The Story of Modern Art

664 Pages·1945·118.112 MB·English

by  Sheldon Cheney

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THE STORY OF MODERN ART
Sheldon Cheney is Author of
A WORLD HISTORY OF ART
EXPRESSIONISM IN ART
A PRIMER OF MODERN ART
THE NEW WORLD ARCHITECTURE
THE THEATRE: 3000 years of drama, acting and stagecraft
ART AND THE MACHINE {with Martha Candler Cheney)
and other books
THE STORY OF
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5HELDON CHENEY
BY
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NEW YORK THE VIKING PRESS
•
1945
FIRST PUBLISHED IN NOVEMBER I94I
SECOND PRINTING MARCH I945
THIRD PRINTING SEPTEMBER 1945
COPYRIGHT 1941 BY SHELDON CHENEY
PRINTED IN U.S.A. BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN
PUBLISHED ON THE SAME DAY IN THE
DOMINION OF CANADA BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS book is a narrative account of the development of the art that is
in the mid-twentieth century called modem. It is, so far as possible,
factual and tangible. Special pains have been taken to illustrate the text
amply with pictures by the many painters who have contributed to the
development of modernism.
I came to the decision to write such a book one night in a prosperous city
of Pennsylvania two or three years ago. A museum director had invited me
to speak on modern art before an audience trained, it was clear from the
gallery exhibits, to judge paintings and sculptures realistically, for their
likeness to nature, their literary cleverness, and their smoothness of finish.
After I had talked and had shown my slides, the director paused for a
cordial word. "That," he said, "was what I wanted my people to hear.
We'll want you down again." He added, equally sincerely: "For my part
I still think modern art is all a racket." He felt that we understood each
other perfectly.
At about that time a patron of the arts in Chicago had organized a
movement and was spending her money freely to combat the advance of
modernism. Under a banner inscribed "Sanity in Art" she had rallied the
forces of conservatism, and she was financing shows of pictures illustrating
her thesis that painting "is more closely related to literature than to music."
In showing photographically true pictures and story-pictures she had the
support of a hundred artists baffled by modernism. She was thinking of
modern art not as a racket but as a blight destroying the sweetness and
light exemplified in Victorian art.
Pondering upon the blindness, as I saw it, of these two influential figures,
the one a museum director, the other a patron, and perceiving over their
shoulders the army of gallery-goers who find security and solace in the old
art, I resolved to seek a new approach to the understanding of modernism.
Most people still, I recognized, see and read pictures, where the moderns
believe that one should see and experience them. For the "reading" public,
paradoxically, most books about the new art (including my own) were
mystifying and alienating. The writers assumed a capacity for formal ex-
perience, and they belittled those properties of art dear to the reader's
heart and mind: story interest, naturalistic fidelity, pathos, message.
— —
The only way to reach these people the form-blind seemed to be to
go back and show how the artists who created modern art came to abandon
V
I
vi Foreword and Acknowledgments
the old art; to tell biographically and chronologically the story of modern-
ism, leading the reader, as it were, along the life-trail of each of the great
revolutionaries, arriving with each, eventually, at the realization of values
beyond the realistic, the sentimental, the literary. The reader steeped in
realism may still reject the flaming canvases of van Gogh as extreme and
anarchistic; but after reading the story of van Gogh's sacrifice of all else
in life for attainment of a form-quality, he must thenceforth admit the
existence of a property in art beyond his previous knowledge. Thus the
way is opened to recognition of the w^hole bundle of components, formal
and mystic, brought in by the moderns.
Two books of mine have dealt with modernism, in the critic's way. A
Primer of Modem Art, first published in 1924 and frequently reprinted,
—
is an introduction to the subject, abounding in examples, analyses, and
—
am afraid argument. Expressionism in Art, published in 1934, was written
especially for students and artists; it is an attempt to analyse the nature
of the "form" that typically gives character to the modern work of art. In
neither book did I go into what I then considered the side issues of artist-
biography and history. Now, remembering especially my museum director
and the "Sanity in Art" crusader, I have attempted this concrete narrative,
a complete story in chronological order.
The present book deals with the art of painting alone. In developing the
narrative I was not a little surprised to find that the record of invention, of
what might be called the intention of the modern artist, places the painters
consistently before the sculptors, the architects, and the other creative
designers. Discovering, when I began to set the record of modern sculpture
into my framework, that the ideas and innovations invariably came after
—
the similar ones of the painters discovering, in short, that the story of
—
painting is the original creative story I decided to render the account in
terms of the lives and works of the painters only. The decision made it
possible to devote the full count of 373 illustrations to the one art.
In better times I should have thought it necessary to go to Paris and
Munich and Berlin to gather the main run of illustrations; but reluctantly,
and understandably, I have omitted that errand. Fortunately many of the
European masterpieces of modernism have been brought to America.
Several museums and schools, moreover, have made extensive collections
of photographs of representative paintings. Tliese institutions have been
courteous and co-operative when I have asked the privilege of reproduction.
In the end, fewer than a dozen scheduled pictures have been omitted.