84
PARTISAN REVIEW
That is the folly of the contemporary cult of so-called "primitives."
In art there is no returning to the past. But we will come to that later.
Yes, I do believe in progress in art. Every generation has greater assets,
greater means of expression at its disposal than its predecessor. Among
great names Cezanne for me is greater as an artist than Rembrandt,
because Cezanne is nearer: the character of his problems is closer to
mine; his solutions are therefore more helpful to me in the solution of
my problems, the problems of my time. For the same reason Rodin is for
me greater than Michaelangelo.
"With artists it is not merely a question of genius or of talent and
it is something much more than science: there is an accumulation of
actual experience. East artist falls heir to all that the ages before him
have worked out. Each time an artist widens the frontiers of expression
he contributes
to
this heritage. The liberty in representation, for exam–
ple, which the cubists brought to art was a contribution. But without
Impressionism's destruction of conventional forms, arrived at through
their analysis of light-effects, the cubists could never have found their
way to the liberties they won.
"By liberty in the arts I mean liberty
vis-a-vis
the spectacle of
nature. Man has always stolen ideas from natural phenomena about him.
He has always imitated aspects of nature. Even in our machinery we
imitate nature. But for machinery it is the essentials of nature in which
we interest ourselves. An airplane does not require feathers to fly; there–
fore, its designers have not imitated this aspect of birds, although they
have copied many other features. In the same way art does not have
to copy nature literally to profit from a study of nature. But there are
essentials which it can and should employ. The essential is timeless; the
superficial with time appears dated, curious-mean. My desire is to
make objects which embody all that is distinctive of man and at the same
time so natural that nature will not blush before them.
"Every artist should be allowed and encouraged to make use of his
vision of nature as he sees fit. Take two men brought up in the same
environment; one a dreamer, anxious to see the world, one content to
remain in his native village. In time the former begins to feel he should
settle down in his native village. He returns to find the other still there.
They meet once again in the same environment, but they are no longer
the same. This situation has its analogy in the arts. Take two artists
both interested in the objective representation of nature: one keeps at
it, the other sets out to explore fresh means of expression. Eventually
the explorer returns to nature. Is he poorer for his expedition? A critic
once blamed me for returning to objective representation, pointing out
a colleague of mine who had never moved away from it. He felt my
years of exploration had been wasted-here I was, he said, back just
where I had started from. Yet for me there was a world of difference
in my grasp of form. And the whole difference lay in the enrichment,
