Word: instinctiveness
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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...
Oxford's Sir Kenneth Clark respects and admires the faceless art of abstract expressionism, but he does not think it will be around forever. At Wellesley last week, he prophesied: "The imitation of external reality is a fundamental human instinct which is bound to reassert itself." To prove his point. Sir Kenneth talked about two kinds of painters-apes and children-whom the crudest of critics like to lump with the abstract expressionists...
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...
...showed no sign of regret at abandoning the moneyed and meaningless roles Hollywood had assigned her, knowing with sure instinct that such parts would never be right for a girl born to the tumbling poverty of Italy's back streets. Says one director: "Sophia is perhaps the only movie star who has never forgotten where she came from...