THIS MODERN ART

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 406, 3 April 1947, Page 5

THIS MODERN ART

Sir,-I always enjoy the controversy on Modern Art, especially when plain citizens take a hand in it. Artists are only public servants, after all; and the public must watch them We don’t like being "bounced," we like civility, and, above all, we long for good type of service Shakespeare and Da Vinci gave their customers, work which appeals to educated people from every class, And the public are very generous in their taste, feeling that an artist must protect his idiosyncrasy until it matures. Young artists may not be understood, but they are generously tolerated.

Now, this little matter of Modern Art! Why so many complaints? Even the famous Matisse is heckled. At eighty-something his idiosyncrasy must be very mature, he is acclaimed as "one of the greatest living painters" by people who ought to know (though they usually don’t), and ‘yet the public everywhere are harshly critical. And the notorious Picasso! If there is even a little truth in the statement ‘that "aftists are public servants" our problem is partly solved, for the Matisse-Picasso collection seem to favour form before colour, the subjective before the objective. The better painters of this group are "superb technicians. Their work is seen by "John Citizen" as he sees a technical work on Mathematical Physics, wather too -abstruse for general reading and about a subject quite outside his everyday interests, "John Citizen" does not begrudge the teaching of Mathematical Physics, of course. But he does, and I think rightly, object when the purely subjective works of peculiar minds are brought to his attention as works of art. I could write the most ridiculous book on Mathematical Physics possible, because I know practically nothing about the subject. But. no student would read far

into it. Some professor would have reviewed the book and pronounced it worthless. Now, art is not a matter on which we accept blindly the opinions of professors. An artist is entitled to say he has been misunderstood, that another generation will realise his quality. But a whole movement, such as has been built around Picasso, and which has persisted for half a century, will not succeed in "bouncing" anyone of sound mind into the belief that it must be good-because-so-and-so-says-it-is.. I think A. R. D. Fairburn argued similarly for Picasso over the radio last year. An artist’s mind must possess some generality, otherwise how can he have good taste? Picasso may believe that his mind is sound and that most of the people in the world have unsound minds, but the discipline of time will place his art conceptions with those of James Joyce. To sum up, I think the value of the schools grouped as Modern Art, in this acentury, will prove to be mainly academic, Artists will. learn’ much from a study of Picasso, but their impressions will be subjective and weak, serving to reinforce their individual idiosyncrasies but not to modify them. The public has no need to be submissive when faced with "A work-of art." Art critics are notoriously wrong in their judgments of contemporary work.

P. O.

C.

(Auckland).