The Use and Abuse of Art by Jacques Barzun

If you've been in the Art business as long as I have, you will come across a vast amount of ink time devoted to opinions about "ART". What is it? What it's not etc. Who's doing it and who isn'nt? We pay attention when artists we admire write about it and sometimes their memoirs become a form of art. Da Vinci , Delacroix , Van Gogh come to mind. A lot of us have contempt for the critic who anoints and baptizes the new art discovery. Many critics in the past have made a mark for themselves. Vasari and Ruskin come to mind. But there are some critics who bring into the public square of art opinion and analysis a reasoned and informed pedigree. One such man is Jacques Barzun.

Jacques Barzun , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Barzun was professor of history at Columbia University. He is retired now and is over 100 years old and counting! He grew up in an artistically cultured family environment and art was an important part of his upbringing. It is no accident that the mature Barzun would write and lecture about Art in 1973 when it seemed that Art was hurling horses off the cliff.

The title of his book may seem odd at first. But as a historian, Mr. Barzun is well aware of contextual paradigms. He is alluding to Nietzche's Essay " The use and abuse of History ". He mentions that the translation from the German should be " The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life". Therefore his book, which is a series of 6 lectures at the National Gallery in DC , deals with how Art affects Life. Does it Destroy or Enhance Life? Can it be as a Religion as the Romantics believed? Can Art Redeem us from a world we view as utilitarian and consumer driven? Are Art and Science compatible? What about Art in the Age of Unbelief? Is it a suitable substitute for God?

Here is a sampling of lines from the book.

...For Representative art does not copy, it imitates; that is, renders in such a way as to make the understanding of its subject, clearer, or more lasting.

....The trouble is that Modern Art in various ways abandoned imitation, representation, naturalism, and it now has to make out a case for its products still being truth.

...From the Romantics onward, art was supposed to deepen, enrich, distill, refine, enoble, redeem life.....Therefore to enhance life through art must mean from the outset to increase hope and self-confidence, to reduce fear and self-doubt, not the reverse.

The doctrine of salvation by Art may be summed up, then, as a path with two branches. Art by its nature expresses the deepest and best in Man. Hence it is bound to attack the wickedness of man-in-society.

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What you will find in reading this book is a grand survey of Art from a man who steps back and gives a vast and erudite explanation of what man has been up to with his lines and colors in Historical swatches. How has man Used and Abused Art? He himself is not an artist, but he is sensitive to what mankind produces and is able to put it all in context.


There are so many gems in this book that I am reading it again for the third time. The whole book is practically underlined. You can purchase the book used, like I did, for less than $4 dollars on Amazon.