The Story of Modern Art

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 726, 12 June 1953, Page 18

The Story of Modern Art

"{T is easy to talk about the arts in a sort of vacuum, as though they exist in a vacuum, somehow apart from. the world. But, of course, the arts are products of men and women like ourselves, and they cannot help but mirror the times in which their creators lived." In these words Eric’ Westbrook, Director of the Auckland Art Gallery, explained to The Listener his approach to a series of seven. talks on the history of the visual arts, in what we call the Western world, for the past fifty years or so. Called Mirror of the Age, this series will be heard from 1YC at 8.0 p.m, on Mondays, | beginning with an introductory talk on June 15. Mr. Westbrook will cover the period a decade at a broadcast. setting the arts against the social background of the times and relating them to changes in

thinking and feeling. His subject headings will include "The First Decade" (1900-10), "Art in War-and War in Art" (1911-20), "Dance Little Lady" (1921-30), "Movements and -Manifestos" (1931-40), and "Cultivate | Your Garden," which will deal with present-day trends. | "This is a convenient but to some extent artificial method,’ says Mr. West- | : brook, "for naturally the arts cannot be | divided off into neat little packages as completely as that. Works from the : same period, even the same country, | may show startlingly different charac- | teristics, and some examples of what we call ‘modern’ art may have been) painted quite a long time ago. "Sometimes it is claimed that artists | are prophetic. That is probably non- | sense, but the truly creative artist is particularly perceptive of the age in which he lives, whereas the bulk of the people are not. Thus work of about the art itself, with a widespread turning to period 1911-1920 reflects the conflict- | and there is a conflict in the world of | surrealism and abstract forms on~the | one hand, and on the other an angry ; conviction that the ‘moderns’ are delib- | erately setting out to be obscure, or _ perverse. "Then follows a time of relief and gaiety. After 1930 there is an astonishing change of attitude, ‘evidence that | another pre-war period has begun. There is a sobering up, with artists taking tremendous interest in political movements, particularly of the Left." — The Second World War. decade brought a period of official patronage -on the whole enlightened patronagewhich lasted until after the Festival of Britain, and with the fall of France British art ceased to be fed with inspiration from Paris, British artists had to the post-war period is over and that.

find their own feet, and there was a tendency to look back to British traditions. Today’s trend, Mr. Westbrook thought, was strongly back to abstract painting, "suggesting, perhaps, a concentration on settling: our own problems."