I enjoy reading conservative art critics, even if I don't agree with them. Hilton Kramer, Jed Perl, and Robert Hughes, to name three prominent ones, have served as a ballast against the faddishness of the art world, and wrote (and continue to write, in Perl's case) insightfully about what they believed. Alas, the late New York Times critic John Canaday doesn't hold a candle to them.

Canaday's limitations are very apparent, and while I might agree with some of his assessments about the lesser lights of Abstract Expressionism, it's clear that he never understood the movement; he never grasps that abstraction could be of more than just formal interest. Instead, Canaday needed to see the subject represented, so where he knocks Mark Rothko or Franz Kline, he holds up histrionic "image of man" artists such as Antonio Saura, James Kearns, and Leonard Baskin, none of whom have dated well.

To add insult to injury, his hamfisted attempts at humor (including not one but two articles about fictional artists he thinks represent the folly of the era) in comparison make Garrison Keillor sound like an edgy alternative comic. ( )