International studio (58.1916)

A not her New A rt Venture

York. Verdicts, however, like reputations, are in
a state of flux, and to-day we find many signs that
modern painting, far from emulating that extinct
bird, the dodo, is very much alive and kicking.
Exhibitions take place continually about Fifth
Avenue devoted entirely to the display of mod-
ern work.”
Indeed, New Art exhibitions are neither novel,
nor rare nowadays, in New York, where a num-
ber of opulent dealers are frequently featuring
modern art in apparently perfect concord with
their customary academic wares. Surely New
Art must have proven its profitable decorum to
have thus gained admittance into places less
known by their tender concern for innovation
and hospitality, than by their caste-catering,
remunerative conservatism. If then, in the face
of such potent adoption of modern painting on
Fifth Avenue and thereabouts, the placidity of a
cut-and-dried season was suddenly disturbed by
a stentorially heralded, many-fathered, unselfishly
forfended New Art venture—then it surely must
have happened because of motives not identical
with those usually responsible for the common
sort of New Art displays.
I believe that I am correctly voicing the opin-
ions of a majority of the Forum Committee when
asserting that their exhibition was not a self-
sufficient aim, but only a nearest, tangible link in
the chain of the vast evolution in art life, known
as the New Art Movement, of which the exhibited
work was one of the worthy manifestations, and
to which are dedicated the larger sympathies of
most of the Forum Committee.
The immediate scope of the Forum Exhibition
was formulated by Mr. W. H. Wright—the most
active of its initiators—in the following manner.;
“The object of the present exhibition is to put
before the American public in a large and com-
plete manner the very best examples of the more
modern American art; to stimulate interest in the
really good native work of this movement; to
present, for the first time a comprehensive, critical
selection of the serious painting now being shown
in isolated groups; to turn public attention for
the moment from European art and concentrate
it on the excellent work being done in America;
and to bring serious, deserving painters in direct
contact with the public without a commercial in-
termediary.”
Unamplified, this declaration might justify one
to class the Forum Exhibition with the other good

shows of the season. But the extensive additional
explanations—embodied in an elaborate catalogue
—raise it to a higher level and betray its real
character of the New Art Movement rather than
a mere scheme for the advancement in a new
aesthetics.
The fundamental difference between traditional
and New Art ideals lies in the fact that the New
Art Movement is more than a search for this or
that aesthetic incarnation. It is an all-inclusive
renascence of which new plastique is one of the
vertices. It is an embodiment of the modern
spirit, of a new romanticism, that projects a
man’s ego into its environment as a creative
leaven and fashions all being in subservience to
man’s notions.
It treats natural things and laws as phe-
nomena of human experience—hence it makes
of art the mistress of the objective world,
the virtual recreator of it in man’s own likeness.
That is why it strives “to divest art of all anec-
dote and illustration,” in a painstaking endeavour
to exclude all that is not genuinely human.
At the outset of our man-centred era a French
poet wrote when under the spell of modern life:
“All is blazing, quaking, smoking, rushing; all is
flowing, fusing and parting: crumbling and rising
anew. The deed and the worker—all are burned
and fructified in fire: flaming Salamanders every-
where! A world’s hell and paradise! Paris—the
beginning and the end, gloom and light! I don’t
know whether it be evil or not, but it is beauti-
ful, it is grand! I know it with my whole soul
that in this flame there is being forged a wholly
new world.”
Only with a background like this picture of a
cosmic, procreative chaos, the products of the
New Art Movement become intelligible. Into
their masterpieces (often without the artist’s
awareness) has been distilled the irascible dy-
namism of our epoch, and thanks to this rudi-
ment the formal aesthetique of their art was trans-
muted into an expression of vital surge.
One must grant to New Art its inherent spirit
to perceive it in complete fairness and with gen-
erous reward. In claiming this for New Art, I
am not demanding for it any privilege beyond
that which always belongs to art during the age
of its inception; surely, the art of the Parthenon
meant infinitely more to ancient Greeks than it
does to the subtlest of our modern aesthetes.
Surely did the art of a Cimabue, Fra Angelico

cxvi