Apes Never Improve

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.

"Apes take their painting seriously," said Sir Kenneth seriously. "The patterns they produce are not the result of mere accident but of intense, if short-lived concentration and a lively sense of balance and space-filling. If you compare the painting of a young ape with that of a human child of relatively the same age, you will find that in the first, expressive, patternmaking stage, the ape is superior.

Then, inexorably, the child begins to paint things--man, house, truck, etc. This the ape never does." He does not develop because he lacks the child's impulse to record what he sees. If the desire to represent external reality reflects the loftier idea of "the formation of concepts, which are then modified by visual sensation," the image is bound to return. "For I consider the human faculty of forming concepts at least as inalienable as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

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."

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