ART CHRONICLE-SWEENEY
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surance and seeming inevitability. As a consequence their syntheses turn
to mere arrangements, their style into a formula.
In 1912 Marcel Duchamp realized that the researches of the cubists
and the further simplifications of form which were growing out of them
threatened just such a danger. He felt that painting and sculpture had
too long concerned themselves with physical appearances. The imagina–
tion had been slighted. The abuse went all the way back to Courbet.
Courbet was the master whom the cubists hailed as their forerunner.
It was he, according to Gleizes and Metzinger in their book
Cubism,
who "inaugurated a realistic impulse which runs through all modern ef–
forts." And Duchamp had come to feel it was time for a turn-about.
Painting, as he expressed it, should once again "be put at the service
of the mind." It was this recall of the imagination on Duchamp's part
that paved the way through Dada and Surrealism, to work such as
Giacometti's.
And in Giacometti we have the ideal combination of a thoroughly
aware abstractionist and fantasist, or sentimentalist in the best sense of
that word. He is an artist who knows his metier. His father was a
painter. Giacometti also began as one and worked through various styles
from the pointillist to the expressionist. But apparently his temperament
demanded a tighter idiom and from the time he left painting for
sculpture while still practically a boy, he has persisted in his effort to
perfect one. Even in his mature work, such as that shown at Art of this
Century, we still find the craftsman always striving for a greater preci–
sion, a greater refinement, never satisfied that he has achieved the full
expression at which he is aiming. He has, however, the gift of conveying
a sense of living reality through the barest essential form, without any
reliance whatsoever on literal description. His simplifications are scrupu–
lous condensations-never shortcuts, carefully studied intensifications of
volume and surface relationships. And stili he never allows these material
simplifications to interfere with the suggestion of emotional overtones
in his sculpture, whether it be the Kafkan tragedy of
Woman With a
Cut Throat;
the maternal sentiment of
Disagreeable Object;
or the lyric,
dream atmosphere of
Palace at 4 A. M.
A similar hospitality to the imagination, oddly enough, has charac–
terized much of the more individual work by younger painters shown
in New York this season. Word from Paris indicates that the tendency
there among young artists during the occupation was to follow the lead
of such masters as Bonnard, Matisse and Picasso--ali painters in the
"physicat tradition" according to Duchamp's distinction. In this country,
on the other hand, during the same years, there has been a definite
trend away from this path. Here the tendency has been rather in an
expressionist direction, or at least toward a greater freedom of brush
work and a more excited compositional organization than is customarily
