CONTEMPORARY ART

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 547, 16 December 1949, Page 5

CONTEMPORARY ART

Sir,-I have read with interest the opposing views of your correspondents. One clear fact would seem to emergethat the root of appreciation of modern art (or indeed any form of art) lies in the ability of the beholder to understand the thought which prompted the execution of a particular work. Why were the 17th Century Dutch so preoccupied with the accurate representation of food in abundance at a time when Holland was obliged to be thrifty? Why did painters of the Renaissance concentrate on the characters of mythology, often introducing them into paintings dealing with the teachings of Christendom? Why did the 18th Century artists of the French Courts centre their interest on the fripperies of court life in Arcadian setting? The answer is that the artist has ever been influenced by the surroundings and mass thinking of his time. It is his job to translate those surroundings into paint, or sculpture or architecture. Any attempt by an artist to ape the manners of a preceding age must be regarded as conceit if the circumstances prompting that painting bear no relation to it. Thus it is conceit for an artist to follow blindly the distortions evolved by Picasso in his painting during the German occupation. During that period he painted largely in greys, yellows, sage green and blacks-tortured colours of tortured buildings recognisable to anyone who visited Europe during that tortured period. Again his monstrous children with faces a hundred years old were his protest against the famine of Europe as were his still life studies of frugal household possessions in a France stripped of her wealth. I should think he will paint no more of these things. He has made his point to those who can understand, as surely as did the artists of the Middle Ages who represented hellfire and damnation or a life everlasting.

JOHN PINE

SNADDEN

(Welington).