Beginning with Whistler’s “Arrangement in grey and black: portrait of the painter’s mother,” Weinberg zeros in on one of the fundamental problems I’ve always had with the painting -- without ever really stopping to worry over it. Look, Weinberg says, at the way this supposed totem of maternal love is so curiously cold and deathlike, how seemingly irreconcilable drives meet in an image so problematically parental that when the post office made a stamp of it, they were forced to radically redesign the image. While I could not wholly accept Weinberg’s psychoanalytic account of the painting, his analysis was studded with useful insights and had the virtue of making a painting I knew, but never really looked at, come alive.
His study of the issue of artistic influence produces one of the strongest chapters in the book -- an analysis of Picasso’s influence on Pollock. Here Weinberg’s painter’s eye (he is also an exhibiting artist) teases out numerous instances of Picasso’s hold on Pollock, finding in the dramatic purging of Picasso in Pollock’s mature work motive for the greatness yet to come.
The more traditionally art historically structured meditations on Alfred Stieglitz’s dual career as dealer and photographer -- and late blooming career as Georgia O’Keeffe’s husband -- yields wonderful dividends towards an account of the status of photography early in the century. His analysis of Stieglitz’s obsession with O’Keeffe’s hands offers breathtaking insights on the role of touch in the visual arts. I found less compelling Weinberg’s imaginative reconstruction of one of O’Keeffe’s never completed mural commissions, but his equally imaginative reconstruction of her reasons for never starting the work in the first place had the ring of truth.
Weinberg worries over the social and political valence of Hockney’s art, or as he powerfully puts it, “[I]ts collusion with the establishment it mocks.” He rightly points out that the big problem for a younger generation of critics and writers is not Abstract Expressionism and its abandonment of a left agenda, but the problematic of Pop and its complicated flirtation with the commodity. A study of Hockney’s print series “A rake’s progress” concludes with the stunning insight that “In a weird postmodernist transmutation of values, it is not Hockney the rake but Hockney the high modernist who seems decadent.”
But what of Weinberg’s queer studies agenda? The queerest part of the book is found in its concluding essays: an account of the erotics of the Basquiat/Warhol collaboration; a paean to Weinberg’s artist friend the late Marc Lida; and a meditation on the NAMES Project Quilt. But Weinberg claims that a distinct queering informs the book as a whole, and while it would be ridiculous to sever Weinberg’s art history from his status as a politically active gay man, I confess to missing his queer-specific voice in the still painfully small field of queer art historical studies. Nonetheless, the book he has produced is a rich and multi-faceted amalgam of close looking, imaginative hypotheses and thoughtful research -- and for all that, a real pleasure to read.
Bibliographic information:
Weinberg, Jonathan. Ambition & love in modern American art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xxi, 312 p. with 165 b&w illus. (Yale publications in the history of art) Indexed. ISBN 0-300-08187-1 (cloth : $35.00)