Our Art Culture Makes No

Just As A Musician Loves Music And Not Nightingales, And A Poet Loves Poetry And Not Sunsets, A Painter Is Not Primarily A Person Who Responds To Figures And Landscapes. He Is Primarily One Who Loves Pictures.

Our Characteristic Response To The Mutilated Statue, The Bronze Dug Up From The Earth, Is Revealing. It Is Not That We Prefer Time-worn Bas-reliefs, Or Rusted Statuettes As Such, Nor Is It The Vestiges Of Death That Grip Us In Them, But Those Of Life. Mutilation Is The Scar Left By The Struggle With Time, And A Reminder Of It - Time Which Is As Much A Part Of Ancient Works Of Art As The Material They Are Made Of, And Thrusts Up Through The Fissures, From A Dark Underworld, Where All Is At Once Chaos And Determinism.

Our Art Culture Makes No Attempt To Search The Past For Precedents, But Transforms The Entire Past Into A Sequence Of Provisional Responses To A Problem That Remains Intact.

In Ceasing To Subordinate Creative Power To Any Supreme Value, Modern Art Has Brought Home To Us The Presence Of That Creative Power Throughout The Whole History Of Art.

The Next Century's Task Will Be To Rediscover Its Gods.