Jed Perl is one of the most ferociously intelligent art critics writing today. From his perch at The New Republic, he issues not only taut reviews of current exhibitions but also regular contentions about the state of the art world. There is something prickly about much of Perl’s writing, but at a time when the writing of many so-called art critics is indistinguishable from the puffery dispensed by the PR departments of museums and galleries, it is a pleasure to encounter a critic who understands that criticism is not cheerleading, that it involves sifting, judgment, discrimination, and the deployment of taste.
I’m not sure I would have selected Perl to edit a volume of writing about American art from 1945 to 1970. His most conspicuous virtues as a critic, I would have urged — including a lordliness that not infrequently trespasses into the ornery — augur ill for a task demanding evenhandedness. I would have been wrong: It turns out that Perl was exactly the right person to assemble this plump miscellany. On view in this volume is Perl’s intelligence sans his ferocity. His introduction, though brief, is authoritative and conjures expertly with the most astonishing fact about this period of American cultural endeavor: the sudden entry into the limelight of American art as a mainstage, top-billing phenomenon. As Perl notes, “the sense of confidence and authority that American artists, curators, collectors, critics, gallerygoers, and museumgoers were experiencing in the 1950s and 1960s was certainly unprecedented.”
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