Studio: international art (89.1925)

THE STUDIO

SOME REMARKS ON RECENT movements, because they appear abnormal

ENGLISH PAINTING. BY ARTHUR at first sight (as Wagner's music did on

M. HIND. (Slade Professor of Fine Art first hearing) is as unreasonable as whole-

in the University of Oxford). 0 0 sale disparagement of academies. The

great work of art is just as likely to be

IHAVE seen it said in a recent letter found on the walls of the Royal Academy

to the press that many would-be col- as in the New English Art Club, the

lectors of modern art keep from buying Goupil, Independent or Mansard Gal-

because the critics have contracted the leries; perhaps even more likely in the

habit of praising little but the abnormal case of larger and more elaborate achieve-

and more revolutionary productions of the ments. 000000

past ten or fifteen years. Personally I To ccme at once to the chief centre of

am convinced that if recent criticism, conflict, i.e., the criticism of Mr. Roger

following the lead of fashion and the Fry and Mr. Clive Bell; I recognise its

craving for some new thing, has had an value and its vitality, and am ready to

unfair bias in one direction, it is all the follow both critics to considerable lengths

more the duty of the thinking amateur in their reasoning, but constantly fall

to support what he regards as good art out when they cite their illustration,

by the most convincing mode of apprecia- It is this denouement which makes me

tion, i.e., by purchase. Criticism of every despair of general principles of aesthetics

colour is in constant danger of fetish leading to safer estimates of individual

worship ; wholesale disparagement of new works. They have, in my opinion, stressed

"interior of a wood"
woodcut by john nash

Vol. LXXXIX. No. 182.—January, 1935. 3