Modern Art and the Dignity of Man

by FRANCIS HENRY TAYLOR

1

THE modern movement is not a theory; it is a condition. It is a condition arising out of a series of historic facts and consequences which center on the dignity of man — his position in the universe, his search for truth, and his constant desire to render truth in sensible form so that other men may grasp its meaning and its beauty.

Even to attempt to associate truth with beauty brings down the horror and contempt of the intelligentsia today. Art for them has ceased to have any moral or religious significance; they have divorced it from the area of common human experience and made it a form of private communication—when it communicates at all—whereby abstract associations of form and color convey intimacies scarcely less cryptic than those revealed on the psychoanalyst’s couch. The innocent layman, visiting the national exhibitions, may be forgiven for suspecting that the chief purpose of American art is to illustrate the Kinsey Report. Instead of soaring like an eagle through the heavens as did his ancestors and looking down triumphantly upon the world beneath, the contemporary artist has been reduced to the status of a flat-chested pelican, strutting upon the intellectual wastelands and beaches, content to take whatever nourishment he can from his own too meager breast.

Yet, were he still an eagle, the world unrolled before the artist’s view could scarcely give him inspiration or encouragement. In a brilliant inquiry into the nature of Decadence, the popular English philosopher, C. E. M. .Joad, has summarized before the jury of public opinion the true indictment of our times: —

[Ours is] an age which has no fundamental beliefs or convictions and, in particular, no beliefs in regard to the existence of an order of reality other than that which we can see and touch. It is an age which, having no religion, does not believe in God. Hence, it cannot write about Him as Milton did, make music about Him as Hack did or. like the cathedral makers of the early Middle Ages, build beautiful structures in His honour. Moreover, since it is an age whose mind has been largely formed by science, and which believes, therefore, only in the existence of what it can sec and touch, and of things which are of the same kind as those which it can see and touch, it does not believe in the existence of beauty as an immaterial form which can manifest itself in man’s handiwork and touch with surprise of its sudden glory his structures of sound and paint and brick. It does not aspire to make such structures. Finally, it is an age which does not believe in the dignity of man and does not seek, therefore, to assign him his place and prescribe for him his purpose in the developing scheme of a purposeful universe. In so far as it considers man at all. it thinks of him after the mode that science has made fashionable; he is an accident of evolution, a complex of reflexes, a puppet twitched into love or war by the showman in his unconscious who pulls the strings, or, as the behaviourists would have us believe, a by-product of chemical and physiological processes, pursuing his course across a fundamentally alien and brutal environment and doomed ultimately to finish his pointless journey with as little significance as in the person of the amoeba his ancestors once began it.

As a consequence the artist has become the favorite whipping boy. Since he is supposed to be the custodian of that ineffable thing called beauty, he is blamed if he does not jealously conserve it without change, and equally blamed if he tries to place it within the context of the world in which he lives, He is condemned for being the cause, but never forgiven that he is merely the effect. If he has ceased to be a spiritual leader, it is only because he has no Gospel to impart. The reserves of selfsufficiency are drying up; his day-to-day existence is controlled by a cruel and inexorable determinism which leaves little room for the exercise of his own free will and even less for the will of God.

Having accepted modern art as something which, while they never understood it, they nevertheless vaguely approved, the public have begun to wonder whether they are not “being had.” They are accustomed to daily accounts of world crisis in the press and radio. These are the stuff of which ordinary experiences are made, and in so far as the artist deals with them objectively the public is willing to admit the latter’s right to express his opinion and even to find, if he can, some beauty in them. But where they part is in the realm of the subjective: interpretation, representation or nonrepresentation as the case may be, the psychology of color and the myriad emotional and intellectual connotations with which every contemporary work is filled. The public, after trying patiently to understand, has at last rebelled.

Among the many straws in the wind was the manifesto issued by the Institute of Modern Art in Boston changing its name to Institute of Contemporary Art “because ‘Modern Art,’ an innocent phrase, denoting simply the art of our times, came to signify for millions so met lung unintelligible, even meaningless. . . . ‘Modern Art.’ describes a style which has become both dated and academic.” As Degas remarked about a Bouguereau nude, “N“ayez pas peur; cela se dégonfle.”

This manifesto was not an isolated shot. Ortega y Gasset, the celebrated author of The Remit of the Masses, had predicted a quarter century ago that the new style was condemned to sterility. Now published in English as The Dehumanization of Art, his essay confirms once more that the modernists, by their insistence on avoiding living forms and by their dependence upon the ironical and the inconsequential, have “changed the position of the work of art in the hierarchy of human interests and activities.”

To humiliate and patronize the masses with an art which can be deciphered only by an intellectual elite — the fashionably initiated — must inevitably arouse a people’s antagonism and their indignation. “Through its mere presence,” he says, “the art of the young compels the average citizen to realize that he is just this — the average citizen, a creature incapable of receiving the sacrament of art, blind and deaf to pure beauty. . . . But such a thing cannot be done after a hundred years of adulation of the masses and apotheosis of the people. Accustomed to ruling supreme, the masses feel that the new art, which is the art of a privileged aristocracy of the finer senses, endangers their rights as men.”

Finally, pursuing its efforts to find a common denominator of American taste, Life called in June a Round Table Conference to inquire “into the value, standards, morals and t rue historical position of modern art.”The question it proposed was: “Is modern art, considered as a whole and definitions aside, a good or had thing?”

For the better part of three days museum officials, critics, and writers from both sides of the Atlantic sat in an atmosphere of kleig lights and candid cameras borrowed from Lake Success and pondered on the ultimate. ’The techniques and the results were largely those of the United Nations; evasion of issues, brilliant scoring on peripheral discussions. Everyone waited for ihe veto but Molotov did not appear. As was to be expected, the elephants of the art world had labored and produced a mouse.

2

THE issue for our generation is not so much one of principle as it is one of the degree of communicability versus incommunicability. And, while no sensible person would wish to turn back the clock, there are many who might wish to read its face without having to take its works apart.

The question is no longer one of technique or taste but revolves about the problem of reality. The “absolutes” which so disturbed the scholastics of the Middle Ages have been resurrected as fighting words. Obscured by the conquest of material existence in the nineteenth century, philosophy has again reappeared as the champion of those new freedoms of conscience and opinion which have resulted in the liberation of the individual. Having become his own center of activity, generating energy with a rapidity such as the Western world has never known, man has misinterpreted his own researches into the modern world of science as the answer to ultimate cause and purpose, He has become, indeed, the arbiter of his own fate but he has not yet learned that the cosmic is distinguished from the comic by only a single consonant.

The art ist has been the victim of similar pressures and obsessions. During the past hundred years he has moved slowly from decorative arrangements of optical impressions to what Stephan Bourgeois has called so aptly “the creative expression of the mind’s dynamic perception.” Reality of the mind has been substituted for the time-honored absolute of reality of the eye. The transition was made possible by the invention of photography which demonstrated the difference between optical seeing, or observation of what is true to nature, and mental perception —that is, “the difference between reality as the eye sees it and the world of action as the mind perceives it.”

We are confronted, therefore, with a conflict between two venerable truths inherited from the Renaissance, two types of reality: the one (dependent upon the concept of time and space) presents the picture of the world within the traditional limits of visual experience, and the other presents it from the point of view of personal emotion. Each of these truths is equally valid and equally circumscribed. Neither one attempts a teleological explanation of the universe. Man is the pivot about which the world revolves and he is absolved of any responsibility for its conduct.

More recently another reality has suggested itself to the artist — time is conceived as a type of fourt h dimension projecting itself through space. Its impact has been a by-product of Einstein’s theory of relativity and of the investigations in nuclear physics. Time and space are shown to be no longer absolute. But even more, radar, television, and the rapid time-destroying projection of an airplane through space, in which we move from continent to continent as quickly as a telegram, have conditioned popular thinking. We are forced to bow before the “dynamism of change.” Art therefore might conceivably become the illustration of energy rather than the illustration of form; the artist is thus presented with another reality or absolute as potential as electricity or atomic power.

Energy, then, whether it be physical or mathematical, biological or metaphysical, has suddenly presented a new Reef of Norman’s Woe upon which the Hesperus of accumulated aesthetic knowledge and experience inherited from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance has been wrecked. The survivors are struggling to a sandy and uncertain shore which is constantly receding with each new movement and artistic current.

The history of art is a visual record of the philosophical concepts which have engrossed creative thinkers of each age. In their works they leave behind them both the history of their personal reactions and an accurate barometric reading of their intellectual climate. Recognition is instantaneous and universal. It does not require any act of intuition or special gifts of birth or education to experience it. Anyone who looks at a picture, a statue, or the architecture of a building learns instinctively and immediately something of the world which produced it. What will the art of today tell the spectator of tomorrow? In the sense that it announces the sterility and the intellectual vacuum of twentieth-century America or Europe, it will have at least that questionable validity; it will be recognized as the product of its time.

If we accept the definition of art as (he rendering of truth in sensible form, and truth as ihe interpretation of human experience, it is obvious that a work of art is essentially communicative. It must mean something to someone other than the person who created it — in fact, and more important still, it can mean the same thing or several different things to a number of persons. Hut meaning it must have. Not until the second quarter of the twentieth century was the essential communicability of art ever denied. Communication has been common to all the great racial traditions and, once established, can take any variety of expression. It is unlimited in content or subject matter, free to adopt any style or technique. The one and only quality denied to a work of art throughout t he ages is privacy. Unless participation is allowed the spectator, it becomes a hopeless riddle and ceases to be any work of art at all.

3

IF the artist is obligated to communicate his meaning, the public in return should bear in mind that, they are no less obligated to make an effort to understand what the artist is attempting to say to them. The message of art is not necessarily a simple message or an easy one; and it is quite legitimate that a painting or a statue may be meaningless to persons at one level of education and yet be clear and explicit to those of another level who are particularly trained to understand it. The same layman who takes offense at an abstract picture in an exhibition, into which the artist has put years of self-discipline in logical and orderly arrangement of abstract or theoretical ideas, will accept without question the right of a university or a research foundation to publish abstruse mathematical conclusions and equations which, as an untrained person, he can never hope to comprehend. In the sciences, then, in the social sciences, and in the humanities there is a general acceptance of the fact that certain studies are reserved for the higher intellect. Unfortunately this is not true in the arts.

It is, however, this very appeal to the higher intellect in the early works of such masters as Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Paul Klee which has had such influence on the present generation. For the art of the past fifty years has been more an art of cerebration than one of reflective and constructive thought. Absorption in technical experiment and the influence of psychiatric and physical investigation have completely engrossed the larger and more experimental minds. What started in Picasso to be a revelation and, indeed, a revaluation of the art of seeing has come through excessive introspection and cynicism to he a terrible disservice to younger art ist s who lack his ext raordinary talents and mercurial virtuosity. Whether or not one likes the message these larger talents are communicating, whether one thinks them good or evil, or prophetic of destruction or nihilistic in their purpose, one must nevertheless admit that they do at least communicate a message of importance to the present day.

That this message is more often t han not a message of propaganda for some popular and current ideology is of course one of the fundamental dangers inherent in the modern movement. But Picasso, even when he is most socially destructive, is free from the charge of producing something meaningless or utterly private in its concept. As the storm center of the contemporary movement, he has become the symbol in the public mind of what is good or bad in modern art. Yet few of the visitors to an exhibition who are not trained in the history of design realize the fundamental significance of his contribution to the thought of our time.

One has but to trace the growth of Picasso, in the recent avalanche of publications devoted to his art, to recognize his almost unearthly power. However, only the specialist w ill recognize in his recent work “the most brilliant, the most deadly parody of art ever created by man or devil.”"Picasso, an English critic, Michael Ayrton, has said, “has sucked the history of painting dry and built a monument with its bones . . . his work is a superlative paraphrase of art. Everything which he has produced has been in effect a criticism of some previous style or attitude of man towards art. He has “fed upon art and is therefore a vampire of art,”more concerned with the analysis and dissection of an idea or vision than with its realization. Leaping from style to style—from archaic Greek to Romanesque and back again to Oceania he has carried art criticism to a pinnacle never before known and in so doing has disturbed profoundly those talents less nimble-witted than himself.

Picasso is at once the giant paradox and the lowering genius of our day who has captured our imagination by exploiting the manic depression which has carried our generation through two world wars and is hurling us along the road to world revolution. He has caught, our suicidal despair and laughed at it hysterically. Only history can determine whether Picasso, like the skeleton at the feast, is the last flowering of a civilization whose collapse amuses him, or whether there is latent in his extraordinary mobility of line and color the prophecy of a new world w hich is to come.

If Picasso with his uncommon gifts has shown at every turn his utter contempt for the dignity of man, one can scarcely expect much more from those lesser luminaries on both sides of the Atlantic who slavishly follow7 in his footsteps. Whereas it is clear that Picasso is always completely master of himself, and knows to a carefully calculated nicety what he is doing, the imitators are capable of producing only the empty forms but not the content. Much that has become unintelligible in contemporary art to the spectator is incommunicable solely because the artist-imitator himself has failed to comprehend the meaning of forms and techniques which he has borrowed from the master. We are confronted therefore with second-rate minds mouthing secondhand ideas. The modern movement has become a vast public monte di pietà in which the golden balls of Medici patronage arc being exchanged for pawn tickets of dubious redemption. The pseudo scientists and psychiatrists of Greenwich Village have had to find an outlet either in the non-objective plagiarism of machine design or in the diverting and pornographic possibilities of Dr. Freud.

4

THE stalemate which now exists between the objective and the subjective attitudes is nothing new in history. A parallel perplexity harassed the Graeco-Roman world at the period of its decay.

Greek art followed very much the pattern of Greek science. With the dawn of formal religion there was a conscious dissociation of the material from the spiritual. A polytheistic system was developed which soon became so complicated that a priesthood was essential to regulate the various deities’ powers and influences, to separate the sacred front the profane, the human from the semihuman, and to establish the personality of heroes, gods, and mortals. Simultaneously with the groping towards this organized religious belief, there arose what today we would call ihe heresy of pure scientific thought, as expressed by Thales, Democritus, and Anaxagoras. But even the Greeks were overwhelmed with the exclusiveness of science. In opposition to the atomic theories of Democritus a dualism was admitted which allowed for the independent existence of free will and for the tradition of a god made in the image of man. Thanks to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, there developed an intellectual way of life which was to be handed on to Christianity as a code of ethics and a basis for the estimate of spiritual values.

One of the principal vehicles for transmitting this human knowledge and experience was the concept of the academy which for so long directed the course of creative art. The academic ideal, leaving aside for the moment the connotations of system and authority which it engendered, was merely the effort to translate into terms of art and architecture the clarity and rational element in Greek thought, to return to the principles and examples of Hellenic form, to recapture its purity, and to show the relation of these later works of man to the accepted beliefs of the day. It suppressed passion and, as it progressed through the centuries, it restricted the inventiveness of human will and individual discovery. It became the “ideal of the ideal,”a fundamental discipline for arriving at a perfection which, if not necessarily original, was acceptable according to clearly established rules of taste rules predicated in their turn upon the logical sequences of Greek science and philosophy. Since, however, it chose to impose its will, the academy passed from the objective attitude of man-made determinism to the totalitarian concept. This totalitarian concept has been revived in the present day in the even more fanatical Academy of the Left.

There are essential differences between a sculpture of the Age of Pericles and a more modern work. ’The classical approach is instinctively and fundamentally intellectual. The Greek artist, like the scientist and philosopher, placed the emphasis on clarity and ignored what was outside of human experience. A relief from the Parthenon frieze, for example, expressed a generality of concept, never a specific experience. The background of the relief is neutral and indefinite; the scene or event portrayed is not restricted to the limitations of time or space; environment is seldom if ever indicated before the time of Scopas and Praxiteles in the fourth century, and then only in the general sense of “house” or “forest,” not Dr. Johnson’s house or the Forest of Arden. The human figure in the beginning is subject to the severest discipline of symmetry, of formal composition; portraiture, until the Asiatic influences brought in by Alexander’s conquests, was virtually unknown. Then and only then did subjectivism creep in; the Pergamene and Alexandrian Schools introduced the sense of pain and immediate sensation from specific circumstance, such as we see in the Laocoön. But by that time the classic world was breaking up. Mithraism and Christianity brought with them the concept which was to engulf the medieval world — the idea of sin and its forgiveness through the practice of faith. The Greek ideal of clarity was to yield to another equally compelling ideal of mystical reality.

5

THE Gothic Madonna on the other hand reveals the differences of philosophical approach between the two civilizations. Whereas the classic statue expresses an idealism which renders truth, empirical and amoral truth, into a memory picture of an idea, freed from the limitations of setting, abstract and intellectual, the Madonna conversely uses these same technical means in making a statement of quite another kind. The representation is of Mary and Jesus; this immediately puts the statue in a tight compartment of time and space. Automatically both artist and spectator are called upon to contemplate a relation between two individuals who at the same time are both human and divine — the Blessed Virgin and the Son of God. Even the event is brought within a given limit of time and place — Bethlehem, during the infant years of the first Christian century.

Herein lies the difference between Greek idealism and the intuitive realism which appeals so much more to the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon temperament. It is the complete negation of the academic point of view, which was, of course, a perversion of the classical ideal; the Madonna is the attempt to render truth not through a generality, but truth as it is vested in the particular, conditioned by circumstance. But more important than any of these elements is the sense of the infinite which pervades the whole of Gothic art and lies at the bottom of the new medieval style in architecture.

The Gothic cathedral is the epitome of the interest in the new realism. Human interest, pathos, and individual memories replace the familiar generalities and concepts of the Graeco-Roman world. Sculpture abandons its static calm, is frankly episodic, and becomes more animated and less remote from life. Color is employed to enhance the mystical effect and is intimately interwoven with the symbolism of religion. But it is above all in the philosophy of space in architecture that one observes the greatest change. Whereas the Greek sought to avoid the indefinite, and composed with clearly established forms, the medieval architect, wishing to express the mysteries of infinity, composed with segments of enclosed space, untenanted and majestic. “Solution of form in space,” Charles R. Morey has insisted, “is the Gothic builder’s purpose, to unite the material with the divine after the manner of the Christian mystic. Isolation of form from space was what the Greek was after, instinctively excluding from his concepts that which could not be defined.”

If the Gothic cathedral on the one hand symbolized the variety and individuality of Christian existence, it did so nonetheless according to a strict discipline and formula. In its very construction, where each detail played its specific purpose in expressing the glory of God, it became the synthesis of Christian dogma and belief. It was the concrete embodiment of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas — but it was also a synthesis predicated on the leadership of the Church. This in turn was doomed to break down in the later Middle Ages before the emergence of Renaissance man. Here at last was an individual who breathed the air of freedom, who could draw upon any source, pagan or Christian, for his subject matter, and who could give unlimited expression to fantasy and invention. The Christian unity of the Middle Ages was broken, and the artist was to enjoy a momentary liberty before bowing once again to the academic classical ideal.

The Renaissance was nothing more or less than the rediscovery of man by man. He revealed himself to himself as a thinking animal, a creature of free will to whom the act of voluntary choice and selection of ideas and tastes were a new adventure not known to Western Europe since the fall of Rome. But the political misfortunes which darkened Europe in the sixteenth century put an end to the playful independence of Renaissance man. To be sure, he had come into his own, his stature was everywhere reflected in the monuments he created — ostensibly for the glory of God but essentially to magnify his own importance. The climax was reached in the Golden Age of the Papacy when the temporal magnificence of God’s Vicar all but snuffed out the sacred flame which had been handed down from early Christianity. Italy was invaded by Charles V, the city republics of the Middle Ages were reduced to bondage, and the religious community was torn asunder by the conflict between Protestant Reform and Catholic Reaction.

From these calamities emerged a graver, more sober attitude towards art. In their anxiety men turned once again to the experience of classical antiquity, but in their return to the past they lost themselves within it. Beauty was divorced from truth, and art became theory instead of practice. The academic point of view was not so much the triumph of mind over matter as it was the complete triumph of tradition over human will.

6

JOHN DONNE, preaching before King Charles I at St. Paul’s on Christmas Day, 1625, asked the question: —

What eye can fixe itself upon East and West at once? And he must see more than East and West that sees God, for God spreads infinitely beyond both: God alone is all; not only all that is but all that is not, all that might be if he would have it be. God is too large, too immense, and then man is too narrow, too little to be considered; for who can fixe his eye upon an Atome; and he must see a lesse thing than an Atome, that sees man for man is nothing.”

Pascal echoed the same refrain: “What is man in nature? A nothing in infinity, an everything in regard to nothing, a middle point between everything and nothing.”

It did not require a stock pile of Uranium 235 to convince the poet, the philosopher, and the prelate of the seventeenth century that, although the atom had not yet been split, fission had already taken place in man. The separation of the soul from the intellect could lead, they held, only to inevitable disaster. The atomic age had begun not with Hiroshima or Nagasaki but with Democritus and the earliest physicists of Greece. The medieval synthesis had been exploded, voyages of exploration on land and sea had produced new worlds to conquer. The Reformation as well as the CounterReformation of the Jesuits had concerned itself with the problem of the individual and his conscience—that spark of God within him — and its relation to the constantly expanding, yet at the same time increasingly particularized, scientific universe.

While Colbert and Lebrun, building upon the intellectual ground plan of Richelieu, were erecting the structure of the academies of art, the spirit of authoritarianism began to infect mathematics and astronomy, the natural philosophies, and the realm of metaphysics. There was a constant pressure to reduce all natural phenomena to natural law. What law you accepted depended entirely upon which side of the angels you wished to stand — to the right with Descartes, who reconciled the order and rhythm of the universe with the idea of a supreme being capable of revealing himself according to the beliefs of the Catholic Church; or, at the other extreme, with the mechanists who refused to concede the existence of any reality which was not predetermined by reason or the senses.

But in both camps the chief concern was always with infinity, which H. T. Pledge considers one of the “few genuine elements which we derived from the ‘barbarians’ rather than from the Greeks. The infinities,” he adds, “though not the pessimism of the Eastern religions, had been preserved by Christianity. For the step-by-step communion with the infinite by a series of sacraments, science had substituted the step-by-step communion with it by a scries of hypotheses and experiments. But the infinity remains.”

The artist of the Baroque and Rococo, protected by a hard enamel of convention, seldom penetrated the inner recesses of science or philosophy. Only in the trompe-l’æil decoration for a ceiling where cloud-enveloped putti, foreshortened and provocative, arc casting slings and arrows at outrageous fortune, do we see him struggling with the doctrinal disputes of the day. Yet in the atelier as in the observatory it was the fashion to pursue t he answer to ultimate causes in the heavens. Whereas in science the contribution of the individual was subordinated to the progress of a group of like-minded seekers after truth who moved inexorably toward the common goal, the artist on the other hand was more subjective and responded to the inner compulsions of his own creative genius. “Even without Copernicus,” says Pclscneer, “we should have had the Copernican system; it simply would have had another name. Not so with Bach; without him we would not have had his concertos.”

Reality, then, whether it was the subjective mystical reality of El Greco or the objective realism of Vermeer, was the preoccupation of the artists. But it was the intensity of the human element in a picture which alone could make it rise above the literal and factual representation of the little masters. In Rembrandt, possibly, is the full realization of that belief accepted by scientists today that “reality must have something of a mental nature.”

Metaphysical anxiety and restlessness, so characteristic of the seventeenth century and its art, was followed by the frankly skeptical inconsequence of the eighteenth. Elegance and form were more important than the content. The modern age had yet to await the full expression of its absolute materialism in the doctrine of determinism. This was announced in 1812 by Laplace: “We should envisage,” he wrote, “the present state of the universe as the effect of its previous state and the cause of the state that is to follow.”

Laplace had simply stated the credo of the nineteenth century. Unlike Luther, he had nailed the articles of his belief upon the closed and bolted door of human experience. The world of the future was to be predetermined, reasonable and rigidly a priori. If there was any room at all for the Christian God, he was to he tolerated merely as a genial judge and counselor in a juvenile court of moral delinquents. The new God was the God of Science from whose mechanistic and determinist conclusions there was no turning. Voltaire had already pointed to the sterility of the mechanistic view when he wrote to La Villevieille, “ Les athées nont jamais répondu à cette difficulté qu’une horloge prouve un horloger — The atheists have never explained the difficult fact that a clock presupposes a clock maker.”

7

MAN and artist have become the victims of the scientific world they have created, and in their common fear for the future have lost contact with one another. The crisis in the arts is nothing more or less than the crisis of the human race. How far, one may ask, can the artist be held responsible for the society of which he is the product? How far can the Zeitgeist be laid at his doorstep? Are we to assume that he has sold his birthright for a mess of psychic and mechanistic pottage? No, nor can we lay the blame for un intelligibility upon the failure of the artist to continue the traditions of craftsmanship of t he old masters. As Toynbee has observed: —

The prevailing tendency to abandon our artistic traditions is not the result of technical incompetence; it is the deliberate abandonment of a style which is losing its appeal to a rising generation because this generation is ceasing to cultivate its aesthetic sensibilities on the traditional Western lines. We have willfully cast out of our souls the great masters who have been the familiar spirits of our forefathers; and while we have been wrapped in self-complacent admiration of the spiritual vacuum that we have created, a Tropical African spirit in music and dancing and statuary has made an unholy alliance with a pseudo-Byzantine spirit in painting and bas-reliefs, and has entered in to dwell in a house which it found swept and garnished. The decline is not technical in origin but spiritual. In repudiating our own Western tradition of art and thereby reducing our faculties to a state of inanition and sterility in which they seize upon the exotic and primitive art of Dahomey and Benin as though this were manna in the wilderness, we are confessing before all men that we have forfeited our spiritual birthright. Our abandonment of our traditional artistic technique is manifestly the consequence of some kind of spiritual breakdown in our Western Civilization; and the cause of this breakdown evidently cannot be found in a phenomenon which is one of its results.

load would be inclined to feel that our current plight comes from the fact that man has misread his position in the universe. Puffed up with pride as the arbiter of his fate and fortune, conscious of his omniscience and superior sensibility, he tends to regard his own romantic experience as an end in itself; the satisfaction of individual desires and the enlargement of emotional experience become the standard of value. This then is the burden of Joad’s inquiry into decadence. “The Gods take their revenge against man’s impertinence. He is cast down and through suffering made to realize his true nature. In the chaos and confusion he recognizes the need for a higher reality than his own.” It is the recurrent theme of the Greek tragedies in which “hubris or arrogance, attempting to be the até or lord of the universe, is overtaken by nemesis.” Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler have proved quite recently the timelessness of ihe argument.

How, then, the reader may well ask, is the artist to proceed in the intellectual and moral vacuum of the present day? Each artist of good will and personal integrity must work this problem out for himself. First of all he must be willing to communicate his meaning to others in terms of universal human experience. He must resist propaganda of both the Right and the Left as rigidly as he must reject fashion and intellectual snobbery; for propaganda in paint or plaster, even when presented under capitalistic auspices, is no less persuasive than the written word. He must recognize that he shares the responsibilities of citizenship equally with the writer or the politician.

Only this year the pages of the Atlantic have called for “Freedom of the Brush.” No intelligent person would seek to deny the innate and inalienable right of the art ist to do and think as he pleases. He cannot and should not be restricted or enjoined. But as a citizen the time has come for him to choose whether he is for civilization or whether he is against it, whether he believes in the freedom of individual conscience or whether he is ready to accept whatever propaganda is fed to him with a spoon. Only by his complete freedom of creation can the integrity of art be kept alive.

But that, on the other hand, is no reason why the public should be dragooned to admire and to applaud what they cannot understand. If the public must respect the artist’s freedom of creation, then in the same way the latter must acknowledge the public’s freedom of acceptance or rejection. Any other concept is academic and totalitarian.