I. POLEMIO TOWARD THE LIBERATING CRITERIA OF ART Ar TEN o'cLocK I TH MORNING.on any day of the week except legal holidays,the typical art museum anywhere in the country is open for visitors.The entrance hall usually leads the average aficionado of art through a series of galleries in orderly progression from one imposing collection to another.presenting the visual history of civilization,the drama of the human mind.As far back as man could reason,his works are there:evidence of the Neolithic,the dawn of antique remains of dynastic power.the classical traditions.the intervening lincs of humanist development,the Renaissance and baroque flowering,to the most recent acquisitions of modern and contemporary art:they are all there,more or less,in periodic array.As he progresses leisurely through the halls,the visitor is led through a process of transitions in the ages of man.He is ha rdly a aware of the changes,yet their impact,gradual and moving is not lost on him.He correlates the concrete visions of the past into a stirring processional of events As he reaches the modern age,his eye is delighted with the radiance,the luminosity,and joy of impressionism.Yet he is vaguely disturbed by its unmannerly sketchy appearance,its random spontaneity,its lack of finish,its seeming amateurishness Then,as he crosses the threshold to the new art,to postimpressionism and beyond,deep into cubism,expressionism,abstraction,and surrealism-their derivations and deviations- the alarm bells begin to ring in his head,the sirens and the fireworks go off,and our afi- cionado of art-who is not a snob,by the way-is left in a morass of helpless confusion and dismay.The even tenor of his mood is disrupted in the colorific visual violence,the aes thetic assault from the walls.The simple progression is gone;the contact with life is demol- ished in a pyrotechnic profusion of unrecognizable fulminations
DYNAMIC ANATOMY In the art of the past,there seemed to be no line of visual expression our visi or to the museum could not follow.No matter how far back,even to Paleolithic cave art, he could trace the thread,the primitive urge,the historic need,the humankind.At times the line stretched thin and tenuous;at others,strong and firm.But always it was there for him to see,a long unbroken line of human succession,linking a vast reach of time,twen- ty thousand years of change.Now in his own time,in the day when the visitor and moder man have arrived at a new age of invention and discovery,recognizing the demand of every human need and the promised fulfillment of every human dream,the historic line of art communication in human understanding,imperative now more than ever before,has bro ken down.The new art that thundered down at our receptive visitor to the museum is filled with an eclectic diversity of forms-biomorphic,kinemorphic,psychomorphic mechanomorphic-all of them intensely personal,subjective expressions of inner states of being.The figure in art,the highest expression of man's visual creative powers,the subject of twenty thousand years of painstaking search,has been reduced to a number,a cipher. an esoteric symbol,a kinesthetic impulse driven by a primitive-emotional urge.Today, anatomical man,for all artistic purposes,is dead. Art,in the mid-twentieth century,is in a period of critical transition.We are seeing today an extraordinary concentration of effort and energy in the visual arts never before experienced at any time in history.Never has there been so widespread an inter- est,never have so many individuals participated actively in its creation.Never have we had so much contact with art of all kinds-art from the dim reaches of time,art from across the oceans,art of primitive peoples;art from the past great eras to the modern era fine art,commercial art,industrial art,technical art,experimental art,psychological art, leisure art,amateur art.It would appear we are seeing a great new Renaissance in visua art,for in the volume of art creation we are witnessing a cultural phenomenon of the first magnitude. In the frontiers of knowledge and culture,art may be said to be in its heyday of exploration.The exploratory fervor of the sixteenth century.using new logic,new mathematics,new science,opened the unknown areas of the world to commerce and phys ical contact of peoples and broughtout a treasure of artworks to the Western world,which only now,in the twentieth century,is being experienced by artists in our time.Like the riches of the East in an earlier day,this influx of art is beginning to be seen,felt,and assim ilated.The day of global exploration is accomplished.Now has begun the day of cultural exploration,some five hundred years later.Yet never has there been so much confusion in the arts as there is today. so]
CHAPTER I TOWARD THE LIBERATING CRITERIA OF ART STUDY FOR PAINTING WITH WHITE FORM. 1a68 944)RUSSIAN NEW YORK 1 The twentieth-century artist appears to be in a state of conflict and disorder.He has a world of art to explore,yet he shows no purpose,no goals.He seems to have lost his sense of direction as he ranges across the uncharted art frontiers.He has rejected the com pass:he has thrust aside standards,criteria.definitions:he has renounced science as a tool in the discovery and development of art.He has rejected the human need to relate,to communicate the results of discovery. If we recognize it is the mission of science to define with clarity and precision the workings of the universe,to relate with order and harmony the new concepts of time space,and energy into new and better ways of life,we reach the conclusion that science is the most powerful instrumentality in the progress of man.To the artist,however,science is considered an invasion,a hindrance,a stricture upon his free and personal interpreta tion of the world.He sees the scientist as an intellectual instrument-precise,logical. mathematical,mechanical.He sees himself as a sensitive organ of feeling,emotion,inspi ration,and intuition.As a result,the artist rejects science and scientific thinking in the pro jection of art.Art to be pure,he reasons,must be devoid of science;feeling is not precise; emotion is not mechanical:inspiration is not logical:intuition is not measurable the artist is no scientist.Attempting to distinguish the work of art from other works of life as a
DYNAMIC ANATOM refinement of endeavor,distinct and separate from the ordinary and commonplace necessities,the artist has in effect said that science prods and pushes with the workaday things to build a better mousetrap,while he,the emotionally endowed aesthete,represents the inspirational work,the filtered aesthetic reflex of sociey,the fine arts.It isa neat tric of turning the tables;the bohemian wastrel and garret outcast,through intellectual legerdemain and bootstrap levitation,has become an individual of a pure kind.In this state,he rises above plebeian strivings toa position of sophisticated recognition and social grandeur,and from this remote pinnacle surveys the marketplace mediocrity below. How devastating and destructive a view this is can be gauged by the fact that in every other area of modern life,in every field of endeavor.science merges easily,compat- ibly,productively-except in the visual arts.Only here is the view held-by artists of all idioms,indeed,the whole of contemporary society-that science and art do not mix,that they are mutually contradictious,irreconcilable.Yet this is a distortion of the truth,a delu- sion,a self-imposed deception,a retreat from life. The dislocation of art and science has never been so apparent as it is todav almost a hundred years from the time it first revealed a disturbance in the continuity of ar communication.The impressionist rebellion,the last flower of the humanist spirit of the Renaissance,still exhibiting its attachment to scientific precepts in its spectral light and its recorded observations of the momentary life of the people, recreation,and leisure,was too weak a movement to triumph over the entrenched authority of the regres- sive French Academy.When it withered and died after twenty years of frustration and social exile.the deep space of the picture plane became a barren shell:the landscape closed down into a two-dimensional decorative pattern of shapes;the vibrant pulsating figure,the human analogue,shrank and hardened into an artifact,a constructed intellectual object the artist's emotional power and insight in human affairs subsided into symbolic outcrop- pings of tenuous moments of excitation,apprehension,or despair. In their seizure upon the"immediate"and the"personal,"the followers after the impressionists disengaged themselves from every known principle of spatial structure and design.They withdrew from earlier concepts of form,value,color,and image.The worked toward the total rejection of the Academy.In their hatred of the"academic,"they extirpated the scientific legacy of arl,carefully nurtured and marshaled over fifty centuries of historic develo pment,and erased it in a short span of fifty years.In their need to rebe against the"academic,"they rebelled against science.They proclaimed the distinction of the"fine arts"and gave it to society as a new description,uniquely different from aca demic art or the utilitarian commercial art.They presented to the entire contemporary (gz)
CHAPTER I TOWARD THE LIBERATING CRITERIA OF ART generation of society and the artists who followed the doctrine that"art"was above scien- tific discipline,above definitions and criteria.The need to communicate in art,to be responsible for the exchange of art experience into human experience,was considered to be an anachronistic demand of aggressive academic vulgarity,and was held beneath con- tempt.The rebellion against the "sterile,"the"mechanical,"the"academic"-truly a human cry of anguish-had become a distortion and a delusion.The fine artist had turned his back on reality.He became an incoherent high pricst of good taste.an absolute arbiter of egocentric mirror-image art,a melancholy,involuted microcosm turned in upon itself to an inevitable dead end. Yet the impulse to art is unquestionably the impulse to life.The art process and the life process are an indissoluble entity.The components of one are the components of the other.They may be uneven,but never alien:they may be out of joint,but never out of union. The need to create,to synthesire experience,is a primal force in art.Because it is the TWO MEN. 1881-1955). MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 38