Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning — Reading Notes

A Polemic for Aesthetic Law

Wright’s foreword is a manifesto against democratic art appreciation. He writes that any attempt to democratize art results only in lowering the artistic standard, and that true appreciation cannot grow without understanding aesthetic laws. He compares the irrelevance of narrative qualities in painting to the punctuation in Faust or the words of the Hymn to Joy in the Ninth Symphony. This rhetorical move positions the reader as an initiate who must abandon naïve pleasure for rigorous judgment. The excerpts do not reveal whether Wright sustains this combative tone throughout, but the opening establishes a clear hierarchy: the critic who knows form versus the public swayed by mood.

Gauguin as a Test Case

The extended treatment of Paul Gauguin shows Wright applying his method. He describes Gauguin as a “contented and passionate dreamer” whose art was shaped by a lifelong flight from reality—from banking to Brittany to the Marquesas. Wright recounts Gauguin’s biography in vivid detail: his sea apprenticeship, his Sunday painting under Pissarro’s influence, the violent episode with Van Gogh at Arles, and the final years in the tropics. Yet the analysis remains tethered to the artist’s psychology rather than to formal principles. The excerpts do not show Wright evaluating any specific painting by Gauguin; instead, he uses the life story to explain the “actuating impulses” behind the work. This suggests a tension between the book’s stated aesthetic program and its actual practice.

Structure and Omission

The catalog lists Modern Painting under Architecture and assigns subjects of Painters and Impressionism. The excerpts, however, reveal a book that ranges far beyond Impressionism: the Gauguin section alone touches on Symbolist poets, Martinique, and the Marquesas. Wright’s method is historical and biographical, not strictly formal. The book’s ten text sections and nearly 95,000 words imply a comprehensive survey, but the excerpts offer no evidence of how Wright handles other major figures—Cézanne, Matisse, or Picasso. Readers should note that the foreword’s promise of a purely aesthetic standard may be undercut by the biographical emphasis visible in the Gauguin chapter.

Wright’s book is best approached as a period document that reveals how early twentieth-century critics argued for modern art’s legitimacy. The excerpts show a writer who insists on rigorous standards but often falls back on narrative biography. Readers interested in the history of art criticism will find a revealing case study; those seeking close formal analysis of individual paintings may need to look elsewhere.

That rainy afternoon, Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning kept circling back to Gauguin’s forms—shapes demanding their own logic, not mine. I closed it feeling how ritual can outlive its story. Later, idly, I picked up The Cross in Ritual, Architecture and Art — Key Ideas to Explore, and the same quiet weight was there, in stone and gesture, unsaid.