Word: visional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...William Ernest Hocking nevertheless sees the problem. "Corporate officialdoms," he says, "are helpless and barren?the parties, bureaus, departments, cabinets, commissions?barren because of the inner cancellation of each other's certitudes. The composite program, prudentially polished, has every virtue in it but life. Where there is no personal vision, the people perish." And the late Whitney Griswold put it thus: "Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals...
There are those who neither rebel nor assert egos but are consumed by a vision, like Buddha, Pascal, St. Joan, Mary Baker Eddy. There are the converts who see a sudden or a slow light for which they surrender their past, like St. Paul or Mary Magdalene or Cardinal Newman. There are those who are willing to defy the class or service to which they belong, like Savonarola or Franklin D. Roosevelt or Billy Mitchell, and those who fulfill their individuality in the sometimes more difficult discipline of submission...
...neither a rebel nor a conservative, but a conserver. He was no artist, except in using public language and in using men. His life was an infinitely varied mixture of leading and following, conforming and defying. He could temporize, compromise, and maneuver. But he always held to his own vision and met the exacting definition of an individual set down by French Philosopher Georges Bernanos: "A man who gives himself or refuses himself, but never lends himself...
...That which is most real to me," said Delacroix, "is the illusions that I create with my work. The rest is shifting sand." Each artist has his own vision, and part of it is left with those who will stop to share it. But in the best of the shows of May 1963, there is something in common: the "inner necessity" of which the Blue Rider movement spoke, combined with a sense of interdependence. From ancient Greece to Rodin to Lipchitz is a distant course but logical. From the lushness of Delacroix to the colored orchestrations of the Fauves...
...shaken as we are, so wan with care," Simons growls in the manner of a jumpy but undeniably vigorous bullfrog, establishing a style that never leaves him. Not a word of the part inclines me to believe anything but that Henry is chiefly a moraliser, that saving his vision of Jerusalem his is unimaginative, that his health is bad, and that his principal outward characteristic is almost uncanny self-restraint. Simons displays none of these qualities; their essential counterpoise to those of Hal is smothered...