James Johnson Sweeney
PAINTER PUGG AND THE CHAIR
CARRIERS' CALVES : RECONSIDERED
"Some day no doubt," Henry Austin Dobson wrote in
his
study of William Hogarth in 1891, "a critic with (or without) the
transfiguring enthusiasm of a Saint-Beuve will take up
The Analysis of
Beauty
and demonstrate that it contains much commonsense and some
unregarded verities."
And today it would not be surprising to see Dobson's prediction
borne out. While contemporary conditions are vastly different from
those of eighteenth-century England, they are not without certain re–
semblances. It is true we are not afflicted today by a cult of "correct
taste" that accepts only Italian art, or Italianate derivatives. Such a
vogue for "black masters," as Hogarth described them-paintings
darkened to give the appearance of age-no longer chokes contemporary
production and fosters fakes of every kind. We are not tyrannized over
by neo-classic dogma. But who can say whether we are not, perhaps,
a lready over the threshold of what one day may be regarded as a "new
romantic" period in contrast to the period that has preceded ours, just
as Hogarth was in the middle eighteenth century? For in the last
twenty-five years we have seen among the leaders in the plastic arts
a growing recognition of the need for a new poetic emphasis. In paint·
ing, sculpture and literature this was heralded by Surrealism's doctrines,
and in architecture by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Alvar
Aalto, to mention merely the most prominent names.
During the opening years of this century "ornament" may have
been equated with "crime" in the minds of architects influenced
by
the viewpoint of the Viennese, Adolf Loos. Popular misconceptions of
"form" in its relation to "function" may have stripped architecture to
an anemic formalism in the following quarter-century, just as super·
ficial misconceptions of cubism, neo-plasticism, constructivism and Kan·
~
dinsky's discoveries in the same years were starving the associational
richness, variety and vitality of the pictorial and sculptural organizations
in the work of many followers of these trends. But a turn has long since
been taken. In 1857 John Ruskin foresaw what lay ahead. "The furnace
