ART CHRONICLE
95
principally a question of beauty-what interests us is the structure of
painting, not the appearance of the "objects" of the external world. An
empty canvas is more to the point, in being itself, an "object," and not
m£rely an awkward image of "real objects''; and is, moreover, as K an–
dinsky says,
"far lovelier than certain pictures."
The problem is more
nearly how not to lessen the original virginal loveliness of the canvas.
. ..
From this direction the oddness of non-objective art is evident. It is
an art of negation, a protest against naturalistic descriptiveness as the
most adequate vehicle of expression for the modem mind. This protest
has
not gone unheeded. No major painter of the present is primarily
descriptive in his means; and, among the interesting younger painters,
none is descriptive at all, so far as we know. The occasional exceptions
to this tendency occur against the painter's will, as in those passages
where he has not yet found adequate non-descriptive means, or where,
with
other ends in view, he may still involuntarily, and by chance, seem
to refer to the external world.
Indeed at present, at this very moment, when non-objective painters
have made their point, we are able to fee1 much less strongly than earlier
in
the century the historical necessity of the rigid self-imposed limitations
of abstract art. We are impelled instead to remark with Wallace Stevens:
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white.
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
*
It
may be that the great Mondrian himself now feels such wants and
needs. Certainly hi> recent painting,
Broadway Boogie-Woogie
(Museum
of Modem Art, New Acquisitions) represents a marked shift on his
part from an intent of simple purification to one of expressiveness.. ..
Now in his old age, and in a foreign country, Mondrian has as–
sembled all his remarkable resources for purely expressive ends. In
Broadway Boogie-Woogie
the simple elements of his hitherto analytical
art have been transformed.* The former severe black bands are fractured
*
The intrinsic value of this new picture cannot concern us here. Though it
has
been sometimes judged a near failure, we regard it as the most important
work by Mondrian with which we are acquainted. The value, however, of a non–
objective painting, like that of a piece of "pure" music, cannot be proven. "Proof"
rests only on persuasion; and in our time we are persuaded by demonstration.
But the qualitative greatness of specific sensuous relations, which constitute the
content of non-objective art,
cannot be demonstrated-as
one can demonstrate,
and apart from strictly formal qualities, the symbolic richness of the early Chirico,
