Cross stared. The wife of a Communist leader painting nonobjectively?

“You don’t like nonobjective painting, do you?” she asked, putting a soft challenge in her voice. 

“But I do; absolutely,” he answered honestly. “Say, I’ve a theory about it -”

“You have?” she sad, but she did not look at him. She was evidently struggling with herself. Then impulsively: “I’d like to hear it.”

“Well, you see, maybe my notion is kind of far-fetched,” he began, glad that they had at last found some common ground. “Nonobjective painting expresses the dominant consciousness of modern man…Sounds corny, huh? But I mean it.” He hesitated, wondering what approach would get beneath her reserve. “Modern consciousness is Godlessness and nonobjective painting reflects this negatively. There is really no nonobjective painting without either a strong assumption of atheism or an active expression of it, whether the nonobjective painter realizes it or not…”

“We agree so far,” she said as thought thinking of something else.

“I mean Godlessness in a strict sense,” he argued. “There is nothing but us, man, and the world that man has made. Beyond that, there’s nothing else. The natural world around us which cradles our existence and which we claim we know is just a huge, unknowable something or other…We may find out how it works, discover some of its so-called laws, but we don’t know it and can’t know it…Nature’s not us; it’s different. A part of us is nature, but that part of us that’s human and free is opposed to nature. What there is of the natural worlds that seems human to us is what we have projected out upon it from our own hearts. We created cities, roads, factories, ect. Sunset, waterfalls, and landscapes are but a few accidental aspects of nature that we happen to like, that somehow reflect moods of ours…So we are prone to forget all of the other phases of nature that are terrible, inhumane, and alien to us…Now, my notion is that since this is true, that the world we see is the world we make by our manual or emotion projection, why not let us be honest and pain our own projections, our fantasies, our own moods, our own conceptions of what things are. Let’s paint our feelings directly. Why let objects master us? Let’s take forms, planes, surfaces, colors, volumes, space, ect., and make them express ourselves by our arrangement of them. It’s an act of pure creation…”

“You’ve said it,” she exclaimed looking fully at him for the first time. “I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

“Not many people feel like that,” she said. “I’d not have thought that a colored person would like nonobjective art. Your people are so realistic and drenched in life, the world…Colored people are so robustly healthy.”

“Some of us,” he said

“Any you’re not? How did that happen?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “Some people are pushed deeper into their environment and some are pushed completely out of it.”

“Do you feel that much aloneness?” she asked in surprise. 

“Yes; and you?”

“Yes,” she said simply and was silent.

These two pages were so beautiful, that I couldn’t resist sharing them.