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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (April 13, 1973)
Commentary The last great giant killer By GARY WILLS He jotted down masterpieces the way executives do memos. He worked in job lots, dropping twenty or so Madonnas into his account, or a hundred guitars chromatically disassembled. But no matter how prolific or repetitive he became, he was unchallengeably the major visual artist of the century. He was to the plastic art what Pound was to poetry, Joyce to the novel, or Stravinsky to music. Picasso’s death reminds us we have lost three of these giants in roughly the space of one year. Pound, Stravinsky and Picasso had outlived most of their contemporaries; and none of their suc cessors has managed to lode like he belonged in their league. One reason for that is simply stated. Our giants were giant-killers. They undid the monumental art forms of the 19th century. The old painting, or novel, or symphony was accumulative, serial, and social; each settled into the society it reflected and criticized. Modern art is a matter of in dividual raids and eccentric scurryings; dry, analytic, critical — standing off from everything else in a risky isolation. The 19th century ended in a rich sunset of painterly values. What came next was a kind of nonpainting, light as the rapid calligraphy of Matisse, airy and disem bodied, cubist blueprints of reality, or X ray photographs. Picasso is, in his obituaries, being called a painter. The word misleads. Painting is the deliberation of a patina, textured, growing, existing in its own haze. But color is often an afterthought in Picasso, or a distraction. There is little difference between the sketch and the finished painting for a work like “Boy With a Horse.” His pink and blue periods were created by smearing a faint mist of those colors over clean line drawings. In “Guernica” and “Charnel House” he painted down to the level of newsprint — these are horror stories done in the style of a report. Paintings were finished things. Picasso created a thousand brilliant fragments. Ongoing reports, or satirical asides. It was not that he could not paint — he did an apple for Gertrude Stein in the style of Cezanne. But that style he would indulge only as an exercise — for he had come to destroy it, as surely as Stravinsky destroyed the style of Brahms, or Pound destroyed that of Tennyson. Joyce might write a long novel, but it was not the novel of Tolstoy or Flaubert or Dickens. It was a weave of puzzles and poetry held together from outside by learning, not by internal energies of plot and character. “Ulysses” is a loving satire of the novel, as Stravinsky’s “Rake’s Progress” is of the opera form. No one has followed in the tracks of this century’s giants because even they could not go far beyond their first breakthrough —beyond the “Rite of Spring,” the women of Avignon, the first “Cantos,” or “Ulysses.” Their breakthrough was, in each case, something of a breakdown. These men had a technique of critical analysis and dissection. But when they were through criticizing, they could not put the corpse back together again. And no one else has, either. They could only turn their technique into a mannerism (e.g., “Finnegan’s Wake”), or scribble more fragments in a kind of absentminded frenzy (e.g., Picasso’s later etchings). It is dangerous to master the art of not painting. Picasso seemed, in each of his actual works, to reveal something less than his whole talent; he is never carried beyond it. He stunned with a dazzling variety of skills, but not with wisdom, wholeness, or creation. The giant-killers worked awesome deeds, but our world is a bit duller for its loss of giants. And now it is further darkened by the dying of the last great giant-killer. Letters Recalling Johnson I am prompted to write as a result of Barry Mitzman’s perceptive review, in the April 6 issue of the Emerald of journalism professor Ken Metzler’s new book, Con frontation: The Destruction of a College President (Nash, 1973). Publication of Metzler’s analysis of the tragic death of Charles E. Johnson, acting president of the University of Oregon in 1968-69 has been the occasion of recollecting my own “peculiar con nectedness” to the man whose untimely death occured on June 17, I960, when his Volkswagen smashed head-on into a logging truck on UJS. Highway 126. Even now, almost four years later, the circumstances surrounding that oc currence remain indelibly etched in my memory. On that fateful morning, my family heard the first news of the smash-up on our car radio as we were leaving home for our first extended drive out U .S. 126 toward the Cascades. Initially the radio news report did not identify the driver of the Volkswagen or his condition, pending notification of family. Our drive took us past the almost totally demolished Volks and upon seeing it we remarked that the driver must certainly have perished, still not knowing his identity. It was not until late that evening that we learned that we liad earlier seen the death car of Charles E. Johnson. I joined the University of Oregon faculty In September 1968 after leaving another university in the Pacific Northwest where [ had become a catalytic irritant in an academic freedom controversy. Against that background, during the 1968-69 school year I developed a deep respect for Acting President Johnson as a pmuon who un derstood the true character of a university In a democracy and who was willing to maintain a mature, unswerving loyalty to the ideal of responsible academic freedom even in the face of the damnable political social pressures which characterized the period of his tenure as administrative head at the University. As a constant reminder to myself of what the University of Oregon should be all about, I keep within easy reach on my desk the following excerpt from a letter sent by Charles Johnson to a legislator in December 1968: “A University must be a place where it is possible to bring up for examination all ideas, good and bad, offensive and inof fensive, well expressed or badly ex pressed, in the firm conviction that through this process those of value will find ultimate acceptance in a free en terprise democracy and those of little or no worth will find their rightful place in the wastebasket.” Ronald J. Rousseve Professor, Education and CSPA PRGhu inanity Here in our Democracy we may cheerfully burn each other up with wards now and then...but that’s a notable im provement over Calvin roasting Servetus on a slow fire, Mary putting the torch to Cranmer, and the imaginative Elizabethan variation (hanging, drawing and quartering). I am the researcher “who made Morality into a Science” and so am obliged to speak “with authority and not as the scribes”: (I didn’t say journalists, I said scribes). Both Tom Mascott’s “chaotic energy” and Douglas Braton’s “ordered energy” call for clarification: Religionists dote on saying “All this civilization of ours and the protoplasmic miracle of a live homo sapiens (as distinguished from a homo insapiens, not known to classifier Linnaeus 225 years ago but now discovered) could not possibly have came to pass simply by chance.” Certainly not. Nor by the non-existence of an “Almighty.” If there were such a being existent, it is not possible but that its existence could not avoid being detected by cme of our five specialized senses...or the unspecialized sixth one, commonly and scientifically called ESP. Here’s the answer: The reason we are here is by the quite well known (except to religious psychotics: people who would rather speak of the disparate molecules of the dead protoplasm of Jesus as “the truth” (John 14:6) than so much as accept a bit of paleontology from a paragraph heading in Encyclo Brittanica: “THE ROCK RECORD”) fact of Evolution. We’re here by Evolution...and it’s not discontinuous but continuous from non-life mi into life. It happens thus always in an Earth type of planet when cooling produces the optimum temperature: Certain highly Evolved forms of inanimate matter Evolve right on into the first live matter: Unicell. ABILITY TO EVOLVE are the key words and il*t watchword in this non negligible matter. (The Stoic ...Philosophy Dept, please note and come on in...were groping for exactly those words when they said: “A universal reason permeates everything, inanimate as well as animate”). I particularly hope Ronald Ronald will join in rejoicing that our American free enterprize has enabled us to Evolve Marxism-Leninism-socialism-humanism into this (practically perfect) dictum: “From each according to his highest skill; to each according to his worth to PROhumanity. PROhumanity is all will to defend the interest of homo sapiens.” I’ll write a commentary. Please don't wait for it. PROhuman williams (sic; name ordered by court) Education ’36. For Murray—Garrett I am hpapy to strongly support the election erf Darrell Murray as ASUO president. I have known Darrell closely for several years and have observed these qyakutues in him: First Darrell is industrious. He has had to work hard to support himself through high school and college. He knows what hard work is, and he knows how to work hard. Second, Darrell is honest. He states his opinions forthrightly, and bases them on well thought-out reasons. Third, Darrell is intellectually sharp. He brings a good balance of knowledge, perception, and judgement to the ASUO presidency, a position which needs this type of person. Fourth, Darrell is concerned. He is concerned about campus problems that affect students, faculty and ad ministration. I believe that Darrell can effectively influence in a positive, progressive way decisions as they relate to student government leadership. I am pleased to commend Darrell highly to this position. Glenn M. Gordon, M.D. Former Chairman Eugene Committee to End the War 'I WAS ALWAYS THANKFUL HE WASN'T A POLITICAL CARTOONIST!'
