Science and the rejection of realism in art

Abstract

A rejection of representational realism characterizes much of Western art after 1850. And various inquirers have sought to found this rejection in the desire of recent artists for a new kind of audience an audience that would admire the artist not because he succeeded in reproducing the familiar world of everyday experience, but because through his genius he created a pure art-world independent of everyday experience. However, many serious students of contemporary arts have been offended by this type of explanation. They have, indeed, gone so far as to condemn all socio-aesthetic analysis which is patterned after that of Ortega Y Gasset. For, in their view, such analysis ends by denying the integrity of the whole body of recent art. No result save this is possible, these students assert, when an analysis begins with the assumption that poet and painter alter their styles solely because they refuse to tolerate a philistine audience which does not appreciate the technical imagination of the artist. Now it can be admitted that this assumption seems unlikely to provide a thoroughly adequate analysis of the motives of artists in the period in question. But precisely what an adequate analysis of motives would consist of is unclear. The defenders of the integrity of the modern artist set forth their own in generalities. They aver that the artist alters his mode of expression in the direction of difficulty or even obscurity because he feels that older modes are inadequate for the presentation of his dis coveries in an unexplored range of experience. And hence we are to conclude for ourselves that the modern artist's flight from simple repre sentational realism (and from the analogues of this style in verse and music) has been in some measure a result of a new conviction that truly realistic interpretation of human experience was impossible in that mode of art. But what was the source of this conviction? If it were possible to find one which, in its finality, excluded all others, the entire dispute might end