Volume VI, Issue 3
Author: The Mother
Editor’s Note: The two conversations featured help us understand the evolutionary curve through which Art, like everything else, goes through in manifestation. The relation between Art and the changing aesthetic sensibilities is also explored in these passages.
On Modern Art
Conversation dated 9 April 1951
Disciple: “Why is modern art so ugly?”
The Mother’s Response:
I think the main reason is that people have become more and more lazy and do not want to work. They want to produce before having practised, they want to know before having studied, and they want to become famous before having done anything good…
Now, to tell you the truth, we are climbing up the curve again. Truly, I think we had gone down to the depths of incoherence, absurdity, nastiness ─ of the taste for the sordid and ugly, the dirty, the outrageous. We had gone, I believe, to the very bottom. . .
Recently I saw some pictures which truly showed something other than ugliness and indecency. It is not yet art, it is very far from being beautiful, but there are signs that we are going up again. You will see, fifty years hence we shall perhaps have beautiful things to see. I felt this some days ago, that truly we had come to the end of the descending curve—we are still very low down, but are beginning to climb up.
There is a kind of anguish and there is still a complete lack of understanding of what beauty can and should be, but one finds an aspiration towards something which will not be sordidly material. For a time art had wanted to wallow in the mire, to be what they called “realistic”. They had chosen as “real” what was most repulsive in the world, most ugly: all deformities, all filth, all ugliness, all the horrors, all the incoherences of colour and form; well, I believe this is behind us now. I had this feeling very strongly these last few days.
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Future That is Trying to Manifest
Conversation dated 1 June 1955
I don’t know, perhaps in ten years I shall tell you whether there is something in modern painting. Because I am going to tell you something curious: for the moment I find it downright ugly, not only ugly but stupid; but what is frightening is that it makes you completely sick of all other pictures. When one sees painting as it is done today… for we receive all the time art reviews in which, with much intelligence, are put reproductions of both ancient and modern pictures, and they are put side by side, which makes the thing very interesting, you can see both and compare.
I can’t manage to have yet a very clear notion of beauty in what modern painters do, I confess this, I haven’t yet understood; but what is curious is that they have succeeded in taking away from me all the taste for the painting of old; except some very rare things, the rest seems to me pompous, artificial, ridiculous, unbearable.
Now this means that behind this incoherence and chaos there certainly is, there must be a creative spirit which is trying to manifest.
Sincerity in Art
We have passed from a particular world which had reached its perfection and was declining, this is absolutely obvious. And so to pass from that creation to a new creation (because… well, suppose that it is the forces of ordinary Nature which are acting), instead of passing through a continuous ascent, there was evidently a fall into a chaos, that is, the chaos is necessary for a new creation.
The methods of Nature are like that. Before our solar system could exist, there was chaos. Well, in passing from this artistic construction which had reached a kind of summit, before passing from this to a new creation, it seems to me still the same thing, evidently a chaos. And the impression I have when I look at these things is that they are not sincere, and that’s what is annoying.
It is not sincere: either it is someone who has amused himself by being as mad as possible or perhaps it is someone who wanted to deceive others or maybe deceive even himself, or again, a kind of incoherent fantasy in which one puts a blot of paint in one place and then says immediately, “Why, it would be funny to put it there, and if one put it here, like this, and again if one put this like that, and again…” There, for the moment this is the impression it gives me, and I don’t feel that it is something sincere.
But there is a sincere creative spirit behind, which is trying to manifest, which, for the moment, does not manifest, but is strong enough to destroy the past. That is, there was a time when I used to look at the pictures of Rembrandt, of Titian, of Tintoretto, the pictures of Renoir and Monet, I felt a great aesthetic joy. This aesthetic joy I don’t feel any more. I have progressed because I follow the whole movement of terrestrial evolution; therefore, I have had to overpass this cycle, I have arrived at another; and this one seems to me empty of aesthetic joy.
From the point of view of reason one may dispute this, speak of all the beautiful and good things which have been done, all that is a different affair. But this subtle something, precisely, which is the true aesthetic joy, is gone, I don’t feel it any longer. Of course I am a hundred miles away from having it when I look at the things they are now doing. But still it is something which is behind this that has made the other disappear.
Towards a Formula of New Beauty, New Expression
So perhaps by making just a little effort towards the future we are going to be able to find the formula of the new beauty. That would be interesting. It is quite recently that this impression came to me; it is not old. I have tried with the most perfect goodwill, by abolishing all kinds of preferences, preconceived ideas, habits, past tastes, all that; all that eliminated, I look at their pictures and I don’t succeed in getting any pleasure; it doesn’t give me any, sometimes it gives me a disgust, but above all the impression of something that’s not true, a painful impression of insincerity.
But then quite recently, I suddenly felt this, this sensation of something very new, something of the future pushing, pushing, trying to manifest, trying to express itself and not succeeding, but something which will be a terrific progress over all that has been felt and expressed before; and then, at the same time is born the movement of consciousness which turns to this new thing and wants to grasp it. This will perhaps be interesting. That is why I told you: ten years.
Perhaps in ten years there will be people who have found a new expression. A great progress would be necessary, an immense progress in the technique; the old technique seems barbarous. And now with the new scientific discoveries perhaps the technique of execution will change and one could find a new technique which would then express this new beauty which wants to manifest. We shall speak about it in ten years’ time.
