Last Stop

"It is possible that present-day art has little esthetic value; but he who sees in it only a caprice may be very sure indeed that he has not understood either the new art or the old. Evolution has conducted painting--and art in general--inexorably, fatally, to what it is today."

By that double-edged dictum, Spanish Philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset cuts the ground from under the moderns and anti-moderns alike. Writing with gloomy detachment in the current Partisan Review, Ortega traces the evolution of painting from Giotto to Picasso, describes it as "a unique and simple action with a beginning and an end."

Giotto, says Ortega, was "a painter of solid and independent bodies." Three centuries later, Velasquez emphasized "hollow space"--the area between the eye and the thing seen. In recording only a dazzle of colored lights, the impressionists brought painting smack up to the retina. Picasso carried the same process a step further, painting what was back of the eyeball, inside his head. "[In the Picasso school] the eyes, instead of absorbing things, are converted into projectors of private flora and fauna. Before, the real world drained off into them; now, they are reservoirs of irreality.

"The guiding law . . ." Ortega concludes, "is one of disturbing simplicity. First things are painted; then, sensations; finally, ideas. This means that in the beginning the artist's attention was fixed on external reality; then, on the subjective; finally, on the intrasubjective. These three stages are three points on a straight line."

For those who could follow him, it looked as if modern art must be the end of the line.

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