(See front cover)
Art, like most other human enterprises, has its makers, sellers, buyers and commentators. Prominent living makers of art—Matisse, Picasso, Zuloaga, Augustus John, Rockwell Kent—are known at least by name to multitudes of laymen. And almost every literate person has heard of Sir Joseph Duveen. He is, however, neither an artist nor a critic, as laymen have been known to wager. He is, of course, the supersalesman and the most famed name in contemporary art. Extensive buyers of art—Andrew Mellon, Jules Semon Bache, John Ringling—are widely recognized as such.
Who can name an art critic? An art critic is a public commentator, supposedly invested by virtue of his learning and taste with the right to interpret the esthetic trend to the commonalty, to denounce that which he considers bad and proclaim that which he considers good. In any society pretending to cultivation and beauty, the position of art critic should obviously command renown and respect. Yet who can name an art critic?
Thoroughgoing readers of either Scribner's magazine or the New York Herald Tribune will immediately give the name of Royal Cortissoz (pronounced Kor-tee-zus). A small, chunky, lively gentleman with iron-grey hair, moustache and goatee, he has conducted Scribner's art department for six years and the Herald Tribune's for 38. No art critic in the U. S. exhibits a more dignified, fastidious, yet spirited approach to his subject. None writes with more alertness and lucidity. Through all his years of professional journalism, Royal Cortissoz has preserved the gusto of an amateur.
Because he is chief U. S. spokesman of the conservative attitude toward art, he is particularly interesting. For, while modernistic art may or may not be valuable, it is undeniably fashionable in the U. S., and this is due in no small measure to the increasing publicity and support given it by U. S. art critics. But you will not find Royal Cortissoz in the fervid com-pany which swirls in adulation around recent esthetic figures. Post-Impressionism and other modern cults and coteries are not sacred to him. In the March Scribner's, he regretfully says farewell to the magazine, which is hereafter to appear without illustrations and, hence, without Critic Cortissoz. But chiefly he devotes his paragraphs to a discussion of recent developments in the field of art, most significant of which is Manhattan's recently-opened Museum of Modern Art (TIME, Sept. 16). Clearly he states his opinions about several modernist idols:
". . . on the whole Matisse seems to remain one of the most stationary of them all. and Picasso, with his long sequence of 'blue periods' and the like, is as far from proving that modernism gets its practitioners anywhere. . . .
"Amadeo Modigliani . . . was a sensitive young draughtsman and had in him possibilities as a colorist which might have been interestingly fulfilled had he lived. But he was given to unfortunate distortions, providing the sitters for his portraits with absurdly elongated throats, slit-like eyes and swerving noses, and to make matters worse he kept repeating these malformations until his portraiture suggests the functioning of a thin stencil.