Last revised 16:03:05
John Benson
A module of the BA Philosophy programme
Institute of Environment Philosophy and Public Policy | Lancaster University | e-mail philosophy@lancaster.ac.uk
Rather than attempt a definition, let’s be content with some examples:
A painting displays an arrangement of areas of colour of various shapes, related to one another so that an overall pattern or design can be discerned. The elements in a composition may be arranged so that the eye is led to trace, for instance, a triangle as the dominant design. That would be a simple case; often things are more complicated.
In a musical work sounds are composed in sequences to make melodic structures and superimposed one on another to make harmonic structures. These elements are combined in larger structures to make sonatas, symphonies and so on.
In a poem words are arranged in metrical patterns, sometimes with rhymes tying together elements in the structure, to make sonnets, odes and so on.
These are all examples of the formal attributes of works of art. One way of describing a work is to describe its form in particular detail, something that can be done quite neutrally, without indicating any evaluation of the work. But often formal qualities are pointed out as merits, or demerits. A picture may be said to be well-balanced, its colours harmonious or discordant; or a vase beautifully or clumsily proportioned; a poem rhythmically subtle or monotonous.
Form is usually contrasted with something. One distinction, of great importance in Aristotle’s philosophy, is between form and matter. In a work of art this is the distinction between the stuff the work is made of (paint, clay, marble) and what it is made into - a flat variously coloured surface or a carved or moulded object of some particular three-dimensional shape. The matter in the case of music is presumably sound, but this is problematic: whereas a sculptor may begin with a lump of clay on which she imposes a shape, the composer does not begin with a bunch of sounds which he arranges into a piece of music. The distinction seems equally difficult to apply straightforwardly to language arts. Are words the matter, their arrangement the form of a poem?
A second contrast is between form and content. The term ‘content’ suggests something contained and so encourages one to think of form as a container. This is not a very happy metaphor. Containers and their contents are typically quite distinct from one another: the glass is emptied, the wrapper removed, the object taken out of its box. But form and content in art are often, if not always, much more intimately related.
It avoids the awkward metaphor if we talk about formal qualities and qualities
of other sorts, especially representational qualities.
Thus we can distinguish between the unity of composition and harmonious balance
of the principal masses in Poussin’s ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, and the fact that
it depicts three shepherds and an elegantly draped woman looking at the inscription
on a stone tablet.
We can use this example to introduce the formalist theory of art: to have a purely aesthetic experience of this painting one must contemplate it for its formal qualities, not for it representational ones. This is not the moderate claim that we should appreciate the formal qualities as well as the representational qualities, or even that certain formal qualities - balance, harmony etc - are essential in any picture. Such a moderate claim would be an appropriate response to the view that the essence of art is the imitation of nature. The formalist claim is the extreme claim that a response to a work as a work of art is necessarily a response to its formal qualities alone.
The chief exponents of this theory were Roger Fry, the art critic who introduced the work of the Post Impressionists (Matisse, Braque, Picasso and others) to the British public in 1910-12, and Clive Bell, an art critic associated with the Bloomsbury Group. Fry seems to have been the originator, and the more subtle exponent of the theory, Bell the more forthright and even dogmatic.
[Note on the reading. ‘The Metaphysical Hypothesis’ (Feagin and Maynard 158-9) is a very brief extract from Clive Bell’s Art. It isn’t enough for a proper understanding of his view. The extracts in Wilkinson, Theories of Art and Beauty (pp 82-105) are adequate. Extracts are also to be found here, at Appendix A. Bell is discussed in two places in Hanfling’s Philosophical Aesthetics: Essay Two, section 6 and Essay 4, section 7. For Fry see the collection of his essays, Vision and Design, especially the first two essays.]
Points 1-9 relate to his ‘Aesthetic Hypothesis’, viz. that the essential quality of works of (visual) art is significant form.
1 There is a kind of emotion peculiar to the response to works of art. ‘The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art’.
2 The ground for this claim: ‘All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art’.
3 There must be some quality common and peculiar to all works of art, their essential quality, if the term ‘work of art’ is meaningful.
4 It is this essential quality, whatever it is, that provokes the emotion peculiar to works of art.
5 The only quality common to all the various things we call works of art - buildings, stained glass, ceramics, carpets, sculpture, paintings of various traditions - is that ‘In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions’. These relations and combinations, ‘these aesthetically moving forms’ are ‘Significant Form’ Significant Form therefore is the essential quality of works of art.
6 The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion (n.b. treated as equivalent to ‘emotion peculiar to the experience of a work of art’) vary from person to person. This is a threat to the objective validity of aesthetic judgement. Despite not coinciding in all our judgements, however, you and I may agree that what is common to all the works either of us is moved by is significant form.
7 Descriptive painting which uses form not to provoke aesthetic emotion but to convey ideas, tell a story, give information, or suggest emotion (ordinary life emotion) is not art.
8 Realistic forms may be significant, that is, a picture may be both representational and have significant form, ‘[B]ut if a representative form has value, it is as form, not as representative. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, always it is irrelevant.’
9 The reason the representative element is irrelevant is this: to understand a representation of life or nature one must have some knowledge and understanding of the reality that is represented, but no such knowledge is required to understand significant form. ‘To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space’
What is it about some forms that make them significant? At some points in his account Bell says that what makes a form significant is that it provokes the aesthetic emotion. But that is uninformative: we have been told that a peculiar emotion is provoked by certain forms; when we ask which forms those are, the answer is ‘Those forms that provoke a peculiar emotion’. In the section, reprinted in Wilkinson and also in Feagin and Maynard, called ‘The Metaphysical Hypothesis’ he offers a different answer:
10 Some forms may provoke an intense aesthetic emotion because that form evoked an emotion of that kind in the artist and the artist’s emotion is conveyed to the spectator by her presentation of the form. The question then becomes why certain forms cause that emotion in the artist.
11 The artist ‘in moments of inspiration’ sees objects as pure form, that is as ends in themselves, not as means. For instance he sees a chair not as a means to physical comfort or as an object associated with family life, but as pure form.
12 What is revealed by pure form is ‘ultimate reality’, and it is the contact with this that provokes the artist’s emotion, which is then communicated by line and colour.
13 ‘Significant form’ is ‘form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality’.
14 The emotions provoked by works of art and sometimes by contemplation of actual material things may be ‘emotions felt for reality revealing itself through pure form’.
On the claim that there is a peculiar emotion which all sensitive people agree
is provoked by works of art:
It may be questioned whether there is a special kind of emotion provoked by
works of art. To be told that ‘all sensitive people’ agree that there is such
an emotion is to be put in an awkward position: if I protest that I have never
felt a special emotion in contemplating a work of art I risk betraying the fact
that I am not one of the sensitive people. Perhaps I’m not. It would be cheating,
however, to decree that if I disagree about the existence of the special emotion
I am thereby shown to be not a sensitive person. It isn’t certain that Bell
intends to use this underhand device, but then he gives no indication of how
we could verify his claim about the view of all sensitive people. He needs to
offer some test by which we could recognise those who qualify as sensitive.
It is also difficult to test the claim that all sensitive people are provoked
to feel a special emotion by works of art if ‘work of art’ is defined to mean
a work that provokes a special emotion. We need to identify works of art independently
and then find out how a representative sample of the people who have passed
the test for sensitivity respond to them.
On the claim that there must be a common quality:
Remember the discussion of the first topic of the course - whether it is possible
to define ‘work of art’ by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions. There
may be many different qualities, none common to all works, to which we respond
and in which we find value..
On the claim that it must be this essential quality that provokes the special
emotion:
Have we been given good enough grounds for accepting that there is such a peculiar
emotion? Even if we concede that the response to a work of art is always an
emotion of a peculiar kind, it does not follow that it must always have the
same cause.
On the claim that the only quality common to all works of art is form:
It may be trivially true that any work of art must have form, if form is just
some arrangement of lines and colours. But no argument is given for saying that
this is the only quality that all works have in common.
On the claim that only form is relevant to the appreciation of a work as a
work of art:
Since it has not been established by the argument that form is the essential
quality of works of art, it is not valid to conclude that form alone is relevant
to understanding and valuing works of art.
On the claim that we need only a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of
three-dimensional space:
The acknowledgment that we need a knowledge of three-dimensional space is an
important concession to representationalism.
On the Metaphysical Hypothesis:
Bell seems well out of his depth, not waving but drowning.
It is important to recognise that to show that the argument for a position is
unsound and therefore does not establish the position, is not to show that the
position is mistaken. Bell certainly fails to show that formalism is correct,
but it may be correct all the same.
How can we decide whether it is or not? A good way is to consider some cases of what are indisputably works of art (given any non-wayout view of what a work of art is) and ask what features of them deserve attention. Or, remembering that we may not be sensitive people, ask what features people we think to be discerning critics find worthy of attention. I call as witness Roger Fry himself, one of the foremost formalists, who, in his study of Giotto, repeatedly emphasises the interdependence of dramatic and formal values. (See extracts from this essay of 1901in the Appendix B) Fry later (1920) recants, having convinced himself that formal values alone are relevant to the value of art. We are free to judge which was right, his earlier, or his later view.
1 To understand why formalism appeared at the time it did we need to note two art-historical facts. The first is the great flowering of post impressionist art: Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Van Gogh and others. These artists, even though they were not in the main producing purely abstract art, were not in the business of naturalistic depiction of nature. They were using painting in new ways and challenged established ways of understanding painting. (See Fry’s introduction to the second post impressionist exhibition in Appendix B). The second fact is that much painting in the later 19th century and into the 20th was narrative and documentary, telling a story or depicting a social event. Fry and Bell were reacting against these functions of painting, which they thought could be done by other means than painting. They found in the post impressionist artists a concern with what painting alone could do. Their extreme formalism, in rejecting representative or figurative painting altogether, was aimed at too wide a target.
"Art"
by Clive Bell
Editor's Note: This essay is an excerpt from the book Art, originally published
in 1914. It is in the public domain and may be freely reproduced.
#1. It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than
about anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that.
It is certain, however, that about no subject with which I am acquainted has
so little been said that is at all to the purpose. The explanation is discoverable.
He who would elaborate a plausible theory of aesthetics must possess two qualities
- artistic sensibility and a turn for clear thinking. Without sensibility a
man can have no aesthetic experience, and, obviously, theories not based on
broad and deep aesthetic experience are worthless. Only those for whom art is
a constant source of passionate emotion can possess the data from which profitable
theories may be deduced; but to deduce profitable theories even from accurate
data involves a certain amount of brain-work, and, unfortunately, robust intellects
and delicate sensibilities are not inseparable. As often as not, the hardest
thinkers have had no aesthetic experience whatever. I have a friend blessed
with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he takes an interest in aesthetics,
has never during a life of almost forty years been guilty of an aesthetic emotion.
So, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is
apt to rear up a pyramid of irrefragable argument on the hypothesis that a handsaw
is a work of art. This defect robs his perspicuous and subtle reasoning of much
of its value; for it has ever been a maxim that faultless logic can win but
little credit for conclusions that are based on premises notoriously false.
Every cloud, however, has its silver lining, and this insensibility, though
unlucky in that it makes my friend incapable of choosing a sound basis for his
argument, mercifully blinds him to the absurdity of his conclusions while leaving
him in full enjoyment of his masterly dialectic. People who set out from the
hypothesis that Sir Edward Landseer was the finest painter that ever lived will
feel no uneasiness about an aesthetic which proves that Giotto was the worst.
So, my friend, when he arrives very logically at the conclusion that a work
of art should be small or round or smooth, or that to appreciate fully a picture
you should pace smartly before it or set it spinning like a top, cannot guess
why I ask him whether he has lately been to Cambridge, a place he sometimes
visits.
#2. On the other hand, people who respond immediately and surely to works of
art, though, in my judgment, more enviable than men of massive intellect but
slight sensibility, are often quite as incapable of talking sense about aesthetics.
Their heads are not always very clear. They possess the data on which any system
must be based; but, generally, they want the power that draws correct inferences
from true data. Having received aesthetic emotions from works of art, they are
in a position to seek out the quality common to all that have moved them, but,
in fact, they do nothing of the sort. I do not blame them. Why should they bother
to examine their feelings when for them to feel is enough? Why should they stop
to think when they are not very good at thinking? Why should they hunt for a
common quality in all objects that move them in a particular way when they can
linger over the many delicious and peculiar charms of each as it comes? So,
if they write criticism and call it esthetics, if they imagine that they are
talking about Art when they are talking about particular works of art or even
about the technique of painting, if, loving particular works they find tedious
the consideration of art in general, perhaps they have chosen the better part.
If they are not curious about the nature of their emotion, nor about the quality
common to all objects that provoke it, they have my sympathy, and, as what they
say if often charming and suggestive, my admiration too. Only let no one support
that what they write and talk is aesthetics; it is criticism, or just "shop."
#3. The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience
of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of
art. All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by
works of art. I do not mean, of course, that all works provoke the same emotion.
On the contrary, every work produces a different emotion. But all these emotions
are recognisably the same in kind; so far, at any rate, the best opinion is
on my side. That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of
visual art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by
pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, etc., etc., is not
disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is called the
aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to
all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the
central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential quality
in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other
classes of objects.
#4. For either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we
speak of "works of art" we gibber. Everyone speaks of "art,"
making a mental classification by which he distinguishes the class "works
of art" from all other classes. What is the justification of this classification?
What is the quality common and peculiar to all members of this class? Whatever
it be, no doubt it is often found in company with other qualities; but they
are adventitious - it is essential. There must be some one quality without which
a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is
altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects
that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and
the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets,
Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces ofPoussin, \piero della Fancesca,
andCezanne? Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each, lines
and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms,
stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours,
these aesthetically moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant
form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art.
#5. At this point it may be objected that I am making aesthetics a purely subjective
business, since my only data are personal experiences of a particular emotion.
It will be said that the objects that provoke this emotion vary with each individual,
and that therefore a system of aesthetics can have no objective validity. It
must be replied that any system of aesthetics which pretends to be based on
some objective truth is so palpably ridiculous as not to be worth discussing.
We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.
The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion vary with each individual. Aesthetic
judgments are, as the saying goes, matters of taste; and about tastes, as everyone
is proud to admit, there is no disputing. A good critic may be able to make
me see in a picture that had left me cold things that I had overlooked, till
at last, receiving the aesthetic emotion, I recognise it as a work of art. To
be continually pointing out those parts, the sum, or rather the combination,
of which unite to produce significant form, is the function of criticism. But
it is useless for a critic to tell me that something is a work of art; he must
make me feel it for myself. This he can do only by making me see; he must get
at my emotions through my eyes. Unless he can make me see something that moves
me, he cannot force my emotions. I have no right to consider anything a work
of art to which I cannot react emotionally; and I have no right to look for
the essential quality in anything that I have not felt to be a work of art.
The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience.
All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience - that is to
say, they must be subjective.
#6. Yet, though all aesthetic theories must be based on aesthetic judgments,
and ultimately all aesthetic judgments must be matters of personal taste, it
would be rash to assert that no theory of aesthetics can have general validity.
For, though A, B, C, D are the works that move me, and A, D, E, F the works
that move you, it may well be that x is the only quality believed by either
of us to be common to all the works in his list. We may all agree about aesthetics,
and yet differ about particular works of art. We may differ as to the presence
or absence of the quality x. My immediate object will be to show that significant
form is the only quality common and peculiar to all the works of visual art
that move me; and I will ask those whose aesthetic experience does not tally
with mine to see whether this quality is not also, in their judgment, common
to all works that move them, and whether they can discover any other quality
of which the same can be said.
#7. Also at this point a query arises, irrelevant indeed, but hardly to be suppressed:
"Why are we so profoundly moved by forms related in a particular way?"
The question is extremely interesting, but irrelevant to aesthetics. In pure
aesthetics we have only to consider our emotion and its object: for the purposes
of aesthetics we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind
the object into the state of mind of him who made it. Later, I shall attempt
to answer the question; for by so doing I may be able to develop my theory of
the relation of art to life. I shall not, however, be under the delusion that
I am rounding off my theory of aesthetics. For a discussion of aesthetics, it
need be agreed only that forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown
and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way, and that it is the business
of an artist so to combine and arrange them that they shall move us. These moving
combinations and arrangements I have called, for the sake of convenience and
for a reason that will appear later, "Significant Form."
#8. A third interruption has to be met. "Are you forgetting about colour?"
someone inquires. Certainly not; my term "significant form" included
combinations of lines and of colours. The distinction between form and colour
is an unreal one; you cannot conceive a colourless line or a colourless space;
neither can you conceive a formless relation of colours. In a black and white
drawing the spaces are all white and all are bounded by black lines; in most
oil paintings the spaces are multi-coloured and so are the boundaries; you cannot
imagine a boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary
lines. Therefore, when I speak of significant form, I mean a combination of
lines and colours (counting white and black as colours) that moves me aesthetically.
#9. Some people may be surprised at my not having called this "beauty."
Of course, to those who define beauty as "combinations of lines and colours
that provoke aesthetic emotion," I willingly conceded the right of substituting
their word for mine. But most of us, however strict we may be, are apt to apply
the epithet "beautiful" to objects that do not provoke that peculiar
emotion produced by works of art. Everyone, I suspect, has called a butterfly
or a flower beautiful. Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly
or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture/ surely, it is not what
I call an aesthetic emotion that most of us feel, generally, for natural beauty.
I shall suggest, later, that some people may, occasionally, see in nature what
we see in art, and feel for her an aesthetic emotion; but I am satisfied that,
as a rule, most people feel a very different kind of emotion for birds and flowers
and the wings of butterflies from that which they feel for pictures, pots, temples
and statues. Why these beautiful things do not move us as works of art move
us is another, and not an aesthetic, question. For our immediate purpose we
have to discover only what quality is common to objects that do move us as works
of art. In the last part of this chapter, when I try to answer the question-"Why
are we so profoundly moved by some combinations of lines and colours?"
I shall hope to offer an acceptable explanation of why we are less profoundly
moved by others.
#10. Since we call a quality that does not raise the characteristic aesthetic
emotion "Beauty," it would be misleading to call by the same name
the quality that does. To make "beauty" the object of the aesthetic
emotion, we must give to the word an over-strict and unfamiliar definition.
Everyone sometimes uses "beauty" in an unaesthetic sense; most people
habitually do so. To everyone, except perhaps here and there an occasional aesthete,
the commonest sense of the word is unaesthetic. Of its grosser abuse, patent
in our chatter about "beautiful huntin'" and "beautiful shootin',"
I need not take account; it would be open to the precious to reply that they
never do so abuse it. Besides, here there is no danger of confusion between
the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic use; but when we speak of a beautiful woman
there is. When an ordinary man speaks of a beautiful woman he certainly does
not mean only that she moves him aesthetically; but when an artist calls a withered
old hag beautiful he may sometimes mean what he means when he calls a battered
torso beautiful. The ordinary man, if he be also a man of taste, will call the
battered torso beautiful, but he will not call a withered hag beautiful because,
in the matter of women, it is not to the aesthetic quality that the hag may
possess, but to some other quality that he assigns the epithet. Indeed, most
of us never dream of going for aesthetic emotions to human beings, from whom
we ask something very different. This "something," when we find it
in a young woman, we are apt to call 'beauty.' We live in a nice age. With the
man-in-the-street 'beautiful" is more often than not synonymous with "desirable":
the word does not necessarily connote any aesthetic reaction whatever, and I
am tempted to believe that in the minds of many the sexual flavour of the word
is stronger than the aesthetic. I have noticed a consistency in those to whom
the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful woman, and the next most
beautiful thing a picture of one. The confusion between aesthetic and sensual
beauty is not in their case so great as might be supposed. Perhaps there is
none; for perhaps they have never had an aesthetic emotion to confuse with their
other emotions. The art that they call "beautiful" is generally closely
related to the women. A beautiful picture is a photograph of a pretty girl;
beautiful music, the music that provokes emotions similar to those provoked
by young ladies in musical farces; and beautiful poetry, the poetry that recalls
the same emotions felt, twenty years earlier, for the rector's daughter. Clearly
the word 'beauty" is used to connote the objects of quite distinguishable
emotions, and that is a reason for not employing a term which would land me
inevitably in confusions and misunderstandings with my readers.
#11. On the other hand, with those who judge it more exact to call these combinations
and arrangements of form that provoke our aesthetic emotions, not "significant
form," but "significant relations of form," and then try to make
the best of two worlds, the aesthetic and the metaphysical, by calling these
relations "rhythm," I have no quarrel whatever. Having made it clear
that by "significant form" I mean arrangements and combinations that
move us in a particular way, I willingly join hands with those who prefer to
give a different name to the same thing.
#12. The hypothesis that significant form is the essential quality in a work
of art has at least one merit denied to many more famous and more striking -
it does help to explain things. We are all familiar with pictures that interest
us and excite our admiration, but do not move us as works of art. To this class
belongs what I call "Descriptive Painting" that is, painting in which
forms are used not as objects of emotion, but as means of suggesting emotion
or conveying information. Portraits of psychological and historical value, topographical
works, pictures that tell stories and suggest situations, illustrations of all
sorts, belong to this class. That we all recognise the distinction is clear,
for who has not said that such and such a drawing was excellent as illustration,
but as a work of art worthless? Of course many descriptive pictures possess,
amongst other qualities, formal significance, and are therefore works of art;
but many more do not. They interest us; they may move us too in a hundred different
ways, but they do not move us aesthetically. According to my hypothesis they
are not works of art. They leave untouched our aesthetic emotions because it
is not their forms but the ideas or information suggested or conveyed by their
forms that affect us.
#13. Few pictures are better known or liked that Frith's "Paddington Station";
certainly I should be the last to grudge it its popularity. Many a weary forty
minutes have I whiled away disentangling its fascinating incidents and forging
for each an imaginary past and an improbable future. But certain though it is
that Frith's masterpiece, or engravings of it, have provided thousands with
half-hours of curious and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no
one has experienced before it one half-second of aesthetic rapture - and this
although the picture contains several pretty passages of colour, and is by no
means badly painted. "Paddington Station" is not a work of art; it
is an interesting and amusing document. In it line and colour are used to recount
anecdotes, suggest ideas, and indicate the manners and customs of an age; they
are not used to provoke aesthetic emotion. Forms and the relations of forms
were for Froith not objects of emotion, but means of suggesting emotion and
conveying ideas.
#14. The ideas and information conveyed by "Paddington Station" are
so amusing and so well presented that the picture has considerable value and
is well, worth preserving. But, with the perfection of photographic processes
and of the cinematograph, pictures of this sort are becoming otiose. Who doubts
that one of those daily Mirror photographers in collaboration with a Daily mail
reporter can tell us far more about "London day by day" than any royal
Academician? For an account of manners and fashions we shall go, in future,
to photographs, supported by a little bright journalism, rather than to descriptive
painting. Had the imperial academicians of Nero, instead of manufacturing incredibly
loathsome imitations of the antique, recorded in fresco and mosaic the manners
and fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish, would now be
an historical gold-mine. If only they had been Friths instead of being Alma
Tademas! But photography has made impossible any such transmutation of modern
rubbish. Therefore it must be confessed that pictures in the Frith tradition
are grown superfluous; they merely waste the hours of able men who might be
more profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence. Still, they are not
unpleasant, which is more than can be said for that kind of descriptive painting
of which "The doctor" is the most flagrant example. Of course "The
doctor" is not a work of art. In it form is not used as an object of emotion,
but as a means of suggesting emotions. This alone suffices to make it nugatory;
it is worse than nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false. What it
suggests is not pity and admiration but a sense of complacency in our own pitifulness
and generosity. It is sentimental. Art is above morals, or, rather, all art
is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works of art are immediate means
to good. Once we have judged a thing a work of art, we have judged it ethically
of the first importance and put it beyond the reach of the moralist. But descriptive
pictures which are not works of art, and, therefore, are not necessarily means
to good states of mind, are proper objects of the ethical philosopher's attention.
Not being a work of art, "The Doctor" has none of the immense ethical
value possessed by all objects that provoke aesthetic ecstasy; and the state
of mind to which it is a means, as illustration, appears to me undesirable.
#15. The works of those enterprising young men, the Italian futurists, are notable
examples of descriptive painting. Like the Royal Academicians, they use form,
not to provoke aesthetic emotions, but to convey information and ideas. Indeed
the published theories of the Futurists prove that their pictures ought to have
nothing whatever to do with art. Their social and political theories are respectable,
but I would suggest to young Italian painters that it is possible to become
a Futurist in thought and action and yet remain an artist, if one has the luck
to be born one. To associate art with politics is always a mistake. Futurist
pictures are descriptive because they aim at presenting in line and colour the
chaos of the mind at a particular moment; their forms are not intended to promote
aesthetic emotion but to convey information. These forms, by the way, whatever
may be the nature of the ideas they suggest, are themselves anything but revolutionary.
In such futurist pictures as I have seen - perhaps I should except some by Severine
- the drawing, whenever it becomes representative as it frequently does, is
found to be in that soft and common convention brought into fashion by Besnard
some thirty years ago, and much affected by Beaux-Art students ever since. As
works of art, the Futurist pictures are negligible; but they are not to be judged
as works of art. A good Futurist picture would succeed as a good piece of psychology
succeeds; it would reveal, through line and colour, the complexities of an interesting
state of mind. If futurist pictures seem to fail, we must seek an explanation,
not in a lack of artistic qualities that they never were intended to possess,
but rather in the minds the states of which they are intended to reveal.
#16. Most people who care much about art find that of the work that moves them
most the greater part is what scholars call "Primitive." Of course
there are bad primitives. For instance, I remember going, full of enthusiasm,
to see one of the earliest Romanesque churches in Poitiers (Notre-Dame-la-Grande),
and finding it as ill-proportioned, over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy as
any better class building by one of those highly civilised architects who flourished
a thousand years earlier or eight hundred later. But such exceptions are rare.
As a rule primitive art is good - and here again my hypothesis is helpful -
for, as a rule, it is also free from descrip6tive qualities. In primitive art
you will find no accurate representation; you will find only significant form.
Yet no other art moves us so profoundly. Whether we consider Sumerian sculpture
or pre-dynastic Egyptian art, or archaic Gree, or the Wei and T'ang masterpieces,
or those early Japanese works of which I had the luck to see a few superb examples
(especially two wooden Bodhisattvas) at the Shepherd's bush Exhibition in 1910,
or whether, coming nearer home, we consider the primitive Byzantine art of the
sixth century and its primitive developments amongst the western barbarians,
or, turning far afield, we consider that mysterious and majestic art that flourished
in Central and South America before the coming of the white men, in every case
we observe three common characteristics - absence of representation, absence
of technical swagger, sublimely impressive form. Nor is it hard to discover
the connection between these three. Formal significance loses itself in preoccupation
with exact representation and ostentatious cunning.
#17. Naturally, it is said that if there is little representation and less saltimbancery
in primitive art, that is because the primitives were unable to catch a likeness
or cut intellectual capers. The contention is beside the point. There is truth
in it, no doubt, though, were I a critic whose reputation depended on a power
of impressing the public with a semblance of knowledge, I should be more cautious
about urging it than such people generally are. For to support that the Byzantine
masters wanted skill, or could not have created an illusion had they wished
to do so, seems to imply ignorance of the amazingly dexterous realism of the
notoriously bad works of that age. Very often, I fear, the misrepresentation
of the primitives must be attributed to what the critics call, "wilful
distortion." Be that as it may, the point is that, either from what of
skill or want of will, primitives neither create illusions, nor make display
of extravagant accomplishment, but concentrate their energies on the one thing
needful - the creation of form. Thus have they created the finest works of art
that we possess.
#18. Let no one imagine that representation is bad in itself; a realistic form
may be as significant, in its place as part of the design, as an abstract. But
if a representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. The
representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it
is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing
from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.
Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation.
For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories
are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure mathematician
rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not
identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived
relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, inhuman or super-human,
from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators
of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before
we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive
intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do, it
would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture
to be good, although we cannot say that it has provoked much emotion. We seem
to have recognised intellectually the rightness of its forms without staying
to fix our attention, and collect, as it were, their emotional significance.
If this were so, it would be permissible to inquire whether it was the forms
themselves or our perception of their rightness and necessity that caused aesthetic
emotion. But I do not think I need linger to discuss the matter here. I have
been inquiring why certain combinations of forms move us; I should not have
traveled by other roads had I enquired, instead, why certain combinations are
perceived to be right and necessary, and why our perception of their rightness
and necessity is moving. What I have to say is this: the rapt philosopher, and
he who contemplates a work of art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar
significance of its own; that significance is unrelated to the significance
of life. In this world the emotions of life find no place. It is a world with
emotions of its own.
#19. To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of
form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space. That bit of knowledge,
I admit, is essential to the appreciation of many great works, since many of
the move moving forms ever created are in three dimensions. To see a cube or
rhomboid as a flat pattern is to lower its significance, and a sense of three-dimensional
space is essential to the full appreciation of most architectural forms. Pictures
which would be insignificant if we saw them as flat patterns are profoundly
moving because, in fact, we see them as related planes. If the representation
of three-dimensional space is to be called "representation," then
I agree that there is one kind of representation which is not irrelevant. Also,
I agree that along with our feeling for line and colour we must bring with us
our knowledge of space if we are to make the most of every kind of form. Nevertheless,
there are magnificent designs to an appreciation of which this knowledge is
not necessary: so, though it is not irrelevant to the appreciation of some works
of art it is not essential to the appreciation of all. What we must say is that
the representation of three-dimensional space is neither irrelevant nor essential
to all art, and that every other sort of representation is irrelevant.
#20. That there is an irrelevant representative or descriptive element in many
great works of art is not in the least surprising. Why it is not surprising
I shall try to show elsewhere. Representation is not of necessity baneful, and
highly realistic forms may be extremely significant. Very often, however, representation
is a sign of weakness in an artist. A painter too feeble to create forms that
provoke more than a little aesthetic emotion will try to eke that little out
by suggesting the emotions of life. To evoke the emotions of life he must use
representation. Thus a man will paint an execution, and, fearing to miss with
his first barrel of significant form, will try to hit with his second by raising
an emotion of fear or pity. But if in the artist an inclination to play upon
the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator
a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective
sensibility always. It means that his aesthetic emotions are weak or, at any
rate, imperfect. Before a work of art people who feel little or no emotion for
pure form find themselves at a loss. They are deaf men at a concert. They know
that they are in the presence of something great, but they lack the power of
apprehending it. They know that they ought to feel for it a tremendous emotion,
but it happens that the particular kind of emotion it can raise is one that
they can feel hardly or not at all. And so they read into the forms of the work
those facts and ideas for which they are capable of feeling emotion, and feel
for them the emotions that they can feel -the ordinary emotions of life. When
confronted by a picture, instinctively they refer back its forms to the world
from which they came. They treat created form as though it were imitated form,
a picture as though it were a photograph. Instead of going out on the stream
of art into a new world of aesthetic experience, they turn a sharp corner and
come straight home to the world of human interests. For them the significance
of a work of art depends on what they bring to it; no new thing is added to
their lives, only the old material is stirred. A good work of visual art carries
a person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy: to use
art as a means to the emotions of life is to use a telescope of reading the
news. You will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember
pictures by their subjects; whereas people who can, as often as not, have no
idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the representative
element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms
and the relations and quantities of colours. Often they can tell by the quality
of a single line whether or not a man is a good artist. They are concerned only
with lines and colours, their relations and quantities and qualities; but from
these they win an emotion more profound and far more sublime than any that can
be given by the description of facts and ideas.
#21. This last sentence has a very confident ring - over-confident, some may
think. Perhaps I shall be able to justify it, and make my meaning clearer too,
if I give an account of my own feelings about music. I am not really musical.
I do not understand music well. I find musical form exceedingly difficult to
apprehend, and I am sure that the profounder subtleties of harmony and rhythm
more often than not escape me. The form of a musical composition must be simple
indeed if I am to grasp it honestly. My opinion about music is not worth having.
Yet, sometimes, at a concern, though my appreciation of the music is limited
and humble, it is pure. Sometimes, though I have poor understanding, I have
a clean palate. Consequently, when I am feeling bright and clear and intent,
at the beginning of a concert for instance, when something that I can grasp
is being played, I get from music that pure aesthetic emotion that I get from
visual art. It is less intense, and the rapture is evanescent; I understand
music too ill for music to transport me far into the world of pure aesthetic
ecstasy. But at moments I do appreciate music as pure musical form, as sounds
combined acco4ding to the laws of a mysterious necessity, as pure art with a
tremendous significance of its own and no relation whatever to the significance
of life; and in those moments I lose myself in that infinitely sublime state
of mind to which pure visual form transports me. How inferior is my normal state
of mind at a concern. Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form, my aesthetic
emotion collapses, and I begin weaving into the harmonies, that I cannot grasp,
the ideas of life. Incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin
to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and mystery, love and
hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior
feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation
- the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the
laughing of demons - to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended.
Very likely I should be pleased; they would afford new points of departure for
new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know very well what has
happened. I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading
into it the ideas of life. I have been cutting blocks with a razor. I have tumbled
from the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm
humanity. It is a jolly country. No one need to ashamed of enjoying himself
there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little
crestfallen in the cosy valleys. And let no one imagine, because the has made
merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess
at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white
peaks of art.
#22. About music most people are as willing to be humble as I am. If they cannot
grasp musical form and win from it a pure aesthetic emotion, they confess that
they understand music imperfectly or not at all. They recognize quite clearly
that there is a difference between the feeling of the musician for pure music
and that of the cheerful concert-goer for what music suggests. The latter enjoys
his own emotions, as he has every right to do, and recognises their inferiority.
Unfortunately, people are apt to be less modest about their powers of appreciating
visual art. Everyone is inclined to believe that out of pictures, at any rate,
he can get all that there is to be got; everyone is ready to cry "humbug"
and "imposter" at those who say that more can be had. The good faith
of people who feel pure aesthetic emotions is called in question by those who
have never felt anything of the sort. It is the prevalence of the representative
element, I support. That makes the man in the street so sure that he knows a
good picture when he sees one. For I have noticed that in matters of architecture,
pottery, textiles, etc., ignorance and ineptitude are more willing to defer
to the opinions of those who have been blest with peculiar sensibility. It is
a pity that cultivated and intelligent men and women cannot be induced to believe
that a great gift of aesthetic appreciation is at least as rare in visual as
in musical art. A comparison of my own experience in both has enabled me to
discriminate very clearly between pure and impure appreciation. Is it too much
to ask that others should be as honest about their feelings for pictures as
I have been about mine for music? For I am certain that most of those who visit
galleries do feel very much what I feel at concerts. They have their moments
of pure ecstasy; but the moments are short and unsure. Soon they fall back into
the world of human interests and feel emotions, good no doubt, but inferior.
I do not dream of saying that what they get from art is bad or nugatory; I say
that they do not get the best that art can give. I do not say that they cannot
understand art; rather I say that they cannot understand the state of mind of
those who understand it best. I do not say that art means nothing or little
to them; I say they miss its full significance. I do not suggest for one moment
that their appreciation of art is a thing to be ashamed of; the majority of
the charming and intelligent people with whom I am acquainted appreciate visual
art impurely; and, by the way, the appreciation of almost all great writers
has been impure. But provided that there be some fraction of pure aesthetic
emotion, even a mixed and minor appreciation of art is, I am sure, one of the
most valuable things in the world - so valuable, indeed, that in my giddier
moments I have been tempted to believe that art might prove the world's salvation.
#23. Yet, though the echoes and shadows of art enrich the life of the plains,
her spirit dwells on the mountains. To him who woos, but woos impurely, she
returns enriched what is brought. Like the sun, she warms the good seed in good
soil and causes it to bring forth good fruit. But only to the perfect lover
does she give a new strange gift - a gift beyond all price. Imperfect lovers
bring to art and take away the ideas and emotions of their own age and civilisation.
In twelfth-century Europe a man might have been greatly moved by a Romanesque
church and found nothing in a T'ang picture. To a man of a later age, Greek
sculpture meant much and Mexican nothing, for only to the former could he bring
a crowd of associated ideas to be the objects of familiar emotions. But the
perfect lover, he who can feel the profound significance of form, is raised
above the accidents of time and place. To him the problems of archaeology, history,
and hagiography are impertinent. If the forms of a work are significant its
provenance is irrelevant. Before the grandeur of those Sumerian figures in the
Louvre he is carried on the same flood of emotion to the same aesthetic ecstasy
as, more than four thousand years ago, the Chaldean lover was carried. It is
the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal. Significant
form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable
of feeling it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats; men change their
institutions and their customs as they change their coats; the intellectual
triumphs of one age are the follies of another; only great art remains stable
and unobscure. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that
it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of
this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what
does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day
before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago? The forms of art are inexhaustible;
but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic
ecstasy.
Two extracts from Roger Fry’s essay on the Florentine painter Giotto (1266?-1337). In the first he is describing one of the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. In it the risen Christ is resisting the approach of Mary Magdalene: ‘Noli me tangere’ (‘Touch me not’).
Giotto was, I believe, the first artist to represent the Resurrection by the
Noli me tangere. The Byzantines almost invariably introduced the Descent into
Hades or the Three Maries at the Tomb. In any case it is characteristic of Giotto
to choose a subject where the human situation is so intimate and the emotions
expressed are so poignant. Here, as in the
" Navicella," where he was free to invent a new composition, he discards
the bilateral arrangement, which was almost invariable in Byzantine art, and
concentrates all the interest in one corner of the composition. The angels on
the tomb are damaged and distorted, but in the head and hands of the Magdalene
we can realise Giotto's greatly increased power and delicacy of modelling as
compared with the frescoes at Assisi. It is impossible for art to convey more
intensely than this the beauty of such a movement of impetuous yearning. The
action of the Christ is as vividly realised ; almost too obviously, indeed,
does he seem to be edging out of the composition in order to escape the Magdalene's
outstretched hands. This is a striking instance of that power which Giotto possessed
more than any other Italian, more indeed than any other artist except Rembrandt,
the power of making perceptible the flash of mutual recognition which passes
between two souls at a moment of sudden illumination.
Vision and Design p. 166
It is mainly by means of the composition and the general conception of pose
and movement that Giotto expresses the dramatic idea. And regarded from that
point of view, these frescoes are an astounding proof of Giotto's infallible
intuitions. The characters he has created here are as convincing, as ineffaceable,
as any that have been created by poets. The sad figure of Joachim is one never
to be forgotten. In every incident of his sojourn in the wilderness, after the
rejection of his offering in the temple, his appearance indicates exactly his
mental condition. When he first comes to the sheepfold, he gazes with such set
melancholy on the ground that the greeting of his dog and his shepherds cannot
arouse his attention; when he makes a sacrifice he crawls on hands and knees
in the suspense of expectation, watching for a sign from heaven; even in his
sleep we guess at his melancholy dreams; and in the scene where he meets his
wife at the Golden Gate on his return, Giotto has touched a chord of feeling
at least as profound as can be reached by the most consummate master of the
art of words.
It is true that in speaking of these one is led inevitably to talk of elements
in the work which modern criticism is apt to regard as lying outside the domain
of pictorial art. It is customary to dismiss all that concerns the dramatic
presentation of the subject as literature or illustration, which is to be sharply
distinguished from the qualities of design. But can this clear distinction be
drawn in fact? The imaginings of a playwright, a dramatic poet, and a dramatic
painter have much in common, but they are never at any point identical. Let
us suppose a story to be treated by all three: to each, as he dwells on the
legend, the imagination will present a succession of images, but those images,
even at their first formation, will be quite different in each case, they will
be conditioned and coloured by the art which the creator practises, by his past
observation of nature with a view to presentment in that particular art. The
painter, like Giotto, therefore, actually imagines in terms of figures capable
of pictorial presentment, he does not merely translate a poetically dramatic
vision into pictorial terms. And to be able to do this implies a constant observation
of natural forms with a bias towards the discovery of pictorial beauty. To be
able, then, to conceive just the appropriate pose of a hand to express the right
idea of character and emotion in a picture, is surely as much a matter of a
painter's vision as to appreciate the relative
"values" of a tree and cloud so as to convey the mood proper to a
particular landscape.
Vision and Design 168-9
When the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition was held in these Galleries two
years ago the English public became for the first time fully aware of the existence
of a new movement in art, a movement which was the more disconcerting in that
it was no mere variation upon accepted themes but implied a reconsideration
of the very purpose and aim as well as the methods of pictorial and plastic
art. It was not surprising, therefore, that a public which had come to admire
above everything in a picture the skill with which the artist produced illusion
should have resented an art in which such skill was completely subordinated
to the direct expression of feeling. Accusations of clumsiness and incapacity
were freely made, even against so singularly accomplished an artist as Cezanne.
Such darts, however, fall wide of the mark, since it is not the object of these
artists to exhibit their skill or proclaim their knowledge, but only to attempt
to express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences; and
in conveying these, ostentation of skill is likely to be even more fatal than
downright incapacity.
Indeed, one may fairly admit that the accusation of want of skill and knowledge,
while ridiculous in the case of Cezanne is perfectly justified as regards one
artist represented - for the first time in England - in the present Exhibition,
namely, Rousseau. Rousseau was a custom-house officer who painted without any
training in the art. His pretensions to paint made him the butt of a great deal
of ironic wit, but scarcely anyone now would deny the authentic quality of his
inspiration or the certainty of his imaginative conviction. Here then is one
case where want of skill and knowledge do not completely obscure, though they
may mar, expression. And this is true of all perfectly naive and primitive art.
But most of the art here seen is neither naive nor primitive. It is the work
of highly civilised and modern men trying to find a pictorial langage appropriate
to the sensibilities of the modern outlook.
Another charge that is frequently made against these artists is that they allow what is merely capricious, or even what is extravagant and eccentric, in their work - that it is not serious, but an attempt to impose on the good-natured tolerance of the public. This charge of insincerity and extravagance is invariably made against any new manifestation of creative art. It does not of course follow that it is always wrong. The desire to impose by such means certainly occurs, and is sometimes temporarily successful. But the feeling on the part of the public may, and I think in this case does, arise from a simple misunderstanding of what these artists set out to do. The difficulty springs from a deep-rooted conviction, due to long-established custom, that the aim of painting is the descriptive imitation of natural forms. Now, these artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality.
The logical extreme of such a method would undoubtedly be the attempt to give up all resemblance to natural form, and to create a purely abstract language of form - a visual music; and the later works of Picasso show this clearly enough. They may or may not be successful in their attempt. It is too early to be dogmatic on the point, which can only be decided when our sensibilities to such abstract forms have been more practised than they are at present. But I would suggest that there is nothing ridiculous in the attempt to do this. Such a picture as Picasso's "Head of a Man" would undoubtedly be ridiculous if, having set out to make a direct imitation of the actual model, he had been incapable of getting a better likeness. But Picasso did nothing of the sort. He has shown in his "Portrait of Mille. L. B." that he could do so at least as well as anyone if he wished, but he is here attempting to do something quite different.
No such extreme abstraction marks the work of Matisse. The actual objects which
stimulated his creative invention are recognisable enough. But here, too, it
is an equivalence, not a likeness, of nature that is sought. In opposition to
Picasso, who is pre-eminently plastic, Matisse aims at convincing us of the
reality of his forms by the continuity and flow of his rhythmic line, by the
logic of his space relations, and, above all, by an entirely new use of colour.
In this, as in his markedly rhythmic design, he approaches more than any other
European to the ideals of Chinese art. His work has to an extraordinary degree
that decorative unity of design which distinguishes all the artists of this
school.
Between these two extremes we may find ranged almost all the remaining artists.
On the whole the influence of Picasso on the younger men is more evident than
that of Matisse. With the exception of Braque none of them push their attempts
at abstraction of form so far as Picasso, but simplification along these lines
is apparent in the work of Derain, Herbin, Marchand, and L 'Hote. Other artists,
such as Doucet and Asselin, are content with the ideas of simplification of
form as existing in the general tradition of the Post-Impressionist movement,
and instead of feeling for new methods of expression devote themselves to expressing
what is most poignant and moving in contemporary life. But however various the
directions in which different groups are exploring the newly-found regions of
expressive form they all alike derive in some measure from the great originator
of the whole idea, Cezanne. And since one must always refer to him to understand
the origin of these ideas, it has been thought well to include a few examples
of his work in the present Exhibition, although this year it is mainly the moderns,
and not the old masters, that are represented. To some extent, also, the absence
of the earlier masters in the exhibition itself is made up for by the retrospective
exhibition of Monsieur Druet's admirable photographs. Here Cezanne, Gauguin,
and Van Gogh can be studied at least in the main phases of their development.
Finally, I should like to call attention to a distinguishing characteristic
of the French artists seen here, namely, the markedly Classic spirit of their
work. This will be noted as distinguishing them to some extent from the English,
even more perhaps from the Russians, and most of all from the great mass of
modern painting in every country. I do not mean by Classic, dull, pedantic,
traditional, reserved, or any of those similar things which the word is often
made to impJy. Still less do I mean by calling them Classic that they paint
"Visits to Aesculapius" or "Nero at the Colosseum." I mean
that they do not rely for their effect upon associated ideas, as I believe Romantic
and Realistic artists invariably do.
All art depends upon cutting off the practical responses to sensations of ordinary
life, thereby setting free a pure and as it were disembodied functioning of
the spirit; but in so far as the artist relies on the associated ideas of the
objects which he represents, his work is not completely free and pure, since
romantic associations imply at least an imagined practical activity. The disadvantage
of such an art of associated ideas is that its effect really depends on what
we bring with us: it adds no entirely new factor to our experience. Consequently,
when the first shock of wonder or delight is exhausted the work produces an
ever lessening reaction. Classic art, on the other hand, records a positive
and disinterestedly passionate state of mind. It communicates a new and otherwise
unattainable
experience. Its effect, therefore, is likely to increase with familiarity. Such
a classic spirit is common to the best French work of all periods from the twelfth
century onwards, and though no one could find direct reminiscences of a Nicholas
Poussin here, his spirit seems to revive in the work of artists like Derain.
It is natural enough that the intensity and singleness of aim with which these
artists yield themselves to certain experiences in the face of nature may make
their work appear odd to those who have not the habit of contemplative vision,
but it would be rash for us, who as a nation are in the habit of treating our
emotions, especially our aesthetic emotions, with a certain levity, to accuse
them of caprice or insincerity. It is because of this classic concentration
of feeling (which by no means implies abandonment) that the French merit our
serious attention. It is this that makes their art so difficult on a first approach
but gives it its lasting hold on the imagination.
Vision and Design pp. 237-42
|
||
Last revised 16:03:05 |
||
John Benson |
||
A module of the BA Philosophy programme Institute of Environment Philosophy and Public Policy | Lancaster University | e-mail philosophy@lancaster.ac.uk |