MODERN ARTISTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 527, 29 July 1949, Page 16

MODERN ARTISTS

THE MARCH OF THE MODERNS, by Wil- : re} Gaunt; Jonathan Cape. English price, : ; OPENING with Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, in this his third study of artists and their times, William Gaunt glances at the personalities who evolved Dada and other "isms," nods quickly at James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and her kindergarten and passes out in an apocalyptic movie made by Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. The more effective sections of the book are those dealing with the cults that gathered impetus after the first world war; the histories of the earlier artists included are common knowledge now. Supplanting the classical vision of human nature at the centre of a world that is ordered and understood, the violent and anti-social gestures of Dada, and surrealism’s frantic guying of convention reflected the contemporary mental and spiritual chaos. Confronting man mastered by social habit, the pressures of mass culture, standardisation and advertising, Hulsenbeck, for instance, wrote poems that had no evident meaning and howled them louder and louder at-his audience while a drum beat an accompanying crescendo. The cubist, Duchamp, sent a "ready made" to a New York art exhibition, a lavatory basin signed "R. Mutt." If people could be goaded into angry outbursts, upsetting their habitual passivity, purpose was. considered to have been achieved. The March of The Moderns is, in effect, a streamlined acdount of modern enthusiasms in the arts, for those who prefer their reading hustled up that

way.

J.R.

C.