Why

Most people regard most paintings with total apathy if they regard them at all. Most painters decry this inattention; some will even admit that in this day their art has become a weak one, fostered by artificial and injurious enthusiasms. Precisely why should it be less fun to look at paintings than to read books is a question for which there are many answers. Lee Simonson, able editor of Creative Art, suggested one last week. He wrote: "The modernity of the painter today reveals itself just as much in what he paints as the way he paints it. That change can be summarized by saying, that formerly the subject of a picture was a text whereas today it has become a pretext "The reason that sustained support of modern art is so difficult to maintain, is that even our most indubitably gifted moderns have so little passionate conviction about the things that they want to paint, or the necessity for painting them. "The vitality of any art, even in its most formal and purely aesthetic aspect, depends on some theme which is a living factor in the existence of a whole people and which colors their emotions and motivates their lives. . . . "To say that pictures need not, or should not, tell a story is to state the problem falsely. In all great epochs of art, the painter's subject was already a story with which generations of poets, philosophers and visionaries had moved the hearts and stirred the minds of men. "If the painter is to survive he must make his job a necessary one. . . ."