Henry Varnum Poor, Resident Artist Lecture 1953

Henry Varnum Poor gives a lecture talking about why he believes that the present day situation for contemporary painting is so confused. Poor begins this thought process by stating how the orderly progression of painting came to the end with Picasso. With the arrival of Picasso, instead of any singleness of intention, there are now so many differences that there is no accepted tradition of painting anymore. This has triggered the development of a hundred ways to paint, and developed a hundred points of view, which can create confusion because of a lack of a singleness in tradition. Poor goes further stating that Imagery is an essential part of painting, and that abstract painting has also become a new medium, due to its ability to raise the element of decoration into another dimension by making it emotional, injecting it with a force, and being imbued with a power that it has never had before and seeing how far that power can be carried. Poor uses these histories to tell the participants that they–as artists– should always push back against tradition. Poor elaborates on this point by stating that the real quality of a work of art must always lie in the tension between imagery plus the abstract qualities of art. As soon as one completely overpowers one or the other, the art work will become completely dead, giving the example that just as when one eliminates all qualities of design and composition from a painting, it also becomes dead. Poor ends his lecture by stating that artists should never lose track of their own contact with the world. Every painter who is any good paints out of the sense of excitement and rediscovery of the world around them, and that rediscovery will always be influenced by how other painters have rediscovered this before them.