ART CHRONICLE
THE DECLINE OF CUBISM
•
As more and more of the recent work of the masters of the
School of Paris reaches this country after the six years' interruption
between 1939 and 1945, any remaining doubt vanishes as
to
the con–
tinuing fact of the decline of art that set in in Paris in the early thirties.
Picasso, Braque, Arp, Mir6, Giacometti, Schwitters-exhibitions, sam–
ples, and reproductions would indicate exhaustion on the part of those
who in the first three decades of the century created what is now known
as modem art. This impression is supported by the repetitious or retro–
grade tendencies of the work of the notable School of Paris artists who
spent the war years here: Leger, Chagall, Lipchitz. And there is also
the weakening Mondrian's art suffered between 1937 and his death in
1944 (in this country) . On the other hand, Matisse, the late Bonnard,
and even the late Vuillard seem to have been spared by the general
debility, going on in the thirties and forties to deliver themselves of
some of their supreme statements: in the usual way of painters, who,
unlike most poets, get better as they grow older.
The problem for criticism is to explain why the Cubist generation
and its immediate successors have, contrary to artists' precedent, fallen
off in middle and old age, and why belated Impressionists like Bonnard
and Vuillard could maintain a higher consistency of performance during
the last fifteen years; why even the German Expressionist, Max Beck–
mann, so inferior to Picasso in native gifts, should paint better today than
he does. And why, finally, Matisse, with his magnificent but transitional
style, which does not compare with Cubism for historical importance,
is able to rest so securely in his position as the greatest master of the
twentieth century, a position Picasso is further than ever from threatening.
At first glance we realize that we are faced with the debacle of
the age of "experiment," of the Apollinairian and Cubist mission and
its hope, coincident with that of Marxism and the whole matured tradi–
tion of Enlightenment, of humanizing the world. In the plastic
arts
Cubism, and nothing else, is the age of "experiment." Whatever feats
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