Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and PoetsHartley, Marsden
History
Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
Hartley, Marsden
Art; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism; Vaudeville
These sentences, out of a letter to a near friend, and the marginalia
written upon the edges of many of his drawings, show the varying
degrees of delicacy Rex was eager to register and make permanent for
his own realization. His thought was once and for all upon the
realities, that is, those substances that are or can be realities
only to the artist, the poet, and the true dreamer, and Rex Slinkard
was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of
himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so poetic painter.
He had learned early for so young a man what were his special
idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for
refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of
being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual
application into the proper and requisite calm. He lived in a
thoroughly ordered world of specified experience which is typified in
his predilection for the superiority of Chinese notions of beauty over
the more sentimental rhythms of the Greeks. He had found the proper
shade of intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental
expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality that gave him
more than the platonic. He was searching for a majesty beyond
sensuousness, by which sensuous experience is transformed into greater
and more enduring shades of beauty. He wanted the very life of beauty
to take the place of sensuous suggestion. Realities in place of
semblances, then, he was eager for, but the true visionary realities
as far finer than the materialistic reality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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