Comment on England
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Comment on England (1935) is an essay by Geoffrey Grigson first published in the first issue of Axis[1]. The essay features an early use of the term biomorphism.
- "Certain artists have realised this in their practice ; abroad Picasso, Brancusi, Klee, Miro, Hélion ; in England Wyndham Lewis and Henry Moore. Abstractions are of two kinds, geometric, the abstractions which lead to the inevitable death ; and biomorphic."
In his " Elements of Folk Psychology " Wilhelm Wundt describes the way in which the Bakairi of Central Brazil mak e simple geometrical designs on wood, affective through symmetr y and rhythm , and how then they read into these designs " through imaginative association, the memor y images of objects "—snakes, swarms of bees, etc. In these geometrical patterns so interpreted he finds the beginning of formativ e art. Abstract art at this tim e needs (but actually and not only in fancy) to be bodied out in such a way ; to be penetrated and possessed by a mor e varied affective and intellective content. Only so can it answer to the ideological and emotional complexity of the needs of human beings with their enlarged knowledge of the widened country of self.