THE NECESSITY OF THE OLD MASTERS
cannot withdraw his attention from the past with impunity. Cezanne
to the contrary notwithstanding, the moderns are not the primitives of
a new tradition, but the liquidators of an old one. Abstract art is still
western European art; one still--even if only barely-paints easel pic–
tures; one does not decorate Haida cloths or make sand drawings. An
p.rtist working in New York or Paris still cannot introduce Oriental,
archaic, or barbaric elements into his work without modifying them
radically to fit the terms of easel painting as established by a tradition
that goes back to the end of the Middle Ages and is not yet dead. The
greater the artist's awareness of those terms, the greater is his power
of self-criticism, even if he paints like Mondrian-who was himself by
no means indifferent to the old masters. And it is the failure of self–
criticism, a failure deriving in part from the inverted historical provin–
cialism of the "modern," that accounts for some of the most serious
shortcomings of contemporary advanced American art as a whole.
Whereas in the past we were provincial in our attitude toward the
art of other civilizations or cultures, today our best young talent runs
the danger of becoming provincial toward the past art of our civilization.
Modem· art has not in actual practice repudiated that past art as much
a• many of us think. It is still necessary to be very much aware of it,
if
only to overcome it. And in so far as we still paint easel pictures to
hang on walls, we still have more in common with that past, down at
bottom, than with the art of Mrica or the South Seas.
The exhibition of the Berlin pictures-which, before fifty-two paint–
ings on wood and metal were substracted from the lot to
be
returned
to Germany, had the highest frequency of good items I have ever seen
in so large a group-demonstrates this indispensability of the past with
a certain timeliness. Beginning with the Italian primitives and stopping
with Watteau and Tiepolo (except for a magnificent Daumier and a
fairly good Manet, both from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin), it affords
a succinct and pure impression of the essential character of the Western
tradition in painting. We see a world whose depth, resonance, and pleni–
tude are the product of illusion--of perspective, chiaroscuro, under–
painting, glazes, scumbles, etc. The single picture is a projection of all
reality and makes itself felt as something heavy and full-bodied and
inward. These qualities modem painting has sacrificed to intensity.
Whereas the Renaissance picture draws you into a statement of a com–
plex of relations between various areas of experience, the post-Cubist
picture thrusts a sheet of pigment at you with an immediate force prop–
er only to the realm of material sensations.
Modern art, like modem literature and modem life, has lost much.
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