APPENDIX F 



TAINE'S CRITERIA APPLIED TO MODERN 



ABSTRACT ART 



PERHAPS the permanent value of Taine's criteria can be 

 illustrated by brief reference to an example of modern 

 'abstract' art, namely, Picasso's 'Guernica' mural. Analysis 

 would reveal that the 'subject' of that painting is, not so much the 

 people or animals portrayed, but rather the 'nightmare' of modern 

 war — even more specifically, Picasso's feelings of revulsion at 

 the bombing of the Spanish town after which the mural was 

 named. The artist has communicated his feelings by means of 

 more or less recognizable symbols and forms, one of them a horse, 

 distorted in Picasso's special style so that it may fit into his total 

 design, express animal terror, and so forth: the 'universal' horse 

 has here been 'modified' so as to 'make predominant an essential 

 character'. Thus, a complete analysis would neglect neither the 

 objective nor the subjective experiential elements involved; and 

 judgment would result both from realization of the profundity of 

 Picasso's theme and the skill with which he has fused many 

 elements to produce his overwhelming eflfect. 



The need for such a balanced view has sometimes been lost 

 sight of in modern criticism because of a misunderstanding of the 

 significance of abstraction in art. i So-called 'abstract' art at its 

 best (the cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque may be taken as 

 examples) is not arbitrary, but rather a highly individualized 

 interpretation of nature's forms, what Clement Greenberg has 

 called 'a truer, completer imitation of nature'. ^ 'Thus the painter 

 abandoned his interest in the concrete appearance, for example, 

 of a glass and tried instead to approximate by analogy the way in 

 which nature had married the straight contours that defined the 



glass vertically to the curved ones that defined it laterally. 



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