I
ART CHRONICLE
IRRELEVANCE VERSUS IRRESPONSIBILITY
The recent questioning of the validity of modern painting in
this, its post-'Cubist stage-as we see such questioning, for instance, in
Geoffrey Grigson's article, "Authentic and False in the New 'Romantic–
ism'," in the March
Horizon
and in the remarks quoted indirectly therein
from Gide and the late Coomaraswamy-reflects again the fallacies to
which any criticism of a non-literary art commits itself when it relies
largely on discourse, and when, in addition, the amateur's distance is
assumed to be adequate to serious discussion, Once again we hear that by
devoting himself to means instead of ends the contemporary advanced
artist has reduced himself to a technician, performer, virtuoso, at best
a mere exponent of his own sensibility, whose work must lack real
"human" import.
Modern art lacks a subject (end), lacks "humanity," etc.-how
many cultivated people, literary men in particular, go on complaining
this way. Thirty years ago their similars, with an equal incomprehension
of the point of modern art, were so excited by the novelty of the phe–
nomenon itself that they were willing to suspend the traditional de–
mands for subject and form, purpose and treatment, means and ends;
whether or not they realized what it was all about, they had a categorical
enthusiasm for the "modern" that stilled their qualms. And regardless of
the damage this uncritical attitude may have done in some areas, it was
on the whole a lucky thing for modern art, for without the busy support
of the amateurs of novelty in the teens and twenties it would have had
much more difficulty in getting itself accepted. But times have changed
again, and modern painting and sculpture have now drifted into one of
the most precarious of all positions: that of a familiar phenomenon
whose familiarity has not made it any the less baffling, a phenomenon
moreover that continues to resist the literary approach. And when one
remembers that for the average cultivated person in our society the
literary approach is the standard one with respect to all the arts, then the
position of modern painting and sculpture is seen to be precarious indeed.
·573
