Rococo to Cubism in art and literature

Uittreksel

"... I have assumed tha a genuine style is an expression of a prevailing, dominant, or authentically contemporary view of the world by those artists who have most successfully intuited the quality of human experience peculiar to their day and who are able to phrase this experience in forms deeply congenial to the thought, science and technology which are part of that experience. This is an expression not easily achieved. A style is born slowly, after many efforts, false starts, and mistakes. All these difficulties, all these deviations are inevitable, for any age comes only indirectly to a consciousness of what it believes about the world in which it exists: and there is always the inclination to phrase comtemporary experience in the idiom of past experience - which, of course, is what gives continuity to the History of the arts." - Back cover.