Out of the Fog

Is modern art, considered as a whole, a good or a bad development?

A lot of irritated, puzzled or just curious people would like to know the answer. So would the editors of LIFE. They invited 15 critics and connoisseurs to a "round table" to discuss the whole baffling subject. Among them were conservatives like New York's Metropolitan Museum Director Francis Henry Taylor and such ardent defenders of the new faith as James Johnson Sweeney and Columbia's able Professor Meyer Schapiro. After two days' discussion, the fog was thick, but an island of agreement seemed to loom in it. Last week LIFE tried to survey the island through the fog.

Beyond Nakedness. The trouble with most people who look at a painting, said the experts, is that they can't see the leaves for the tree--and consequently don't recognize what kind of tree it is. Said Novelist Aldous Huxley: "A person who looks at a Titian solely because it represents a naked woman is not getting the full content of the picture."

Added Sir Leigh Ashton, director of London's Victoria & Albert Museum: "After all, painters have always sought to make an object.Very often they have taken a subject too; but if only this mythical layman could be persuaded instead of looking at the subject to look at the object [the painting itself], he might then be able to appreciate . . . difficult pictures."

A. Hyatt Mayor, curator of prints at the Metropolitan, added the comforting thought that critics too are stumped by new experiences in art: "I remember the first Cezannes that I saw in my early 20s. I neither liked them nor disliked them. I simply could not read them . . . But nowadays, of course, Cezanne seems right in the middle of a great tradition of painting."

Catastrophic Effect. Another point agreed on without much fuss was that most modern art, like most art of any period, is second-rate or worse. "We have lived," said British Critic Raymond Mortimer, "[in an art age] dominated by a few men of extraordinary imaginative power, like Matisse, Picasso and Braque. Greatly as I admire them, I think their effect on their contemporaries and juniors has been catastrophic. To distort before you can represent is like trying to dance before you can walk." But, argued Mortimer, "modern painting is no more difficult to understand than modern poetry, modern music, or, for that matter, modern science."

When the experts got around to discussing specific paintings, the fog really shut down. Hung for their consideration was Joan Miro's Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird. Looking at it, James Johnson Sweeney led off with: "Let's take the mood first. The mood is gay. The mood --:"

Sir Leigh: "I disagree. I think it is very somber."

Alfred Frankfurter (editor of Art News): "I like the picture . . . First because it shocks me into being interested; secondly, because I am curious to know its title. Without the title you would not know what it was . . ."

Sir Leigh: "What alarms me, apart from . . . my personal dislike, is that it is so frightfully badly painted . . ."

Hyatt Mayor: "But it does show a sweep of wind and atmosphere."

Francis Henry Taylor: "I think it is a very witty picture . . ."

Theodore Greene (professor of philosophy at Yale): "May I make a comment? . . . Miro expresses a kind of infantilism . . . I happen to like children. But I think there is a limit to how much time I want to spend in conversation with a one-year-old."

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