Art, Freedom and the Human Spirit In The Contemporary World
SHAHN, BEN
On ART By Ben Shahn Art, Freedom and the Human Spirit In the Contemporary World PERHAPS it is presumptuous for an artist to make predictions as to the future of art. I believe that its course...
...For so much that we live with and experience today has become devoid of personality...
...In which case, it will have earned an honored place among the humanities...
...If it aspires to an aesthetic of double-talk, just that will be its position, nothing more: and life itself will walk around it and let it alone...
...Whatever pretentions to cosmic authority may have been BEN SHAHN is the distinguished American painter...
...It is even affirmative in the sense that it asks us to be of good cheer...
...That was true of the golden age of Greece, whose intellectual and emotional concepts we still own...
...Objects that we handle and use are mass-produced, our clothing mass-designed...
...and that included his moralities and immoralities, his inner vision and his outer grossness, all of which were celebrated in the arts of the time...
...But perhaps later generations, if there are to be later generations, will discover in it qualities which the near view prevents one's seeing...
...But I think that artists ought to recognize this, that there is no moral reason why art ought to go on if it has nothing further to express, nor is there any moral or aesthetic reason why the public ought to bend the knee in reverence before the mere fact of art...
...Art, because it is the innate expression of man, speaks also in final values, tends to reaffirm the individual...
...in himself, ultimate value...
...It is claimed that non-objective art is the perfect expression of such an age, and perhaps that is true...
...the machine can absorb our emotions and contain our soul...
...What then can be said to be a favorable condition for art...
...Our entertainment, in great part, must needs be reduced to common denominators and cliches...
...It is one of the few remaining outposts of free speech—unprocessed speech...
...Whatever he says or feels is communicated directly and without modification to those who look at his work...
...The last half of the nineteenth century in France—in all of Europe—saw the rise of the free and sovereign individual...
...It needs to be reminded that neither the pressure of events nor the exigencies of diplomacy can warrant the final debasement of man...
...but given human compulsions, some intellectual stature and great competence, it can perhaps bring man back into focus as being of supreme importance...
...Looking backward, one might observe that the surpassingly beautiful art of the past has emerged from those periods when man was deeply stirred spiritually, or by great ideas...
...If it adopts the manners and outlook and philosophy of a minor expression, then a minor expression it will be...
...His humanness was his paramount quality...
...For the non-objective painting claims validity only for its mechanics, for the material with which it is made and the manner of their organization...
...We might assume that art is important only if it essays to be important...
...Mass communication has stereotyped public information, and with that, the personal truth-gathering and truth-telling that we have held so essential to our well-being...
...If art must evolve about an elite, it may become increasingly abstruse . . . although that's merely a guess...
...I doubt that what now seems to be an atomic age, or is in any case a scientifico-mechanical age, will ever be greatly distinguished for its contribution to the human spirit...
...Even opinion must be processed editorially before it may be relayed to the ordinary citizen...
...And there is no tangible evidence that Democracy will necessarily yield a good art...
...It rejects man, his life, his visions, his philosophies, his future...
...An exhibition of some of his work during the last few years was recently put on at the Downtown Gallery in New York made by the art of the "isms," it succeeded only in being more human...
...We have witnessed the banalities that the totalitarian condition produces...
...Still, I believe that the increasing interest and activity in art is in essence a rebellion against the absolutism of science and mechanics, that it evidences a widespread nostalgia for the human touch and for the personal statement...
...The personal touch of the artist's hand remains ineradicably upon his canvas...
...We need a resurgence of the humanities, a rebirth of spirit...
...I believe that its course will be determined by the moods of society, by political situations, by kinds of patronage and so on...
...Society needs more than anything else to be reminded that man is...
...We carry its images about with us now and are the better for it...
...But art is still the citadel of the individual...
...Art is neither use, nor appointed task...
...Again, during the Renaissance, artists and poets were captured by the refinements of religious devotion...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 13
