And art in the Middle Ages portrays

— the whole of it, or be shat-tered 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 dis-cordant 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 por-trays this quiet simplicity in sub-jects 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 every-thing. 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 continu-ous, 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, demand-ing 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