Selected Art Writings

Schuyler observed in the late 1950s: ""In New York, the art world is a painter's world; writers and musicians are in the boat, but they don't steer,"" and indeed, the New York School of Poets--John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and Schuyler--never achieved the epochal significance of their namesake, the New York School of Painters (including Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning). But the poets participated in the artistic ferment of the period: O'Hara, who served as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was an art critic; Ashbery and Schuyler, whose poetry won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981, wrote about the visual arts as well. This volume of reviews and essays, completed largely from 1957 to 1962 for the magazine Art News, is somewhat disappointing. Absent a contextualizing foreword, the writing, which in its exuberance and associative logic differs from a mid-century critic's typically cool, analytic prose, is neither erudite nor polished. Because Schuyler was drawn to figurative artists (he lived with the painter Fairfield Porter and his family for 11 years), the bulk of his protracted attention goes to lesser-known artists such as Jane Freilicher. Jasper Johns's early iconic images receive barely two sentences, and Jules Olitiski's color-field canvases receive no mention at all. Where Schuyler's frequently luminous prose excels is in his descriptions of color, and in his longer essays on Franz Kline and Porter. The book is not well served by the illustrations, which frequently display photographs of the artists rather than examples of their work. Still, if taken on a poet's terms, this introduction to a group of artists overlooked by history comes as a pleasant surprise. (Mar.)