Art for Life's Sake

...The result is that the miserable artist, harried by the bored capacity of his patron, goes on pretending to lay new sensational wonders...

...He perceives what few except Roman Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and 18th Century cosmopolitans like Condorcet have seen...

...Without false pride he dares to be a spokesman...

...But in this crisis, he asks, who speaks for man...

...Greene's huge and lavishly illustrated work is, unlike Seligman's slender volume, not confined to painting alone, but ranges to scultpure, architecture, the dance, music, and literature as well...

...At the root of the trouble, Seligman thinks, is the contemporary world's attitude toward art, viewing it as a vain game or a luxury, while it is, in fact, "a vital function of man...

...Here, too, as in Greene's book, all arts are dealt with, and in this case including even what Ozenfant calls "the arts of faith": science, philosophy, and religion...

...6...

...10...

...But belonging to the human race, man is without a spokesman...

...Art patrons are often so ignorant that they fall prey to unscrupulous dealers and spend fortunes for works of art without respect to true merit...

...The Arts and the Art of Criticism, by Theodore Meyer Greene...

...The real artist—be he painter, sculptor, poet, or musician—does not yield to such a temptation...

...Men must reach for and obtain world government...

...Once familiar with the properties (the "raw material") of a work of art, the onlooker may start to appraise it critically on a number of different levels—five, according to Greene...

...Belonging to a religion, man has religions that can speak for him...

...348 pp...

...all of the human race are "more alike than dif...

...Collectors pay unbelievably high prices for mediocre paintings as long as they belong to a school or period currently fashionable...

...According to Greene, works of art reveal Truth, finite truth, as much as mathematics or physics, though the aesthetic insights and values gained thereby are of a different nature from those that can be verified by instruments...

...Since the Hegelian school many philosophers have looked down upon the arts, considering them far below philosophy...

...For, as Ozenfant succinctly says: "The needs of an epoch equal eternal needs plus recent needs plus tomorrow's needs...

...Put these two ideas together and what must be concluded...

...Princeton University Press...

...The author blames the art critics • in particular for the low state of public taste...

...its will on the other, but how we can keep both sides from fusing inside an atomic oven...

...His is Willkie's One World concept applied to the arts, since he holds that "men are different from each other, but more similar than different...

...Dover Publications...

...They are likely to agree with Huyghe's bitter statement: "Many of our contemporaries are less developed in intellect and in sensitivity than a Greek of the 5th Century B. C." But they launch their philippics from different points of departure...

...Belonging to an economic and social order, man has economic or political orders that can speak for him...

...He is not only a child of his age—he is also a major architect of his world, and of the next to come...

...Yet the art patrons are as responsible for the confusion reigning in the world of 20th Century aesthetics as are some of the creators of the ever-changing styles: "This is a gifted age, yet think of the gifts that have been ruined by the need for distraction...

...Emphasizing that art exists for life's sake rather than just for art's sake, Greene considers it imperative to end the confusion in the realm of art criticism by finding a denominator common to all the arts, to produce a frame of reference unifying the various aesthetic experiences of Man by means of strictly defined categories...

...Greene, however, holds that each art has its own "peculiar excellence" as well as its "special limitations...

...Hegel considered literature to be the "highest" of the arts because, unlike the other arts, it provides conceptual experience as well as the perceptual that results from sensory processes while a stimulus is present...

...they are either narrow-minded specialists, unable to encompass the "universality and perennial quality" of art, or they are journalists who confine themselves to lyrical praise of accepted and unchallengeable masterpieces...

...690 pp...

...He rejects as non-art everything that merely satisfies a passing need, everything that is revolutionary merely for the sake of causing a revolution...

...II Greene, who undertook the ambitious task of trying to set down basic principles of criticism applicable to all arts, would never have succeeded, were not his outlook on art different from that of scholars who consider the term "truth" to be a property of logicians and scientists...

...Seligman, who has headed one of the most respected firms in the art business world for the past three decades, is mainly concerned that superficial fashion rather than sound judgment is dictating prices on the art market...

...Briefly, a work must be judged upon its formal excellence (its organization which makes it aesthetically beautiful), its artistic quality, its artistic integrity, its artistic truth, and its artistic greatness...

...Beneath the obvious diversities and the bitter power struggles men are of man...

...While "any creative effort is truly related to its epoch," it should be able to satisfy "the totality of needs of that epoch, including those which are still inarticulate, and of which the greatest a-rtists have as it were a presentiment...

...Reviewed by Alfred Werner AN art dealer, a university teacher, and a painter take Contemporary Man to task...

...it is not the mature egg we demand, but Easter eggs in the latest fashion...

...The painter Ozenfant (Foundations of Modern Art) shares with Greene an admirable seriousness of approach, but where the Princeton scholar adheres to a rigid plan and a strict order, the Frenchman indulges in an undisciplined aphoristic style and manner of treatment that make it difficult to follow all the gyrations of his mind...

...Seligman undoubtedly would warmly recommend a thorough reading of The Arts and the Art of Criticism by Theodore Meyer Greene to those many writers whom he censures for their lack of scholarly background...

...We demand that the painter shall lead us from surprise to surprise...

...His contribution is marked with the stamp of universality and eternity...

...Belonging to a nation, man has nations that can speak for him...

...People have yet to learn how to look at works of art, how to embrace them lovingly "with the outstretched tentacles of all our centers of receptivity...

...Foundations of Modern Art, by Amedee Ozenfant...

...The alternative is atomic death...

...People will buy the least important creations of the Impressionist school, and swallow all artistic effusions of the living painters of Paris, yet beautiful and significant creations of 18th Century French art have relatively little market value...

...No attempt can be made here to outline these principles described and analyzed in over a hundred pages—the critic, without rigorously following all, will be well off if he just remembers that no judgment can be satisfactory if it is based on one level of critical approach alone...

...If he lashes out against Dada and similar movements of the twenties, he does so not because he is averse to new ways of artistic expression, but because he objects to artists dwelling in a dream world of their own, speaking an esoteric language incomprehensible to contemporary man...

...From the Ice Age to Picasso, there is only one kind of art—Great Art...

...His general philosophy, however, seems as valid today as it was a quarter of a century ago when this book was first published in France...

...works by Van Gogh (who, in Seligman's opinion, will not rank as high in the future as he does today) and Toulouse-Lautrec are over-priced, while the master-works of geniuses of the past, like Fragonard, Delacroix, Courbet, or Boudin, are neglected...