EP&M Online
Essay
Essay on Sculpture
by
Michael Curtis
The Arabs, smiling, tried their
scimitars on the arms of our tired Romans who fell like dried
wheat. And forward they rode dizzy with success, twirling their
thirsty scimitars, the sands of Arabia behind them, the vision of God
before them; the army of Mohamed – with the song of the Koran
stinging from their lips – harvested the civilized world and laid all I
cared for to waste. So it was with the Arabs, so it is with the
Moderns. Damn them.
I, like a Roman in eclipse, retire to my country-house, finding peace
and contentment in my books, my pictures, and my statues. Too,
like an old cheery tree who sends forth a last desperate profusion of
fruit and flowers, I have decorated my home with columns of every
description – thirty-some at last count. So, I sit and read, and
watch, and think.
You asked me, Arthur, for thoughts and words on sculpture: A large
subject. When young, largely would I have answered. You,
Sir, would have been burdened with a brief history – spanning several
dozen pages – beginning with the Archaic through Polyklitos; the Greek
canonical divisions, the Roman variants, the divergence of Medieval
styles, the classical revival and its variations, then onto National
styles, into the United States with our first and second generation
expatriates in Florence and Rome, the third in Paris, then home to
native-American – not Indian – schools, to the sculpture of Empire, et
cetera: then, I would have gone on about the forms – abstract, ideal,
realistic, and naturalistic – not non-objective; a non-object object
despite being an oxymoronic concept cannot exist – the quality of
volume, line and mass, content, precedent, and on and on until delight
in my erudition devolved into tolerance, until tolerance itself became
intolerable. And you, like my long-suffering students, would have
closed your eyes or in quiet snuck away. And, rightly so.
Sculpture did not develop like a finch’s beak; in fact, finch’s beaks
may not have developed like finches beaks. Can Spencerian – the
gradual development toward increasing complexity and from complexity
through dissolution to the ultimate source – or Darwinian – the process
of natural selection that favors those whose peculiar characteristics
are best adapted to the environment – evolutionary theories be applied
to civilization, culture, and craft: Is there progress in the
Arts? Look about you.
And yet, the positive Progressives continue to smile a frowning,
self-satisfied, contemptuous smile, convinced of the truth in their
Koran, droning old prose passages lugubriously on. Yesterday, I
heard that one hundred art-historians named R. Mutt’s “Fountain”
(Marcell Duchamp’s “urinal”) the seminal art-work of the Twentieth
Century: A fitting tribute to the imagined progression of an imagined
century. Do they know that bored with their deconstructed,
unmeaning lives they piss on their minds? And do they care?
No, in fact, no one cares. No one cares for ugliness, murder, and
destruction, except barbarians, and barbarians cannot long
sustain themselves. Sure, the Arabs enjoyed a brief flowering of
Greco-Roman culture, as did the Goths and the Vandals. So too the
Modernist-Progressives have lived off the fruits of Greco-Roman
civilization – make no mistake, our civilization is Greco-Roman and the
Modernists are envious barbarians thirsty for the destruction of our
civilization – and they will continue to survive as-long-as they suck
our civilization’s life-blood. Should they succeed in killing
their host it is they not we who will fade away.
What do people love? Beauty and goodness. What
survives? The beautiful and the good. Those few beautiful
objects of modernism may survive, the rest, unloved, will decay
and fade away while the classical will live on much beloved. – I
pause to laugh at the modern architects who have abandoned their glass
houses for Georgian mansions. –Thus, it will be with the objects of
modernism, so too with the notion of inevitable progress.
What is left, Arthur? The God in us, the beautiful, the good, and
the true. For three generations I have battled modernism, the
progressives, and the barbarians. I have struck them and watched them
bleed; I have watched them whimper and scream, and I have listen to the
ubiquitous modernist, progressive, liberal lecture – unmoved. Now, I
watch them fade away, unloved. I suspect, Arthur, that they will
continue to smile the frowning, self-satisfied, contemptuous smile even
though their scimitars have grown rusty, even though their arms have
grown tired; even though they continue to drone their Koran, no one who
matters is listening.
Behind me I see two growing generations of architects, painters,
sculptors, and poets of the Greco-Roman tradition inspired by the
God within them, in love with goodness, greatness, and truth; and they
are beautiful. You remember the darkness of modernism, the
battles with the mice and the spiders, the killing fields of the
liberal university, the private-club of democratic government
patronage, the prejudice of the modernist’s marketplace, their museums
and tombs. Well, these beautiful young artists do
not. They see greatness and know it by the God in
themselves. By them we shall again see greatness in the
world. The modernist-progressives vampire-like are hungry for
their blood. Let us protect them as best we can. Let us
give them a world in which to grow. Let us help give them life,
that by their life we all may live beautifully and true.
The essay you asked for on sculpture I cannot, in conscience,
write. For, I no longer believe in the social,
evolutionary, historical theories I was taught. Instead, I have
learned that each man is a new civilization and that our civilization
springs anew with each new man. The forms used by an artist
harmonize with the philosophy chosen by the soul. For some, the
soul chooses ideal forms, for others abstract, naturalistic, or
realistic forms, each after the nature of their soul. The stories
and pictures an artist makes are peculiar to the artist’s experience
and inclinations; all such stories and pictures touch the unformed
forms in other persons and bring them to life: The artist brings forth
from the God in himself objects that have life in the object
itself, and from itself, the God in others is brought to life and lives
through them into a person’s every experience. So, I cannot give
you an art-historical essay on sculpture. The truth is,
art-history is a myth.
As verse and poetry are being reinvented, so too are painting,
sculpture, architecture, music, dance, and philosophy being
reinvented. The old terms and methodologies simply will not
do.
I leave you with a verse to happily curl your lip: Avant-garde March.
Ride on Hegel, ride on Marx,
Ride on, ride on Alfred Barr,
Ride the magic zeitgeist train
In this the avant-garde parade.
As the globe spins round and round
The avant-garde must not slow down;
We march till time and space collapse
Then quickly, quickly we march backwards.
Michael Curtis