This book is a collection of reviews and essays written by Hilton Kramer. Mr Kramer is a well respected art critic, known for his well trained eye and writing style.

So what time period is the "Avant-Garde"? Mr Kramer believes it is the period of time from 1855 to the 1950s. The reviews are divided by time periods, as well as the nationalities of the artists. The reviews are well written and don't have the snobbish point of view that some art critics use, that only the critic can decide what is art.

This book helps set different art movements in a historical perspective, so the reader can easily see what else was going on in the art world when the art was produced. The book also contains black and white photos of various art work - it's a shame they couldn't have been done in color. That is my only complaint about this book.

I recommend this book highly for old and new artists alike - or even if you're just interested in art - to see how art is put into the historical perspective as well as for the enlightenment the reviews give the reader.

Most denuncations of the state of the Arts in late twentieth century America are rooted in a nostalgia for the supposed glories of the past. What makes The New Criterion so different is that its editors and writers are in sympathy with modernism's goals. Therefore, their criticisms of excesses in the arts are more pungent--and more telling. No journal of the arts is as relevant as The New Criterion. Read this anthology and find out why. Not only will the articles open your eyes about what's right (and wrong) about today's culture, but you'll have the bonus of reading work that is extremely well-written in its own right

James Mellow performs an excellent work exploring the life of Evans. The photographic documents are great. The book covers all he Work of Evans, including his travels on Mexico, Cuba and the work for the Farm Security Administration. This biography explores his primary influences in Paris and all that creates a master af the photography of the century.

In a 1994 interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, reporter and critic John Corry told how politically one-sided the _New York Times_' newsroom was in 1980. In that year, of all the reporters and editors on staff, he only knew of one person who voted for Ronald Reagan, and that was the paper's art critic, Hilton Kramer. Kramer left a couple of years later, continuing his art criticism in the _New York Observer_. But he also set out to do battle with the cultural Left, that "herd of independent minds", in Harold Rosenberg's famous phrase. Eventually, he founded the _New Criterion_, an intellectual journal, which features some of the finest cultural criticism on offer today. This book, Twilight of the Intellectuals, is as much a retrospective of his often lonely mission, as it is a survey of the political climate of American intellectual culture in this century.

_Twilight_ differs from Paul Johnson's _Intellectuals_ in treating only 20th century intellectuals. Plus, Kramer's high culture background allows him to provide the reader with more insight into his subjects' worlds, as opposed to Johnson's uniform tarring of his as scoundrels (mostly accurately, though). Kramer even expresses some nostalgia for some of the people here, such as Kenneth Tynan, giving him his artistic due over the political divide.

But in the main, his work here is a series of political polemics. "Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion," is how the Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus described the mindset that Kramer battles here. Throughout, Kramer selects his old articles with the intent of fixing the truth about influential leftist intellectuals firmly in the cultural memory. People like Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss, Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, and such are all known qualities now, and do not need to be refuted afresh. But they still hold places of honor in institutions where like-minded intellectuals cluster, so the task of telling the truth about them is an ongoing one. The progressive myth surrounding Hiss is still so thick that Kramer felt compelled to include two essays about his case.

His praise of Sidney Hook, the lone ranger of socialism, is fulsome, and deservedly so. Hook did much of the heavy lifting in building the Marxist mindset among American intellectuals in the Thirties, and then atoned for it with a long, noble and lonely career as an anti-communist cold warrior. He oddly tags Hook for a philistine, though, for having pooh-poohed an anti-communist arts festival with the comment that artistic greatness could appear in dictatorships, too. Hook was right on that point, though, in my opinion. A musical program of Shostakovich and Prokovieff at their best would more than stand comparison with a program of contemporaneous Western composers, caged birds though the Soviet artists were otherwise.

His estimation of Saul Bellow may be a little unfair. Bellow has never been known for being a brawler, which may explain Kramer's disappointment in his seeming acquiescence to PC attacks against him. One _Herzog_, one _Mr. Sammler's Planet_, ought to be enough to ask from any writer's career, without also being called upon to spend creative energy in opinion journal polemics.

A print reviewer of this book commented on how entering the culture wars must have retarded Kramer's potential as a critic, by draining his powers. I don't know about that, but he makes a convincing Horatius At The Gate, giving battle to the herd of independent minds, who marched in leftist lockstep so disgracefully, for so long.

With this book, Hilton Kramer, a Cold-War anti-Communist Liberal of the last half of the 20th century, fills in many historical gaps for younger seekers of intellectual purity. While the book does a credible job explaining shifting differences of cold-war opinion amongst leftist academics and ideologues, it begs us to consider how otherwise intelligent people could continue to support tyranny in the face of such incontrovertible evidence of its evil. Kramer cites the verbal and media assault on anyone daring to question the tenets of the Cold War Socialist Left. He outlines the criticisms of Alexander Solzhinitsyn by George Steiner, the diatribes of Lillian Hellman, that staunch supporter of Stalinism, and the scurrilousness of Mary McCarthy, the pro-Hanoi apologist. He shines light on the Communists in Hollywood and the media and the many ways in which they aided the Soviet cause.

Starting with the intellectual rejection of Whittaker Chambers, in favor of the Soviet spy Alger Hiss, we are treated to a travesty of heresies that have yet to be renounced by their proponents. Kramer points out that Bard College today has an academic chair in their Humanities department in Alger Hiss's name. By the same token, women's studies departments at many universities still use "I, Rigoberta Minchu" as a text even while knowing that she made the story up. Current Writers who have kept on with this tradition of making it up as they go along, in the name of the class warrior socialist cause, are Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe, Stephen Glass of the New Republic, Joseph Ellis of Mount Hollyoke and Janet Cooke of the Washington Post; and these are just the ones who got caught. Even though they are a tribe of diminishing numbers, the shrillness of their followers is reminiscent of the Pod People in "the Invasion of the Body Snatchers". They still make their presence known in the universities, worshippers of their secular religion, their social studies professor's a fit for the over 50 white guy demographic of those remaining listeners of Pacifica Radio. Even with Cold War Left intellectualism "water over the dam", we still stand witness to the twilight of the intellectual era while we watch a continued post-modernist assault on free market values. In the war of ideas, they still fight on the side of our political enemies, and their fight is as relentless as it is prolonged. The saving grace is that their numbers continue to dwindle as their message becomes ever more diluted and confused. We can only sit in awe as we watch them "rage against the machine" and tilt at the windmills of free market capitalism. The Ruckus society, Greenpeace, PETA and Friends of the Earth come to mind.

The book outlines the details of urgent political debates that tore apart friendships and sundered institutions. Kramer gives life to these issues that animated controversies, but ended in the triumph of a new sensibility over modernism, what he calls a strange fate for liberal anti-communism. What's so interesting is how people like Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling and George Orwell were able to see the truth where other fellow travelers would not. It seems that the rigid ones suffered, and suffer still, from the condition that Thomas Sowell often refers to as compartmentalized brain syndrome. Hilton Kramer has done a fine job for those of us who are younger but still curious about this struggle of Cold war peripatetic's espousing their tale of the inevitability of a Marxist heaven on earth as the logical future for all mankind. This cruel plan, which oversaw the deaths of more than 100 million people in the 20th century, never succeeded and some of the credit has to go to those intellectuals with the courage to see the error of their ways. Hilton Kramer gives them their due.

Like most people born in the Sixties, I was taught by the commissars to exercise proper moral outrage at McCarthy and to ridicule the excesses of anti-communism. It wasn't until I was well out of school, when I read Witness by Whittaker Chambers, that I realized there was another side to the story, one more deserving of my sympathy.

I learned that the excesses of the "Red Scare" had not proved it wrong. There had been Communists in Hollywood, in the media, in politics, and in government, including Alger Hiss, a State Department official under FDR who had been revealed to be a spy by Chambers, himself a former Communist.

Despite the exoneration of Chambers and the slow trickle of information about the Soviet Union after its fall, the Left has never come clean about its failures on this issue. Hilton Kramer tries to set the record straight in this collection of his essays, most of them published first in his monthly review, The New Criterion, by telling some of the individual stories within the intellectual history of the Cold War (roughly 1930-1990). Kramer examines the impact of the politics of the Thirties and Sixties and the gradual fall of what Raymond Aron called "the two avant-gardes," Marxism and Modernism.

These were the days of coffee-house revolutionaries who had either taken leave of their senses or were willing to do anything in the name of Stalinism. Some of them were acquaintances of Kramer; some were merely part of the cultural smog that everyone inhaled. They were divided into the Communist Left and the anti-communist Left, with the latter typically excommunicated whenever it attempted to reveal the truth about Stalin.

The excesses of the anti-anti-communists were many. Kramer found Sidney Hook's autobiography a key text in the literature of anti-communism, but historian Arthur Schlesinger thought Hook exaggerated the influence of Communism on America. Lillian Hellman claimed it was the anti-communists who were the real threat to democracy. Susan Sontag called the white race the cancer of history. George Steiner was outraged to hear Solzhenitsyn say it was Lenin, not Hitler or Stalin, who created the slave-labor camp and that Soviet terror was worse than National Socialism. Mary McCarthy defended Communism in Hanoi and attacked the anti-communism of a fellow Leftist, George Orwell. Alfred Kazin tried to drum Saul Bellow out of the club because Bellow departed from Left-liberal orthodoxy. William Phillips, an editor of Partisan Review, wrote that defectors from Communist idealism, like himself, were often denied entry into various journals and university jobs.

If all of this sounds like puritanical, it is because the Left has often brought religious overtones to its politics. Despite claims to tolerance, liberals punished their dissenters harshly. But the untold story is the one Hilton Kramer has begun-of those who sacrificed and suffered because of their integrity and their loyalty to the truth.

Breaking man's urge to create down to the point of a dialectic battle between his level of comfort with the surrounding environment, Worringer outlines the historical balance between our urge to make what we perceive concrete (through abstraction) or organic (through empathy). This classic dissertation argues it is only by finding a state of equipoise between these two urges that art can make a lasting connection with any generation.

Recommended for all those interested in advancing art and design evaluation beyond mere opinion.

Milton Avery's landscapes are breathtaking. The reproductions are of good quality, and the editorials are interesting. This is an important book to add to your fine art library.

So writes Roger Kimball in this book's final paragraph. This collection of ten essays seeks to stave off the latter through discussions of what is permanent in politics, art, law, medicine, education, and social values.

As a collection of essays, the book is naturally somewhat uneven; some of the pieces have a much broader range than others, and the tone varies widely from one to another.

Worth the price of the book is Mark Steyn's hilarious and brilliant polemic on "the West's anti-Westernism." In examples that might make one weep if they weren't so funny, he describes how a remarkable variety of people from the West have bent over backward and forward to apologize for all sorts of supposed crimes against an ever-increasing roster of victims.

Others to single out include the one by Robert Bork. If you're a recovering liberal, you'll read this essay at first with a touch of queasy fascination that will then become enthusiastic head-nodding, as Bork explains just how in the name of Hollywood we have, in a short generation, come to the point where ... obscenity are fully privileged (and thus everwhere visible and audible) and any expression of religious faith in the public square has become Verboten (and thus everywhere hidden and inaudible).

In addition, Keith Windschuttle, whose subject matter overlaps to some degree with Mark Steyn's, rebuts the views of Edward Said and his Orientalism; Roger Kimball, among many other things, illustrates why we should be re-reading Matthew Arnold and ignoring Susan Sontag; and Kenneth Minogue, in discussing what he calls "the new Epicureans," shows how the modern "avoidance of the burdensome" has led people to forgo the responsibilities of marriage and family.

Looking over the table of contents again, I can find only two essays that I found either hard to penetrate (in one case) or narrow in scope (in another).

Although there's no recipe in this book purporting to contain the magic ingredients needed for the survival of culture, the essays as a whole will help readers think through, and resist, the assault on permanent values.

4.5 stars.

IF you like the FOX NEWS CHANNEL or the 700 CLUB, this is the book for you. Since the authors are clearly far-rightists and much more "elitist" in their thinking than anyone can possibly imagine, its amazing to see them defending principles of "Freedom" against the encroachment of the state and its "elites", until you realize that what is being bemoaned is the "natural" elite's eroding ability (as these cranks see it) to exploit and suppress the mob of unwashed scum (blacks, women, etc.) who insist on being treated decently when we all KNOW they are all INFERIOR, right?

Add the authors' names to the list of those NOT TO BE SAVED.

This olio of essays explores a variety of factions where true liberalism has been hijacked by groups with an agenda that is anything but liberal. In issues as diverse as tobacco to gun control to federal funding of the arts, the modern so-called liberals are virtually identical in their beliefs to Adolph Hitler-someone who never wore the title of liberal.

The nine authors are a mixed lot, but all have obviously done their homework, and even the less-than-stellar efforts will stimulate any open mind. Some of the pieces prove very readable, while getting through others is a tad of a struggle. Among the strongest are Robert Conquest's "Liberals and Totalitarianism" which examines the growing unnatural alliance between these strangest of political bedfellows. His reasoned suasion piqued my interest to read his current "Reflections of a Ravaged Century." Australian thinker Keith Windscuttle (an unusual last name must have been a prerequisite for contributing to this tome) covers "Liberalism and Imperialism" in another standout exploration.

Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball who co-edited the volume contributed a joint exordium that clearly sets the parameters of this disquisition. Kimball also contributes an essay on the philosophy of freedom that contains this courageous common sense gem, "notwithstanding the slogans of our cultural commissars, 'diversity' itself is neither good nor bad." Despite the somewhat sluggish pace of a few entries, this concoction warrants a perusal especially by those pure liberals who resent the piracy of their nomenclature.

This collection of papers explores various aspects of the decline of the liberal movement, ostensibly dedicated to peace and freedom, sweetness and light, into the coercive utopian form that dominates in the western world at the present time. As a result of this process the term liberalism has ceased to mean anything unless it is qualified in some way.

All of the contributors have something valuable to offer, especially Keith Windshuttle and Robert Conquest. Windschuttle has studied the waxing and waning fortunes of British liberalism, especially in relation to imperialism and the Empire. Adam Smith and David Hume saw no future for overseas dominions other than as friendly trading partners and similar views were held by the 19th century Manchester radicals such as Cobden and Bright. However one evil led to another because the threat of Napoleon prompted Britain to establish a worldwide system of naval bases to protect their sea trade and later these became the entry points for colonization of the pink coloured empire that extended around the globe. The philosophical counterpart of this movement was the philosophy of T H Green and the later Mill. The new nationalism and jingoism of the late 19th century resulted in some of the most squalid episodes in British history, of which the worst was probably the Boer War.

Robert Conquest's essay examines the record and credibility of the fellow-travelers with communism. During the Cold War Arthur Koestler speculated that the future of civilization might depend on the outcome of the struggle between communists and ex-communists because only ex-communists could comprehend how the cause could capture the loyalties of some of the best of men and also the worst of men. The best had to undergo crises of conscience when the reality could not be avoided. Little Louie, the fictional communist dockworker in Darkness at Noon committed suicide but more sophisticated western fellow travelers generally lack his integrity.

The collection has strengths and weaknesses. First the positives.For a long time it has been apparent that true liberalism could win any number of battles on economic policy but still lose the war through being outflanked on the cultural front. It often seems that true liberals of the libertarian kind have not been very active on this front or even aware of the issues at stake. Conservatives tend to be more alert to the dangers in this area and more active in responding to them, as the contributors to this collection have done.

Some market liberals may need to be reminded that we do not live by bread and technology alone. Our lives gain meaning and purpose from the myths and traditions which constitute our non-material heritage. At a lower but no less important level our daily transactions are dignified and lubricated by civility and good manners. Both the higher and lower orders of this fragile structure of civilisation are perpetuated by
cultural practices and by institutions such as the family and the universities. Many of these freedom-enhancing and life-enriching traditions, like the private domain itself, are under threat from various doctrines of the debased kind of liberalism that is targeted in this collection of essays. Many schools of thought which run counter to true liberalism are part of intellectual heritage. For this reason, if we lose the capacity to subject our tradition heritage to imaginative criticism, we run the risk that the good tendencies will be driven out by the bad. Some would say that this process is well advanced.

On the negative side, those contributors to this book who take up philosophical issues have hardly drawn upon the two most powerful liberal philosophers of our time, namely Hayek and Popper. There are some fleeting references to Hayek but none at all to Popper. This is rather like going into a big ball game with your two strongest players on the bench. Some of the contributors (Scruton, Kimball and Windschuttle) would probably not even want Popper on the squad,
judging from their comments on his work in other places.

The economic agenda of liberalism was not under the spotlight in this collection, still it was disconcerting to find that John Silber comes across as an unreconstructed New Dealer. Hadley Arkes, writing on "Liberalism and the Law" deplored the equivocation of Justice Harlan faced with a youth in his courthouse wearing a coat emblazoned with "Fxxxx the Draft". No doubt this was an obscene act but the conscription of young man for Vietnam was the great obscenity of the time, not only in its own right but for the way that it resulted in the loss of the war (through loss of support at home) after it had been effectively won on the ground in Vietnam. In the same way that conscription was the great moral mistake of the sixties, the War on Drugs threatens to shred the fabric of civil liberties and due process in our time. John O'Sullivan referred to the fall in crime "plainly the result of greater use of imprisonment" but the fall in crime is much more likely to be result of demographic factors (and possibly abortion law reform two decades ago) while the rise of imprisonment is a result of the War on Drugs. Another factor that undermines respect for even-handed justice and promotes racial tension is the racism of aggressive affirmative action programs such as college set asides and quotas for hiring.

Hayek pointed out that there are tensions between conservatives and Old Whigs, even while we form common cause against radicals and modern liberals (someone wrote "I vote libertarian if I can, otherwise I hold my nose and vote Republican"). These tensions
need to be explored so that economic liberals become more attuned to the culture war and conservatives become more sensitive to the erosion of freedoms by the State when it attempts to act as a custodian of morals.

I happen to think a great deal of good has been created by DWM (dead white males), and that they have much to say to us, despite the homogeneity of their ilk. But, these writers' prejudices about incidental matters (e.g., homosexuality) tend to throw the authors off subject into temperamental tangents of irritating, often infuriating, polemics. Indeed, this tendency among these so-called conservative illuminati make them seem borish, immature, and wildly inflammatory about all the wrong things. Rather than lead us to appreciate the "best" in human history, after the excellence of Matthew Arnold, they tend to approach the matter by eloquent straw man sophistry. It makes them appear collectively as myopic narcisists, whose only worldview is what they hate. I hate "jello," but what relevance does jello have with the excellence of a Berlioz composition? About as much as homosexuality has to the excellence of John Maynard Keynes' economics. Shooting the tree and getting lost in the forest is not a good sign for any critic; yet, nearly all are "victims" of this polemic. For individuals who despise victimhood, they fail to see their essays are filled with it; what they write often begets the very thing they profess to deplore. As articulate as these essays are, they are not very well-written. If looking to the past opens doors to the future, then reading Allen Tate, Isaiah Berlin, and Aldous Huxley are much better road maps to great ideas and fine literature, and much better critics than most of these amateurs.

Now I have to read this work. Could it possibly be more "irritating" than the January fifth review?! We shall see. All in all, it sounds like the perfect antitode to today's unconscious and helpless relativism.

This is a brilliant and compulsive book, though in its dissection of our cultural malaise far more terrifying than any escapade by Hannibal Lecter. Read it if you care about the future of civilization.