PARTISAN REVIEW
In some directions it has more than compensated for the loss, developing
its own complexity and its own-far more subjective-inwardness. But
as one brought up on the past (like everyone else), I cannot help re–
gretting what has been lost. The regret is futile, yet I believe that this
nostalgia for the past, responsible though it has been for academicism,
has also been a vital ingredient of the greatest advanced art of our
times. The artist immune to it has that much less to struggle with, but
he is also so much the poorer for his immunity. A certain dosage of
nostalgia, a certain twinge of academicism, the very struggle against it
seem to me to have been indispensable to both Matisse's and Picasso's
greatness and to have contributed to the superior largeness of their
art
(and I do not mean here Picasso's excursions into Ingres and the antique,
but something far subtler and more intimately involved with his tem–
perament). Not that the work of the modem artist must by any means
resemble the past; but that he must show some sense of it, a realization
of its presence and attraction. Otherwise he dissipates himself in sheer
quality and fails to impose that order and shaping which are the indis–
pensable concomitants of high art, and without which the truly culti–
vated spectator is left thirsty. High
art
resumes everything that pre–
cedes it, otherwise it is less than high.
Among the fifty-two Berlin pictures returned to Germany were
some of the strongest of the entire group: particularly Rubens' "Perseus
Frees Andromeda," Bosch's "St. John on Patmos," Botticelli's "Madonna
and Child with Singing Angels," Durer's "Portrait of a Young Woman,"
Jan van Eyck's ''Giovanni Amolfini," Gossart's (Mabuse) "Christ
in
the Garden of Gethsemane," Holbein's "George Gisze," Lippo Lippi's
"Madonna Adoring the Christ Child," Simon Marmion's two altar
panels, and Antonio Pollaiuolo's "David with the Head of Goliath."
But enough still remains-or remained at least to be shown at the
Metropolitan in New York. I would draw attention especially
to
Alt–
dorfer's (an ancestor of Klee's painting) "Nativity," Messina's portrait,
the unknown fifteenth-century Austrian master's "Dead Christ," Giovanni
Bellini's "Resurrection" (as poorly unified as this picture is), Bouts's
"Madonna in Adoration," Bronzino's "Portrait of a Young Man,"
Castagno's "Assumption of the Virgin," Cossa's "Harvest Allegory,"
Cranach's "Frau Reuss," Elsheimer's "Noah's Thank Offering" and
his
landscape, Geertgen Tot Sint Jans's amazingly green "John the Baptist
in the Wilderness," Giorgione's portrait, Giovanni di Paolo's three small
panels, Guardi's "Balloon Ascension," Patinir's "Rest on the Flight to
Egypt," Rembrandt's "Man with Golden Helmet" and his landscape,
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