The Corruption of Taste

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Mike Sullivan

The Corruption of Taste

Post by Mike Sullivan » Sat Dec 06, 2014 3:56 am

It is proposed, as a thesis for consideration, that Jews have little or no high artistic sense as we know it. Consider the eruv, a territory which is designated according to Jewish Orthodoxy as an area in which various functions may be performed on the Sabbath, such as pushing a pram or carrying keys. In reality the scheme serves as a test, 'Can we get away with this?' It probes the host nation's tolerance to the Jewish presence, serving the same purpose as an opinion poll, although dressed up as religious doctrine. Eruvs are in place in London's Golder's Green and around a certain prestigious property in Washington, DC.

Similarly, in much of Jewish 'classical' music can be detected an element of parody. It appears to progress in chutzpah from the songs of the 'English' Finsey to the 'Americans' Gershwin, with his ghastly 'Rhapsody in Blue,' and Copeland, whose barnyard noises seem invariably to be delivered in grandiose style and without a hint of awareness of the mockery that is being done. Besides 'composers,' the competence of Jewish conductors and performers may be adequate, as with many Orientals, but what passes for art is replaced by flamboyant dress and manner.

Another interesting analogy is with the 'cameo roles' Alfred Hitchcock gave himself in many of his movies. At first, this was evidently a private joke. Then enthusiasts watching Hitchcock's films who had learnt of it could not relax until they had identified the Director among the extras. So Hitchcock fell to making his cameo appearance early on so his audience could relax and enjoy the rest of the movie. This was copied by Jewish film-makers and a number of film and television movies exist which feature a Jewish joke within the first few minutes. It might be a reference to a rabbi, for example. This is passed over by Gentile viewers, but Jews in the audience understand fully from thenceforth that they are in the safe hands of their brethren.

Hence it is postulated that Jewish 'art' is naught but imitation and adaptation of Gentile art, to serve as an 'in joke' among their kindred, reinforcing the conspiracy. Whether the conspiracy is deliberate or merely instinctive, secret or simply unacknowledged, its result is the same. The extent of the parody serves to 'feel the temperature' and thus it assists in gauging the increment for the next stage of subtle power accumulation. Such information-gathering procedures (typically, using one thing to obtain information about another), the subtle accumulation of power (not advancing enough at any one time to provoke a response) and conspiracy are all female policies.
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Vulgarity, gross over-elaboration, impurity of line.
18th century crown for Torah scroll in silver and precious stones


JEWISH ART, like art in Russia after the communist take-over, scarcely exists in its own right and culturally its influence on mankind has been negligible – that is until Jewish 'art' during the present century became positively baneful.

In Russia, however, there is a traditional Russian art from pre-communist days – literature, music and the ballet which flourished under the Tsars and upon the significance of which the communist regime traded unblushingly.

The case of Jewish art is different since until modern times the Jews had no nation state and the scope of aspiring artists was limited by the social conditions imposed on the Jews in varying degrees of severity in different countries and over many centuries. They were in fact forbidden to indulge in important artistic activities. Obviously there must have been reasons for this and for the apparently harsh treatment of these people. It is not proposed to explore in depth these reasons or to analyse why nobody loves the Jews. Indeed, with the beady eye of the Board of Deputies of British Jews probing everywhere in efforts to neutralise the world's growing hostility to the troublesome state of Israel with all its ramifications, it might be dangerous to assert the right of open criticism.

From the earliest times visual art was discouraged among conforming Jews by the Ten Commandments – Thou shall not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness of anything that is in the heaven above or that is in the water under the earth. This oppressive injunction was given out in more detail in Deuteronomy IV, 17-18. Admittedly the prohibition was variously interpreted throughout later centuries, but at least in 66 A.D., after the expulsion of the Romans, the ban was emphatically observed by Jewish Government order. Throughout this early period of Jewish history many intolerant iconoclasts emerged and on occasion even the Romans were forced to comply with the wishes of God's Chosen when it came to the display of human images and statues.

The rise of Islam

Later, not to be outdone on zeal, Jewish iconoclasm was actually reinforced by the rise in the sixth century of Islam with precisely the same prohibition. There was, however, this difference between the two races: the Arabs managed to produce a splendid civilisation and culture in a large area of the known world and which, during a flowering in Spain, even managed to accommodate the Jew. The achievements of this Moslem culture may still be witnessed in Grenada today. One is reminded of the lament of the Spanish poet, Lorca, when he observed, much to the annoyance of the Franco regime, that the fall of Grenada in 1492 was a disaster.

There was never a comparable or even noticeable flowering of Jewish art and literature, let alone a sound Jewish administrative structure that could give economic prosperity and political security to its mixed inhabitants over a period of centuries. Any such basic inspiration and the conception of peace and tranquillity does not seem throughout history ever to have existed in the turbulent Jewish mind. Today the failure of a propped-up Israel only confirms this. So it is seen that over the centuries the outcast Jew is left to specialise in usury and to act as a go-between in trade to Moslems and Christians.

Nevertheless, not all outlets for artistic expression were denied to Jews. Before the 10th century little remains even of minor interest to command the attention of the art historian – the crudely painted wall of a synagogue in Iraq, a glass bottle, a clay or bronze lamp, an amulet and some coins. During the Middle Ages and largely due to ghetto conditions, it was only the synagogue that unimpressively displayed a distinct racial origin. Sometimes the foundations were sunk extra deep into the ground to give internal height, since the height of the exterior of the synagogue was strictly regulated to remind the Jews they were not entitled to special privilege and were under necessary control.

But it was the ritual synagogue objects that could fulfil creative ambition. Often these objects were associated with Torah scrolls and they were heavily proportioned and grossly over-decorated, sharing that squat, almost menacing, quality apparent in some Jewish buildings. The cases, finials, crowns and torah breastplates were sumptuously elaborate and lacked any purity of line. Today one can find this typical Jewish taste for excess carried even further in the plush flats of Golders Green where shine and glitter proclaim the ultimate in vulgar emancipation.

Before the 18th century, artisans, craftsmen, architects and painters were in the lower echelons of society and inevitably Jewish craftsmen gained a monopoly of the jewellers' trade as well as that of the goldsmith and metal worker. In the Yemen, for example, all metal and silverwork was in the hands of the Jews and it was much the same in North Africa. In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance the minor arts of bookbinding and manuscript illumination were also captured by the Jews and elaborate Jewish book illumination reached a climax in Italy, greatly influenced as it was by Italian art.

The real poverty of typical Jewish art, in fields wider than the narrow inward-looking minor arts connected with the book, is most apparent in the great art of painting, with its many distinct national schools and where it is always possible for a genius to emerge – a Leonardo, a Velasquez or a Watteau – to proclaim his kinship, however remote, with the Creator. Before the end of the 18th century literally nothing worth mentioning in painting appeared from a Jewish hand – that is unless one includes the dubious case in England of Johann Zoffany or, in Italy, that of Anton Raphael Mengs, who was possibly of mixed birth and was a Christian. There were, however, in that century quite a number of third-rate Jewish artists who for commercial reasons felt capable of extending their work in the minor arts to that of portraiture, particularly in Germany following a general easing of the human likeness prohibition.

Period of emancipation

In the nineteenth century came the great period of emancipation when the Jews surged ahead in every field of profitable endeavour that formerly had been denied to them by countries of the civilised world anxious to survive oppression and exploitation. After 1850 and with the upsurge of liberalism there was a sudden growth of inferior Jewish artists who performed in an uninspired academic style. Many of them changed their Jewish names to more Gentile-sounding ones and in the interests of mammon rejected Judaism for Christianity. Their reputations, some of them considerable, especially in Germany, have not survived and their personalities and work have sunk with hardly a trace except as names bandied about by small-time dealers feeding mainly upon themselves.

Such artists were P. Viet, E. Bendemann, E. Magnus, J. Muhr and numerous lesser lights from Holland, Hungary and Poland. By then, Jews were accepted in society and there was little or nothing to impede their artistic careers, or indeed the careers of the brighter of God's Chosen in financial elevation.

In England there was the Jewish artist, Solomon A. Hart R.A., the son of a silversmith who produced large canvasses crowded with posturing academic figures. Better known is Simeon Solomon (1834-1905), a minor pre-Raphaelite who is remembered for the dissipated end he achieved rather than for his pictures of anaemic young ladies.

Only in the latter part of the 19th century did Jewish painters begin to get a world-wide reputation. At this point the Jewish art historian finds less difficulty in making out a case for the existence of original Jewish art. The rise of Impressionism, itself a revolt against academic art and authority and therefore bound to appeal to the naturally contentious Jewish temperament, inevitably attracted Jewish artists. It did in fact produce one painter of the first rank – the outstanding French Impressionist, Camille Pisarro. This artist is seized upon as an example of Jewish genius by those ever avid to claim more than their fair share of artistic credit, although in a number of respects he is not typically Jewish at all.

Pisarro was born in the West Indies of a Creole mother and a French Jewish father. He was also a convinced atheist and fell under the spell of typically French artists starting with Corot and Courbet. Later, Cezanne observed that Pisarro was, 'Of all painters the nearest to nature.' Furthermore, while hosts of minor artists are mentioned in the current Jewish Encyclopaedia, Pisarro's name appears not at all. He had escaped into a French art and played a major part in all the eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Respected by all his colleagues, both writers and painters, the whole personality of the man was the reverse of Jewish – his humility and gentleness and his restraint in imposing his artistic ideas on others.

At this time two other Jewish painters of stature emerge, Max Liebermann and Josef Israels. Neither of them, apart from subject matter, had anything Jewish to contribute to painting, and Liebermann's importance to the German School lay in his contribution to it of a knowledge of the European schools, particularly of the French Impressionists. His own art, at times influenced by the French, was still typically German. It is the same story in other European countries.

Even in Russia the fine landscape painter Isaac Levithan, beloved by Chekov, produced works not Jewish in inspiration but inspired by the Russian landscape and the French Impressionists. Another Russian Jew, the ballet designer Leon Bakst (1868-1924), was influenced mainly by Slav and Asian folk-art.

Indeed Jews had nothing to give the world that was original Jewish – that had the unmistakable and legitimate flavour of a functioning nation. Everywhere, the Jewish artistic temperament, when it produced – rarely – anything of quality, had been subdued by the culture and the sentiment of the host nation – that is until the fatal twentieth century when liberalism and the complete freedom from all restraint unleashed the great hotch-potch of Jewish 'art' on the almost unresisting world, a veritable deluge of buffoonery and imposture.

No Jewish School

It is quite inappropriate for Jews to prate about the importance of Jewish art before 1900 and to make exaggerated claims about Jewish artists who certainly belonged to no traceable Jewish school. The Jewish art scholar, Berenson, in The Visual Arts, admitted that Jewish artists have never shown originality or expressed anything that could be called Jewish. As the Jewish art critic, Ernest Namenyi, observed in Jewish Art (1961), 'Up to the middle of the nineteenth century no single Jewish artist and no work of art created by a Jew can be proved to have definitely contributed towards forming the style of any one period.'

It seems appropriate that two published statements from Jews – and in some respects they have never lacked perception – should end this brief survey. In the twentieth century art holocaust, the equivalent of the gas chamber was introduced into the visual arts; when the kingdom of the spirit was invaded by the Jewish boot with a calculated viciousness and with a vengeance springing from the Old Testament. The labours and aspirations of the painter and sculptor were subtly channelled into paths which have led to a cultural annihilation more complete than that which overtook the six million in Jewish fiction.

Modern Art

THE DISTURBING manifestation 'Modern Art' just about finished off French national art, the end of which was heralded by the death of Degas in 1917. To most of the public 'Modern Art' is still synonymous with the weird and incomprehensible; others, it fills with boredom, and to the more gullible, 'Modern Art' somehow achieves a kind of engaging incompetence like a child learning to walk.

The first revolutionary art movement began with the Fauves or "wild men" led by Matisse who at that time had reached middle-age without any marked success. During 1905-06 the art world was shocked by Fauvist exhibitions flaunting extravagant colour in deliriums of unrestrained "expression" which successfully annihilated drawing. The movement lasted for two years.

Next came Braque and Picasso who between 1907 and 1914 created cubism – a boring manifestation into which Ozenfant (1866-1966) managed to infuse a dignity akin to that found in the stylized forms of certain oriental carpets upon which people happily tread.

The daring nature of these various ventures into a kind of dilettante world which could be boldly legitimized and encouraged by the written word and into the bohemian atmosphere of which the average man did not care to intrude, seems to have set the stage for the eruption – almost entirely from the ghettoes of eastern Europe – of the so-called School of Paris.

It was an impressive assemblage of God's Chosen, a dozen of them born between 1884 and 1900, including Modigliani, Chagall and Soutine. Art literature calls them "romantics", "lyricists" and "passionate individuals", but in a more restrained vein we hear they had "tormented souls'" their work portrayed a certain sickness of life – something dark and irrational (Modigliani) for a generation eager for vivid sensations and pleasures.

But the term 'School of Paris' gradually came to have a looser application which signified avant garde painting of almost any kind.

Annihilation

In some extreme cases, such as the first 1910 abstracts of Kandinsky (without actual proof we may suspect Jewish blood somewhere in his merchant family), embarrassed members of the public are reminded of effects on the pavement after treading in it – until with a shock it is recalled that on 21 October 1980 in Christie's, NY, lot 233 (entitled DELUGE II) by Kandinsky fetched $950,000.

To-day this sort of stuff seems to have reached the end of the road, for what could be avanter garder than mere canvas enclosed in a frame? This depraved movement towards annihilation was set in motion and maintained by Jews and one can perceive here a kind of revenge for all the healthy checks imposed upon this race.

Nevertheless, the ungodly company of Poles, Russians, Bulgarians, Lithuanians and just one Italian found the right atmosphere in Paris, where at that time anything 'went' in art, and conveniently there was sufficient opposition to novelty to activate the flow of expectant Jewish andrenalin eager, as always, for strife.

The Jews were at last able to express their disenchantment with life – Modigliani with the portrayal of mild idiocy, Chagall with silliness that was upgraded by smart writing and Soutine to wallow or writhe in the sickness of his own mind.

Crude colour and outrageous distortion were the simple gambits that subdued the uninitiated beholder who, at the same time, had the printed word to assure him he was in the presence of great art and not just maunderings from the lunatic asylum or the psychiatrist's consulting room. It was not long before further manipulation in the auction room was to furnish the important commercial stamp of authenticity on this rubbish.

Modigliani who died in Paris in 1920 from tuberculosis and whose squalid life assisted by drugs and alcohol has been highly dramatized, found his particular successful formula in extreme distortion with which he poured contempt on many of his fellows.

Ephemerals

Modigliani's portraits consist of a gallery mainly of village idiots or as R. H. Wilenski has put it, "...essentially original – the direct exteriorizing of his personal experience by means expressly fashioned for that end." In plain English this means that Modigliani's personal experience of, say, The Girl in a White Collar or La Chocolatiere was an egg perched on a kind of pumpkin. The elongated and stylized features express no kind of life; the slotted eyes belong to Death.

They are dubbed "portraits", but they are not much in advance of a Cycladic marble head of 2500 BC. Perhaps the human ephemerals who frequently acted as models would not or could not hit back at this divesting of human dignity. Perhaps they were impervious to insult. Possibly they thought it was a bit of a joke. Certainly it was an expensive one.

Had you attended a Sotheby's sale on 4 July last year [1981] when Modigliani's Mme Zborowska (the wife of a Jewish collector) came under the hammer – and had you twitched your nose at the wrong moment, it would have set you back a cool £100,000. It might not have been much of a consolation afterwards if some critic had found some sort of mournful elegance paraded in a pumpkin and repeated in the egg surmounting it.

Marc Chagall is different. His stuff is for the nursery wall – something that might be put into a jumble sale when the kids grow up. That is until the hired critic reaches for the pen, and with a Mauve Circus going at £115,000 or Red And Yellow Bouquet at a modest seventy-five grand, small wonder the critic dips la plume dans le Bull!

In the art of writing, gibberish is immediately spotted. Painting, however, is more difficult to authenticate and lies wide open to the manipulator and to the seductive activities of the Jewish broker. Art jargon is his formidable weapon and difficult to combat because nobody can understand it; you cannot refute the mouthings of a baboon.

This art clap-trap that is supposed to reveal some Jewish genius is given a deceptive kind of authenticity and especially as Lindsay observed when it appears between glossy illustrated covers and is cunningly placed in the dealer's front window between a volume say on Titian and another on Degas. We have been conned yet again by God's Chosen.

Doodling

Looking frankly at Chagall's Clock With A Blue Wing one suspects that no great art values are really enshrined here. It would seem to be a kind of doodling – the art one pulls off on the notepad beside the telephone while listening to an account of what her cat had for supper. On reflection, Hieronymous Bosch did much the same thing as Chagall three centuries ago but these even more horrible visions were projected with a technical skill far beyond the competence of any member of the School of Paris.

The critic, J. Lassaigne observes, "Chagall's importance in modern art increases daily. In 1941 Andre Breton stressed the fact that already in 1911 Chagall's work had broken down the barriers of the elements and the laws of physics."

We say that Chagall flouted a basic stability in art which existed thanks to certain impositions placed upon art by sectors of society, but which at the same time never prevented the original genius from breaking through those restrictions without destroying the whole edifice.

Il Greco managed to impose his peculiar distorted vision of agony and acid on the then mighty Church; Rembrandt triumphantly ignored the social requirements of his well-fed patrons.

But Chagall screaming complete liberation has with his crude effects torn down the barriers of sanity and assisted by all that is arty-crafty opened the field of painting to a host of brush-wielding morons. With Jewish arrogance Chagall admits he is unteachable. "I got the impression," he wrote, "that we were still scratching at the surface of things, that we were afraid to plunge into the chaos, afraid to smash and trample that surface underfoot... Down with naturalism, impressionism and realistic cubism! Welcome to our new madness!"

This madness can be seen to embrace a vulgar Jewish attempt to mystify and shock; hysterical efforts to reveal areas of the imagination that are simply too boring and irrational to others. The vacuous day-dreams of an uncomfortable Jew are not the stuff of great art.

The French critic Paul Valery noted "This modern painting has been made by writers; if they would only keep quiet it would disappear in a year."

As an example of this kind of writing we may quote from an impudent Skira production, one of a series entitled The Taste of our Time (i.e. Jewish taste, or lack of it, thrust on the unsuspecting public!). It concerns Chagall's Portrait of the Artist's Mother (1914): "The small portrait of his mother, showing her on a divan, is a masterpiece of orange and brown, a simple color harmony creating an atmosphere of homely intimacy and filial devotion." Thus writes the Jew Lionello Venturi for the Jewish firm of Skira!

But when we come to look at this masterpiece, what do we find?

What kind of a son, we humbly ask, would deliberately depict his mother's face as an expressionless, baked potato? Presumably Chagall, to put it mildly, disliked his mother. Or is this really a typical Jewish expression of filial devotion? And is the undignified hippo-like form of Madame Chagall really on a divan at all? Rather she seems to be simulating a corpse suspended against a trivial floral background. Her lemon-yellow face indicates that this poor woman is in the last throes of jaundice which she has undoubtedly passed on to her son. If all this is "homely intimacy", many timid people might prefer the vicinity of a leper colony. A more tasteless crucifixion scene has not appeared in art!

Disturbed

The Russian Jew, Chaim Soutine (1894-1943) was particularly disturbed. During his lifetime he somehow escaped being discovered and written-up and it would be unfair to call him an impostor. Soutine was just a nut-case who tried to relieve himself in paint. Like Modigliani, his 'portraits' have nothing to say about the sitter which they invariably insult. The human predicament is always Soutine screaming insanely.

Thanks ultimately to Jewish manipulation he has of course become expensive – around the £50,000 mark, which is a lot to pay for a wriggling horror in paint and for a complete rejection of life, from his ghastly landscapes to the degraded choirboys.

Other Jews of the School of Paris were Gottlieb, Zak, Kremegne, Mintchine and the passable Kisling. There were of course many others.

In a 1925 Mercure de France, Vanderpyl, the art critic, wrote in an article "Does a Jewish school of painting exist?":
  • "...but suddenly Israelite painters swarm. In the after-the-war-salons the Levys are legion. Maxime Levy, Irene and Flore Levy, Simon Levy, Geo. Levy-Say, Alkan Levy... without counting the Levys who prefer to exhibit under pseudonyms of less Hebraic assonance – which is one of the habits of the modern Jew – and without mentioning the Cohen, Bloch, Weill, Zadok etc. which one gleans from every page of the catalogues. Whence comes and so immediately, this desire to paint, among the descendants of the ten tribes...? Broking, which is the buying and selling of goods that have no fixed or current values is the typical trade of the Jew. The day that painting became for the many a speculative business the Jew came in..."
This accusation of Jewish commercial manipulations in the art market was met by silence.

Lindsay in Addled Art quotes Rene Guillouin in the Revue Hebdomadaire for January 1938 commenting on this Jewish racket:
  • "In a few years they have become the all-powerful masters of a rich and beautiful domain, traditionally free, the kingdom of the spirit. They have their Press, for making and destroying reputations, and in every country their agents, who pretend to the title of collector, once a noble distinction, are but hucksters and revendors. They 'place' their 'colts', as they call them in their ignoble jargon, in private collections, which accept, sometimes through vanity or weakness, sometimes for ready money, their presence for a time, hung side by side with authentic masterpieces. And they place them in the public collections, in certain museums, never hesitating to arrange a price, or even to present them, to assure for them the official stamp. And while they are busy raising the market price for the small living painter, they lower it for the great dead, buying their work underhand, as a guarantee against the crash which they have always to fear in their other speculations.

    "No words could be strong enough to denounce this last and supreme violation of the spirit at the hands of money."
But the greatest destroyer of them all was Picasso. Oceans of adulation and incomprehensible jargon have been expended on this protean nightmare of a painter, and the flow continues. Any dissident voice is soon forgotten, but that of Sir Lionel Lindsay needs to be recalled. After pointing out that Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881 of Spanish, Jewish and Italian stock, Sir Lionel continues:
  • "As a hierophant of novelty, he remains a representative figure, the unapproached quick-change performer who, at all costs, must astonish his audience.

    "Yet, except for his vitality, there is nothing very Spanish about his mind. Its mercurial restlessness, expediency, flashness, marks not the Andalusian but the Jewish constituent in his character: for he changes colour like a chameleon... At first a painter of promise, he soon became the freak, the world's stunter. He was swift to recognize that the day was to the arriviste, and to paint well required too much time. The race was to the swift, and no-one knew better than the art-boy, Picasso, how to create wonderment swiftly and to bring the Press to his aid and the dealers to his feet. Each fresh audacity, each rabbit from the conjuror's hat, made his shallow audience squirm with delight; and that sardonic mouth must have curled with satisfaction as Picasso watched the cod-eyed groundlings bite on his bait. He was sustained always by the actor's vanity, and unable to live outside a blaze of publicity that stimulated his performance.

    "The earliest example of his work that I have seen (is) a thin imitation of Fortuny. After Fortuny came Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Puvis de Chavannes, Greco and the blue and red periods. Cubism he got from Braque, Negro art from Vlaminck... What do you make of it all? Can you find anywhere a personality seeking expression? Any particular vision that demands utterance? Or merely the spoilt child in the nursery... All these play-boy tricks would have mattered little if they had not been taken seriously, and, through the devices of dealers, found their way into public collections. Pursuing novelty, he is at the mercy of chance and, possessed by his daemon, is driven to seek distraction in change and deformations. Picasso is the complete nihilist. He can be copied, that is all. He can found no school, for the foundation of his work are the quicksands of opportunity. His place is in no gallery of fine art, but in the little museums devoted to social history."
This devastating analysis of the world's most talked-of painter may seem final. But it might be added that Picasso has done the greatest injury to art by his responsibility – also shared by the Jews of the Ecole de Paris – for creating a great confusion of values not only in the limited minds of the public but also in those of weak-minded critics and even in men who are normally perceptive and, one would hope, not susceptible to the blandishments and clamour of the paid manipulator.

Thus Herbert Read dubs Picasso as "careful as Ingres and massive as Michelangelo", Chagall as "painting from the heart" (see illustration!) and Paul Klee as "a supreme draughtsman". Thus everybody has become more and more confused in an ever-increasing welter of third-rate daubing and humbug, and any incipient taste has been undermined at the outset.

To end this article, it is only fair to let Picasso have the last words, written to his friend G. Pagin. They were published in the magazine Von Atelier Zu Atelier 1953, No. 5 and were later re-published in the Munich Süddeutsche Zeitung in December 1955.

Picasso's confession sets the seal on much of the 20th century painting:
  • "The time to look to Art for comfort and exaltation is past, but the over-refined, the rich and the busybodies trying to extract conclusive wisdom out of everything always hope to find something new, unique and unusual. Since the days of cubism and later I have endeavoured to satisfy these lovers and critics with those freakish ideas passing through my head and the less they understood the more they marvelled at me. While I amused myself with this sort of game I became famous and rich and that very quickly too. But when I am alone with myself I have no courage to consider myself an artist in the great and worthy sense. I am just a public joker who gained an insight into his days and has succeeded in exploiting the stupidity, vanity and avidity of his contemporaries. Of course my confession is bitter and painful but at least it has the advantage of being an honest one."
From New Nation, No. 3, Autumn 1982

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