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Modern Art Film Clips  "The art of living in the wrong century - this is Saul Steinberg's (1914 – 1999) own designation for the predicament he has been illustrating for over a decade. In his latest collection, The Passport (the title is a deceptively mild clue to the whole works; it sneaks up on you), he has again and more inexorably than ever demonstrated his infinite capacity for taking pains in his graphic pursuit of melange, drafting, with a vilifying grasp of the murderously essential, our contemporary quest for style - in architecture, in furniture, clothing and machines - which we can also own." At the very peak of bourgeois respectability, one of the high priests of art and culture, Gilbert Seldes (1893 - 1970), sat comfortably on his woolsack atop Mount Parnasus and piled the praises high and deep for one of the lowest of the commercial arts. The beneficiary was the cartoonist George Herriman (1880 – 1944), creator of Ignatz Mouse and all other absurd creations that appeared in his syndicated comic strip, "Krazy Kat" (1913-1944):
"His strange unnerving distorted trees, his totally unlivable houses, his magic carpets, his faery foam, are items in a composition which is incredibly with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology." A magazine article about the artist Ben Shahn (1898 – 1969) and his particular approach to making art: "A fundamental of Ben Shahn's philosophy insists that there should be a minimum of separation between the private and the public work of art. He believes that the painter should speak with the same voice in the room and in the street. He is pleased by the criticism that his posters sometimes look like fragments of murals..."
This review was penned by James Thrall Soby (1906 – 1979), art historian and critic who wrote two monographs on the artist. |
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