Art Criticism - The State University of New York

music that (like the Mona Lisa) has lost any thrust and heat it once had. But the
dedicated artist who wants to be like the universally respected spiritual helper
of yesteryear must leap over the avant garde esthete's snobbish antithesis of
abstraction to the Hegelian synthesis of strong em0tion, using folk elements
as compost for communication.
One could compare the international style in architecture and in
constructivist painting to the musical kit that was sent out from Germany to
colonize America in the Eighteenth Century, a Haydnesque basic language
that could be easily adapted to the wilderness. Hasn't Abstract Expressionism
become even more of such a lingua franca, more flexible and personality-sustaining
than Mondrian's and Corbusier's dogma? American music languished
in the Nineteenth Century because'of the repla