Chapter 35 Chapter 6 Art 1914-1945

The "Paris" painted by surrealist artists is a small "universe"... The external celestial universe is exactly the same as all the objects in this small human world, and it also has crossroads and ghosts. Traffic lights flicker alternately.Life is full of unsolvable related events, entangled and intertwined, and there is an astonishing similarity between the two.The poetic implication of surrealism is to describe this strange place where chaos is orderly. ——Benjamin, "On Surrealism" (WalterBenjamin, One Way Street, 1979, p. 23) The New Constructivism seems to be making little headway in America.... The overzealous advocates of this new style are always babbling, almost distasteful, in the same lecturing tone as those who believed in the flat tax. ... However, after hard work and preaching, so far only the factory architectural design has been influenced by it, and no other believers have followed it.

——American newspaperman Mencken (H.L.Mencken, 1931)