The Flow of Art: Essays and Criticisms.

Henry McBride was an art critic with regular newspaper and magazine beats, at his peak back in the days - unlike today - when hardly anybody in this country was hip to modern art. He wonderfully summed up his relationship to his audience in the lead to a short piece, simply titled "Modern Art," for a journal called Creative Art in 1930: "Some people would rather argue than eat. As for me I am precisely the contrary. Occasionally one is obliged to combine the two activities. Quite recently an energetic hostess, seating her guests at the dinner table, mentioned to the lady who was to sit next to me that I was one who could 'tell her all about modern art,' and the lady in question dutifully said: 'Oh, yes, do tell me.'. . . She appeared to be serious. In fact, she was evidently a serious lady, with a dearly chiseled face and grim lines to the lips that indicated she had definite and decided views upon life and all that concerned it. Not the type, you would think, since she was unquestionably American, that would go in heavily for art of any kind, but she said again, seeing my hesitation: 'Do tell me about modern art. I so want to know.'"

The man who did tell thousands of equally disingenuous folks about modern art, and who was arguably the most astute chronicler of the modernism that eventually conquered nearly every precinct of American high culture, hardly looked the part. A tall, balding, bespectacled gentleman with an aristocratic bearing, McBride was fairly conservative in politics and dress, and he wrote (as above) in a fussily conversational style echoed today - albeit with less sympathy for the art of his times and much less humor - by the crustacean critic Hilton Kramer, who added the new foreword for this reissued collection. McBride, for instance, often used the term "motors" for "cars."

On the other hand, McBride wasn't a stuffy academic, just a nice guy who originally came to New York from Pennsylvania to be an artist and didn't make it. He did, however, study under John Ward Stimson, an American admirer of William Blake, which probably gave him some essential understanding of artistic weirdness. And he taught studio classes at the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side (with Abraham Walkowitz and Jacob Epstein among the students who passed his way), which probably gave him some essential understanding of artistic grit, the other leg of modernism. Then, in 1913, when he was already forty-six years old, he fell into the job of art critic at The New York Sun. McBride later recalled: "I was obliged . . . to shift my brow into 'high.' I was . . . made responsible for the activities of about a hundred art galleries. It was then that the calendar speeded up and the whole week melted into a succession of [deadline] Thursdays." (McBride later wrote for the great literary magazine The Dial, edited by the poet Marianne Moore, and Creative Art, where his column was mawkishly called "The Palette Knife." Pieces from all three have been collected in The Flow of Art.) Simply put, McBride wrote and wrote and wrote until he was almost ninety. He died at ninety-five in 1962, after having declined a request to sit for a long, oral-history-ish interview. McBride thought the written record sufficient to give an accurate picture of what he thought and felt about art. It is, and it paints a pleasing portrait.

A few months after McBride took the job at The Sun, the Armory Show descended on New York and planted the seeds of what we in Gotham today mean by the term "the art world." (Unfortunately, The Flow of Art includes nothing by McBride on the Armory Show itself, only its aftermath.) He was quick to go to bat for the avant-garde, whose art he often defended simply by employing a little reasonableness. In 1914, he wrote of a Brancusi sculpture: '"Mlle Pogany's ear is a droll ellipse and may worry beginners in modern art study, but the same individual who will be astonished at such an ear in modern art admires exactly the same sort of art convention in a Chinese jade." In 1928, he pointed out that a Miro painting "looks, at first glance, like the writings upon a cobalt canvas of a particularly lazy Indian. But the laziest Indian never paints a picture without putting himself in communion with the unseen powers, and so it is with Miro." But McBride never swallowed anything whole; he knew you could go overboard in accepting everything the avant-garde threw your way. In 1920, the wealthy Duchampophile Walter Arensberg showed him "Marcel's latest," a strange little glass container. "'It's air from Paris,' said my host, 'hermetically sealed at a particular street comer in that city.'" With a perfect facetious touch (and one that doesn't necessarily peg him a philistine, given the generally lackluster reception of Duchamp in critical circles), McBride added, "I'm not a bourgeois, so I didn't have a fit." And, although he wrote early (for a noninsider) and appreciatively (especially for a guy in his eighties who'd cut his aesthetic teeth on Cezanne) about some of the Abstract Expressionist painters, he didn't buy the entire program. In a nice observation about Pollock (an artist whom, rather presciently, he liked), McBride noted in 1949: Previous works by him which I had seen looked as though the paint had been flung at the canvas from a distance, not all of it making happy landings."

What really worried McBride - and what possibly exceeded his concern about the lack of American public acceptance for aesthetically progressive artists - was the corrosive effect on an artist of deliberately playing to a mass audience. After a withering dismissal of some murals by the reactionary artist/critic Kenyon Cox, McBride philosophized about the public's part in their creation: "I consider that he should not have allowed himself to have been persuaded into the making of the long series of joyless mural paintings, but after all the real blame for this lies upon us, upon you who were smiling just now and upon me, because for years we have been permitting all the Western Senates in the land to acquire them without protest." Seventeen years later, in 1932, McBride turned his attention to Thomas Hart Benton and his particular tactic (the opposite of Cox's moribund academicism), a pandering, pseudofolky vulgarity. "There is no denying the fact that vulgarity is a part of life and even has a necessary place in life," he wrote, "but it is by no means the whole of life. Quite evidently the artist thought, in all this, that he was being broadminded, like the Walt Whitman who accepted everything, who was the poet for 'the foolish as much as the wise,' who was 'stuff'd with the stuff that is course [sic] and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine'; but, alas, in accepting only the vulgarity of life one is far from being broadminded. If Mr. Benton will take another look at the 'Leaves of Grass' he must discover that Whitman balances every ugly thing with a beauty, every ignoble thing with something that is noble; that, in short, he keeps the balance."

But McBride never panned art simply because it was widely popular, and he was perfectly willing to acknowledge a people's-choice talent when he saw one: "My latest [genius] is Walt Disney. The moment I walked into the Kennedy Galleries [in 1933], where the Mickey Mouse originals are shown, the bell rang sharp and clear." Why? "The idea is, all other news to the contrary, that this big public likes art and will lap it up as readily as a horse laps sugar from the hand; only, it knows what it wants and wants it when it wants it. The moment you try to bully the public, the moment you say, 'Don't eat sugar. Sugar is vulgar. This is what you should eat,' proffering still-life pictures of lemons and bananas in the style of Cezanne, the chances are the public will walk out on you, leaving you to eat your lemons and bananas yourself."

McBride, of course, wasn't perfect; he said a lot of little things that were smug, or a bit off, or surprisingly tasteless. He kept referring to certain controversial works of art (such as Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase) as causing Americans to "spill ink," as if he weren't doing exactly that himself. (What he intended, of course, was that other ink-spillers were hysterical philistines while he remained a noble mugwump; that's what was smug about it.) He tried to disguise his bafflement over Picasso's Guernica with some halfhearted, distanced praise, and remarked, patronizingly, "Technically the work is overwhelmingly clever." (Clever?) And you have to cringe when he describes Pollock's drip method as "Hiroshima effects" and then compounds the gaffe a few lines later by predicting that the pictures would be considered masterpieces "as Hiroshimas both real and pictorial become more frequent." Okay, he was eighty-four when he wrote that and his sense of moral proportions might have gotten as creaky as his knees.

In fact, you have to be pretty picky to find fault with McBride as a critic for a general audience. In the big picture, he was perceptive, generous, honest, uncorruptible, and a very graceful writer in his own, leather-armchair way. McBride could issue the bon mot, such as: "When politics come in at the door, art flies out the window." He even left behind a few ringing words that could have been carved into memorial walls, instead of being tucked into vernacular reviews. For artists: "Art is not a cloak that an artist borrows from someone else but a fabric he improvises for himself." And for their audience: "It is perhaps impossible ever to reason the adverse into an appreciation of a work of art. Art is felt, not understood. All the talk and loud shouts in the world won't cause you to like a picture that you are convinced you loathe. But the laughters [sic] are finally stilled through sheer weariness of their own laughter." Come to think of it, we haven't seen McBride's equal since.

Peter Plagens is art critic for Newsweek and a painter.