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Confusion in the arts

by
Anthony M. Ludovici

The Contemporary Review 192, 1957, pp. 106–110


- p. 106 -
For some time now a certain school of artists has been inviting the public to accept as authentic products of the plastic and graphic arts, works which depart so sharply from what centuries of tradition have accustomed it to regard as such that the bewilderment, let alone the repulsion, it feels, can have failed to be pushed to the extreme of a loud protest only because in matters aesthetic either too much modesty or too much snobbery prevents a secret sense of outrage from reaching expression. The modest among the public, hearing the merits of such works trumpeted by cliques of champions and critics assumed to be responsible and expert, hold their peace. They disapprove, but are inclined to ask themselves, "After all, what do I know about it? Who am I to object?" The snobs, on the other hand, dreading to appear reactionary or low-brow, stifle their instinctive repugnance and feign the admiration that seems to be authoritatively enjoined. As, moreover, no Art-canons exist, and most modern art-criticism is little more than sophisticated verbiage resting on no accepted rules and principles, the average man is left to resign himself disconsolately

- p. 107 -
to yet one further unwelcome innovation. Yet, if the modest would but trust their feelings to the point when their diffidence would be overcome, and if the snobs would only take courage and be more sincere, both parties would be astonished to find how right their smothered misgivings about this new Art have been all along, and, united, would join in a chorus of condemnation. It is not enough for a great artist like Sir Alfred Munnings publicly to arraign this pseudo-art and question its validity. For, although his distinguished achievements lend impressive weight to his artistic judgements and his vehemence finds a grateful echo in our breast, he offers us no incontrovertible principles to vindicate our secret feelings and give us the right to trust him. Nor can the average man be expected to know how the confusion arose which now seems to justify all these art-products that bewilder him. If he knew their genesis, however, he could perhaps identify the moment in recent history when the first fundamental blunder was made, which by degrees grew into the heterodox doctrines on which these perplexing art products are based. For it is all recent history, and the scene opens in France not much earlier than 1860.
        At that time the Academy, the official school of Art, was bankrupt and exhausted. With its stuffy studio atmosphere and lighting, its artificial effects, its cardboard classicism and "subject" pictures and sculptures, it had degenerated into a company of tradesmen purveying "oleographs" and polished drawing room pedestal statuettes for the least tasteful art-patrons in the population. It had become, as Jacques said, a society of mere "illustrators." Against the Academy were arrayed all the malcontents consisting of the refusés, and these were by no means only incompetents smarting under the humiliation of having had their works rejected. Many of them were more richly endowed. They thought they knew the sickness that had overtaken the Academy and how it could be cured, and stood for many things the Academy scorned or had not thought of — Light, Air, Life, a Reformed Palette and new ways of seeing and recording what was seen. They were the first Impressionists and the forebears of even the least comprehensible forms of modern Art.
        The opportunity to effect desirable reforms was obviously favourable; for the classic convention of the Academicians had certainly lost touch with Life, and they included many time-serving mercenaries destitute of genius. These men would have acquired a new vitality, an improved graphic and plastic rhetoric, by adopting some of their adversaries' teaching. They were undoubtedly studio-bound and their newest works were already second-hand in their remoteness from Nature. But, to effect a cure, it was essential that the diagnosis should be correct, and here the Impressionists made their first blunder. In their ardour to expose and overcome the evils of the Academy school, they mistook a symptom for a cause. They imagined that the shortcomings of the Academicians' technique were the sole root of the trouble, and thus, insensibly, they ended by making fetishes of what they accused the Academicians of lacking. The means whereby they proposed to reform Academic methods, they proclaimed as ends. In their enthusiasms, they forgot that to banish blacks, browns and umbers from the painter's palette, to induce him to grant importance to Light and Atmosphere, and to convince him that Arrangement, Composition and Colour Schemes were the major, if not the only, interest in a picture, could neither improve inspiration nor create artistic passion where both were defective. Whistler was probably right when he said that a

- p. 108 -
picture should look as far behind its frame as the scene it depicted was distant from the painter. But this, like many other new rules, was no cure for the impoverished gifts of the Academicians and many of their contemporaries outside the Academy.
        All such innovations could do was to give the artist, good or bad, the technical equipment to be more arresting and convincing than theretofore, better able to pass on to the beholder at least some of the vital spark received by his closer touch with Nature. But, such were the freshness and vigour which the new technique imparted to the works of even the least gifted of the Impressionists' camp-followers, many of whom could not have vied with the Academician, Ingres, in technical mastery of the old style, that gradually there grew up a faith, a fanaticism, in connection with technical changes alone, which superseded all other considerations. There can be little doubt that these changes were fondly expected to regenerate Art overnight, whether the human material to hand were or were not more gifted than that which had produced the Academicians of the classic convention, or whether or not our present world, Life, Faith in Life, and the Love of Humanity, still had the potency to procure adequate inspiration for the artist. Competence in the new technique thus became the measure of artistic merit, and this was the supreme blunder. Even Camille Mauclair, most friendly to the Impressionists, admits this: "Impressionism," he says, "being beyond all a technical reaction" (The French Impressionists, Dent, p. 10). We shall now see how this initial blunder led to the plastic and graphic aberrations that now baffle the Common Man and which, in his heart of hearts, he suspects of being bogus.
        When Manet said, Le personnage principal dans un tableau c'est la lumière, and Whistler argued that Arrangement, Composition, Harmony and the Colour Scheme of a picture constitute its chief interest and "the subject does not matter," neither knew how dangerously his feet were already dangling above Nature and Mother Earth — those very anchorages for Art, which, strange to say, their school had charged the Academicians with forsaking. In the noise and dust of the battle they failed to grasp the precarious logic of their tenets. For if the principal figure in a picture were the Light, and the only essential features were those Whistler suggested, how could the adventitious coruscations of the kaleidoscope, the arbitrary pattern of a shawl or a carpet, be proscribed from the graphic arts? Can we wonder that these reckless fiats too soon opened the way to the extravagances of Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism and the defiant obscurities of the Abstract School of Painting?
        One or two of the saner men of a slightly later period — painters like Gauguin and Van Gogh, the sculptor Rodin and the author Émile Zola — vaguely, it is true, but with sound instinct, saw the fallacy in this concentration on purely technical considerations, and particularly in the banishment of the subject from the role of the legitimate primum mobile of an artistic performance. In a letter to Charles Morice in April, 1903, Gauguin had said: Nous venons de subir en art une très grande période d'égarement . . . Les artistes ayant perdu tout de leur sauvagerie, n'ayant plus d'instinct, on pourrait dire d'imagination, se sont égarés dans tous les sentiers pour trouver des éléments producteurs qu'ils n'avaient pas la force de créer (Mercure de France, Vol. XLVIII, 1903, p. 105). This hit the nail on the head; but it still dodged the important issue of the role of the subject; although we may perhaps feel that, by implication, it deplores the banish-

- p. 109 -
ment of this role from the process of artistic inspiration. Zola, with his robust realism, had long before 1903 supplied the clue to the solution of the problem when, in 1866, he had said, Une oeuvre d'art est un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament (Mes Haines, Chap. III). He here describes the first essential stage in every artistic inspiration. "A part of creation" as seen through an artist's temperament is indeed the detonator of the whole concatenation of events culminating in the completed work of art and giving it its validity. Besides being the instigating factor in the production, it is the ultimate reference by which the quality of the artist's interpretation may be measured. We shall see how a shrewd Indian aesthete used this fact to expose the Whistlerian heresy.
        One Post-Impressionist of genius, Van Gogh, actually disclosed the form which he wished this "part of Creation" to take if it was to inspire him. "I want," he said, "to paint humanity, humanity and again humanity . . . I love nothing better than this series of bipeds, from the smallest baby in long clothes to Socrates, from the woman with black hair and white skin to the one with golden hair and a brick-red sun burnt face" (Letters of a Post-Impressionist, p. 85). But the New School's leading representatives, as we have seen, exalted Arrangement, Pattern, Composition, Light and Colour Scheme as the first essentials of a picture, and declared that "the subject did not matter." It is true that in most cases — with Manet invariably and with Whistler often — they were fortunately better than their doctrine. But it was their doctrine that their followers took to heart and carried to its logical conclusions, with the result that pictures soon began to appear which were nothing more than Arrangements, Compositions, Colour Schemes — patches differently coloured, hieroglyphs made up of arbitrary forms — conveying no message or meaning, and for which no ultimate reference existed. In fact, in the hands of these least gifted and least inspired epigones of the Impressionists, a work of art became, not "a part of Creation as seen through an artist's temperament," but rather "a part of an artist's temperament."
        And here we have the gravamen of the charge against the Whistlerian heresy: it gave a permanent licence to subjectivity in Art. Henceforward the artist, if a painter, could satisfy all the demands of his vocation if his hieroglyph had meaning for himself alone. Worse still, since all means of reference were no longer expected, he could at once conceal and parade his technical incompetence (if he were incompetent) without any chance of being detected. If he happened to be a poet, he could go about chanting Abracadabra and claim that, because it was perfectly comprehensible to himself, it was impertinent to ask what it meant. Thus subjectivity and charlatanry were given carte blanche. There were of course protests, but none was radical enough to expose the cardinal root of the mischief. Even a very good one (The Times, July 24, 1956, "Heresy of abstract painting") only goes as far as to state "the most obvious" of the objections — namely, that in this form of art "the interest of an abstract picture is exclusively decorative; since it is not an image, since its forms and colours represent nothing but themselves, it can have no independent pictorial quality. It might supply an admirable motif for a carpet, or a wall-paper." All this is true; but the writer could greatly have strengthened his argument and made it conclusive had he summoned to his side the shrewdest critics of the heresy he attacked.
        The sanest observations on this question we owe to the distinguished

- p. 110 -
Indian aesthete Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy, who in 1943 said, "The fundamental judgment [of a work of art] is the degree of the artist's success in giving clear expression to the theme of his work. In order to answer the question, Has the thing been well said? it will evidently be necessary for us to know what it was that was to be said. It is for this reason that in every discussion on works of art we must begin with the subject-matter" (Why Exhibit Works of Art? Chap. I). Equally magisterial and useful is Dr P. R. Ballard's criticism of the Whistlerian heresy. Commenting on the hackneyed tag, "Verisimilitude is not art," which is only a variation of Whistler's unfortunate dictum, he says: "And yet verisimilitude cannot be wholly ignored. For art is not merely expression, it is also communication; and communication is only possible through a series of symbols which have virtually the same meaning to the parties concerned, the communicator and the communicatee. . . . Appearances are the words of his [the graphic artist's] language" (Educating for Democracy, Edit. by J. T. Cohen and R. M. W. Travers, 1939, Chap. XIII). The two above statements surely give us the most satisfying refutation of the doctrines which, after 1860 in France and elsewhere, by their exaltation of technical reforms alone, and more particularly by their ill-considered dismissal of "the subject" in measuring the merits of a work of art, inevitably, but for the most part unwittingly, paved the way for the gross abuses now marring much of latter-day production in both painting and sculpture.

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