ART WITHOUT MEANING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 June 1939, Page 7

ART WITHOUT MEANING

IMAGINATION OUT OF FASHION. Portraits and landscapes between them occupy a good deal more than half the available wall space at the Royal Academy, writes Mr Eric Newton, the art critic, in the “Manchester Guardian.” It is strange that so large a proportion of contemporary art should be content to record the face of nature of the faces of mankind. Problems, allegories, narrative paintings, or flights of pure imagination are out of fashion. At Burlington House you will find no Blake trying to scale the heavens, no Watts preaching sermons, no propagandist showing “Democracy arming against Bellona,” not even a Luke Fildes to reveal the poignancies of everyday life. It is left to the novel and the cinema to tell stories: sermons are the monopoly of the pulpit and propaganda of the Left Book Club. It is a pity that painters should refuse to preach, for there has been enough talk about paint values, and colour values, and tone values. The layman has a perfect right to demand that the artist’s aesthetic muscles should be made to serve some useful, human purpose instead of performing a kind of artistic daily dozen in thg cloistered privacy of the studio.