So often L'Ecole declines to petty larceny, the desciple
to a pickpocket who picks merely the lining, missing the
aesthetic specie.

Surrealism was the latest movement to produce a novelty
for our intellectual concern. Although, ethically, hindered by
its ingenuity of Evil, it was sufficiently valid to take part
in that series of ocular surprise propelling the history of art.

It's theoretic contrivance for somersaulting reason into
an "Alician" world of topsy-turvy logic, remains only vaguely
familiar to my memory, perhaps because I find modern phychiatries
shallow. So although, visually, it greatly entertained me my
conclusive reaction to much of it was "Black Magic". But I was
taken aback to read corroboration by a critic, one of a genus I
imagined would refuse to touch such a term with tongs.

Someone once remarked on the conceptual discrepancies be-
tween Heaven and Hell in old masters' frescos. Indeed their
so variously shapen monsters, intensive physiognomy of terror,
endless inabilities to escape pronged instruments of torture,
displayed a plenitude of ideate design obviously out of scale in
comparison to the Beatified inertia of their Paradise; due, in-
disputably to the defiance of intellect by the sublime.

This is brought home to us on the Sistine ceiling, where
through incompetence of intellect to extend to comprehension of
and thus presentation of, The Originator, Michael Angelo managed
the portrayal of merely a rather angry old man, while the Adam
of His improvisation, being human, therefore concievable, shows
actually somewhat of the divine - an element in greatest art -

powerful enough to suffuse the face of Adam with the total
aspirations toward the inexpressible inherent to subsequent
mankind. *

Instantly on entering Egan Gallery I was intrigued by my
comparative recognition of that atmosphere of enduring elevation
one's mind inhales on entering certain ancient European Cath-
edrals induced by centuries of aspiration to consort with the
transcendent: - a form of mental indulgence at present sparsely
popular.

Music is the only transcendency communicable to us all, here
in this bird cage diocese prevailed on optic music seductive as
juvenile voices of Bach choristers from the school originated
by Johann Sebastian himself.

Why has humanity lost its olden concentration on the
sublime? It does not serve as entertainment.

Mondial life, with all its exaspiration, does. It interests,
intrigues, amuses; provides for the ingenious, inexhaustible
opportunities for aesthetic recombination of its recognisable
elements. We can play with it.

There seems to be no other inspiration the human intellect
so far is able to objectify. The sublime, t'would seem, does not
solidify.

Hence my distinction: comparative recognition. Whence I
deduce the extreme importance of Cornell. For in this conversion
of Cathedral elation, we are for the first time served sublime
entertainment in lieu of "awe".

* Since then the symbolism of divinity has become sometimes completely inept. I have seen a crucifiiction in Peru, so ugly, so bloodily bedecked, as to induce an aesthetic ailment.

4.

Is it not noteworthy that Surrealism in veritable finale
of figuration: my presentation of that which is, as something
exceeding the abstract.....the impossible, should have bred,
within its own phantasmal precincts, its own negation.

From black to white magic in one movement.

For almost as though it had been better described as
sub-realism, Cornell, while theoretically adhering to surrealist
formula alone has raised it above reality, having achieved an
incidence of the sublime solidified.

When formerly I saw his palace with windows this exceptional ability of Joseph Cornell led to my plea that he make an object of magnitude: the Kingdom of Heaven.

He shrugged off my suggestion, intelligently. This was
a faux-pas on my part because it is not the concern of evol-
utional conscience to reinvoke a concept of cosmic equilibrium
degenerated to interminable harping on countless harps.

The Futurist's Boss once insisted to me he had the right
to sign his own name to the most revered of masterpieces had
he the wits to appreciate it; which might infer that a work of
art exists in recognition......I wondered if a universe ensued
from a nostalgia of the Gods for an audience.

Eventually Surrealism qualified this presumptuous claim
of borrower's rights.When Max Ernst masterpieced a wonder-
world he brought into new-view by the cutting up and re-
arrangement of dead engravers' illustrations.

A contemporary brain weldling a prior brain as a more
potent implement than a paint-brush.

Thus this appropriation of others' handiwork is not pilfer-
ing, but lifting out of the past another's sight tinged with that