Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Special number))

MODERN ART AND THE PUBLIC

THE difficulty experienced by the public in understanding modern art
is the result of a misunderstanding.
This misunderstanding exists not only towards modern art but
towards every manifestation of ancient or modern art. The number of people
who really understand the interest and beauty of the Primitives and of El
Greco and Rembrandt is as limited as the number of those who genuinely
appreciate modern painting.
This misunderstanding arises because the public looks upon art merely as
a pastime, a form of entertainment that is due to it, and balks at making
the slightest effort to understand the significance of the work of art or the
art itself. It seeks in the work of art merely its own personal vision of life—
its own conventions—and it declares it to be absolutely without interest if
it does not find in it the egotistical and superficial pleasure that it had hoped
to find there. It is because of this that the whole misconception has arisen.
For art is not just a pastime, nor a striving for pleasure; nor is it the
expression of a mere conventional beauty. It is simply a means by which
men may communicate with each other and express the profound needs of
their being, of their race and of their epoch to go beyond the exact meaning
of words and to reach the mysterious source of nature.
And so it is not from our own egotistical point of view alone that we ought
to regard a work of art in order to form an opinion of it. The question,
even, of whether one has or has not a merely sensuous pleasure ought not to
impose itself at all. On the contrary one should try to suppress one’s own
personality in order to understand that of the artist. One should try to
reconstitute his thought, his need and the need of the epoch in which he lived
and the form of the language in which he tried to express himself. For ex-
ample the ideal of the primitive painters has little or no relation to the ideal
of our time. If we judge their work from the point of view to which we
have arrived today it will seem to us unskillful and absolutely illogical. In
order to feel the purity of these paintings one has to remember the simple
religious temperament of the artists of the Middle Ages; and the mystical
tendency of their minds, and then we can understand that the grotesque
deformities which offend our conventional modern standard of proportion is
intentional with them for a more intense expression.
We have to realize, for a further comprehension of them, that they did not
want to represent merely external nature but that they availed themselves
of natural forms to embody their religious and sentimental ideals; and the
beauty of their achievement lies rather in the expression of feeling than in the
representation of objects.
In looking, then, at the work of the Primitives and seeing it from the
point of view of expression which was their only intention, the deformities and
disproportions of their figures will cease to trouble us. We will notice them