ART CHRONICLE:
Some Personal Letters to American Artists
Recently Exhibiting in New York
To the American Abstract Artists, American Fine Arts Galleries:
I know well the obstacles that have been surmounted in the shaping
of this exhibition. Afterwards it will be difficult to determine the extent
of success or failure; yet even beforehand it is easy to line up your
opponents. I could approximate, before it is written, the article each
critic will print upon your work. Some of those who were indifferent will
begin to see what you are driving at. The definitely hostile will grow more
violent. Others will find themselves unable to write at all.
The strongest public opposition will issue, as always, from the large
troupe of perpetual gallery-visitors. Like other members of established
society, they have become categorically opposed to anything unaccus-
tomed; and the traditions you seek to perpetuate surely require a re-
orientation. Unable to shake away preconceived notions of what a 'work
of art' should be, many visitors will continue to suspect that you are
artfully concealing representational objects. But this large-scale opposi-
tion no longer counts at all. Only a few of the newspaper columnists
still give it public utterance.
Another group-and one which should know better-presents a
more formidable barrier to recognition. For it contains artists, teachers,
critics. The natural function of these should be to lead the public; in
America the critics merely confuse and hold the public back. Many of
them are of course governed by fear, not merely the conventional bour-
geois fear that hungers for conformity with the past, but the more
definite fear that an understanding of' the abstract processes might
suggest that their own years of effort had been misdirected. They have
for a century been evolving ingenious arguments to defeat your prede-
cessors in every art-form. And now in turn they will pronounce your
pictures 'dead'
(as though the life in a work of art were derived from
the liveliness of its subject-matter) ; that they are imitative (as though
all aesthetic innovators had not been likewise dependent on their pre-
cursors); that they are purely emotional; that they are not emotional
enough; that they are academic; that they are governed by no laws of
any kind.
And you must not overlook an opposition that. will oppose you on
political grounds, that will satirize you as 'escapists' who work in a
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