The Modern School of Painting

When the People of the Cave awoke, three centuries after they had entered it, they were reasoning by the same logic by which they had reasoned before they slept that wondrous sleep. They took the money they had with them to buy food, not knowing that the world had changed, that the coinage had changed, that life had changed from its very foundations.

And we today in the Arab East are waking from a slumber much like the slumber of the People of the Cave, supposing that life is still as it was five centuries ago, and that the standards by which we used to measure are still the very ones operative in the world.

This is true above all of our artistic outlook and of our judgment upon what is today called modern art.

Some specimens of this art have filtered through to us by way of magazines, exhibitions, and émigrés, and most of us stand before them scoffing, as if to say:

What are these deformed pictures?

What is this nonsense?

And how far is this from classical art, which portrays life naturally and limpidly — which, if it portrays a human being, presents him as a beautiful human being, and if it portrays a scene, produces it in conformity with the familiar.

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The modern age is not born of today; it is the inevitable result of the development that begins with the age of the Renaissance. From the moment man reflected and looked upon his past with a critical eye — from that moment it was settled that he should end where he stands today. The Romantic school was nothing but a revolt against the rigidity of the classical; the Naturalist school was nothing but a revolt against the Romantic, with a heightened interest in natural scenery. And Impressionism was nothing but a revolt against all that preceded it: it gave light the greatest importance in the picture, and hid the lines of the canvas, relying upon colors to define form. Impressionism went on sweeping through subject after subject until it had exhausted them, and some change became unavoidable; and then the discoveries of "Van Gogh," "Gauguin," and "Cézanne" took on the greatest importance as points of transition. Van Gogh believed in subordinating form and color to the idea to be expressed: whoever wishes, for instance, to express the idea of the stars shining in the night as they moved him, must not be bound by photographic proportions, but must magnify the size of those stars so that they give off an unnatural radiance proportioned to the impression the scene made upon his soul. Then came the sweep of "Gauguin," by which he discovered that in a scene there is usually one dominant color that dazzles more than the rest, and so he multiplied it in his canvas. And the sweep of "Cézanne," which holds that light joins the parts of beings together so that they appear contiguous when in reality they are separate, and that beings are composed of geometrical shapes bound together by light. All these theories, which we accept in the canvases of these three, the modern school took up on the basis of continuous development: it enlarged form and carried it to excess, separated color from form, divided beings into cubes, strengthened the lines, used pure unmixed colors on broad flat surfaces, and diminished the value of those beings. Perhaps the most important mark of modern art is man's doubt of the absolute values he had embraced for thousands of years: everything has become for him relative and unfixed, and he himself has become the scale of final values, whereas formerly those values were imposed upon him by a being outside himself.

The truth is that art is bound as closely as can be to what they call the spirit of the age. It does not portray things as we want to see them; it portrays the human impulses hidden behind that will, and behind everything at which man aims. Greek art portrays the Greek spirit, which looks upon life with a natural, limpid gaze, and so it portrays nature at its most beautiful.

Ancient Egyptian art portrays the spirit that strains toward what lies beyond life: it cares less for nature than for the obscure symbols that carry man out of the range of the familiar into the spiritual obscurity that leads to religion.

And art in the Middle Ages portrays

— the whole of it, or be shattered and deformed. In any case it loses its familiar color, and from here the obscurity arises. Modern art is obscure and unexplainable because it portrays an obscure spirit that cannot be explained.

All we understand of it is that before one picture we feel that it is harmonious and beautiful, and before a second that it is discordant and disturbing — because behind the first is a mighty spirit which this forced growth has not deformed, so that it has kept its hidden harmony; and behind the second is a soul that was defaced and deformed before this ordeal — and both pictures are a true and realistic portrayal, just as the "Mona Lisa" was realistic in its own age.

I say realistic in the sense that it is faithful to the subject it portrays; for the subject of art is not things in themselves, but the human soul that reflects those things. When the conditions of that soul change, the forms of artistic expression change with them, in painting and beyond painting. Those who call today for a return to the classical ways in art are only trying to turn aside from the world's problems and its currents, withdrawing from reality to imagine themselves in hermit cells that carry them and their lives back to the bygone centuries which brought forth that art — so that this act of theirs is not merely a revolt against modern art, but a revolt against modern life in its entirety; for art and life are not to be parted. This direction in painting we find likewise in modern music, in modern literature, in poetry, in philosophy, and in life. Either we turn the whole caravan in another direction, or we turn away from it, or we walk with it. But to single out from it one element — art — and call for its return and its grounding upon foundations other than those on which it stands: this means separating art from life, and thereby destroying it.

— the simple, quiet spirit of man, resting upon the constant practice of a religious law; it portrays this quiet simplicity in subjects most of which are religious.

As for modern art, behind it is a spirit stranger and more complicated than what lies behind the old arts.

Behind it is the spirit of this modern man, in revolt against everything. Searching for everything. Dissolving into everything.

The spirit of this man who has gained mastery over matter and gone on enjoying that mastery in a kind of madness.

The spirit of this man who has smashed even the atom for the lust of knowledge, without grasping its reach.

Modern art portrays nothing but this spirit, which shattered itself before it shattered the atom, and was thus the first force behind this perilous upheaval. If we stand before the picture of a human being who bears no mark of the human being as we know him, it is because it portrays the spirit of the man who has gone outside the familiar and has truly been broken, that he might dissolve himself in this matter which he set about smashing in order to discover its essence.

In the Middle Ages man grew up in surroundings without change, and passed his life in a continuous, slowly moving inner growth — no upheaval, no revolution, nothing to alter his spirit; and if one individual changed, society did not change. But this kind of quiet self-building is no longer possible today, because modern life — swift, clamorous, demanding many kinds of knowledge — does not permit so slow a growth. The spirit of man today does not grow according to its own nature; it is stretched by artificial methods external to it: either it withstands the trial and embraces the world