There Must Be Some One Quality Without

All Sensitive People Agree That There Is A Peculiar Emotion Provoked By Works Of Art.

It Is The Mark Of Great Art That Its Appeal Is Universal And Eternal.............. Great Art Remains Stable And Unobscure Because The Feelings That It Awakens Are Independent Of Time And Place, Because Its Kingdom Is Not Of This World. To Those Who Have And Hold A Sense Of The Significance Of Form What Does It Matter Whether The Forms That Move Them Were Created In Paris The Day Before Yesterday Or In Babylon Fifty Centuries Ago? The Forms Of Art Are Inexhaustible; But All Lead By The Same Road Of Aesthetic Emotion To The Same World Of Aesthetic Ecstasy.

Genius Worship Is The Inevitable Sign Of An Uncreative Age.

What Quality Is Shared By All Objects That Provoke Our Aesthetic Emotions? Only One Answer Seems Possible— Significant Form. In Each, Lines And Colors Combined In A Particular Way; Certain Forms And Relations Of Forms, Stir Our Aesthetic Emotions. These Relations And Combinations Of Lines And Colors, These Aesthetically Moving Forms, I Call ‘significant Form’; And ‘significant Form’ Is The One Quality Common To All Works Of Visual Art.

Art And Religion Are, Then, Two Roads By Which Men Escape From Circumstance To Ecstasy. Between Aesthetic And Religious Rapture There Is A Family Alliance. Art And Religion Are Means To Similar States Of Mind.