Shorter notice.(Christopher Wilmarth: Light & Gravity)(Book Review)

Shorter notice

Steven Henry Madoff Christopher Wilmarth: Light & Gravity. Princeton, 184 pages, $49.95

Christopher Wilmarth tells a tragic story of American art--the story of an artist who held his own against aesthetic inhumanities only to succumb to more personal demons. Wilmarth committed suicide in 1987 at age forty-four. He departed at a time when, even taking into account his early successes, his career was still in flood stage.

Wilmarth was something of a messianic figure. His statements, quoted in Madoff's essay and elsewhere in the monograph, reveal just the sort of battles a serious artist faced when surrounded by Minimalism and Pop. It's not hard to imagine. While Donald Judd famously maintained that "I'm totally uninterested in European art, and I think it's over with," Wilmarth believed that "The past is nourishment and support for the present." He was echoing T. S. Eliot ("the history sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence") and Cezanne ("One does not substitute oneself for the past; one merely adds a new link to the chain").

Wilmarth saw the spirit as art's common bond. While taking up many of the idioms of Minimalism (scale, abstraction, the industrial materials of metal and glass), he sought a different end from the soullessness of Judd ...