DOI article:
Oscar Bluemner, Audiator et Altera Pars: Some Plain Sense on the Modern Art Movement
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.31330#0038
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and expression in the age of Titian, Cranach and El Greco. Since then and
up to this day, music developed and perfected a superior power to interpret
the subtlest feelings of man, as his soul, freed from the suppressing ballast
of ages, has yearned for the most direct and responsive instrument of utter-
ance. In the meantime since art continued to serve the more material in-
stincts of individualism, it aimed more and more toward fidelity to life and
nature.
Ingres, Manet and Monet, Delacroix to some extent, and consciously
even Cezanne, sought nothing more than to increase the artist’s powers to
make a painting the perfect illusion and almost reproduction of reality. Of
course, we must not forget that they and the French impressionists possessed
the true pictorial instinct, whereas their principles have caused painting and
sculpture elsewhere—abroad and here in America—to grow naturalistic to
the point of losing all art value.
From this lowest ebb the new movement will rescue art; it will restore
to painting true pictorial principles, and set it on the road to attain an even
wider sphere of individual expression and a greater height of beauty than
art ever had before. The young artists, with their fervid impetus, are impa-
tient of awaiting orders from a public that itself needs to be directed. Hence,
today it is not the newness of subject, but the novelty of vision that inspires
the progressive artist. He is even more at war with the public, generally,
than Manet or the Impressionists ever were. For the ignorance and indiffer-
ence of the people toward art nowadays are on a level with art’s general low
ebb, and with the mental state of those who prefer conventional art. Hence
it is that some original artist-thinkers, like Cezanne, Van Gogh, Degas, and
others, turned away from the public altogether and attempted no fruitless
battle at all with the salons, dealers, and reporters.
* * * * *
It was science that, during the period of increasing materialism, led
painting downward; and it is science, now, that assists it upward. From
Da Vinci, who, as an inventor and investigator in art, increased the artist’s
power of imitating nature, it led on to Monet, who converted the light-theory
of Newton and the color-experiments of Rood and Chevreul into methods of
bottling up nature alive, so to speak, within the four stretchers of a canvas.
All this time music was soaring skywards and revealing heavenly perspectives
of beauty and emotional expression. The musician robbed the painter of his
sleep. “Why cannot art be free from mercenary imitation and selfish author-
ity, more individual and ideal?” some painters and sculptors began to ask
themselves some ten years ago. The only way out for the painter was to
follow the progress of things all around, instead of treading the academic
mills. Thus, in this age of science it meant to think, to analyze, to experiment
by synthesis, to go back to the elementary in painting, to see and to feel the
world, as science reveals it today.
In this way originates the new vision of external objects and of imagina-
34
up to this day, music developed and perfected a superior power to interpret
the subtlest feelings of man, as his soul, freed from the suppressing ballast
of ages, has yearned for the most direct and responsive instrument of utter-
ance. In the meantime since art continued to serve the more material in-
stincts of individualism, it aimed more and more toward fidelity to life and
nature.
Ingres, Manet and Monet, Delacroix to some extent, and consciously
even Cezanne, sought nothing more than to increase the artist’s powers to
make a painting the perfect illusion and almost reproduction of reality. Of
course, we must not forget that they and the French impressionists possessed
the true pictorial instinct, whereas their principles have caused painting and
sculpture elsewhere—abroad and here in America—to grow naturalistic to
the point of losing all art value.
From this lowest ebb the new movement will rescue art; it will restore
to painting true pictorial principles, and set it on the road to attain an even
wider sphere of individual expression and a greater height of beauty than
art ever had before. The young artists, with their fervid impetus, are impa-
tient of awaiting orders from a public that itself needs to be directed. Hence,
today it is not the newness of subject, but the novelty of vision that inspires
the progressive artist. He is even more at war with the public, generally,
than Manet or the Impressionists ever were. For the ignorance and indiffer-
ence of the people toward art nowadays are on a level with art’s general low
ebb, and with the mental state of those who prefer conventional art. Hence
it is that some original artist-thinkers, like Cezanne, Van Gogh, Degas, and
others, turned away from the public altogether and attempted no fruitless
battle at all with the salons, dealers, and reporters.
* * * * *
It was science that, during the period of increasing materialism, led
painting downward; and it is science, now, that assists it upward. From
Da Vinci, who, as an inventor and investigator in art, increased the artist’s
power of imitating nature, it led on to Monet, who converted the light-theory
of Newton and the color-experiments of Rood and Chevreul into methods of
bottling up nature alive, so to speak, within the four stretchers of a canvas.
All this time music was soaring skywards and revealing heavenly perspectives
of beauty and emotional expression. The musician robbed the painter of his
sleep. “Why cannot art be free from mercenary imitation and selfish author-
ity, more individual and ideal?” some painters and sculptors began to ask
themselves some ten years ago. The only way out for the painter was to
follow the progress of things all around, instead of treading the academic
mills. Thus, in this age of science it meant to think, to analyze, to experiment
by synthesis, to go back to the elementary in painting, to see and to feel the
world, as science reveals it today.
In this way originates the new vision of external objects and of imagina-
34
