Customer Reviews

Ambition and Love in Modern American Art

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I, like others, picked up Weinberg's book after the stellar Nochlin review. I was somewhat puzzled by the project at first, but as is often the case with the art Weinberg discusses, "Ambition and Love in Modern American Art" is too seductive to dismiss. While his categories seem vague, even silly, his discussion of the artists and their work is elegant. His style is always engaging, mostly because it is so often personal. I suspect that critics have been troubled by Weinberg's approach, the lack of any real scholarly investigation, replaced by coffee-table talk and emotional musings. I can't really refute such critiques. But I do think that Weinberg's approach holds a lesson for all those interested in studying, writing about, and even practicing art. To try and separate oneself from the art you create or examine is a futile enteprise. His inclusion and discussion of such themes (God forbid!) as love, desire, and ambition adds a much needed jolt of blood and flesh into art history. It reminds us that art history is no science and that art historians need not feel so insecure about that. After all, art-making itself is not just a process of intellect, it is one of passion. Perhaps historians should investigate their own stirrings a bit more, as Weinberg has done here, to make their own scholarship truly insightful and what's more, readable.

This is one of the best art history reads I've had in a long time. Wenberg's is an original mind. You just have to try it for yourself.

Picked up this book based on Linda Nochlin's rave review in Art in America, and also, having recently heard Weinberg speak in New Mexico. This is a smart well-written text which will appeal to scholars and regular folks as well. Chapter on O'Keeffe, and the one on O'Keeffe and Stieglitz quite fascinating, as is the Weinberg's take on Agee and Evans. I plan on assigning this to my students for a course on 20th century American art.

I loved this book. This magisterial work makes for absorptive reading- it absorbs your interest in art as well as your capacity to read further. The author displays an incredible sponge-like capacity. Like a sponge used to prevent any conception, the work keeps anything from coming into mind. I particularly loved the chapters on Wharhole and Polyp: Weineberg's own style pays fantastic homage in imitating the abrasive contents of the former's brillo box. It's also great how the author just soaks up some cast off comments from Freud and Manzoni, draining them like a vampire. He just sinks his teeth right in! I had a few disagreements about how he handled Basquiat with rubber gloves, especially the early work, but in the end I appreciated Weinberg's janitorial finesse and the range of his sweeping generalization.

It's certainly true, as some critics have argued, that there's not enough here to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of professional art historians. But that misses Weinberg's central point: that it's far less important to possess talent than it is to convince others that you have it. Indeed, implicit in Weinberg's study is the idea that the plain and undisguised absence of talent is no obstacle to thinking of oneself as an artist. But whereas any number of critics have made this argument before, and convincingly so, what makes Weinberg's analysis different is his choice of words -- for even as he neatly reiterates the arguments of earlier scholars, he oftentimes uses entirely different words to do so, sometimes going so far as to construct whole sentences that might reasonably be labelled as his own. Less hospitable reviewers have described Weinberg's book as "an academic redundancy," "the fatuous mutterings of a vacant and sterile intellect," and even "the crudely drawn transcript of a mind nearly porcine in its desire to wallow around in its own filth." But what such judgments fail to acknowledge is that, in the context of Weinberg's book, such intellectual ineptitude is transformed into a self-justifying vehicle for professional advancement. It may be all its critics have made it out to be (in the end, one is hard pressed to refute their attacks). But the important lesson that Weinberg teaches us is that scholarly merit, or the lack thereof, is ultimately no substitute for artless ambition.

Jonathan Weinberg is one of the world's foremost historians of modern art (in addition to being a splendid painter). His stellar reputation is absolutely deserved, a fact to which this book most certainly attests. It is cogent (easy to understand), while being extremely well-written and researched. You need not be an art historian to understand the work, because Weinberg writes above academic jargon and mumbo-jumbo. Weinberg is thoughtful and thought provoking -- for those interested in modern American art or, indeed, modern American culture, more generally, this is an indispensable book.