“Is It Art or Is It Double Talk,” is an attack on modern art by journalist/illustrator/portraitist S.J. Woolf, whose drawings often accompanied the profiles of celebrities and notables that he wrote for the Sunday Times magazine. He also drew covers for Colliers, Time and other magazines. An exhibition of his portraits of prominent New Yorkers was running at this time at The Museum of the City of New York.
Tis article is an embarrassingly retrograde jeremiad in which he compares Picasso and Dali to children and the insane, complete with comparative photos to illustrate his point. The modernist artists, Woolf declared, were incompetents and fakes. But modernism had moved from the avant-garde to the cultural mainstream decades earlier. Abstract Expressionism was the emerging movement. Woolf was expressing the views of the still plentiful rearguard.
It proved a highly controversial article that unleashed a torrent of letters to the editor, a sizable sampling of which ran in the Sunday magazine on April 28. The Times said the letters ran about two to one in Woolf’s favor. Some of the negative ones were scathing in their rejection of his critique and of his claim to expertise. The head of the NYU Journalism department, for instance, compared him to a Hearst reporter, among the lowest creatures on the journalistic scale, who recently had written a piece implying that Modern Art was a Communist plot to weaken America. Some of the supportive letters predicted that Woolf’s perceptive article would help doom the fakeries that had been foisted on the public and establish Woolf, a man in his sixties, as the voice of sanity in the world of art criticism.
Alas, 1946 would turn out to be a bummer year for Woolf. Soon after the article ran, the portrait he had painted of his good friend Fiorello LaGuardia, intended to join the gallery of mayoral portraits hanging in City Hall, was returned to him by the Municipal Art Commission for not meeting even their conservative standards. Far worse, he was diagnosed later in the year with lateral sclerosis, the dreaded Lou Gehrig’s disease. He died two years later at 68, working, with great difficulty, almost until the end.