Beauty & the Babble

Modern art may be a riddle to most people, but there are always experts indefatigably willing to try unriddling it. Last week it was the turn of the San Francisco Art Association, which dedicated a two-day symposium to the job.

The Californians thought the recent LIFE "Round Table" on modern art (TIME, Oct. 18) had left a lot of questions dangling because LIFE had excluded artists and concentrated on critics. This time the artists pitched in, too, and livened things up a bit as artists should.

Rubbish & the Retina. The liveliest of all, as usual, was Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a genius in his profession who is not above seizing the center of the stage like an old Shakespearean in a public symposium. Wright kicked off the opening session by proclaiming that modern art was "crime without passion." The paintings up for discussion (including two Picassos, two Matisses, and Symposium Participant Marcel Duchamp's famous Nude Descending a Staircase) were, Wright averred, "just rubbish." A gasp of shocked disagreement went around the table, but no one seemed to want to take him up on it directly.

Strangely enough, Wright later found an ally of sorts in Duchamp, who doesn't have to make a living by his art, and long ago ceased to dish it out. In the '20s he abandoned painting for chess; now, a solemn, stick-thin 62, he plays a tournament-caliber game. Duchamp readily conceded that "the element common to all modern art since the impressionists is [that it] doesn't go beyond the retina." That was what a lot of puzzled people had been saying in the simpler phrase, "I don't get it."

At the second session the artists turned on the critics. French Composer Darius Milhaud, who had been invited to speak for the musicians, remarked that he had never learned anything from critics, "but I still have hopes." Wright put it more roughly, "I have learned ... to avoid the critic by all the means in my power."

Paint & Plug. That made dapper, bespectacled Andrew C. Ritchie of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art lose his temper. He had been led to believe, he said, that humility was a necessary quality in both critics and artists, and he was "distressed" to find that Architect Wright had so little of it. Without going into any detailed defense of modern art, Ritchie took the occasion to tag Wright's earlier attack on the exhibits as "pure nonsense."

By the final session the conferees were cooler, if a little wilted. Their three-point conclusion: 1) the artist should have freedom to produce what he wants to, 2) the public should continue to accept what it likes and reject the rest, 3) the critic should keep on plugging away to explain the artists to the public. Beyond these obvious and non-controversial propositions, the conferees found that they had decided nothing at all.

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