CONTEMPORARY ART
Sir~-I am glad to see two letters in your issue of November 4 sailing into the opponents of "modern art." Both have recalled vital truths, one that mankind commonly enjoys the "abstract" ‘beauty of a mass of flowers, the other that logic breaks down in the final assessment of a work of art. That is why it also breaks down when we try to convey the impression a great work makes upon! us to those who are completely out of sympathy with it. Unfortunately the remarks will fall on deaf or sieve-like ears. It is not modern visual art against which so many people revolt, but all visual art which does not come within very close range of the photographic ideal. Thus: in my own home I have met aggressive haters of art who have as they think airily dismissed my own taste with a wave of the hand. It wasn’t me these persons really dismissed but modern New Zealand art, impressionist art, Renaissance art, Byzantine art and that of Pompeii wall frescoes: From the tone of the letters of the earlier correspondents I suspect they belong to this happy breed. If this is so, how can Messrs. Snadden and Ward effectively communicate with such persons? Why do the-art haters even listen to radio discussions on art? And lastly, why are they frequéntly so much more aggressive in. their dislikes than, say, those who must confess to an attraction for the work of a Klee, a Chagall or a Gauguin? If we who like. 20 old pictures to every one modern painting are, as one of your correspondents implies, a little crazy, then I contend we are crazy in a pretty solid and harmless tradition and should be left, hoaxed as we have been -by the master charlatans of pictorial art from Cimabue downwards. — .. From the safety of my own happy asylum and home, I will say only this, that while I do distrust those who talk on modern aft and who display little interest in what went before; I cannot take those men seriously whose concern for the state of painting is prodded furiously alive only when they hear any modern art praised.
JOHN
SUMMERS
(Christchurch).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 544, 25 November 1949, Page 7
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369CONTEMPORARY ART New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 544, 25 November 1949, Page 7
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