Modern Art

A retrospective exhibition of Van Gogh's work organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the mid-thirties and shown in a group of American cities attracted long queues of spectators like those outside a motion-picture house for a premiere and was attended by a total of 900,000 people. A season's vogue in women's clothes and accessories was built on the madman's masterpieces through the zeal of department store show-window planners during the exhibition; and a subsequent season's styles in the slower-operating market of "interior decoration" made a feature of accessory furniture with facsimile reproductions of some of the masterpieces used as insets. A thoughtful public recalling the scorn and derision that greeted the earlier showings of this artist's work in American cities may ponder the way of fame.

Cezanne gave to modern art its conception of architectonic form. To painting, that with Impressionism had reached its final limitations as an exercise in visual analysis, he restored, it now appears, the internal construction which makes it (as he had falteringly undertaken to do) "something solid like the work of the Old Masters," something "for the museums." He discarded the device of aerial perspective, re-presenting three-dimensional space, and distance, by the separation of his planes, as in the landscapes. By concentration upon the scene, he finally abstracted its essential elements, realizing them in his picture by primary reliance upon color, used structurally with an intuitive understanding of its advancing and recessive values. (The tree in one of the water colors confronts the spectator, the figure on the road is at almost invisible distance-relationships established through the simple manipulation of color planes in discontinuous space. The ordering of the elements into an architectonic unity, complete in itself, corresponds not with the visual aspects of the scene but with its reality in the mind of Cezanne. This is the reality that modern art seeks.)

Other Americans, meantime, came to prominence for their painting and sculpture influenced conspicuously by French post-Impressionism, most notably by the abstractionists. Our modern art of the time was largely abstract art, though the term was not precisely defined and was full of confusions. The standard dictionary gives two meanings for "abstraction": (1) a summary of something fully set forth in some other place; and (2) something unreal, opposed to reality. Cezanne's pictures were responsible for the term's earliest significance to modern art. His landscapes were "powerful understatements of the earth's architecture," and gave the spectator a more vivid sense of the scene than could be gained from the multiplication of realistic detail. His portrait of Madame Cezanne, or his Card Players, conveys the essence of profound and penetrating observation. From work of this order modern painting gains its affinity with the art of the great portrait traditions of the past, which is nonnaturalistic in intention.

Max Weber and Maurice Sterne are among the most widely accepted Americans of the international modernist world. Both work with a maturity that might well give prominence to their painting in any exhibition. Each has been given a large retrospective showing by the Museum of Modern Art within the recent past, and this has provided an exceptional opportunity to a general public to evaluate the total mature product in each case and to note similarities and differences in two distinguished styles.