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[[strikethrough]] THE SCHOOL OF NEW YORK [[/strikethrough]]

^[[PREFACE]]

[[strikethrough]] The culture of modern art is about a hundred years old, or older than nearly every man alive. It is [[?]] not easy to speak of it to anyone who does not have a clear and detailed image of its background, [[?]] face and figure - just as it is difficult for the sailor to express himself to one who has never seen the ocean, who does not know that that great body exists. The culture of modern painting is comprised of thousands of objects, related to each other and to the [[?]] ocean on which they float, like the fleets of the world. [[/strikethrough]] 

^[[Indent /]] Every intelligent painter carries the ^[[^ whole]] culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a [[underlined]] critique [[/underlined]], and anything he says a gloss. It is the visual expression of the modern mind, subtle, rich and sensual; [[strikethrough]] and anyone [[/strikethrough]] who lacks the culture of modern painting is without a great human experience, new, adventurous, and [[strikethrough]] ineffably [[/strikethrough]] pure, with the intensity of mystical experience, but [[strikethrough]] , for the first time in history [[/strikethrough]] secular in [[strikethrough]] character [[/strikethrough]] ^[[background]]. Odilon Redon wrote, in 1898, that his works "[[underlined]] inspire, [[/underlined]] and are not meant to be defined. They determine nothing. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined. They are a kind of metaphor..."

The recent [[strikethrough]] [[??]] [[/strikethrough]] "School of New York" - a term not geographical, but denoting a direction - is an aspect of the culture of modern painting. The works of its artists are "abstract," but not necessarily "non-objective." They are always lyrical, often anguished, brutal, austere, and "unfinished," in comparison with our young contemporaries of Paris; spontaneity and a lack of self-consciousness is emphasized; the pictures stare back as one stares at them; the process of painting them is conceived of as ^[[^ an]] adventure, without preconceived