandler, Stephen C. Foster, Christin J. Mamiya (University of Ne-braska), and David Cateforis (University of Kansas), which I moder-ated. The Bennett Martin Library also organized a series of displaysdrawn from the Kees archive.

This publication marks the last vestige of this project, conceivedalmost a decade ago. It would not have been possible without thetireless efforts of a small but very talented and dedicated group ofpoets, professors, critics, and essayists who have labored diligently tokeep Kees's name alive in the history of American arts and culture.Furthermore, while this specific pro ject was progressing ever so slowly,many of Kees's supporters continued to generate more scholarship.

It is one of the ironies of history that such a significant body ofcreative work as Kees's remains perpetually in danger of being forgot-ten. The first of many heroic attempts to rescue Kees from historicaloblivion took place in 1960 at the University of Iowa, only five yearsafter his suicide, where printers Raeburn Miller, K. K. Merker, andpoet Donald Justice, under the auspices of Iowa's Writer's Workshopand Stone wall Press, published - in an edition of only two hundred -The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees. This collection was drawn fromthree books of Kees's poetry published during his lifetime, in ad-dition to a dozen or so uncollected poems. It was this publication,and its subsequent reprinting and revisions by the University of Ne-braska Press, which reintroduced Kees's voice into the chorus of greattwentieth-century American poets.

By 'ig7g a number of publications attempted to recover the signifi-cance of Kees's contribution to American culture. Ted Gioia edited a

special number of Sequoia, Stanford University's literary review, en-titled "Is Weldon Kees America's Greatest Forgotten Poet?" In thesame year the Sheldon organized a modest exhibition of Kees's art-work curated by the director, Norman Geske, and which provided theoccasion for a conference focusing on Kees's unique contribution.

Gioia edited and introduced Kees's short stories in a 1984 publi-cation entitled The Ceremony and Other Stories (Port Townsend WA:Graywo}f Press, 1984). In 1985 Jim Elledge edited A Critical hntroduc-tion to Weldon Kees (Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985), which con-sisted of a number of essays by various contributors on aspects ofKees's poetry. Kees's unpublished play The Waiting Room was pub-lished in the Prairie Schooner in 1986, the same year that Robert Knolledited and annotated Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Let-

ters 1935-1955 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), a bookthat provided significant insight into Kees's art and life through anexamination of his voluminous correspondence, most of it in the

archive at the Bennett Martin Library. Two years later, James Reidel

edited Kees's art and cultural criticism (Weldon Kees: Reviews and

Essays, 1936-1955 [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988]).In 1990, Reidel edited and introduced Kees's unpublished novel FallQuarter (Brownsville OR: Story Line Press, 1990). Robert Niemi, whowrote a doctoral dissertation on Kees's fiction and librarian Daniel

Gillane collaborated on The Bibliography of Weldon Kees (Jackson MS:

Parrish House, 1997), which includes Gioia's essay reprinted in thispublication. More recently, Reidel has authored a comprehensive bi-ography that is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press inspring of 2003. And finally, the University of Nebraska Press is reprint-ing Gioia's collection of Kees's short stories, The Ceremony and OtherStories.

Kees's art and life defy easy associations between his forays into thevarious forms of artistic expression that interested him and his com-

plex life. Born on 24 February 1914 in Beatrice, Nebraska, Kees gradu-ated with a degree in English from the University of Nebraska in 1935.While there he worked on a WPA Federal Writers' Project, from 1936 to1937, and came under the influence of Lowry Wimberly, who had

established the Prairie Schooner in 1927. The Prairie Schooner providedKees with his first publishing opportunities (as it did Mari Sandoz anda host of other emerging writers on the Plains in the mid-thirties).While in Lincoln, from 1934 to 1939, Kees published nine short sto-ries. In 1939 Kees left Lincoln for the University of Denver, where hereceived training as a librarian. While in Denver he served as a li-

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X DANIEL A. SIEDELL Editor's Introduction xi

brarian and acting director for the Bibliographic Center for Researchof the Rocky Mountain Region.

Kees moved to New York City in 1943 and that same year his firstbook of poetry appeared in print, published by Colt Press and entitledThe Last Man. From 1943 to 1948 Kees worked for Paramount NewsService. In 1947 Kees's second book of poetry, The Fall of the Magicians,was published. One year later, Kees enjoyed the first of four solo ex-hibitions of his paintings and collages at the Peridot Gallery. By thelate forties, Kees's reputation as an art and cultural critic was substan-

tial enough for him to be asked to succeed Clement Greenberg as theart critic for The Nation, which he did from 1949 to 1950.

In sg5s Kees moved to San Francisco, where he continued to paint,make collages, and write poetry and cultural criticism, but he alsoexplored music, theater, and film. He composed music with Turk Mur-phy and William Heick, arranging and composing a musical score forThe Adventures of Jimmy. Kees had a solo show of his paintings andcollages at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1951 and in1952 completed his first film, Hotel Apex, which was reviewed quitefavorably by The Nation critic Manny Farber. In 1954 Kees publishedyet another book of poetry, entitled Poems rp47-zg54. From 1952 to1955 he produced six films on communication with anthropologistGregory Bateson and psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch, culminating in abook entitled Nonverbal Communica'hon: Notes o?'l the Visual Percep-tion of Human Relations and published by the University of CaliforniaPress in 1956. In 1955, the year of his disappearance, Kees produced ThePoet's Follies, a vaudevillian theater production that celebrated andpoked fun at both high and low culture. He also started work on ahaunting film called The Bridge, which consisted of imagery of theGolden Gate Bridge combined with the narrator reading Hart Crane' spoem, "The Bridge." After Kees's suicide, Heick finished the film,which, because of its subject matter and the fact that Crane himself

had committed suicide by leaping off a bridge, provides a suitablyambiguous ellipsis to Kees's art and life.

Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury is an attempt to bring to-gether a selection of perspectives on Kees's diverse artistic activities

with a particular emphasis on his participation in the midcentury artworld. Although this marks the end of a decade-long project, I antici-pate that this will be only the beginning of a revisionist history of

postwar American art and culture, within which Kees will play anincreasingly important role.

In "Midcentury Cultural Milieu," art historian Dore Ashton, au-thor of the first "cultural history" of the New York School, The NewYork School: A Cultural Reckoning (1973), lays out the cultural frame-work within which Kees's activities as an artist must be interpreted.

Art historian Irving Sandler, author of the first authoritative historyof Abstract Expressionism ( The Triumph of American Painting [1970] ),explores Kees's role as one of the forgotten "Irascibles," that group ofAbstract Expressionist artists who authored a protest letter to theMetropolitan Museum of Art in 1951. Art critic B. H. Friedman ad-dresses the aesthetic diversity of Kees's paintings, referring to himas a "polyartist." In "The Silent Film of Weldon Kees," poet and Keeshistorian James Reidel analyzes a little-known component of Kees'sinvolvement in the visual arts: his silent films. I explore an often-overlooked part of his activities in "The Art Criticism of WeldonKees," but one that is fundamental to understanding how his literaryand visual work fit together. In "Late Modernism and the Minor Lit-erature of Weldon Kees's Poetry," literary historian Nicholas Spen-cer analyzes Kees's poetry within the framework of the modernism-postmodernism dialectic. Poet and critic Dana Gioia contributes "TheCult of Weldon Kees," an important essay that is being reprinted in arevised version courtesy of the author. Foster' s provocative essay stepsback from the specific arguments of this publication and surveys theintellectual landscape, raising additional questions for further explo-ration, particularly Kees's relationship to the historical avant-garde.

This book would not have been possible without the assistance andsupport of the University of Nebraska Press, which has played animportant role in the study of Kees' s art and life. I would like to thankthe Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors, LincolnCity Libraries, Lincoln, Nebraska, for granting permission for the es-sayists to quote directly from previously unpublished correspondence.Thanks are due also to the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and PerformingArts for funding to defray costs associated with reproducing images. Iwould also like to express my appreciation to Janice Driesbach, direc-tor of the Sheldon, for allowing me, from time to time, the oppor-tunity to divert my energies from my museum responsibilities to thisprotect. I would also like to express my gratitude to my mentor, intel-

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lectual role model, and friend, Stephen C. Foster, who gave me theopportunity to take a more proactive role in this project. I was fortu-nate to have the help of curatorial interns Elaine Leonard and JudeGustafson for important assistance at early stages of this project.

Finally, this book would not have been possible without the supportof those enthusiasts of Kees's visual and literary work who have la-bored for decades to keep his memory alive. To all of you, who havefaithfully and enthusiastically advanced the cause of Weldon Kees,I dedicate this book.

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Daniel A. Siedell

CHAPTER FOUR

The Art Criticism

of Weldon Kees

For Robert Knoll, teacher and friend

The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventionalbut to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on,not standing still.-Edward W. Said, "Intellectual Exile: Expatriates andMarginals"

Introduction

Weldon Kees did wonderful things with words. His contribution topostwar American culture begins first as a poet and short story writer.But it does not end there. What makes him unique in the history of

arts and letters in the twentieth century were his sustained and quite

successful forays into visual media such as painting, collage, film, and

photography. Far from being merely dabblings or diversions to occupyhim between literary projects, he took his visual work very seriouslyand consequently made significant contributions to the visual arts

during the decade or so in which he was engaged in them.Kees began painting in 1943 and later in the decade he was exhibit-

ing regularly at the Peridot Gallery in New York and had developedfriendships with William Baziotes, Hans Hofmann, Clement Green-berg, Robert Motherwell, Harold Rosenberg, and other key partici-pants in the New York avant-garde. By the early fifties he was makingcollages. His emerging collage aesthetic found a significant outlet inhis experimental films, particularly Hotel Apex. Kees continued his

interest in photography and film after moving to the San FranciscoBay Area, where he worked on films and photography for a book

on nonverbal communication written by anthropologist Gregory

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76 DANIEL A. SIEDE[L

The Art Criticism of Weldon Kees 77Bateson and psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch. His last work of visual art, afilm entitled The Bridge, was left unfinished at the time of his disap-pearance in 1955.

Although Kees took his visual work very seriously, it is difficult toassess how it relates to his literary activities, if at all. It is quite possiblethat Kees considered his visual and ltterary work to be somehow sepa-rate but more or less equal. Kees's close friend, painter Fritz Bultman,observed, "One reason that Weldon liked painting is that he felt it tobe open and less controlled by editors-revtewers."1 This essay assertsthat a productive place to begin to explore these connections is one ofhis activities that actually bridges the "visual" and "Iiterary" compo-nents of his creative work, art criticism.

By its very nature art criticism is a literary genre that attempts tomake (literary) sense of visual art. It thus was perfectly suited, ttseems, to interest Kees. An examination of his art criticism makesclear the important debt that modernism in the visual arts owes tomodernist literary criticism. It is in this context that Kees's art criti-cism achieves significance. Moreover, Kees's art criticism is an indica-tor of his own complex views of culture, which underwrote all hiscreative work.

But Kees ' s art criticism is worth analysis not merely because it offersinsights into his own artistic vision or is a key to a better understand-ing of midcentury American art. It also reveals a perspective derivedfrom his literary vocation and his intimate knowledge of the art worldthat makes a significant and unique contribution to the history ofpostwar art criticism. This perspective, nourished by a tragic vision,allowed Kees to produce significant critical perspectives in one of themost important periods in this country's cultural history. Kees's artcriticism embodies the ideals of the critical spirit.2

Postwar Art Criticism and the New York School

In the late forties, the poet and critic Randall Jarrell published an essayentitled "The Age of Criticism," in which he argued that the twentiethcentury has been dominated by criticism, which he contrasted withthe creative spirit of previous centuries.-' Whether or not one agreeswith Jarrell's pessimistic assessment, it is undeniable that criticism -both of literature and the visual arts - has mushroomed in the second

p,l1f of the twentieth century, becoming its own discipline within the::ca'demy. Within the context of the visual arts, the professionaliza-;on of art criticism can be traced to the so-called triumph of Ameri-(,1H-painting at midcentury, which also included the triumph of theJnstitutional structures characteristic of the contemporary American3rt world, including art criticism."-At midcentury, art criticism provided the necessary discourse tode;onstrate both Abstract Expressionism's "avant-gardism" and?conservatism," thus attaching it to the progressive display institu-ti;ns such as the influential "uptown" commercial galleries, the Mu-seum of Modern Art (i.e., the "tradition of the new"), the prolifera-tion of art review publications ( i.e., the quest for the new) , those moreconservative institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art;;d-the Whitney Museum of American Art ( i.e., the "authority of the;ecursor"), and academia. Midcentury art criticism, particularlythat of Clement Greenberg, succeeded in making avant-garde art mar-ketable from a commercial and museum exhibition standpoint and;uitable for academic study. The emergence of the academic disciplineof art history, as distinct from departments of archaeology and themethods of connoisseurship and the growth of graduate programsand university art museums throughout the country in the late fiftiesand early sixties, was facilitated through the professionalization of acertain form of midcentury art criticism that could treat contempo-rary art with the same rigor as traditional art. s

This "triumph" of art criticism, as it were, was expedited through acritical rivalry between Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg,which intensified after the latter republished his most influential es-say, "The American Action Painters" (Art News 1952), in The Tvaditionof-the New (1959). Greenberg responded with his own-radicallyr:evised - and'extremely influential collected criticism entitled Art andCulture (1961).6 This rivalry focused considerable attention on therole and function of art criticism, so much so that Greenberg virtuallystopped writing art reviews and focused instead, for nearly twenty-fiveyears, on dogmatically asserting, through essays, lectures, and inter-views, what art criljcism should be while criticizing Rosenberg's phi-losophy. This rivalry between Rosenberg and Greenberg wove the theo-retical into the fabric of the practical and has shaped the histori-ography of postwar American art criticism. Greenberg's dogmatism

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78 DANIEL A. SIEDELLThe Art Criticism of Weldon Kees 79

prevailed and Art and Culture serves as the foundation upon which thediscipline of art criticism is founded.

The emergence of postwar American art criticism as an academicdiscipline did not simply derive from or grow out of the art itself, ,15commonly assumed, but by appropriating available strategies, meta-phors, and narratives from Anglo-American literary criticism of theearly twentieth century. 1/Vhile modern art struggled to gain a foot-hold in the United States, American letters excelled in the early twen-tieth century, with such poets as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wtlltam Car-los Williams, Hart Crane, and writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and ErnestHemingway, not to mention other important writers in the Englishlanguage, such as James Joyce, who all pushed literature's limits.Moreover, writers such as Eliot, Pound, and Williams and other prac-ticing critics working under the rubric of the "New Criticism," createda literary tradition of both artistic and critical production that pro-vided a strong and seductive model for those intellectuals seeking toargue the significance of American art at midcentury. The New Criti-cal influence is most clear in the writing of Clement Greenberg, whoincluded a book review of T. S. Eliot in Art and Culture and who wastnfluenced by New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley's opposition to thefallacies of "intention" and "affection." But unlike literary critics,the midcentury art world lacked the strong presence of artist-criticswho could provide the same critical insights of Pound, Eliot, andWilliams.

The close relationship between art and literary criticism at midcen-tury reveals the important fact that art criticism, despite its focus onthe visual arts, is a literary genre, and thus, as a creative art form, bearsa much closer resemblance to literature than the visual arts it at-tempts to interpret. The development of criticism as a distinct literarygenre has its origins in the history of modernism. Criticism was themeans by which intellectuals engaged in defining modernism's valuesin the public arena. The history of art criticism (as exemplified byKees ) must be understood within this broader history of criticism. Theemergence of art criticism as a distinct genre of criticism in the nine-teenth century is evidence that articulators of the modernist yisionrecognized that the visual arts could serve an important purpose forthe cultural politics of modernism. (Since the late eighteenth century,the annual salons in Paris were occasions for intellectuals to use the

yisuat 3rts to explore contemporary issues.) Many writers and publicintellectuals recognized that the visual arts and other forms of visual;ulture could serve as potent symbols for a new vision of social, cul-tural, and pplitical direction. Critics appropriated art for their owndiverse purposes and agendas. These critics were not professional artinterpreters, art historians, or the like, but poets, novelists, essayists,and pamphleteers. They were "amateurs" and it is this amateurism, astawara w. Said has asserted, that gave their criticism texture andenergy.7 Moxeover, it also made the art they wrote about appear to beaeeply engaged not merely with the techniques of the "Good, theTru'e,-and the Beautiful" as presided over by the art academies but,following Baudelaire's dictum of the critic being "passionate, politi-cal, and partisan," with the most vital social, cultural, and politicalrelevance.

This admittedly brief and cursory rehearsal of the complex historiesof criticism and art criticism is relevant because those who wrote artcriticism at midcentury were writing in a context without the clearprofessional and disciplinary boundaries that developed in subse-quent decades. These critics were poets and essayists who were en-gaged in writing criticism from a broad cultural perspective and whosesuccess was defined through creating and sustaining a readership, nottenure. Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg began writing cul-tural and political criticism in the mid-xg3os while writing poetry. Andalthough Greenberg abandoned his poetry (and rejected the "poetic"and "rhetorical" in art criticism), Rosenberg continued to write po-etry (while affirming the "poetic" and "rhetorical" in his criticism).Ultimately, the poetic was rejected by the academy in the aftermath ofthe Greenberg-Rosenberg debates.

Moreover, the literary bent of Rosenberg and Greenberg made thework of the New Critics and the dynamic tradition of Anglo-Americanmodernist poetry they wrote about an appealing model for art criticalpractice. The New Critics' Enlightenment agenda was to make ad-vanced literature accessible to all who could read, despite gender, cul-tural, racial, and other differences. This "democratic vision" (or uni-versalization of culturally specific skills) helped ensconce the study ofliterature in colleges and universities through criticism by transform-ing literary studies from the "romantic" biographical and historicalmethod to the more "scientific" method of the New Criticism, which

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8o DANIEL A. SIEDELLThe Art Criticism of Weldon Kees 8i

focused exclusively on the objective meaning in the text itself, eschew-ing both the author's and reader's intentions. The New Criticism ;dthe d3mamic tradition of modernist Anglo-American poetry had b;tHachieved international recognition and thus served as models f;rwriters concerned to articulate an authentic American avant-gard6movement in the visual arts at midcentury. It is therefore not su;prisIing that when recounting his own development as an art critic,aMI-chael Fried chose to emphasize his poetic background and connectionto the New Criticism, having studied poetry with the New Critic R. P,Blackmur at Princeton as an undergraduate.8

Kees and the Visual Arts at MidcenturyIt was into this rich foment of aesthetic and critical energy thatWeldon Kees found himself when he moved to New York in ig43.9 As ;published poet and writer of fiction, Kees found an audience of writer:who respected his work, writers such as Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe,Mary McCarthy, and Dwight Macdonald, among others, who-formedthe nucleus of the so-called New York Intellectuals, those writers ofpredominantly Jewish identity whose interest in art, iculture, and poli?tics gravitated around Parhsan Review.1o Among the New York In-tellectuals with whom Kees became acquainted were the art criticsHarold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg.

Although his art criticism is an important extension of his literarywork, Kees's experience as a painter also played a significant role, nootonly because it gave him authority in the art world but because it'gavehis art criticism a texture that distinguished it from those not prac-ticing the arts about which they wrote. Kees really did function a-s theartist-critic that the advanced art community had lacked. Kees ex-hibited his work widely, enjoying four solo shows at New York's Per-idot Gallery from 1948 to 1951. He had a painting selected for the 1949Whitney Annual and was included by Robert Motherwell, a year later,in "Black or White," an exhibition featuring American and Europeanpainters such as Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hofm-ann,Joan Mir6, Piet Mondrian, Robert Motherwell, and Picasso, amongothers, held at the Kootz Gallery. Kees was also included in a numbe;of other group shows that identified him as a participant in the "new"American painting. In 1951, NOV. 1949 (now called The Wall) was

(eproduced in the publication Modern Artists in America, edited bymobert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and Bernard Karpel and published5y Wittenborn and Schultz. Even Clement Greenberg, in private cor-respondence in 'ig78, recalled that he liked Kees's work and told him5(i ;ften.11 In a postcard to Kees in 1948 Greenberg complementedpim on his first solo show and apologized for not being able to re-yiew it.12

But it was not simply his painting that put him in the center of the6merging New York School community of visual arts. Kees also or-ganized the Forum 4g lecture series during the summer months inProvincetown, where Kees, Fritz Bultman, Hofmann, and many otherartists spent their summers. The events consisted of lectures on paint-iHg, jazz, politics, literature, and a host of other topics that ClementGreenberg called one of the more exciting events outside New York.13

Kees then participated in a three-day closed conference in 1950,which effectively ended the activities of the Studio 35 artists' school.One of the more important meetings of this period, it included suchadvanced artists as Willem de Kooning, William Baziotes, LouiseBourgeois, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman,and others. Alfred H. Barr Jr., of the Museum of Modern Art, was theonly nonartist invited to participate. The proceedings were subse-quently edited and published in Modern Artists in America and have be-come an important document of the burgeoning New York School.l4Unfortunately, Kees is represented with only two contributions to thediscussions.

Kees also found himself in the midst of perhaps the most famousarts controversy of the 1950S, the so-called Irascibles Manifesto.Spurred by the Metropolitan Museum's juried exhibition "AmericanPainting Today - 1950," which gave short shrift to those artists work-ing in modern aesthetic vocabularies, Kees was one of eighteen artiststo sign his name to a letter written to Roland L. Redmond, president ofthe museum. This episode was memorialized in a famous photographby Life Magazine that featured the so-called Irascibles, including Jack-son Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Motherwell, de Kooning, and others.However, Kees was not present for the photograph.15

Although he appreciated the freedom of painting and the auton-omy it granted him in contrast to his writing, Kees's contribution tothe New York School cannot be assessed solely through his studio

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82 DANIEL A. SIEDELLThe Art Criticism of Weldon Kees 83

work.16 He brought immense culture to the coalescing community @favant-garde art. Kees's contributions, although modest and subtle incontrast to others, nonetheless were important. And although g(2(25himself was absent from the famous Life Irascibles photograph, whicphas become an icon of American avant-gardism at midcentury, hispresence in the controversy, as we will see below, warrants proper due,In short, like the photograph, Kees had a significant and unique pres-ence in the midcentury vanguard art world even though his image isabsent from most histories of the period.

Kees as Literary Critic

Kees's absent presence is revealed in Brushes with History: Writfng onArt from The Nation: r865-zoor, a collection of art reviews that haveappeared in The NationF Although two reviews of Kees's are includedin the anthology, they receive no notice from critic Jonathan Wein-berg in his review of the book, which focuses predominately on Clem-ent Greenberg. He argues, "The writings of Greenberg dominate thisanthology, not by their breadth or erudition but by their clarity andsense of mission."18 Weinberg continues, "When Greenberg left,it took ten years for The Nahon to find an adequate replacement, inthe less doctrinaire Fairfield Porter."19 However, when Greenberg re-signed from The Nation in 1948 to whom did the magazine turn tosucceed one of the most popular and avidly read art critics? WeldonKees. It is precisely because of Greenberg's "clarity and sense of mis-sion," a mission that included professional dominance, that Kees'sown work, the epitome of "breadth" and "erudition," has been forgot-ten. Although his was a short tenure of two years, Kees's appointmentas art critic for the distinguished periodical implied that his reputa-tion as a critic was considerable. And despite the fact that he lackedGreenberg's "clarity and sense of mission" (read "ideology"), theyears of his involvement with The Nation (1949-50) were stimulatingand dynamic times for the contemporary art world and his criticalvoice was an important contribution. Many commentators havecalled this period "the turning point" of the postwar American artworld.2o And Kees was one of the critical voices active at this moment.Despite his short career, I(ees's art criticism is significant because itembodies certain ideals of criticism that were subsequently sacrificed

to the altar of professionalization. In short, the perceived "clarity"';lHdJ::'asense of mission" of these writings is due in large part to an:'('ademy -that owes its very existence to its embrace of Greenberg'syalues.2l

'What follows is an overview of Kees' s criticism and an evaluation ofwhat'makes-it a significant contribution to midcentury critical dis-co;se-+-a discourse that has been largely reduced to variations on'Gre'e'nberg's ideological themes. (If Greenberg functions as a foil to;ees-in -tl-is essay it is because the standards for evaluating postwarA?;erican-art criticism are largely Greenberg's. Moreover, Kees ad-'mirem 6reenberg' s aesthetic perspective and followed in his shadow atThe Nation.)

aTh:W 'doesanot mean that Kees was less passionate or polemical thanGrWnberg. To the contrary, he had a tremendous stake in the midcen-?'Hry avan;garde community. But his was as a practicing artist as wella;-a'n-outside commentator or observer, thus giving voice to an activity:n-which he was himself deeply engaged. Kees's criticism, then, iswritten fn a different key. It is the voice of a participant in the artis-tic-activities of the midcentury art world. Kees's mission as a criticseemed',ln Said's words, "to advance human freedom and knowl-;d,e*;iz:!a In contrast, by the time of Kees's disappearance, Green-b;rg had become obsessed with institutional power and gaining afoothold in the academic and market establishments. Although Keeswas drawn to the visual arts because of its relative freedom, he waslikewise drawn to criticism for similar reasons. It was an activity in;hich he could marshal all his intellectual resources and substantialc'ulWre-in the service of celebrating and indulging his creative andcritical freedom, thus making positive use of his status as an exile.

Although he had been writing art criticism only since 1946, Keeshad written literary criticism since his student days in the mid-xq3os,which demonstrated the seriousness with which he took the critic' srole and responsibility. Kees' s early criticism is distinguished by severalcharacteristics that contribute significantly to the texture and timbreof his art criticism in the forties-. First, Kees possessed a deep knowl-edge of the history of modern literature. Alfred Kazin has observedthat Kees "was un'believably well informed on the smallest details ofmodernist literature, eagerly presented himself as a walking encyclo-pedia on every little 'magazine eVer published between Reykjavik and

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84 DANIEL A. SIEDELLThe Art Caticism of Weldon Kees 85

Pinsk. He was a poet who desperately wanted to be famous, to be 'upthere,' as he used to say, with Eliot, Pound, and other stars in ourfirmament."23 This sophistication and ambition formed the ric;foundation upon which he drew for his art writing and is characterisItic of all his criticism. His introduction in The American Guide (f'%yYork: Hastings House, 1949) reveals the depth of his understandi'ng ofthe history of American literature.24 An important part of Kees's critiIcism is the conviction that the artist-the creative producer-is re-sponsible to participate in the criticism of his aesthetic craft. Andtherefore Kees's criticism reflects the breadth of his many creativeendeavors. His criticism of the visual arts, film, poetry, short fiction,film, and jazz emerges out of his engagement in 'the p;actjce-of ;h::s'eart forms. And his knowledge of the history and theory of each ofthese art forms is considerable. For example, Kees's understanding offiction enables him to assess the importance of William Carlos Wil-liams's fiction, which had been ignored at the expense of his poetry.25

This deep historical knowledge gives his criticism an irenic spiritthat allows him to resist ideological fashions while remaining "pas-sionate, partisan, and political." Even his student criticism reveals anantidogmatic bent as well as a desire to take every thought captive tothe creative and critical spirit. His first work of criticism, a review ofJames T. Farrell's literary criticism, reveals his disappointment with a"sectarian" form of Leftism that uses art as an instrument of politics.Although he was no doubt a fellow traveler and sympathizer of theLeft, he was not ideologically motivated and devoted more space tocriticism of his own political community than he did to those aes-thetic and political positions on the other side of the aisle. In an earlyessay, Kees asserts: "Sectarianism is probably unavoidable during aperiod of economic upheaval, but the impact of hastily digested theo-ries on some critics of the political Left was so strongly felt that manylost what little integrity they had, and came out with statements onliterature that were breathtaking in their stupidity. "26 Kees's criticismreveals a sophisticated distance, an ability to remain engaged but toresist intellectual fads that is indicative of a writer and thinker willingto risk marginalization. Kees begins another review by criticizing cur-rent critical practices: "One way to judge a writer-if you are inter-ested in one-way judgments, as a lot of critics seem to be these days - ison the basis of how much he keeps himself out of the picture. "27

,Another important characteristic of Kees's criticism is his humor,yhich is a rhetorical weapon that he deploys brilliantly to critiquethose who take themselves too seriously and to signal his indepen-dence from institutional power. Kees chides a poet for being "Black-;urish" (a reference to New Critic and academic poet R. P. Blackmur);nd for being "more than a part-time member of what we call the Cultof the Superfluous Exdamation Point."28 In a 1937 review of a re-cent work-of fiction by Morley Callaghan, Kees observes: "It has beenpointea out somewhere that Callaghan is entirely free of the influence'of Hemingway, whom Callaghan was accused of imitating. A littlemore of Hemingway's influence would be a 'fine thing for Callaghan:H these days when he writes of a man going downstairs with a 'ahumble eagerness.' You wouldn't catch Hemingway letting anyone godownstairs with a humble eagerness."29 As a twenty-three-year-oldstudent, Kees's humor is just right to score his critical points aboutthe importance of learning from tradition. Elsewhere Kees quips, "Itwould seem that the paper shortage we hear so much about is lessworrisome than we have been led to believe. "3o But perhaps the mostremarkable example of his humor is found in his review of MurielRukeyser's collection of poetry, published in Partisan Review in 1942.It consists of one sentence: "There's one thing you can say aboutMuriel: she's not lazy."31 Such a shockingly pithy statement couldonly have come from a mature critic who is bent on resisting, as Saidsays, "accommodation, yea-saying, settling in."32 And moreover, thefreedom with which he moved around and about various art forms isexpressed most completely, to my mind, in his criticism, a vehicle ofliterary expression that not only integrates the visual and the literary,words and images, but also celebrates the iconoclasm and individual-ism of the critic as a perpetual outsider. His use of humor was astrategy to preserve this freedom, this detachment from "centralizingauthorities," which he seemed to resent in just about every manifesta-tion. Like his interest in painting, Kees was no doubt drawn to crit-icism because of the relative freedom it granted him, a freedom frompublishers to indulge his natural outsider status as a small-town Mid-westerner, who could move around in the most elite of circles on theEast and West Coasts, but who could never feel completely at home.

His humor is also used to express another important characteristicof his critical yoice: his frustration with the current state of "ad-

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86 DANIEL A. SIEDELL The Art Crihcism of Weldon Kees 87

vanced" aesthetic activities and the negative impact that the emergingindustries, such as academia and marketing, have had on them. Kee:'regards Henry Miller to be indicative of this malaise. In a review of oneof Miller's novels for Tiger's Eye in sg48, Kees writes, "A considerableamount of Henry Miller' s appeal - chiefly to the young of all ages whoform his cult (their older brothers eagerly awaited new issues of th6American Mercury under Mencken) - springs from his preservation ofhimself as a twenties literary expatriate, complete with standard per-sonality fixtures, during a time of pervasive extinction of personality,willed and unwilled, among American writers."33 And in an analys:sof "little magazines" published four years earlier in Partisan Review in1944, Kees opines, "There is a good deal to be said against the intellec-tual product of the twenties; yet those writers who established them-selves in that period, and who still exist, reminding us occasionallyof creatures from another age - Cummings, Eliot, Stevens, Williams,etc. - remain our most gifted avant-garde contributors. The competi-tion from those who followed is a sporadic affair only. If that wasa Wasteland and they were the Lost Generation, then what is thismoldy milieu in which we find ourselves; and what are we?"-"' Al-though Kees admires the literary contribution of the twenties he rec-ognizes that the rise of literary criticism as an academic pursuit, theexplosion of book publishing, and the rise of the "culture industry"tended to idealize this period, leaving the current generation withouta vital literary avant-garde even while the barometers of such achieye-ment-criticism, book publishing, and even the "little magazine" -were thriving.

Although as a writer of prose and verse with ambitions to be "upthere in the firmament" with the likes of Pound and Eliot, his crit-icism displayed an interest in a wide array of subjects, from %azz, filmand popular culture to literature, politics, and the visual arts, oftenwritten in different critical voices, from one-liners and fictional con-versations to more ideologtcally driven pronouncements of value(e.g., "Dr. Williams is quite simply the finest craftsman writing prosein America today" ).35 And unlike subsequent artist-critics like RobertMotherwell, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd, Kees did not use hisplatform to serve his own aesthetic ends. Reaffirrning the diversity ofhis subjects and critical voices was the fact that he wrote for a varietyof venues, from more elite journals like Partisan Review, the New

[2puM7c, and The Nation to more popular publications, like the New'l:o;k Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and Time.

Kees as Art Critic

?3y the time he was asked by the painter Byron Browne in 1946 to write":yi' :-nterpretive announcement for his solo exhibition at the Samuel;oo't;-Gallery, Kees was an experienced critic with a sophisticatedWitical voice,-not to mention a published poet well known to the NewYork intelligentsia. These literary achievements gave Kees authority asan-a'rt critic that was unique in the New York avant-garde art commu-Wq.- Moreover, Kees's involvement occurred as an insider, as onewhose significance would be evaluated on the basis of his painting,not his c;iticism. Kees most definitely understood his art criticism as;ound and Eliot understood their literary criticism, as natural out-growths of the practice of their aesthetic craft."-;hese uniqu; qualities are on display in Kees's essay on RobertMotherwell, published in the Magazine ofArt in 1948 on the occasion;f-Motherwe-ll's exhibition at the Kootz Gallery. In this short article,Kees introduced his work within the context of the great literary mod-Wnist Gustave Flaubert: "The beliefs to which the most advancedp-ainters of our own time give their allegiance were foreshadowed byaFlaubert."36 Kees quotes Flaubert: " 'What I should like to write is abook about nothing at all, a book which would exist by virtue of themere internal strength of its style. . . . A book which would exist byyirtue of the mere internal strength of its style.' " "This," Kees thenobserves, "is the literary equivalent of the canvases of Robert Mother-well." He thus placed Motherwell in a literary context that was at oncemodernist and-French. And because he understood the history anddevelopment of modern literature, Kees was able to extend the literaryand visual relationships in much greater depth than other critics. Akey component for Kees, as it was for Clement Greenberg and the NewCritics, was art's autonomy, Kees begins his analysis of Motherwell'sexhibition in this way. "Painting should be music. Painting should beliterature. Painting should be propaganda, an anecdote or an arrowpointing to a path of salvation. . . . These were, on various occasions,the beliefs of the past. They are also the beliefs of your Aunt Cora,the people next door, half Fifty-seventh Street, and Mr. Truman."

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88 DANIEL A. SIEDELL The Art Criticism of Weldon Kees 89

But painting, like great literature, is about its own media. For just asthe Symbolist poet Mallarm6 reportedly informed the painter EdgarDegas that poetry consisted of words not ideas, Kees states that "[i?BMotherwell, however, a new kind of subject matter becomes manifest,It is paint itself. The paintings are quite simply 'about' paint." Keescontinues, "They are objects from their own world, and that world isthe world of paint."

Interestingly, Kees and Greenberg's approaches to celebrating art'sautonomy differed. Kees deployed an in-depth understanding of themechanics of modern literature-and its criticism-and sought tosearch out places in the art world where artists were likewise con-cerned with these mechanics. Greenberg, on the other hand, mOStnotably in his essays "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939) and "Towards ;1Newer Laocoon" (1940), theorized the autonomy of the modernistarts through a quasi-Kantian view of aesthetic judgment and a quasi-Hegelian view of the march of history that, nonetheless, still reliedheavily on the contributions of the New Criticism.37

For Kees, Motherwell's art manifests the "tensions," "divisions,"and "schism in the mind that comprises so much of our modernity."On the one hand, the "ranged recklessness, savagery, chance-taking,the accidental" and on the other, "refinement, discrimination, cal-culation, taste." In the end, it is this tension, expressed in "continualencounters and contests," that is the real subject of Motherwell'swork and the reason for his significance. This essay sketched out themain contours of Kees's thought regarding not only how to approachthe new modern painting in New York critically but also how to en-gage in its practice as well. Kees would look to Motherwell and an-other manifestation of "advanced" art, Hans Hofmann, as major in-fluences in his own development as a visual artist. It is significantthat Motherwell deeply appreciated Kees's perspective and referredto that piece, many years later, as one of the first and best reviews ofhis work.38

Even Kees's brief notice for Byron Browne's exhibition at Kootzreflects similar interests that characterize his critical voice. Kees laudsBrowne because of the artist's ability to resist the temptation to settleinto a comfortable "period" style in order to continue to explore.Hovgever, Kees lauds his recent work not simply because it is "new" butbecause it exists in dynamic relation to his previous efforts, "along

yith him he drags the best of his past."39 In addition to praisingByowne's successful risk taking, Kees praises his "delight in the physi-(31 qualities of paint." This "delight" puts Browne into the vicinity ofMotherwell's modernist project.

In 1949 Kees published in Partisan Review a review of ClementGreenberg's monograph on the Spanish modernist Joan Mir6. In itKees offers analysis of both Mir6's contribution and Greenberg's criti-cal perspective. Kees again relies on literary modernism as a criticalyocabulary for assessing the significance of modernist art. "Mir6, is,in a sense, the first Imagist in modern painting. The Imagists fixed onexactitude, precision, bareness of statement as methods for dealingwith a carefully defined and controlled subject matter . . . Mir6 hasarrived at painterly equivalents." Although he does not see modernistpainting aspiring to be literature, Kees draws on the critical languageof modernist literature, particularly poetry, to demonstrate how thenew painting could be approached critically. Later, Kees would observeabout the work of his friend William Baziotes, "Without being in theleast literary, his work is saturated with scene, situation, movement,atmosphere, weather.""o

Kees also welcomes the opportunity to engage a more sustainedanalysis by Greenberg. "Freed from the commitments that accom-pany the reviewing of reputations unfixed, Greenberg writes here withgreater persuasion and density, and with what one might have pre-dicted in advance - an absence of those mixed reproofs, shiftings, andassured pinnings of blue ribbons that must necessarily, I suppose,mark the work of the only American critic regularly, seriously, andambitiously engaged in evaluating contemporary painting." Kees ' s ad-miration for Greenberg is, however, not uncritical. Kees's critiquederives from Greenberg's too-easy tendency to skimp on analysis andto declare winners and losers in the game of staying on pace with the"development of modernist painting." Although he attributes thislack on Greenberg' s part to the necessary evil of the critic's status andthe constraints of his medium, Kees is still disappointed by Green-berg's lack of depth, even though he concludes that it is "one of thebest summaries of a modern artist of which I know." He states, "Thereare penetrating, but for my liking, overbrief, analyses of Mir6's succes-sive manners and of numerous individual paintings." Kees continues,"Greenberg is in general so good on Mir6's painting that his remarks

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90 DANIEL A. SIEDEI.LThe Art Criticism of Weldon Kees 91

on Mir6 himself seem gratuitous and ill considered." Kees's main di5-pute with Greenberg's character assessment is that it downplayedMir6's status as an outsider in the face of an attempt by the critic toassimilate him. What Kees observed when he met the artist was thot"on more than one occasion during his New York visit, Mir6's silenceand indifference provided some genuine and bona-fide bourgeois, whoare by more than anything repelled by those who refuse to communi-cate or fit in, with moments of real discomfort." It is unavoidable t@speculate that what Kees observed in Mir6 was what Kees himselfexperienced in the face of the bourgeois establishment, an establish-ment that Greenberg was certainly a part of, in some way, by 1949. Inretrospect, it is clear that Greenberg was not at all comfortable doingwhat Kees most wanted to see him do: focus sustained and rigorous at-tention on a single artist's work. Rather, Greenberg's influence layultimately in his ability to offer "overbrief" assessment, shorthandindicators of an analytic rigor nowhere present, in favor of a meta-narrative of modern art.

Two months later Kees published another book review for PartisanReview, focusing on recently published monographs on Max Weberand Hans Hofmann that accompanied exhibitions at the WhitneyMuseum of American Art and the Addtson Gallery of American Art,respectively. Kees uses these monographs to contrast Weber and Hof-mann' s modernism. For Kees, Weber embodies an academic modern-ism, in which his early works were "inferior and off-register reproduc-tions of their French originals" and his recent canvases "are merelythin and embarrassing caricatures of Cubism."41 While Kees charac-terized Weber's career as "coasting on a plateau," he regards Hof-mann's to be "a slow uphill walk, climaxed by a spectacular spurt tothe finish line." For Kees, "Hofmann's importance lies in his unre-mitting insistence on the seriousness and self-sufficiency of plas-tic expression and in his insight into the nature of abstract order -insight that has never become hardened into blocks of modernistorthodoxy."

Kees notes that both artists were exposed to the "same exhilaratingforce in Paris" but that while Weber moved quickly to copy and assimi-late, a move that has ultimately left him with little else creatively,Hofmann moved "ponderously, experimenting and studying for yearsin his search for a highly personal way of seeing." As Kees observed, it

is inspiring "to see a man of Hofmann's years producing, with suchpassion and joy and inventiveness, his finest canvases. One thinks ofYeats, and Schweitzer."

Kees admired Hofmann' s art and his approach to his art immensely;indeed, a cursory comparison of Hofmann' s calligraphically renderedpaintings in the late forties to Kees' s own compositions shows that thisadmiration also consisted of a stylistic influence. But this admirationyvas not one-way. Hofmann also admired Kees's paintings and his skillas a poet, asking him to write a poem for his exhibition in 1949 in Parispt the Galerie Maeght (an exhibition organized by the Kootz Gallery).

Despite his respect for his criticism, Kees's does not reflect the ideo-logical narrowness that characterizes Greenberg's work, particularlyas revealed in the critic's revisions in Art and Culture. Rather thancraft a tightly constructed narrative in which the momentum of mod-ernist painting carries it swiftly through to its "logical development"(as assumed by Greenberg), Kees was not interested in detecting thebroad contours of the story line, but the specific cases where artistshave succeeded in taking "the slow uphill walk." Kees turns his criticalattention precisely to what he sees lacking in Greenberg' s reviews, thestruggle of the artist. Greenberg's "clarity and sense of mission," asWeinberg put it, seems to have had a tin ear for the subtle story lines ofthe difficulty of creation to which Kees was naturally sensitive, for itwas his identity as an artist, a poet, and a painter that shaped hiscritical perspective, not a diviner of "movements," "developments,"or other "directions."

On the occasion of two exhibitions of Alfred Maurer' s work ( at theWhitney and at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery), Kees discerns a "pro-found sadness in the painting of this talented and sensitive Americanartist." And like Weber, Maurer struggled to avoid the arid academi-cism that emerged when he engaged French modernism. Kees writes,"Only a few men, such as Marin and Demuth, possessed the centralityof purpose, the personal obsession, that spared them the fate of play-ing endless variations from a score composed by those whose domi-nance and control were largely overpowering. Considering the frus-trations of his life, the lack of acclaim, the many buried and bitteryears, it is a double triumph that Maurer, in his best paintings, brokethrough, however momentarily." It is this struggle to break throughfrom academicism to authentic and fresh aesthetic creation that

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92 DANIEL A. SIEDELL The Art Criticism of Weldon Kees g3

Kees's criticism sought to discern, no matter when it occurred, eVenif late in one's career and only briefly. Kees praises an exhibitionof Adolph Gottlieb's recent work by asserting, "This willingness tochange and experiment at a crucial stage of his career is perhaps themost important aspect of the most interesting show of this artist'swork in some years."42

Kees's first issue as staff critic for The Nation consisted of two or-ticles, one entitled "Dondero and Dada," which was "an effective,irony-laced attack" from 1949 on George A. Dondero, a Michigancongressman who was denouncing modern art as a Communist con-spiracy.43 Kees's response to Dondero's attacks was to launch his ownoffensive. The object of Kees's criticism is the relationship of art topolitics and, more particularly, the political use of art by the state. Hechides the politician for caring about the state of the art world only asa vehicle of politics, not for the sake of the survival of art or culture."Although the congressman has admitted he seldom visits an art gal-lery or museum, he has picked up a fairly wide range of aversions."="Kees also includes Dondero in a long list of politicians (those withwhom Dondero would be loath to identify as holding anything incommon) who have used art for political gain, namely Hitler, Stalin,and the dadaists. "Look, Mr. Dondero, art is not a weapon, no matterhow insistently you, the Nazis, and the Communists maintain that itis." Kees goes on to observe, "The fact that the nationalist academi-cism he approves is also the official and only permissible art under theStalinist dictatorship does not appear to trouble him at all." He alsoraises the rather humorous situation that the same artists Donderoaccuses of being "Communist" are precisely those that the Commu-nists attack as "bourgeois formalists" and "degenerate lackeys of adying capitalism." This bizarre situation strikes Kees as a quintessen-tially dadaist turn. "Now Mr. Dondero is something of a Dadaisthimself." In fact, he sees Dondero's public accusations not as exam-ples of statecraft or political discourse, but as aesthetic performancesinfluenced by the dadaist spectacle.

In contrast to this grandstanding in the public arena that uses"modern art" to serve political ends, Kees argues that the situation ismuch more complex and that in the midst of cultural politics, theintegrity of the artist's vocation is compromised. "As painters we haveno concern with politics; as men we are in the midst of them. Our

world entails a vast individual schizophrenia, and not to grasp this is5o-enter a community of dwarfs." Again, it is the critic' s responsibilityto 'reveal and reflect on the various difficulties and dichotomies thatnot only mark modern life, but the life of the modern artist. Thes:gnificance of this review is not lost on Raphael Rubinstein, who, in::ovsewinz The Nation anthology observes, "Greenberg may have beenl-f2r better critic than Kees, but it's hard to imagine him publiclychallenging a red-baiting Republican."45 The reason that it is difficultto see Greenberg embarking on the same course as Kees is that theformer was much more concerned about power. Greenberg's own;oves from Marxism to Trotskyism to anti-Stalinism to good oldestablishment liberalism appear much more as calculated maneuversto retain power than the revelation of any personal change in belief.Kees, on the other hand, manifested an anti-establishment perspec-tive as a student, looking askance at all forms of political dogmatism,and this remained with him even as he ascended to one of the morerespected and authoritative critical posts in the country.

A prevalent leitrnotif throughout Kees's writing during this pe-riod is his concern for what he observes to be a general cultural mal-aise that pervades not only larger culture but the contemporary artworld as well, a malaise that makes the kind of artistic exploration heyalues difficult to find and perhaps even more difficult to engageconsistently.

Kees begins his 7 January 1950 review tri this way. "The atmospherein art circles, here in New York at least, seems increasingly grayer, agood deal emptier than in years, and charged with stasis. . . . Thetorpor and despondency that have pervaded literary circles for sometime seem to have widened their area of saturation." This would ap-pear counterinhiitive given the "success" and "assimilation" of ad-vanced American painting of the last five years or so. But Kees con-tinues, "From an economic standpoint the activities of our advancedpainters must be regarded as either heroic, mad, or compulsive; thathave only an aesthetic justification and even this, one feels, has be-come increasingly meager." The major obstacle for Kees is not anignorant public so much as it is the "success" of the contemporary artworld, as the "advanced" art of the first two decades has becomehardened into an academy and a "look," a look that sells and a lookthat not only includes conservative figurative art but progressive ab-

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stract art as well. In a review of the recent work of Bradley WalkerTomlin, Kees observes that "[t]he middle-ground critic used to have ;1sizable stable of tasteful middle-ground painters in whose company fi(2felt comfortable and assured; now there are not so many to providecomfort and assurance, and they are growing fewer. There is the aVant-garde, and there is the great glowering world of the Academy. "46

It was becoming more difficult for Kees to navigate between the two,He feels compelled to assume this position because Tomlin, one ofthose "tasteful middle-ground painters" has become a "recent Convertto a manner of painting for which we still have no satisfactory name"and has come under fire by critics for his experimental forays. "But it isdispiriting to find all the critical notices I have seen on Tomlin's showworking overtime in questioning his altered manner." A certain kindof modernism has become a good investment, both economically andsyrnbolically, leaving less and less room for those artists, like 'romlin,Hofmann, Motherwell, and others, who are hard at work developingtheir own aesthetic vocabularies. The problem Kees sees is not outrightrejection, but assimilation and condemnation through faint praise,each conspiring to keep artists from moving beyond their signature"look." "If there was an heroic artist of the caliber of a van Gogh, 'hewould be "recognized," would show annually on Fifty-seventh Street,be stroked, complimented, sell a few canvases, go to cocktail parties,and be tamed. Not tamed too much, however.' " Kees's conclusion?"One is continually astounded that art persists at all in the face of somuch indifference, failure, and isolation."

Kees's first art review as The Na'Hon's art critic consisted of a reyiewof Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian's posthumous exhibition at theJanis Gallery, an exhibition that revealed the blessings and curses ofthe artist's significance. The Janis show proves for Kees that Mondriandid not develop in the "currently fashionable notion," that his careerwas not a "succession of methodically calculated upward steps -something along the line of nineteenth-century progress at its rosi-est. "47 The art world institution, perhaps facilitated by the Museum ofModern Art's 1945 posthumous retrospective, has taken the adventur-ism and risk from Mondrian and replaced it with the "logical conse-quences" of Cubism. This, according to Kees, has negatively impactedthe American art world. "Mondrian's influence has been, on thewhole, more restrictive than liberating. It has produced a vocal group

(if disciples and imitators." Kees no doubt has in mind some of theprtists of the American Abstract Artists Group (AAA) who were unitedin their distaste for Surrealism and their interest in exploring the

geometric abstract styles inherent in Cubist composition. "[H]is fol-lowers have glimpsed a mold rather than a suggestion," participatingiyi affirming the kind of art world that rewards certain modernist5tyles while penalizing the virtues of creativity, experimentation, andrisk that originally produced those styles in the first place.

In contrast to Mondrian, in which this artist's reputation has in-

creased disproportionately after his death, Kees discusses the work ofArmenian immigrant Arshile Gorky and his lack of critical attention.

Gorky as an artist "seemed more than ordinarily marked by a struggleto get at his own identity.""" The Kootz Gallery's exhibition of hislate paintings reveals an artist who, late in his brief life, tragically cutshort by suicide, succeeded in working through Mir6, Picasso, andMatta "to declare his own being unmistakably." Kees concludes, notwithout a pinch of regret and irony, "Perhaps Gorky, now that he issafely dead, will receive the recognition denied him when he was in aposition to care."

Kees's growing concern with the state of the contemporary artworld becomes more intense as he responds to Life Magazine's feature,

"Nineteen Young American Painters" (20 March) in his 8 April re-view. "What is significant and vital in recent art activity in thiscountry-the emergence of a radical, original, and pervasive move-

ment animated by Abstract, Fauve, Expressionist, and Surrealist in-

fluences . . . is here completely bypassed. It is as if one wrote an

account of recent pictorial journalism without mentioning Life and

its contemporaries."49 Kees finds these "best" artists to be a "cast

of art-school medal-winners and housebroken scholarship perennialswhose feet are firmly planted in the past and have taken root there."These artists also work in worn-out styles, social protest, figuration,"American-scene" paintings, and "a number of abstractions and semi-abstractions notable for their tastefulness and timidity."

But he is also critical of the most important and influential institu-tion of modern art. "The Museum of Modern Art, on the basis of its

recent offerings, seems scarcely in a position to lay proper claim to itsown title." Kees is critical of the early modernist Charles Demuth's

recent retrospective, which appears to him to be short on editing and

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long on his watercolors of flowers. Moreover, the Modern's recentforays into showing the work of contemporary British and Italianpainters has culminated in a presentation of the work of FranklinWatkins, who, according to Kees, is "a fiercely academic artist whosecareer sums up with a thoroughness of definition all that is conVen-tional and beside the point in modern painting." Kees continues,"The selection of Watkins may very possibly mark an all-time low inthe museum's strenuous grapplings with eclecticism. What next? AWinston Churchill retrospective?"

In his 6 May contribution to The Na'bon, Kees reports on an exhibi-tion, selected by critics Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg ( "tw0critics most alert to serious art activity" ), called "Talent 1950," whichfunctions almost as an answer to Life Magazine's "best" painters fea-ture spread. Held at the Kootz Gallery, it features the work of twenty-three "unknown or little-known painters living in New York, most ofthem under the age of thirt5r."so 'If it fails to reveal any breathtakingrevolutionary mood or to indicate any sharp break with the course ofcontemporary painting, the show is a notable one for a number ofother reasons. . . . [T]hese are largely outcast and unrecognized paint-ers who are ordinarily brushed off by Fifty-seventh street. It has beenchosen by men of advanced tastes, willing to take risks and make useof their own brains, instead of the ruck of cross-section fanatics andGallup Poll characters who infest our museums and magazines. It is avery young show, with all such a show's uncertainties and gropings,but with enormous spirit and optimism and love of paint." "Talent1950" no doubt represents the kind of exhibition Kees has in mind as aplace where the values of advanced painting can flourish - a selectionof artists not already "tamed" and "assimilated" by the emergingmodern art industry, chosen by avant-garde critics who are willing totake risks and act independently, and that celebrates artists just begin-ning their long journey of aesthetic discovery.

Kees's June installment for The Nation represents his most explicitactivism on behalf of the values of advanced art in the face of theenemies he had for the last two years condemned. His column attacksNew York' s most venerable art institution, the Metropolitan Museumof Art, that encyclopedic and ultra-conservative bastion of GreatArt, an institution, by the way, that had virtually ignored twentieth-century American art. For this, the Met had recently come under

serious criticism. "I/Vhether knuckling under to such pressure," Kees4ites, "or acting for its own mysterious reasons, the Metropolitanhas suddenly become a beehive of activity directed at 'recognizing' and:supporting' American art of the present. "51 0f the two activities thatrec;ivea Kees's attention, one was an exhibition, curated by Andrewgitchie, from the Met's permanent collection of twentieth-centuryAmerican painting. Kees observed, rather wryly, that this exhibitionmust explain "a spree of apparently frantic buying in an attempt to fillpp the gaping holes so long in evidence."52 The other activity was a'lumbo national competitive exhibition," entitled "American Paint-ing Today - 1950," an exhibition juried by a "solid phalanx of such aca-demics"-as Lamar Dodd, Leon Kroll, and Franklin Watkins, that re-yeals "not eclecticism or proportional representation but entrenchedtimidity and conservatism of the purest ray serene." 53 This exhibition,flying under the banner of contemporary American art, seems to havebeen-the last straw for Kees, who goes on to say that "it has beensuggested that this jury 'may surprise us' by picking an adventurousand valuable show. I look forward to this with the same warm ex-pectations that I have of the American Legion building a series ofmarble shrines honoring the memory of Randolph Bourne or of Bau-delaire being voted the favorite poet of the Cicero, Illinois, junior highschools." It apparently was the last straw for seventeen other artistswho wrote a }etter to Roland L. Redmond, president of the Met inprotest of the exhibition, which Kees "was pleased to sign." The letter;as subsequently dubbed the "Irascibles Manifesto." Far from beingan outside observer, Kees used his position of authority to give addedvoice to this protest. Kees concludes by making explicit what had beena growing concern for him for the past year: "For the 'first time, avant-garde painters in this country have taken a united position againstthe Academy; this is their historical role; the Academy itself drewthe lines."

With this revievv, Kees ended his tenure as regular critic for TheNatfon and, shortly thereafter, in the fall of 1950, left New York forSan Francisco, where he continued to write, not only for the WestCoast media but for a curious New York readership as well.

In his first piece of criticism from the West Coast published on NewYear's Eve 1950 in the New Yovk Times, Kees discussed the unique SanFrancisco art scene. "Next to New York, San Francisco strikes at least

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98 DANIEL A. SIEDELL The Art Criticism of Weldon Kees gg

this observer, after an absence of ten years, as the liveliest center @fart activity in the country today," in large part because of "the :?0-sence of anything resembling New York's gallery system. San pran-cisco' s ' artistic' atmosphere seems remarkably fluid, open, and adven-turous. Young painters are serious and ambitious, but unworried, forinstance, about their chances of getting a one-man show on Fifty-seventh Street." 54 This review tells us as much about Kees's frustrationwith the New York art world as it does his perceptions of what is righ?about San Francisco's. Kees lauds the San Francisco Art Festival, heldat the Palace of Fine Arts, which was not only the result of a collabor3-tion between the city and the arts community, but a "desire to bringtogether and relate the whole range of the arts." Kees' s interest in film,photography, and popular music in addition to "advanced" paintingand literature were apparently rekindled in San Francisco. But Keespaid special attention to the festival's presentation of an importantexhibition of paintings. "Yet the most moving and vigorous paintingin the festival came from the neo-Fauve group of abstract expression-ists that has mushroomed wildly here in the last few years." Under theinfluence of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, who taught at the Cali-fornia School of Fine Arts in the mid-forties, these artists, such asEdward Corbett, Hassel Smith, and George Stillman, who would be-come known as the "San Francisco School of Abstract Expression-ism," attracted Kees because they "have sensed a general directionrather than a formula. Work by any one of these men would set NewYork's avant-garde seismographs aquiver."ss

The San Francisco art scene apparently allowed Kees not only topursue different aesthetic activities, it also provided a rich contextfrom which to reassert his interests in culture more generally. In 1951Kees reviewed two books on jazz for The Nation, in which he analyzedthe history of jazz and popular music.s? He also reviewed a book onthe "tastemakers" by Russell iynes for the New Republic in 1955, inwhich he observed that "Lynes is not so much interested in 'taste-makers' as he is in the amusement to be provided through the chang-ing styles and fads promoted by commercial interests in the fields ofpainting, design, architecture, and interior decoration."57 Kees criti-cizes Lynes, essentially, for simply taking pleasure in telling the storyof how authentic "taste," or the difficult, laborious struggle to eithercreate or appreciate serious, advanced art, is defeated time and timeagain through the powerful machinery of the culture industry.

Perhaps Kees's clearest statements about culture are found in apiece entitled "A Note on Climate and Culture," published in Painting(ind Sculpture (San Francisco Art Association; Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1952).58 Focusing initially on the unique challengesof the San Francisco art world, Kees digs deep to analyze the relation-ship between advanced art and modern culture. He concludes that;ur culture is sick. "With our obsessive regard for specialization - aregard that is ridiculously the common ground of those in business, inthe arts, and in the professions - the shared understanding of a largeruniverse is a concept that generates the coldest light conceivable." It isthis "shared understanding of a larger universe" that animates Kees'sown creative and critical activities. In fact, his criticism focuses par-ticular attention on revealing this "larger universe" against which toyiew cultural life, including advanced art. Moreover, it was criticismthat enabled Kees to overcome the limits of these "specializations." Ifhe felt limited as a "poet" or "painter," his criticism could move freelybetween literature, visual arts, music, politics, movies, and a host ofother subjects and media that interested him. Kees engaged in criti-cism not to change the world, transform the arts, or participate in anyother utopian or ideological movement. Criticism served much moremodest, and personal, needs. " If we are beyond the point of hoping fora healthy culture, we can at least entertain a hope for a few smallislands, crannies, nooks, here and there, where an art that is mature,serious, and unprovincial can come into being." Kees's criticism ingeneral, and art criticism more specifically, was concerned primarilywith finding precisely those "few small islands." Advanced art has,and will always be, a challenge in whatever social, political, and eco-nomic context artists find themselves. These few small islands, thosenooks and crannies "here and there" were not going to transformculture or society; therefore Kees had no utopian illusions. This senseof the world, however, allowed Kees to speak truth to power, to riskunpopularity, and even to be funny and sarcastic where more deeply"committed" (i.e., invested) critics might have shied away.

Condusion

Although Kees seemed to move around quite comfortably within thevarious artistic and cultural communities where he found himself, it

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is clear that he did not feel necessarily "at home," whether as a poet,painter, filmmaker, and musician, connoisseur of high and popularculture, or as a small-town Midwesterner, member of the New York

cultural elite, or part of the bohemian world of San Francisco.

The sadness that seems to have pervaded Kees's art and criticism

and which was picked up on by many friends and colleagues, seems

intimately connected to the idea of exile, both geographically andpsychologically, which offered him a necessary distance from which

to exercise the critical spirit. Kees seemed interested in but not swal-

lowed up by "in-house" disputes or plagued by the blindspots pro-duced by overspecialization.

Kees did certainly do wonderful things with words. But criticism -

literary, cultural, artistic-allowed him to indulge in, even celebrate,his homelessness and general discomfort with the world. And al-

though this tragic perspective ultimately overwhelmed him in 1955,it allowed him to produce significant critical perspectives in one of

the most important periods in this country's cultural history as hesearched out culture's "little islands."

Many commentators have recently bemoaned the transformation

of criticism and art criticism into various forms of marketing, slogan-

eering, and other manifestations of power politics.s" Kees's criticism

offers a brief but potent demonstration not only of the preservation ofthe critical spirit, but the costs involved in such a commitment. In a

culture of professionalized criticism, Kees's critical writing is one ofthose "little islands."

NOTES

s. "Weldon Kees: Enemy of Mediocrity," Provincetown Arts 3 (summer

1987).

2. I owe my understanding of the critical spirit to the critic Donald B.

Kuspit, as articulated most explicitly in The Critic Is Artist: The In-terdaonality ofArt (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984). In the pref-ace Kuspit states that "criticism can never be popular, and so has a

unique opportunity to be imaginative. Criticism is inherently un-popular, which is its lucky fate. . . . Critical thinking is irreconcil-

able with popular understanding, the one necessarily underminesthe other" (xv).

The Art Criticism of Weldon Kees 101

3, Randall Jarrell, "The Age of Criticism," Partisan Review 19, no. 2a '(-M;r-.LApr. 1952): 185-201. Literary critic George Steiner has more

r'e;ently made the same argument in Real Presences (Chicago: Univer-5ity of Chicago Press, 1989).

4. This phrase is taken from the title of the first book on Abstract Expres-a sionism written by Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting

(NewYork: Praeger, 1970).s. The initial stages of the establishment of contemporary Americana avantJgarde ar; as an appropriate subject of academic study was be-

gun in 1956 when the painter-critic-curator William Seitz succeeded(with the-help of the Museum of Modern Art founding director Al-fred H. Barr's intervention) in writing a doctoral dissertation onAbstract Expressionism for Princeton University. "A Continued Story:'f'afred H. Barr, Jr., Princeton University, and William C. Seitz," Ar-chives of American Art Journal 21, no. 3 (1981): 8-t3.

6. nee myareview essay, "Contemporary Art Criticism and the Legacy ofa '6;me'nt Greenberg: Or, How Artwriting Earned its Good Name,"

The Journal of Aesthetic Education 36, no. 4 (winter 2002) for a fullerana:ysis of the relationship between Greenberg and Rosenberg.

7. Edward W. Said, Representahons of the Intellectual (New York: Pan-theon Books, 1996), 65-83.

8. Michael Frield,";An Introduction to My Art Criticism," Art and Ob-jecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1998), 4-

g. This section draws heavily on Robert Knoll, ed. and commentary,Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Leffers, 1935-1955 (Lin-coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

to. See Alan Wald,- The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of theAnti-Stalinist Left from the 19305 to the rg8os (Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carol!nm Press, 1987) and Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons:The New York Intellectuals and Their World ( New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1986).

it. Letter from Clement Greenberg to Gary Goldberg, 7 November 1978,Archiyes of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden,University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

12. Postcard on Commentary letterhead from Clement Greenberg to Wel-don Kees dated 26 November 1948. Weldon Kees Papers, BennettMartin Library, Lincoln NE.

'i3. Letter to Kees from Clement Greenberg, 27 June sg4g. Weldon KeesPapers, Bennett Martin Library, Lincoln NE.

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