Dehumanized Nightmares

Author-Critic Lewis Mumford is a hard maa to please. As the nation's most critical sidewalk superintendent, he has long pointed out to modern "builders their mistakes in design and long-range planning. In his big, philosophizing books (The Condition of Man, The Culture of Cities, Technics and Civilization), he is just as ready to point out what he considers the mistakes of history. This week, in the first of a series of Columbia University lectures on art in the machine age, Critic Mumford leveled his sights on soth Century painting:

"In those special realms of art, above all painting, that once recorded the greatest freedom and creativeness, we find in our age that the symbols of the deepest expression of emotion and feeling are a succession of dehumanized nightmares . . .

"Undoubtedly one of the great pictures of our day is Picasso's Guernica mural, just as he himself is one of the greatest artists of our time . . . But the fresh symbols that come forth from this masterly hand reveal the scars and shocks of our sad era, with not even the faintest hints of a new integration ... At times the emotion is so lacerating that the next step beyond would be either insanity or suicide, violence and nihilism; the death of the human personality. This is the message that modern art brings to us at its purest."

Picasso is not the only offender, according to Mumford. "The maimed fantasies, the organized frustrations that we see in every comprehensive exhibition of painting today are the evidence of a deeper personal abdication. Pattern and purpose have all but disappeared, along with the person who once, in his own right, embodied them. Man has become an exile in this mechanical world, or even worse, he has become a displaced person."

The reason Mumford gives for modern art's parlous state: "When society is healthy, the artist re-enforces its health; but when it is ailing, he too easily re-enforces its ailments."

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