Review

Reviewed Work(s): How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom and the Cold War by Serge Guilbaut
Review by: Juliet Steyn
Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, Photography (1984), pp. 60-64
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1360294
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Book Reviews

How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: West with an ideology ... It is difficult to think that the West
Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold would adopt other than an American or an American
War, Serge Guilbaut, University of Chicago Press, sponsored one.3
1983, ?22.
It is now a matter of record that in art, Britain
succumbed to the dominant role played by America.
Serge Guilbaut's thesis in How New York Stole the Idea of
The British art establishment complied with almost
Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold
disarming disingenuousness. From an Arts Council
War is that the cultural fate of the West in the post-war
Report of 1955/56 we learn that
world was sealed through the protracted cultural and
political debates which took place in New York during
The Council co-operated with the Tate Gallery in their
and after the Second World War. The origins of these
showing of modern art in the United States by undertaking
debates lay in the 1930s but so far as the effect on art
the provision of the catalogue. By a very generous subsidy
and artists was concerned it was the hysterical anti-
from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, who organised
communist dialogues of 1947-48 which were to prove the exhibition and from whose collection the exhibition has
critical. The outcome, Guilbaut argues, and convinc- been provided, it was possible to sell the catalogue at well
ingly so, was that abstract expressionism achieved its below the cost price.4
success not solely on aesthetic or stylistic grounds, as
many historians and critics have claimed, but because By this time American dominance had been secured
of the ideological use to which it was put. Thus it was and Patrick Heron would write with enthusiasm:
that the 'drip' of Jackson Pollock's paintings no less
than Bendix washing machines, Ritz crackers and Pall We shall watch New York as eagerly as Paris for new
Mall cigarettes came to be a symbol of the freedom developments ... your school comes as the most vigorous
embodied in the Great American Dream. movement we have seen since the war.5
Abstract expressionism as an adjunct to indivi-
American dominance was not effected without
dualism and to consumerism quickly and in turn
opposition. In France (where, as Guilbaut shows, the
appropriated, re-defined and abused the concept of
whole free-masonry of paralysis and fear of the art
freedom. Liberty and liberating it may have been:
establishment at first tried to ignore the onslaught with
freedom it certainly was not.
insouciant disdain) and in Britain (whose experience,
At the heart of Guilbaut's thesis is the notion that art
sadly, lies outside the scope of his book) an offensive
is always political even when it appears otherwise; that
was mobilised around debates on 'Realism versus
art was used as a weapon in the Cold War; and that
Abstraction'. In both France and Britain the left took
those who preside over power politics struggle for
the lead. They saw as their starting point Klingender's
cultural laurels to aid their cause. Thus the cultural
view that
history of the post-war period can only be seen as:

To be neutral in aesthetics means to ignore the fact that art

the history of the reconstruction of American culture on new
plays a most important part in the class struggle. It either
foundations laid by changes in the world economy in general
helps people to see more clearly in their search for the truth,
and the American economy in particular. It is the trans-
or it mystifies and misleads them.6
valuation of social values, a reevaluation of cultural signs.'
In Britain the Communist Party, pledged to 'create a
In a book whose language is compelling and clear
culture "socialist and democratic in content and British
and based on the belief that art history is a rigorous
in form" '7 set the pace. It is important however not to
discipline, Guilbaut picks his way nimbly through the
over-estimate its influence and to set it in context. Ray
development of post-war culture (at a time when New
Watkinson (Charles Morris) in the Daily Worker, John
York was taking over from Paris as the mecca), always
Berger in the New Statesman, journals like Our Times,
distinguishing the contingent from the universal, the
Arena publications, the Communist Review and the short
possible from the inevitable.
lived Realism attempted to galvanise intellectuals and
alert workers to the threat of American cultural and
What is not inevitable can be fought for. The battle for
political hegemony. They defended Realism, which they
the minds of Europe, Guilbaut argues, 'may have been
defined as
a "cold war" but it was nonetheless a total war.
Accordingly art, too, was called to play its part.'2 With
... peace and an end to the threat of a third world war: it
Western Europe still bleeding from war wounds and means subservience to the dollar: it means the forward
heavily dependent on America for economic aid few can movement towards a peoples' democracy in this country; it
have been surprised to read in an article in the Times means socialism and a new life.8
Literary Supplement in 1951:
They discussed nationalism versus cosmopolitanism
Perhaps America is the only country capable of providing the and provincialism versus internationalism as they

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affected art. They concluded that nationalism in art was
essential to preserve the character, the culture of a
nation with the recognition that a new set of values
based upon those of the living world need be created,
taking the best from the British heritage and remould-
ing it into a new art which would serve the working
people:
It can be seen that there is a great national heritage of art
with the tradition of realism and the search for truth. When
came the break with this tradition and the turn towards
formalism and cosmopolitanism?9
They rejected cosmopolitanism and internationalism,
which they equated with American cultural values, and
in which art was constructed as timeless, free from
culture, class or gender and united across some
mythical consensus. Guilbaut, clearly in sympathy with
them, explains how in the USA:
Art moved first from nationalism to internationalism and then
from internationalism to universalism. The first important
item on the agenda was to get rid of the idea of national art,
which was associated with provincial art, with the political
and figurative art of the 30s. This kind of art no longer
corresponded to reality, much less to the needs of the Cold
War.1
In Britain during the 1950s the new values found
expression in the works of artists like Heron and Frost
(British abstractionists) whose paintings were con-
structed as 'international'. The values inscribed in these
configurations were arguably not truely international
but those of the NATO alliance. British capitalism had
found it necessary to ally itself to American capitalism
in order to support its own system and ideology against
what was construed as a threat from the Eastern 'bloc'.
Freedom in Britain too became a symbol of the ideology
in which the freedom of the West was placed in
opposition to the notion of servitude in the East.
Guilbaut shows that the new definitions of freedom
in America were at the centre of the new liberalism set
out by Arthur Schlesinger in his popular book The Vital
Centre (1949). In Britain, as if to emphasise the point,
the influential economist Hayek connected repression
with socialism when he wrote The Road to Serfdom:
There can be no doubt that the promise of greater freedom
has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist
propaganda and that the belief that socialism would bring
freedom is genuine and sincere. But this would only heighten
the tragedy if it should prove that what was promised to us as
the Road to Freedom was in fact the High Road to
Servitude.11
Socialism in Britain had long been used as a scare.
Balfour had asserted that:
Mosley and Cripps have the same policy. The socialist state
of Cripps is to be the same as the fascist state of the
blackshirts. 12
The Conservative Government of 1951 claimed
freedom as their priority. The Earl of Woolton, Chair of
the Conservative Party, recalled in his memoirs:
We had said that we would 'set the people free', we had
declared our firm intention - against all the usual practice of
incoming governments - of revoking much previous legislation
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... The Churchill Government was pledged in its election
manifesto to undo much of the Socialist legislation of the
preceding six years.'3
The Conservatives talked about freedom, but there
was a contradiction between their philosophy and their
economic policies. For, while dismantling war-time
controls, they consciously and insidiously increased
State power, as the following quote from the Party
pamphlet of 1951 shows:
Of all the services, we believe education to be second only to
housing. In the long run these two services more than any
other will determine the health and prosperity of the British
people. Indeed, so long as the 'cold war' against communism
continues, education is more than a social service, it is part of
defence. 14
It quickly became apparent that economic freedom
was to be given to the few and denied to many. A
'Second Welfare State' grew, one favouring the middle
classes who received grants for their children to go to
university, and tax relief for their mortgages. For most,
the new colours dazzled only to deceive. A competitive
thrusting, materialist society brought only the illusion of
choice for many. In the confusion that followed,
freedom became almost indistinguishable from the
ability to buy goods and services. The freedom to
choose, first enshrined in the eighteenth-century doc-
trines of Adam Smith, became the only freedom. There
was a crossing of discourses in which free choice, in the
sense of purchasing power, became linked with notions
of personal freedom. These notions affected the concepts
of artistic freedom, which became important in so far as
they could supply the images of freedom. Freedom was
thoroughly enshrined in the ideology of American
cultural practices too. In a speech prepared for him by
MOMA to celebrate its 25th anniversary, President
Eisenhower declared:
Freedom of the arts is a basic freedom, one of the pillars of
liberty in our land. For our republic to stay free, those among
us with the rare gift of artistry must be able to use their talent
... How different is tyranny. When artists are made the
slaves and tools of the State; when artists become chief
propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation
and genius are destroyed . . . Let us resolve that this precious
freedom of America will, day by day, year by year become
ever stronger, ever brighter in our land.'5
Art discourses in Britain quickly adopted the new
language. The idea of a free individual in a free society
was elided with the state of modern art which was a
priori the free art of the free society:
Modern art is the art of a free society, and by freedom of the
individual, it lives in all its range and variety. The readers of
Reveille (used by Berger as non-comprehending low-brow)
may not be among the connoisseurs of contemporary painting,
but at least they democratically let it live, which is more than
the Bergers of the world are willing for it to do.'6
Modernist art was constructed by its adherents as pure,
unideological, carrying within its form the possibility of
individual artists expressing their unfettered responses
to the universe. Or, according to Meyer Shapiro on a
visit to Britain at the time of the Tate exhibition of
American Art in 1956, 'The artist's freedom is located
more narrowly and more forcibly than ever before
- 7:2 1985 61
within the self'."7 In art then, freedom became defined
in terms of the artist's individuality, which went along
with an apolitical stance.
Guilbaut goes further and argues that in the USA
the de-politicisation of the artist was necessary precisely
to allow the work to be put to political use:
the avant-garde artist who categorically refused to participate
in political discourse and tried to isolate himself by accen-
tuating his individuality was co-opted by liberalism which
viewed the artist's individualism as an excellent weapon with
which to combat Soviet authoritarianism.18
It was against the background of this ideology, and
feelings of frustration, powerlessness and rage on the
part of radical intellectuals, that a frightening chasm
opened up between politicians and public and between
the painter and the public as well as the painter and the
politicians. Instead of coming to the rescue, some
radical painters contented themselves with the notion
that art could speak to and liberate the people through
myth as it had done in earlier times.
The use of art as a political weapon can be seen in an
exhibition like the Venice Biennale. The Biennale
functions as a sort of cultural embassy in which the
participants compete for honours and present their
national ideologies. Frances Pohl has shown how the
Biennale was used by the American government as a
place to site a campaign aimed at improving its world
image, as part of the battle against communism.19 In
1954 Bernard Denvir noted:
As this year saw the participation of a number of iron curtain
countries, one almost inevitably began viewing the Biennale in
terms of cultural 'blocs'.20
In that year, the works of Ben Shahn and de
Kooning were selected to represent the USA. The
selection of a realist and a modernist artist was highly
significant in that it allegedly demonstrated to the world
the breadth of American culture and the freedom of
individual artists to express themselves in whatever way
they chose. Furthermore, in the case of Shahn's work
the potential for the artist to criticise society was
implicitly recognised. The 'freedom' of American art
was thus made to contrast sharply with official Soviet
art (social realism) which was constructed as narrow,
circumscribed and unfree.
Two years later, the British Council was to choose
the 'Beaux-Arts Quartet',21 Derrick Greaves, Edward
Middleditch, Jack Smith and John Bratby to represent
Britain at the Biennale, along with Ivon Hitchens and
Lyn Chadwick. It may not have been a coincidence that
a model not unlike the American one was used - that is
a combination of realist and abstract art. But, as far as
realism was concerned, which art could claim properly
to represent it?
In 1949 Klingender had defined realism as:
that quality that enables certain artists to be more than a
passive expression of the regime. And it is in this power 'to
extend the bounds of the human empire' that Communists
find the touchstone of good art. Many people are clamouring
for 'freedom' these days ... But the only freedom worth
fighting for in the field of art is the freedom to speak the
In 1954 Jack Smith wvas able to divorce realism from
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any social or political imperatives when he said he was
'Depicting what was around him' and insisted, 'You've
got to go back to living; and the things around you'.23
In 1955 debates broke out in the press about the politics
of realism. Alan Clutton-Brock suggested in The Listener:
In France the political intention is certainly more conscious
and overt than in this country, and perhaps this distinction is
reflected in the fact that French realists specialise in street
scenes and views of industrial districts, while English realists
rather favour interiors of kitchens or other workaday parts of
the house. In France they expose the afflictions of a whole
quarter but in England Mr. Smith complains of the sink.24
A week later, in the same paper, Jack Smith replied:
... Nor do I complain of the kitchen sink; and it is extremely
doubtful whether the French realists are complaining of the
afflictions of their quarter. They are painting those things with
which they have contact everyday.2
For Jack Smith, realism - a term he disliked when
applied to his work - carried with it no political
connotation. It was a realism enervated by its own lack
of urgency. It was a realism which could be used by the
British art establishment to promote a particular view
of culture.
The art establishment in Britain claimed that the
arts should be self-governing and that artists should
have artistic freedom. The so-called 'arm's length'
policy which distances art from politics disguises how
cultural values are imposed. Liberalism has its own
standards which serve to subsidize a particular profes-
sional community and to enshrine its orthodoxy. A
closed elite culture has been produced in which some
people are free to create while others are not. The art
establishment played a vital role in the creation of the
post-war consensus whose main object was to create a
classless society. It could use realism - or the idea of a
realism - to give the appearance of a broad-based
culture, one which theoretically at least addressed itself
to different classes and one in which artists are free to
negotiate their own forms of expression. Social demo-
cracy could be achieved without changing the structures
of power and cultural dominance of that small but
powerful section of society who have traditionally and
historically formed the interests and tastes of that
society.
But just as the establishment could use realism it
could abandon it. The shifts in critical standards were
by 1956 in a process of redefinition so that realism could
no longer be judged by its own standards - by its moral
imperatives, by how it helped people perceive and
interpret what was most affecting them in their daily
lives. The internal artistic debates served to change
critical standards, so that vulnerable from within
realism could not sustain the sweeping attacks from
without which labelled it as uncreative, inhibiting
artistic freedom, provincial, ideological. In sum, realism
became identified with repression.
A realist art had been an alternative mode of artistic
practice in the immediate post-war years. When the
Communist Party argued that the aim of art was to set:
Problems and themes which serve the working-class move-
ment. While not evading the specific professional or specialist
problems, the themes of our work must be chosen not on
abstract grounds but becauvse they represent real problems.26
JOURNAL - 7:2 1985
 To the Communist Party, realism was the depiction
of working-class life. It was the depiction of this area of
experience which was in the 1950s claimed as radical.
There is much we can now criticise about leftish
cultural policies which failed to engage a working-class
constituency, failed to recognise the heterogeneity of
working-class life, and failed to create a new public
either for the consumption or production of art. Their
theory rested on the Leninist assumption that one
political group has the absolute claims to being the true
representatives of a class. These failures in theory in
part account for the failure of realism which could only
be further compounded by its depoliticalisation -
despite the valiant attempts by the Communist Party,
Berger, Watkinson and de Francia amongst others.
Divided from within, its depoliticisation served to allow
its appropriation by the liberal establishment. After
1956, with its swansong at Venice, it could be
jettisoned. It had served the state and it was expend-
able. A space was cleared for an American version of
modernism. By 1959 Berger could write with con-
viction,
Abstract expressionism and New Dadaism are sweeping the
field. Nowhere in Western Europe is there a realist stronghold
left.27
Berger perceived the American threat to culture and
argued that the new wave of action painting was closely
connected with American hegemony - not in the
motives of the artists but as a social phenomenon:
The works in their creation and appeal are a full expression of
the suicidal despair of those who are completely wrapped in
their own dead subjectivity ... Behind those works is the
same motive of revenge against the subjective fears as there is
behind the practical policy of clinging to the protection of the
H-bomb.28
He interprets Action painting as a symbol of the
ultimate hopelessness of a laissez-faire economy and
social structure. It bore within it many of the
disintegrating social and cultural values of that society.
Just as British capitalism had allied itself to
American capitalism, so did British culture. The de-
politicalisation of realism was one stage in this process.
The take-over by Americanised modernism, with its
freshness and its packaging as the cultural emissary for
freedom, was its product. It is because modernist art
history has produced art as a sealed domain, closed off
- or removed from - social and political concerns that
British realist art has been all but obliterated from
accounts of post-war history. The discourses of
modernism have produced the silences, created the
ommisions and wiped out whole groups of artists and
types of artistic practice.
I could not read How New York Stole the Idea of Modern
Art without feeling despair towards the historical
processes Guilbaut describes. 'To be AND not to be;
ultimately in order to speak one must both be and not
be involved'29 declares the author in a quote which
opens the book. The critical distance established is
chilling, alienating. It does present the reader with
certain difficulties:
What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some
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increasingly total system or logic - the more powerless the
reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins therefore by
constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to
that degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is
thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt,
not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly
perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.3U
If Guilbaut's book errs in the direction of historical
determinism, if he only narrowly misses a conspiracy
theory of history, these pitfalls are also paradoxically
the book's strength. For we begin the process of
changing the world by providing outselves with sets of
concepts that enable us to understand and explain it. It
is only through recreating history that we can gain
control over our lives and shape our culture. Through
understanding the past, we are not its victims oppressed
by the inexorable forces of history. The individuals who
participated in the 'Triumph of American Painting'
were its victims. Rothko's suicide, Pollock's untimely
death, Evergood's dismissal from the annals of history
are just three of the individual tragedies behind the
glory. The wheel of history that Guilbaut charts leaves
no place for resistence. In history there is always
dissent. There are always alternative modes of struggle,
always places for individual and collective action.
Sartre, whose existentialist philosophy gripped the
imagination of the post-war West and whose notions of
freedom gave a philosophical justification to bourgeois
individualism, was himself at that very moment
redefining freedom and moving into another realm of
discourse - that of Marxism and Socialism:
It was then (1945-1950) that I looked on freedom with a new
eye. In these studies I conceived liberty as being something
that in certain circumstances might be abolished and as
something that bound men to one another in so far as each, in
order to be free, needed the freedom of all the rest.3"
In order to make freedom triumph, Sartre knew that it
was necessary to act upon history and the world and to
bring about a different relationship between people on
the one hand and history and the world on the other.
Guilbaut's book takes its place as part of that process,
as part of a political struggle.
Juliet Steyn
References
1. Guilbaut, op. cit., p. 8.
2. Ibid., p. 173.
3. TLS 24 August 1951.
4. Arts Council 11th Report 1955/56, p. 36.
5. Manchester Guardian March 1956 in Hyatt Art Wars Rochdale
1984.
6. 'Communist Art: a controversy' in Communist Review January
1947, p. 20.
7. S. Aaronovitch in Communist Review June 1952, p. 224.
8. R. Turner: 'Britain's Cultural Heritage' in Arena 1951, p. 46.
9. Ibid.
10. Guilbaut op. cit., p. 174.
11. The Road to Serfdom London 1944, p. 20.
12. M. Foot: Aneurin Bevan London 1975, p. 505.
13. Memoirs London 1979, p. 336.
14. Conservative Party Pamphlet 1950.
15. In the Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art v, 1954-19
16. G.F. Hudson, Review of Heron's 'The Changing Forms of Art'
in Twentieth Century clix., February 1956, in Hyatt op. cit., p. 207.
17. 'The Younger American Painters of Today' in The Listener
January 1956, pp. 146-147.
- 7:2 1985 63
 18. Guilbaut op. cit., p. 143.
19. 'An American in Venice' in Art Histo7y vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 80-107.
20. The Artist 1954.
21. Basil Taylor in the Spectator 5 October 1955.
22. Communist Review January 1949, p. 21.
23. Time 1954.
24. 'Round London Galleries' in The Listener June 22 1955, p. 986.
25. 'Letters to the Editor' in The Listener June 29 1955, p. 1025.
26. S. Aaronovitch: 'The Party's Cultural Work' in Communist
Review June 1952, p. 217.
27. New Statesman 31 October 1959.
28. New Statesman & Nation 21 January 1956.
29. Christian Metz: Le Signifiant Imaginaire in Guilbaut ibid p. 1.
30. F. Jameson: 'Post-Modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism' in New Left Review July/Aug. 1984, p. 57.
31. Simone de Beauvoir: Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre London
1984, p. 359.
Scenes of Everyday Life. Dutch Genre Painting of
the Seventeenth Century, Christopher Brown, Faber
and Faber, 1984, ?25.00.
Masters of Seventeenth-century Dutch Genre
Painting (catalogue of The Age of Vermeer and De
Hooch, Royal Academy, 1984), Peter Sutton et al.,
Philadelphia Museum of Art and Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1984, paperback ?7.95.
The Dutch Genre Show at the R.A. has been crowded.
Occupying fewer than half of the first floor galleries, the
exhibition displays over one hundred paintings. Short
introductory paragraphs divide the works across the
walls and rooms- 'cardboard ambience' is eschewed,
we are left alone with the paintings. The crowds
stumble through the darkness, metaphorical and real,
for the paperback edition of the catalogue has sold out,
and the rooms are cast into that kind of gloom which
nervous hosts cultivate to get parties going. Those
fortunate enough to own a catalogue possess colour
illustrations of each work shown and more (one
hundred and twenty in all), two solid essays (one
introducing Dutch Genre painting, the other surveying
the social history of the Netherlands in the seventeenth
century), a catalogue entry on every painting illus-
trated, biographical accounts of every painter exhibited,
and a humblingly large bibliography. The plates are
arranged chronologically (the approximate order of the
exhibition), the catalogue alphabetically by painter.
From Faber and Faber, in time for this show, but
rather late for those who missed the catalogue to the
National Gallery's touring exhibition of 1978 upon
which it is based, comes Christopher Brown's Scenes of
Everyday Life. Dutch Genre Painting of the Seventeenth
Century. As the author notes, this is 'an entirely new
book'. The original exhibition consisted of only twenty-
eight paintings, and the economy of that selection
remains in the clear and straightforward organisation of
the book. Scenes of Everyday Life proceeds by introducing
the types and prototypes of Dutch genre painting - the
definition of which is clearly implied by the title. On an
unpretentious level we are shown the relationships
between genre painting and its contemporary society.
Flemish influence, in person and by example, is
explained. The themes of Dutch genre paintings are run
through - homo bulla, images of deception and folly, and
other emblematic motifs; then the various subject
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matters - the professions, the life of soldiers, women
and the home, taverns and brothels, etc. Apologies in
the preface that these are all selected on a 'rather
arbitrary' basis seem unnecessary, for they absorb the
evidence with little trouble. Many people have been
waiting for a sound and scholarly introduction to Dutch
genre painting - here it is.
The exhibition and catalogue of the Masters of Dutch
Genre Painting sets out to trace 'the first great flowering
of this art form'; it does so in a way analogous to Dr
Brown's in the first introductory essay to the catalogue
- though without the diversity of illustration or variety
of emphasis available to one writing a book, and
independent of the particularity of a loan exhibition.
The apparently innocent intentions of the organisers
conceal unacknowledged value judgements, however.
These value judgements shape their history of art into a
familiar curve - infancy, youth, maturity, decline and
senility. At the root of these judgements lie concepts of
'Dutchness' and 'Genre' which seek, quite rightly, to
relate the production of these paintings to the everyday
life so palpably reflected in them, but which fail to do so
by avoiding developing any precise theoretical position
which might usefully indicate how paintings and
societies relate, and are far from convincing as concepts
of any value even in this particular context. 'Patterns
emerge', we are told, 'in the selection of subjects that
reflect genre's function for Dutch culture', these subjects
have 'shared associations for the artist and his public as
members of the same culture'. Out of these subjects the
artist can 'allude to concepts or ideas by introducing to
his subject . . . a metaphoric dimension . . ', this can be
high- or low-brow, emblem or slang. However, 'some
genre subjects owed their existence primarily to artistic
tradition and only secondarily to contemporary reality',
this last non-reflective function is necessary to permit
inclusions, dealt with later. As far as it goes this is fine,
such paintings mediate reality and do so in a complex
manner. Dutch genre painters applied emblematic and
symbolic treatments ubiquitously - this is both a result
of artistic tradition and of personal attempts at
metaphoric dimensions, both things doubtless related to
shared associations of what painting was about in a
world which included Descartes as well as Visscher
(who said that there was nothing empty or vain in
things).
'Dutchness', considered on the whole, would seem to
be a Good Thing: proverbial and riddling, plain-spoken
and practical, brutal and tolerant, delighting in the
depiction of things to hand, and ever hinting at things
beyond. If this is the case, then the progress of Dutch
Genre painting is a doomed affair. Words used to
characterise later seventeenth-century painting and
literature are 'cool, often stilted', 'bowdlerised', and
'decorous' .. .; nevertheless history and geography
insist that they are no less Dutch. 'The innovations of
the seventeenth century's developing concept of genre
were the many painters who were more concerned with
the evocation of the world of actual experience . . .' we
are told - the world of actual experience was changing,
the social hierarchy was ossifying and polarising as
manners replaced moralities and a turbulent period of
capitalist expansion levelled off. One can accept that
Naiveu's Gold Brocade Shop (cat. no. 81 ) 'reflects the
eighteenth century's instinct to ornament and delicacy,
while its subject - a mercantile theme with a detail of
JOURNAL - 7:2 1985