Page 22 - Studio International - April 1965
P. 22
The disintegration of form in modern art
Herbert Read, Britain's most Before I speak of the disintegration of form in modern
distinguished writer on art, discusses the art, perhaps I should define what I mean by art's
disquieting phase of modern anti-art. integrity.
Art is a biological phenomenon : that is always my
1 basic assumption. Art has been present as a charac-
James Rosenquist
'Director' 1964 teristic of the human race ever since the species
Oil on canvas 90 x 62 in. emerged from the obscurity of prehistory, and there is
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
2 plenty of evidence to suggest that art, which is the skill
Robert Rauschenberg required to give meaningful shape to human artifacts,
Retroactive 1964
84 x 60 in. This text was originally written for a lecture given by the author at Kassell, was one of the agencies of that emergence. Man
Gallery Ileana Sonnabend, Paris Germany, last year during the exhibition 'Documenta III'.
became civilised to the degree that he could refine on
mere utility, on the tools and husbandry that had been
essential to survival. Even the social aspects of the
earliest civilisations can be called 'civil' only to the
degree that they rise above expediency to effect prin-
ciples of equity or justice—principles that imply a
sensitive discrimination of form in human relation-
ships. As Plato argued in his Politicus, the state is also,
or should be, a work of art.
The immediate purpose of the creative effort that goes-
to the making of a work of art was the refinement of
man's powers of perception and discrimination, and
this purpose was achieved by an ever-progressive
apprehension of the subtleties of form. Whether we look
at the process ontogenetically or phylogenetically, we
see the human organism acquiring command of its
environment by means of increasing ability to dis-
criminate between one form and another, and this power
of discrimination is aesthetic—that is to say, a power
based on the education and training of the senses—the
senses of sight, touch and hearing. To discriminate
between the comparative significance of a form, or the
significance of that form in the field of total sensation
—such is the aesthetic faculty and it is the faculty that
gradually differentiated man from the rest of the
animal kingdom, gave him that self-consciousness
which is the basis of his religion and his science, and
led to the ever increasing fertility of his mind and
imagination.
It follows that any movement in history that leads to a
dulling of the sensibilities, to a relaxation of the con-
sciousness of form, is a retrograde movement, leading
to the decline of human civilisation. And that, I believe,
is the present threat to our civilisation.
It may be observed, however, that art movements have
some degree of independence within the rise and fall
of a civilisation—they have phases of growth and
maturity and then, without disturbing the general
economy, decline and die. The causes of this apparently
arbitrary phenomenon have often been analysed, but
no general law has emerged. Nevertheless, in the sphere
of art the end is nearly always announced by a stylistic
excess—forms proliferate, grow richer and more
intricate, and all sense of restraint is lost. Thus died the
Gothic style, and in the same manner the Classical
Renaissance came to an end. Style perished from sur-
feit. It is far otherwise with the modern movement,
which began with a call to order (Cezanne) and then
passed through those phases of exfoliation which we
call cubism, futurism, expressionism, surrealism and
constructivism, extending and enriching the whole
domain of human consciousness. The modern style was
multiformal, even fragmented and ambiguous, but its
achievements, exemplified in the work of artists like
Matisse, Picasso, Leger, Braque, Klee, Moore and many
others, have been as rich as those of any period of com-
parable length in the history of art.
Naturally, such an outburst of fertility must come to an
