A Polemic Against Modern Art

...To be categorically against any current style in art means, in effect, condemning works of art one has not yet seen or which have not yet been produced, which means in turn questioning the motives of their producers, which means in further turn directing one's attention to causes solely instead of effects--though, as we all know, the effect, the result, alone matters in art...

...But his keenness as a critic of traditional art enters not at all into this polemic...

...This is small failure for a small book...

...In spite of his title, Lewis never attacks the "demon of progress" frontally...

...But even if the ratio of failure to success is now higher than ever in the past, the fact remains that some, if only a few, works of abstract art are better than others...

...Lewis's denunciation of abstract or "extremist" art is largely in terms of its social context, audience, and the qualifications and public roles of its literary champions--just as so many anti-modernists in this country find nothing more to the point, when attacking abstract art's disrespect for "human values," than to quote Art News prose...

...Lewis is not the first categorically to denounce modernism or "extremism" -- in this case, more narrowly, abstractness--in painting and sculpture...

...Lewis, to judge from his Listener pieces, has at times, when addressing himself to the art of a past more than recent, been a superb one (as, for instance, on the superiority of Michelangelo's painting to his sculpture...

...Invariably, the enterprise of anti-modernism, whether in book, article or newspaper column, has been a frustrated one, for Berenson as much as for Robsjohn-Gibbing or Howard Devree--doomed to frustration because the denunciation is a priori and categorical, which honest art criticism can never be, since good as well as bad art remains possible anywhere, and the critic has to wait upon possibility...

...Lewis would still be paying too high a price for the distinction...

...Perhaps the ratio of success to failure was the same in Renaissance naturalism, but we shall never know, since inferior works of art, even in ages we consider to have had execrable taste, have a greater tendency to disappear than superior works do...

...Lewis does not satisfy us on this score when, in the beginning of his book, he hails Moore, Sutherland, Bacon, Colquhoun, Minton, Craxton, Pass-more, Trevelyan, Richards and Ayrton as forming "actually the finest group of painters and sculptors which England has ever known...

...The absurd things which are happening in the visual arts at present are what must happen when an art becomes almost totally disconnected from society, when it no longer has any direct function in life, and can only exist as the plaything of the intellect...

...What truth there is in the last is badly, misleadingly and even dishonestly stated (Lewis would be hard put to define the role of the "intellect" in either the making or the appreciation of any art), but I am surprised most by the fact that he bothers to repeat, as if it were a fresh and startling truth to be proclaimed with self-satisfied asperity, what has been said a thousand times before, and not always with such a banal absence of qualification...

...and to the historical, cultural and sociological fact that "mass-life today is the worst kind of thing for an appreciation of the arts, or of any cultural product...

...And then there is the misinformation in which he, like Sir Herbert, abounds: as, for example, that Cubism was a "borrowing...

...I happen to find this exaggerated, but even were it not, Mr...

...I can but deplore the waste of energy that has gone into the whole business of anti-modernism and keeps going into it...

...Sir Herbert Read, supposedly the all-out advocate of "extremism" (which he is not--though it would not matter one way or another if he were), is an incompetent art critic...

...Actually, none of the anti-modernists except Berenson seems to choose the frontal attack...

...Nineteen out of twenty abstract paintings or pieces of sculpture are bad...

...And he is not the first, nor will he be the last, from whose rough hands it emerges unscathed...

...Suffice it to say that Lewis attributes the proliferation of abstract art to the fact that it offers a handy concealment to artists who lack talent and/or training...

...And the denouncer of "extremism" is, in all conscience, under the obligation to be able to tell the difference before sounding off in public...

...to the further fact that painting and sculpture cost less to bring before the public than music, drama, dance or literature...

...The refusal to attempt to do so is enough of itself to render denunciations like Lewis's suspect...

...The metallic bounce of his style, its conversational rapidity and tartness, seem to be made possible most often by the evasion of any challenge to sustained thought or scrutiny...

...In places, Lewis does even worse than the run-of-the-mill anti-modernists...

...author of numerous works on art T. S. Eliot has called Wyndham Lewis the "greatest prose stylist of my generation -- perhaps the only one to have invented a new style...

...All the old straw-men are on hand: the undiscoverable people--undiscoverable, at least, since 1900--who hold that art gets better as it "advances," in time and otherwise...

...All one can say is that where Sir Herbert would be furtively, surreptitiously incoherent, Lewis is unabashedly so--which, again, is not enough praise...

...It is the failure to sustain or develop, whether on the plane of reason or that of imagination, that characterizes most of the Wyndham Lewis I have read, and it may explain why so many people can read him only in snatches...

...As with all such books, one could go on...

...whom could he quote as believing Picasso and Pollock to be better than Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt...

...On the contrary...

...from science...