ABSTRACT
A great American scholar has recently published a history of art from the earliest times to the present day. This chapter traces the successive revolutionary movements of French painting from Courbert to Picasso but he never tells us against what the revolutionaries were revolting. As for British art, after Turner it appears not to exist, the Pre-Raphaelites are not even mentioned and, in a history which devotes some attention to Thomas Eakins, Morris and Burne Jones are passed over in silence. It was an age of aesthetic fragmentation. There was schism between groups of artists so that we find two or more completely alien aesthetic principles at work within a society and these of so violently antagonistic a nature that the most assured judgment of one age can be entirely reversed by its successor; that is a situation in which good art is good in a different way to that in which bad art is bad.
