Modern Art - v. 1 Author:Julius Meier-Graefe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FIRST FLORESCENCE OF PAINTING The victorious struggle of planes against line continued with results more and more decisive in the new painting. The Veneti... more »ans, Rubens, Rembrandt and Velazquez were its heroes. In the nineteenth century this tendency was carried to its extreme consequence. The result is undoubtedly the most important acquisition made by our art. If it were the only one, and if the influence on all aesthetic production had been limited to it alone, its apogee would coincide with the nadir of our power to form style. This conclusion, a consequence of the Renaissance idea, is happily an error. We shall see later, on which factors the formation of style devolves in our times, at least, in our abstract art. To deduce the style of our day from our pictures would be as absurd as to deduce Gothic art from Gothic pictures. Painting did not create Gothic. The reverse was rather the case. Painting needed the impetus it received from contemporary style, to free itself from that style. Its destinies can therefore at the most only be accounted symptoms of this liberation, this " degothicisation," if I may coin such a word. On the other hand, the period undoubtedly plays a part in another form in the development of painting, however spasmodic this may seem. Its course may, to a certain extent, be recognised as a phenomenon parallel with the development of the human organ of vision and certain faculties of perception, not in its entirety, but certainly in its most important tendency. The great painters, to whom we owe landscape, from the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century to our own contemporaries, were undoubtedly right, when they showed that there are other things to sec in Nature besides the stylistic line which classicism selected. Our own century played such an im...« less