David Anfam (1955–2024)

It is sometimes tricky reviewing a book because one is, after all, reading it because one doesn't know much about the subject, and so is not a good judge of how authoritative the text is. That said, this seems like a pretty good introduction. There is a little bit of biographical information about the artists, and the writing is not too jargon-laden. It is not always clear to me why some of the pieces are considered to be part of the same school. David Smith's work has no obvious (to me) relationship to Jackson Pollock's, but as my taxonomy teacher said: taxonomy isn't reality, it's an attempt to described reality. Things in real life do not fall neatly into boxes. The author has kept allusions to things that the reader may not have heard of to a minimum; it irritates me when an author, writing an introduction to a book about so-and-so, tries to make his/her point by referring to such-and-such, which may be equally unfamiliar to the reader.



The great disappointment is the pictures. Only 28 of 169 illustrations are in color, and frankly, some of the reproductions are so poor that they were better left out. Economics is an important factor here, of course. Ideally, every piece referred to in the text would be illustrated in color. They are handled well in the text: when an illustration is referred to, it's number (rather than page number) is listed in the margin next to the text.



In the end, the author failed to convince me that most of the pieces have any meaning. He quotes David Smith as saying "a work of art of an object s always completed by the viewer," and I don't connect to most of these pieces. Some I find quite visually pleasing: Pollock's Tondo and Eyes in the Heat; Lee Krasner's Noon; Clifford Still's 1948-D, but they don't convey any meaning to me. I was most charmed by some of David Smith's sculptures like The Letter and Oculus, but War Spectre is the only work in the entire book that conveyed meaning and feeling to me, especially since it appears that the artists were not generally trying to convey amusement. Widow's Lament, in Anfam's description "reads as a droll creature with ears and feet," which seems at odds with its intended meaning.

I remain a devotee of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word.… (more)