"Mona Lisa's Mustache: A Dissection Of Modern Art" 1947 ROBSJOHN-GIBBINGS, T.H.

ROBSJOHN-GIBBINGS, T.H.

[265] pp.

Alfred A. Knopf

1947

First Edition

8 3/4" x 6"

VG/ VG

Jacket drawing by Mary Petty

MODERN art's pendulum has really swung, and it's about time. Twenty years ago the author of this book would have been on the bandwagon, judging by his temperament and general approach to a subject. Hereabout, in the gullible Twenties, a latent discontent had given encouragement to the so-called "modern" art, simply because it was in revolt against whatever powers that were then running a rather smug esthetic set-up. The hobgoblins of expressionism and the tortured geometry of nonobjective painting attracted the sympathetic and unquestioning sympathies of bright young minds, who were willing to kick the slats from under any self-appointed referee's armchair. Now the picture has begun to change, for now the modern art referee has been in there too long, and the incipient rebels are now beginning to rally around a new loyal opposition, which is, if not conservative, at least more critical of the shammier parts of our advanced contemporary art.

The author of this book-an English-born designer who came to this country in 1929 and made a remarkable career-had a previous side-saddle hayride in debunking antiques-collecting fallacies in "Good-bye Mr. Chippendale." He would now like to make it "Good-bye Mr. Dali." Not that he has any special animosity toward Salvador Dali. Indeed, Señor D. is merely the high man on a totem pole of Oceanic and African magic that begins with Gauguin and has a dirty look at every misadventure in high European politics and erratic philosophy, not to mention magic again. And not to mention magic in a review of this book would be a travesty, for the author has almost a fixation on the word. It, or its synonym, appears on every page. Magic, voodoo, incantation, the confusion of the bourgeoisie, the mystery of origins, unintelligibility on a condescending scale, the use of distortion and tribal immolation all occur as well-defined attempts to subordinate the individual and his dignity to the all-important state. Out of this, with due recognition to Italian futurism, remittance-men Bolsheviks who went to Germany, other crackpots, and incipient Fascists, came the maliciously planned destruction of nature in art.

Have we rounded up all the culprits yet? Not at all. The story begins way back with the pre-Raphaelites, seemingly a sinister group who thought (like Thoreau, Emerson and Brook Farm) that something was wrong with the highly touted industrial progress of the nineteenth century. It is a most ingenious story because almost all the protagonists for the newer art were self-confessed scamps, and, oddly enough, most of the rising political movements of the time accepted these strange dogmas, only to jettison them as the political movements achieved comparative permanence.

By quoting from convenient sources, such as Pissarro, or by searching assiduously among the manifestos of the Dadaists, or the loose mouthings of the lunatic fringe, Mr. Robsjohn-Gibbings has brought damaging evidence to the cause of the implicit believers in modern art. This, at this time, is no doubt all to the good, because for twenty years no literate and plausible attacker has appeared—and the author's conclusion has both wit and point:

Who is to say, after all, that Dali, using the magic of surrealism for window-dressing and peepshows at the New York World's Fair. has not found the only possible use for such magic in the twentieth century? And who is to say that the symbolist poets, with their occult jargon, and Gertrude Stein, with her esoteric literary stammering, have not been carried to their ultimate conclusion in bobby-soxers lustily singing "Mairsie Doats" and Danny Kaye giving out with "Git Gat Gittle"? Could it be that the volcano after all was one of Horace's mountains, which, as you doubtless remember, labored and came up with "a single laughable little mouse"? It would almost seem so thank God.