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"Cezanne ... is a type of frustration, a man who never fully mastered his craft and in consequence couldn't fully express what was struggling within his cosmos, but at least he had a groping toward the root of the matter."
Forthright, easy to understand, is Critic Cortissoz's summary of modernism:
"The movement continues sterile . . . from a variety of causes. One ... is the want of really compelling leaders, of men of genius having the warrant of creative artists. The other causes embrace an only fitful instinct for truth, an almost fantastical indifference to beauty, and a deplorable neglect of the fundamentals of workmanship. . . . There have been arid epochs before this, such as the Victorian and its equivalent across the Channel in the Paris of Napoleon III. . . . Mediocrity in those days had a stupendous vogue. Modernism is but repeating history. It will someday prove a kind of Victorian 'dud,' with a difference, obviously, but a 'dud' just the same."
Critic Cortissoz coolly and continually insists that excellent technique, often branded by other critics as mere facility or the superficial finesse resulting from laborious routine, is an absolutely essential basis for all fine art worthy of the name. He finds in the late George Bellows, famed for his dramatic depiction of prizefighters, an example of a modern U. S. artist whose art is securely grounded in this respect. In his new book of essays, The Painter's Craft, published a month ago by Scribner's, Critic Cortissoz persuasively explains his emphasis on technique. Says he: ". . . who shall say where the 'manual dexterity' leaves off and the mysterious alchemy of that intensely personal thing, 'touch,' begins? . . . The ponderables and imponderables in this matter are inextricably fused. To grasp the former is to lay hold of an infallible key to the latter. In other words, the painter's craft, allied as it is to 'manual dexterity,' is first and last an index to the painter's artistic character."
To many these statements, and similar Cortissoz writings, reveal an esthetic clearheadedness, a critical sanity quite unusual in a day when loose-thinking esthetes customarily employ such meaningless terms as "realities" and "eternal," choose the most nebulous polysyllables to describe their obscure aims. Modernists, of course, vilify Royal Cortissoz as a fogey if not, indeed, a fool. From them he receives the same stigma of petrifaction which they apply to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art (TIME, Feb. 4, 1929).
Thus it seemed particularly appropriate to find Critic Cortissoz beginning this week with a lecture on "Technique" at the Metropolitan. For although the Metropolitan courteously admits to its rostra lecturers who flay its conservative policies, including even vitriolic Critic Walter Pach (TIME. Dec. 17, 1928), it must happily welcome so able a champion as Critic Cortissoz.