On Modern American Art

Starting out in the 1950s with Pop and Post-Painterly painting (Frank Stella, Jasper Johns) and ending up with big shots from the 1980s (Eric Fischl, Jeff Koons), these 50 essays revisit every stage of Rosenblum's long career as a critic and reviewer, offering an idiosyncratic tour of recent visual art. Rosenblum (Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art), a professor at NYU, Guggenheim curator and Artforum contributing editor explains that he aims ""to translate the visceral experience of art into... modes of language and art history."" Usually he succeeds, as his short pieces introduce and make particular cases for Rothko, Cy Twombly, Joe Brainard, Mike and Doug Starn, and others. (All but two of the essays have been published before; many began as reviews of exhibitions.) Equally comfortable with the retrograde, the canonical and the new, Rosenblum gravitates in particular to the ways in which painters consider the history of their form. For Rosenblum, Willem de Kooning's dangerous women revise Ingres' visions, and Andrew Wyeth's famous Christina's World stays true to a peculiarly American reverie. (Sculptors and installation artists make it in; most conceptual art does not.) More general topics addressed include the importance of retrospective and memory in American painting; the heroic ambitions of Abstract Expressionists; Giorgio de Chirico's ""historic quotation"" and its later equivalents in U.S. paintings; and the perennial question, ""What Is American About American Art?"" Though it's always clear what he means to say, Rosenblum's prose can be less than compelling. Yet despite some awkward sentences, he makes a convincing case for the painter Mark Innerst, whose ""time capsules"" neatly reimagine cities' space. 206 b&w illustrations. (Nov.)