The Kunastrokicm Point

"But every man to his own taste. -- Did not Dr. Kunastrokius, that great man, at his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in combing of asses' tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth, though he had tweezers always in his pocket? ... De gustibus non est disputandum" -- Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy As far as many U.S. citizens are concerned, biting asses' tails, as a leisure occupation, is not much more inexplicable than a lively taste for modern art, especially if it is abstractionist art. What's more -- as Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art has good reason to know -- the public gets disputing mad about it. The gallery's biennial shows of current U.S. painting invariably cause a loud outcry of outrage.

Clear & Teary. Last month the Corcoran put on a show to put the protests in perspective: a selection of some 59 paintings most representative of a century (1830-1930) of U.S. painting, set side by side with what contemporary critics had said about the works. The show's title was to the point: "De Gustibus . . ." Double the usual crowds went to the Corcoran to see it.

Last week, from the evidence of the De Gustibus show, it appeared that popular art appreciation in the U.S. was lagging about 60 years behind contemporary U.S. artists. Visitors to the exhibit picked William M. Harnett's morning-clear still life, Old Models (1892), as their favorite painting in the show, and gave second place to Thomas Hovenden's Breaking the Home Ties (1890), a teary scene of family parting complete with sad-eyed Rover. The 1890s were voted the favorite decade, the 1880s next, and the 1930s (where the modernist vote was massed) third.

There was nothing wrong with what the public liked. Old Models was painted with super-photographic realism and depth perception, qualities in Harnett which experts acknowledge and admire too. More than one visitor absently tried to flick the dust off its violin. Breaking the Home Ties, though as bluntly aimed to draw tears as a punch in the eye, is nevertheless an expertly painted scene of the young man's departure for the big city. When first shown, at Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893, visitors wore out three carpets in the rush to admire it.

Apples & Attraction. The Corcoran induced its visitors to write down what they liked and why. One well-established, if conservative, point of view came from a man who particularly liked William J. Glackens' Nude with Apple (1910): "Of all things on earth,'women are the most beautiful, and this is an honest picture of an attractive woman." One young woman seemed to have got the Kunastrokian point the show was intended to make. She liked the paintings of the 19305 (which included works of ultra-Modernists Abraham Rattner and Karl Knaths)--just "because is because is because."

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