Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	Isms and Wasms A string of firecrackers: these were the isms exploding for the first fifteen years of modern art. Fauvism--before the red paper fragments could settle to the ground, it was over and done with. Then two bangs almost together--cubism and futurism-and the whole string began to go. Orphism and synchromism, vorticism, expressionism, rayonism, constructivism, and suprematism. Ism, ism, ism-the very suffix became a separate word, a symbol and a standard joke of the time. Was it new? Was it nutty? Then put it down as just another ism by those wild young artists. Do you call that a picture? My four-year-old could paint better than that! While we watched the artists, some giant crackers-the foot-long, dollar kind-were letting go: anarchism and nihilism. Then the bugles blew. It was our First World War, and we touched off our own firecrackers: patriotism and nationalism. Fought the war through and found our own little string going off: communism, fascism, national socialism -and isolationism. Then there was Dadaism, and the artists were laughing at us. And we're off again: neo-classicism and neo-plasticism, non-objectivism, purism and immaculatism, surrealism and magic realism. Our private joke of common sense had long since worn thin. We grew uneasy; there was just too much noise. The kids' firecrackers began to seem more like sticks of dynamite in the foundations. Anyway, the house was undoubtedly falling apart, beginning with the cornerstones: Love, Marriage, Home, and Peace. The props that were offered to take their places seemed pretty flimsy: for Love a two-by-four called Biological Urge, and for Marriage a dry stick called Divorce. The corner called Home kept collapsing, and each successive prop grew thinner: the Bungalow, the Duplex, the Motor Court, and, finally, the Trailer. Peace had been a marble block inscribed "1918." We shored up that corner with the Kellogg Declaration, then with Universal Disarmament, then forgot about it. So it caved in completely. Then we boarded it up with a shaky fence called the Cold War. Inside the house, things were even worse. What had gone wrong with Matter--you know, iron, wood, solid stuff like that? The antique table that had been Dr. Samuel Johnson's was falling apart. Or worse: the cabinetmakers looked at it and said: "It isn't even there. It is merely a void filled with electrical charges," and sent in their bill. In the living-room, which we used to call Mind--so comfortably decorated once by Kant & Descartes--the floor was nearly gone. People kept falling through into a wet, dark cellar called the Unconscious Mind. What a nightmare until we woke up and rubbed our eyes! We--the human race--had had a moving-day, had moved from one Period House to another. In the old days you could take one hundred thousand years to move from Stone Age to Bronze Age. But now it gets faster and faster. That's the Atomic Age. Reach the speed of sound and you begin critically eying the speed of light. Miss tomorrow morning's paper and you may be living an age behind the rest of the people. So we awake from the nightmare and begin looking around us, using that New Vision which was formerly the exclusive faculty of the artists and the scientists. We admire the new machines and begin buying them on the installment plan. We talk about fission and space satellites. Finally we got around to looking at art--all those awful isms. So we looked at the Fauves. That insanity of paint now seemed gay--in fact, actually lyrical. And cubism, that ultimate pre-war madness, was now a sober brown refuge of contemplative thought. How they have changed! But wait a minute: "Paintings do not change, people change." "When does an ism become a wasm?" The old vaudeville gag line is still a neat question. Let us take Fauvism. It exploded at the salon d'automne in 1905. By 1907 it had disappeared from the scene; Matisse, Derain, and the others had gone on to newer things. But let us look on both sides: before Fauvism and after Fauvism. Looking earlier, we find Fauvism's writhing lines in Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art Nouveau, its strangely shaped masses in Gauguin, its violent brushwork in Van Gogh, its prismatic color in impressionism, and, through all its violence, strangely conveyed, the quietude of Cézanne. Or, we can go back to 1892 and a little Vuilliard canvas called Au divan japonais, take it out of its context, and say: "A Fauve!" After Fauvism in Paris? It went to Germany about 1908; Germanicized, it became the early expressionism of Kandinsky, Marc, and Jawlensky. Then it went permanently into the vocabulary of a new language, appearing here in one man's color, there in another man's line or another's form. It grew less explicit, more abstract. Forty years after that historic salon d'automne, and nearing mid-century, Fauvism, in the expressionist guise that it had assumed in Germany, would explode all over again as one of the many detonant elements in a completely new international style, American abstract expressionism. That is the history and pre-history of the first and presumably one of the most short-lived of the modern isms. It is like a laboratory demonstration of the law of the conservation of energy: no energy is ever lost. Or, put another way: nothing ever comes out of nothing. "Ism," the word, is almost a synonym for "search." Each of the important ones has been a search for reality by the adoption of a new point of view. This may sound strange when we consider the purple trees of the Fauves, the exploded planes of the cubists, the bare horizontal and vertical lines of the neo-plasticists. A chorus of voices will ask: "And just what does all this have to do with reality?" Well, the artists say, seeing is not necessarily believing, and believing is not necessarily seeing. There is that table which Sam Johnson pounded on to refute (so he thought) Bishop Berkeley's denial that matter, as such, existed. Everyone knows what a table looks like--a drawing of any table will do as well as a drawing of Dr. Johnson's original one. But any table looks like a table only because a bunch of atoms have decided to stay together. So what about that reality? How do you draw a realistic picture of an atom, a thing that the eye has never seen? You don't. You express it with that ominous little hieroglyph of three slim interlaced ovals which every schoolboy recognizes today; he recognizes it and doesn't even care that the atom symbol is abstract art. Artists are frank about it: they are more than a little bored with all the hue and cry about "abstract" art. The most realistic painting, they point out, is abstract in one sense: it is certainly not the thing depicted, but only a set of painted symbols for elements abstracted (drawn) from the original. Then they turn it around: even Mondrian's most non-objective canvas is not abstract, for each of its elements is completely real in and of itself, and it was with these elements and these only that Mondrian was working. Patient Mondrian himself once referred to the "new realism" of his paintings. Artists like to quote Guillaume Apollinaire on the subject. Many years ago Apollinaire rebuked a critic of the "abstractness" of Picabia's paintings. "This is not a case of abstraction," he said. "Would one say that the flavor of a peach was an abstraction?" Artists are more than bored, they are openly impatient with all the talk that they do not "communicate." Recently even a Director of the Metropolitan Museum described modern art as a "form of private communication . . . divorced from the area of common human experience," adding that it was humiliating and patronizing. Artists all but frothed at the mouth when they heard this dictum. "We are not loudspeakers," they said, "and our pictures are not singing commercials. We have something to say. Let people take the trouble to learn our language. The ones who will study a foreign language, or a special one like mathematics, are the very ones who expect a painting to sing them to sleep." Nevertheless, there are two sides to the matter. Abstraction is confusing, and, worse still, there are two kinds of abstraction. One starts with nature and consists of making the subject more and more unrecognizable. The other, properly called non-objectivism, does not start with real objects at all. Non-objective pictures are simply creations of line, form, and color. It makes a difference to know this in advance.