THE IDEA OF MODERN ART in general as "the destruction of art” has had some currency in many quarters since the beginning of the century. This has not necessarily been an expression of ignorance or prejudice. Picasso himself defined a painting as "a sum of destructions.“[1] Malevich hailed "the avant-garde of revolutionary destruction" which he saw "marching over the whole wide world."[2] Mayakovsky often seemed to be calling for the destruction of poetry, as when, in the published introduction to his "Fifth International" (1922), he issued
- an order to vacate the beauties of verse and introduce into poetry the brevity and accuracy of mathematical formulas.[3]
And it was a habit of Khlebnikov (whose demand for a "bonfire of books" has been noted) to call point blank for "the destruction of languages", without qualifying this demand in any way.[4]
Critics have often been quick to seize on the "negative" aspects of the modernists' programmes, and have argued that what all these artists really represent is the beginning of the end of culture and art. Even James Joyce's brother, Stanislaus, suggested in 1924 that the draft chapters of Finnegans Wake represented
