Bernard Berenson’s World War II diary, Rumor and Reflection,[1] enraptures me for an entire day, but then I stumble upon a sentence in which he confounds abstract art and “visual atheism.”[2] I am stunned that an art critic of his fame and experience, for he was eighty when this was written, could be so blind to the burning mysticism inherent in abstract art. Worse, he was a contemporary of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich. Perhaps it takes an entire generation or maybe two for art critics to catch up with their fellow artists.

Footnotes

1. London: Icon Books, 1963 (first published in 1952).

2. Op. cit., p. 195.