Art: Last Stop

“It is possible that present-day art has little esthetic value; but he who sees in it only a caprice may be very sure indeed that he has not understood either the new art or the old. Evolution has conducted painting—and art in general—inexorably, fatally, to what it is today.”

By that double-edged dictum, Spanish Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset cuts the ground from under the moderns and anti-moderns alike. Writing with gloomy detachment in the current Partisan Review, Ortega traces the evolution of painting from Giotto to Picasso, describes it as “a unique and simple action with a beginning and an end.”

Giotto, says Ortega, was “a painter of solid and independent bodies.” Three centuries later, Velasquez emphasized “hollow space”—the area between the eye and the thing seen. In recording only a dazzle of colored lights, the impressionists brought painting smack up to the retina. Picasso carried the same process a step further, painting what was back of the eyeball, inside his head. “[In the Picasso school] the eyes, instead of absorbing things, are converted into projectors of private flora and fauna. Before, the real world drained off into them; now, they are reservoirs of irreality.

“The guiding law . . .” Ortega concludes, “is one of disturbing simplicity. First things are painted; then, sensations; finally, ideas. This means that in the beginning the artist’s attention was fixed on external reality; then, on the subjective; finally, on the intrasubjective. These three stages are three points on a straight line.”

For those who could follow him, it looked as if modern art must be the end of the line.