Selected Essays of John Berger

Preface to the 1979 Edition

This book was first published in 1960. Most of it was written between 1954 and 1959. It seems to me that I have changed a lot since then. As I re-read the book today I have the impression that I was trapped at that time: trapped in having to express all that I felt or thought in art-critical terms. Perhaps an unconscious sense of being trapped helps to explain the puritanism of some of my judgments. In some respects I would be more tolerant today: but on the central issue I would be even more intransigent. I now believe that there is an absolute incompatibility between art and private property, or between art and state property — unless the state is a plebeian democracy. Property must be destroyed before imagination can develop any further. Thus today I would find the function of regular current art criticism — a function which, whatever the critic’s opinions, serves to uphold the art market — impossible to accept. And thus today I am more tolerant of those artists who are reduced to being largely destructive.

Yet it is not only I who have changed. The future perspective of the world has changed fundamentally. In the early 1950s when I began writing art criticism there were two poles, and only two, to which any political thought and action inevitably led. The polarization was between Moscow and Washington. Many people struggled to escape this polarization but, objectively speaking, it was impossible, because it was not a consequence of opinions but of a crucial world-struggle. Only when the USSR achieved (or was recognized to have achieved) parity in nuclear arms with the USA could this struggle cease to be the primary political factor. The achieving of this parity just preceded the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the Polish and Hungarian uprisings, to be followed later by the first obvious divergences between the USSR and China and by the victory of the Cuban Revolution. Revolutionary examples and possibilities have since multiplied. The raison d’ětre of polarized dogmatism has collapsed.

I have always been outspokenly critical of the Stalinist cultural policy of the USSR, but during the 1950s my criticism was more restrained than now. Why? Ever since I was a student, I have been aware of the injustice, hypocrisy, cruelty, wastefulness and alienation of our bourgeois society as reflected and expressed in the field of art. And my aim has been to help, in however small a way, to destroy this society. It exists to frustrate the best man. I know this profoundly and am immune to the apologetics of liberals. Liberalism is always for the alternative ruling class: never for the exploited class. But one cannot aim to destroy without taking account of the state of existing forces. In the early 1950s the USSR represented, despite all its deformations, a great part of the force of the socialist challenge to capitalism. It no longer does.

A third change, although trivial, is perhaps worth mentioning. It concerns my conditions of work. Most of this book was first written as articles for the New Statesman. They were written, as I have explained, at the height of the Cold War during a period of rigid conformism. I was in my 20s (at a time when to be young was inevitably to be patronized). Consequently every week after I had written my article I had to fight for it line by line, adjective by adjective, against constant editorial cavilling. During the last years of the 1950s I had the support and friendship of Kingsley Martin, but my own attitude towards writing for the paper and being published by it had already been formed by then. It was an attitude of belligerent wariness. Nor were the pressures only from within the paper. The vested interests of the art world exerted their own through the editors. When I reviewed an exhibition of Henry Moore arguing that it revealed a falling-off from his earlier achievements, the British Council actually telephoned the artist to apologize for such a regrettable thing having occurred in London. The art scene has now changed. And on the occasions when I now write about art I am fortunate enough to be able to write quite freely.

Re-reading this book I have the sense of myself being trapped and many of my statements being coded. And yet I have agreed to the book being re-issued as a paperback. Why? The world has changed. Conditions in London have changed. Some of the issues and artists I discuss no longer seem of urgent concern. I have changed. But precisely because of the pressures under which the book was written — professional, political, ideological, personal pressures — it seems to me that I needed at that time to formulate swift but sharp generalizations and to cultivate certain long-term insights in order to transcend the pressures and escape the confines of the genre. Today most of these generalizations and insights strike me as still valid. Furthermore they seem consistent with what I have thought and written since. The short essay on Picasso is in many ways an outline for my later book on Picasso. The recurring theme of the present book is the disastrous relation between art and property and this is the only theme connected with art on which I would still like to write a whole book.

The title Permanent Red was never meant to imply that I would not change. It was to claim that I would never compromise my opposition to bourgeois culture and society. In agreeing to the re-issue of the book I repeat the claim.

John Berger, 1968/1979

Introduction

If you take a long-term historical view, ours is obviously a period of mannerism and decadence. The excessive subjectivity of most of our art and criticism confirms this. The historical and social explanations are not hard to find. It may be unpopular but it is not stupid to condemn works as bourgeois, formalist and escapist.

If, on the other hand, you take a very limited view it is possible to sympathize with almost all artists. If you accept what they themselves are trying to do, you can admire their effort. The work is then no longer proof of the validity of the artist’s intentions: his intentions have to prove the validity of his work. If you want to know what it feels like to be X, his paintings will tell you as much as anything else ever will. Accept that it is necessary for him to create a kind of tidal world of flux in which solidity, weight and identity are all sucked away, and then his paintings are certainly impressive.

The limitation of the first approach is that it tends to be over-mechanical. To take a long-term historical view you must stand outside your own time and culture. You must base yourself on the past, in an imaginary future or in the centre of an alternative culture. Your general opinion will probably be right. But you will almost certainly be blind to the processes by which your own period is changing itself. You will tend to see the dramatic break between the culture with which you identify yourself and the culture that surrounds you more clearly than you will see the dialectic leading up to and away from that break. You would, for instance, have seen that Surrealism was decadent but you would have failed to understand how it nourished Eluard who later opposed all decadence. It is an approach that assumes that your own period is finished rather than continuous.

The limitation of the second way of approach is its subjectivity. Intentions count for more than results. You judge the distance travelled instead of the distance still necessary to travel. You think as though history begins afresh with each individual. Your mind is open — but anything can enter it and so seem positive. You will admit the genius and the fool — and not know which is which.

So what is required is a combination of both approaches. Then you will be fully equipped to recognize that rare transformation which, when it happens, allows an artist’s pursuit of his personal needs to become a pursuit of the truth. You will have the historical perspective necessary to evaluate the truth he discovers, and you will have the imaginative appreciation necessary to understand the route he must take to travel towards his discovery. In theory, such a combination would equip the ideal critic. But in fact it is impossible.

The two approaches are mutually opposed. You are demanding that the critic is simultaneously in one place (in X’s imagination) and everywhere (in history). You are casting him for the role of God. Which is, of course, the role most critics cast for themselves. Their one concern and one fear is that they will fail to understand the next genius, the latest discovery, the newest trend. Yet they are not God. So they wander about, looking for they know not what, and always believing that they have just found it.

Proper criticism is more modest. First, you must answer the question: What can art serve here and now? Then you criticize according to whether the works in question serve that purpose or not. You must beware of believing that they can always do so directly. You are not simply demanding propaganda. But you need not fall over backwards in order to avoid being proved wrong by those who later take your place. You will make mistakes. You will miss perhaps the genius who finally vindicates himself. But if you answer your initial question with historical logic and justice, you will be helping to bring about the future from which people will be able to judge the art of your own time with ease.

The question I ask is: Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights? First let me explain what I do not mean by that. When I go into a gallery, I do not assess the works according to how graphically they present, for example, the plight of our old-age pensioners. Painting and sculpture are clearly not the most suitable means for putting pressure on the government to nationalize the land. Nor am I suggesting that the artist, when actually working, can or should be primarily concerned with the justice of a social cause.

Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,

Keep those children out.

There on that scaffolding reclines

Michael Angelo.

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

Yeats understood the necessary preoccupations of the artist.

What I do mean is something less direct and more comprehensive. After we have responded to a work of art, we leave it, carrying away in our consciousness something which we didn’t have before. This something amounts to more than our memory of the incident represented, and also more than our memory of the shapes and colours and spaces which the artist has used and arranged. What we take away with us — on the most profound level — is the memory of the artist’s way of looking at the world. The representation of a recognizable incident (an incident here can simply mean a tree or a head) offers us the chance of relating the artist’s way of looking to our own. The forms he uses are the means by which he expresses his way of looking. The truth of this is confirmed by the fact that we can often recall the experience of a work, having forgotten both its precise subject and its precise formal arrangement.

Yet why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality. Not of course our awareness of our potentiality as artists ourselves. But a way of looking at the world implies a certain relationship with the world, and every relationship implies action. The kind of actions implied vary a great deal. A classical Greek sculpture increases our awareness of our own potential physical dignity; a Rembrandt of our potential moral courage; a Matisse of our potential sensual awareness. Yet each of these examples is too personal and too narrow to contain the whole truth of the matter. A work can, to some extent, increase an awareness of different potentialities in different people. The important point is that a valid work of art promises in some way or another the possibility of an increase, an improvement. Nor need the work be optimistic to achieve this; indeed, its subject may be tragic. For it is not the subject that makes the promise, it is the artist’s way of viewing his subject. Goya’s way of looking at a massacre amounts to the contention that we ought to be able to do without massacres.

Works can be very roughly divided into two categories, each offering, in the way just described, a different kind of promise. There are works which embody a way of looking that promises the mastering of reality — Piero, Mantegna, Poussin, Degas. Each of these suggests in a different way that space, time and movement are understandable and controllable. Life is only as chaotic as men make it or allow it to be. There are other works which embody a way of looking whose promise lies not so much in any suggested mastery, but rather in the fervour of an implied desire for change — El Greco, Rembrandt, Watteau, Delacroix, Van Gogh. These artists suggest that men in one way or another are larger than their circumstances — and so could change them. The two categories are related, perhaps, to the old distinction between Classic and Romantic, but they are broader because they are not concerned with specific historical vocabularies. (It is obviously absurd to think of El Greco as a romantic in the same sense as Delacroix or Chopin.)

All right, you may now say, I see your point: art is born out of hope — it’s a point that’s often been made before, but what has it to do with claiming social rights? Here it is essential to remember that the specific meaning of a work of art changes — if it didn’t, no work could outlive its period, and no agnostic could appreciate a Bellini. The meaning of the improvement, of the increase promised by a work of art, depends upon who is looking at it when. Or, to put it dialectically, it depends upon what obstacles are impeding human progress at any given time. The rationality of a Poussin first gave hope in the context of absolute monarchism: later it gave hope in the context of free trade and Whig reforms; still later it confirmed Léger’s faith in proletarian Socialism.

It is our century, which is pre-eminently the century of men throughout the world claiming the right of equality, it is our own history that makes it inevitable that we can only make sense of art if we judge it by the criterion of whether or not it helps men to claim their social rights. It has nothing to do with the unchanging nature of art — if such a thing exists. It is the lives lived during the last fifty years that have now turned Michelangelo into a revolutionary artist. The hysteria with which many people today deny the present, inevitable social emphasis of art is simply due to the fact that they are denying their own time. They would like to live in a period when they’d be right.

1960

Drawing

For the artist drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations. It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it. Each confirmation or denial brings you closer to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it: the contours you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what you have become. Perhaps that sounds needlessly metaphysical. Another way of putting it would be to say that each mark you make on the paper is a stepping-stone from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as though it were a river, have put it behind you.

This is quite different from the later process of painting a ‘finished’ canvas or carving a statue. Here you do not pass through your subject, but try to re-create it and house yourself in it. Each brush-mark or chisel-stroke is no longer a stepping-stone, but a stone to be fitted into a planned edifice. A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event — seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself. It is significant in this respect that only when the artist gained a relatively high standard of individual ‘autobiographical’ freedom, did drawings, as we now understand them, begin to exist. In a hieratic, anonymous tradition they are unnecessary. (I should perhaps point out here that I am talking about working drawings — although a working drawing need not necessarily be made for a specific project. I do not mean linear designs, illustrations, caricatures, certain portraits or graphic works which may be ‘finished’ productions in their own right.)

A number of technical factors often enlarge this distinction between a working drawing and a ‘finished’ work: the longer time needed to paint a canvas or carve a block: the larger scale of the job: the problem of simultaneously managing colour, quality of pigment, tone, texture, grain, and so on — the ‘shorthand’ of drawing is relatively simple and direct. But nevertheless the fundamental distinction is in the working of the artist’s mind. A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work — related far more directly to the demands of communication.

It follows from this that there is an equal distinction from the point of view of the spectator. In front of a painting or statue he tends to identify himself with the subject, to interpret the images for their own sake; in front of a drawing he identifies himself with the artist, using the images to gain the conscious experience of seeing as though through the artist’s own eyes.

As I looked down at the clean page in my sketchbook I was more conscious of its height than its breadth. The top and bottom edges were the critical ones, for between them I had to reconstruct the way he rose up from the floor, or, thinking in the opposite direction, the way that he was held down to the floor. The energy of the pose was primarily vertical. All the small lateral movements of the arms, the twisted neck, the leg which was not supporting his weight, were related to that vertical force, as the trailing and overhanging branches of a tree are related to the vertical shaft of the trunk. My first lines had to express that; had to make him stand like a skittle, but at the same time had to imply that, unlike a skittle, he was capable of movement, capable of readjusting his balance if the floor tilted, capable for a few seconds of leaping up into the air against the vertical force of gravity. This capability of movement, this irregular and temporary rather than uniform and permanent tension of his body, would have to be expressed in relation to the side edges of the paper, to the variations on either side of the straight line between the pit of his neck and the heel of his weight-bearing leg.

I looked for the variations. His left leg supported his weight and therefore the left, far side of his body was tense, either straight or angular; the near, right side was comparatively relaxed and flowing. Arbitrary lateral lines taken across his body ran from curves to sharp points — as streams flow from hills to sharp, compressed gulleys in the cliff-face. But of course it was not as simple as that. On his near, relaxed side his fist was clenched and the hardness of his knuckles recalled the hard line of his ribs on the other side — like a cairn on the hills recalling the cliffs.

I now began to see the white surface of the paper, on which I was going to draw, in a different way. From being a clean flat page it became an empty space. Its whiteness became an area of limitless, opaque light, possible to move through but not to see through. I knew that when I drew a line on it — or through it — I should have to control the line, not like the driver of a car, on one plane: but like a pilot in the air; movement in all three dimensions being possible.

Yet, when I made a mark, somewhere beneath the near ribs, the nature of the page changed again. The area of opaque light suddenly ceased to be limitless. The whole page was changed by what I had drawn just as the water in a glass tank is changed immediately you put a fish in it. It is then only the fish that you look at. The water merely becomes the condition of its life and the area in which it can swim.

Then, when I crossed the body to mark the outline of the far shoulder, yet another change occurred. It was not simply like putting another fish into the tank. The second line altered the nature of the first. Whereas before the first line had been aimless, now its meaning was fixed and made certain by the second line. Together they held down the edges of the area between them, and the area, straining under the force which had once given the whole page the potentiality of depth, heaved itself up into a suggestion of solid form. The drawing had begun.

The third dimension, the solidity of the chair, the body, the tree, is, at least as far as our senses are concerned, the very proof of our existence. It constitutes the difference between the word and the world. As I looked at the model I marvelled at the simple fact that he was solid, that he occupied space, that he was more than the sum total of ten thousand visions of him from ten thousand different viewpoints. In my drawing, which was inevitably a vision from just one point of view, I hoped eventually to imply this limitless number of other facets. But now it was simply a question of building and refining forms until their tensions began to be like those I could see in the model. It would of course be easy by some mistaken over-emphasis to burst the whole thing like a balloon; or it might collapse like too-thin clay on a potter’s wheel; or it might become irrevocably misshapen and lose its centre of gravity. Nevertheless, the thing was there. The infinite, opaque possibilities of the blank page had been made particular and lucid. My task now was to coordinate and measure: not to measure by inches as one might measure an ounce of sultanas by counting them, but to measure by rhythm, mass and displacement: to gauge distances and angles as a bird flying through a trellis of branches; to visualize the ground plan like an architect; to feel the pressure of my lines and scribbles towards the uttermost surface of the paper, as a sailor feels the slackness or tautness of his sail in order to tack close or far from the surface of the wind.

I judged the height of the ear in relation to the eyes, the angles of the crooked triangle of the two nipples and the navel, the lateral lines of the shoulders and hips — sloping towards each other so that they would eventually meet, the relative position of the knuckles of the far hand directly above the toes of the far foot. I looked, however, not only for these linear proportions, the angles and lengths of these imaginary pieces of string stretched from one point to another, but also for the relationships of planes, of receding and advancing surfaces.

Just as looking over the haphazard roofs of an unplanned city you find identical angles of recession in the gables and dormer-windows of quite different houses — so that if you extended any particular plane through all the intermediary ones, it would eventually coincide perfectly with another; in exactly the same way you find extensions of identical planes in different parts of the body. The plane, falling away from the summit of the stomach to the groin, coincided with that which led backwards from the near knee to the sharp, outside edge of the calf. One of the gentle, inside planes, high up on the thigh of the same leg, coincided with a small plane leading away and around the outline of the far pectoral muscle.

And so, as some sort of unity was shaped and the lines accumulated on the paper, I again became aware of the real tensions of the pose. But this time more subtly. It was no longer a question of just realizing the main, vertical stance. I had become involved more intimately with the figure. Even the smaller facts had acquired an urgency and I had to resist the temptation to make every line over-emphatic. I entered into the receding spaces and yielded to the oncoming forms. Also, I was correcting: drawing over and across the earlier lines to reestablish proportions or to find a way of expressing less obvious discoveries. I saw that the line down the centre of the torso, from the pit of the neck, between the nipples, over the navel and between the legs, was like the keel of a boat, that the ribs formed a hull and that the near, relaxed leg dragged on its forward movement like a trailing oar. I saw that the arms hanging either side were like the shafts of a cart, and that the outside curve of the weight-bearing thigh was like the ironed rim of a figure on a crucifix. Yet such images, although I have chosen them carefully, distort what I am trying to describe. I saw and recognized quite ordinary anatomical facts; but I also felt them physically — as if, in a sense, my nervous system inhabited his body.

A few of the things I recognized I can describe more directly. I noticed how at the foot of the hard, clenched, weight-bearing leg, there was clear space beneath the arch of the instep. I noticed how subtly the straight under-wall of the stomach elided into the attenuated, joining planes of thigh and hip. I noticed the contrast between the hardness of the elbow and the vulnerable tenderness of the inside of the arm at the same level.

Then, quite soon, the drawing reached its point of crisis. Which is to say that what I had drawn began to interest me as much as what I could still discover. There is a stage in every drawing when this happens. And I call it a point of crisis because at that moment the success or failure of the drawing has really been decided. One now begins to draw according to the demands, the needs, of the drawing. If the drawing is already in some small way true, then these demands will probably correspond to what one might still discover by actual searching. If the drawing is basically false, they will accentuate its wrongness.

I looked at my drawing trying to see what had been distorted; which lines or scribbles of tones had lost their original and necessary emphasis, as others had surrounded them; which spontaneous gestures had evaded a problem, and which had been instinctively right. Yet even this process was only partly conscious. In some places I could clearly see that a passage was clumsy and needed checking; in others, I allowed my pencil to hover around — rather like the stick of a water-diviner. One form would pull, forcing the pencil to make a scribble of tone which could re-emphasize its recession; another would jab the pencil into restressing a line which could bring it further forward.

Now when I looked at the model to check a form, I looked in a different way. I looked, as it were, with more connivance: to find only what I wanted to find.

Then the end. Simultaneously ambition and disillusion. Even as in my mind’s eye I saw my drawing and the actual man coincide — so that, for a moment, he was no longer a man posing but an inhabitant of my half-created world, a unique expression of my experience — even as I saw this in my mind’s eye, I saw in fact how inadequate, fragmentary, clumsy my small drawing was.

I turned over the page and began another drawing, starting from where the last one had left off. A man standing, his weight rather more on one leg than the other …

1953

Jackson Pollock

In a period of cultural disintegration — such as ours in the West today — it is hard to assess the value of an individual talent. Some artists are clearly more gifted than others and people who profoundly understand their particular media ought to be able to distinguish between those who are more and those who are less gifted. Most contemporary criticism is exclusively concerned with making this distinction; on the whole, the critic today accepts the artist’s aims (so long as they do not challenge his own function) and concentrates on the flair or lack of it with which they have been pursued. Yet this leaves the major question begging: how far can talent exempt an artist if he does not think beyond or question the decadence of the cultural situation to which he belongs?

Perhaps our obsession with genius, as opposed to talent, is an instinctive reaction to this problem, for the genius is by definition a man who is in some way or another larger than the situation he inherits. For the artist himself the problem is often deeply tragic; this was the question, I believe, which haunted men like Dylan Thomas and John Minton. Possibly it also haunted Jackson Pollock and may partly explain why in the last years of his life he virtually stopped painting.

Pollock was highly talented. Some may be surprised by this. We have seen the consequences of Pollock’s now famous innovations — thousands of Tachiste and Action canvases crudely and arbitrarily covered and ‘attacked’ with paint. We have heard the legend of Pollock’s way of working: the canvas on the floor, the paint dripped and flung on to it from tins; the delirium of the artist’s voyage into the unknown, etc. We have read the pretentious incantations written around the kind of painting he fathered. How surprising it is then to see that he was, in fact, a most fastidious, sensitive and ‘charming’ craftsman, with more affinities with an artist like Beardsley than with a raging iconoclast.

His best canvases are large. One stands in front of them and they fill one’s field of vision: great walls of silver, pink, new gold, pale blue nebulae seen through dense skeins of swift dark or light lines. It is true that these pictures are not composed in the Renaissance sense of the term; they have no focal centre for the eye to travel towards or away from. They are designed as continuous surface patterns which are perfectly unified without the use of any obvious repeating motif. Nevertheless their colour, their consistency of gesture, the balance of their tonal weights all testify to a natural painter’s talent. The same qualities also reveal that Pollock’s method of working allowed him, in relation to what he wanted to do, as much control as, say, the Impressionist method allowed the Impressionists.

Pollock, then, was unusually talented and his paintings can delight the sophisticated eye. If they were turned into textile design or wall-papers they might also delight the unsophisticated eye. (It is only the sophisticated who can enjoy an isolated, single quality removed from any normal context and pursued for its own sake — in this case the quality of abstract decoration.) But can one leave the matter there?

It is impossible. Partly because his influence as a figure standing for something more than this is now too pressing a fact to ignore, and partly because his paintings must also be seen — and were probably intended — as images. What is their content, their meaning? A well-known museum curator, whom I saw in the gallery, said ‘They’re so meaningful.’ But this, of course, was an example of the way in which qualitative words are now foolishly and constantly stood on their heads as everybody commandeers the common vocabulary for their unique and personal usage. These pictures are meaningless. But the way in which they are so is significant.

Imagine a man brought up from birth in a white cell so that he has never seen anything except the growth of his own body. And then imagine that suddenly he is given some sticks and bright paints. If he were a man with an innate sense of balance and colour harmony, he would then, I think, cover the white walls of his cell as Pollock has painted his canvases. He would want to express his ideas and feelings about growth, time, energy, death, but he would lack any vocabulary of seen or remembered visual images with which to do so. He would have nothing more than the gestures he could discover through the act of applying his coloured marks to his white walls. These gestures might be passionate and frenzied but to us they could mean no more than the tragic spectacle of a deaf mute trying to talk.

I believe that Pollock imaginatively, subjectively, isolated himself almost to that extent. His paintings are like pictures painted on the inside walls of his mind. And the appeal of his work, especially to other painters, is of the same character. His work amounts to an invitation: Forget all, sever all, inhabit your white cell and — most ironic paradox of all — discover the universal in your self, for in a one-man world you are universal!

The constant problem for the Western artist is to find themes for his art which can connect him with his public. (And by a theme I do not mean a subject as such but the developing significance found in a subject.) At first Pollock was influenced by the Mexicans and by Picasso. He borrowed stylistically from them and was sustained by their fervour, but try as he might he could not take over their themes because they were simply not applicable to his own view of his own social and cultural situation. Finally in desperation he made his theme the impossibility of finding a theme. Having the ability to speak, he acted dumb. (Here a little like James Dean.) Given freedom and contacts, he condemned himself to solitary confinement in the white cell. Possessing memories and countless references to the outside world, he tried to lose them. And having jettisoned everything he could, he tried to preserve only his consciousness of what happened at the moment of the act of painting.

If he had not been talented this would not be clear; instead one would simply dismiss his work as incompetent, bogus, irrelevant. As it is, Jackson Pollock’s talent did make his work relevant. Through it one can see the disintegration of our culture, for naturally what I have described was not a fully conscious and deliberate personal policy; it was the consequence of his living by and subscribing to all our profound illusions about such things as the role of the individual, the nature of history, the function of morality.

And perhaps here we have come to something like an answer to my original question. If a talented artist cannot see or think beyond the decadence of the culture to which he belongs, if the situation is as extreme as ours, his talent will only reveal negatively but unusually vividly the nature and extent of that decadence. His talent will reveal, in other words, how it itself has been wasted.

1958

Henry Moore

I believe that Henry Moore himself considers that most ‘interpretations’ of his work are so much nonsense. He is probably right. Not only because many critics are fools, but because the problem of the meaning of his work haunts him and forces him round in circles so that finally his inability to solve it actually supplies him with his subject matter. On certain occasions Moore has tackled straight subjects — the Madonna and Child, the Dead Warrior, the War Sketch Books. On other occasions he has got lost and confused and so produced works which are objects and not images at all. But most of the time he has to wrestle — even if unconsciously. And so must we, too, but consciously and logically. We can, of course, simply say that Moore has the ability to create forms that somehow please us and then use words like Dignity, Strength, Power — words offered to mysterious gods. But in time these words wear thin, and if Moore’s work is to last, its significance must become clearer.

Take his figure for the Unesco building in Paris. A reclining figure is what it is called. Probably feminine. The forms of the body rounded, hollowed out, transported and transformed. If it wasn’t for the head on the neck it would be difficult to recognize as a figure at all. Given this clue, however, the forms do become readable. Yet as what? As you walk round the work, the five massive earth-bound forms change their relationship with one another, change their formation as easily and freely as five birds in the sky. And in the pliable imagination suggested by that, you recognize Moore’s mastery. Yet mastery for what purpose? A master makes the form of a work seem inevitable. Then this inevitability challenges the inevitability of nature in the name of something. In the name of what does this sculpture challenge? Why do three boulder-like masses fuse together to challenge two legs? The questions nag. You respond to the work. You say to yourself: the meaning of art cannot always be made explicit in words. But imagining yourself a sculptor, you also sense that no one could go on from where Moore leaves off. And no one has. Why?

The distortions in this work are not emotional in the expressionist sense: they clearly don’t reflect the artist’s attitude to his subject, if his subject is assumed to be a woman. Nor are they structurally analytical: they reveal nothing about the way a body moves, grows or is controlled. They don’t, in other words, take us beyond static appearances, propelled forward by either emotion or dynamic knowledge. On the contrary, Moore’s distorted forms appear more immutable than any living appearance. They are dead? Not quite. More dead than alive? Yes, but what is more dead than alive? Inorganic matter. And there you have it. Moore’s subject here is not a woman: it is the inert material he has in his hands. This work doesn’t challenge the reality of the human figure: it challenges the reality of the meaningless mass that it might so easily have been. It is an object striving to become an image: a prophecy of life not yet manifest. And so it seems to me that Moore’s work represents effectively and truthfully the modern artist’s struggle to achieve vitality, to discover a theme. It poses the problem, it begs for a solution, but it does not offer one. It is art which has voluntarily put its back against the ultimate wall. Which is also why no one can follow Moore. One can’t go further back than he has.

1955

Juan Gris

By temperament Gris appears to have been obstinate, cold, mean, but courageous about his health — he died at forty; his great virtues as an artist were his intelligence and clarity, the latter quality being the result, as with Stendhal, of an extreme, disciplined frankness. He was as near to a scientist as any modern painter has been, and thus, because Picasso’s and Braque’s discovery of Cubism was the discovery of a formula, Gris was the purest and most apt of all the Cubists.

It may seem shocking in our period of hysterical individualism to say that Cubism supplied a formula. Yet this was its unique advantage over all other twentieth-century movements, and is why many second-rate artists who came under its influence were temporarily made first-rate. At its best it was not, of course, a formula for making pictures, although it finally became that; it was a formula for interpreting and understanding reality.

Theoretically, the reality of an object for a Cubist consisted of the sum total of all its possible appearances. Yet in practice this total could never be arrived at, because the number of possible visual appearances (or aspects) was infinite. Consequently, the most the Cubist could do was somehow to suggest the range of, the infinity of possibilities open to, his vision. The real subject of a Cubist painting is not a bottle or a violin; the real subject is always the same, and is the functioning of sight itself. The bottle or the violin is only the point of focus, the stake to which the artist’s circling vision is tied. (The Cubists’ trick of imitating the surfaces of the objects they were painting — by wood graining, marble patterning, etc. — served to fix this necessary focus in the quickest possible way.) To look at a Cubist painting is like looking at a star. The star exists objectively, as does the subject of the painting. But its shape is the result of our looking at it.

The artist, in other words, became his own subject, not in any subjective or egocentric manner, but as a result of his considering himself and the functioning of his own senses as an integral part of the Nature he was studying. This was the formula for Cubism and when Cézanne insisted on being faithful to Nature via his petite sensation he predicted it. Again, however, I want to emphasize that by formula I mean a new, revolutionary truth, which, once posed, can be generally learned, taught and applied. Why revolutionary? Because, simultaneously with the scientific discoveries of that period (Rutherford, Planck, Einstein) which were just beginning to give man, for the first time in history, the possibility of an adequate control of his environment, the Cubist formula presupposed, also for the first time in history, man living unalienated from Nature. And it is perhaps this which explains why those few Cubist pictures which were created during the years immediately preceding the First World War are the calmest works painted since the French Revolution.

Following the war and its consequences, the prophetic confidence of the Cubists was broken. They had enlarged the vocabulary of painting, but the revolutionary meaning of what they had added was largely forgotten. Only Léger remained consistently faithful to the original spirit of Cubism: Picasso was so spasmodically: whilst Braque and Gris withdrew into decorative idioms — Gris in an architectural spirit, Braque with the spirit of an epicure poet.

It still seems logical to believe, however, that when eventually a modern tradition of art and teaching is established — and this tradition will inevitably be materialist in philosophy and uncommercial in context — it is to Cubism that its exponents will return as a starting point.

1958

Jacques Lipchitz

Critics should always look their hobby-horses in the mouth. Yet despite this warning, the more I think about the art of the last and the next forty years (which is the minimum time-span with which any critic should concern himself) the more I am convinced that the question of Cubism is a — and probably the — fundamental one. Cubist mannerisms are of course widespread, but it is not to these that I refer; stylistic mannerisms are the small-talk of art. It is the Cubist attitude to nature, to the content of art, which has opened up so many real and truly modern possibilities.

The static single viewpoint in painting and sculpture can no longer satisfy the expectations deriving from our new knowledge of history, physical structure, psychology. We now think in terms of processes rather than substances. Many twentieth-century artists have expressed this shift and progress in our knowledge by using unusual, eccentric viewpoints whose significance depends on vibrant comparisons, made outside the picture, with other less eccentric viewpoints. This is the principle behind expressionist distortions and surrealist juxtapositions. Their success depends on — as it were — setting the viewer spinning. Their argument is: a form is not in fact what it appears to be, and therefore if we wilfully deform it we can usefully make people doubt the apparent truth; so let us cast off and trust to the unknown currents. The reduction to absurdity of this attitude is the worship of the accident, as in Action Painting.

The Cubist attitude is totally opposed to this. The Cubists established the principle of using multiple viewpoints within the picture and therefore of controlling the spin and the vibrations of meaning. They were concerned with establishing new knowledge rather than with destroying the old, and so they were concerned with statements, not doubts. They wanted their art to be as self-sufficient as the truth. They aimed to disclose processes, not to ride hell bent down them into ferment. They were not of course scientists. They were artists, and so they connected one phenomenon with another by an imaginative rather than physical logic. Human consciousness was their arena as well as their tool. But they were almost unique in modern art in that they believed that this consciousness could be considered rationally, not, as all romantics believe, just suffered.

Readers might now reasonably assume that I am talking about the classic Cubist works of 1908 to 1913, and that when I say ‘multiple viewpoints’ I mean it literally and optically. The true consequences of Cubism, however, are far wider, and nobody illustrates this better than the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, along with Zadkine among the few possibly great sculptors of our time.

Lipchitz would be the first to admit that he was formed by Cubism. Indeed, from 1913 for about ten years he produced sculpture which looked very like early Cubist paintings: the same scrolly shapes, sharp edges, lack of depth, and even the same subjects. These were the works of his apprenticeship. Mostly they fail as sculpture. The forms have been taken too directly from painting. They look like canvases seen through stereoscopic spectacles. But from the middle twenties Cubism ceased to be a matter of style for him, and became a question of imaginative vision. Some of his new works were open wire-like sculptures; others were massive figures, a little like the sculptural equivalent of Léger’s, with surfaces sometimes polished and sometimes very broken-up. All, however, were metaphors in movement.

I fear that that is an obscure phrase but perhaps I can clarify it by an example. There is a large work of a pair of lovers on the ground. The forms are very severely simplified. There are no hands, no feet, no faces. One mass presses down on another. Their four legs have become two simple forms — a little like the front wings of a car. The man’s arms connect two shoulders — his own with hers. Their heads, both bent backwards from the chin, form a shape like an open beak, his the top bill and hers the bottom. In profile the whole work looks somewhat like a tortoise — the shell their two bodies — raising itself up on its legs. But its spirit is not in the least zoomorphic. It is cast in bronze and its forms are metallic. Just as much as a tortoise, it also suggests a fulcrum, levers and counter-weights. Its distortions and simplifications have not been governed by the material as in Moore, nor by emotional urges and fears as in Marini; they have been very carefully derived from the objective structural stresses and movements of the subject. Hence the energy of the work. It springs from its own base. Rodin, whom Lipchitz much admires, was also concerned with movement, but for Rodin the movement of a figure was something that happened to it. For Lipchitz, concerned with processes rather than substances, and looking in imagination from multiple viewpoints, movement is the very mode of being for his figures.

Poetically this means that he conjures up allusions to all forms of movement: to the wind, to animals, to fire, to plants opening, to gestation. His refugees fall like stones from a collapsing building; Prometheus strangles the vulture (an intended symbol for Fascism) as wind strangles a flame. His happy figures are like new boats on the stocks. Orpheus rediscovers his love and they are like two clouds in the sky.

Ideologically it means that he is in a position to make the truthful symbols of our time. Speed is rightly — but not just in the sense of travelling fast — our special concern. We aim to set processes in motion. Only gods are static. And historically it means that Lipchitz has learnt, when he is at his best, the lessons of Cubism: has learnt to control the spin and produce a modern rational art.

1959

Ossip Zadkine

In May 1940 the centre of Rotterdam — including, among other buildings, 25,000 homes — was bombed to rubble. It was the second European city to be a victim of the German policy of extermination bombing. Warsaw was the first.

On the waterfront of the new city there now stands Zadkine’s monument to the ordeal of the old city. It is a reminder of which the citizens of Rotterdam are almost unanimously proud. It is a memorial which can shame those Germans capable of admitting shame. It is an inspiration in the struggle for progress and peace. And quite apart from this, it is — in my opinion at least — the best modern war monument in Europe.

You can only see it properly by walking round it on foot. It stands by itself, well away from any road or large building, overlooking the harbour. Although near the centre, this is one of the few quiet, still places in the modern city. You walk round the plain granite block on which the figure, cast in dark bronze, simultaneously stands, dies and advances. The scale is big. Two or three large gulls can perch on the hand that appears to be flattened against the surface of the sky. Between the outstretched arms the clouds move. A ship’s siren sounds on the other side of the water, and you think of the largest anchor, but buckled, and trailing not over the sea bed but over those moving clouds. At night it is different. It becomes a silhouette, less symbolic and more human. Shadows, which are half the visual language of sculpture, are obliterated. Only the gesture therefore remains. A man stands, arms raised to hold off an invisible load between him and the stars. Then in the early morning you see again the lime of the gulls and the dead fixed texture of the massively cast bronze in contrast with the bright, crinkling surface of the water. Thus the sculpture changes with the time of day. It is not a passive figure with a corrugated cloak waiting to be benighted, lit up, scorched and snowed upon until it becomes no more than the unmeltable core of a snowman. Its function and not just its appearance depends upon the hours. It engages time. And the reason for this is that its whole conception as a work of art is based on an awareness of development and change.

But first let me admit that there is one very weak passage in this work: the tree stump by the side of the figure. An upright form is necessary there to support the figure, but both the shape and the associations of a tree stump are quite unsuitable: like a potato by the side of a crystal. However, it is almost possible to ignore this. It is not part of the figure and it is not part of the work’s true image.

What is the meaning of this image? Or, rather, what are the meanings? — for it is the fact that this work has simultaneous meanings that allows it to express development and change so well. The figure represents the city. And the first dominant theme is that of the city being ravaged, razed. The hands and the head cry out against the sky from which the man-aimed bombs fall. I say man-aimed because this makes the anguish sharper and fiercer than that of an Old Testament prophet crying out against the wrath of his god, and this extra anguish partly explains, I think, the violence of the distortions in modern tragic works like this. The torso of the man is ripped open and his heart destroyed. The wound is not portrayed in terms of flesh. The man represents a city, and the sculpture is of bronze and so the wound, which in fact is a hole right through the body, is seen in terms of the twisted metal of the burnt-out shell of a building. The legs give at the knees. The whole figure is about to fall.

The second theme is very different. This is also a figure of aspiration and advance. The heart is ripped out, but the arms and hands are not only held high in anguish and a vain attempt to hold off, they also raise and lift. The legs not only give at the knees, they also bend because they are steady. And from every direction as you walk round this figure, the step appears to be forwards. The figure has no back — and so cannot retreat. It advances in every direction (and do not think I am now talking metaphorically; I am being quite literal). On the site of the old city a new one was to be built. One week after the German attack, plans were made to rebuild Rotterdam after the Germans were eventually driven out. And so the curses also become a rallying cry.

How does the work achieve this duality? Not by philosophic dualism, not by separating the spiritual from the physical — as in certain crucifixions where the body of Christ is tortured and the expression of his face peaceful and triumphant. This is a work which is uncompromisingly physical and the basis of its double meaning is a material one. First, the statue has an existence and logic of its own. It is not imitative. It is a piece of bronze demonstrating something and it does not disguise the fact that it is a piece of bronze: its forms are metallic in both shape and tension. This allows it to express the content of one moment — the moment of dying or the moment of resurrection — whilst not being exclusively committed to that moment; it also clearly remains a piece of bronze on the waterfront at Rotterdam in 1960. Thus its formalizations become the equivalent of a historical perspective: they do more than generalize, they allow for change. Yet by itself this is a dangerous principle to work upon because it can lead to that kind of abstraction which ‘contains’ any meaning because it actually has none. Formalizations governed by the material of the work in question must always be modified and checked by observation of the reality of the subject. And this is the second way in which the basis of the double meaning of this work is a material one. It is not by magic that Zadkine has modelled a figure which simultaneously advances and collapses; it is by learning from the methods of Cubism. He now knows what is constant in all the ways in which a body can move and retain its balance. He can sense the points of physical coincidence between a man falling and a man going forwards. (Who has not mistaken laughter for weeping, a gesture of affection for one of attack?)

And so having established these points and the precise relationship between them — round the wrists, at the pit of the neck, under the shoulders, along the thighs, near the knees — he constructs the form of each limb to suggest, given those fixed points, all its possibilities of movement. The figure becomes like a dance which does not need time to unfold. The dancer’s movements have been made simultaneous, but within itself each movement obeys its natural law.

Naturally the way Zadkine actually worked was not as cerebral as I have made it seem; nor is the impact of the sculpture half as involved. It is a popular work, accepted by the citizens of Rotterdam, because its dialectic is a very human one. Unlike most memorials, it is neither gruesome nor patronizing. It does not try to turn defeat into victory, nor does it hide the truth by invoking Honour. It shows that different people can use the words defeat and victory to describe the same thing, whilst the reality which is actually suffered is something continuously developing and changing out of that apparent contradiction. And it shows this in terms of pain and effort. It stands on the edge of the land. And it is as if this figure has crossed the world and come through history to stand on the most advanced point to meet those who will soon arrive.

1959

Fernand Léger

Our productive, scientific abilities have outstripped our ethical and social conscience. That is a platitude and no more than a half truth, but it is nevertheless a way of summing up at least an aspect of the crisis of our time. Nearly all contemporary artists who have faced up to this crisis at all have concentrated on the ensuing conflict of conscience. Léger was unique because he seized upon our technical achievements and by concentrating upon their real nature was led on to discover the spirit, the ethics, the attitude of mind, necessary to control and exploit them to our full advantage. It is because of this — because Léger put the facts of our environment first and through them arrived at his attitude to life — that one can claim that he was so boldly a materialist.

As an artist Léger is often accused of being crude, vulgar, impersonal. He is none of these things. It is his buoyant confidence that makes him seem crude to the diffident. It is his admiration of industrial techniques and therefore of the industrial worker that makes him seem vulgar to the privileged; and his belief in human solidarity that makes him seem impersonal to the isolated. His works themselves refute the charge. Look at them. I always feel absurdly pretentious when trying to write about Léger. His works so clearly affirm themselves. In front of a painting by Picasso or Bonnard, one senses such an urgency of conflict that it seems quite appropriate to discuss and debate and plead for all the issues involved. But in front of a Léger one thinks: There it is. Take it or leave it. Or rather, take it when you want it, and leave it when you don’t. Scribble moustaches on his girls if you like. Buy a postcard of it and send it home along with a vulgar one. Lean against it, and prompted by the bicycle in it, discuss where you’re going next Sunday. Let the dumb-bells in another remind you that you’ve stopped doing your early morning exercises. Or stand entranced and reflect afterwards that he has probably learned more from Michelangelo than from any other artist. It doesn’t matter. Look at his bicycles, and his girls in their sports clothes, and his holiday straw hats, and his cows with their comic camouflage dapples, and his steeplejacks and acrobats each knowing what the other takes, and his trees like the sprigs you put into a jam jar, and his machinery as gay as the youth who plans to paint his motor-bike, and his nudes as familiar as wives — what other modern painter doesn’t paint a nude as though she were either a piece of studio furniture or a surreptitious mistress? — and his compasses and keys painted as if they were emblems on flags to celebrate their usefulness — does his work seem mechanical and cold?

Léger’s greatest works are those which he painted since the war and those in which, dealing with the human figure, he expressed directly the profound humanism of his materialist philosophy. Among these are the studies for his famous large painting of builders working together on scaffolding, and the monumental heads with their striped flags of bright colours superimposed over their contours.

These heads with their strips of bright orange, red and blue, represent the culmination of Léger’s art. Léger began with the machine. His cubist pictures were untheoretical. In them he simply used the cube and the cylinder to recreate the energy of machine blocks and pistons. Then he discovered the machine-made object. Unlike most artists, but like the average man of our century, he was not interested in its associations but in how it was made. From this period in his painting he learned how to manage solids — how to manufacture them, how to preserve a surface with paint, how to dazzle with contrasts, how to assemble mass-produced signs with colour. Later, interested by how colour changed the appearance of shapes and vice versa, he began designing abstract murals. Yet, unlike so many others, he always realized that abstract painting meant nothing if separated from architecture. ‘It is our duty,’ he said, ‘to spread light and colour’ — and he meant into the mean, grimed city apartments. From this phase he learned to see beyond the single static object: he learned to connect. And with this formal development came a human one. He saw that the machine had made labour collective, that its discipline had created a new class, that it could offer freedom. He suddenly saw machines as tools in the hands of men, no longer as mere objects in themselves. From that moment everything he painted ceased to be a celebration of the mechanical industrial world as it is, and became a celebration of the richer human world to which industrialization would eventually lead. He painted Adam and Eve and made them a French worker and his girl granted Leisure. He painted bicycles as a symbol of the machine available to the working class which could convey them to where they wished. And he painted his monumental heads with their waving flags of colour.

Léger was not one to parade his sensibility as though it were his only virtue. The bright dynamic colours reflect what he learned from the machine. The unblinking confidence of the heads, expressed in their faces themselves and in the steady unchanging contours which define them, reflect what he learned from those who work machines. The two then combine. These paintings incorporate all the formal discoveries of modern art and yet are classic, suggest order and yet are full of gaiety. The strips of colour run across many different forms yet are so finely modified and placed that they give to each a solidity and definition which is nothing short of miraculous. I have called these works flags. They are emblems for something permanent and are as full of movement as pennants in the wind.

In fact Léger was the only modern European artist to have created an heroic style. Many factors prove this; that his work has a dignity and a sense of scale which in no way relies upon his literal subject; that on one hand it is as formal and architectural as a Corbusier building, and on the other is as simple in meaning as a ballad; that the nudity of his figures is less private than any painted since Michelangelo. He makes his figures nude to emphasize what they have in common. He calls one picture Les Trois Soeurs. The heroic artist cannot by definition be interested in idiosyncrasies.

Léger rejected every implication of ‘Glamour’. ‘Glamour’, as it has now come to be understood, stands for everything that separates one person from another, whether it is their ‘special’ understanding of art or the colour of their lipstick; Léger was only concerned with what we have in common. The current vision of the genius is almost synonymous with that of the mysterious, misunderstood outcast; Léger’s vision of the genius was of a man with an imagination so in tune with his time and therefore so easily understandable, that he could become almost anonymous — his works as easy and yet sharp to the eye as popular proverbs to the ear.

He stands beside Picasso. Picasso is the painter of today; his greatness rests on the vitality with which he expresses our present conflicts. Léger is the painter of the future. And by that I do not simply mean that his future as an artist is assured, but that he assures his audience, if they have the courage to accept it, of their future. Yet at the same time Léger was not Utopian. He recognized human vulnerability and allowed for it by the tenderness of gesture and mood of his figures. In a Utopia there might be gaiety and co-operation and happiness but there would be no need for tenderness, for tenderness is the result of understanding human weakness. His Constructeurs do not only build together: they also protect one another — as, in practice, men working on high scaffolding must. His portrait of Eluard shows all the doubting that a lyrical poet must undergo. In one of his last canvases, called Maternité, the typical bands of bright colour set the drawing flying, as gay as a tricolour, but the daughter’s hand touches her mother’s cheek with the necessary reassurance that children can give. Such tenderness is not innocent.

1954

Pablo Picasso

Because Picasso holds the position he does, every misinterpretation of his work can only increase contemporary misunderstanding of art in general. That is the justification for adding a few more hundred to the millions of words through whose mesh he himself always escapes.

Above all Picasso suffers from being taken too seriously. He recognizes this himself and it is one of the ironical themes of some of his drawings. The indignant take him too seriously because they attach too much importance to the mad prices his works fetch and so assume that he — instead of his hangers-on — is a racketeer. The ostentatiously tolerant take him too seriously because they forgive him his excesses on the ground that, when he wants to be, he is a great draughtsman. In fact this is untrue. His best drawings if compared to those of Géricault, Daumier or Goya appear brilliant but not profound. Picasso’s future reputation as a great artist would not, as is so often said, be guaranteed by his realistic works alone. The enthusiastic take him too seriously because they believe that every mark he has made, the date on which he made it and the address he happened to be living at, are of sacred significance. The critical minority in the Communist Party take him too seriously because they consider him capable of being a great socialist artist and assume that his political allegiance is the result of dialectical thinking rather than of a revolutionary instinct.

In front of Picasso’s work one pays tribute above all to his personal spirit. The old argument about his political opinions on one hand and his art on the other is quite false. As Picasso himself admits, he has, as an artist, discovered nothing. What makes him great are not his individual works, but his existence, his personality. That may sound obscure and perverse, but less so, I think, if one inquires further into the nature of his personality.

Picasso is essentially an improviser. And if the word improvisation conjures up, amongst other things, associations of the clown and the mimic — they also apply. Living through a period of colossal confusion in which so many values both human and cultural have disintegrated, Picasso has seized upon the bits, the fragments, the smithereens, and with magnificent defiance and vitality made something of them to amuse us, shock us, but primarily to demonstrate to us by the example of his spirit that within the confusion, out of the debris, new ideas, new values, new ways of looking at the world can and will develop. His achievement is not that he himself has developed these things, but that he has always been irrepressible, has never been at a loss. The romanticism of Toulouse-Lautrec, the classicism of Ingres, the crude energy of Negro sculpture, the heart-searchings of Cézanne towards the truth about structure, the exposures of Freud — all these he has recognized, welcomed, pushed to bizarre conclusions, improvised on, sung through, in order to make us recognize our contemporary environment, in order (and here his role is very much like that of a clown) to make us recognize ourselves in the parody of a distorting mirror.

Obviously, this shorthand view of Picasso oversimplifies, but it does, I think, go some way to explaining other facts about him: the element of caricature in all his work; the extraordinary confidence behind every mark he makes — it is the confidence of the born performer; the failure of all his disciples — if he were a profoundly constructive artist this would not be so; the amazing multiplicity of his styles; the sense that, by comparison with any other great artist, any single work by Picasso seems unfinished; the truth behind many of his enigmatic statements: ‘In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.’ ‘To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all.’ Or, ‘When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or the future.’

The tragedy of Picasso is that he has worked at a time when a few live by art alone and the vast majority live without art at all. Such a state of affairs is of course tragic for all artists — but not to the same extent. Certain painters — such as Cézanne, Degas, Gris — can work for the sake of research. They work to extend painting’s conquest over nature. Picasso is not such an artist; it is significant, for instance, that for over forty years he has scarcely ever worked directly from a model. Other painters — such as Corot, Dufy, Matisse — work to communicate a quintessence of pleasure and are comparatively satisfied if this pleasure is shared even by a few. Again, Picasso is not such an artist. There is a violence in everything he has done which points to a moral, didactic conviction that cannot be satisfied simply by an awareness of pleasure. Picasso is, as Rodin was in a different way, naturally a popular dramatic artist, terribly handicapped by a lack of constant popular themes.

What makes a work by Picasso immediately recognizable? It is not only his familiar formalizations but his unique form of conviction, of utter singlemindedness in any one canvas. Possibly that sounds a vague quality. Yet if one goes into a Romanesque church and sees side by side a twelfth- and an eighteenth-century fresco, it is this quality of singlemindedness which distinguishes them, when all the other obvious differences have been allowed for. The twelfth-century painter, if a local one, was usually clumsy, unoriginal and entirely ignorant of theoretical pictorial principles. The eighteenth-century painter was often sensitive, highly skilful in rendering an unlimited variety of poses and steeped in valid pictorial theory. What then explains the force of the twelfth-century artist’s composition, the expressiveness of his drawing, the clarity of his narrative, and the comparative feebleness in all these respects of the later work? It is surely the earlier artist’s singlemindedness — a singlemindedness which in terms of religion was impossible in the eighteenth century. Because the earlier artist knew exactly what he wanted to say — and it was something quite simple — it did not occur to him to think of anything else. This reduced observation to a minimum but it gave his work the strength of seeming absolutely inevitable. It is precisely the same quality which distinguishes Picasso’s work from that of his contemporaries and disciples; or, on a quite different level, it is the same quality that one finds in the humorous drawings of Edward Lear.

Look at the drawing of the hands and feet in Guernica. They are based on no more penetrating observation than those in the work of an efficient cartoonist. They represent no more than the idea of hands and feet. But — and this is why Guernica can still strike our hearts until we are forced to make resolutions — the ideas of hands, feet, a horse’s head, a naked electric light bulb, a mother and ravaged child, are all equally, heartrendingly and entirely dominated by the idea of the painting: the idea of horror at human brutality.

I believe that in almost every work of Picasso’s a single idea has dominated in this way and so created a similar sense of inevitability. If the idea is, for example, that of sexual beauty, it demands more subtle forms: the girl’s back will be made to twist very sensitively: but the principle remains the same and rests on the same ability of the artist to forgo all questioning and to yield completely to his one purpose. Forms become like letters in an alphabet whose significance solely depends upon the word they spell. And that brings us back to the tragedy of Picasso. Obviously in the case of an artist such as I have described, his development within himself and his impact on others depend exclusively on his ideas, on his themes. Picasso could not have painted Guernica had it only been a personal nightmare. And equally, if the picture which now exists had always been called Nightmare and we knew nothing of its connection with Spain, it would not move us as it does. All aesthetes will object to that. But Guernica has deservedly become the one legendary painting of this century, and although works of art can perpetuate legends, they do not create them. If they could Picasso’s problem would have been solved, for his tragedy is that most of his life he has failed to find themes to do himself justice. He has produced Guernica, War and Peace, some miraculous Cubist studies, some beautiful lyrical drawings, but in hundreds of works he has, as a result of his singlemindedness, sacrificed everything to ideas which are not worthy of the sacrifice. Many of his paintings are jokes, either bitter or gay; but they are the jokes of a man who does not know what else to do except laugh, who improvises with fragments because he can find nothing else to build upon.

It would be foolish to imagine that Picasso could have developed differently. His genius is wilful and instinctive. He had to take what was at hand and the unity of popular feeling essential to sustain the themes of a dramatic artist such as he is, has often been lacking or beyond his horizon. He then faced the choice of either abandoning his energy or expending it on something trivial and so creating parodies.

I am sure he is aware of this. He is obsessed by the question of whether art, which as we understand it today is so conscious an affair, can ever be born of happiness and abundance instead of lack and loss. The immortal incomplete artist beside the mortal complete man — this is one of his recurring themes. The sculptor chisels instead of enjoying his model. The poet-lovers search for images in one another’s eyes instead of each other. A woman’s head is drawn in a dozen different ways, is almost endlessly improvised upon, because no single representation can do her living justice. And then at other times, and particularly in the second half of his life, Picasso reverses his comment and comparison, and contrasts the artist’s always new, fresh imagination with his ageing body. The old man and the young girl, Beauty and the Beast, Beauty and the Minotaur: the theme of the self-same artist and man being unable to accept each other’s roles.

Yet finally why is it so impossible to end without saluting him? Because by his dedication to his great themes, by his constant extremism, by the audacity of his jokes, by his simplicity (which is usually taken for incomprehensibility), by his very method of working, he has proved that all the paraphernalia, all the formulae of art are expendable for the sake of the spirit. If we now take him too seriously we destroy his example by re-establishing all the paraphernalia he has liberated us from.

1954/1955

Henri Matisse

Matisse’s greatness has been recognized but not altogether understood. In an ideological climate of anguish and nostalgia an artist who frankly and supremely celebrated Pleasure, and whose works are an assurance that the best things in life are immediate and free, is likely to be thought not quite serious enough. And indeed, in Matisse’s obituaries the word ‘charming’ appeared too frequently. ‘I want people who feel worried, exhausted, overworked, to get a feeling of repose when looking at my painting.’ That was Matisse’s intention. And now, looking back over his long life’s work, one can see that it represents a steady development towards his declared aim, his works of the last fifteen or twenty years coming nearest to his ideal.

Matisse’s achievement rests on his use — or in the context of contemporary Western art one could say his invention — of pure colour. The phrase, however, must be defined. Pure colour as Matisse understood it had nothing to do with abstract colour. He repeatedly declared that colour ‘must serve expression’. What he wanted to express was ‘the nearly religious feeling’ he had towards sensuous life — towards the blessings of sunlight, flowers, women, fruit, sleep.

When colour is incorporated into a regular pattern — as in a Persian rug — it is a subsidiary element: the logic of the pattern must come first. When colour is used in painting it usually serves either as a decorative embellishment of the forms — as, say, in Botticelli — or as a force charging them with extra emotion — as in Van Gogh. In Matisse’s later works colour becomes the entirely dominant factor. His colours seem neither to embellish nor charge the forms, but to uplift and carry them on the very surface of the canvas. His reds, blacks, golds, ceruleans, flow over the canvas with the strength and yet utter placidity of water above a weir, the forms carried along on their current.

Obviously such a process implies some distortion. But the distortion is far more of people’s preconceived ideas about art than of nature. The numerous drawings that Matisse always made before he arrived at his final colour-solution are evidence of the pains he took to preserve the essential character of his subject whilst at the same time making it ‘buoyant’ enough to sail on the tide of his colour scheme. Certainly the effect of these paintings is what he hoped. Their subjects invite, one embarks, and then the flow of their colour-areas holds one in such sure equilibrium that one has a sense of perpetual motion — a sense of movement with all friction removed.

Nobody who has not painted himself can fully appreciate what lies behind Matisse’s mastery of colour. It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture either by allowing one colour to dominate or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.

Perhaps the best way of defining Matisse’s genius is to compare him with some of his contemporaries who were also concerned with colour. Bonnard’s colours dissolve, making his subjects unattainable, nostalgic. Matisse’s colours could hardly be more present, more blatant, and yet achieve a peace which is without a trace of nostalgia. Braque has cultivated his sensibility until it has become precious. Matisse broadened his sensibility until it was as wide as his colour range, and said that he wanted his art to be ‘something like a good armchair’. Dufy shared Matisse’s sense of enjoyment and his colours were as gay as the fětes he painted; but Matisse’s colours, no less bright, go beyond gaiety to affirm contentment. The only man who possibly equals Matisse as a colourist is Léger. But their aims are so different that they can hardly be compared. Léger is essentially an epic, civic artist; Matisse essentially a lyrical and personal one.

I said that Matisse’s paintings and designs of the last fifteen years were his greatest. Obviously he produced fine individual works before he was seventy. Yet not I think till then had he the complete control of his art that he needed. It was, as he himself said, a question of ‘organizing the brain’. Like most colourists he was an intuitive painter, but he realized that it was necessary to select rigorously from his many ‘instincts’ to make them objective in order to be able to build upon them rationally. In terms of the picture this control makes the all-important difference between recording a sensation and re-constructing an emotion. The Fauves, whom Matisse led, recorded sensations. Their paintings were (and are) fresh and stimulating, but they depended upon and evoke a forced intoxication. When Matisse painted red flashes against ultramarine and magenta stripes to describe the movement of goldfish in a bowl, he communicated a pleasurable shock; one is brought up short by the climax but no solution follows. It was for this reason, I think, that Matisse finally abandoned Fauvism and returned to a more disciplined form of painting. Between 1914 and 1918 he produced paintings — mostly interiors — which are magnificently resonant in colour, but in which the colours seem assembled rather than dynamic — like the furnishings in a room. Then for the next ten years he painted his famous Odalisques. In these the colour is freer and more pervasive, but, being based on a heightening of the actual local colour of each object, it has a slightly exotic effect. This period, however, led him to his final great phase: the phase in which he was able to combine the energy of his early Fauve days with a quite objective visual wisdom.

It is of course true that Matisse’s standards of imagination and taste belonged to the world of the French haute bourgeoisie. No other class in the modern world enjoyed the kind of seclusion, fine taste and luxury that are expressed in Matisse’s work. It was Matisse’s narrowness (I can think of no modern artist with less interest in either history or psychology) that saved him from the negative and destructive attitudes of the class-life to which his art belonged. It was his narrowness that allowed him to enjoy this milieu without being corrupted by it, or becoming critical of it. He retained throughout his whole career something of Veronese’s naive sense of wonder that life could be so rich and luxurious. He thought and saw only in terms of silks, fabulous furnishings, the shuttered sunlight of the Côte d’Azur, women with nothing to do but lie on grass or rug for the delight of men’s calm eyes, flower-beds, private aquaria, jewellery, couturiers and perfect fruit, as though such joys and achievements, unspoilt by mention of the price, were still the desire, the ambition of the entire world. But from such a vision he distilled experiences of sensuous pleasure, which, disassociated from their circumstances, have something of the universal about them.

1954

Oskar Kokoschka

Kokoschka’s genius is difficult to define. On the one hand, it is sensible to compare him with Rubens — not necessarily in stature, but temperamentally, because he has the same kind of scale as a painter. Like Rubens, he has painted panoramic landscapes which the light visits like an archangel at an Annunciation. Like Rubens, he glories in exotic animals and fruits, seeing them as symbols of various kinds of human power. Like Rubens, he paints human flesh as though it were a garden and each brushmark a blossom. And, like Rubens too, he is immensely confident, never failing through diffidence, but sometimes through abundance becoming chaos. Yet on the other hand, Kokoschka is a man of the twentieth century. He has not created a new language or a new form of art. What he has done is to speak with great authority in an unforgettable tone of voice — always remembering that for an artist his tone of voice is inseparable from what he has to say:

All life is a risk, but that is no reason for panic. In the normal course of things it ends in death; only in the Académie Française are immortals to be found. But to anyone who is clear about the risks of life and learns to confront them with open eyes, the inscrutable, humanized in art form, becomes comprehensible and thus loses its terror.

Kokoschka is usually labelled an Expressionist. This is misleading, because since he is often considered as a German painter, it means that he is bracketed with other German expressionists, whereas his aim, unlike theirs, was to reduce, not to parade, panic. It is also usually said that his early work is stronger than his later work, but this judgment springs from the same misconception: that he is essentially an artist of conflict and pain. In fact, his constant theme is something quite different — energy. In his earlier works, up to about 1920, he was concerned, mostly in portraits, with what is roughly called nervous energy. The spirits of his sitters crackle like lightning, and their hands, with their outstretched fingers, often look like trees that have just been struck. Later he was concerned, in his large panoramic views, with the energy of cities — with what might be called historical energy. Still later he turned to ancient legends to find themes which embodied the energy of the cycle of life itself.

But of course the word energy is too vague and too abstract to define the character of Kokoschka’s achievement and searching. It makes it easy to understand why he has turned to baroque artists for help, but it does not explain why his voice has such authority, why he is so surely a modern artist.

Energy means for him movement and development. In his portraits one has the sense that the sitter has been painted, unawares, whilst on a journey, not necessarily a physical journey, but a journey of thoughts and decisions, which is going to change — which indeed at that very moment is changing — his life. In our century of crisis these are, in this sense, the most precarious portraits painted, and in that precariousness we recognize ourselves. How often in his panoramic landscapes he includes a river or, as an important not an incidental element in the picture, birds in the sky; and these again suggest voyaging, movement, time passing. In his recent large triptychs his concern with development, with consequences, is even more obvious, for here he has painted consecutive incidents from a story — the story of Prometheus or the story of the Greeks defending Thermopylae.

Kokoschka did not of course arbitrarily select this constant theme. It has arisen from his experience. As a mid-European born in 1886, he has seen much. And he has never been a passive spectator or a remote studio man. He has prophesied and committed himself. He is acutely aware of the way our European societies alienate man from man (and incidentally believes abstract art to be a symptom of this alienation):

That technical civilization, in which we have all collaborated, has been throughout two world wars nothing but an attempt to escape disaster by means of an intensified production for the mere sake of production, and the effort is shown to be all the more senseless as the numbers of the homeless, the desperate and the starving roaming over the untilled fields of the world increase.

Consequently he has searched for a way forward, a way of release. The emotion behind most of his work is liberating. The figures, the animals, the cities in his canvases are set free: the skies around them are like those endlessly imagined by a prisoner. His richness and abundance is not luxurious as in true baroque art, rather it represents a kind of innocence. Not that he is a Utopian artist. His aim is simply to make us see what we are capable of, to warn us against accepting the idea that all circumstances are final.

His weakness as a painter is that he is sometimes formlessly effusive. This may be the result of the fact that he blames technology itself for our predicament, so that his positive alternative becomes an unselective all-embracing humanism. If he were more aware of the economic and social basis of history, his hopes might be sharper and less generalized. Nevertheless we can only honour. He has confronted our situation with open eyes and has never retreated into cynicism, nihilism or morbid subjectivity: his genius has remained expectant. Having borne witness to great suffering, he still, at the age of over seventy, believes with Blake that ‘Exuberance is Beauty’.

1952

The Clarity of the Renaissance

It’s depressing. The rain’s set in. It’s wet but we can’t grumble. It’s grey and dull. Each of these comments describes the same day from a different point of view: the subjective, the practical, the moralistic and the visual. All true painters naturally see and feel in a way that is a hundred times more acutely visual and tangible than the last, or indeed any comment, can illustrate. But what they see and feel is — normally — the same as everybody else. To say this is, I realize, platitudinous. But how often it is forgotten. Indeed, has it ever been consistently taken for granted since the sixteenth century?

I spent the other day in the National Gallery looking mainly at the Flemish and Italian Renaissance works. What is it that makes these so fundamentally different from nearly all the works — and especially our own — that have followed them? The question may seem naive. Social and stylistic historians, economists, chemists and psychologists have spent their lives defining and explaining this and many other differences between individual artists, periods and whole cultures. Such research is invaluable. But its complexity often hides from us two simple, very obvious facts. The first is that it is our own culture, not foreign ones, which can teach us the keenest lessons: the culture of individualist humanism which began in Italy in the thirteenth century. And the second fact is that, at least in painting, a fundamental break occurred in this culture two and a half centuries after it began. After the sixteenth century artists were more psychologically profound (Rembrandt), more successfully ambitious (Rubens), more evocative (Claude); but they also lost an ease and a visual directness which precluded all pretension; they lost what Berenson has called ‘tactile values’. After 1600 the great artists, pushed by lonely compulsion, stretch and extend the range of painting, break down its frontiers. Watteau breaks out towards music, Goya towards the stage, Picasso towards pantomime. A few, such as Chardin, Corot, Cézanne, did accept the strictest limitations. But before 1550 every artist did. One of the most important results of this difference is that in the great later forays only genius could triumph: before, even a small talent could give profound pleasure.

I am not advocating a new Pre-Raphaelite movement, nor am I making any qualitative judgment — in the broadest human sense — of the art of the last three and a half centuries. But now when so many artists tend — either in terms of technique or subjective experience — to throw themselves vainly against the frontiers of painting in the hope that they will be able to cut their own unique individual passes, now when the legitimate territory of painting is hardly definable, I think it is useful to observe the limitations within which some of the greatest painters of our culture were content to remain.

When one goes into the Renaissance galleries, it is as if one suddenly realized that in all the others one had been suffering from a blurred short-sightedness. And this is not because many of the paintings have been finely cleaned, nor because chiaroscuro was a later convention. It is because every Flemish and Italian Renaissance artist believed that it was his subject itself — not his way of painting it — which had to express the emotions and ideas he intended. This distinction may seem slight but it is critical. Even a highly mannered artist like Tura convinces us that every woman he painted as a madonna actually had doubly sensitive, double-jointed fingers. But a Goya portrait convinces us of Goya’s own insight before it convinces us of his sitter’s anatomy; because we recognize that Goya’s interpretation is convincing, we are convinced by his subject. In front of Renaissance works the exact opposite occurs. After Michelangelo the artist lets us follow him; before, he leads us to the image he has made. It is this difference — the difference between the picture being a starting-off point and a destination — that explains the clarity, the visual definitiveness, the tactile values of Renaissance art. The Renaissance painter limited himself to an exclusive concern with what the spectator could see, as opposed to what he might infer. Compare Titian’s presented Venus of Urbino of 1538 with his elusive Shepherd and Nymph of thirty years later.

This attitude had several important results. It forbade any attempt at literal naturalism because the only appeal of naturalism is the inference that it’s ‘just life like’: it obviously isn’t, in fact, like life because the picture is only a static image. It prevented all merely subjective suggestibility. It forced the artist, as far as his knowledge allowed him, to deal simultaneously with all the visual aspects of his subject — colour, light, mass, line, movement, structure, and not, as has increasingly happened since, to concentrate only on one aspect and to infer the others. It allowed him to combine more richly than any later artists have done realism and decoration, observation and formalization. The idea that they are incompatible is only based on today’s assumption that their inferences are incompatible; visually an embroidered surface or drapery, invented as the most beautiful mobile architecture ever, can combine with realistic anatomical analysis as naturally as the courtly and physical combine in Shakespeare.

But, above all, the Renaissance artist’s attitude made him use to its maximum the most expressive visual form in the world — the human body. Later the nude became an idea — Arcadia or Bohemia. But during the Renaissance every eyelid, breast, wrist, baby’s foot, nostril, was a double celebration of fact: the fact of the miraculous structure of the human body and the fact that only through the senses of this body can we apprehend the rest of the visible, tangible world.

This lack of ambiguity is the Renaissance, and its superb combination of sensuousness and nobility stemmed from a confidence which cannot be artificially re-created. But when we eventually achieve a confident society again, its art may well have more to do with the Renaissance than with any of the moral or political artistic theories of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, it is a salutary reminder for us even today that, as Berenson has said so often and so wisely, the vitality of European art lies in its ‘tactile values and movement’ which are the result of the observation of the ‘corporeal significance of objects’.

1955

The Calculations of Piero

After reading Brecht’s Galileo I was thinking about the scientist’s social predicament. And it struck me then how different the artist’s predicament is. The scientist can either reveal or hide the facts which, supporting his new hypothesis, take him nearer to the truth. If he has to fight, he can fight with his back to the evidence. But for the artist the truth is variable. He deals only with the particular version, the particular way of looking that he has selected. The artist has nothing to put his back against — except his own decisions.

It is this arbitrary and personal element in art which makes it so difficult for us to be certain that we are accurately following the artist’s own calculations or fully understanding the sequence of his reasoning. Before most works of art, as with trees, we can see and assess only a section of the whole: the roots are invisible. Today this mysterious element is exploited and abused. Many contemporary works are almost entirely subterranean. And so it is refreshing and encouraging to look at the work of the man who probably hid less than any other artist ever: Piero della Francesca.

Berenson praises ‘the ineloquence’ of Piero’s paintings:

In the long run, the most satisfactory creations are those which, like Piero’s and Cézanne’s, remain ineloquent, mute, with no urgent communication to make, and no thought of rousing us with look or gesture.

This ineloquence is true so far as Piero’s protagonists are concerned. But in inverse ratio to how little his paintings say in terms of drama, they say volumes about the working of his own mind. I don’t mean they reveal his psychology. They reveal the processes of his conscious thought. They are open lessons in the logic of creating order. And possibly the inverse ratio exists because, just as the aim of the machine is economy of effort, the aim of systematic thought is economy of thought. Anyway it remains true that before a Piero you can be quite sure that any correspondence or coincidence which you discover is deliberate. Everything has been calculated. Interpretations have changed, and will change again. But the elements of the painting have been fixed for good and with comprehensive forethought.

If you study all Piero’s major works, their internal evidence will lead you to this conclusion. But there is also external evidence. We know that Piero worked exceptionally slowly. We know he was a mathematician as well as a painter, and that at the end of his life, when he was too blind to paint, he published two mathematical treatises. We can also compare his works to those of his assistants: the works of the latter are equally undemonstrative, but this, instead of making them portentous, makes them lifeless. Life in Piero’s art is born of his unique power of calculation.

This may at first sound coldly cerebral. However, let us look further — at the Resurrection in Piero’s home town of San Sepolcro. When the door of the small, rather scruffy municipal hall is first opened and you see this fresco between two fictitious, painted pillars, opening out in front of you, your instinct is somehow to freeze. Your hush has nothing to do with any ostentatious reverence before art or Christ. It is because looking between the pillars you become aware of time and space being locked in a perfect equilibrium. You stay still for the same reason as you do when you are watching a tight-rope walker — the equilibrium is that fine. Yet how? Why? Would a diagram of the structure of a crystal affect you in the same way? No. There is more here than abstract harmony. The images convincingly represent men, trees, hills, helmets, stones. And one knows that such things grow, develop and have a life of their own, just as one knows that the acrobat can fall. Consequently, when here their forms are made to exist in perfect correspondence, you can only feel that all that has previously occurred to them has occurred in preparation for this presented moment. Such a painting makes the present the apex of the whole past. Just as the very basic theme of poetry is that of time passing, the very basic theme of painting is that of the moment made permanent.

This is one of the reasons why Piero’s calculations were not so cold, why — when we notice how the left soldier’s helmet echoes the hill behind him, how the same irregular shield-shape occurs about ten times throughout the painting (count them), or how Christ’s staff marks in ground plan the point of the angle formed by the two lines of trees — why we are not merely fascinated but profoundly moved. Yet it is not the only reason. Piero’s patient and silent calculations went much further than the pure harmonies of design.

Look, for instance, at the overall composition of this work. Its centre, though not of course its true centre, is Christ’s hand, holding his robe as he rises up. The hand furrows the material with emphatic force. This is no casual gesture. It appears to be central to Christ’s whole upward movement out of the tomb. The hand, resting on the knee, also rests on the brow of the first line of hills behind, and the folds of the robe flow down like streams. Downwards. Look now at the soldiers so mundanely, so convincingly asleep. Only the one on the extreme right appears somewhat awkward. His legs, his arm between them, his curved back are understandable. Yet how can he rest like that just on one arm? This apparent awkwardness gives a clue. He looks as though he were lying in an invisible hammock. Strung from where? Suddenly go back to the hand, and now see that all four soldiers lie in an invisible net, trawled by that hand. The emphatic grip makes perfect sense. The four heavy sleeping soldiers are the catch the resurrecting Christ has brought with him from the underworld, from Death. As I said, Piero went far beyond the pure harmonies of design.

There is in all his work an aim behind his calculations. This aim could be summed up in the same way as Henri Poincaré once described the aim of mathematics:

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.… When language has been well chosen one is astonished to find that all demonstrations made for a known object apply immediately to many new objects.

Piero’s language is visual, not mathematical. It is well chosen because it is based on the selection of superb drawing. Nevertheless, when he connects, by means of composition, a foot with the base of a tree, a foreshortened face with a foreshortened hill, or sleep with death, he does so in order to emphasize their common factors — or, more accurately still, to emphasize the extent to which they are subject to the same physical laws. His special concern with space and perspective is dependent on this aim. The necessity of existing in space is the first common factor. And this is why perspective had so deep a content for Piero. For nearly all his contemporaries it remained a technique of painting.

His ‘ineloquence’, as already hinted, is also connected with the same aim. He paints everything in the same way so that the common laws which govern them may be more easily seen. The correspondences in Piero’s works are endless. He did not have to invent them, he only had to find them. Cloth to flesh, hair to foliage, a finger to a leg, a tent to a womb, men to women, dress to architecture, folds to water — but somehow the list misses the point. Piero is not dealing in metaphors — although the poet in this respect is not so far removed from the scientist: he is dealing in common causes. He explains the world. All the past has led to this moment. And the laws of this convergence are the true content of his art.

Or so it seems. But in fact how could this be possible? A painting is not a treatise. The logic of its measuring is different. Science in the second half of the fifteenth century lacked many concepts and much information which we now find necessary. So how is it that Piero remained convincing, whilst his contemporary astronomers have not?

Look again at Piero’s faces, the ones that watch us. Nothing corresponds to their eyes. Their eyes are separate and unique. It is as though everything around them, the landscape, their own faces, the nose between them, the hair above them, belonged to the explicable, indeed the already explained world: and as though these eyes were looking from the outside through two slits on to this world. And there is our last clue — in the unwavering, speculative eyes of Piero’s watchers. What in fact he is painting is a state of mind. He paints what the world would be like if we could fully explain it, if we could be entirely at one with it. He is the supreme painter of knowledge. As acquired through the methods of science, or — and this makes more sense than seems likely — as acquired through happiness. During the centuries when science was considered the antithesis of art, and art the antithesis of well-being, Piero was ignored. Today we need him again.

1959

Poussin’s Order

At Dulwich Art Gallery there are six Poussin canvases, and I recommend the reader to go there and study them under ideal conditions — it is quiet, the rooms are small and well-lit and one can think without being disturbed. And strange as it may seem, here — not in the endless volumes put out by the Museums of Modern Art — is the clue to all the best works created since Cézanne.

Take a picture like the Nurture of Jupiter. Are we still interested in a child god being suckled by a goat, in bees that made special honey for him and in Cretan nymphs? Hardly. Was even Poussin as interested as is often thought? A nymph, the Virgin Mary, a spectator of David’s triumph over Goliath — each has the same face. So why are we moved? By the purely formal design? If that were so, we would be moved in the same way by, say, a Byzantine mosaic. Clearly we are not. No. In fact, it is here that we come to the first discovery: that in Poussin — and actually, though less obviously, in all art which survives its period — there is something between form and content arbitrarily divided: there is the way of looking at the world, the artist’s method of selection, which the work in its entirety expresses and which is more profound than either its subject matter or its formal organization.

Poussin offers us the world as an impossibly honest trader. Everything on show is declared and defined without the slightest ambiguity. One can see on what every foot stands, what every finger touches. Compare his large tree with the trees in Claude next door. Claude’s are far truer to the confusion of appearances as they normally strike us. In the Poussin the leaves are as defined as those of a book. Yet this clarity is not a question of fussy accuracy. On the contrary Poussin painted broadly and simply — the surface of his painted flesh like that of water running shallowly and imperceptibly over a perfectly smooth pebble. His clarity is the result of order. Nothing in his figure paintings (his late landscapes are different) has been snatched from chaos or temporarily rescued from mystery. The wind blows in the right direction to furl the striding nymph’s golden dress so that it becomes a precise extension and variation on her own movement. The reeds break, and point like arrows to the focal centre of the scene. The sitting nymph’s foot forms a perfect ten-toed fan with the foot of the child.

Yet why, then, is the picture not completely artificial? For two reasons. First, because Poussin’s intensely sensuous vision of the human body forced him — as true sensuousness, as opposed to vicarious eroticism, must always do — to recognize the nature of physical human energy. His figures move with the same inevitability as water finds its own level, and consequently they transcend their rhetorical gestures. A man, after all, lifts his arm to stop a bus in the same way as he might wave to greet the spirit of a poet on Parnassus. And in this painting the kneeling foster-father could be wringing out a wet towel just as well as holding the head of the goat between his legs. Secondly, because the scene, given its arrangement, is still visually true. For example, the deep velvet blue of the sitting nymph’s robe, the pale aquamarine dress of the nymph on the rocks and then the sudden porcelain blue of the sky behind the hills — these blues, in a cereal-coloured landscape, clash, welcome, correspond and set up distances between themselves just as blues can do on Boat Race day.

And so we think: this is not another world, nor is it even a stage fantasy. Here the aspect of a shoulder or a breast is like the voice of an actress delivering Racine’s words: we have seen and heard them in different situations. This is simply the world ordered beyond any previous imagining.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter and the second discovery. Poussin’s sense of order added up to something more than an impeccable sense of composition — as we now use the term. Compare the studio works or the copies at Dulwich with the artist’s own works. On the canvas they are sometimes just as well arranged or composed. But only on the canvas. The shapes and colours and lines are ordered. But not the scene itself. In front of a Poussin one feels that he brought order to the slice of life he was painting before he even picked up a brush: that he posed his whole subject, as he might have posed a single model: that his power to organize didn’t just derive from the act of painting, but from his whole attitude to life itself. It is by this that we are elated. A Poussin is not simply evidence that a master can control his medium: it is evidence that a man has believed that man can control his fate. We have the same sense of elation in front of Renaissance artists like Piero, Mantegna, and to some extent Raphael, who was Poussin’s own star. But because Poussin was working a century later and painting had become very much more complex, Poussin’s expression of order was wider in scope. In front of a Piero we see, as it were, the blueprint of an ordered world; in front of a Poussin we see velvet, metal, flesh and the time of day all far more tangibly under control.

And now how can one explain this historically? I suspect the full explanation will upset a good many apple-carts, for clearly Poussin was simultaneously both a very reactionary and a very revolutionary artist. He was reactionary because for his subjects and for his examples — classical sculpture and the works of the mid-Renaissance — he looked backwards, and also because probably his sense of order derived from, and was sustained by, the absolutism of the France of Louis XIII and XIV. One has only to compare him to his contemporaries, such as Rembrandt, Velázquez or Galileo, to see how far he stood apart from the new subjects, the new problems and the progressive possibilities of his time.

He was a revolutionary artist, not only because his work was supremely rational — and consequently was to inspire the revolutionary classicism of David — but even more profoundly, because his determination to demonstrate the possibility of man controlling his fate and environment made his art the solitary link, in this respect, between the two periods when such a control could generally be believed in: the Renaissance and our own century. Between Poussin and Cézanne there were many works of genius, but none of them suggest an order imposed upon nature before the act of painting. Which is why Cézanne knew he had to go back to Poussin in order to continue from where Poussin had stopped.

Poussin’s system of order was static — however much energy his figures may imply. Look at The Triumph of David. If, as a result of the implied movement of the triumphal procession, we reckon with new consequences and changed circumstances, the whole unity of the picture falls to bits. What happens when the procession moves on and the head of Goliath no longer coincides with the robes of the spectator behind, and the folds of those robes no longer echo the victorious arm of David? For this reason Poussin could not deal with the constantly moving dynamic forces of nature, as expressed in full, open landscapes; he then had to let in mystery, the unknowable. His struggle, with inadequate means, to avoid doing this is very moving. In A Roman Road he tries desperately to keep everything under control: he emphasizes the straight edge of the man-made road, he makes as much as he can of the calculated angles of the church roof, he disposes the small figures in their telling, clear poses, but the evening light making shadow chase shadow, the sun going down behind the hills, the awaited night — these are too much for him. For Poussin there was chaos beyond the town walls, beyond the circle of learning — as there was bound to be until it was realized that human consciousness had as material a basis as nature itself.

And it was from this point that Cézanne continued. Cézanne’s incredible struggle was to find some system of order which could embrace the whole of nature and its constant changes. Against his wishes this struggle forced him to abandon the order of the static viewpoint, to admit that human consciousness was subject to the same dialectical laws as nature. And the Cubists continued from where he stopped, rejecting the Renaissance because they were aiming at the same end with quite different means. Even today the process is incomplete, the solution only partial. But for those who will take the next step forward, Poussin, straddling the two periods in our culture when men sought order in life before they sought it in art, will remain an inspirer.

1959

Watteau as the Painter of His Time

Historical generalizations — and particularly Marxist ones — can dangerously over-simplify. Yet unless one takes into account the fact that the eighteenth century ended with the French Revolution, it is impossible to understand how Watteau was so incomparably greater than all his followers.

The eighteenth century in France saw the complete transformation of power from the aristocracy to the middle class. The struggle and contradictions behind this transformation were reflected in the art of the period — but reflected in a highly complicated way. By the beginning of the century, following the death of Louis XIV, the doctrine of absolute monarchism was dead and with it declined the solemn, monumental, impersonal classicism of Poussin, Le Brun, Racine. There followed the transitional rococo art of Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher, whose public was the aristocracy now freed — fatally — from royal obligations and restraint, and the affected élite of the rising middle class. It was a transitional art because it preserved much of the artificiality of the previous classicism but introduced more movement (Watteau was greatly influenced by Rubens) and substituted casual Dalliance and Elegance for imperial Power and Dignity. In reaction to its hedonism, but continuing its tendency towards movement, characterization and informality, there arose the middle-class art of such painters as Chardin and Greuze: an art based on the virtues of domesticity, industry and personal responsibility. Finally under David there was the return to Classicism as the only sufficiently heroic style for the revolution itself. But this classicism was very different from that of the seventeenth century: it was far more concerned psychologically with the individual and contained much of the realistic observation of the preceding genre-painters.

Such is the bare outline of development. How did this affect Watteau? No historical analysis explains genius; it can only help to explain the way genius develops. If one compares Watteau’s fětes-galantes with similar works by Pater, Fragonard or Robert, their greater depth of meaning and observation becomes immediately obvious. The hands of a figure in a Fragonard are merely elegant gestures terminating the movement of an arm; in a Watteau the hands of each figure, however small, have their own energy as they restlessly finger the strings of a guitar or bodice. Faces in the work of the other painters are automatic, like the made-up faces of a chorus; in a Watteau, however silken the dalliance and finery, beady eyes look out from faces expressing all the desperation of an unrealized boredom with pleasure — an echo almost of voices in Chekhov. Watteau’s followers painted the stage of ‘manners’ as seen from the auditorium; he himself painted the performance from the wings whence one can occasionally see a performer querying his role. In his fragment of a Girl’s Head one is suddenly made to realize the disturbing (or encouraging) fact that no make-up can ever disguise the expression of the eyes. Or compare Watteau’s nudes with those of Robert or Boucher. For Boucher nudity was a commercial aphrodisiac; for Watteau it was a moment — evanescent as everything else — of intimacy.

And so one comes to the now accepted view of Watteau’s art. ‘The content of Watteau’s work, if we may dare state it in a word, is mortality — that fatal sense of life’s transience about which his every picture whispers but never speaks openly,’ as Mr Gordon Washburn has put it. Watteau’s own temperament and his suffering from tuberculosis obviously contributed to his vision. But what made his expression of such an attitude to life larger than his personal feelings and bigger than the subjects he represented was that he expressed so surely the reality of his time. He revealed in feeling the true transitional nature of the style he worked in. He remained (and was born) outside the social order he painted, but the ambivalence of the mood of his work was a perfect expression of the nature and destiny of that order. It was to be said later, ‘Under Louis XIV no one dared open his mouth, under Louis XV everyone whispered, now everyone speaks out loud and in a perfectly free-and-easy way.’ The whispering in Watteau’s paintings (which both quotations refer to) is partly a nostalgia for a past order, partly a premonition of the instability of the present; partly an unknown hope for the future. The courtiers assemble for the embarkation for Cythera but the poignancy of the occasion is due to the implication that when they get there it will not be the legendary place they expect — the guillotines will be falling. The paradox is that whenever an artist achieves such a true expression of his time as Watteau did, he transcends it and comments on a permanent aspect of life itself: in Watteau’s case on the brevity of it. The difference between Watteau and his followers (Fragonard’s landscapes are in a separate category) is that they were unable to see beyond the consoling pretence of the charades they painted — and incidentally were therefore very much more popular with their public.

1954

The Honesty of Goya

Goya’s genius as a graphic artist was that of a commentator. I do not mean that his work was straightforward reportage, far from it; but that he was much more interested in events than states of mind. Each work appears unique not on account of its style but on account of the incident upon which it comments. At the same time, these incidents lead from one to another so that their effect is culminative — almost like that of film shots.

Indeed, another way of describing Goya’s vision would be to say that it was essentially theatrical. Not in the derogatory sense of the word, but because he was constantly concerned with the way action might be used to epitomize a character or a situation. The way he composed was theatrical. His works always imply an encounter. His figures are not gathered round a natural centre so much as assembled from the wings. And the impact of his work is also dramatic. One doesn’t analyse the processes of vision that lie behind an etching by Goya; one submits to its climax.

Goya’s method of drawing remains an enigma. It is almost impossible to say how he drew: where he began a drawing, what method he had of analysing form, what system he worked out for using tone. His work offers no clues to answer these questions because he was only interested in what he drew. His gifts, technical and imaginative, were prodigious. His control of a brush is comparable to Hokusai’s. His power of visualizing his subject was so precise that often scarcely a line is altered between preparatory sketch and finished plate. Every drawing he made is undeniably stamped with his personality. But despite all this, Goya’s drawings are in a sense as impersonal, as automatic, as lacking in temperament as footprints — the whole interest of which lies not in the prints themselves but in what they reveal of the incident that caused them.

What was the nature of Goya’s commentary? For despite the variety of the incidents portrayed, there is a constant underlying theme. His theme was the consequences of Man’s neglect — sometimes mounting to hysterical hatred — of his most precious faculty, Reason. But Reason in the eighteenth-century materialistic sense: Reason as a discipline yielding Pleasure derived from the Senses. In Goya’s work the flesh is a battleground between ignorance, uncontrolled passion, superstition on the one hand and dignity, grace and pleasure on the other. The unique power of his work is due to the fact that he was so sensuously involved in the terror and horror of the betrayal of Reason.

In all Goya’s works — except perhaps the very earliest — there is a strong sensual and sexual ambivalence. His exposure of physical corruption in his Royal portraits is well known. But the implication of corruption is equally there in his portrait of Dona Isabel. His Maja undressed, beautiful as she is, is terrifyingly naked. One admires the delicacy of the flowers embroidered on the stocking of a pretty courtesan in one drawing, and then suddenly, immediately, one foresees in the next the mummer-headed monster that, as a result of the passion aroused by her delicacy, she will bear as a son. A monk undresses in a brothel and Goya draws him, hating him, not in any way because he himself is a puritan, but because he senses that the same impulses that are behind this incident will lead in the Disasters of War to soldiers castrating a peasant and raping his wife. The huge brutal heads he put on hunchback bodies, the animals he dressed up in official robes of office, the way he gave to the cross-hatched tone on a human body the filthy implication of fur, the rage with which he drew witches — all these were protests against the abuse of human possibilities. And what makes Goya’s protests so desperately relevant for us, after Buchenwald and Hiroshima, is that he knew that when corruption goes far enough, when the human possibilities are denied with sufficient ruthlessness, both ravager and victim are made bestial.

Then there is the argument about whether Goya was an objective or subjective artist; whether he was haunted by his own imaginings, or by what he saw of the decadence of the Spanish Court, the ruthlessness of the Inquisition and the horror of the Peninsular War. In fact, this argument is falsely posed. Obviously Goya sometimes used his own conflicts and fears as the starting point for his work, but he did so because he consciously saw himself as being typical of his time. The intention of his work was highly objective and social. His theme was what man was capable of doing to man. Most of his subjects involve action between figures. But even when the figures are single — a girl in prison, an habitual lecher, a beggar who was once ‘somebody’ — the implication, often actually stated in the title, is ‘Look what has been done to them.’

I know that certain other modern writers take a different view. Malraux, for instance, says that Goya’s is ‘the age-old religious accent of useless suffering rediscovered, perhaps for the first time, by a man who believed himself to be indifferent to God’. Then he goes on to say that Goya paints ‘the absurdity of being human’ and is ‘the greatest interpreter of anguish the West has ever known’. The trouble with this view, based on hindsight, is that it induces a feeling of subjection much stronger than that in Goya’s own work: only one more shiver is needed to turn it into a feeling of meaningless defeat. If a prophet of disaster is proved right by later events (and Goya was not only recording the Peninsular War, he was also prophesying) then that prophecy does not increase the disaster; to a very slight extent it lessens it, for it demonstrates that man can foresee consequences, which, after all, is the first step towards controlling causes.

The despair of an artist is often misunderstood. It is never total. It excepts his own work. In his own work, however low his opinion of it may be, there is the hope of reprieve. If there were not, he could never summon up the abnormal energy and concentration needed to create it. And an artist’s work constitutes his relationship with his fellow men. Thus for the spectator the despair expressed by a work can be deceiving. The spectator should always allow his comprehension of that despair to be qualified by his relationship with his fellow men: just as the artist does implicitly by the very act of creation. Malraux, in my opinion — and in this he is typical of a large number of disillusioned intellectuals — does not allow this qualification to take place; or if he does, his attitude to his fellow men is so hopeless that the weight of the despair is in no way lifted.

One of the most interesting confirmations that Goya’s work was outward-facing and objective is his use of light. In his works it is not, as with all those who romantically frighten themselves, the dark that holds horror and terror. It is the light that discloses them. Goya lived and observed through something near enough to total war to know that night is security and that it is the dawn that one fears. The light in his work is merciless for the simple reason that it shows up cruelty. Some of his drawings of the carnage of the Disasters are like film shots of a flare-lit target after a bombing operation; the light floods the gaps in the same way.

Finally and in view of all this one tries to assess Goya. There are artists such as Leonardo or even Delacroix who are more analytically interesting than Goya. Rembrandt was more profoundly compassionate in his understanding. But no artist has ever achieved greater honesty than Goya: honesty in the full sense of the word meaning facing the facts and preserving one’s ideals. With the most patient craft Goya could etch the appearance of the dead and the tortured, but underneath the print he scrawled impatiently, desperately, angrily, ‘Why?’ ‘Bitter to be present’, ‘This is why you have been born’, ‘What more can be done?’ ‘This is worse’. The inestimable importance of Goya for us now is that his honesty compelled him to face and to judge the issues that still face us.

1954

The Dilemma of the Romantics

The term Romanticism has recently been taken to cover almost all the art produced in Europe between about 1770 and 1860. Ingres and Gainsborough, David and Turner, Pushkin and Stendhal. Thus the pitched battles of the last century between Romanticism and Classicism are not taken at their face value, but rather it is suggested that the differences between the two schools were less important than what they both had in common with the rest of the art of their time.

What was this common element? To take a century of violent agitation and revolt and then to try to define the general, overall nature of its art, is to deny the very character of such a period. The significance of the outcome of any revolution can only be understood in relation to the specific circumstances pertaining. There is nothing less revolutionary than generalizing about revolution. However, a stupid question usually gets stupid answers. Some try to define Romantic art by its subject matter. But then Piero di Cosimo is a Romantic artist along with George Morland! Others suggest that Romanticism is an irrational force present in all art, but that sometimes it predominates more than at other times over the opposite force of order and reason. Yet this would make a great deal of Gothic art romantic! Another observes that it must all have had something to do with the English weather.

No, if one must answer the question — and as I’ve said, no answer is going to get us all that far — one must do so historically. The period in question falls between the growing points of two revolutions, the French and the Russian. Rousseau published Le Contrat Social in 1762. Marx published Capital in 1867. No two other single facts could reveal more. Romanticism was a revolutionary movement that rallied round a promise which was bound to be broken: the promise of the success of revolutions deriving their philosophy from the concept of the natural man. Romanticism represented and acted out the full predicament of those who created the goddess of Liberty, put a flag in her hands and followed her only to find that she led them into an ambush: the ambush of reality. It is this predicament which explains the two faces of Romanticism: its exploratory adventurousness and its morbid self-indulgence. For pure romantics the two most unromantic things in the world were firstly to accept life as it was, and secondly to succeed in changing it.

In the visual arts the two faces reveal themselves in a sense of new dimensions on the one hand, and in an oppressive claustrophobia on the other. They are Constable’s clouds formed by land and water we can’t see, and there is the typical romantic painting of a man being buried alive in his coffin. There is Géricault looking calmly and openly at the inmates of an asylum, and there are the German Romantic painters in the Mediterranean painting the hills and sky such a legendary blue that the whole scene looks as though it could be smashed like a saucer. There is Stubbs scientifically comparing animals and looking into the eyes of a tiger, and there is James Ward reducing Gordale Scar to a rock of ages just cleft for him. There is a new awareness of the size and power of the forces in the world — an awareness which invested the word Nature with a completely new meaning, and there is the breathlessness of the new superstitions that protected men from the enormity of what they were discovering: above all the superstition that a feeling in the heart was somehow comparable with a storm in the sky.

Naturally the focal centres of Romantic art varied a great deal according to time and place. In England the provocation was the Industrial Revolution and the new light (literal and metaphorical) that it threw on landscape; in France the predominant stimulus was the new mode of military heroism established by Napoleon; in Germany it was the mounting compulsion to establish a national identity. Naturally, too, the political predicament I’ve described often presented itself in indirect forms. More Romantic artists were directly influenced by the literary cult of the past when life was thought to have been ‘simpler’ and more ‘natural’, than they were by, say, Chartism. Newtonian science was also relevant to Romanticism. The Romantics accepted the way science had freed thought from religion, but at the same time were intuitively in protest against its closed mechanistic system, the inhumanity of which seemed to be demonstrated in practice by the horrors of the economic system. The complexities of the situation are immense. Certain artists of the time, precisely because they were not affected by the Romantic predicament, should not be classed as Romantics even though they borrowed from the Romantic vocabulary: e.g. Goya and Daumier.

Yet, despite the complexities, this historical definition is the only one that will make any general sense at all. It is confirmed by the fact that after 1860 when the predicament was no longer real because the knowledge and experience with which to overcome it were available, Romanticism degenerated into effete aestheticism. And it is confirmed most strikingly by the work which represents Romanticism at its height: Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios.

The sub-title of the picture is A Greek Family Awaiting Death or Slavery. It is an acknowledged masterpiece and contains brilliant passages of painting. Its political gesture was important and also undoubtedly sincere. But it remains a gesture. It has nothing to do with any true imaginative understanding of either death or slavery. It is a voluptuous charade. The woman tied to the horse is a languorous sex-offering, the rope round her arm like an exotic snake playing with her. The couple in the centre might be lying in a harem. Indeed all the figures (with the possible exception of the old woman) are exotic. They belong to art dreams and literary legends, and have only been placed in an actual context for the sake of being ‘ennobled’ further by also belonging to an historical tragedy.

Delacroix records how he talked to a traveller just back from Greece and says that on one occasion this man ‘was so much impressed by the head of a Turk who appeared on the battlements that he prevented a soldier from shooting at him.’ Elsewhere Delacroix raves about a painting by Gros and says, ‘You can see the flash of the sabre as it plunges into the enemy’s throats.’ Such was the romantic view of war: you could stop or start it like a film. It was a sincere view, but it was a compromisingly privileged view. And between the privilege and the reality lay the predicament.

1959

Millet and Labour

Millet’s holy humble peasants have been used to illustrate many moral lessons and have comforted many uneasy consciences: the consciences of those who have borne everything ‘with fortitude’, but who suspect themselves of perhaps having accepted too much too passively: also, the consciences of those who, living off the labour of others, have nevertheless always believed that in an indescribable sort of way (and God help those who describe it too explicitly) the labourer has a nobility which they themselves lack. And, above all, Millet’s pictures have been quoted to persuade the confined to count the blessings in their cells; they have been used as a kind of pictorial label round the great clerical bottle of Bromide prescribed to quieten every social fever and irritation. This is a more important part of the history of Millet’s art than the fact that highbrow fashion has ignored him for the last thirty or forty years. Otherwise what is important is that such artists as Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Sickert, all accepted as a matter of course that he was a great draughtsman. In fact, Michelangelo, Poussin, Fragonard, Daumier, Degas, can all be cited in discussing his work — though it is only necessary to do so in order to convince the ‘art-loving’ public, misled by its textbooks, that Millet was not just a kind of John the Baptist forerunner of the Pre-Raphaelites or of Watts. But when that has been said, it is the moral issue which is the issue that Millet raises.

Millet was a moralist in the only way that a great artist can be: by the power of his identification with his subjects. He chose to paint peasants because he was one, and because — under a somewhat similar influence to the unpolitical realists today — he instinctively hated the false elegance of the beau monde. His genius was the result of the fact that, choosing to paint physical labour, he had the passionate, highly sensuous and sexual temperament that could lead him to intense physical identification. Sir Kenneth Clark makes much of the point that at the age of thirty-five he gave up painting nudes which were — but only in the mythology they employed — a little like eighteenth-century boudoir art. Yet there was no inhibited puritanism behind this decision. Millet objected to Boucher because ‘he did not paint nude women, but only little creatures undressed’.

As for the nature of Millet’s power of identification, this is clearly revealed in one of his remarks about a drawing by Michelangelo.

When I saw that drawing of his in which he depicts a man in a fainting fit — I felt like the subject of it, as though I were racked with pain. I suffered with the body, with the limbs, that I saw suffer.

In the same way he strode forward with The Sower, felt the weight of the hand on a lap even when it was obscured in shadow (see his etching of a Mother Feeding her Child), embraced with the harvesters the trusses of hay, straightened his back with the hoers, clenched his leg to steady the log with the wood-cutters, leant his weight against the tree trunk with the shepherdess, sprawled at midday on the ground with the exhausted. This was the extent of his moral teaching. When he was accused of being a socialist, he denied it — although he continued to work in the same way and suffer the same accusation — because socialism seemed to him to have nothing to do with the truth he had experienced and expressed: the truth of the peasant driven by the seasons: the truth so dominating that it made it absolutely impossible for him to conceive of any other life for a peasant.

It is fatal for an artist’s moral sense to be in advance of his experience of reality. (Hogarth’s wasn’t; Greuze’s was.) Millet, without a trace of sentimentality, told the truth as he knew it: the passive acceptance of the couple in The Angelus was a small part of the truth. And the sentimentality and false morality afterwards foisted upon this picture will prove — perhaps already has proved — to be temporary. In the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art the same story is repeated again and again. The artist, isolated, knows that his maximum moral responsibility is to struggle to tell the truth; his struggle is on the near side, not the far, of drawing moral conclusions. The public, or certain sections of it, then draw moral conclusions to disguise the truth: the artist’s work is called immoral — Balzac, Zola: or is requisitioned for false preaching — Millet, Dostoevsky: or, if neither of these subterfuges work, it is dismissed as being naive — Shelley, Brecht.

1956

The Politics of Courbet

Because Courbet was a declared and incorruptible Socialist (he was of course imprisoned for the part he played in the Commune and at the end of his life was driven into exile in Switzerland), reactionary critics have pretended that his politics were nothing to do with his art — they couldn’t deny his art itself if only because of his important influence on later artists such as Manet and Cézanne; progressive critics, on the other hand, have tended to assume that his art is great as an automatic result of his political loyalty. So it is pertinent to ask exactly how his socialism was implied in his paintings, how his attitude to life was reflected in the innovations of his art.

First, though, it is necessary to clean off some of the mud that has stuck. Because Courbet was uncompromising in his convictions, because his work and his way of life ‘vulgarly’ proved that art was as relevant to the back-parlour, the workshop, the cell, as to the drawing-room, because his paintings never offered the slightest possibility of escape from the world as it was, he was officially rejected in his lifetime and has since been only grudgingly admitted. He has been accused of being bombastic. Look at his self-portrait in prison. He sits by the window quietly smoking his pipe, the invitation of the sunlight in the courtyard outside the only comment on his confinement. Or look at his copy of the Rembrandt self-portrait. He had the humility to impose that discipline on himself at the age of fifty. He has been accused of coarseness. Look at a Normandy seascape, in which the receding air between the empty sea and the low clouds holds firmly but with an extraordinary finesse all the mystery implied by the apparent fact and the actual illusion of an horizon. He has been charged with sentimentality. Look at his painting of the great hooked trout; its truth to the essential facts forces one to feel the weight of the fish, the power with which, struggling, his tail would slap the rocks, the cunning necessary to play him, the deliberation necessary to gaff him — he would be too large to net. Occasionally, of course, such criticisms are fair, yet no artist only paints masterpieces, and the work, say, of Constable (whom Courbet in his independent contribution to landscape painting somewhat resembled), Corot or Delacroix is just as unequal, but is far less frequently singled out for prejudiced attack.

But to return to the main problem: Courbet believed in the independence of the artist — he was the first painter to hold a one-man show. Yet to him this meant independence from art for art’s sake, from the prevailing Romantic view that the artist or his work were more important than the existence of the subject painted, and from the opposing Classic view that the inspiration of all art was absolute and timeless. He realized that the artist’s independence could only be productive if it meant his freedom to identify himself with his living subject, to feel that he belonged to it, never vice versa. For the painter as such that is the meaning of Materialism. Courbet expressed it in words — this indestructible relationship between human aspiration and actual fact — when he wrote, ‘Savoir pour pouvoir — telle fut ma pensée.’ But Courbet’s acknowledgment, with all the force of his imagination, of the actuality of the objects he painted, never deteriorated into naturalism: a thoughtless superficial goggling at appearances — a tripper’s view of a beauty spot, for instance. One does not just feel that every scene he painted looked like that but that it was known like that. His country landscapes were revolutionary in so far as they presented real places without suggesting any romantic antithesis with the city, but within them — not imposed upon them — one can also discover a sense of potential Arcadia: a local recognition that for playing children and courting couples such ordinary scenes might gather familiar magic. A magnificent nude in front of a window and landscape is an uncompromising portrayal of a woman undressed — subject to many of the same laws as the trout: but, at the same time, the picture evokes the shock of the unexpected loneliness of nudity: the personal shock that inspires lovers, expressed in another way in Giorgione’s Tempest. His portraits (the masterpieces of Jules Vallès, Van Wisselingh, The Hunter) are particular people; one can imagine how they will alter; one can imagine their clothes worn, ill-fitting, by somebody else; yet they share a common dignity because all are seen with the knowledge of the same man’s affection. The light plays on them kindly because all light is welcome that reveals the form of one’s friends.

A parallel principle applies to Courbet’s drawing and grasp of structure. The basic form is always established first, all modulations and outcrops of texture are then seen as organic variations — just as eccentricities of character are seen by a friend, as opposed to a stranger, as part of the whole man.

To sum up in one sentence, one might say that Courbet’s socialism was expressed in his work by its quality of uninhibited Fraternity.

1953

Gauguin’s Crime

Gauguin’s life — poverty, disease, loneliness, disillusion, guilt — was wholly tragic. The legend of the stockbroker who chucked up his family and job, or that of the Genius sublimely above Responsibility, are inadequate both to the facts and to the suffering involved. Gauguin was a criminal. It may seem perverse to call a great artist that — and one must remember that his ruthlessness always extended to his own treatment of himself — but it is the only way, I think, of beginning to understand him.

Gauguin’s self-portraits, after he left his family in Copenhagen and became an outcast, are very revealing, especially if one remembers the innocence of Van Gogh’s. The large lumbering body, the big hooked nose, the dark eyes whose expression is defensive and gives nothing away, the whole face — like one carved forcefully but with a blunt knife out of crude wood — are seen bitterly, cynically, as though the image Gauguin saw in the mirror reminded him of how a convict might strike a prison visitor, or how a man might appear, brought up from a dark cell for interrogation.

His crime was his decision in 1883 to become a professional, dedicated painter. It amounted to a crime partly because of the social attitude forced upon the imaginative artist at that time, and partly because of Gauguin’s own temperament. All the great works of the late nineteenth century were produced in the belief that the individual could only risk himself creatively against society. This by itself turned the artist into an outcast. One half of Gauguin’s character accepted this role so uncompromisingly that he was treated as a criminal: the other half, longing for acceptance and respect, made him feel a criminal. He instinctively understood both processes. ‘A terrible epoch,’ he wrote, ‘is being prepared in Europe for the coming generation: the reign of gold. Everything is rotten, both men and the arts. You must understand that two natures dwell within me: the Indian and the Sensitive Man.’ Although Gauguin claimed descent from the Peruvian Indians, the Indian also had a symbolic meaning for him: he was the Free Man, the Independent Hunter, the Pure Primitive of uncorrupted appetite. The sensitive man was the exact opposite: the man of Esteem, cultivated, articulate Taste, Affection and Family Feeling. The two combine, the independence of the Indian and the guilt of the Sensitive Man, in such twisted agonized remarks as: ‘Yes, I’m a great criminal all right. But what does it matter? Michelangelo also. And I’m not Michelangelo.’

All through his life until his attempted suicide six years before his death, this conflict continued. His letters from Panama, Brittany, Tahiti, the Marquesas, read like those of a man on the run, always planning to get over the border to security and comfort and a normal full life.

You are without confidence in the future, but I have that confidence because I want to have it. Without that I should have long since thrown up the sponge. To hope is almost to live. I must live to do my duty to the end, and I can only do so by forcing my illusions, by creating hopes out of dreams. When day after day, I eat my dry bread with a glass of water, I make myself believe it is a beefsteak.

And at the end he wrote: ‘You have known for a long time what it is I wish to establish: the right to dare everything.’ Dare not Do. In that difference of motive the conflict emerges again. One only talks of risking what one values.

It was not until after the death of his favourite daughter and his attempt at poisoning himself that Gauguin seems to have given up hope, or, more accurately, to have accepted his own terrible sentence on himself of deportation. His physical sufferings increased even further, but in his mind he achieved a certain reconciliation and calm.

Now, none of this would be worth pointing out and one could at least leave Gauguin his privacy, if it did not give us an important clue to understanding his art. Given the ideas of his time, Gauguin’s painting was a very direct expression of his personality.

The Sensitive Man, robbed of security and sensibility, needed to dream. This might have led Gauguin to pure fantasy, symbolism, esoteric religious art — all of which he touched but never developed because the Indian in him required tangible trophies, required that ‘the dream’ should have weight and body to it. Hence his travels: to Brittany (where the dream had to be forced a little) and to the South Seas where dream and actuality were fused: the scene simultaneously exotic and stark.

The Sensitive Man inspired the mood and often the titles of the paintings: Alone, Nevermore, Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Whither Do We Go? The Indian bound with contours as strong as leather the simple tangible forms. Neither was concerned with superficial illusions: both wanted to strip their subjects to what they thought was the heart of the matter: one to the essential mystery, the other to the instinctive body.

Consider the masterpiece Nevermore. Like all Gauguin’s most original and mature works, it is, in one sense, clumsily painted. This clumsiness, however, is absolutely necessary to express the constant tension within the picture between the evocative and the real; between the hieratic gesture of a carved statue (or the stylized movement of a dancer) and the spontaneous pose of a Tahitian girl lying in wait on a couch: between flat decoration and solid structure: between allegorical and local colour. As in all Gauguin’s later works, there is a marked distinction between the figure and its surroundings. The girl’s body is modelled and physically convincing, the background is two-dimensional and schematic. As one thinks about this one suddenly realizes the explanation. The painting is the most accurate interpretation of what the girl herself might have felt as she lay there, intensely aware on the one hand of the reality of her own body, and, on the other hand, of the intangible comfort and threat of the dimensionless images projected around her from her own mind.

I believe that, sometimes very directly and sometimes less so, this duality of interpretation explains a great deal in Gauguin’s greatest and most mysterious works. In his art he finally achieved his aim: to become a primitive and at the same time to remain finely articulate: to be simultaneously the Indian and the Sensitive Man. His work represents a single-handed attempt to build from primitive material an alternative civilization to the one he inherited. It is not altogether surprising that the latter considered the activity a criminal one.

1955