International studio (57.1915/1916)

The Gospel of Jerome Myers

order and the new rages at his highest flame, and
in its every phase there can be found the ma-
terial of an art keenly aware of its social value,
perfectly expressing the essence of our function
as a period. It is to such a condition of objective
interpretation that his graphic art and his paint-
ing aspire in their simple delineation of the
component elements in which our life is firmly
rooted. He has seen the struggle, intellectual
and physical, in all its phases; its pathos, its
quaint humour, the grim monotony of its task, the
passionate cherishing of antique customs by the
elders, the rare revelry of pleasure, and in these
consists the material of his art.
He treats life with a simple seriousness and a
rare humour that have been notably lacking in
American art, for the conventional reaction in the
realm of art to an age that is ftankly materialistic
has been a reversion to the influence of romanti-
cism, dealing with a world that is different from
that of our daily experience, weak because it
reveals no relation to the spirit of our own day.
The failure of much modern art can be attributed
to the supposition that a way of looking at life
can be identified with the life that it looks at. It
is the result of a fallacy of thought peculiar to an
age innately critical, a tendency to confuse an
interpretation with a reality, and to substitute
for the presentation of the reality an individual
criticism. The language of art is largely governed
by the changing interests of life; the paintings of
Cimabue and Giotto are the natural expression
of an age concerned primarily with the desire for
an ultimate salvation through religion, in the same
degree that the sculpture of Meunier and the
graphic work of Jerome Myers are reflective of
our own epoch, pre-occupied with labour and the
struggle of the masses to achieve self-expression.
The modern Christ is the inscrutable miner
betrayed by deadly fire-damp, as Meunier has
created him; the modern Holy Family is the
benign and patriarchal Jew gathered with his
wife and child before the portal of a synagogue
in the slums, as they appear in a drawing by
Jerome Myers, a little group imbued with the
spirit of religion, a backwater in the flaming life
of the modern city. In such art there can be pres-
ent no consciousness of a complicated theory of
aesthetics, there is only the realization of the im-
mense significance of life as it is being lived, and a
desire to faithfully record the beauty and the
faith that it engenders, different in their super-

ficial aspect from the conception of an older day,
identical in the quality of their spirituality.
The fundamental importance of the work of
Jerome Myers lies in the essential fidelity of his
art to the spirit of contemporary life, and in his
conviction of the dignity and the simplicity of
life itself. His is an art that expresses the beauty,
the idealism, the humour and the firm purpose of
an age in which the majority see only a crass
materialism. He has understood that underlying
the labour of the masses there is an abiding spirit-
uality, that behind the achievements of com-
merce the genius of our age is essentially religious,
making for a new beauty and a new truth that
seek the expression in art that they have already
found in life. The critic of form will find much to
comment on in his work; the tenderness and the
virility of his line, his delicate sympathy with
children, his abounding humour, his superb mastery
of the medium. His significance in American
art, however, may be measured by the fact that
where others saw ugliness and degradation, he
found poetry and beauty, and that in an age
when life has concentrated its forces in the dynamic
labour of the masses in the huge industrial cities,
he sought no refuge in the past or in an unreal
view of life, but courageously has striven to ex-
press the soul of the present.


OLD FRIENDS (DRAWING)

BY JEROME MYERS

CXXVIII