AN AESTHETIC PROPHECY
The Future of Painting. By Willard Huntington Wright. 12mo. 65 pages. B. W. Huebsch. $1.
MR WRIGHT, in his periodic excursions into the science of aesthetics, has committed himself to many ill-considered prophecies. His book, Modern Painting, written in defence of a certain school of contemporary artists called Synchromists, announced in unequivocal language the supremacy of abstract composition. With extraordinary cleverness and ingenuity he attempted to prove that the trend of art since Delacroix had been a sustained and inevitable progression toward the overthrow of representative form, and that the Synchromists, through an intellectual fusion of form and colour, partaking of architecture on the one hand and symphonic music on the other, had at last relieved art of its traditional illustrative integuments, and had achieved final plastic perfection. Painting could go no farther—its future was to be a new tradition of abstract harmonics in colour. This forecast was made in 1915, but since then much has happened. Mr Wright has made a discovery: he has realized that the underlying principle of all the art of the past is not colour, but drawing, and this fact has instigated new speculations.
His latest book is less dogmatic and challenging, but not less pretentious In its assertions: painting is dead; it was exhausted in the omniscient genius of Rubens; it was an experiment even with the Synchromists; and it survives to-day only in the hands of academic practitioners. But Mr Wright pronounces the requiem with a vision of hope—out of the ashes of the dead past he heralds the phoenix of a splendid dawn—the new art of colour. His lamentations on the obsolete art remind us of George Moore, who wept bitterly because English was a worn-out expressive vehicle, apparently unaware of a Polish expatriate named Conrad.
Mr Wright clings to the empathic hypotheses of a decade past, to such limited reasoners as Grant Allen, Lipps, Lee, and Thompson, who made a futile effort to reduce aesthetic expression and appreciation to physical reactions. He attributes all art values
