19 AUGUST 1955, Page 16

REALISM IN ART

SIR,—Bravol Mr. Basil Taylor. He has ex- tracted the nails from the rather rickety struc- ture of Socialist Realism, Social Realism and Realism, and left it lying low.

Now what? Surely we come back to good and bad art: shoddy, cheap mentality or deep, penetrating vision, either in representa- tional or non-representational painting.

Mondriaan may have thought that he had found the universal, but fortunately it was only his conception of the 'straight and nar- row'—the spiral of art evolution is there to defeat any straight-line concept.—Yours faith- 'fully,