Art today is moving in directions
that our forebears couldn’t know.
The Horsemen of Apocalypse
now gallop through the air.
Excitement can be felt all over Europe
as new artists signal to each other from all sides;
a glance, a touch
conveys an understanding.
For we are staunch and true
and in a champagne mood.
I’m trying to make contact with
the tremor and the flow of blood in nature,
in animals and in the air.
I try to make it all into a picture with
new movements and new colors
that reduce old easel paintings to absurdity.
Art frees itself from the desires and needs of men.
We will no longer paint a forest or a horse
as they may seem to us,
but as they really are.
Expressions that seems spectral now
will be thought natural tomorrow.
The feeling of the people for artistic form
can only rise again when
we have wiped from memory
the worn-out jumble of art concepts
from last century.
Religions die, but slowly.
From the words of Franz Marc
Linda Frye Burnham 2014