610
PARTISAN REVIEW
Earth. The art has its own particular stillness, as high art does. Then
come Copernicus and Galileo and mathematics and perspective-the
Renaissance. Everything moves. It's a different world. Thrust and coun–
terthrust. Renaissance art is almost besotted, through and through, with
contraposto.
Titian's last
Entombment ofJesus
(he did two
Entombments
ofJesus;
I think the later one is the best) is utterly sublime. It is one of the
highest moments of the Renaissance. So, too, the art of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries is replete with its own expressive reality.
The next major shift in reality, expressed in visual art, is Impression–
ism. Perceived, at least technically, as a kind of diffusion, in the hand of
a genius like Monet, diffusion became ravishing. It was left to Picasso
and Braque's analytical cubism to present reality in fractured planes
seen from many points of view. These expressions of an era's reality do
not in any manner or form guarantee high art. High art is made by
artists who make high art.
Throughout the ages (and most particularly in Hellenic art) beauty
and excellence were premier goals, until now, when, like Gresham's
Law, the question is, will low art drive out high art? For the present, low
attracts more low. Maybe there is no bottom to low. I won't accept that,
nor should anyone else accept the situation as irreparable.
First-rate art is being made, created in the shadows, for the most part,
unseen. Some artists are young. For me, at eighty, young is sixty. Darby
Bannard is an example, for a long time almost forgotten , he suddenly
emerged, making paintings overflowing with painterly feeling and rav–
ishingly beautiful. James Walsh, another kid in his fifties, is also making
wonderful paintings. There are others, highly gifted. Darryl Hughto;
Susan Roth; Bannard's really young protege, he must be thirty or so,
George Bethea; and not to leave out Walsh's wife, Annie, very talented.
There are others, but I tend to stay close to my own studio.
It's many months now since September
II,
and I wonder what effect,
if any, that day has had on the art community. Historically, the barbar–
ians appear when they smell decadence. Are we in trouble? The smell,
indeed, is ripe.
It
was about a week before September
[T
that I received
a letter from a dear friend, a sculptor. He was working on a group of
sculptures to be called
The Barbarians.
He was excited by the work, and
his description of it over the phone excited me, as well. He had been
reading some history, as he put it, of the barbarians, of Huns swooping
down from the mountains, raping and pillaging decadent Rome.
"Awful," he said, "but they were rather welcomed, weren't they?" I
thought of my friend's remark when September
II
came and in the days
and weeks and months after.
If
our art scene reflects our reality, we are
