Читать книгу Cubists and Post-Impressionism онлайн

5 страница из 70

Call this man an extremist if you like, but do not lightly dub him insincere and charlatan. He is the counterpart in art of the extremist in politics, the man who has no patience with palliative measures, who demands the whole loaf and nothing but the loaf, who kicks savagely away the fragments of bread tendered him by the moderate and respectable. A dangerous man he may be, but he is no trifler; and, if he succeeds in his purpose, as extremists sometimes do, the whipped world at his feet hails him as reformer and benefactor of humanity.[2]

The Columbian Exposition gave American art a tremendous impetus forward, but of late it has been getting a little smug; the International Exhibition came and gave our complacency a severe jolt.

The net result is that American art has received another impulse forward; it will do bigger and finer and saner things. It will not copy the eccentricities, the exaggerations, the morbid enthusiasms of the recent exhibition, because America as yet is not given to eccentricities and morbidness—though it may be to a youthful habit of exaggeration. America is essentially sane and healthful—say quite practical—in its outlook, hence it will absorb all that is good in the extreme modern movement and reject what is bad.