On Art - Addresses and Writings

Appendix

An extract from " A Study of History " by Toynbee may be cited here to stimulate the critical consideration of modern art:

" The prevailing tendency to abandon our artistic traditions is not the result of technical incompetence; it is the deliberate abandonment of a style which is losing its appeal to a rising generation because this generation is ceasing to cultivate its aesthetic sensibility on the traditional Western lines. We have willfully cast of our souls the great Masters who have been the familiar spirits of our forefathers; and, while we have been wrapped in complacent admiration of the spiritual vacuum that we have created, a Tropical African spirit in music and dancing and statuary has made an unholy alliance with a pseudo-Byzantine spirit in painting and bas-relief, and has entered in to dwell in a house which is found swept and garnished. The decline is not technical in its origin but spiritual."

" Our abandonment of our traditional artistic technique is manifestly the consequence of some kind of spiritual breakdown in our Western civilization,"