John Edwin Canaday (1907–1985)

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.… (altro)

Slight on "detecting" in the conventional sense; the narrator relays information to Dr Mary Finney and she draws conclusions which she mostly keeps to herself until the time is ripe for a plot twisting revelation or surprise move. But the setting is exotic and taken from author Canaday's wartime experience, the characters are fully drawn, and the eye of the art critic is always in evidence. A psychological study for which a crime is a pretext, but still a satisfying read for mystery connoisseurs.… (altro)

Second in the series about medical missionary detective Mary Finney and Hoop Taliaferro, in this one a minor US government bureaucrat working for the (Head's note says) imaginary War Claims Settlement Commission --basically paying off U.S,. government purchase left over from World War 2. As in Murder at the Flea Club (rereading which led me to buy this) much of the first part of the story is Hoop just telling Mary the circumstances leading up to a murder. In this case, he has gone to the (real, but according to Head's note slightly adjusted for the story) tiny Portuguese enclave of Cabinda (next to then Belgian Congo) to pay an incredibly high price ($4 million when that really was $4 million) for a load of mahogany which was going to be made into a projected airplane that got scrapped.. On the way, he meets a dubious English expat type named Pete Biggs who shows up murdered in Cabinda.… (altro)