ARTISTS OF TODAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 June 1939, Page 7

ARTISTS OF TODAY

PLACED IN THREE CLASSES. Artists today may roughly be divided into three categories, writes Mr Jan Gordon, the English art critic. The first pursues what might be called the "heart" of the Art, the second the "art" of the Art. and the third the Art of the heart. The first includes the inventive and research artists —constructionists, expressionists, surrealists, and' others—who arc still exploring and extending the limits of painting and are educating the spectator's response to novel and unusual forms of expression. With justice we claim that these are really pursuing the “heart" of the Art. The second group is by far the largest. It includes the whole body of excellent painters who do first-class, straightforward work. Its ambitions are to interpret Nature as sincerely and as brilliantly as gilts and personal idiosyncracies will allow. They present the ordinary, heightened partly by natural talent and partly, sometimes largely, by the use of ideas or traditions borrowed or inherited from other painters. The third group is in some ways a sublimation of the second: indeed, at their best moments, regular members of the second group may rise into the third for a picture or two. Yet even a regular artist of the third group may fail to bring off the miracle. This consists in using no extraordinary experiments, and yet. infusing into a recognisable image of reality some almost subconscious elements of an extraordinary ’ nature without straining the appearance of simple realism. The infusion of the ordinary with the subtly extraordinary has the effect of heightening empowers of perception and of thus extending our vision.