Art and Its Rewards

By Paul Gray

Some creators who made news that stayed news

One of audience, most notable innovations was to treat all forms had art and thought as news, to be reported and judged every week. But no battlefield, no fen of murky political intrigue resisted the newsweekly for mula so stubbornly as that variety of activities categorized by some of the magazine's early section titles: Music, Art, Radio.

While the editors did not expect artistic milestones to appear every seven days, on deadline, they did hope to recognize them when they saw them. It was rarely that simple.

First, most major cultural achievements cannot be singled out from the long careers of their makers. News stories proclaim the dramatic, the striking, the unprecedented. Creative acts usually build subtly on what has gone before toward something perhaps yet to be imagined. They trace a curve of achievement, not a jagged series of breathtaking strokes. One week is hardly long enough to sense and report a pattern that may take decades to emerge. Sixty years ago, for example, William Faulkner was loitering about his home town of Oxford, Miss., being called "Count-no-count" by derisive neighbors for his aloof artiness. During the late '20s and early '30s he produced a series of novels that amounted, one by one, to an epic saga of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a sum greater than the number of its parts. Though TIME published a cover story on Faulkner in 1939, several years had passed since his greatest books were written and several years more were to pass before his total work could be accurately reckoned.

Cultural change is subject to other time lags. A few performances make vivid headlines, but for reasons that often turn out to be transitory, wrong or both. Other events remain hidden for long periods, news postponed. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) now stands, along with Joyce and Proust, as an indispensable guide to the modern temperament. Yet readers during the '20s learned nothing of Kafka, for the bulk of his work was published posthumously, and English translations began appearing only in the '30s.

While it can take many decades for artistic judgments to solidify, to demonstrate that a Mozart will outlast a Salieri, art forms themselves now change rapidly. Readers in 1923 had never heard a movie actor talk, never imagined a television screen. Technology kept bringing new transformations: long-playing records, high-speed cameras, videotape equipment. Not only arts changed but audiences as well. Local orchestras, opera, ballet and theater companies proliferated. So did the electronic babel (sitcom disc-jockey disco-rock singing commercial) that now seems an inescapable fact of life. In the age of the mass audience, more people could watch a Shakespeare play on TV than had ever seen it in all previous performances; more still watch network fare like Three's Company.

The following selections illustrate a far-reaching coverage, but there have been one or two practical restrictions. A few towering names that could have been included here are not, either because they are mentioned elsewhere in this issue or because their appearances occurred in particularly news-heavy years. (TIME'S cover story on Stravinsky, for example, came out in 1948, the year that also brought the Berlin airlift and the creation of Israel.) In addition, only one representative has been chosen for each of half a dozen different arts. The The names that survived these tests all made news that stayed news.

Charlie Chaplin did not invent the movies, but he might as well have. Coming out of the British music-hall tradition, he quickly taught everyone how comedy on film should be performed. His onscreen character, the Tramp, became an indelible image of the little guy enduring and prevailing in the face of every tyranny.

Ernest Hemingway has been in and out of fashion, and there are now signs of a revival. At his height he imbued a whole generation with his own passionate sense of courage and art, of what it meant to be a man, and of how the good life should be lived. Though his later years turned that sense to bloated self-caricature, his early works expressed it in a spare prose that has influenced younger writers ever since.

Frank Lloyd Wright could be called the first New World architect. Unlike his distinguished American predecessors, he did not look toward classical or European models for inspiration. He advocated and used indigenous materi als designed to harmonize with natural settings.

The Beatles announced the imperial triumph of pop culture. Thanks to technology, these Liverpool lads won a world wide constituency of delirious fans. When they retreated from concert stages to a London recording studio, they mixed eerie sounds that captivated highbrows and teeny-boppers alike.

Picasso. The last name alone is enough to sum up 20th century art. The Spanish-born painter went through several stages of development, each of which outstripped the lifetime output of other artists. His creative force was fierce and incomparable. The final assessment of him came only when an enormous retrospective exhibition in Manhattan in 1980 made it possible for the first time to see the myriad elements of his work all together and in perspective. He had been dead seven years, but the Museum of Modern Art's splendid show was, as much as any battlefront communique, news.

--By Paul Gray This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.