It wasn’t long ago that painters were celebrities; when Picasso died in 1973, it was big news to everywhere. Paul McCartney wrote a song about it. In the 70s, painters and paintings were still a part of mainstream culture; around that time, though, the art world moved from modernist and abstract-expressionist painting, though pop-art, to post-modernist and post-beauty painting. Unsurprisingly, the man on the street lost interest. Desperately cutting-edge art critics were free to call half-dissected sheep and giant balloon dogs beautiful, but it was obvious to everyone else that they were wrong. Confronting this irreconcilable difference, popular culture and “fine art” parted company. If you had to put a date on it, you might say the split happened in 1981 when Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc”—a rusted piece of steel 12 feet high and 120 feet long—was installed in a public plaza in Manhattan. The big metal wall forced the thousands of people who walked across the plaza every day to take a time consuming detour, which gave them a chance to contemplate the wall’s tremendous ugliness. In 1989 it was removed, and the divorce was final.
In 1667, the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture held an art exhibition in Paris—a sort of command performance of contemporary painters for the pleasure of Louis XIV, who was the Academy’s founder. It was open to the public, and the public enjoyed it. By the middle of the 18th century, the annual or biennial Paris “Salon,” as it was universally known, was the focal point of the art world. Salon opening-nights were major world-cultural events; the Salon was where the typical, cultured middle-class frenchman went to see the latest Turners, Sargents, Manets, Degases and Rodins. So voluminous were the submissions to the Salon that, in 1863, a secondary Salon—the so-called Salon des Refusés—was established, for the paintings that weren’t quite good enough, or weren’t quite conservative enough, for the taste of Salon-prime. Courbet and Whistler had pieces in that ’63 Salon of the refused, which attracted more than a thousand visitors a day. Pissarro showed a painting there too. So did Manet—the Déjeuner sur l’herbe.
By the turn of the 20th century, the prime Salon had become so bureaucratically single-minded and unimaginative that Renoir and Rodin formed a new dissenters’ version — the Salon d’Automne. Starting in 1903, the Autonomous Salon was where the homme on the street went to see the latest Cézannes, Gaugains and Matisses. The Salon d’Automne is still an annual event — but it no longer has any real cultural pull. When the Second World War started, the art world left Paris and moved to New York.
New York didn’t have a Salon. It had galleries and museums and Greenwich Village and Peggy Guggenheim, but no Salon. No focal point. It should have had one, and it should have one now — the New York Salon, a Salon des Refusés, featuring the painters who refuse to make things that are ugly for the sake of attempting social commentary. And there are lots of them — chances are you haven’t heard of many, or any, because they are not to the average contemporary critic’s taste. Nonetheless, there is a brave cadre of painters painting things that are intentionally beautiful. Look a few of them up: Jeremey Mann, Richard Schmid, Ray Turner, Makoto Fujimura, Ilana Lewitan, Joseph Lorusso and Hsin-Yao Tseng are some of the best. (I had the surprising pleasure, recently, of walking into the office of the philanthropic “Tikvah Fund” in midtown Manhattan and seeing one of my father’s paintings hanging next to a framed letter handwritten by Abraham Lincoln: David Gelernter’s on the list too, but many of you know him already.)
I’m talking about a big, serious art event, aimed at the general public, promoted like the New York Auto Show, that gathers the newest offerings of all the artists who are painting things that people actually want to look at. New York needs to reclaim its title as the world’s art center, and the art world needs to reclaim its relevance.
