Modern Art and Muddled Thinking

by GEORGE BIDDLE

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DURING the war years and, with increasing tempo, the last two seasons, there has been a rapid swing in the art markets along New York’s Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street toward modernistic, abstract, and non-objective art. This was not the case with just the Whitney Museum, which supposedly has its finger on the pulse of young America; or with Knoedler’s Gallery, which has specialized in early VictorianAmerican; or Durand-Ruel’s, whose cellar is stocked with the vintage of French Impressionism; or Jacques Seligmann’s, which deals in eighteenthcentury French furniture; or the Metropolitan Museum, which streamlines early Etruscan and Egyptian; or even the National Academy, whose arteries are generally conceded to be about as young and pulsating as those of the Knickerbocker Club. Not just all this, but even the State Department’s first purchases to be sent overseas to represent the dignity of Uncle Sam’s artistic maturity.

Does all this mean the final victory of Modernism, youth, liberalism, and the left wing? Anything but that, unless we conclude that Durand-Ruel’s, Knoedler’s, Jacques Seligmann’s, the Metropolitan Museum, and the State Department are youthful, experimental, and revolutionary. And they are not. It means that modernistic art has become thoroughly academic and therefore acceptable to the most conservative institutions and galleries.

History often repeats itself. The identical art forms which arc now having this tremendous vogue — not only in New York but all over the country — had exactly the same vogue in Paris just after World War I, between 1919 and 1925. So much so, that if the paintings of the young men then could take the place of those of the young men now, nobody would know the difference. Is this just what one should expect? Or is it a little depressing that a generation later — and I’m telling you that things move fast in our generation — America can express nothing in art after World War II that Paris did not express after World War I?

Let us examine the causes which may explain this all-out trend toward extreme Modernism or non-objective art in America today. In the first place it is not a novelty. Abstract art, which reached its full expression, if not its final form, in the great Cubist Exhibition in Paris in 1911, was fully shown in the Armory Exhibition in New York in 1913 and thereafter in many American cities. In 1921 the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts gave a comprehensive exhibition of American modernists, and since then abstract and non-objective art has been shown in almost every museum and in most American galleries. Still there was what could be called a time-lag in America as compared with Paris and other European cities. Now this time-lag has finally been caught up with, and the resistance to modernistic art has been pretty well eroded away. What was in 1911 a dynamic, creative, experimental art movement has become a static, crystallized, period style, like any other: the Baroque, Victorian, or Art Nouveau.

It would seem natural, then, that this current acceptance and momentary preoccupation with nonobjective art should be used to advertise their wares by such dealers as are stocked with the great names of the École de Paris. Nor is there anything intellectually shabby in such promotion. If Knoedler’s, Durand-Ruel’s, Rosenberg, Kootz, Pierre Matisse, Valentine, Perls, and all the small fry, have heavy investments in Picasso, Matisse, and the other great names of a generation ago, it would seem perfectly appropriate that, in the current exhibitions of American art, they should display the sort of advertisement that barks most loudly up their particular alley. It is of course an understatement to say that the Fifty-seventh Street market is heavily rigged and that enormous pressure is exercised on a snobbish, gullible, and muddy-minded public by highly astute businessmen. But there is nothing dishonest in such manipulation of taste. Nothing that would not pass the most rigid test of the Pure Food and Drug Act.

How much of this current preoccupation with abstraction, as opposed to traditional or representational art, is due to war neuroses, to world fatigue? I think a case could be made that abstract color and design offer a stronger stimulant, and one to which there is a more immediate response, than does traditional art. In each case the aesthetic reaction is produced by the same rhythms, harmonies, and dissonances of line, color, and design. But in traditional art the “phrasing” of the rhythm is closely integrated with a visual statement of the outside world. Similarly in the crafts the phrasing of the rhythm is integrated with the shape and purpose of a useful object. The artist creates an abstraction, into which he fits the observed facts of life. This abstraction in itself has beauty, form; but it is the integration of the abstract with the objective statement of the outside world which immeasurably enhances the aesthetic enjoyment. It could be plausibly maintained in fact that this integration of the abstract with the representational aspect of life or utilitarian purpose is the chief cause of aesthetic pleasure. In non-objective paintings, there are no rules to follow except those governing color and design. For this reason, in traditional art there is a greater intellectual demand, the need of a more subtle eye for color, line, and design. The student’s training is far more exacting if, in addition to mastering a knowledge of color and design, he must also learn to draw and to paint the figure, landscape, and atmosphere. To the same measure the aesthetic enjoyment of traditional art calls for an understanding, by the audience, of the solution of this problem: the integration of the abstract with visual nature. This aesthetic enjoyment is, of course, partly intellectual and partly sensory. But such is the case with the enjoyment of every other art form: architecture, literature, drama, music, or the dance.

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IT might be maintained that the insistent appeal of abstract or non-objective art during and immediately after World War I in Paris, and during and immediately after World War II in America, was partly due to war fatigue or war neuroses. This is very different from arguing that such war neuroses were the cause of this art. The great intellectual movement, generally known as Modern Art or the École de Paris, which was essentially a preoccupation, on the one hand with the elements of design, on the other with the philosophic relation of abstract form to the visual world, germinated in those carefree, happy days before World War I. But although world fatigue had nothing to do with the origin of abstract art, it may well be one of the explanations of its present popularity.

Snobbism, too, has had a by no means negligible influence on the patrons and art lovers. I am not just referring to the Museum of Modern Art, whose prestige, largely built on snobbism, is enormous; or to the more subtle technique of the dealers. One of the most intelligent of them said to me recently: “Whether one likes it or not, the appeal to snobbism is what sells pictures, even though it does not always engender taste.”

For almost a generation, Hollywood has used modernistic sets to decorate the homes of the fashionable and smart. Many a simple bourgeois, who himself delights in strawberry-and-cream sunsets, associates sculptured doughnuts and children’s distortions signed by expensive foreign names with the artistic taste of the elite of wealth and fashion. Americans admire streamlined up-to-dateness. Though they may not like modern design in their parlors, they respect and expect it in the kitchen or the garage.

All these reasons, then, — war neuroses, a dealerrigged market, snobbism, and an association of Modernism with up-to-dateness, — have helped to give modernistic and non-objective painting, the normal appeal of which was to the aesthete, the initiate, and the intelligentsia, a certain vogue and mundane popularity which it would be hard to explain on other grounds. The vast majority of Americans, who, whether rightly or wrongly, have no particular taste for this somewhat narrow aspect of art, are therefore confused and frustrated. Either they think the whole thing is some snobbish hocuspocus and arc thoroughly irritated by its apparent hypocrisy, or else they are deeply skeptical of their own intelligence and taste and are ashamed to express their own low-brow opinions. These inhibitions on the part of the public would not be so dangerous if it were not for the complete breakdown of critical thinking and tradition which ushered in and has accompanied the modern movement.

At the turn of the century the protagonists of the new art attributed an aesthetic jargon to their deceased master, Cézanne, which this single-minded, confused, and completely honest painter never held. Seizing on an equivocal passage in one of Cézanne’s letters to his friend de Monfreid, they broadcast to the world their mumbo-jumbo of the translation of nature in terms of the cylinder and cube. As well translate nature in terms of circles and rectangles!

Critics, artists, and laymen began mouthing such totally meaningless baloney as “spatial” and “tridimensional” attributes of flat-surface design. Clive Bell and Berenson hypnotized the aesthetes with the “significant form” and “tactile values" of great paintings. From then on, a muddy-minded stream of art clichés poured over the dam, bewildering painters even more than the public. Expressionists, cubists, futurists, vorticists, dadaists, surrealists, abstractionists, and non-objectivists flung out their manifestoes, with no more regard for each other’s aesthetics than for the traditions upon which the arts of the past were grounded. “Michelangelo is roast beef,” cried Brancusi, not so much cementing the foundations for his own art as denying the validity of anything that had preceded it.

The cultivation of the meaningless reached a point where in 1937 Pablo Picasso, a great painter and a talented publicity agent, could take the public into his confidence, describing his latest masterpiece as a “fandango of shivering owls souse of swords of evil-omened polyps scouring brush of hairs from priests’ tonsures standing naked in the middle of the frying-pan — placed upon the ice-cream cone of codfish fried in the scabs of his lead-ox heart —his mouth full of the chinch-bug jelly of his words —” etc. For years to come it will be debated as to whether Picasso’s paintings have profound intellectual content. It would seem evident that his critical pronouncements have none.

Another modernist writes of his own work: “The new philosophy shall be a true plastic cosmogony. That is to say, neither a symbolization nor an interpretation, but rather a direct visualization through artistic media, of the forces which move and excite us. Neither symbolic nor metaphysical, this cosmogony does not attempt to anthropomorphize the universe, but to universalize man, causing him to participate emotionally in the great cosmic poles.

“Thus it is no longer the job of art to answer ingenuous questions; today the painting looks at the spectator and asks him: What do you wish to say?”

As clear and simple as that. And lots more. No wonder the harried spectator goes on a hunger strike, refusing to swallow such empty and pretentious slibber-slobber any longer.

Today, then, there is almost no sound tradition of art criticism, without which experimentation has little value. Art deals with ultimate truths. It is presumptuous to think that any movement, no matter how radical, can alter or upset these basic values. When a moment in history shows unusual creative vitality, it will usher in, as did the Renaissance, a new outlook on life expressed by a new reaction to life’s problems, but it will at best offer only a somewhat different solution expressed in somewhat different terms.

One assumption to hold in mind is that nonobjective art does not in any way imply a revolution in aesthetics, but at best a new approach. Indeed, there is nothing strictly new in the use of nonobjective design, unless it is the questionable propriety of exhibiting it in gilt frames rather than incorporating it in useful objects. It is difficult to draw the line between the aesthetic emotion derived from any wall hanging with a non-objective design, such as a Persian carpet, and a painting by Kandinsky, Braque, or Stuart Davis. In both cases the color, rhythm, and texture give us pleasure. The former helps to insulate cold walls.

It can be concluded that if art today is in a state of chaos and the public confused and inhibited, it is not because there is too much experimentation, but rather that the critical thinking which is the basis for healthy experimentation is confused, pretentious, and lacking in tradition.

Most emphatically this assumption does not warrant a return to the artistic idioms of 1900. It does imply that an aesthetic philosophy — no matter what — must precede an experimental statement. It does not call for a return to the baroque styles or Art Nouveau. It does demand an analysis and knowledge of the elements of design which constitute the Primitive, Gothic, Baroque, and Modern. At moments Picasso borrows elements from the classic Hellenistic tradition of the eighteenth century; at times he uses elements from Zñni pottery. Dali mixes traditional Victorian with modernistic. Max Ernst jumbles together modernistic with realistic plant forms. Artists are lumped as modernists who advocate a social or a Marxian approach; who believe in expression through the subconscious; who believe that art should have no intellectual content; who advocate the subjective-expressionistic approach; who proclaim the mathematical architectonics of the abstract. O.K. But which? And why?

It is not here relevant to outline my own artistic credo. But almost any approach presupposes a few assumptions which, I believe, will find fairly general acceptance. Their restatement may help to clarify the direction and validity of various current art movements.

1. Art is a restatement, reflection, reaction, criticism, or experience of life, expressed in a given medium with a certain rhythm. But always life is the artist’s raw material.

2. Art has always exercised two unrelated functions. It can give us aesthetic pleasure. The pleasure seems to derive from the rhythm — of color, line, form, sound, or melody — which is basic in all works of art. It also has social value. Since art reshapes or criticizes life through its selective reflection of the external world, it becomes a yardstick of man’s mind, aspirations, religion, and philosophy. It is the only “open sesame” by which we can penetrate the spiritual meaning of the great civilizations of the past and thus borrow from their wisdom and experience in recharting our course through the night that lies ahead.

3. This being so, those arts which appeal to the greatest number of people and which deal with basic human emotions will survive the longest and exercise the most influence. In this sense they are vital since their roots are in the hearts of mankind.

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How then, in the light of the foregoing premises, shall we evaluate the current preoccupation with abstract and non-objective art and the ultimate achievement of the whole modern movement? To the degree to which the original creative movement has become a crystallized period “style,” its lifegrowth is ended, although the fossilized art form may linger on for years like that of any other fashion. It is, however, far more than just a fashion: more properly what we think of as a stylistic approach, such as the classic, realistic, or romantic approach in art or literature. And this, I take it, from the long view is its importance. The great dynamic movement which started in Paris belore World War I as a protest against the preceding realism of Impressionism, as an attack on the outworn modes of the Baroque, as an exploration into the meaning and relations of color and design, has done far more to widen the horizons of art than merely to contribute new techniques and color modes. A more generous comparison could be made with the application to painting of the laws of perspective by the artists of the Renaissance. This, too, became more than a stylistic fashion, which we associate with an historical date; rather, it became a stylistic approach, which in the endless art stream of history is recurrent.

In the rapid, high-tension tempo of life today, the swing of the pendulum from one extreme to the other has become accelerated. Whethcr we conceive of extreme Modernism — non-objective and abstract art — as a fashion or as a stylistic approach, its momentary vogue, judging from others, will be short-lived. Looking back for one generation, we have seen the sunset of the Ash-Can School illuminating the art horizon before World War I; the first impact of the Paris movement immediately thereafter; the so-called Regional Art School flourishing during the depression; and now the recurrent swing toward the abstract and non-objective.

Extreme Modernism as a fashion will not last many years. As an experimentation in the techniques and as a somewhat different response to aesthetic enjoyment, it can broaden and vary our approach to art. The limitation to the entire movement, however, is that to date it offers nothing by way of content other than technical experimentation. It addresses itself exclusively to the aesthetes, the intelligentsia, and—let us be honest — the intellectual snobs and the sensation-mongers of a tired world. For when experimentation is finished, something must be done or said with the new techniques or it becomes empty and meaningless, and the creative impulse which flowed into it diffuses itself and dies.

My point can best be illustrated by two historical analogies. As I have suggested, the great Italian artists of the Renaissance, notably Michelangelo, Leonardo, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, and Signorelli showed a similar intellectual preoccupation in their technical experimentations with anatomical research and lineal perspective. But into these new techniques they poured an excitement about life which gave the Renaissance vitality for five centuries. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, in the field of music, there went on a similar technical experimentation in the development of counterpoint and the fugue. It reached a point where musicians were as preoccupied in writing tunes that could be played backward as in composing worthy music. This was the swan song in the twilight decadence of a great school of medieval music.

Somewhere in his writings, Van Wyck Brooks remarks that only a great humanistic century can create great portraits. It is noteworthy of the modern movement that it has produced no great portrait. For a portrait to be great must be more than a physical likeness or even a spiritual interpretation. It must be a social and a personal drama. Nor has the movement produced a single great mural painting. Picasso’s Guernica is really a large easel canvas, although it was commissioned for a wall of the Spanish Pavilion, where it hung for several months in the Paris Exhibition of 1937. But a painting on canvas, destined for traveling exhibitions or private collections, and without any particular relation to the architectural requirements or the social significance of the building it decorates, can hardly be called a great mural painting. Diego Rivera was one of the early cubists, but his mural achievement is based on a sweeping protest against the philosophy of French Modernism.

Schools of painting, however, can achieve emotional depth and philosophic content which limit themselves to landscape or still-life painting. The Dutch, the French impressionists, and the entire range of Chinese and Japanese art give rich examples. At present, the extreme exponents of the modern movement — the non-objective and abstract — are not primarily occupied with human beings, landscape, social drama, or any other aspect of the world we live in. They are primarily occupied with but one theme: art for art’s sake. If this is a proper analysis of the current directions of these particular art streams — and I believe their protagonists would in a great measure agree with my analysis, if not with my findings — one cannot help concluding that although the movement, vital and creative at its inception, developed new techniques and a new aesthetic approach, it is at present arid, decadent, without depth, social importance, or universal meaning.

It is my belief that our general public’s healthy appetite for art is stifled and inhibited by the onesided diet now being offered to it — but even more so by the pretentious, ornate, and vapid presentation of the fare. There are some who will show a natural taste for the non-objective dish. The great majority, however, will ahvays crave a simple and more vigorous sustenance to satisfy their normal, pictorial appetite. All I plead for is that the bill of fare be written out in a basic and lucid English which can be understood by the average intelligent American.