Jonathan Weinberg’s new book is comprised of a series of thoughtful, original essays on the workings of fame and desire on the production and reception of a select number of twentieth-century American paintings and photographs. A social art historian writing in the wake of postmodernism, Weinberg remains committed to a modernist faith “in the viability of painting” (xxi), even as his sensitive and erudite readings of particular works test and complicate that faith in light of Pop art and the demise of Greenbergian orthodoxy.

Following a brief introduction, the book proceeds in three sections (“Parents,” “Autonomy,” and “Collaborations”), each containing a trio of essays devoted to what at first appears to be an odd assortment of characters: James McNeill Whistler, Jackson Pollock, Sally Mann, Alfred Steiglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Hockney, James Agee and Walker Evans, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Marc Lida and the anonymously collective NAMES Project. Weinberg is particularly attentive to the ways in which these artists’ private lives, encompassing family, friends, and lovers become implicated in the construction of iconic works in modern American culture. His final chapter, “Advertisements for the Dead,” then neatly reverses field in order to consider two compelling instances in which the artist’s work continues to matter in the absence of a famous name.

Weinberg locates himself unobtrusively within the text as an art historian who is also a gay man, practicing painter, and New York intellectual. His prose manages to be both learned and colloquial. He makes extensive use of the existing scholarship, while bending it to his own original ends. His overarching concern is with the many ways in which notable and often controversial works in twentieth-century American high culture become enmeshed in issues of love and fame, understood in the comprehensive, Freudian sense as the ends toward which artists strive in the pursuit of meaning and happiness in the face of death.

The book’s first three chapters are devoted to Whistler’s iconic portrait of his mother, Sally Mann’s controversial photographs of her three preadolescent children, and Pollock’s drip paintings, all understood as intensely intimate creative acts caught up in the dynamics of the child-parent relationship originating in the family romance. The second section begins with a discussion of Stieglitz’s famous series of photographs based on his relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe, followed by a complementary chapter, brilliantly attuned to the differences that gender makes, on O’Keeffe’s flower paintings and her abortive mural commission for the women’s powder room of Radio City Music Hall. The section ends with a more identificatory account of David Hockney’s 1963 suite of autobiographical prints, A Rake’s Progress, based upon the youthful British artist’s conquest of the New York art world. The last three essays address various forms of collaboration: the Depression-era, social documentary photo-texts by James Agee and Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), and Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White (You Have Seen Their Faces); the rivalrous and mutually exploitive partnership of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the anonymity, obscurity, and collectivity that conditioned art making in the time of AIDS.

The arguments move sinuously between polarities of fame and desire, the work and the life. Although nowhere explicitly theorized, Weinberg’s method pays homage to the modernist alchemy by which the idiosyncracy and mundanity of personal, private experience are mysteriously transmuted by way of formal artifice into a publicly communicable and culturally significant visual image. The “love” invoked in the book’s title refers to that psychic matrix that must, under modernism’s rules, be given voice, yet also be made over or subsumed in the name of high-cultural, impersonal, communicable form. “Ambition,” in turn, entails that combination of courage, discipline, cupidity, perseverence, ruthlessness, and art-world saavy necessary for the successful promotion and circulation of the artist’s product. Weinberg’s great gift is the complex interweaving of these two strands to produce a series of intensely social interpretations. At the same time, Weinberg commands a clear view of the larger critical field, noting that whereas Abstract Expressionism and Clement Greenberg were the preoccupations of an older generation of artists and art historians, Pop art remains “the great problem, the great obsession” for the artists and critics of the 1980s and 1990s: “We are haunted not so much by art failures as by art successes” (159).

The careful elucidation of the influences of fame and desire on key works of modern American art affords fresh critical perspectives on well-trodden ground. For example, by reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men through Wayne Koestenbaum’s concept of “double talk,” a theory of the dynamics, both competitive and collaborative, of male-male literary authorship, and by comparing and contrasting Agee and Evans’s partnership with Caldwell and Bourke-White’s rival production, You Have Seen Their Faces, Weinberg makes a locus classicus of social documentary newly interesting even as he notes how the historical subject is all but effaced in the process of “praising or damning famous artists” (210).

The discussion of the collaboration between Basquiat and Warhol in the early 1980s becomes one of the places where Weinberg’s insistence upon the relevance of the artist’s life to the work proves most productive. His juxtaposition of two paintings (Warhol’s Jean-Michel Basquiat and Basquiat’s Dos Cabezas) is exemplary for the ways in which it elucidates “fame and its costs, collaboration and competition, ambition and abjection” (214). Weinberg understands his own project as complicit with the dynamics of use and abuse to which Basquiat’s life and career have been put by the contemporary art world even as he eloquently contests a fellow New York art critic’s dismissal of Basquiat’s achievement. For Weinberg, Basquiat’s paintings seek to reclaim “the potential expressiveness of painting” (225). This affirmation is made within the context of painting’s contested status in the wake of postmodernism—a cultural condition that allows Weinberg to argue convincingly, if anachronistically, that “[Julian] Schnabel was not alone in learning to paint from Basquiat. Andy Warhol had the same experience” (227). It is no small critical feat that at the end of the chapter, Basquiat’s Untitled (Love) surfaces, in the aftermath of Warhol’s deadpan mirroring of commodity culture, as a “lesson on how to paint if not differently or better, then at least again” (241).

The concluding chapter is by far the most personal. Devoted to the watercolors of a close friend, Marc Lida, and to the NAMES Project Quilt, this essay steps beyond the bounds of modernist art history to ask, “But what if the artist never becomes famous and death comes before his or her art is ever known?”(242). Weinberg’s answer is to write not only as art historian but also as witness and advocate in the full knowledge that “splendid painting” (254) can be a consolation but never a substitute for the loss of those we love. In his treatment of the AIDS Quilt, Weinberg makes the most of his ambivalence toward a vast, continuously unfolding, communal work that “defies its detractors and admirers, because it is more akin to a process than to an object” (271). It is a measure of Weinberg’s capaciousness and generosity as a critic that he can write so astutely and movingly about a work that he and his “circle of New York art-world intellectuals and artists” cannot accept as “an apt expression of mourning” given its affinities with kitsch (269). At the end, Weinberg’s erudite exposition of the American modernist tradition and his defense of painting as a still viable high-cultural form gives way to an act of remembrance. Here, the “outside” that the social art history demands as the informing, if not determining, supplement to the work of art as a specialized practice and disinterested aesthetic experience, comes forward as the ethical basis for writing art criticism.

What, if anything, might Weinberg’s lucid and learned essays presage about the writing of art history in the new century? I think it is important to note in this regard how successfully his project “sidesteps” Greenbergian modernism and thereby “much of art historical debate of the 1980s and 1990s” (xvii). In its place he offers at one point a qualified and updated version of Adrian Stokes’s Kleinian psychoanalytic model of painting as an archetypical form of art making in which the will to form reconciles both artist and viewer to the conflicts between love and death, autonomy and connection, that lie at the core of psychic experience. Weinberg is too good a critic to advance such a model as anything but a qualified aid in coming to terms with the unresolved tensions inhabiting James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother. Nonetheless, Stokes’s viewpoint clearly commands Weinberg’s sympathies, particularly as it affords the viewer ways of looking at work that go beyond generational critique to forge “an experience of integration” (xviii). I would extrapolate from this to say that Weinberg’s project takes into account, if only tacitly, the waning of postmodernism as a dominant form of cultural discourse. Yet the reversion to a Freudian model is symptomatic, at least for this reader, of the need for new theories and models of criticism to adequately address the fractured pluralism of these troubled and uncertain times.