MODERN ART

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21882, 18 August 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

MODERN ART

BY KOTAItE

AIMS AND METHODS

Lifo must bo very difficult for the man who would bo up to the minute in his knowledge and appreciation of modern art. Once I was faint yet pursuing, but I have long given up tho chase. Just what our age is worth artistically, what it lias been ablo to contribute of solid value to the development of artistic standards and ideals, will be clear enough no doubt a century hence, when all the dust of controversy will long have settled, and when time has coldly and finally decreed what is to hold its place in the temple of fame and what is to be mercifully bundled into the rag-bag of oblivion. But one cannot leave everything to the judgment of time. We want to have somo idea where we stand, or what is more important, whither we are moving. After all, the men of a hundred years hence will be very much liko ourselves, and, except that they will have a detachment and a perspective impossible to us, they will actually bo no more competent than ourselves to pass a final judgment. And they will know, of course, what has proved to have a principle of life in it and what has fluttered through its hectic little day and ceased to be. One of the chief troubles with the amateur who makes no pretensions to width and depth of knowledge is the difficulty of deciding what is genuine and sincere and what is prompted simply by tho desire to be different and to attract attention. The exhibitionist is unfortunately always with us. Ho must bo doing things that will set peoplo talking, or life has no savour for him. To his morbid mentality there is a supreme value in mere novelty. There is no chance of tho limelight for him unless he outdoes everybody else in being fantastically different. Any path is good if no ono has ever trodden it before.

Sincerity It takes much moro knowledge than I possess to estimate what is sincere in modern art and what is self-adver-tisement. I have looked at pictures and statuary that produced in mo an overwhelming senso of resentment; the man was surely poking fun at me. He had so little opinion of my judgment that he was trying to fool mo with this precious stuff. The public want to be considered up to date, and lie will bluff them by appealing to their vanity, their determination to be ultra-modern, appreciative of the last word in advanced art. Once that suspicion of insincerity creeps in, one not only condemns the artist but looks with something of disgust on thoso who shout his praises. But such a summary judgment cannot really bo justified without a much wider acquaintance with the aims and spirit of modern art than the ordinary layman possesses. When one can make no claim to connoisseurship one has no right to emphatic opinions. That style of thing docs not appeal to this particular type of mind —that is the utmost that can be said. A mind more richly furnished, a taste more sensitively developed, will have reactions that my limitations mako impossible to me. So I accept a considerable area of modern art as wholly outside my range. It may be everything its champions maintain; I have not qualified myself to express an opinion, and my judgments formed by the unaided light of Nature no doubt would reveal my own inadequacies rather than the demerits of the picture and its artist. The only decent thing left for mi; is to withhold the comments my resentments suggests, and not to pretend I see a masterpiece where there is nothing to me but an ill-drawn, worse-composed conglomeration of meaningless colour. The Expert

But granting all that, one cannot let everything go by default. After all, one has a right to some sort of opinion, and there is something seriously wrong if we are to accept only the verdict of a very limited company of experts. Whether art is an interpretation of the true values of life, or an expression of lifo on its highest levels of emotional experience, or an escape from life and tlio narrowing realities that hem us into a wider, richer world of imagination and beauty and feeling, the fact remains that it means something of vital importance to all who would mako the most of their task of living, and that it has failed utterly if it can be understood and appreciated only by the one or two that have climbed to the rarefied upper air. It is clear that modern art in most of its forms —painting, sculpture, music, poetry, architecture —is seeking to express something that is characteristic of our age, something that no other ago has realised so completely. It is the spirit of our times, our scale of values as the circumstances of our own special problems have developed them. We see things from our own angle. We are not merely the heirs of the past; we have been shaped by the special conditions of our own time. If our art is to be sincere it must ho much more than an imitation of the triumphs of a previous age. It can build on these or it can take new lines of its own. But it cannot under any circumstances be the same. It may not be better, but it must be different.

In addition, there was perhaps never an age so determined to cut with tradition. That a thing was good enough for our fathers is more than a sufficient reason for changing it. Convention and acquiescence have given tho keynote to some of tho past ages in our history. Revolt, radical change, are central in modern life. Wo have definitely something that is worth expressing, and we shall find our own forms oJf expressing it.

Present Goals

Once a universal religious faith was the forcing-bed that stimulated art to its highest forms. Even social and political conditions have had their part ns the inspiration and driving force of the artist. " Art had always to have a shovo from behind from religion or politics, and a lift by the scruff of tho neck from architecture, in order to achieve anything. Left to itself it tended to lose touch with exterior reality, to become over-mental and meaningless." That is the opinion of Mr. John Armstrong, an ultra-modern of the English Unit One group. Religion and politics arouse no universal faith or pride to-day; and nothing else that could take their place as a stimulus to tho arts has so far been evolved by modern conditions. But amid tho welter of new theories and experiments in every field of artistic expression, some definito goals are at least emerging.

Professor Beilly sums up tho modern age as a revolt from realism in order to express more intense feeling. Roger Fry considers that ours is a period of " free speculation on the whole nature and purpose of tho painted image, with experiments toward an abstract nonrepresentational art, and finally to a return to the concept as tho unit of design." Tho trouble usually is that tho explanations of what the artist would be at convey as little intelligible meaning to the ordinary mind as the picture or the statuo they are intended to elucidate.