Word: instinctiveness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...powerful Art Students League. Davis' next teacher was the 1913 Armory Show, which he saw when he was not yet 20. It was sheer emancipation to see that Van Gogh and Gauguin used color, not as nature had it, but almost arbitrarily in accordance with artistic instinct. Davis also discovered that "cubism allowed you to form the concept of the object as you saw it from different views." When he had absorbed the show, he knew what direction he would take: "I would be a modern artist. So easy. Except for one small matter...
...conflict that he experienced during his first jump. "On the one hand is the fact of its safety: you grasp this easily and firmly with the mind. But on the other hand is the emotion of fear. It is so strong that you might want to call it an instinct. It is not, of course. This fear is very useful, and you have learned it from your earliest days of falling out of your high-chair...
Frederick the Great of Prussia, who called himself "the first servant of the state," was as much a tyrant as any monarch of the 18th century, but he liked to say of himself that he was "philosopher by instinct and politician by duty." He was also a patron of the arts. He played the flute to the accompaniment of one of Johann Sebastian Bach's sons; he wrote indifferent poetry under the tutelage of his sometime friend Voltaire; he was an avid collector of paintings and sculpture. In affairs of state, he was Prussian to the bone...
Businessmen, still sharing the general euphoria over the "industrial statesmanship" of the steel contract, were startled by U.S. Steel's unexpected price increase. Their initial instinct was to applaud Roger Blough's dramatic affirmation of the right of a businessman in a democratic, free-enterprise society to set his own prices. But as the week went on, and Blough himself made clear that he had no such defiant design in mind, and had simply underestimated the probable Administration and public reaction, another current of opinion set in. Stupidly handled, even if economically justified, was now the view...
Aside from this instinct, added Sir Kenneth, "it is an incontrovertible fact of history that the greatest art has always been about something, a means of communicating some truth which is assumed to be more important than the art itself. The truths which art has been able to communicate have been of a kind which could not be put in any other way. They have been ultimate truths, stated symbolically." Until the need for such communication is felt again, "the visual arts will fall short of the greatest epochs, the ages of the Parthenon, the Sistine Ceiling and Chartres Cathedral...