Dennis Claxton
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In its permutation at the UCB art department it turned into the non-representation crowd against the west coast figurative painters. Both were inside the department and the abstract crowd had the majority.
I had to figure this out in my blunt headed fashion and switch over to the majority so I could get out of there. I kept asking my self why what I was doing wasn't just called design?
Tansey is pretty damned fabulous. He should do up a postcard reproduction series. I'd have loved to send the Triumph of the New York School to my stepfather and some of his friends as Christmas cards. (They had a great sense of humor about all this.) One of these guys, Hubert Crehan, was for a time the editor of Arts Magazine in the early-middle 50s as the surrealists were transformed into a kind of Freudian and Jungian sort of art analysis. Crehan as a serious worshiper of the Dionysian was definitely into the Harold Rosenberg side, and against the Clement Greenberg side. Crehan later became part of the early 60s NYC figurative group, which was basically rejected. He wrote up a good review of an Alice Neel retrospective at Reed College. Then, he moved out here about that time. Here is a pretty good essay on what the Rosenberg v. Greenberg fight was about:
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2008-07/DuelingDuo.html
It gives people some idea of what art criticism was into about the time I started in art classes. It also suppresses the strong division between Marxists over art.
Last night I went to Crehan's ex-wife's poetry reading from her book of poetry build as a inner portrait of Charlotte Salomon. The book is called Our Charolotte. This was just about as far from the Cusset book as I could have imagined. Here is a link to a page that explains Saloman's short life and massive output:
http://www.jmberlin.de/charlottesalomon/en/index.html
It fits well with the Arendt, Jasper letters. There are other elements in this long poetic study. One of them is Gerhard Rickter and this portrait of his daughter Betty:
http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/Gerhard_Richter/Betty/
and then another:
http://www.npg.org.uk:8080/richter/images/betty.jpg
Guess who I ended up sitting next to? One of the former executive directors of Amnesty International (guessing the 80s era). We had fun trying to identify what period we had entered Anne's life, that is which husband. I dated from the painter husband obviously. She dated from the political husbands. (Both had worked for her at one point or another.) We agreed it was wonderful to get away from the world on occasion, or to re-enter it in a different way. God damned were we old. She was in her late seventies, me leaving the mid-sixties.
CG
