II
These are the premises with which the realists and the romanticists, cubists, futurists, etc., start. They all assume rather naïvely the existence of an immediately perceived natural reality of given colours and forms. Their divergence is in their views as to the activity of the artist in respect of this natural reality. The realist considers that the painter's function is to transcribe it, to copy it on to canvas. He may select certain aspects which appeal to him, in fact he paints a particular scene exactly because that scene gives him more pleasure than others. But his creativeness is limited to this selection of given scenes and to their skilful and accurate reproduction.
The opponents of this view (and they include the majority of persons who have any serious acquaintance with painting) maintain that the essential element in a picture is not its resemblance to something else, but its intrinsic interest, and, this being the case, so long as the painting contains and conveys an emotion that is inherent in its line and colour it does not matter if there is not a literal resemblance to real objects. In fact, it is thought that the very effort to express a subjective mood centring round an external situation, to project one's own imaginative life into that which itself has no life, inevitably results in a certain distortion of the natural reality, in a deliberate emphasising of certain features. The line vibrates with feeling, the colour is grouped and blended so as to conform to the emotion of the individual mood, irrespective of whether "out there" the artist can actually "see" such an arrangement. The photograph has tended strongly to confirm this theory. Back in the eighties J. A. Symonds wrote, "The artist cannot avoid modifying his imitation of the chosen object by the impression of his own subjective quality. Human art is unable to reproduce nature except upon such terms as these. It cannot draw as accurately as the sun does by means of the photographic camera. Art will never match the infinite variety and subtlety of nature; no drawing or painting will equal the primary beauties of the living model ... yet art has qualities derived from the intellectual selective imaginative faculties of man which more than justify its existence." Walter Pater went a step further and asserted that "Art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant aim of art to obliterate it."
The cubist and futurist art theories are a logical development of certain implications contained in arguments such as these: they are an attempt to make pictorial and plastic art identical with what music is supposed to be to get rid altogether of the irrelevant incubus of representation. They are quite distinct from the explanation often advanced for the primitive simplificatory character of Post-Impressionist art. The latter retains and is not a bit afraid of a representative content; it merely advocates a revolt from tradition and from the inclusion of facts which we know to be there in the objects depicted without actually seeing or perceiving them. Its purpose is not a musical elaboration of our vision, but a clarification and purging of it of all derivative and merely intellectual elements. Hence the stress laid on the art and vision of the child and the primitive. There is no doubt, however, that the explanations offered of the art of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne gradually led to the cubist theory. It was felt that not only were these artists breaking away from tradition in order to attain clearness and directness of vision, but that their vision was expressive rather than representative. "Primitive art, like the art of children, consists not so much in an attempt to represent what the eye perceives as to put a line round a mental conception of the object. Like the work of the primitive artist, the pictures children draw are often extraordinarily expressive."[15]
[15] Catalogue, Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Grafton Galleries, 1910-11, pp. 11-12.
It should be noted that the early Post-Impressionists were artists first and theorists afterwards, and they did not themselves produce the theories which attempt to explain their art. The later men, on the other hand, appear to have consummated a remarkable marriage of philosophical reflection and artistic expression. Their art is the conscious execution of their argument. There is no a priori objection to this luminous rationality. The only essential is that the argument should be correct. Therefore, while one cannot condemn the art of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne on the ground that the explanatory theories subsequently put forward are fallacious, a great many of the cubist experiments live or fall with their theory.
While Cubism and Futurism had a similar origin they very soon parted ways, and each followed the light of its own peculiar interpretation. The difference of opinion concerned not the departure from verisimilitude to persons and natural objects, about which both were in agreement, but the content and character of the expression. The futurists wanted, so to speak, programme music, the cubists pure music without any taint of worldly and literary associations. It is curious that these two movements which started so near together should diverge to either extreme, Cubism to enshrine itself in a pure inhuman emotion which possesses an absolutely divine "in itselfness," but is totally unrelated to the rest of life, and can, therefore, only be ejaculated about, and Futurism "to introduce brutally life into art, to combat the old ideal æsthetic, static, decorative, effeminate, precious, cynical that loathed action."[16] Cubism is fugitive, mystical, averse to science and the world of raw human passion. Futurism is explosive with mundane energy; it is not merely a theory of art, literature, music, it is a new orientation embracing the whole of life; "on every question, in Parliament, in communal councils, and in the market-places, men are divided into lovers of the past (passatisti) and futurists." Yet it is not so much the whole of life that the futurists wish to express as that part of it which is peculiarly modern, its movement, its flux, its dynamism. Any theory of a disruptive, hurly-burly aspect is grist to the mill of Futurism. With what acclamation will Professor Einstein's relativism be greeted: except that space should be angular rather than gracefully curved! And it is again curious how the extremes tend to meet. The Futurist's state, nous aspirons à la création d'un type inhumain en qui seront aboli la douleur morale, la bonté, la tendresse et l'amour.[17] Man must become metallic, mechanical, and dynamical. Mr. Clive Bell aspires (if only in art) after an inhuman emotion crystallised in abstract plastic form, in intricate relations of masses: a sort of divine mathematical matter.
[16] Noi Futuristi! Milan, 1917.
[17] Le Futurisme, by Maxinetti and others. 1911.
Recently an interesting controversy has taken place in the Burlington Magazine between Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. D. S. Maccoll on the question of representative and abstract or purely decorative form. Mr. Maccoll stands for the older school of J. A. Symonds; Mr. Roger Fry would assimilate pictorial art to music and deprive it altogether of a world outside itself. Both are in agreement as to art being non-photographic, and as to the existence parallel with or prior to visual emotional art of a photographic visual consciousness. Art, they both admit, is not reproductive; to reproduce is the function of photography and of the photographic side of our minds.
Art is temperamental, the expression in line and colour of emotion. But while Mr. Maccoll thinks that the emotion lies mainly in the rhythm of the objects represented, Mr. Fry considers that we are wrong in concerning ourselves either with the ideas and sentiments of the artist or with his interpretation of objects. We must appreciate and judge a drawing solely according to the degree of beauty the lines set up among themselves. Mr. Maccoll shrewdly points out that Mr. Fry and his school always lay great emphasis on "mass," "volume," "plasticity," etc., which are definitely characters of objects and, therefore, representative. It is possible, however, to go further: even a line and a colour are natural objects, and if we are able to find enjoyment in simple arrangements of lines and colours, why should we not find equal enjoyment in trees and clouds and hills and people? Stated thus these are generalities, but so are lines and colours: in a picture, however, or a decoration they are endowed with individual life, with a unique tone and significance.
In order to be absolutely logical, neither Mr. Roger Fry nor Mr. Clive Bell should attempt to describe or explain a picture at all. It is a world in a watertight compartment entirely severed and shut off from the ordinary world. It either throws us into an ecstasy or it does not, but these ecstasies are so many discrete units, and if they differ we cannot articulate the difference. We ought not, for instance, to describe early Italian art as ascetically religious, Botticelli as pagan and lyrical, Hogarth as satirical. For this would be ascribing to art a content extracted from life, it would be turning art into literature. Even literature, however, at its best is devoid of meaning. "In great poetry," writes Mr. Clive Bell, "it is the formal music that makes the miracle. The poet expresses in verbal form an emotion but distantly related to the words set down." And he quotes Shakespeare's poetry as an instance of this great meaningless word music. This surely is the reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory.
Mr. Clive Bell defines art as significant form. At first sight it would appear as though the delimitations set up by the reduction of art to abstract form were swept away by the admission of "significance" which might include in its range the whole world. But the significance is indescribable except in terms of form itself. Hence there is a certain justification in Mr. Maccoll's contention that Mr. Clive Bell really means "insignificant form." In his reply Mr. Bell falls back on the conception of emotion. The significance is emotional, it is not only incommunicable except by means of the actual work of art, but is also totally unrelated to life in general: it is an intelligible and self-contained department of its own, and does not require the liaison work of the critical guide and commentator.
The fact is that in their most legitimate preoccupation of ensuring that the work of art shall be a world in itself, a unity whose essential significance and content does not lie outside itself in a world of which it is merely a superfluous copy, but is firmly grasped and held in its imaginative synthesis so that the content is identical with the form. Messrs. Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Co. have gone absolutely to the other extreme and deprived the work of art of all content and significance; they have rendered it a discrete unit instead of an individual unit. Now, there is only one mental activity which deals with discrete units, and that is mathematics. Hence we can detect a gradual assimilation in their critical terminology to the language of mathematics and physics. The mysticism of art is becoming the mysticism of planes, angles, cubes, surfaces and relations of lines and masses.
But Mr. Clive Bell has another and equally legitimate preoccupation. He has observed that he experiences the same kind of pleasure from a fine piece of architecture, a specimen of pottery, a decoration on a carpet, as from a painting inside a frame which ostensibly refers to people and objects existing independently outside the frame. And he concludes that all these works must admit of reduction to a common denomination, they all have that in common which induces us to call them works of art. Obviously as architecture is non-representative in the ordinary sense, we must excogitate a general definition which does not necessitate representation. And so by a simple classificatory abstracting process he arrives at the formula of "significant form."
Now this expressly refers only to pictorial art and does not pretend to be a definition of music, literature, dancing, etc. These, however, all come under the heading of art, and any formula for any single branch of art must contain something of the universal essence of art in general. This cannot lurk in the conception of form, because by form Mr. Bell means not the logical concept, but the spatial physical image. It must, therefore, inhere in the conception of significance. Pictorial art is something significant expressed in the medium of spatial form. But here we come up against the first preoccupation of eschewing all so-called literary content. The significance of Rembrandt's dramatic masterpiece, for instance, "Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery," must consist in the relation of the colours and lines to each other and not in its intensely dramatic human expression, which is an illegitimate literary association of ideas. The significance is wrapt up in the abstract spatial image and, therefore, so far from defining the essence of all art, including literature and music, it will not even cover dramatic representational painting. In his preoccupation of including decorative art in his definition Mr. Bell has excluded all other kinds of art, and has simply universalised the idiosyncrasy of decorative art.
He has not, however, really achieved that, because even decorative art has what Mr. Bell would call a literary significance. No one can seriously reflect upon Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architecture without admitting how profoundly they are charged with historical meaning, and that it is precisely this meaning which differentiates them and gives them their individuality. They are the spirit of their respective ages, caught up and embodied in what by an abstractive process of thought we refer to as abstract form. Actually it is only abstract when thought of apart from a particular instance: in any given instance, e.g., the Cenotaph in Whitehall, it is as concrete and individual as an ordinary picture or statue: it is a manifestation and expression of the human mind in a particular set of circumstances.
The foregoing analysis brings out two facts. The new art of abstract significant form is not, strictly speaking, anything new: it is as old, if not older, than representational art, and it is equally pregnant with literary meaning. Until quite recently, however, it has never been condensed into the form of a picture and surrounded with a frame; it has almost without exception been connected with objects of utility. This does not detract from its value in the slightest; it may mean that abstract art will outlive the picture; it is simply a statement of historical fact. Nor can we draw the immediate inference that abstract art is inappropriate in a frame. Certainly the contrary would be inappropriate: that is to say, if we built a house in the form of an Assyrian lion or made a hearthrug after Rembrandt's picture of an old woman. But it is significant that the cubist and futurist art has so far exercised a far greater and more beneficial influence in the direction of curtains, upholstery, and dresses than of pictures. Moreover, one of the leading English apostles of futurist art, Mr. Wyndham Lewis, is beginning to realise the immense field which lies open to him in the sphere of architecture, and is growing impatient with the limitations and narrow confines of the picture frame.[18]
[18] The Caliph's Design. The Egoist Ltd. A brilliant piece of destructive writing.
However this may be, the lovers both of representational art and of abstract art must live and let live, and the wrangle as to which is the most perfect, the purest kind of art, is as sterile and futile as the dispute over prose and poetry, opera and chamber music, tragedy and comedy.