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own subjects or regard them as merely incidental pretexts for form. But a little observation will show that each school of modern artists has its characteristic objects and that these derive from a context of experience which also operates in their formal fantasy. The picture is not a rendering of external objects - that is not even strictly true of realistic art - but the objects assembled in the picture come from an experience and interests which affect the formal character. An abstract art built up out of other objects, that is, out of other interests and experience, would have another formal character. 

Certain of these contents are known in earlier art, but only under social conditions related to our own. The painting of an intimate and domestic world, of moments of non-practical personal activity and artistic recreation (the toilette, the music-lesson, the lace-maker, the artist, etc.), of the land-scape as a pure spectacle with little reference to action, occurs, for example, in the patrician bourgeois art of Holland in the 17th century. In the sporadic, often eccentric, works of the last three centuries in which appear the playing cards, the detached personal paraphernalia, the objects of the table and the artistic implements, so characteristic of Cubism, there we find already a suggestion of Cubist aesthetic -- intricate patterns of flat, overlapping objects, the conversion of the horizontal depth, the plan of our active traversal of the world, into an intimate vertical surface and field of random manipulation.

Abstract forms in primitive societies under different conditions have another content and formal character. In Hiberno-Saxon painting of the 8th century the abstract designs are not freshly improvised as in modern art, as a free, often grotesque, personal fantasy; but are conceived ornamentally as an intricate, uniformly controlled and minute, impersonal handicraft, subject to the conventional uses of precious religious objects. Hence in these older works, which are also, in a sense, highly subjective, there is usually a stabilizing emblematic form, a frequent symmetry and an an arrangement of the larger units in simple, formalized schemes. In modern abstract art, on the contrary, we are fascinated by incommensurable shapes, unexpected breaks, capricious, unrecognizable elements, the appearance of a private, visionary world of emerging and disappearing objects. Whereas these objects are often the personal instruments of art and ideal sensation described above -- the guitars, drinking vessels, pipes, books, playing-cards, bric-a-brac, bouquets, fruit and printed matter -- in the older art such paraphernalia is completely absent. A more primitive and traditional content, drawn from religion, folklore, magic and handicraft -- Christian symbols, wild beasts, monsters, knotted and entangled bands, plait-work and spirals -- constitute the matter of this art.

A modern work, considered formally, is no more artistic than an older work. The preponderance of objects drawn from a personal and artistic world does not mean that pictures are now more pure than in the past, more completely works of art. It means simply that the personal and aesthetic contexts of secular life no condition the formal character of art, just as religious beliefs and practices in the past conditioned the formal character of religious art. The conception of art as purely aesthetic and individual can exist only where culture has been detached from practical and collective interests and is supported by individuals alone. But the mode of life of these individuals, their place in society, determine in many ways this individual

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art. In its most advanced form, this conception of art is typical of the rentier leisure class in modern capitalist society, and is most intensely developed in centers, like Paris, which have a large rentier group and considerable luxury industries. Here the individual is no longer engaged in a struggle to attain wealth; he has no direct relation to work, machinery, competition; he is simply a consumer, not a producer. He belongs to a class which recognizes no higher group or authority. The older stable forms of family life and sexual morality have been destroyed; there is no royal court or church to impose a regulating pattern on his activity. For this individual the world is a spectacle, a source of novel pleasant sensations, or a field in which he may realize his "individuality," through art, through sexual intrigue and the most varied, but non-productive, mobility. A woman of this class is essentially an artist, like the painters whom she might patronize. Her daily life is filled with aesthetic choices; she buys clothes, ornaments, furniture, house decorations; she is constantly re-arranging herself as an aesthetic object. Her judgements are aesthetically pure and "abstract," for she matches colors with colors, lines with lines. But she is also attentive to the effect of these choices upon her unique personality.

Of course, only a small part of this class is interested in painting, and only a tiny proportion cultivates the more advanced modern art. It would be out of place here to consider the reason for the specialized interests of particular individuals; but undoubtedly the common character of this class affects to some degree the tastes of its most cultivated members. We may observe that these consist mainly of young people with inherited incomes, who finally make art their chief interest, either as artists and decorators, or as collectors, dealers, museum officials, writers on art and travellers. Active business men and wealthy professionals who occasionally support this art tend to value the collecting of art as a higher activity than their own daily work. Painting enters into little relation with their chief activities and every-day standards, except imaginatively, insofar as they are conscious of the individual aspect of their own careers and enjoy the work of willful and inventive personalities.

It is the situation of painting in such a society, and the resulting condition of the artist, which confer on the artist to-day certain common tendencies and attitudes. Even the artist of lower middle-class or working-class origin comes to create pictures congenial to the members of this upper class, without having to identify himself directly with it. He builds, to begin with, on the art of the last generation and is influenced by the success of recent painters. The general purpose of art being aesthetic, he is already predisposed to interests and attitudes, imaginatively related to those of the leisure class, which values its pleasures as aesthetically refined, individual pursuits. He competes in an open market and therefore is conscious of the novelty or uniqueness of his work as a value. He creates out of his own head (having no subject-matter imposed by a commission), works entirely by himself, and is therefore concerned with his powers of fantasy, his touch, his improvised forms. His sketches are sometimes more successful than his finished pictures, and the latter of acquire the qualities of a sketch.

Cut off from the middle class at the very beginning of his career by poverty and by the non-practical character of his work, the

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