by Jon Lackman | 21 May 2010 | Journals, Modern
The CAA’s Art Journal has a new editor, Katy Siegel. I haven’t had a chance yet to look at her first issue, which is now out and apparently focuses on artists’ projects. Siegel has said, “While preserving its integrity as an academic journal, I want to make sure that every issue of Art Journal also represents the vitality and vicissitudes of the real life of art and artists.”
This got me curious about the original intent and early life of Art Journal, which has in recent years seemed to me to lack a coherent mission. I went and had a look at the journal’s first few issues. Its first issue appeared in November, 1941. It was then called College Art Journal. A year’s subscription cost $1, the equivalent of about $15 today. Its founding editor was CAA vice-president Myrtilla Avery. CAA President Sumner McKnight Crosby wrote the issue’s foreword and stressed its potential as a venue for discussing pedagogical innovation.
In the inaugural issue, Elizabeth Wilder (Weismann) plumped for more study and teaching of Latin America: “There is literally no book at present available in English on Latin American art in general”. Harry D.M. Grier published “Television: A New Means of Art Education”: “The combination of aural and visual material in television has the advantage of provoking in the audience a concentration of attention closely parallel to that of an actual gallery visit.”
The most influential contribution to the inaugural issue was “Modern Art Makes History, Too,” by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., which ignited a debate that then preoccupied the early issues of Art Journal. In his essay, Barr urged the university to let modern art past its gates:
[When] I was a student between fifteen and twenty years ago … I heard all told three professors in three leading college art departments lecture to undergraduates on modern art. One was querulously resentful, a second wittily condescending, the third dismissed painting from Cézanne to 1925 with a glib retelling of the donkey’s tail legend. All three knew several times as much about Sano di Pietro as Picasso. About the art of the previous fifty years they were either complacently superficial or profoundly ignorant … Up to a decade ago, so far as I can recall, the learned magazines such as The Art Bulletin and Art Studies published between them only one article on modern art and that was hostile … I can’t help but feeling that college art historians are not even now generally and deeply interested in modern art. Isn’t far more tiem given in their undergraduate courses to the early fifteenth or seventeenth centuries than to the early twentieth? … Even more obvious and urgent is the need for graduate work in modern art. The field is wide open and crying for scholarly research but how many candidates for Ph.D. or M.F.A. are doing these in twentieth-century art? Or even in the late nineteenth century? … I intend not a rebuke, but a challenge—and a cry for help.
Barr’s exasperation now seems quaint, considering the vogue today for contemporary art history. But the present trend may be helpfully illuminated by an examination of its origins in the controversy Barr generated.
W.M. Ivins, Jr. of the Metropolitian Museum promptly protested Barr’s suggestion in the following issue in a letter to the editor. And Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., responded at length:
I have much sympathy with my friend Alfred H. Barr’s opinion … It is a suggestion that has earlier been made by Dr. Lionello Venturi. Yet there are reasons for confining our study of human values generally to those values that are established, hence really teachable … In short, in any balanced curriculum of liberal studies the present must always have a standing rather marginal than central … [As for graduate research on modern art] Does Mr. Barr think that his imaginary graduate student is likely to provide from this endeavor anything but documentation of a somewhat dubious sort? … I simply shudder at the results even our best graduate students are likely to gain from pumping, say, Marin, Benton, or Dali.
In the following issue, Laurence Schmeckebier agreed with both sides, though rather more than Barr, noting that a dose of modern art might help re-engage undergraduates with the humanities at a time when, he lamented, they were becoming increasingly pre-professional in their outlook. James Thrall Soby and Robert. J. Goldwater defended Barr strenuously. And MoMA’s Beaumont Newhall made a related argument for “Photography [Studies] as a Branch of Art History.” (MoMA film curator Iris Barry recommended “Motion Pictures as a Field of Research” soon thereafter.)
(I wonder by the way where Venturi made his suggestion – Mather doesn’t say. Parnassus perhaps? The magazine was cited in a later report by Goldwater as the other major venue for this debate.)
Barr would return to Art Journal in the May 1945 issue, to advocate for more attention to be paid to American art, noting that since 1918 the Art Bulletin had published just one article on American painting and that one professor had asked him “half seriously whether after all there was any American art worth studying.”
