But Donner, as an old man who has suffered, converts to traditional realism. He and Sophie both speak out against “the child’s garden of easy victories known as the avant-garde.” This argument for well-made art against nonsense and randomness will recur in Travesties and will develop into later debates about the artist’s responsibilities, in The Invention of Love, The Real Thing and The Coast of Utopia. Why shouldn’t art be easy, Martello asks Sophie. “The more difficult it is to make the painting,” she replies, “the more there is to wonder at.” Donner rejects Beauchamp’s tapes as rubbish. Art
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