SIR,—Must we all gird up our loins for batik when
the revolution is over? (The phrase about renaissance man was perhaps a silly one, but let's not quibble about whether revolutions destroy old eras or start new ones.) For nine years it has been my constant refrain that every form of art is valid, that they are not mutually exclusive, but that art is richer in so far as it embraces additional levels of intellect and feeling; poorer in so far as it excludes them. The whole point of my comment was, not that it is naughty to find starting points in other people's work, but that if you choose the extremes of non-figuration (or realism : the last time I entered this column the cry was 'Unfair to Realists') you have chosen some- thing so limited as to defy development. Beyond a certain point, formal arrangements must degenerate into decotation. some such external factor, which -will offer 'the same resistance to pure subjectivity that the model offers the representational painter' Mr. Heath has elsewhere admitted the.neces- sity. I merely suggest that mathematics are not enough.
The classical rules of criticism arc three. First, find out the aims of the artist; second. establish whether those aims have been achieved; third, consider whether they were worth achieving. It is upon the last point that Mr. Heath and I disagree. A construction based upori an interpreted mathematical pro- gression stems to me to bear much the same relationship to a technical mathematical model as a society portrait does to a photograph.
I am not sure what Mr. Mills is trying to say
(I mentioned the three early abstractionists just because they were so different. And whkt are 'the facts' I have to square?) but he puts his finger on one point when he admits . the necessity for studying the writings of abstract artists before their paintings can be under- stood. And what is Mr. Heath doing claiming the number of abstractionists as evidence of anything? Literary-romantic-illusionism was general in Europe throughout the second half of the last century, but we still regard it as the nadir of academic painting.
I admire the integrity of Mr. Heath and the artists who showed with him at the Redfern, and should like to see their talents used in decorative schemes in various kinds of new building, but I shouffl be sorry if theirs was the only form of art left in the world.—Yours faithfully, M. H. MIDDLETON
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