3M
PARTISAN REVI
conventions exhausted, others just on the point of losing their
others not yet discovered or brought forth, problems still to
plored or attacked again. Of course, all art is about "nature,"
from nature, takes its forms from nature, especially if nature is
,-V",,,,,,...
on the level of ultimate meaning, essential order and rhythm, and
mysteries and manifold ways of life, as many of the artists did considrt
it. Then one wants to know, why this particular plastic expression of
itl
Whether or not nature will seem to have been a preoccupata
of our times, as it was in the eighteenth century-who of us can
teIIl
The years between 1900 and 1925 certainly witnessed an absorpti.
in several kinds of nature that were previously unknown or ignored,
and the art of the period shows it; yet it also shows so many ou.
things (and cubism is not distinctly an art deriving from nature),
thai
we are at a loss to know how to understand the relationship and
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better leave it to the more ambitious cultural historians. For examplt.
I would hesitate to make too close a connection between the
greatII
space in abstract painting and the greater contemporary consciouSlllll
of interplanetary space, although it is a connection that future cntia
will undoubtedly make. We should not see our own times in quite
thai
way, I think. But when we consider how much is made of the rediscovay
of classical civilization for the art and thought of the Renaissance, ,.
how much weight balances the Elizabethan world picture and the
new
sciences, or how much cultural force was generated by the Industrill
Revolution-then we can hardly assert the independence of abstract
space from outer space. It is equally possible that our contemporary
art
has reached a baroque phase and intuitively selects the grandeur
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space for its convention, thus responding to the demands of the
hist<lf
of advanced painting; because these questions of the surface and
space
are
questions of painting, are problems posed by the art itself,
not by nature or science or politics or any other dimension of cultur&
If,
in this convention of space, there seems to be, as well, a response
the contemporary consciousness, perhaps it is no more, no less, than
proper behavior, always to some degree remote from culture, and
at the same time a part of culture, reflecting culture and at the
time creating it.
Sonya
