Read "In the American Jungle" by Waldo David Frank online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
When you have done with the latest work on relativity or the theory of quanta, and the once so solid universe has melted into a mere congeries of spaceless, timeless, substanceless vibrations, go to some modern art gallery and bask in the certainties of our painters. For the best of these are men who hold to a reality or are resolved to re-establish it.
From Picasso to Weber, from Marin to Orozco, it is amazing how harmonious most of these painters and sculptors are, in their formal purpose, even in their formal use of color. They are builders of _structure_. Not of architectures or machines: not even, for the most part, of such designs as the fugue or the canon. The structure which they seek to produce is the answer to the chaos which they find about them. It is as if they were plunging through a liquidated world; and as they fall they build-in order to cease falling.