Modern Art

...To those about sixty, modern art began with the expressionistic swagger of a Kokoschka or Soutine...

...Another person might have written an entirely different book on the same subject (with emphasis, for instance, on the very Pop-Art which, to Sedgwick, does not really constitute art...

...I did my utmost to satisfy the questioner, largely by pointing out that I had learned to understand that "modern art" might best be appreciated as one approaches music—that is, without looking hard for "subject matter," and that with such an approach, I have been able to feel at home in the multi-chambered mansion of modern art...

...it is to create something that never existed before...

...To understand them better, it might be advisable to start with the roots of modern art, with the Impressionists a hundred years ago, and then to study the Post-Impressionists, the Cubists, the Surrealists, and so on...

...This has embarrassed me, for my lectures always deal with one or another aspect of modern art...

...As lucid as he is in his comments, he is humble in his approach to art, and he demands the same humility from any other onlooker...

...His primary concern is to remove misconceptions that have been plaguing the public for a long time and have prevented it from coming to grips with modern art, and, sooner or later, enjoying it...

...It is a fallacy to assume that art must imitate nature...

...Modern Art Discovering Modern Art, by John P. Sedgwick, Jr...

...The artists of our time are, for the most part, serious men whose language is not obscure, once we have become familiar with their terminology...

...An untutored layman may want in a picture something he can recognize, while for an artist a picture is the crystallization of a unique experience, a new world: "The true function of art is not to catch something that already exists...

...art and nature are mutually exclusive...

...While conceding that there is no dearth of practical jokers in the world of art, Sedgwick warns us against thinking of modern art as of "imagination gone berserk...

...On inquiry, I invariably learned that "modern art" meant a different thing to each of those who had stood up in puzzlement—or to challenge me...

...Sedgwick is aware that all technical terms we have invented for the language of aesthetics are inadequate...

...Sedgwick insists on the closeness of the newer visual arts to music...

...Such a book has at last appeared: Discovering Modern Art, by John Sedgwick, Jr...

...But all good artists have distorted, even Michelangelo and Raphael, who worked in the Sixteenth Century...

...Reviewed by Alfred Werner T?very time I have lectured, there has been at least one member of the audience who rose to ask, "What do you think of modern art...

...while for those still in college even Jackson Pollock was old hat, and nothing counted but Op-Art, Pop-Art, and Kinetic Art...

...Had I failed to communicate...

...But when I tried to recommend a book suitable as an introduction to the subject, I could not recall one short and lucid enough to enlighten the would-be-art lover instead of confusing him even further, nor one whose author has sufficient perspective to evaluate contemporary phenomena and to distinguish between art and non-art...

...to those ten or more years younger, the term was identical with non-representational art...

...Its subtitle, "The intelligent layman's guide to painting from Impressionism to Pop," states precisely what it offers, though there are, inevitably, also references to sculpture (painting and sculpture cannot very well be treated separately, particularly in our century...

...One thing many people object to in modern art is the so-called "distortion...