Like an Irish stew, modern art is made up of many ingredients, some good, some bad, some indifferent. It displays various styles, trends, influences. At times there is breath-taking originality and imagination, inspiration or vision. But one also finds less admirable qualities: shallowness, banality, slovenliness, inexcusable distortions, even a cult of the ugly. Thus modern art is highly variable. Consequently it would be unwise to give an unqualified yes or no to our question.

The dictionary meaning of dehumanise is to ‘divest of human characteristics.’ In our context we must go further and understand the word as meaning: to disregard essential human values; to ride rough shod over those things that man as man ought to respect or hold dear. Let me remark paradoxically that the subject of a work of art may be a human being; the treatment may be lush with human sentiment; yet the work may be largely dehumanised. On the other hand, a work may lack all intimate human touches and even a human subject; yet if may be not at all dehumanised. For the whole handling may issue from the deepest wells the artist as a man possesses. Take the typical, nineteenth-century academy portrait of a young lady. Very sweet and human, but quite superficial and even largely dehumanised. For the only ‘humanised’ element about it is that it represents a girl instead of a giraffe. The more the work of art expresses the significantly human, the more humanised it is; the less it stresses this, the more dehumanised it is. Hence, the portraitist that skips over a man’s physique in order to accentuate his character and mind, his cherished ideals and aspirations, produces a more ‘humanised’ work than the mere photographer. Likewise with religious art. One contrasts the Renaissance treatment of the Madonna-and-Child theme with the handling of it by the Byzantine artists. From the point of view of anatomy, naturalism, maternal tenderness, the Renaissance treatment is far superior. The Byzantine artists give us few human touches. Often far from yearning towards one another, Mother and Child look straight out of the picture at the viewer; there is little or no portraiture; the figures are starched and angular. Yet which school is the more dehumanised? Surely, the Renaissance. The Byzantine artists rise far better to the challenge of the theme, to its sublimity. They convey a sense of majesty and mystery. Luminously they make us aware that here is a peerless woman, a unique child — God’s Mother and himself in the flesh. Thus in the Byzantine rather than in the Renaissance school, creative inspiration reaches its zenith. One has a humanisation in the sense of loftiest expression of the human spirit. Nothing can be more humanised than that.