Monday, Dec. 03, 1951

Blasted Abstracts

As a leading London art critic, Eric Newton has watched the rising tide of abstract art with a patient but critical eye. But, at 58, he is beginning to sound like a man whose patience has finally run out.

Writes Newton in the British journal, World Review: "The abstract artist . . . in his search for ultimate purity has achieved a kind of auto-castration, and in so doing he has made himself sterile. The forms and colors with which he 'animates' his canvas can never link themselves to his visual experience; they can only express his visual imagination. That thrilling orgasm in which a Titian or a Fra Angelico can make the visible world his own and beget a work of art that combines the essence of himself with the essence of the place and the time he lives in, that miracle is denied him, and all he can offer in its place is his innocence, his celibacy, his immunity from the temptations of the world and the flesh . . .

"We live in [a non-humanist] epoch, and we have the abstract artists we deserve. Like an emetic, they have purged us of a great deal of silly 19th Century sentiment; like a professor of anatomy, they have revealed the permanent, the timeless bones beneath the perishable flesh. Yet the perishable flesh, in all its ephemeral weakness, will assert itself again. The body can be purified by an emetic, but it can't be nourished by it."

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