The New Art

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 4, Issue 8, 1 February 1926, Page 12

The New Art

'Ey W. PAGE ROWE

Our Mistaken Notions

ART in Auckland is evidently in a very bad way, that is if Mr. Epstein and some others are producing the best kind of art up to date. The opinion that there are but four good pictures in our Art Gallery plainly errs on the side of leniency, for I cannot find one which approaches this new standard, unless, proaches this new standard, so it is evident that the sooner we clear out the whole lot the better. The gallery could then be renamed and re-furn-ished with enlarged photos of our local M.P.’s, and perhaps their “run-ners-up,” not quite so large, and also of our successive mayors and councillors. A few photos of local beauty spots might be included, such as a selection of views of our waterfront, a study of overhead cables, thearchilecture of Queen Street, one of the tram refuges—so simple and yet so solid—the new workmen’s dwellings. and that beautiful area which so cngagingly leaves everything to the imagination in its name of “Civic Centre” which everybody gives to it,

f I 'HIS new phase of art is all A very disturbing. Here have I been admiring sundry pictures in our Art Gallery—more than four—and condemning others, only to find the Mackelvie trustees and myself are in the same wrong box. I have often climbed the hill to look again and again at the statue by Lucchesi, in the Albert Park, representing “The Triumph of Peace,” and reproduced on this page, and it seems that I have been misguided, for I have admired it hugely, and it is all wrong, and therefore I don’t begin to know what good art is. It is just possible that the pedestal may be right according to the new canon, but there again I have always found it inexcusable, unless it is to be taken as the subtle cause for a certain air of dejection about the figure. The inscription also is just what it should not be, and omits both the title and the name of the sculptor. Similarly. I find that those remarkable statues at the Hospital, of Nurse Cavell, a sailor, and a soldier, took

my breath away for quite a wrong reason, for as far as I can grasp the meaning of this new kind of art, these express its intentions more nearly than anything I have yet seen in Auckland outside the Museum. IT seems that we arc all wrong in imagining that Greek sculpture, such as the Venus of Milo, epitomises the beauty of the human form. Not a hit of it! We should get our inspiration and our ideals from Negro sculpture, at least so says a host of high-browed authorities, and in quite unmistakcablc terms. You have only to look at the picture of one of these masterpieces to see how wrong we all are in our conception of beauty. What our women-folk are going to do about it, I don’t know. Because if this sort of thing represents - female beauty, they will have to find some other means of getting at it than hair-bobbing and lip-sticks. Mr. Epstein evidently agrees also that the Negro idea is right, as

witness his “Curse the Day that I was Born.” There is, however, one encouraging point about this piece of sculpture, for those who try to adjust their ideas to the new “art”— everybody will agree that the person represented had every reason to curse. TT seems to my unregenerate mind -*■ that the Cubist performances were much more tolerable. When a Cubist covered his canvas with cubes and triangles, ingeniously discordant in arrangement and colour, and put an eye in one corner and a shoe in another, and assured us that it was a “Portrait of a Lady” he at least left something—a great deal, in fact —to the imagination, as good art should. How the lady in question liked it was his affair. But Cubism is already dead of a rapid decline, and this newer “art” leaves nothing to the imagination. It gives us very plain statements, in more than one sense of the word, and its perpetrators maintain that these statements are in accordance with the most essential facts, and that the results are beautiful. What we have yet to learn is that the essential facts are certainly not the visual facts; that the prime necessity is to distort those facts so as first of all to eliminate all qualities of what we wrongly suppose to be beauty. If we find the result ugly, then we are unregenerate and the truth is not in us. Ugliness is the new beauty. Speaking of another phase of this new “art” Mr. Konody says that it has set “a new standard of beauty which is now imitated in the world of fashion.” Per-

haps those ladies are going- to lead us to this new temple of beauty, who have shorn off their long hair, which we have so mistakenly thought to be one of their most beautiful features, and done their best, with wonderful success, to suppress all characteristic lines of the figure, and turn themselves into tubes on two stalks. But the “world of fashion” moves on an uncertain orbit, and the figure divine shows signs of filling out again, albeit not very much in accordance with natural contours. O PEAKING seriously, there are two main causes for this freakish “art,” one concerned with art itself, and the other with life. All these recent violent revolutions in art have received their first impetus from a revulsion from the “pretty-pretty” kind of “art” which had all but engulfed the Royal Academy and similar exhibiting institutions, and which was so largely patronised by people with more money than taste. Some kind of revolution was already overdue before the war, and these upheavals, though very mixed blessings in themselves, may prove to have been useful to the coming generation of artists, although not at all in the way that their protagonists imagined. The other cause is the War, which has destroyed old land-marks, raised new shoals, and unexpected barriers, and generally upset the whole course of life in every direction. The result has been a feverish longing for something different, anything, so long as it is different, and the more violent the better.