Twentieth-Century painting [antikvár]

Introduction It seems an impossible task to consider the art of the twentieth Century - the Century we live in, whose second third is still not over - from a single, unified standpoint. A common denominator could be found for the European art (particularly the painting) of earlier centuries. Différent stylistic concepts have been deduced from the différent ages, usually equated with centuries, and the changes in them have been traced in connexion with changes in human culture; rhythms and breaks in the histor-ical development of visual art have been discerned. But, when it comes to describing, interpreting and weighing our own age, the whole arsenal of criticai and historical ideas seems to be inadequate. Not only do we lack the distance in time without which a wider survey is impossible, but the multiplicity and variety of the phenomena which are crowded into the short historical space of the last seventy-five years seem to condemn to failure any unified approach to this period. Nevertheless, in this book I will attempi to view the development of visual art, and above all painting, from a single standpoint, and from one which by no means starts out from the often contradictory formal characteristics of contemporary art, but tries to demónstrate the common intellectual content in this very variety of formai characteristics. The question that must be asked at the beginning of any attempi to view twentieth-century painting as a whole concerns the 'laws it follows' - in other words, the principies that determine its form and essence and govern its development at every stage. The studies of the last hundred years have shown that these are not scientific laws prescribing the germination, maturity and decline of each artistic trend, but rather a reflection of man's outlook on life at the time - which is why for some seventy years they have been thought of as a 'will to form'. What, then, is this law, this 'will to form' which is equally valid for every trend of the art of this Century, and which is closely, essentially