The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972-1984

New York: Free Press: Macmillan, Inc., 1985. Cloth, xv, 445 pages; 25 cm. Firm binding, unmarked. Age toning, light soiling. Dust jacket, with light edgewear, protected in a mylar cover. A collection of articles & reviews by the cranky art critic for the New York Times and The New Criterion, a journal he cofounded with funding from various right-wing thinktanks. A long polemic against postmodernism. Not entirely unentertaining. CONTENTS: I. REVIVALS AND REVISIONISM: Andre Meyer Galleries at the Met; A Turner for the eighties; Age of Revolution I & II; Landseer: the Victorian paragon [Sir Edwin]; The Natural Paradise; Isolation of Thomas Eakins; Gorky revised [Maxim]; Rediscovering Stanley Spencer; The Return of the Nativist: Grant Wood. II. MODERNISTS IN RETROSPECT: Europeans: Late Cezanne [Paul]; the public and the private Rodin [Auguste]; Picasso's rage [Pablo Picasso]; Essential cubism in London; Bonnard [Pierre]; De Stijl; Vantongerloo [Georges]; Max Ernst; Miro and his critics [Jean]; Sonia Delaunay; Giacometti's moral heroism [Alberto Giacometti]; Americans: Marsden Hartley; Florine Stettheimer; Elie Nadelman; Edward Hopper; Morton L. Schamberg; Precisionism revised; Morris Kantor; Abstract expressionism: the formative years; the Rothko Retrospective; the singularity of Clyfford Still. III. CONTEMPORARY ART: THE ANATOMY OF PLURALISM. Fairfield Porter; Noguchi; Encountering Nevelson; Jacob Lawrence's Chronicles of Black history; Pousette-Dart: odd man out; Richard Lindner, artist of two worlds; Saul Steinberg; Romair Bearden; Helen Frankenthaler in the fifties; Morris Louis; Kenneth Noland; Frank Stella, renewing abstraction; Agnes Martin; Anthony Caro at MoMa; Christopher Wilmarth; The transformations of Lucas Samaras; Richart Diebenkorn; Chuck Close; Pearlstein's Portraits; Kitaj, the vision of an expatriate; Maurice Sendak; David Hockney; Social realism of Jack Beal; Milet Andrejevic; Roy Lichtenstein in the seventies; Robert Smithson. IV. THE PROSE AND POETRY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Fox Talbot and the invention of photography; Muybridge, the Stanford years; Young Steichen; Imogen Cunningham and Minor White; Ansel Adams, trophies from Eden; Walker Evans; Notes on Irving Penn; Avedon; The new American photography. V. CRITICS AND CONTROVERSIES: Tom Wolfe and the revenge of the philistines; The Apples of Meyer Shapiro; Fairfield Porter as critic; Stanford Schwartz; Hoving Era at the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art]; On the failure of museums; Reproduction for the plebes; Criticism endowed. VI. ART FOR THE EIGHTIES: The new scene; Jackie Winsor; Neil Jenney; Charles Simonds; The return of the realists; Signs of passion: the new expressionism; Malcolm Morley; Julian Schnabel; Turning back the clock: art and politics in 1984; MoMA reopened: the Museum of Modern Art in the Postmodern era.. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo.