32
PARTISAN REVIEW
oping chaos imposes upon the artist a new demand for order. We
can perhaps thus account for the strongly-built Byzantine esthetic
which attended the break-up of the Roman Empire.
As soon as the pressure of the last world-conflict was relaxed,
the artists who had persevered received a very prompt reward.
With a surprising swiftness the new directions in painting, sculp–
ture, and architecture began to reach sections of the public that
had been hitherto quite closed to any esthetic advance. In Moscow
the Russian constructivists continued their work, and were consid–
erably encouraged by the new regime. Germany and Austria,
although economically wrecked by the war, began the most pro–
ductive period they had shown in modern times; while in Paris the
important painters and sculptors were very soon achieving results
that have probably remained the finest of the Twentieth Century
to date. (The
Three Musicians
of Picasso is dated 1921.) Abstract
movements likewise developed in Poland, Italy, Switzerland, and
Holland. It is interesting to note that England and America, who
emerged from the war as the dominant world powers, failed to
react creatively, until after the world depression had set in, to
anything more daring than an occasional expressionist hang-over.
The end of the last decade introduced a new and pervasive
insecurity, which was accompanied in the art-world by a gradual
shift in its center of gravity. A culture which might survive actual
war-conditions is powerless to combat the forces which precipitate
war, as most tellingly expressed by the new European dictatorships.
Gabo and Pevsner had started the wes_tward drift early in the last
decade, when they left Moscow for Berlin. The German artists and
their elaborate educational systems were dispersed in 1933. The
outbreak of the present war found the movement which had so
swiftly spread eastward throughout Europe, backed down at Jast
upon London and Paris. And even in these once open-minded capi–
tals the repeated crises had begun to dull the public's receptivity
to any serious art at all. People were in a condition to tolerate only
pictures that might with slight effort distract for a moment; they
craved no more plastic interest than could be provided by Dufy,
Rouault, and the Surrealists.
Many artists, however, have managed to retain their integrity.
And there have been compensations. The abstract movement has
become clarified as the painters, in default of a public, have
