# The Arts/Volume 1/Issue 2/The Art of John Storrs

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THE ART OF JOHN STORRS
By the Editor
TWO exhibitions were open during the holiday season almost within a stone's throw of each other which showed two opposing tendencies. They were as the oil and the vinegar of a salad, each the complement of the other, each the reaction from the other. I enjoy the life of civilized man, the culture, the traditions of centuries, but when I have had my fill of culture I find nothing more relaxing and, in a way, more stimulating than to spend a few months in the back woods of Maine.
In the exhibition of Roerich we had the relaxation and, in a way, the stimulus of the backwoods, not of Maine, but of Russia, of Finland. In the art of John Storrs we had the culture, the tradition of centuries of Mediterranean civilization. John Storrs is by temperament a Latin, a Greek not a Northerner. His art is no less sane than ​that of Roerich, but his is the sanity of the Mediterranean races. He does not use local color. He is not American, he is a cosmopolitan. Roerich is steeped in the local color peculiar to Russia. Art does not need to have local color, but without it, there is danger that art will become cold as is the sculpture of Flaxman, and, in our day, as the work of Paul Manship. Manship is an eclectic, an artist with a fine sense for beauty of line. He is wholly lacking in appreciation of that more subtle beauty, beauty of the relationship between masses. He sees in terms of line and a sculptor should see in terms of mass. I insist on this because it is a national characteristic. We as artists do not properly appreciate depth. We see as if everything were upon one plane. John Storrs is an American by birth and it was impossible that he should wholly escape this defect in our feeling for form. His sculpture is far more sculptural than that of Manship, but one feels it should be still more sculptural, that it should show a yet stronger perception of mass.
It is in the perception of mass that the classicists have ever excelled, the romanticists in the perception of color. The Mediterranean artists have above all been masters of form, of mass. From the earliest Egyptian times that has been characteristic of them. The danger of classicism is that the artist drop into a formula and that his work become cold. The danger of romanticism is that it become so individualistic that it is no longer comprehensible. I feel that John Storrs has avoided the danger which he had to fear as a classicist. His work is not cold. Some of it is not yet sufficiently personal and I do not feel it adequately expresses the man. The romanticist attains self-expression far more rapidly than the classicist. The classicist has to take up old forms and to give them new life.
Storrs is not yet entirely John Storrs. There are traces of an old academic training. It is coated over with a solid layer of modernism and one feels instinctively that the traces of academic training do not at all represent John Storrs. The modernistic superstructive is far closer to the man, yet even that is not the whole man. The fact that in his latest work one divines his personality far more than in that of a few years back gives much promise for his future success. In a criticism which I wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle, in speaking of the work of John Storrs, I said: "His wood-cuts are even more beautiful than his sculpture." In order that no one should misunderstand me, I shall now add that his sculpture shows far more promise than his wood-cuts.
TWO WOOD-CUTS BY JOHN STORRS