Publisher’s Note: The publisher has had no role in editing this column, which is published as the writer submitted it with the intention of publication in BEACONS.
By Christyn Pettway
Emily Genauer was granted a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for the critical writing she did about artists and their work. In 1973, Genauer wrote five pieces: “Chagall museum: A biblical theme”, “'Otherness' is part of Munch exhibition”, “Picasso's influence found at the roots”, “Soutine in Paris: A soul in agony”, and “Changing views of nudity, violence.” Within the world of journalism, only knowledgeable journalists that truly understand how critical think pieces work can write critically. Genauer showed this skill in the following readings by following the rules of critical writing.
Chapter 29 of “The Arts, Entertainment, Criticism,” states that “Pure criticism requires expert judgement...the good critic uses his or her knowledge and understanding of a particular field to evaluate the performance or work of art.” Genauer’s focus throughout these pieces was about the art of various artists like Marc Chagall, Edvard Munch, Van Gough, Pablo Picasso, Chaim Soutine and Juan Genoves.
Genauer was able to successfully write about these artists because she lived through the times of their success. Within the first story of the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, written on July 30, Genauer writes about Chagall’s biblical themed art, explaining that “...Chagall has always painted the Bible. When he painted doves and donkeys and playful bears, he was painting the animals of Noah’s ark. When he painted lovers floating among flowers, he was painting Paradise.” The same way she explains the way Chagall “studied and adjusted” his drawings with great detail is the same way she now studies his work for herself.
As a critic, you can note something negative about an artist without meaning anything negative by it. Genauer has no problem getting across how she felt about Chaim Soutine in the piece “Soutine in Paris: A Soul in Agony.” Genauer writes that “Soutine’s is a kind of painting which, after continued exhibition of cool, cerebral abstraction, of op and pop and even of that abstract-expressionism which once seemed so feverish (and has roots in Soutine), we have come to find embarrassing...Soon we saw no feeling in Pollock at all, only a rich ‘curtain’ of sensuous pigment and form. Always the desideratum for the museum people who chose our shows was bloodless, arm’s-length cool. Anything more revealing seemed somehow in bad taste, ‘illustrational.’ We were forgetting that art is passion, revealed and projected in ordered shapes, colors, lines. If it’s a passion only for technical means, it’s pretty thin stuff.” But this isn’t her disliking his work, but instead understanding his background and what he previously went through such as “...hunger, deprivation and exploitation to death before he was 50, after an unsuccessful operation for stomach ulcers” and that “his extreme nervousness had been unquestionably aggravated by his years of terror living in a German-occupied French provincial city, which as a result led to the sadness and lack of feeling in his art during this time.
I enjoyed Genauer’s writing style because her personal voice was strongly present throughout all of her pieces. In “Changing Views of Nudity, Violence,” I really heard her voice while reading when she says “Is it possible to grow so blase that a Rubens nude whose yearning for Adonis can scarcely be contained in her rosy flesh or that a Courbet standing nude, all bulging belly and dimpled behind, can be viewed essentially as embodiments of the spiritual Platonic ideal of union between man and women?” or “Most successful among them, and furthest removed from mere caricature, are Ipoustegy’s metal sculpture of a trapped and fragmented head and May Stevens’ cool, sardonic double portrait of an unidentified man who may be an army officer, a political office-holder, a president, whatever,” because her writing sounds as though she’s talking to her readers the way she’d speak in a regular conversation.
Overall, being a critic isn’t a job that just any journalist can have. To be a successful critic, research and detail must be put into each topic to then properly convey what's being criticized in its entirety. Emily Genauer was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for being skilled in critical writing after writing five stories about the arts and artists. Chapter 29 of “The Arts, Entertainment, Criticism” explains what makes a good critic and Genauer proves to be one throughout the course of her stories. The main goal of successful criticism is to get your readers and audience to make readers interested in the topic, letting them know what to expect, but still allowing them to decide for themselves how they feel about it if in fact, the piece is worthwhile. After reading Genauer’s pieces I want to read about and see the pieces of Chagall and Soutine; I see that as a success in being a good critic.
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