Fraternity-Testvériség, 1963 (40. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1963-08-01 / 8. szám
10 FRATERNITY growing appeal to total force totally applied in the intercourse of nations, organized selfishness, cyuiicism, indifference to pain in the ruling of peoples and in the intercourse of nations. Finta perceived this, and could find no reason why he should make of his art a vehicle of agony, calamity and defeat. He believed that beauty could cure modern man’s distress; and he found that beauty already in the tradition. He could not believe the tradition was exhausted. Here he may have erred. He was too hopeful a man, perhaps, too solicitous for the happiness of man, to read his own times pessimistically, that is, accurately. The tradition was exhausted, and the modern movement in a single burst of destructive contradiction killed it off. Finta, as an artist loyal to the tradition, is fated to remain obscure. For the history of modern art is written by its partisans. As the modern style and its historiography become official, the art and the artists it disapproves will be excluded from the record. Unless an independent criticism and an objective history can be created, the history of modern art will be written out of the ideology of victorious modernism. Mr. Sheldon Cheney has assured us that in the second half of the twentieth century most historians of art — and I think he would want to add most artists and critics — are on one side; and that “the struggle for a modern attitude” has been won.4 Dissenting and independent criticism is not invited; and only the friends of the movement will figure in its history. A critique of Finta constitutes a dissent from modernist orthodoxy and a plea for an objective history of modern art. 4 A New World History of Art, New York, Dryden Press, 1956, p. 5. (To be continued)
