A concise history of modern painting by Read Herbert Edward Sir 1893-1968

Author:Read, Herbert Edward, Sir, 1893-1968
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Painting, Modern
Publisher: New York, Praeger
Published: 1959-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The Origins and Development of an Art of Determined Relations: Constructivism

In this chapter and the next we shall consider two further developments of modern painting which have pursued a parallel course from the time of their origins to the present day. Again it is fundamentally a question of two kinds of sensibility, two distinct directions given to the creative energies of the artist. An artist such as Picasso, being like Shakespeare 'myriad-minded', may to some extent express himself in either mode, while rejecting the extremes of both. But other artists, not being so various, so ambivalent, tend to develop their style in strict accordance with a determinate personality. We have therefore two distinct movements, one reaching towards an ideal of clarity, formality, and precision; the other towards the opposite idea: obscurity, informality, and imprecision—or, since an ideal cannot be defined by such negative terms, let us say expressiveness, vitality, and flux.

I have already suggested that the analysis of these two distinct tendencies in the history of art which Wilhelm Worringer made in 1908, at the beginning of the modern movement, had a premonitory effect. It gave a painter like Kandinsky what one might call the courage of his instincts. Like every highly conscious artist at this time, he had been experimenting—experimenting with colours and forms to express what he called 'an inner necessity'. In the course of these experiments he hit upon the obvious fact that in order to be expressive of such inner necessity it was not

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