ART CHRONICLE
639
range of expression.
It
may compensate for this by a greater intensity
and concreteness-contemporary abstract art has done so with signal
success-but a loss is still felt in so far as the unity and dynamics of
the easel picture are weakened, as they must be by any absolutely flat
painting. The fact is, I fear, that easel painting in the literally two–
dimensional mode that our age, with its positiveness, forces upon it may
soon
be
unable to say enough about what we feel to satisfy us quite,
and that we shall no longer be able to rely upon painting as largely as
we used to for a visual ordering of our experience.
I do not mean to suggest that painting will soon decline as an art ;
it is not essential to the point I wish to make to claim that. What is to
be pointed out is that painting's place as the supreme visual art is now
threatened, whether it is in decline or not. And I want also to call at–
tention to sculpture, an art that has been in relative desuetude for sev–
eral centuries but which has lately undergone a transformation that
seems to endow it with a greater range of expression for modern sen–
sibility than painting now has. This transformation, or revolution, is a
product of Cubism.
Between the Renaissance and Rodin sculpture suffered as a vehicle
of expression because of its adherence to the monolithic, somatic Graeco–
Roman tradition of carving and modelling. The ideal subject of this
tradition was the human torso and head, and it rejected as inappro–
priate all that was inanimate and immobile. An art confined to the
monolith could say very little for the post-Renaissance man, and painting
was therefore able to monopolize subject matter, imagination, and talent
in the visual arts, where almost everything that happened between
Michelangelo and Rodin happened on canvas. That sculpture was at
a lesser remove than any of the other arts from that which it imitated–
from its subject matter-and that it required less powers of abstraction
to transpose the image, say, of an animal to stone in the round than
to a flat surface, or into words-this also counted against it for several
centuries. Sculpture was too
literal
a medium.
Rodin was the first sculptor who tried actually to catch up with
painting, dissolving stone forms into light and air in search of effects
analogous to those of Impressionist painting. He was a great artist
but he destroyed his tradition and left only ambiguities behind him.
Maillol and Lehmbruck were also great sculptors, and it was Rodin
perhaps who made them possible, but the first got his inspiration from
archaeology and the second from expressionist painting. They mark an
end, and their art cleared the way for something radically new to fill
