Selected Essays of John Berger

The Moment of Cubism

This essay is dedicated to Barbara Niven who prompted it in an ABC teashop off the Gray’s Inn Road a long time ago.

Certains hommes sont des collines

Qui s’élèvent entre les hommes

Et voient au loin tout l’avenir

Mieux que s’il était présent

Plus net que s’il était passé.

Apollinaire

The things that Picasso and I

said to one another during those years will never be said again,

and even if they were,

no one would understand them any more.

It was like

being roped together on a mountain.

Georges Braque

There are happy moments,

but no happy periods in history.

Arnold Hauser

The work of art is therefore

only a halt in the becoming

and not a frozen aim on its own.

El Lissitzky

I find it hard to believe that the most extreme Cubist works were painted over fifty years ago. It is true that I would not expect them to have been painted today. They are both too optimistic and too revolutionary for that. Perhaps in a way I am surprised that they have been painted at all. It would seem more likely that they were yet to be painted.

Do I make things unnecessarily complicated? Would it not be more helpful to say simply: the few great Cubist works were painted between 1907 and 1914? And perhaps to qualify this by adding that a few more, by Juan Gris, were painted a little later?

And anyway is it not nonsense to think of Cubism having not yet taken place when we are surrounded in daily life by the apparent effects of Cubism? All modern design, architecture and town planning seems inconceivable without the initial example of Cubism.

Nevertheless I must insist on the sensation I have in front of the works themselves: the sensation that the works and I, as I look at them, are caught, pinned down, in an enclave of time, waiting to be released and to continue a journey that began in 1907.

Cubism was a style of painting which evolved very quickly, and whose various stages can be fairly specifically defined.¹ Yet there were also Cubist poets, Cubist sculptors, and later on so-called Cubist designers and architects. Certain original stylistic features of Cubism can be found in the pioneer works of other movements: Suprematism, Constructivism, Futurism, Vorticism, the de Stijl movement.

The question thus arises: can Cubism be adequately defined as a style? It seems unlikely. Nor can it be defined as a policy. There was never any Cubist manifesto. The opinions and outlook of Picasso, Braque, Léger or Juan Gris were clearly very different even during the few years when their paintings had many features in common. Is it not enough that the category of Cubism includes those works that are now generally agreed to be within it? This is enough for dealers, collectors, and cataloguers who go by the name of art historians. But it is not, I believe, enough for you or me.

Even those whom the stylistic category satisfies are wont to say that Cubism constituted a revolutionary change in the history of art. Later we shall analyse this change in detail. The concept of painting as it had existed since the Renaissance was overthrown. The idea of art holding up a mirror to nature became a nostalgic one: a means of diminishing instead of interpreting reality.

If the word ‘revolution’ is used seriously and not merely as an epithet for this season’s novelties, it implies a process. No revolution is simply the result of personal originality. The maximum that such originality can achieve is madness: madness is revolutionary freedom confined to the self.

Cubism cannot be explained in terms of the genius of its exponents. And this is emphasized by the fact that most of them became less profound artists when they ceased to be Cubists. Even Braque and Picasso never surpassed the works of their Cubist period: and a great deal of their later work was inferior.

The story of how Cubism happened in terms of painting and of the leading protagonists has been told many times. The protagonists themselves found it extremely difficult — both at the time and afterwards — to explain the meaning of what they were doing.

To the Cubists, Cubism was spontaneous. To us it is part of history. But a curiously unfinished part. Cubism should be considered not as a stylistic category but as a moment (even if a moment lasting six or seven years) experienced by a certain number of people. A strangely placed moment.

It was a moment in which the promises of the future were more substantial than the present. With the important exception of the avant-garde artists during a few years after 1917 in Moscow, the confidence of the Cubists has never since been equalled among artists.

D. H. Kahnweiler, who was a friend of the Cubists and their dealer, has written:

I lived those seven crucial years from 1907 to 1914 with my painter friends … what occurred at that time in the plastic arts will be understood only if one bears in mind that a new epoch was being born, in which man (all mankind in fact) was undergoing a transformation more radical than any other known within historical times.²

What was the nature of this transformation? I have outlined elsewhere (in The Success and Failure of Picasso) the relation between Cubism and the economic, technological and scientific developments of the period. There seems little point in repeating this here: rather, I would like to try to push a little further our definition of the philosophic meaning of these developments and their coincidence.

An interlocking world system of imperialism; opposed to it, a socialist international; the founding of modern physics, physiology and sociology; the increasing use of electricity, the invention of radio and the cinema; the beginnings of mass production; the publishing of mass-circulation newspapers; the new structural possibilities offered by the availability of steel and aluminium; the rapid development of chemical industries and the production of synthetic materials; the appearance of the motor-car and the aeroplane: what did all this mean?

The question may seem so vast that it leads to despair. Yet there are rare historical moments to which such a question can perhaps be applied. These are moments of convergence, when numerous developments enter a period of similar qualitative change, before diverging into a multiplicity of new terms. Few of those who live through such a moment can grasp the full significance of the qualitative change taking place; but everybody is aware of the times changing: the future, instead of offering continuity, appears to advance towards them.

This was surely the case in Europe from about 1900 to 1914 — although one must remember, when studying the evidence, that the reaction of many people to their own awareness of change is to pretend to ignore it.

Apollinaire, who was the greatest and most representative poet of the Cubist movement, repeatedly refers to the future in his poetry.

Where my youth fell

You see the flame of the future

You must know that I speak today

To tell the whole world

That the art of prophecy is born at last.

The developments which converged at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe changed the meaning of both time and space. All, in different ways, some inhuman and others full of promise, offered a liberation from the immediate, from the rigid distinction between absence and presence. The concept of the field, first put forward by Faraday when wrestling with the problem — as defined in traditional terms — of ‘action at a distance’, entered now, unacknowledged, into all modes of planning and calculation and even into many modes of feeling. There was a startling extension through time and space of human power and knowledge. For the first time the world, as a totality, ceased to be an abstraction and became realizable.

If Apollinaire was the greatest Cubist poet, Blaise Cendrars was the first. His poem ‘Les Pâques à New York’ (1912) had a profound influence on Apollinaire and demonstrated to him how radically one could break with tradition. The three major poems of Cendrars at this time were all concerned with travelling — but travelling in a new sense across a realizable globe. In ‘Le Panama ou Les Aventures de Mes Sept Oncles’ he writes:

Poetry dates from today

The milky way round my neck

The two hemispheres on my eyes

At full speed

There are no more breakdowns

If I had the time to save a little money I’d

be flying in the air show

I have reserved my seat in the first train through

the tunnel under the Channel

I am the first pilot to cross the Atlantic solo

900 millions

The 900 millions probably refers to the then estimated population of the world.

It is important to see how philosophically far-reaching were the consequences of this change and why it can be termed qualitative. It was not merely a question of faster transport, quicker messages, a more complex scientific vocabulary, larger accumulations of capital, wider markets, international organizations, etc. The process of the secularization of the world was at last complete. Arguments against the existence of God had achieved little. But now man was able to extend himself indefinitely beyond the immediate: he took over the territory in space and time where God had been presumed to exist.

‘Zone’, the poem that Apollinaire wrote under the immediate influence of Cendrars, contains the following lines:

Christ pupil of the eye

Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows how

This century changed into a bird ascends like Jesus

Devils in pits raise their heads to watch it

They say it’s imitating Simon Magus of Judea

If it can fly, we’ll call it the fly one

Angels swing past its trapeze

Icarus Enoch Elias Apollonius of Tyana

Hover round the first aeroplane

Dispersing at times to let through the priests

As they bear the Holy Eucharist

Forever ascending and raising the Host …³

The second consequence concerned the relation of the self to the secularized world. There was no longer any essential discontinuity between the individual and the general. The invisible and the multiple no longer intervened between each individual and the world. It was becoming more and more difficult to think in terms of having been placed in the world. A man was part of the world and indivisible from it. In an entirely original sense, which remains at the basis of modern consciousness, a man was the world which he inherited.

Again, Apollinaire expresses this:

I have known since then the bouquet of the world

I am drunk from having drunk the universe whole.

All the previous spiritual problems of religion and morality would now be increasingly concentrated in a man’s choice of attitude to the existing state of the world considered as his own existing state.

It is now only against the world, within his own consciousness, that he can measure his stature. He is enhanced or diminished according to how he acts towards the enhancement or diminishment of the world. His self apart from the world, his self wrenched from its global context — the sum of all existing social contexts — is a mere biological accident. The secularization of the world exacts its price as well as offering the privilege of a choice, clearer than any other in history.

Apollinaire:

I am everywhere or rather I start to be everywhere

It is I who am starting this thing of the centuries to come.

As soon as more than one man says this, or feels it, or aspires towards feeling it — and one must remember that the notion and the feeling are the consequence of numerous material developments impinging upon millions of lives — as soon as this happens, the unity of the world has been proposed.

The term ‘unity of the world’ can acquire a dangerously utopian aura. But only if it is thought to be politically applicable to the world as it is. A sine qua non for the unity of the world is the end of exploitation. The evasion of this fact is what renders the term utopian.

Meanwhile the term has other significations. In many respects (the Declaration of Human Rights, military strategy, communications, etc.) the world since 1900 has been treated as a single unit. The unity of the world has received de facto recognition.

Today we know that the world should be unified, just as we know that all men should have equal rights. Insofar as a man denies this or acquiesces in its denial, he denies the unity of his own self. Hence the profound psychological sickness of the imperialist countries, hence the corruption implicit in so much of their learning — when knowledge is used to deny knowledge.

At the moment of Cubism, no denials were necessary. It was a moment of prophecy, but prophecy as the basis of a transformation that had actually begun.

Apollinaire:

Already I hear the shrill sound of the friend’s voice to come

Who walks with you in Europe

Whilst never leaving America …

I do not wish to suggest a general period of ebullient optimism. It was a period of poverty, exploitation, fear and desperation. The majority could only be concerned with the means of their survival, and millions did not survive. But for those who asked questions, there were new positive answers whose authenticity seemed to be guaranteed by the existence of new forces.

The socialist movements in Europe (with the exception of that in Germany and sections of the trade-union movement in the United States) were convinced that they were on the eve of revolution and that the revolution would spread to become a world revolution. This belief was shared even by those who disagreed about the political means necessary — by syndicalists, parliamentarians, communists and anarchists.

A particular kind of suffering was coming to an end: the suffering of hopelessness and defeat. People now believed, if not for themselves then for the future, in victory. The belief was often strongest where the conditions were worst. Everyone who was exploited or downtrodden and who had the strength left to ask about the purpose of his miserable life was able to hear in answer the echo of declarations like that of Lucheni, the Italian anarchist who stabbed the Empress of Austria in 1898: ‘The hour is not far distant when a new sun will shine upon all men alike’; or like that of Kalyaev in 1905 who, on being sentenced to death for the assassination of the Governor-General of Moscow, told the court ‘to learn to look the advancing revolution straight in the eye’.

An end was in sight. The limitless, which until now had always reminded men of the unattainability of their hopes, became suddenly an encouragement. The world became a starting point.

The small circle of Cubist painters and writers were not directly involved in politics. They did not think in political terms. Yet they were concerned with a revolutionary transformation of the world. How was this possible? Again we find the answer in the historical timing of the Cubist movement. It was not then essential for a man’s intellectual integrity to make a political choice. Many developments, as they converged to undergo an equivalent qualitative change, appeared to promise a transformed world. The promise was an overall one.

‘All is possible,’ wrote André Salmon, another Cubist poet, ‘everything is realizable everywhere and with everything.’

Imperialism had begun the process of unifying the world. Mass production promised eventually a world of plenty. Mass-circulation newspapers promised informed democracy. The aeroplane promised to make the dream of Icarus real. The terrible contradictions born of the convergence were not yet clear. They became evident in 1914 and they were first politically polarized by the Russian Revolution of 1917. El Lissitzky, one of the great innovators of Russian revolutionary art until this art was suppressed, implies in a biographical note how the moment of political choice came from the conditions of the Cubist moment:

The Film of El’s Life till 1926⁴

BIRTH: My generation was born

a few dozen years

before the Great October Revolution.

ANCESTORS: A few centuries ago our ancestors had the luck

to make the great voyages of discovery.

WE: We, the grandchildren of Columbus,

are creating the epoch of the most glorious inventions.

They have made our globe very small,

but have

expanded our space

and intensified our time.

SENSATIONS: My life is accompanied

by unprecedented sensations.

Barely five years old I had the rubber leads

of Edison’s phonograph stuck in my ears.

Eight years,

and I was chasing after the first electric tram in Smolensk,

the diabolical force

which drove the peasant horses out of the town.

COMPRESSION OF MATTER: The steam engine rocked my cradle.

In the meantime it has gone the way of all ichthyosauruses.

Machines are ceasing

to have fat bellies full of intestines.

Already we have the compressed skulls

of dynamos with their electric brains.

Matter and mind

are directly transmitted through crankshafts

and thus made to work.

Gravity and inertia are being overcome.

1918: In 1918 in Moscow before my eyes

the short-circuit sparked

which split the world in

half.

This stroke drove our present apart

like a wedge

between yesterday and tomorrow.

My work

too

forms part of driving the wedge

further

in.

One belongs here or there:

there is no middle.

The Cubist movement ended in France in 1914. With the war a new kind of suffering was born. Men were forced to face for the first time the full horror — not of hell, or damnation, or a lost battle, or famine, or plague — but the full horror of what stood in the way of their own progress. And they were forced to face this in terms of their own responsibility, not in terms of a simple confrontation as between clearly defined enemies.

The scale of the waste and the irrationality and the degree to which men could be persuaded and forced to deny their own interests led to the belief that there were incomprehensible and blind forces at work. But since these forces could no longer be accommodated by religion, and since there was no ritual by which they could be approached or appeased, each man had to live with them within himself, as best he could. Within him they destroyed his will and confidence.

On the last page of All Quiet on the Western Front the hero thinks:

I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.⁵

The new kind of suffering which was born in 1914 and has persisted in Western Europe until the present day is an inverted suffering. Men fought within themselves about the meaning of events, identity, hope. This was the negative possibility implicit in the new relation of the self to the world. The life they experienced became a chaos within them. They became lost within themselves.

Instead of apprehending (in however simple and direct a way) the processes which were rendering their own destinies identical with the world’s, they submitted to the new condition passively. That is to say the world, which was nevertheless indivisibly part of them, reverted in their minds to being the old world which was separate from them and opposed them: it was as though they had been forced to devour God, heaven and hell and live for ever with the fragments inside themselves. It was indeed a new and terrible form of suffering and it coincided with the widespread, deliberate use of false ideological propaganda as a weapon. Such propaganda preserves within people outdated structures of feeling and thinking whilst forcing new experiences upon them. It transforms them into puppets — whilst most of the strain brought about by the transformation remains politically harmless as inevitably incoherent frustration. The only purpose of such propaganda is to make people deny and then abandon the selves which otherwise their own experience would create.

In ‘La Jolie Rousse’, Apollinaire’s last long poem (he died in 1918), his vision of the future, after his experience of the war, has become a source of suffering as much as of hope. How can he reconcile what he has seen with what he once foresaw? From now on there can be no unpolitical prophecies.

We are not your enemies

We want to take over vast strange territories

Where the flowering mystery waits to be picked

Where there are fires and colours never yet seen

A thousand imponderable apparitions

Which must be given reality

We wish to explore the vast domain of goodness where everything is silent

And time can be pursued or brought back

Pity us who fight continually on the frontiers

Of the infinite and the future

Pity for our mistakes pity for our sins.

The violence of summer is here

My youth like the spring is dead

Now, O sun, is the time of scorching Reason

Laugh then laugh at me

Men from everywhere and more particularly here

For there are so many things I dare not tell you

So many things you will not let me say

Have pity on me.

We can now begin to understand the central paradox of Cubism. The spirit of Cubism was objective. Hence its calm and its comparative anonymity as between artists. Hence also the accuracy of its technical prophecies. I live in a satellite city that has been built during the last five years. The character of the pattern of what I now see out of the window as I write can be traced directly back to the Cubist pictures of 1911 and 1912. Yet the Cubist spirit seems to us today to be curiously distant and disengaged.

This is because the Cubists took no account of politics as we have since experienced them. In common with even their experienced political contemporaries, they did not imagine and did not foresee the extent, depth and duration of the suffering which would be involved in the political struggle to realize what had so clearly become possible and what has since become imperative.

The Cubists imagined the world transformed, but not the process of transformation.

Cubism changed the nature of the relationship between the painted image and reality, and by so doing it expressed a new relationship between man and reality.

Many writers have pointed out that Cubism marked a break in the history of art comparable to that of the Renaissance in relation to medieval art. That is not to say that Cubism can be equated with the Renaissance. The confidence of the Renaissance lasted for about sixty years (approximately from 1420 to 1480): that of Cubism lasted for about six years. However, the Renaissance remains a point of departure for appreciating Cubism.

In the early Renaissance the aim of art was to imitate nature. Alberti formulated this view: ‘The function of the painter is to render with lines and colours, on a given panel or wall, the visible surface of any body, so that at a certain distance and from a certain position it appears in relief and just like the body itself.’⁶

It was not, of course, as simple as that. There were the mathematical problems of linear perspective which Alberti himself solved. There was the question of choice — that is to say the question of the artist doing justice to nature by choosing to represent what was typical of nature at her best.

Yet the artist’s relation to nature was comparable to that of the scientist. Like the scientist, the artist applied reason and method to the study of the world. He observed and ordered his findings. The parallelism of the two disciplines is later demonstrated by the example of Leonardo.

Although often employed far less accurately during the following centuries, the metaphorical model for the function of painting at this time was the mirror. Alberti cites Narcissus when he sees himself reflected in the water as the first painter. The mirror renders the appearances of nature and simultaneously delivers them into the hands of man.

It is extremely hard to reconstruct the attitudes of the past. In the light of more recent developments and the questions raised by them, we tend to iron out the ambiguities which may have existed before the questions were formed. In the early Renaissance, for example, the humanist view and a medieval Christian view could still be easily combined. Man became the equal of God, but both retained their traditional positions. Arnold Hauser writes of the early Renaissance: ‘The seat of God was the centre round which the heavenly spheres revolved, the earth was the centre of the material universe, and man himself a self-contained microcosm round which, as it were, revolved the whole of nature, just as the celestial bodies revolved round that fixed star, the earth.’⁷

Thus man could observe nature around him on every side and be enhanced both by what he observed and by his own ability to observe. He had no need to consider that he was essentially part of that nature. Man was the eye for which reality had been made visual: the ideal eye, the eye of the viewing point of Renaissance perspective. The human greatness of his eye lay in its ability to reflect and contain, like a mirror, what was.

The Copernican revolution, Protestantism, the Counter-Reformation destroyed the Renaissance position. With this destruction modern subjectivity was born. The artist becomes primarily concerned with creation. His own genius takes the place of nature as the marvel. It is the gift of his genius, his ‘spirit’, his ‘grace’ which makes him god-like. At the same time the equality between man and god is totally destroyed. Mystery enters art to emphasize the inequality. A century after Alberti’s claim that art and science are parallel activities, Michelangelo speaks — no longer of imitating nature — but of imitating Christ: ‘In order to imitate in some degree the venerable image of Our Lord, it is not enough to be a painter, a great and skilful master; I believe that one must further be of blameless life, even if possible a saint, that the Holy Spirit may inspire one’s understanding.’⁸

It would take us too far from our field even to attempt to trace the history of art from Michelangelo onwards — Mannerism, the Baroque, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century classicism. What is relevant to our purpose is that, from Michelangelo until the French Revolution, the metaphorical model for the function of painting becomes the theatre stage. It may seem unlikely that the same model works for a visionary like El Greco, a Stoic like Poussin (who actually worked from stage models he built himself) and a middle-class moralist like Chardin. Yet all the artists of these two centuries shared certain assumptions. For them all the power of art lay in its artificiality. That is to say they were concerned with constructing comprehensive examples of some truth such as could not be met with in such an ecstatic, pointed, sublime or meaningful way in life itself.

Painting became a schematic art. The painter’s task was no longer to represent or imitate what existed: it was to summarize experience. Nature is now what man has to redeem himself from. The artist becomes responsible not simply for the means of conveying a truth, but also for the truth itself. Painting ceases to be a branch of natural science and becomes a branch of the moral sciences.

In the theatre the spectator faces events from whose consequences he is immune; he may be affected emotionally and morally but he is physically removed, protected, separate, from what is happening before his eyes. What is happening is artificial. It is he who now represents nature — not the work of art. And if, at the same time, it is from himself that he must redeem himself, this represents the contradiction of the Cartesian division which prophetically or actually so dominated these two centuries.

Rousseau, Kant and the French Revolution — or rather, all the developments which lay behind the thought of the philosophers and the actions of the Revolution — made it impossible to go on believing in constructed order as against natural chaos. The metaphorical model changed again, and once more it applies over a long period despite dramatic changes of style. The new model is that of the personal account. Nature no longer confirms or enhances the artist as he investigates it. Nor is he any longer concerned with creating ‘artificial’ examples, for these depend upon the common recognition of certain moral values. He is now alone, surrounded by nature, from which his own experience separates him.

Nature is what he sees through his experience. There is thus in all nineteenth-century art — from the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of the Romantics to the ‘optics’ of the Impressionists — considerable confusion about where the artist’s experience stops and nature begins. The artist’s personal account is his attempt to make his experience as real as nature, which he can never reach, by communicating it to others. The considerable suffering of most nineteenth-century artists arose out of this contradiction: because they were alienated from nature, they needed to present themselves as nature to others.

Speech, as the recounting of experience and the means of making it real, preoccupied the Romantics. Hence their constant comparisons between paintings and poetry. Géricault, whose ‘Raft of the Medusa’ was the first painting of a contemporary event consciously based on eyewitness accounts, wrote in 1821: ‘How I should like to be able to show our cleverest painters several portraits, which are such close resemblances to nature, whose easy pose leaves nothing to be desired, and of which one can really say that all they lack is the power of speech.’⁹

In 1850 Delacroix wrote: ‘I have told myself a hundred times that painting — that is to say, the material thing called painting — was no more than the pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and that of the spectator.’¹⁰

For Corot experience was a far less flamboyant and more modest affair than for the Romantics. But nevertheless he still emphasized how essential the personal and the relative are to art. In 1856 he wrote: ‘Reality is one part of art: feeling completes it … before any site and any object, abandon yourself to your first impression. If you have really been touched, you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion.’¹¹

Zola, who was one of the first defenders of the Impressionists, defined a work of art as ‘a corner of nature seen through a temperament’. The definition applies to the whole of the nineteenth century and is another way of describing the same metaphorical model.

Monet was the most theoretical of the Impressionists and the most anxious to break through the century’s barrier of subjectivity. For him (at least theoretically) the role of his temperament was reduced to that of the process of perception. He speaks of a ‘close fusion’ with nature. But the result of this fusion, however harmonious, is a sense of powerlessness — which suggests that, bereft of his subjectivity, he has nothing to put in its place. Nature is no longer a field for study, it has become an overwhelming force. One way or another the confrontation between the artist and nature in the nineteenth century is an unequal one. Either the heart of man or the grandeur of nature dominates. Monet wrote:

I have painted for half a century, and will soon have passed my sixty-ninth year, but, far from decreasing, my sensitivity has sharpened with age. As long as constant contact with the outside world can sustain the ardour of my curiosity, and my hand remains the quick and faithful servant of my perception, I have nothing to fear from old age. I have no other wish than a close fusion with nature, and I desire no other fate than (according to Goethe) to have worked and lived in harmony with her rules. Beside her grandeur, her power and her immorality, the human creature seems but a miserable atom.

I am well aware of the schematic nature of this brief survey. Is not Delacroix in some senses a transitional figure between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? And was not Raphael another transitional figure who confounds such simple categories? The scheme, however, is true enough to help us appreciate the nature of the change which Cubism represented.

The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram: the diagram being a visible, symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearances: but these too will be treated symbolically as signs, not as imitations or re-creations.

The model of the diagram differs from that of the mirror in that it suggests a concern with what is not self-evident. It differs from the model of the theatre stage in that it does not have to concentrate upon climaxes but can reveal the continuous. It differs from the model of the personal account in that it aims at a general truth.

The Renaissance artist imitated nature. The Mannerist and Classic artist reconstructed examples from nature in order to transcend nature. The nineteenth-century artist experienced nature. The Cubist realized that his awareness of nature was part of nature.

Heisenberg speaks as a modern physicist. ‘Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves: it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.’¹² Similarly, the frontal facing of nature became inadequate in art.

How did the Cubists express their imitation of the new relation existing between man and nature?

1 By their use of space

Cubism broke the illusionist three-dimensional space which had existed in painting since the Renaissance. It did not destroy it. Nor did it muffle it — as Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school had done. It broke its continuity. There is space in a Cubist painting in that one form can be inferred to be behind another. But the relation between any two forms does not, as it does in illusionist space, establish the rule for all the spatial relationships between all the forms portrayed in the picture. This is possible without a nightmarish deformation of space, because the two-dimensional surface of the picture is always there as arbiter and resolver of different claims. The picture surface acts in a Cubist painting as the constant which allows us to appreciate the variables. Before and after every sortie of our imagination into the problematic spaces and through the interconnections of a Cubist painting, we find our gaze resettled on the picture surface, aware once more of two-dimensional shapes on a two-dimensional board or canvas.

This makes it impossible to confront the objects or forms in a Cubist work. Not only because of the multiplicity of viewpoints — so that, say, a view of a table from below is combined with a view of the table from above and from the side — but also because the forms portrayed never present themselves as a totality. The totality is the surface of the picture, which is now the origin and sum of all that one sees. The viewing point of Renaissance perspective, fixed and outside the picture, but to which everything within the picture was drawn, has become a field of vision which is the picture itself.

It took Picasso and Braque three years to arrive at this extraordinary transformation. In most of their pictures from 1907 to 1910 there are still compromises with Renaissance space. The effect of this is to deform the subject. The figure or landscape becomes the construction, instead of the construction being the picture acting as an expression of the relation between viewer and subject.¹³

After 1910 all references to appearances are made as signs on the picture surface. A circle for a top of a bottle, a lozenge for an eye, letters for a newspaper, a volute for the head of a violin, etc. Collage was an extension of the same principle. Part of the actual or imitation surface of an object was stuck on to the surface of the picture as a sign referring to, but not imitating, its appearance. A little later painting borrowed from this experience of collage, so that, say, a pair of lips or a bunch of grapes might be referred to by a drawing which ‘pretended’ to be on a piece of white paper stuck on to the picture surface.

2 By their treatment of form

It was this which gave the Cubists their name. They were said to paint everything in cubes. Afterwards this was connected with Cézanne’s remark: ‘Treat nature by the cylinder, by the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective.’ And from then on the misunderstanding has continued — encouraged, let it be said, by a lot of confused assertions by some of the lesser Cubists themselves.

The misunderstanding is that the Cubist wanted to simplify — for the sake of simplification. In some of the Picassos and Braques of 1908 it may look as though this is the case. Before finding their new vision, they had to jettison traditional complexities. But their aim was to arrive at a far more complex image of reality than had ever been attempted in painting before.

To appreciate this we must abandon a habit of centuries: the habit of looking at every object or body as though it were complete in itself, its completeness making it separate. The Cubists were concerned with the interaction between objects.

They reduced forms to a combination of cubes, cones, cylinders — or, later, to arrangements of flatly articulated facets or planes with sharp edges — so that the elements of any one form were interchangeable with another, whether a hill, a woman, a violin, a carafe, a table or a hand. Thus, as against the Cubist discontinuity of space, they created a continuity of structure. Yet when we talk of the Cubist discontinuity of space, it is only to distinguish it from the convention of linear Renaissance perspective.

Space is part of the continuity of the events within it. It is in itself an event, comparable with other events. It is not a mere container. And this is what the few Cubist masterpieces show us. The space between objects is part of the same structure as the objects themselves. The forms are simply reversed so that, say, the top of a head is a convex element and the adjacent space which it does not fill is a concave element.

The Cubists created the possibility of art revealing processes instead of static entities. The content of their art consists of various modes of interaction: the interaction between different aspects of the same event, between empty space and filled space, between structure and movement, between the seer and the thing seen.

Rather than ask of a Cubist picture: Is it true? or: Is it sincere? one should ask: Does it continue?

Today it is easy to see that, since Cubism, painting has become more and more diagrammatic, even when there has been no direct Cubist influence — as, say, in Surrealism. Eddie Wolfram in an article about Francis Bacon has written: ‘Painting today functions directly as a conceptual activity in philosophical terms and the art object acts only as a cypher reference to tangible reality.’¹⁴

This was part of the Cubist prophecy. But only part. Byzantine art might equally well be accommodated within Wolfram’s definition. To understand the full Cubist prophecy we must examine the content of their art.

A Cubist painting like Picasso’s ‘Bottle and Glasses’ of 1911 is two-dimensional insofar as one’s eye comes back again and again to the surface of the picture. We start from the surface, we follow a sequence of forms which leads into the picture, and then suddenly we arrive back at the surface again and deposit our newly acquired knowledge upon it, before making another foray. This is why I called the Cubist picture-surface the origin and sum of all that we can see in the picture. There is nothing decorative about such two-dimensionality, nor is it merely an area offering possibilities of juxtaposition for dissociated images — as in the case of much recent neo-Dadaist or pop art. We begin with the surface, but since everything in the picture refers back to the surface we begin with the conclusion. We then search — not for an explanation, as we do if presented with an image with a single, predominant meaning (a man laughing, a mountain, a reclining nude), but for some understanding of the configuration of events whose interaction is the conclusion from which we began. When we ‘deposit our newly acquired knowledge upon the picture surface’, what we in fact do is find the sign for what we have just discovered: a sign which was always there but which previously we could not read.

To make the point clearer it is worth comparing a Cubist picture with any work in the Renaissance tradition. Let us say Pollaiuolo’s ‘Martyrdom of St Sebastian’. In front of the Pollaiuolo the spectator completes the picture. It is the spectator who draws the conclusions and infers all except the aesthetic relations between the pieces of evidence offered — the archers, the martyr, the plain laid out behind, etc. It is he who through his reading of what is portrayed seals its unity of meaning. The work is presented to him. One has the feeling almost that St Sebastian was martyred so that he should be able to explain this picture. The complexity of the forms and the scale of the space depicted enhance the sense of achievement, of grasp.

In a Cubist picture, the conclusion and the connections are given. They are what the picture is made of. They are its content. The spectator has to find his place within this content whilst the complexity of the forms and the ‘discontinuity’ of the space remind him that his view from that place is bound to be only partial.

Such content and its functioning was prophetic because it coincided with the new scientific view of nature which rejected simple causality and the single permanent all-seeing viewpoint.

Heisenberg writes:

One may say that the human ability to understand may be in a certain sense unlimited. But the existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known to the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word understanding.¹⁵

Such a notion implies a change in the methodology of research and invention. W. Grey Walter, the physiologist, writes:

Classical physiology, as we have seen, tolerated only one single unknown quantity in its equations — in any experiment there could be only one thing at a time under investigation … We cannot extract one independent variable in the classical manner; we have to deal with the interaction of many unknowns and variables, all the time … In practice, this implies that not one but many — as many as possible — observations must be made at once and compared with one another, and that whenever possible a simple known variable should be used to modify the several complex unknowns so that their tendencies and interdependence can be assessed.¹⁶

The best Cubist works of 1910, 1911 and 1912 were sustained and precise models for the method of searching and testing described above. That is to say, they force the senses and imagination of the spectator to calculate, omit, doubt and conclude according to a pattern which closely resembles the one involved in scientific observation. The difference is a question of appeal. Because the act of looking at a picture is far less concentrated, the picture can appeal to wider and more various areas of the spectator’s previous experience. Art is concerned with memory: experiment is concerned with predictions.

Outside the modern laboratory, the need to adapt oneself constantly to presented totalities — rather than making inventories or supplying a transcendental meaning as in front of the Pollaiuolo — is a feature of modern experience which affects everybody through the mass media and modern communication systems.

Marshall McLuhan is a manic exaggerator, but he has seen certain truths clearly:

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action … The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology. The age of mechanical industry that preceded us found vehement assertion of private outlook the natural mode of expression … The mark of our time is its revolution against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally.¹⁷

The Cubists were the first artists to attempt to paint totalities rather than agglomerations.

* * *

I must emphasize again that the Cubists were not aware of all that we are now reading into their art. Picasso and Braque and Léger kept silent because they knew that they might be doing more than they knew. The lesser Cubists tended to believe that their break with tradition had freed them from the bondage of appearances so that they might deal with some kind of spiritual essence. The idea that their art coincided with the implications of certain new scientific and technological developments was entertained but never fully worked out. There is no evidence at all that they recognized as such the qualitative change which had taken place in the world. It is for these reasons that I have constantly referred to their intimation of a transformed world: it amounted to no more than that.

One cannot explain the exact dates of the maximum Cubist achievement. Why 1910 to 1912 rather than 1905 to 1907? Nor is it possible to explain exactly why certain artists, at exactly the same time, arrived at a very different view of the world — artists ranging from Bonnard to Duchamp or de Chirico. To do so we would need to know an impossible amount about each separate individual development (In that impossibility — which is an absolute one — lies our freedom from determinism.)

We have to work with partial explanations. With the advantage of sixty years’ hindsight, the correlations I have tried to establish between Cubism and the rest of history seem to me to be undeniable. The precise route of the connections remains unknown. They do not inform us about the intentions of the artists: they do not explain exactly why Cubism took place in the manner it did; but they do help to disclose the widest possible continuing meaning of Cubism.

Two more reservations. Because Cubism represented so fundamental a revolution in the history of art, I have had to discuss it as though it were pure theory. Only in this way could I make its revolutionary content clear. But naturally it was not pure theory. It was nothing like so neat, consistent or reduced. There are Cubist paintings full of anomalies and marvellous gratuitous tenderness and confused excitement. We see the beginning in the light of the conclusions it suggested. But it was only a beginning, and a beginning cut short.

For all their insight into the inadequacy of appearances and of the frontal view of nature, the Cubists used such appearances as their means of reference to nature. In the maelstrom of their new constructions, their liaison with the events which provoked them is shown by way of a simple, almost naïve reference to a pipe stuck in the ‘sitter’s’ mouth, a bunch of grapes, a fruit dish or the title of a daily newspaper. Even in some of the most ‘hermetic’ paintings — for example Braque’s ‘Le Portugais’ — you can find naturalistic allusions to details of the subject’s appearance, such as the buttons on the musician’s jacket, buried intact within the construction. There are only a very few works — for instance Picasso’s ‘Le Modèle’ of 1912 — where such allusions have been totally dispensed with.

The difficulties were probably both intellectual and sentimental. The naturalistic allusions seemed necessary in order to offer a measure for judging the transformation. Perhaps also the Cubists were reluctant to part with appearances because they suspected that in art they could never be the same again. The details are smuggled in and hidden as mementoes.

The second reservation concerns the social content of Cubism — or, rather, its lack of it. One cannot expect of a Cubist painting the same kind of social content as one finds in a Brueghel or a Courbet. The mass media and the arrival of new publics have profoundly changed the social role of the fine arts. It remains true, however, that the Cubists — during the moment of Cubism — were unconcerned about the personalized human and social implications of what they were doing. This, I think, is because they had to simplify. The problem before them was so complex that their manner of stating it and their trying to solve it absorbed all their attention. As innovators they wanted to make their experiments in the simplest possible conditions; consequently, they took as subjects whatever was at hand and made least demands. The content of these works is the relation between the seer and the seen. This relation is only possible given the fact that the seer inherits a precise historical, economic and social situation. Otherwise they become meaningless. They do not illustrate a human or social situation, they posit it.

I spoke of the continuing meaning of Cubism. To some degree this meaning has changed and will change again according to the needs of the present. The bearings we read with the aid of Cubism vary according to our position. What is the reading now?

It is being more and more urgently claimed that ‘the modern tradition’ begins with Jarry, Duchamp and the Dadaists. This confers legitimacy upon the recent developments of neo-Dadaism, auto-destructive art, happenings, etc. The claim implies that what separates the characteristic art of the twentieth century from the art of all previous centuries is its acceptance of unreason, its social desperation, its extreme subjectivity and its forced dependence upon existential experience.

Hans Arp, one of the original Dadaist spokesmen, wrote: ‘The Renaissance taught men the haughty exaltation of their reason. Modern times, with their science and technology, turned men towards megalomania. The confusion of our epoch results from this overestimation of reason.’

And elsewhere: ‘The law of chance, which embraces all other laws and is as unfathomable to us as the depths from which all life arises, can only be comprehended by complete surrender to the Unconscious.’¹⁸

Arp’s statements are repeated today with a slightly modified vocabulary by all contemporary apologists of outrageous art. (I use the word ‘outrageous’ descriptively and not in a pejorative sense.)

During the intervening years, the Surrealists, Picasso, de Chirico, Miró, Klee, Dubuffet, the Abstract Expressionists and many others can be drafted into the same tradition: the tradition whose aim is to cheat the world of its hollow triumphs, and disclose its pain.

The example of Cubism forces us to recognize that this is a one-sided interpretation of history. Outrageous art has many earlier precedents. In periods of doubt and transition the majority of artists have always tended to be preoccupied with the fantastic, the uncontrollable and the horrific. The greater extremism of contemporary artists is the result of their having no fixed social role; to some degree they can create their own. But there are precedents for the spirit of it in the history of other activities: heretical religions, alchemy, witchcraft, etc.

The real break with tradition, or the real reformation of that tradition, occurred with Cubism itself. The modern tradition, based on a qualitatively different relationship being established between man and the world, began, not in despair, but in affirmation.

The proof that this was the objective role of Cubism lies in the fact that, however much its spirit was rejected, it supplied to all later movements the primary means of their own liberation. That is to say, it recreated the syntax of art so that it could accommodate modern experience. The proposition that a work of art is a new object and not simply the expression of its subject, the structuring of a picture to admit the coexistence of different modes of space and time, the inclusion in a work of art of extraneous objects, the dislocation of forms to reveal movement or change, the combining of hitherto separate and distinct media, the diagrammatic use of appearances — these were the revolutionary innovations of Cubism.

It would be foolish to underestimate the achievements of post-Cubist art. Nevertheless it is fair to say that in general the art of the post-Cubist period has been anxious and highly subjective. What the evidence of Cubism should prevent us doing is concluding from this that anxiety and extreme subjectivity constitute the nature of modern art. They constitute the nature of art in a period of extreme ideological confusion and inverted political frustration.

During the first decade of this century a transformed world became theoretically possible and the necessary forces of change could already be recognized as existing. Cubism was the art which reflected the possibility of this transformed world and the confidence it inspired. Thus, in a certain sense, it was the most modern art — as it was also the most philosophically complex — which has yet existed.

The vision of the Cubist moment still coincides with what is technologically possible. Yet three-quarters of the world remain undernourished and the foreseeable growth of the world’s population is outstripping the production of food. Meanwhile millions of the privileged are the prisoners of their own sense of increasing powerlessness.

The political struggle will be gigantic in its range and duration. The transformed world will not arrive as the Cubists imagined it. It will be born of a longer and more terrible history. We cannot see the end of the present period of political inversion, famine and exploitation. But the moment of Cubism reminds us that, if we are to be representative of our century — and not merely its passive creatures — the aim of achieving that end must constantly inform our consciousness and decisions.

The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art. The incongruity of that moment, compared to the uncounted, unperceived silence which preceded it, is the secret of art. What is the meaning of that incongruity and the shock which accompanies it? It is to be found in the distinction between the actual and the desirable. All art is an attempt to define and make unnatural this distinction.

For a long time it was thought that art was the imitation and celebration of nature. The confusion arose because the concept of nature itself was a projection of the desired. Now that we have cleansed our view of nature, we see that art is an expression of our sense of the inadequacy of the given — which we are not obliged to accept with gratitude. Art mediates between our good fortune and our disappointment Sometimes it mounts to a pitch of horror. Sometimes it gives permanent value and meaning to the ephemeral. Sometimes it describes the desired.

Thus art, however free or anarchic its mode of expression, is always a plea for greater control and an example, within the artificial limits of a ‘medium’, of the advantages of such control. Theories about the artist’s inspiration are all projections back on to the artist of the effect which his work has upon us. The only inspiration which exists is the intimation of our own potential. Inspiration is the mirror image of history: by means of it we can see our past, while turning our back upon it. And it is precisely this which happens at the instant when a piece of music begins. We suddenly become aware of the previous silence at the same moment as our attention is concentrated upon following sequences and resolutions which will contain the desired.

The Cubist moment was such a beginning, defining desires which are still unmet.

1969

The Historical Function of the Museum

The art museum curators of the world (with perhaps three or four exceptions) are simply not with us. Inside their museums they live in little châteaux or, if their interests are contemporary, in Guggenheim fortresses. We, the public, have our hours of admission and are accepted as a diurnal necessity: but no curator dreams of considering that his work actually begins with us.

Curators worry about heating, the colours of their walls, hanging arrangements, the provenances of their works, and visitors of honour. Those concerned with contemporary art worry about whether they are striking the right balance between discretion and valour.

Individuals vary, but as a professional group their character is patronizing, snobbish and lazy. These qualities are, I believe, the result of a continuous fantasy in which to a greater or lesser degree they all indulge. The fantasy weaves round the notion that they have been asked to accept as a grave civic responsibility the prestige accruing from the ownership of the works under their roof.

The works under their protection are thought of, primarily, as property — and therefore have to be owned. Most curators may believe that it is better for works of art to be owned by the state or city than by private collectors. But owned they must be. And so somebody must stand in an honorary owning relation to them. The idea that works of art, before they are property, are expressions of human experience and a means to knowledge is utterly distasteful to them because it threatens — not their position — but what they have constructed for themselves on the basis of their position.

Since the ‘museum world’ forms a large sector of the ‘art world’ which has recently acquired very considerable commercial and even diplomatic power, what I am saying is bound to be attacked as jaundiced. Nevertheless it is my considered opinion after years of treating with museum directors throughout Europe and in both the socialist and capitalist countries. Leningrad in this respect is the same as Rome or Berlin.

It would be quite wrong to suggest that what curators now do is useless. They conserve — in the full sense of the word — what is already there; and some of them acquire new works intelligently. It is not useless but it is inadequate. And it is inadequate because it is outdated. Their view of art as a self-evident source of pleasure appealing to a well-formed Taste, their view of Appreciation being ultimately based on Connoisseurship — that is to say the ability to compare product with product within a very narrow range — all this derives from the eighteenth century. Their sense of heavy civic responsibility — transformed, as we have seen, into honorary prestige — their view of the public as a passive mass to whom works of art, embodying spiritual value, should be made available, this belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of public works and benevolence. Anybody who is not an expert entering the average museum today is made to feel like a cultural pauper receiving charity, whilst the phenomenal sales of fifth-rate art books reflect the consequent belief in Self-Help.

The influence of the twentieth century on the thinking of museum curators has been confined to décor or to technical innovations for facilitating the passing of the public through their domain. In a book published a few years ago and written by an important curator in France it is suggested that the museum of the future will be mechanized: the visitors will sit still in little viewing boxes and the canvases will appear before them on a kind of vertical escalator. ‘In this way, in one hour and a half, a thousand visitors will be able to see a thousand paintings without leaving their seats.’ Frank Lloyd Wright’s conception of the Guggenheim Museum in New York as a machine for having seen pictures in is only a more sophisticated example of the same attitude.

What then constitutes a truly modern attitude? Naturally every museum poses a different problem. A solution which might suit a provincial city would be absurd for the National Gallery. For the moment we can only discuss general principles.

First it is necessary to make an imaginative effort which runs contrary to the whole contemporary trend of the art world: it is necessary to see works of art freed from all the mystique which is attached to them as property objects. It then becomes possible to see them as testimony to the process of their own making instead of as products; to see them in terms of action instead of finished achievement. The question: what went into the making of this? supersedes the collector’s question of: what is this?

It is worth noticing that this change of emphasis has already deeply affected art. From Action Painting onwards artists have become more and more concerned with revealing a process rather than coming to a conclusion. Harold Rosenberg, who was the spokesman for the American innovators, has put it quite simply: ‘Action painting … indicated a new motive for painting in the twentieth century: that of serving as a means for the artist’s recreation of himself and as an evidence to the spectator of the kind of activities involved in this adventure.’

The new emphasis is the result of a revolution in our mode of general thinking and interpreting. Process has swept away all fixed states; the supreme human attribute is no longer knowledge as such, but the self-conscious awareness of process. The more original artists of the last twenty-five years have felt the shock of this revolution more keenly than most other people; but because they have also felt isolated in an indifferent society (success when it eventually came in no way qualified this indifference), they have been able to find no content for their new art except their own loneliness. Hence the narrowness of interest of their art; but hence also the relevance of its intimation.

In practical terms this means that in the modern museum, works of art of any period need to be shown within the context of various processes: the technical process of the artist’s means, the biographical process of his life, and, above all, the historical process which he may reflect, influence, prophesy or be annulled by. This context will need to be established by the sequence in which paintings are hung and, whenever necessary, by texts on the wall. Photographs of paintings which are elsewhere will need to be hung next to real paintings. In the case of water-colours and drawings, facsimiles will need to be mixed with originals. Inferior works will need to be presented and explained as such. The Connoisseur’s categories of nation and period will frequently need to be broken: a Boucher nude might be hung next to a Courbet. All decors will need to be neutral and mobile. The châtelain will lose his red velours South Room.

I might continue the list of other possible practical consequences but I can already hear the protests. Puritan, didactic propaganda! The philistine enslavement of art to historicism! With these and a thousand other cries and guffaws the sanctity of art as property will be defended: and the present curators will save themselves the humiliation of trying to think about their subject as a whole.

If the application of ideas to the understanding of art implies propaganda, that is indeed what I am proposing. On the other hand, I am certainly not suggesting that a museum should arrange its work along the line of a single permanent argument. Each group of works might be treated in a different way. No argument should be permanent, and even within one grouping of works there would be the possibility — by hanging pictures along screen-walls which intersect at the key work — of presenting a number of different arguments simultaneously. In the great collections works not being temporarily used as part of an argument would be hung as now, for reference and for the pleasure of those who already know them, without comment.

In the case of all but the great metropolitan museums, the approach I am suggesting would transform them utterly. Their reputation would no longer depend upon the small number of unrivalled masterpieces they can claim. Second- and third-rate works could, by their context, be made significant and moving. Imagine a Greuze child study put beside a formal official baroque portrait by one of his contemporaries. Inferior and boring works would suddenly acquire a positive function — for they would illuminate the problems which another work had resolved. If museums collaborated with one another, every museum could have a fabulous collection of facsimile water-colours and drawings to suit its arguments or studies. Photographs could ‘borrow’ for many comparative purposes works from any collection in the world. In brief, the museum, instead of being a depository of so many unique sights or treasures, would become a living school with the very special advantage of dealing in visual images, which, given a simple framework of historical and psychological knowledge, can convey experience far more deeply to people than most literary and scientific expositions.

I have not the slightest doubt that museums will eventually serve the kind of function I am suggesting. I am certain about this, not only because museums will finally be forced to recognize their century and here is an obvious solution to many of their already existing problems, but also because of the only possible future function of the art we have inherited.

The purely aesthetic appeal and justification of art is based on less than a half-truth. Art must also serve an extra-artistic purpose. A great work often outlives its original purpose. But it does so because a later period is able to discern, within the profundity of the experience it contains, another purpose. For example: Villon wrote to introduce himself as he was to God. We read him today as perhaps the first poet of the ‘free’ man alone in Christian Europe.

We can no longer ‘use’ most paintings today as they were intended to be used: for religious worship, for celebrating the wealth of the wealthy, for immediate political enlightenment, for proving the romantic sublime, etc. Nevertheless painting is especially well-suited to developing the very faculty of understanding which has rendered its earlier uses obsolete: that is to say to developing our historical and evolutionary self-consciousness.

In front of a work from the past, by means of our aesthetic response as well as by imaginative intelligence, we become able to recognize the choices which reality allowed an artist four thousand, four hundred or forty years ago. This recognition need never be academic. We are given (as we are not in literature) the sensuous data through which the alternatives of his choice must have presented themselves to him. It is as though we can benefit from our sensations and responses to the form and content of his work, being interpreted by his mind, conditioned by his period, as well as by our own mind. An extraordinary dialectic working across time! An extraordinary aid to realizing how we have historically arrived at becoming ourselves!

1966

The Changing View of Man in the Portrait

It seems to me unlikely that any important portraits will ever be painted again. Portraits, that is to say, in the sense of portraiture as we now understand it. I can imagine multi-medium memento-sets devoted to the character of particular individuals. But these will have nothing to do with the works now in the National Portrait Gallery.

I see no reason to lament the passing of the portrait — the talent once involved in portrait painting can be used in some other way to serve a more urgent, modern function. It is, however, worth while inquiring why the painted portrait has become outdated; it may help us to understand more clearly our historical situation.

The beginning of the decline of the painted portrait coincided roughly speaking with the rise of photography, and so the earliest answer to our question — which was already being asked towards the end of the nineteenth century — was that the photographer had taken the place of the portrait painter. Photography was more accurate, quicker and far cheaper; it offered the opportunity of portraiture to the whole of society: previously such an opportunity had been the privilege of a very small élite.

To counter the clear logic of this argument, painters and their patrons invented a number of mysterious, metaphysical qualities with which to prove that what the painted portrait offered was incomparable. Only a man, not a machine (the camera), could interpret the soul of a sitter. An artist dealt with the sitter’s destiny: the camera with mere light and shade. An artist judged: a photographer recorded. Etcetera, etcetera.

All this was doubly untrue. First, it denies the interpretative role of the photographer, which is considerable. Secondly, it claims for painted portraits a psychological insight which ninety-nine per cent of them totally lack. If one is considering portraiture as a genre, it is no good thinking of a few extraordinary pictures but rather of the endless portraits of the local nobility and dignitaries in countless provincial museums and town halls. Even the average Renaissance portrait — although suggesting considerable presence — has very little psychological content. We are surprised by ancient Roman or Egyptian portraits, not because of their insight, but because they show us very vividly how little the human face has changed. It is a myth that the portrait painter was a revealer of souls. Is there a qualitative difference between the way Velázquez painted a face and the way he painted a bottom? The comparatively few portraits that reveal true psychological penetration (certain Raphaels, Rembrandts, Davids, Goyas) suggest personal, obsessional interests on the part of the artist which simply cannot be accommodated within the professional role of the portrait painter. Such pictures have the same kind of intensity as self-portraits. They are in fact works of self-discovery.

Ask yourself the following hypothetical question. Suppose that there is somebody in the second half of the nineteenth century in whom you are interested but of whose face you have never seen a picture. Would you rather find a painting or a photograph of this person? And the question itself posed like that is already highly favourable to painting, since the logical question should be: would you rather find a painting or a whole album of photographs?

Until the invention of photography, the painted (or sculptural) portrait was the only means of recording and presenting the likeness of a person. Photography took over this role from painting and at the same time raised our standards for judging how much an informative likeness should include.

This is not to say that photographs are in all ways superior to painted portraits. They are more informative, more psychologically revealing, and in general more accurate. But they are less tensely unified. Unity in a work of art is achieved as a result of the limitations of the medium. Every element has to be transformed in order to have its proper place within these limitations. In photography the transformation is to a considerable extent mechanical. In a painting each transformation is largely the result of a conscious decision by the artist. Thus the unity of a painting is permeated by a far higher degree of intention. The total effect of a painting (as distinct from its truthfulness) is less arbitrary than that of a photograph; its construction is more intensely socialized because it is dependent on a greater number of human decisions. A photographic portrait may be more revealing and more accurate about the likeness and character of the sitter; but it is likely to be less persuasive, less (in the very strict sense of the word) conclusive. For example, if the portraitist’s intention is to flatter or idealize, he will be able to do so far more convincingly with a painting than with a photograph.

From this fact we gain an insight into the actual function of portrait painting in its heyday: a function we tend to ignore if we concentrate on the small number of exceptional ‘unprofessional’ portraits by Raphael, Rembrandt, David, Goya, etcetera. The function of portrait painting was to underwrite and idealize a chosen social role of the sitter. It was not to present him as ‘an individual’ but, rather, as an individual monarch, bishop, landowner, merchant and so on. Each role had its accepted qualities and its acceptable limit of discrepancy. (A monarch or a pope could be far more idiosyncratic than a mere gentleman or courtier.) The role was emphasized by pose, gesture, clothes and background. The fact that neither the sitter nor the successful professional painter was much involved with the painting of these parts is not to be entirely explained as a matter of saving time: they were thought of and were meant to be read as the accepted attributes of a given social stereotype.

The hack painters never went much beyond the stereotype; the good professionals (Memlinck, Cranach, Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velázquez, Hals, Philippe de Champaigne) painted individual men, but they were nevertheless men whose character and facial expressions were seen and judged in the exclusive light of an ordained social role. The portrait must fit like a hand-made pair of shoes, but the type of shoe was never in question.

The satisfaction of having one’s portrait painted was the satisfaction of being personally recognized and confirmed in one’s position: it had nothing to do with the modern lonely desire to be recognized ‘for what one really is’.

If one were going to mark the moment when the decline of portraiture became inevitable, by citing the work of a particular artist, I would choose the two or three extraordinary portraits of lunatics by Géricault, painted in the first period of romantic disillusion and defiance which followed the defeat of Napoleon and the shoddy triumph of the French bourgeoisie. The paintings were neither morally anecdotal nor symbolic: they were straight portraits, traditionally painted. Yet their sitters had no social role and were presumed to be incapable of fulfilling any. In other pictures Géricault painted severed human heads and limbs as found in the dissecting theatre. His outlook was bitterly critical: to choose to paint dispossessed lunatics was a comment on men of property and power; but it was also an assertion that the essential spirit of man was independent of the role into which society forced him. Géricault found society so negative that, although sane himself, he found the isolation of the mad more meaningful than the social honour accorded to the successful. He was the first and, in a sense, the last profoundly anti-social portraitist. The term contains an impossible contradiction.

After Géricault, professional portraiture degenerated into servile and crass personal flattery, cynically undertaken. It was no longer possible to believe in the value of the social roles chosen or allotted. Sincere artists painted a number of ‘intimate’ portraits of their friends or models (Corot, Courbet, Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh), but in these the social role of the sitter is reduced to that of being painted. The implied social value is either that of personal friendship (proximity) or that of being seen in such a way (being ‘treated’) by an original artist. In either case the sitter, somewhat like an arranged still life, becomes subservient to the painter. Finally it is not his personality or his role which impress us but the artist’s vision.

Toulouse-Lautrec was the one important latter-day exception to this general tendency. He painted a number of portraits of tarts and cabaret personalities. As we survey them, they survey us. A social reciprocity is established through the painter’s mediation. We are presented neither with a disguise — as with official portraiture — nor with mere creatures of the artist’s vision. His portraits are the only late nineteenth-century ones which are persuasive and conclusive in the sense that we have defined. They are the only painted portraits in whose social evidence we can believe. They suggest, not the artist’s studio, but ‘the world of Toulouse-Lautrec’: that is to say a specific and complex social milieu. Why was Lautrec such an exception? Because in his eccentric and obverse manner he believed in the social roles of his sitters. He painted the cabaret performers because he admired their performances: he painted the tarts because he recognized the usefulness of their trade.

Increasingly for over a century fewer and fewer people in capitalist society have been able to believe in the social value of the social roles offered. This is the second answer to our original question about the decline of the painted portrait.

The second answer suggests, however, that given a more confident and coherent society, portrait painting might revive. And this seems unlikely. To understand why, we must consider the third answer.

The measures, the scale-change of modern life, have changed the nature of individual identity. Confronted with another person today, we are aware, through this person, of forces operating in directions which were unimaginable before the turn of the century, and which have only become clear relatively recently. It is hard to define this change briefly. An analogy may help.

We hear a lot about the crisis of the modern novel. What this involves, fundamentally, is a change in the mode of narration. It is scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. And this is because we are too aware of what is continually traversing the story line laterally. That is to say, instead of being aware of a point as an infinitely small part of a straight line, we are aware of it as an infinitely small part of an infinite number of lines, as the centre of a star of lines. Such awareness is the result of our constantly having to take into account the simultaneity and extension of events and possibilities.

There are many reasons why this should be so: the range of modern means of communication: the scale of modern power: the degree of personal political responsibility that must be accepted for events all over the world: the fact that the world has become indivisible: the unevenness of economic development within that world: the scale of the exploitation. All these play a part. Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us. To prophecy today it is only necessary to know men as they are throughout the whole world in all their inequality. Any contemporary narrative which ignores the urgency of this dimension is incomplete and acquires the over-simplified character of a fable.

Something similar but less direct applies to the painted portrait. We can no longer accept that the identity of a man can be adequately established by preserving and fixing what he looks like from a single viewpoint in one place. (One might argue that the same limitation applies to the still photograph, but as we have seen, we are not led to expect a photograph to be as conclusive as a painting.) Our terms of recognition have changed since the heyday of portrait painting. We may still rely on ‘likeness’ to identify a person, but no longer to explain or place him. To concentrate upon ‘likeness’ is to isolate falsely. It is to assume that the outermost surface contains the man or object: whereas we are highly conscious of the fact that nothing can contain itself.

There are a few Cubist portraits of about 1911 in which Picasso and Braque were obviously conscious of the same fact, but in these ‘portraits’ it is impossible to identify the sitter and so they cease to be what we call portraits.

It seems that the demands of a modern vision are incompatible with the singularity of viewpoint which is the prerequisite for a static-painted ‘likeness’. The incompatibility is connected with a more general crisis concerning the meaning of individuality. Individuality can no longer be contained within the terms of manifest personality traits. In a world of transition and revolution individuality has become a problem of historical and social relations, such as cannot be revealed by the mere characterizations of an already established social stereotype. Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.

1967

Art and Property Now

A love of art has been a useful concept to the European ruling classes for over a century and a half. The love was said to be their own. With it they could claim kinship with the civilizations of the past and the possession of those moral virtues associated with ‘beauty’. With it they could also dismiss as inartistic and primitive the cultures they were in the process of destroying at home and throughout the world. More recently they have been able to equate their love of art with their love of freedom and to oppose both loves to the alleged or real abuse of art in the socialist countries.

The usefulness of the concept had to be paid for. There were demands that a love of art, which was so apparently a privilege and was so apparently and intimately connected with morality, should be encouraged in all deserving citizens. This demand led to many nineteenth-century movements of cultural philanthropy — of which Western Ministries of Culture are the last, absurd and doomed manifestations.

It would be exaggeration to claim that the cultural facilities concerned with the arts and open to the public at large have yielded no benefits at all. They have contributed to the cultural development of many thousands of individuals. But all these individuals remain exceptions because the fundamental division between the initiated and the uninitiated, the ‘loving’ and the indifferent, the minority and the majority, has remained as rigid as ever. And it is inevitable that this should be so; for, quite apart from the related economic and educational factors, there is a hopeless contradiction within the philanthropic theory itself. The privileged are not in a position to teach or give to the underprivileged. Their own love of art is a fiction, a pretension. What they have to offer as lovers is not worth taking.

I believe that this is finally true concerning all the arts. But — for reasons which we shall examine in a minute — it is most obvious in the field of the visual arts. For twenty years I have searched like Diogenes for a true lover of art: if I had found one I would have been forced to abandon as superficial, as an act of bad faith, my own regard for art which is constantly and openly political. I never found one.

Not even among artists? Least of all. Failed artists wait to be loved for themselves. Working artists love their next, as yet nonexistent, project. Most artists alternate between being one and the other.

During the summer, at the Uffizi Palace in Florence, the crowds, packed together, hot, their vision constantly obstructed, submit to a one- or two-hour guided tour in which nothing reveals itself or is revealed. They suffer an ordeal, but their reward is that they are able to claim that they have been to the Uffizi Palace. They have been near enough to the Botticellis to make sure that they are framed bits of wood or canvas which are possessible. They have, in a certain sense, acquired them: or, rather, they have acquired the right to refer to them in a proprietary context. It is as though — in a highly attenuated way — they have been, or they have played at being, the guests of the Medicis. All museums are haunted by the ghosts of the powerful and the wealthy: and on the whole we visit them to walk with the ghosts.

I know a private collector who owns some of the finest Cubist paintings ever painted, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the art of the period in which he is interested, who has excellent discrimination and who was or is a personal friend of several important artists. He has no business distractions; his inherited wealth is assured. He would seem to represent the antithesis of the uninformed and unseeing crowds who suffer the ordeal of the Uffizi Palace. He lives with his paintings in a large house with the time and quiet and knowledge to come as close to them as anybody has ever done. Here surely we have found a love of art? No, here we find a manic obsession to prove that everything he has bought is incomparably great and that anybody who in any way questions this is an ignorant scoundrel. So far as the psychological mechanism is concerned, the paintings could as well be conkers.

Walk down a street of private galleries — but it is unnecessary to describe the dealers with their faces like silk purses. Everything they say is said to disguise and hide their proper purpose. If you could fuck works of art as well as buy them, they would be pimps: but, if that were the case, one might assume a kind of love; as it is they dream of money and honour.

Critics? John Russell speaks for the vast majority of his colleagues when — without any sense of incongruity or shame — he explains how one of the excitements of art criticism lies in the opportunity it affords of acquiring an ‘adventurous’ private collection.

The truth is that a painting or a sculpture is a significant form of property — in a sense in which a story, a song, a poem is not. Its value as property supplies it with an aura which is the last debased expression of the quality which art objects once possessed when they were used magically. It is around property that we piece together our last tattered religion, and our visual works of art are its ritual objects.

It is for this reason that, during the last decade, with the emergence of the new ideology of the consumer society, the visual arts have acquired a glamour such as they have not enjoyed for centuries. Exhibitions, art books, artists carry an urgent message even when the works themselves remain unintelligible. The message is that the work of art is the ideal (and therefore magical, mysterious, incomprehensible) commodity. It is dreamed of as the spiritualized possession. Nobody dreams or thinks of music, the theatre, the cinema or literature in the same way.

The extremism of most recent visual art is a consequence of the same situation. The artist welcomes the prestige and liberty accorded him; but insofar as he has an imaginative vision he profoundly resents his work being treated as a commodity. (The argument that there is nothing new in this situation, because works of art have been bought and sold for centuries, cannot be taken very seriously: the concept of private property has been stripped of its ideological disguise only very slowly.) Abstract Expressionism, L’Art Brut, Pop Art, Auto-Destructive art, Neo-Dada — these and other movements, despite profound differences of spirit and style, have all tried to exceed the limits within which a work of art can remain a desirable and valuable possession. All have questioned what makes a work of art art. But the significance of this questioning has been widely misunderstood — sometimes by the artists themselves. It does not refer to the process of creating art: it refers to the now blatantly revealed role of art as property.

I have never believed and still do not that Francis Bacon is a tragic artist. The violence he records is not the violence of the world: nor is it even the violence such as an artist might subjectively feel within himself; it is violence done to the idea that a painting might be desirable. The ‘tragedy’ is the tragedy of the easel painting, which cannot escape the triviality of becoming a desirable possession. And all the protesting art of recent years has been defeated in the same way. Hence its oppressiveness. It cannot liberate itself. The more violent, the more extreme, the rawer it becomes, the more appeal it acquires as an unusual and rare possession.

Marcel Duchamp, much admired today by the young because he was the first to question what makes a work of art art, and who already in 1915 bought a ready-made snow-shovel from a hardware store and did no more than give it a title (several editions of it are now in museums) — Duchamp himself recently admitted defeat as an iconoclast when he said: ‘Today there is no shocking. The only thing shocking is no shocking.’

I do not mean it metaphorically when I say that soon a dealer will mount an exhibition of shit and collectors will buy it. Not, as is repeatedly said, because the public is gullible or because the art world is crazy, but because the passion to own has become so distorted and exacerbated that it now exists as an absolute need, abstracted from reality.

A certain number of artists have understood this situation, instead of merely reacting to it, and have tried to produce art which by its very nature resists the corruption of the property nexus: I refer to kinetic art and certain allied branches of Op art and Constructivism.

Twelve years ago Vasarely wrote:

We cannot leave the pleasure to be got out of art in the hands of an élite of connoisseurs for ever. The new art forms are open to all. The art of tomorrow will be for all or it will not exist … In the past the idea of plastic art was tied to an artisan attitude and to the myth of the unique product: today the idea of plastic art suggests possibilities of recreation, multiplication, expansion.¹

That is to say the work of art can now be produced industrially and need have no scarcity value. It does not even have a fixed and proper state in which it can be preserved: it is constantly open to change and alteration. Like a toy, it wears out.

Such art differs qualitatively from all art that preceded it and that still surrounds it because its value resides in what it does, not in what it is. What it does is to encourage or provoke the spectator by the stimulus of its movements to become conscious of, and then to play with the processes of his own visual perception: in doing this it also renews or extends his awareness and interest in what is immediately surrounding both him and the work. The kinds of movement involved can vary; they may be optical or mechanical, planned or haphazard. The only essential is that the work is dependent upon changes whose origins are outside itself. Even if it moves regularly, driven by its own motor, this movement is only to start and set in motion changes which are beyond itself. Its nature is environmental. It is a device, of little intrinsic value, placed for our pleasure to interact between our senses and the space and time that surrounds them.

The promise of such art to date is limited. Its proper application to those environments in which the majority work and live must involve political and economic decisions beyond the control of artists. Meanwhile it has to be sold on the private market.

More profoundly, such art is limited because as yet its content does not admit the stuff of social relations: that is to say it cannot treat of tragedy, struggle, morality, cooperation, hatred, love. It is for this reason that one might categorize it so far (but not to belittle it) as a decorative art.

Nevertheless its essential nature, its mode of production and its refusal to exploit the individual personality of the artist (which is inevitably unique) allows it to be free of the inversions and to escape the contradictions which cripple the rest of art today. The experiments of these artists will eventually be useful. As artists they have found a way of partly transcending their historical situation.

Does all this mean that the enduring and unique work of art has now served its purpose? Its heyday coincided with that of the bourgeoisie — will they both disappear together? If one takes the long historical view, this seems quite probable. But meanwhile the unevenness of historical development can hide unexpected, even unforeseeable possibilities. In the socialist countries the development of art has been artificially restrained. In much of the third world the autonomous work of art exists only as an export to feed the sick appetite of Europe. It may be that elsewhere the unique work will be given a different social context.

What is certain is that in our European societies as they are now, the unique work of art is doomed: it cannot escape being a ritual object of property, and its content, if not entirely complacent, cannot help but be an oppressive, because hopeless, attempt to deny this role.

1967

Image of Imperialism

On Tuesday, 10 October 1967, a photograph was transmitted to the world to prove that Guevara had been killed the previous Sunday in a clash between two companies of the Bolivian army and a guerrilla force on the north side of the Rio Grande river near a jungle village called Higueras. (Later this village received the proclaimed reward for the capture of Guevara.) The photograph of the corpse was taken in a stable in the small town of Vallegrande. The body was placed on a stretcher and the stretcher was placed on top of a cement trough.

During the preceding two years ‘Che’ Guevara had become legendary. Nobody knew for certain where he was. There was no incontestable evidence of anyone having seen him. But his presence was constantly assumed and invoked. At the head of his last statement — sent from a guerrilla base ‘somewhere in the world’ to the Tricontinental Solidarity Organization in Havana — he quoted a line from the nineteenth-century revolutionary poet José Martf: ‘Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.’ It was as though in his own declared light Guevara had become invisible and ubiquitous.

Now he is dead. The chances of his survival were in inverse ratio to the force of the legend. The legend had to be nailed. ‘If,’ said The New York Times, ‘Ernesto Che Guevara was really killed in Bolivia, as now seems probable, a myth as well as a man has been laid to rest.’

We do not know the circumstances of his death. One can gain some idea of the mentality of those into whose hands he fell by their treatment of his body after his death. First they hid it. Then they displayed it Then they buried it in an anonymous grave in an unknown place. Then they disinterred it. Then they burnt it. But before burning it, they cut off the fingers for later identification. This might suggest that they had serious doubts whether it was really Guevara whom they had killed. Equally it can suggest that they had no doubts but feared the corpse. I tend to believe the latter.

The purpose of the radio photograph of 10 October was to put an end to a legend. Yet on many who saw it its effect may have been very different. What is its meaning? What, precisely and unmysteriously, does this photograph mean now? I can but cautiously analyse it as regards myself.

There is a resemblance between the photograph and Rembrandt’s painting of The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp. The immaculately dressed Bolivian colonel with a handkerchief to his nose has taken the professor’s place. The two figures on his left stare at the cadaver with the same intense but impersonal interest as the two nearest doctors on the professor’s left. It is true that there are more figures in the Rembrandt — as there were certainly more men, unphotographed, in the stable at Vallegrande. But the placing of the corpse in relation to the figures above it, and in the corpse the sense of global stillness — these are very similar.

Nor should this be surprising, for the function of the two pictures is similar: both are concerned with showing a corpse being formally and objectively examined. More than that, both are concerned with making an example of the dead: one for the advancement of medicine, the other as a political warning. Thousands of photographs are taken of the dead and the massacred. But the occasions are seldom formal ones of demonstration. Doctor Tulp is demonstrating the ligaments of the arm, and what he says applies to the normal arm of every man. The colonel with the handkerchief is demonstrating the final fate — as decreed by ‘divine providence’ — of a notorious guerrilla leader, and what he says is meant to apply to every guerrillero on the continent.

I was also reminded of another image: Mantegna’s painting of the dead Christ, now in the Brera at Milan. The body is seen from the same height, but from the feet instead of from the side. The hands are in identical positions, the fingers curving in the same gesture. The drapery over the lower part of the body is creased and formed in the same manner as the blood-sodden, unbuttoned, olive-green trousers on Guevara. The head is raised at the same angle. The mouth is slack of expression in the same way. Christ’s eyes have been shut, for there are two mourners beside him. Guevara’s eyes are open, for there are no mourners: only the colonel with the handkerchief, a U.S. intelligence agent, a number of Bolivian soldiers and the journalists. Once again, the similarity need not surprise. There are not so many ways of laying out the criminal dead.

Yet this time the similarity was more than gestural or functional. The emotions with which I came upon that photograph on the front page of the evening paper were very close to what, with the help of historical imagination, I had previously assumed the reaction of a contemporary believer might have been to Mantegna’s painting. The power of a photograph is comparatively short-lived. When I look at the photograph now, I can only reconstruct my first incoherent emotions. Guevara was no Christ. If I see the Mantegna again in Milan, I shall see in it the body of Guevara. But this is only because in certain rare cases the tragedy of a man’s death completes and exemplifies the meaning of his whole life. I am acutely aware of that about Guevara, and certain painters were once aware of it about Christ. That is the degree of emotional correspondence.

The mistake of many commentators on Guevara’s death has been to suppose that he represented only military skill or a certain revolutionary strategy. Thus they talk of a setback or a defeat. I am in no position to assess the loss which Guevara’s death may mean to the revolutionary movement of South America. But it is certain that Guevara represented and will represent more than the details of his plans. He represented a decision, a conclusion.

Guevara found the condition of the world as it is intolerable. It had only recently become so. Previously, the conditions under which two thirds of the people of the world lived were approximately the same as now. The degree of exploitation and enslavement was as great. The suffering involved was as intense and as widespread. The waste was as colossal. But it was not intolerable because the full measure of the truth about these conditions was unknown — even by those who suffered it. Truths are not constantly evident in the circumstances to which they refer. They are born — sometimes late. This truth was born with the struggles and wars of national liberation. In the light of the new-born truth, the significance of imperialism changed. Its demands were seen to be different. Previously it had demanded cheap raw materials, exploited labour and a controlled world market. Today it demands a mankind that counts for nothing.

Guevara envisaged his own death in the revolutionary fight against this imperialism.

Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle-cry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato chant of the machine-gun and new battle-cries of war and victory.¹

His envisaged death offered him the measure of how intolerable his life would be if he accepted the intolerable condition of the world as it is. His envisaged death offered him the measure of the necessity of changing the world. It was by the licence granted by his envisaged death that he was able to live with the necessary pride that becomes a man.

At the news of Guevara’s death, I heard someone say: ‘He was the world symbol of the possibilities of one man.’ Why is this true? Because he recognized what was intolerable for man and acted accordingly.

The measure by which Guevara had lived suddenly became a unit which filled the world and obliterated his life. His envisaged death became actual. The photograph is about this actuality. The possibilities have gone. Instead there is blood, the smell of formol, the untended wounds on the unwashed body, flies, the shambling trousers: the small private details of the body rendered in dying as public and impersonal and broken as a razed city.

Guevara died surrounded by his enemies. What they did to him while he was alive was probably consistent with what they did to him after he was dead. In his extremity he had nothing to support him but his own previous decisions. Thus the cycle was closed. It would be the vulgarest impertinence to claim any knowledge of his experience during that instant or that eternity. His lifeless body, as seen in the photograph, is the only report we have. But we are entitled to deduce the logic of what happens when the cycle closes. Truth flows in the obverse direction. His envisaged death is no more the measure of the necessity for changing the intolerable condition of the world. Aware now of his actual death, he finds in his life the measure of his justification, and the world-as-his-experience becomes tolerable to him.

The foreseeing of this final logic is part of what enables a man or a people to fight against overwhelming odds. It is part of the secret of the moral factor which counts as three to one against weapon power.

The photograph shows an instant: that instant at which Guevara’s body, artificially preserved, has become a mere object of demonstration. In this lies its initial horror. But what is it intended to demonstrate? Such horror? No. It is to demonstrate at the instant of horror, the identity of Guevara and, allegedly, the absurdity of revolution. Yet by virtue of this very purpose, the instant is transcended. The life of Guevara and the idea or fact of revolution immediately invoke processes which preceded that instant and which continue now. Hypothetically, the only way in which the purpose of those who arranged for and authorized the photograph could have been achieved would have been to preserve artificially at that instant the whole state of the world as it was: to stop life. Only in such a way could the content of Guevara’s living example have been denied. As it is, either the photograph means nothing because the spectator has no inkling of what is involved, or else its meaning denies or qualifies its demonstration.

I have compared it with two paintings because paintings, before the invention of photography, are the only visual evidence we have of how people saw what they saw. But in its effect it is profoundly different from a painting. A painting, or a successful one at least, comes to terms with the processes invoked by its subject matter. It even suggests an attitude towards those processes. We can regard a painting as almost complete in itself.

In face of this photograph we must either dismiss it or complete its meaning for ourselves. It is an image which, as much as any mute image ever can, calls for decision.

October 1967

Prompted by another recent newspaper photograph, I continue to consider the death of ‘Che’ Guevara.

Until the end of the eighteenth century, for a man to envisage his death as the possibly direct consequence of his choice of a certain course of action is the measure of his loyalty as a servant. This is true whatever the social station or privilege of the man. Inserted between himself and his own meaning there is always a power to which his only possible relationship is one of service or servitude. The power may be considered abstractly as Fate. More usually it is personified in God, King or the Master.

Thus the choice which the man makes (the choice whose foreseen consequence may be his own death) is curiously incomplete. It is a choice submitted to a superior power for acknowledgement. The man himself can only judge sub judice: finally it is he who will be judged. In exchange for this limited responsibility he receives benefits. The benefits can range from a master’s recognition of his courage to eternal bliss in heaven. But in all cases the ultimate decision and the ultimate benefit are located as exterior to his own self and life. Consequently death, which would seem to be so definitive an end, is for him a means, a treatment to which he submits for the sake of some aftermath. Death is like the eye of a needle through which he is threaded. Such is the mode of his heroism.

The French Revolution changed the nature of heroism. (Let it be clear that I do not refer to specific courages: the endurance of pain or torture, the will to attack under fire, the speed and lightness of movement and decision in battle, the spontaneity of mutual aid under danger — these courages must be largely defined by physical experience and have perhaps changed very little. I refer only to the choice which may precede these other courages.) The French Revolution brings the King to judgement and condemns him.

Saint-Just, aged twenty-five, in his first speech to the Convention argues that monarchy is crime, because the king usurps the sovereignty of the people.

It is impossible to reign innocently: the madness of it is too clear. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.²

It is true that Saint-Just serves — in his own mind — the General Will of the people, but he has freely chosen to do so because he believes that the People, if allowed to be true to their own nature, embody Reason and that their Republic represents Virtue.

In the world there are three kinds of infamy with which Republican virtue can reach no compromise: the first are kings: the second is the serving of kings: the third is the laying down of arms whilst there still exists anywhere a master and a slave.³

It is now less likely that a man envisages his own death as the measure of his loyalty as a servant to a master. His envisaged death is likely to be the measure of his love of Freedom: a proof of the principle of his own liberty.

Twenty months after his first speech Saint-Just spends the night preceding his own execution writing at his desk. He makes no active attempt to save himself. He has already written:

Circumstances are only difficult for those who draw back from the grave … I despise the dust of which I am composed, the dust which is speaking to you: any one can pursue and put an end to this dust. But I defy anybody to snatch from me what I have given myself, an independent life in the sky of the centuries.⁴

‘What I have given to myself’. The ultimate decision is now located within the self. But not categorically and entirely; there is a certain ambiguity. God no longer exists, but Rousseau’s Supreme Being is there to confuse the issue by way of a metaphor. The metaphor allows one to believe that the self will share in the historical judgement of one’s own life. ‘An independent life in the sky’ of historical judgement. There is still the ghost of a pre-existent order.

Even when Saint-Just is declaring the opposite — in his defiant last speech of defence for Robespierre and himself — the ambiguity remains:

Fame is an empty noise. Let us put our ears to the centuries that have gone: we no longer hear anything; those who, at another time, shall walk among our urns, shall hear no more. The good — that is what we must pursue, whatever the price, preferring the title of a dead hero to that of a living coward.⁵

But in life, as opposed to the theatre, the dead hero never hears himself so called. The political stage of a revolution often has a theatrical, because exemplary, tendency. The world watches to learn.

Tyrants everywhere looked upon us because we were judging one of theirs; today when, by a happier destiny, you are deliberating on the liberty of the world, the people of the earth who are the truly great of the earth will, in their turn, watch you. (Saint-Just to the Convention on the Constitution.)⁶

Yet, notwithstanding the truth of this, there is, philosophically, a sense in which Saint-Just dies triumphantly trapped within his ‘stage’ role. (To say this in no way detracts from his courage.)

Since the French Revolution, the bourgeois age. Amongst those few who envisage their own death (and not their own fortunes) as the direct consequence of their principled decisions, such marginal ambiguity disappears.

The confrontation between the living man and the world as he finds it becomes total. There is nothing exterior to it, not even a principle. A man’s envisaged death is the measure of his refusal to accept what confronts him. There is nothing beyond that refusal.

The Russian anarchist Voinarovsky, who was killed throwing a bomb at Admiral Dubassov, wrote: ‘Without a single muscle on my face twitching, without saying a word, I shall climb on the scaffold — and this will not be an act of violence perpetrated on myself, it will be the perfectly natural result of all that I have lived through.’⁷

He envisages his own death on the scaffold — and a number of Russian terrorists at that time died exactly as he describes — as though it were the peaceful death of an old man. Why is he able to do this? Psychological explanations are not enough. It is because he finds the world of Russia, which is comprehensive enough to seem like the whole world, intolerable. Not intolerable to him personally, as a suicide finds the world, but intolerable per se. His foreseen death ‘will be the perfectly natural result’ of all that he has lived through in his attempt to change the world, because the foreseeing of anything less would have meant that he found the ‘intolerable’ tolerable.

In many ways the situation (but not the political theory) of the Russian anarchists at the turn of the century prefigures the contemporary situation. A small difference lies in ‘the world of Russia’ seeming like the whole world. There was, strictly speaking, an alternative beyond the borders of Russia. Thus, in order to destroy this alternative and make Russia a world unto itself, many of the anarchists were drawn towards a somewhat mystical patriotism. Today there is no alternative. The world is a single unit, and it has become intolerable.

Was it ever more tolerable? you may ask. Was there ever less suffering, less injustice, less exploitation? There can be no such audits. It is necessary to recognize that the intolerability of the world is, in a certain sense, an historical achievement. The world was not intolerable so long as God existed, so long as there was the ghost of a pre-existent order, so long as large tracts of the world were unknown, so long as one believed in the distinction between the spiritual and the material (it is there that many people still find their justification in finding the world tolerable), so long as one believed in the natural inequality of man.

The photograph shows a South Vietnamese peasant being interrogated by an American soldier. Shoved against her temple is the muzzle of a gun, and, behind it, a hand grasps her hair. The gun, pressed against her, puckers the prematurely old and loose skin of her face.

In wars there have always been massacres. Interrogation under threat or torture has been practised for centuries. Yet the meaning to be found — even via a photograph — in this woman’s life (and by now her probable death) is new.

It will include every personal particular, visible or imaginable: the way her hair is parted, her bruised cheek, her slightly swollen lower lip, her name and all the different significations it has acquired according to who is addressing her, memories of her own childhood, the individual quality of her hatred of her interrogator, the gifts she was born with, every detail of the circumstances under which she has so far escaped death, the intonation she gives to the name of each person she loves, the diagnosis of whatever medical weakness she may have and their social and economic causes, everything that she opposes in her subtle mind to the muzzle of the gun jammed against her temple. But it will also include global truths: no violence has been so intense, so widespread or has continued for so long as that inflicted by the imperialist countries upon the majority of the world: the war in Vietnam is being waged to destroy the example of a united people who resisted this violence and proclaimed their independence: the fact that the Vietnamese are proving themselves invincible against the greatest imperialist power on earth is a proof of the extraordinary resources of a nation of thirty-two million: elsewhere in the world the resources (such resources include not only materials and labour but the possibilities of each life lived) of our 2,000 millions are being squandered and abused.

It is said that exploitation must end in the world. It is known that exploitation increases, extends, prospers and becomes ever more ruthless in defence of its right to exploit.

Let us be clear: it is not the war in Vietnam that is intolerable: Vietnam confirms the intolerability of the present condition of the world. This condition is such that the example of the Vietnamese people offers hope.

Guevara recognized this and acted accordingly. The world is not intolerable until the possibility of transforming it exists but is denied. The social forces historically capable of bringing about the transformation are — at least in general terms — defined. Guevara chose to identify himself with these forces. In doing so he was not submitting to so-called ‘laws’ of history but to the historical nature of his own existence.

His envisaged death is no longer the measure of a servant’s loyalty, nor the inevitable end of an heroic tragedy. The eye of death’s needle has been closed — there is nothing to thread through it, not even a future (unknown) historical judgement. Provided that he makes no transcendental appeal and provided that he acts out of the maximum possible consciousness of what is knowable to him, his envisaged death has become the measure of the parity which can now exist between the self and the world: it is the measure of his total commitment and his total independence.

It is reasonable to suppose that after a man such as Guevara has made his decision, there are moments when he is aware of this freedom which is qualitatively different from any freedom previously experienced.

This should be remembered as well as the pain, the sacrifice and the prodigious effort involved. In a letter to his parents when he left Cuba, Guevara wrote:

Now a will-power that I have polished with an artist’s attention will support my feeble legs and tired-out lungs. I will make it.⁸

December 1967

Nude in a Fur Coat Rubens

The interest in drawing or painting nude or semi-nude figures is profoundly sexual: likewise the appreciation of the finished product. The assertion that all plastic art has a sexual basis is liable to confuse the issue. The interest I am talking about is direct and in most cases quite conscious. Titian knew perfectly well why he enjoyed painting nymphs: just as the homosexual painters of the Renaissance knew why they were interested in the subject of St Sebastian: the subject which allowed them to paint a young, nude man in ecstasy.

It is this which makes it possible to compare Rubens’s painting of his wife with a fur round her shoulders with a typical but prettier than average photograph from Beauties of the Month. Both painting and photograph were intended to appeal to the viewer’s imaginative sexual pleasure in a woman’s body.

There are important differences. A wife from the Flemish haute bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century was a very different person from a free-roaming young woman in London today: physically different and aspiring to a different physical ideal.

There are also differences of purpose. One picture was made largely for the artist’s personal satisfaction; the other largely for an impersonal market. Nevertheless the comparison is possible because of their common appeal and because our sexual imagination, unless distressingly inhibited, should be able to transcend the historical changes of taste involved. I want to make the comparison, not in order to prove the obvious — which is that the photograph here is rather less than a work of art — but because I believe the comparison may throw some light on the problem of sexual imagery.

There are surprisingly few paintings in European art of entirely disclosed nude women. The foci of sexual interest — the sexual parts themselves and the breasts — are usually disguised or underemphasized. Inconsequential draperies fall between women’s legs; or their hands, while drawing attention to their sex, hide it. Until comparatively recently, women were invariably painted without pubic hair. Similarly, although breasts were more openly displayed, their nipples were modestly diminished in size and emphasis.

To explain this in terms of moral injunctions would be to project a late-nineteenth-century puritanism backwards into the past. To explain it in terms of aesthetics might be historically more accurate. A Renaissance painter would probably have justified his practice in terms of what seemed and did not seem beautiful. Yet aesthetics are a consequence rather than a cause. And although the producers of Beauties of the Month and other such booklets can hardly be accused of aestheticism, they obey the same rule. The models (except in one or two other series from abroad) are shaved: the ratio of half-disguised or half-dressed figures to naked ones is about four to one. Is this simply the result of the very indirect influence of pictorial convention?

It is a truism that figures undressing are more provocative than naked ones. Clearly the viewer’s expectations are an important factor: imagine a strip club where the girls begin naked and end up fully clothed. (Only poets and lovers would perhaps attend, remembering the experience of lying in bed and watching her dress.) Yet why should it be the preliminary expectations that appeal most? Why is the ensuing nakedness an anti-climax by comparison?

To answer this question we must turn to the sexual function of nakedness in reality, rather than on a stage or in a picture. Clothes encumber contact and movement. But it would seem that nakedness has a positive visual value in its own right: we want to see her naked: she delivers to us the sight of herself and we seize upon it — often quite regardless of whether we are seeing her for the first time or the hundredth. What does this sight of her mean to us, how does it, at that instant of total disclosure, affect our desire?

I may be wrong, and professional psychologists may correct me, but it seems to me that her nakedness acts as a confirmation and provokes a very strong sense of relieved happiness. She is a woman like any other: we are overwhelmed by the marvellous simplicity of the familiar mechanism.

We did not, of course, consciously expect her to be otherwise: unconscious homosexual, sado-masochistic or other desires may have led us to suppress more fantastic expectations: but our ‘relief’ can be explained without recourse to the unconscious.

We did not expect her to be otherwise, but the urgency and complexity of our feelings bred a sense of uniqueness which the sight of her, as she is, then dispels. She is more like any other woman than she is different. In this lies the warm and friendly — as opposed to cold and impersonal — anonymity of nakedness.

The relief of being reminded that women have sexual characteristics in common can obviously be explained by an Oedipus relationship to the mother: it is the relief of being reminded that all women are really like the first one. But what concerns me more now is the attempt to define that element of banality in the instant of total disclosure: an element that exists only because we need it.

Up to that instant she is more or less mysterious. The etiquettes of modesty are not only puritan or sentimental: they recognize the loss of mystery as real. And the explanation is largely a visual one. The focus of interest shifts from her eyes, her mouth, her shoulders, her hands — all of which are capable of such subtleties of expression that her personality, perceived through them, remains manifold — it shifts from these to her sexual parts, whose formation suggests an utterly compelling but single process. She is reduced or elevated — whichever you prefer — to her primary category: she is female. Our relief is the relief of finding a reality to whose exigencies all our earlier fantasies must now yield.

I said that we needed the banality which we find in the first instant of disclosure. And I have explained how — crudely speaking — it brings us back to reality. But it does more than that. This reality, by promising the familiar, proverbial mechanism of sex, offers at the same time the opportunity of mutual subjective identification: the opportunity of what I term in my essay on Picasso the ‘shared subjectivity of sex’.¹

Thus it is from the instant of disclosure onwards that we and she can become mysterious as a single unit. Her loss of mystery occurs simultaneously with the offering of the means for creating a shared mystery. The sequence is: subjective — objective — subjective to the power of two.

How much has this to do with seeing? Could not the same process take place in the dark? It could; but this only substitutes a rather narrowly ranged sense of touch for the far freer and comprehensive sense of sight. Indeed, the sense of sight is so free — that is to say so susceptible to the imagination it feeds — that the process I have described, although normally occurring as part of an overt sexual relationship, can also take place metaphorically.

When I was drawing a lot from models and teaching Life Drawing, the first sight of the model just undressed always had an equivalent effect on me. Prior to that moment she was the creature of her own temperament. Suddenly she became proverbial. Later as one drew her, relying alternately upon analysis and empathy, her particular idiosyncratic existence and one’s own imagination became — for the duration of the drawing — inseparable.

We can now understand the difficulty of presenting an image of emphatic and total nakedness. The image will tend to strike us as banal. And, taken out of context and sequence, this banality, instead of serving as a bridge between two intense imaginative states, will tend merely to emphasize itself.

Let us now return to the comparison of the two pictures. Neither of the two models is entirely naked. Yet our conclusions are relevant; for having analysed nakedness at its most extreme as a factor of sexual experience, we can now see how any degree of nakedness is part of a process which naturally continues past the point of total disclosure. Some may object that this is only a needlessly complicated way of saying: if you see her undressed, you want to fuck her. But crass over-simplification about such matters is an evasion.

Both pictures are intended to imply development in time.

We are meant to presume that the next thing the girl in the photograph will do is to take her panties off. She wears them for our benefit rather than for her own. Rubens’s wife is in the act of turning, her fur about to slip off her shoulders. Clearly she cannot remain as she is for more than a second. In a superficial sense her image is more instantaneous than the photograph’s.

But, in a more profound sense, the painting ‘contains’ time and its experience. It is easy to imagine that a moment before the woman pulled the fur round her shoulders, she was entirely naked. The consecutive stages up to and away from the moment of total disclosure have been transcended. She can belong to any or all of them simultaneously. This is not the case with the girl in the photograph. Everything about her — her expression, her pose, her relationship with the viewer and the nature of the medium as used here — makes it certain that she can only be about to undress further.

Something similar happens in terms of form. In the photograph she confronts us as a matter of fact. Our own or anybody else’s possible pleasure in this fact is a totally separate issue. It is not that we are disinterested, but that the image offered us is disinterested. It is as though we saw her through the eyes of a eunuch while our sexual interest remained normal. Hence her so peculiar tangibility. She is there and yet she is not there: this contradiction being the result, not of the naturalism of the picture, but of its total lack of subjectivity. One might describe this lack — projecting it back onto her — by saying that her body looks as though it is numb.

In the Rubens the woman’s body, far from looking numb, looks extremely susceptible and vulnerable: which, by the same conversion as we have just made, means that she confronts us as experience.

Why do we have such an impression? There are superficial literary reasons: her dishevelled hair, the expression of her eyes revealing how sex liberates into temporary timelessness, the extreme paleness of her skin. But the profound reason is a formal and visual one. Her appearance has been literally broken by the painter’s subjectivity. Beneath the fur that she holds across herself, the upper part of her body and her legs can never meet. There is a displacement sideways of about nine inches: her thighs, in order to join on to her hips, are at least nine inches too far to the left.

I doubt whether Rubens planned this: just as I doubt whether most viewers consciously notice it. In itself it is unimportant. What matters is what it permits. It permits the body to become impossibly dynamic. Its coherence is no longer within itself but within the wishes of the viewer. More precisely, it permits the upper and lower halves of the body to rotate separately and in opposite directions round the sexual centre which is hidden: the torso turning to the right, the legs to the left. At the same time this hidden sexual centre is connected by means of the dark fur coat to all the surrounding darkness in the picture, so that she is turning both around and within the dark which has been made a metaphor for her sex.

Apart from the necessity of transcending the single moment and of admitting subjectivity, there is one further element which is essential for any great sexual image of the nude. This is the element of banality. In one form or another this has to exist because, as we saw, it is what transforms the voyeur into the lover. Different painters — Giorgione in the Tempesta, Rembrandt, Watteau, Courbet — have introduced it in different ways: Rubens introduces it here by means of his compulsive painting of the softness of the fat flesh.

1966

The Painter in His Studio Vermeer

The great revelations all occur before the age of twenty-five. Perhaps because one is so keenly expecting them. Rilke was the first modern European poet I read. Matisse the first draughtsman I understood. My experience of their works is impossible to separate from a girl’s bed, London streets in the early hours of the morning, the stair-well we gazed down into, leaning over the balustrade smoking, whilst the model in the life class rested and the German planes flew very high overhead; in the stair-well we watched men and women ascending and descending, each with their own life full of unexpected changes, partings and offers. Certain poems of Rilke’s are still charged for me with the pride of that time.

The revelations which come later are more objective. One has the sense of suddenly seeing in a new light. But the light is almost as impersonal as the truth. The images are no longer coloured by the recent sensations of one’s own limbs. One becomes simultaneously humbler and more arrogant. One feels a duty and not, as before, just the desire to recognize and be recognized. Everyone over thirty-five starts to explain.

Vermeer’s Painter in His Studio was a comparatively late revelation. It was the summer a few years ago in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Outside in the public garden the sparrows were bathing in the dust. These sparrows were already making their way into the mind of Corker: the central character of the novel I was writing.

For many years I had walked past Vermeers without looking. The painter Friso ten Holt first persuaded me to look. Then I realized that the only thing Vermeer had in common with the other Dutch interior painters was his subject matter, and this was no more than his starting point. His real concern was different and mysterious.

What was it that he wanted to say in the stillness of his rooms which the light fills like water a tank? (It is almost possible to imagine that the light flowing in is audible.) What is the meaning of these women at table and window whom the light discloses? Why can we feel so near to them, our eyes taking in every intimate drop of light (as though by observing we were drying slightly moist surfaces), and yet at the same time be so remote from them?

The questions are not purely rhetorical, for Vermeer was one of the most deliberate painters who ever lived. (His extremely small output is related to this.) The meaning of his art, however complex, must have been in large measure conscious.

The explanation usually given is technical. Vermeer used a camera obscura. (A camera obscura works like an old-fashioned plate camera with a head covering for the photographer. But instead of the light falling on a sensitized plate, the artist himself traces the image on paper or canvas.) This is why Vermeer’s perspective has a strange remoteness — the foreground objects, although very close, always being seen as if in the middle distance; and this is why his subjects have the odd, cold intimacy of colour photography.

Although this is certainly a partial explanation, it never seemed to me entirely adequate. It begs the question of why Vermeer used his technical means with such a single-minded passion. Lawrence Gowing in his book on Vermeer¹ offers a psychological explanation: that Vermeer could not face reality unprotected, that he always needed an artificial process of mediation. The book interested me when I read it, but I was still not satisfied. There still seemed a philosophical purpose in Vermeer’s art which had not yet been fully understood. I did not know what it was.

Meanwhile I merely noticed, as a possible contribution to an unknown answer, his recurring interest in signs, images and writing. In nearly every interior he painted, there is either a map, a sheet of music, a letter, a chart, or a picture whose subject-matter functions like an ideogram. (For instance, behind the woman weighing pearls in a pair of scales is a picture of the Last Judgement.) Was this only the result of convention and contemporary interests? Or was it a more personal, obsessive preoccupation?

I had gone to Vienna to look particularly at the Brueghels and Rubens and also at the Strozzis. Strozzi is a minor painter who fascinates me like a great conversationalist. I find it easy to believe that he was a doctor — this might explain his remarkable psychological insight. I noticed the Vermeer, but saw it as it were out of the corner of my mind. Then, suddenly, it absorbed all my attention. Here was Vermeer’s own comment on being a painter, his own confession of purpose. All the other Vermeers I had ever seen might now be tested.

The painting shows a painter painting a young girl standing in the light from an unseen window. It has been interpreted as an allegory in which the young girl represents Clio, the muse of history, holding the trumpet of fame and the golden record of the world’s events. According to this interpretation, she is looking at the emblems of three other muses which are lying on the table: the mask of Comedy, the book of Polyhymnia, the muse of music, and the score of Euterpe, the muse of flute-playing. All commentators are agreed that the painter is Vermeer himself in his own studio in Delft.

The interpretation of the allegory is ingenious, but it seemed to me beside the point. There was a far starker statement waiting to be read. What the girl is looking at on the table are precisely the visual ingredients or elements of her own appearance. There is a face (the mask), another large book, a piece of blue material like that of her own dress, a piece of yellow material the same colour as the binding of her book, a strip of pinkish paper which corresponds to the glimpse we have of her pinkish collar and, woven into the design of the curtain which hangs in front of the table, are the blue leaves from which her laurel wreath is made. True, there is no trumpet on the table, but there is the written music which the trumpet can turn into sound. The point of the confrontation is to demonstrate the difference between the living and the inert: a difference which transcends all the common visual elements. It is as though Vermeer were exclaiming: Breath is all!

And to emphasize how relevant this is to the art of painting, he shows himself carefully making marks on a canvas to represent the laurel leaves of the living girl. The marks he is making are different from the woven leaves on the curtain. The leaves of the curtain are lifeless. The living girl, wearing the same leaves, transforms them; they become, like her, unpredictable. The painter ‘fixes’ these leaves on his canvas: they become once more inert and two-dimensional but charged now with the painter’s awareness of the mystery of his living model.

Vermeer’s father was a silk-weaver who probably designed the flowers and figures for the curtains he made. It was perhaps he who first taught Vermeer to draw. If so, Vermeer’s ambition to be a painter may well have made him question his father’s decorative formulae, so that he became especially aware of the differences between a living form and its formalized representation. Later, his use of the camera obscura must have further increased this awareness. On the one hand, it helped him to be very faithful to living appearances; on the other hand, it emphasized how much art had to depend upon a device. There, outside, was the changing tangible reality! And here, inside the box, was its flat appearance which he traced! This is not to suggest that there is any self-disparagement in Vermeer’s art. He was preoccupied, not by his limitations, but by those aspects of reality which by their nature defy visual representation.

Historically this is not surprising. He was born in the year in which Galileo published his Copernican dialogues. He was a contemporary of Pascal, who less than ten years before had written:

This whole visible world is only an imperceptible mark upon the ample bosom of nature. No idea of ours can begin to encompass it. No matter how we extend our conceptions beyond the confines of imaginable space, we can bring forth nothing but atoms, at the cost of the reality of things. It is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.²

Vermeer was a friend and exact contemporary of the microscopist Leeuwenhoek, who found and described invisible bacteria. For the first time science, rather than religion, was proving the evidence of the eye inadequate.

I began to realize the significance of the maps on Vermeer’s walls: the maps are diagrams of the country outside the window which we never see; of his favourite theme of the letter, either just delivered or just being written, and whose message from or to the outside world we cannot know; of the light which always enters obliquely through a window we cannot see through. The fundamental difference between Vermeer and the other Dutch interior painters is that everything in every interior he paints refers to events outside the room. Their spirit is the opposite of the domestic. The function of the closed-in corner of the room is to remind us of the infinite.

Vermeer was the first sceptic in painting, the first to question the adequacy of visual evidence. Because three centuries later this scepticism was transformed into disillusion, and the art of recording immediate appearances was abandoned, it is difficult for us to appreciate how affirmative and calm Vermeer’s scepticism was. It was the condition of his approach to reality. He was able to portray with unique precision what constituted one moment because he was so keenly aware, objectively and without a trace of nostalgia, that each succeeding moment is unrepeatable.

The Impressionists were concerned with the momentary, passing effects of light. But they worked on the assumption that these effects, given similar atmospheric conditions, were repeatable. In front of a Monet landscape we become aware of the hour of the day and the season of the year. In front of a Vermeer woman exactly turning her head, reading a letter, pouring milk, trying on a necklace in a mirror, raising a glass, we become aware of the flow of time itself.

That is why the light seems like water.

1966

Et in Arcadia Ego Poussin

‘I have neglected nothing.’ Such was Poussin’s modest reply when asked to comment on his own unique mastery. It is revealing in two ways. It emphasizes Poussin’s methodical, obstinate, highly conscious way of working. He never allowed himself to be in debt to his genius: a fact which has led a lot of stupid and blind people to assume that he had everything except genius, that he achieved what he did simply by obeying all the rules. The remark also emphasizes the outstanding quality of Poussin’s finished art. In Poussin’s world there are no coincidences, no happy or unhappy accidents. Everything seen is foreseen.

Consider the two earliest battle scenes of Joshua’s army, painted when Poussin was thirty. Their turmoil is controlled. They are not seen in terms of the total chaos of the protagonist’s view: they are seen in terms of the modified chaos of the safe eye-witness.

Ten years later, in the first whirling Rape of the Sabines, everything has been placed in the ordered perspective of history. Everything which is included has been made significant. Thus — though flesh is still flesh — the Romans and the Sabines become gods, incapable of triviality.

Ten years later again — in the late 1640s — Poussin’s power becomes complete. He can now go to the centre of the most undramatic incident — a quiet marriage, a baptism, a man walking through a landscape — and so arrange the elements of the scene as to give it a charge, a significance far greater than he gave to the whole of Joshua’s army.

Yet with this power to organize, this mastery, came anxiety. How is it that in Poussin, of all artists, you can glimpse the horror and fears that were later to seize and drive Goya onwards? I don’t want to exaggerate. You can only just glimpse this. It is no more than a nagging doubt, a cloud no larger than a man’s hand on the horizon.

The turning point was about 1648, the year he painted the Dulwich 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. Beyond the town walls, beyond the circle of learning, there is a threat.

From 1648 onwards the light suggests the light which precedes a thunderstorm. The sharply defined leaves of the trees seem to cover the eyes of the landscapes, blinding them. It is as though Poussin began to be horrified at the inertia of the earth.

Clouds become a reminder of smoke. There are literally snakes in the grass, and more than one of his figures falls victim to a hidden serpent. The giant Orion stalks across a landscape, himself blind, the dead tree-roots at his feet like frogs. Other giants too appear, questioning the world of reason and proportion. From where do they come? In the foreground of painting after painting there is dark water, as though to suggest that there is an edge, a limit, to what can be ordered, and that around the edge reflections and illusions are seeping.

Much else continues as before: the same marvellously calculated theorems of colour, blue with the gold of white wine, blazon red with copse green; the same appropriateness of gesture to emotion; the same unity of figures and landscape; the same pastoral spaces. I speak only of a hint. But just once this hint is made dreadfully explicit.

There is the terrible contrast in ‘The Four Seasons’ between the canvases of Summer and Winter. It is as terrible a contrast as that in the Sistine Chapel between Michelangelo’s ceiling and his Last Judgement painted twenty-five years later. Summer, surely one of the richest paintings in the world, is as life-affirming as the golden loaf of bread suggested by its predominant colour. Winter, which also represents The Deluge, is ash-coloured and so withered in all its forms that its composition becomes purely linear and gothic — a phenomenon to be found nowhere else in Poussin’s work. Clearly these two pictures are far more than a comment on the two seasons. If such a winter ends such a summer, some spectre of haunting futility has been met and not been exorcised. What was this spectre for Poussin, Poussin the man of rule and classic continuity, on whose example all the assured academies have been based?

Was it simply the spectre of his own ageing? When he was in his thirties he borrowed from Veronese and Titian to find the means to express his own intense sexuality. There are muses and goddesses in his early work that look forward towards Renoir. Venus lies in a wood among red and white draperies. When the satyrs pull these off, her body is revealed as a blushing infusion and marriage of the two colours. By the time Poussin was in his fifties syphilis had undercut his faculties. The lines in his late drawings are as wavy as embroidered stitches. In 1665 he wrote: ‘I have nothing to do now except die: that is the only cure for the ills that afflict me.’

Was the spectre the disease in his own body? Partly, I think, but not entirely. Many earlier artists had suffered protracted illnesses, but one does not find in their work the same nagging anxiety. Horror and tragedy — yes. But not this latent disquiet which the confident can even ignore. The self-portrait of 1650 reveals the same thing. The pinched face of a proud, courageous, determined man who would like to know a little less than he does. It is not that he has a guilty secret of his own. The anxiety is not personal Angst. It is the price paid for a particular and new kind of opportunity.

The late 1640s were a critical period politically. Charles I was tried and executed. Civil war broke out in France. Nearer Poussin in Rome, there was the plebeian insurrection in Naples, led by Masaniello. The days of absolutism were being numbered. Poussin wrote: ‘It is a great pleasure to live in an age when such great things are happening, provided one can tuck oneself away in some quiet corner and watch the Comedy at leisure.’ Did the spectre arise out of these events or their shadows? Again, perhaps partly. But I cannot help believing that the most profound historical parallel is less direct.

Descartes was born in 1596, two years after Poussin. The Cartesian division between the soul of the observer and the world around him made the division between mind and matter more final than ever before. Nature becomes the ‘dead matter’ that can be organized by the natural sciences. The individual soul becomes private. Philosophical reasoning begins on the basis of doubt. In his own field had not Poussin reached the same threshold?

Look at the Arcadian Shepherds painted in 1650. The three men decipher an inscription on a tomb they have just come across. The woman bows her head in reflection. Landscape and figures are one. The angle of the mountain above the tomb is the same as that of the elbow of the kneeling shepherd. The boughs grow out of the woman as though she were a dryad. Nothing has been overlooked. Within the arrangement of the three shepherds, there are wheels within wheels. The first circle inscribes the kneeling shepherd — leaving aside the kneeling leg on the ground. The second, larger circle is bounded by the standing shepherd’s outstretched arm. The third circle surrounds all four figures. Each circle re-emphasizes the curved shadow of the reader’s arm on the tomb: each circle, as it revolves, draws attention to the finger following the inscription. The inscription reads: Et in Arcadia Ego.

This phrase was an early seventeenth-century invention. It is first found not in literature but in a painting by Poussin’s contemporary Guercino. Unlike a typical medieval inscription — ‘Though now food for worms, I was formerly known as a painter’ — it is not about the process of Death, awaiting all; it is about an individual being taken out of his environment, which is indifferent to his departure, which continues as though he had never been there.

In the painting every material form is ordered and put in its proper place. But the centre of the picture is less than a shadow. There is the shepherd who reads, then there is his shadow, and beyond that, inside the tomb, there is nothing. There is only written evidence of a presence, now departed.

I am not suggesting that Poussin deliberately painted a philosophic allegory. I am not even suggesting that he read Descartes. We have no evidence that he did. What I am suggesting is that Poussin reached in his own art a degree of order and control such as the natural sciences were to reach as a result of the Cartesian division; but that, having reached this, he became uneasy about the limitations of this control. He was haunted by the spectre of Time: that Time, crueller than any experienced before, which was rushing into the new gulf cut between mind and matter. That Time which rendered Vermeer — with his very different temperament — calmly sceptical.

It is no coincidence that Cézanne went back to Poussin as a starting point, for Cézanne’s art was the first to try to rebridge the gulf.

1960

The Maja Dressed and The Maja Undressed Goya

First, she lies there on the couch in her fancy-dress costume: the costume which is the reason for her being called a Maja. Later, in the same pose, and on the same couch, she is naked.

Ever since the paintings were first hung in the Prado at the beginning of this century, people have asked: who is she? Is she the Duchess of Alba? A few years ago the body of the Duchess of Alba was exhumed and her skeleton measured in the hope that this would prove that it was not she who had posed! But then, if not she, who?

One tends to dismiss the question as part of the trivia of court gossip. But then when one looks at the two paintings there is indeed a mystery implied by them which fascinates. But the question has been wrongly put. It is not a question of who? We shall never know, and if we did we would not be much the wiser. It is a question of why? If we could answer that we might learn a little more about Goya.

My own explanation is that nobody posed for the nude version. Goya constructed the second painting from the first. With the dressed version in front of him, he undressed her in his imagination and put down on the canvas what he imagined. Look at the evidence.

There is the uncanny identity (except for the far leg) of the two poses. This can only have been the result of an idea: ‘Now I will imagine her clothes are not there.’ In actual poses, taken up on different occasions, there would be bound to be greater variation.

More important, there is the drawing of the nude, the way the forms of her body have been visualized. Consider her breasts — so rounded, high and each pointing outwards. No breasts, when a figure is lying, are shaped quite like that. In the dressed version we find the explanation. Bound and corseted, they assume exactly that shape and, supported, they will retain it even when the figure is lying. Goya has taken off the silk to reveal the skin, but has forgotten to reckon with the form changing.

The same is true of her upper arms, especially the near one. In the nude it is grotesquely, if not impossibly, fat — as thick as the thigh just above the knee. Again, in the dressed version we see why. To find the outline of a naked arm Goya has had to guess within the full, pleated shoulders and sleeves of her jacket, and has miscalculated by merely simplifying instead of reassessing the form.

Compared to the dressed version, the far leg in the nude has been slightly turned and brought towards us. If this had not been done, there would have been a space visible between her legs and the whole boat-like form of her body would have been lost. Then, paradoxically, the nude would have looked less like the dressed figure. Yet if the leg were really moved in this way, the position of both hips would change too. And what makes the hips, stomach and thighs of the nude seem to float in space — so that we cannot be certain at what angle they are to the bed — is that, although the far leg has been shifted, the form of the near hip and thigh has been taken absolutely directly from the clothed body, as though the silk there was a mist that had suddenly lifted.

Indeed the whole near line of her body as it touches the pillows and sheet, from armpit to toe, is as unconvincing in the nude as it is convincing in the first painting. In the first, the pillows and the couch sometimes yield to the form of the body, sometimes press against it: the line where they meet is like a stitched line — the thread disappearing and reappearing. Yet the line in the nude version is like the frayed edge of a cut-out, with none of this ‘give-and-take’ which a figure and its surroundings always establish in reality.

The face of the nude jumps forward from the body, not because it has been changed or painted afterwards (as some writers have suggested), but because it has been seen instead of conjured up. The more one looks at it, the more one realizes how extraordinarily vague and insubstantial the naked body is. At first its radiance deceives one into thinking that this is the glow of flesh. But is it not really closer to the light of an apparition? Her face is tangible. Her body is not.

Goya was a supremely gifted draughtsman with great powers of invention. He drew figures and animals in action so swift that clearly he must have drawn them without reference to any model. Like Hokusai, he knew what things looked like almost instinctively. His knowledge of appearances was contained in the very movement of his fingers and wrist as he drew. How then is it possible that the lack of a model for this nude should have made his painting unconvincing and artificial?

The answer, I think, has to be found in his motive for painting the two pictures. It is possible that both paintings were commissioned as a new kind of scandalous trompe l’oeil — in which in the twinkling of an eye a woman’s clothes disappeared. Yet at that stage of his life Goya was not the man to accept commissions on other men’s trivial terms. So if these pictures were commissioned, he must have had his own subjective reasons for complying.

What then was his motive? Was it, as seemed obvious at first, to confess or celebrate a love affair? This would be more credible if we could believe that the nude had really been painted from life. Was it to brag of an affair that had not in fact taken place? This contradicts Goya’s character; his art is unusually free from any form of bravado. I suggest that Goya painted the first version as an informal portrait of a friend (or possibly mistress), but that as he did so he became obsessed by the idea that suddenly, as she lay there in her fancy dress looking at him, she might have no clothes on.

Why ‘obsessed’ by this? Men are always undressing women with their eyes as a quite casual form of make-believe. Could it be that Goya was obsessed because he was afraid of his own sexuality?

There is a constant undercurrent in Goya which connects sex with violence. The witches are born of this. And so, partly, are his protests against the horrors of war. It is generally assumed that he protested because of what he witnessed in the hell of the Peninsular War. This is true. In all conscience he identified himself with the victims. But with despair and horror he also recognized a potential self in the torturers.

The same undercurrent blazes as ruthless pride in the eyes of the women he finds attractive. Across the full, loose mouths of dozens of faces, including his own, it flickers as a taunting provocation. It is there in the charged disgust with which he paints men naked, always equating their nakedness with bestiality — as with the madmen in the madhouse, the Indians practising cannibalism, the priests awhoring. It is present in the so-called ‘Black’ paintings which record orgies of violence. But most persistently it is evident in the way he painted all flesh.

It is difficult to describe this in words, yet it is what makes nearly every Goya portrait unmistakably his. The flesh has an expression of its own — as features do in portraits by other painters. The expression varies according to the sitter, but it is always a variation on the same demand: the demand for flesh as food for an appetite. Nor is that a rhetorical metaphor. It is almost literally true. Sometimes the flesh has a bloom on it like fruit. Sometimes it is flushed and hungry-looking, ready to devour. Usually — and this is the fulcrum of his intense psychological insight — it suggests both simultaneously: the devourer and the to-be-devoured. All Goya’s monstrous fears are summed up in this. His most horrific vision is of Satan eating the bodies of men.

One can even recognize the same agony in the apparently mundane painting of the butcher’s table. I know of no other still life in the world which so emphasizes that a piece of meat was recently living, sentient flesh, which so combines the emotive with the literal meaning of the word ‘butchery’. The terror of this picture, painted by a man who has enjoyed meat all his life, is that it is not a still life.

If I am right in this, if Goya painted the nude Maja because he was haunted by the fact that he imagined her naked — that is to say imagined her flesh with all its provocation — we can begin to explain why the painting is so artificial. He painted it to exorcise a ghost. Like the bats, dogs and witches, she is another of the monsters released by ‘the sleep of reason’, but, unlike them, she is beautiful because desirable. Yet to exorcise her as a ghost, to call her by her proper name, he had to identify her as closely as possible with the painting of her dressed. He was not painting a nude. He was painting the apparition of a nude within a dressed woman. This is why he was tied so faithfully to the dressed version and why his usual powers of invention were so unusually inhibited.

I am not suggesting that Goya intended us to interpret the two paintings in this way. He expected them to be taken at their face value: the woman dressed and the woman undressed. What I am suggesting is that the second, nude version was probably an invention and that perhaps Goya became imaginatively and emotionally involved in its ‘pretence’ because he was trying to exorcise his own desires.

Why do these two paintings seem surprisingly modern? We assumed that the painter and model were lovers when we took it for granted that she agreed to pose for the two pictures. But their power, as we now see it, depends upon there being so little development between them. The difference is only that she is undressed. This should change everything, but in fact it only changes our way of looking at her. She herself has the same expression, the same pose, the same distance. All the great nudes of the past offer invitations to share their golden age; they are naked in order to seduce and transform us. The Maja is naked but indifferent. It is as though she is not aware of being seen — as though we were peeping at her secretly through a keyhole. Or rather, more accurately, as though she did not know that her clothes had become ‘invisible’.

In this, as in much else, Goya was prophetic. He was the first artist to paint the nude as a stranger: to separate sex from intimacy: to substitute an aesthetic of sex for an energy of sex. It is in the nature of energy to break bounds: and it is the function of aesthetics to construct them. Goya, as I have suggested, may have had his own reason for fearing energy. In the second half of the twentieth century the aestheticism of sex helps to keep a consumer society stimulated, competitive and dissatisfied.

1964

Mathias Grünewald

The crooked houses, narrow streets and leaning door-frames of Colmar do not look picturesque. They are just old, unchanged and outdated. Apart from the square and the cathedral, there is one other landmark: a tall chimney belching out black smoke from the very centre of the town. This is the boiler of the public bath-house. Private baths are a modern luxury.

Thus, in its own peculiar way, Colmar prepares the visitor for the Grünewald altarpiece. The town hints at a different age, with different expectations of life. Unless the visitor takes this hint, he will get no further than the cliché that Grünewald’s mystic genius was timeless.

The altarpiece, now housed in the town’s museum, consists of ten separate panels, of which the most memorable are the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Temptation of St Anthony. The Crucifixion, now one of the most famous ever painted, is always being referred to in discussions on Expressionism, Germanic cruelty and religious ecstasy. Its true significance seems to me to be much more precise. It is one of the very few great paintings concerned with disease, with physical sickness.

The altarpiece was originally commissioned by an Antonite hospice at Isenheim just outside Colmar, and Grünewald worked there from 1510 to 1515. This hospice was famous for its care and treatment of the sick, especially those suffering from the plague and syphilis. In the second half of the fifteenth century the plague was probably as common as influenza is today. In 1466, for example, 60,000 people died of it in Paris alone. Syphilis was also sweeping across Europe on an unprecedented scale. The uncertainty of life as a result of disease was at least as great as the uncertainty experienced by men in the front line in either of the two World Wars.

When a new patient — although the word patient is already too modern — when a new recruit arrived at Isenheim, he was taken, even before he was examined or washed, to be shown Grünewald’s Crucifixion. Confronted with such evidence of physical suffering he became a little more reconciled and so easier to treat, if not cure.

So much and no more is known from the records. There is also a report that later Grünewald died of the plague himself. But so far as his own attitudes are concerned we have to guess. The longer I looked at the Colmar altarpiece, the more convinced I became that for Grünewald disease represented the actual state of man. Disease was not for him the prelude to death — as modern man tends to fear: it was the condition of life.

All the evidence around him suggested that he lived in an infected world. Like Jeremiah he cried out: Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? And the it represented all that made disease possible and incurable: the shifting insecurity of the world, the apparent indifference of God, the ignorance. He was obsessed with physical disease because it seemed to him to express the most far-reaching truths he had yet discovered about the healthy.

Church and State, as he knew them, were corrupt and merciless. (He was later a follower of Luther and a supporter of the peasants in the Peasants’ War.) All authority, like an epidemic, was arbitrary and terrible. Everything, as the medieval world broke up, decreed that life was cheap.

I am not, of course, suggesting that this Crucifixion is only about disease and not about the New Testament What I am suggesting is that its images and content have been taken straight from the medieval lazar-house. Christ’s body is a corpse from Isenheim, covered with sores, swollen, infected. The feet are gangrenous, the hands suffer a paralysing cramp. The whole is tallow-coloured.

The Virgin Mary topples like a struck tree against St John’s trailing arm. Both of them are as dumb as wood — which is what makes them the most poignant and haunting survivors in the history of art. But, by the same token, it is clear that they were not imagined as figures in a historical religious tragedy. On the contrary, they were minutely observed bereaved at the hospice. And the fact that Grünewald knew that Christ in reality suffered at the hands of men only emphasizes how he saw disease as the epitome of the inhumanity of his world.

It is the same in other panels. The monsters who surround St Anthony represent the traditional sins only in a nominal way. What they really represent is disease, fever, infection. This is a painting of a man on his sick bed. Once consider it in this way, and it becomes obvious. The text at the bottom reads: Where wert thou, Holy Jesus? Why wast thou not there to heal my wounds?

In the Resurrection, Christ ascends to heaven, white and pallid as a corpse — whenever Grünewald uses white it has this connotation of the pallor of death, it is never a positive, pure colour. His winding sheet forks like lightning; and the soldiers, far from sleeping, writhe in convulsions as though poisoned.

Even in the happier scenes the same fatality is implicit. In the Virgin and Child, the swaddling cloth is the same tattered (infected?) rag which serves as loin-cloth for the crucified Christ. In the Annunciation, the angel bursts in upon and dwarfs the Virgin with his promise, to which she reacts as to the news of an incurable illness.

I want now to mention a highly personal and idiosyncratic motivation which Grünewald’s work appears to reveal and which perhaps supports this argument of mine, but which I have not seen previously discussed.

In the Temptation of St Anthony, amongst all the grotesque, invented monsters, there is one passage which is painted with scrupulous accuracy. Its very literalness makes it outstanding. It is the passage concerned with the feathers of the mythical sparrow-hawk. It has clearly been painted by a man for whom feathers had a special significance: for whom feathers in themselves were as charged as all the apocalyptic details which surround them.

One can also find (in other panels) evidence of a similar special significance for Grünewald attached to feathers. The wing feathers of Gabriel in the Annunciation have no connection whatsoever with the rest of the figure; they are like the severed wings of a bird mysteriously held in space above the angel’s shoulders. In the Angels’ Concert, there is the inexplicable feathered one — a kind of prophecy of Papageno in The Magic Flute. He wears a crown of feathers and is also clothed in them. As he plays, his expression suggests aspiration and longing.

Even where feathers are not introduced directly, Grünewald insists again and again on textures and forms which are feather equivalents: palm trees against the sky like tail feathers, and the plaited palm robe worn by St Paul to keep himself warm: the ribbed, padded tunic of a soldier, each segment of cloth curving like a feather: the spires of a coronet worn by an angel.

It is hard to say nearly 500 years afterwards what exact significance feathers may have had for Grünewald, especially as it was almost certainly an unconscious one. But in general psychological theory, feathers are a symbol of power, of aspiration and the ability to transcend (or escape from) material reality. The feathers of the sparrow-hawk probably emphasize the incomprehensible power of his aggression. The feathered angel in the Angels’ Concert may well represent the ‘flight’ of human imagination.

The point of this observation about the feathers is that it may explain a little more about the great, mysterious figure of Christ in the Crucifixion. The lacerated body is unique: no other painter ever depicted Christ on the cross like this. The literal explanation of the lacerations is that the body has been scourged and scratched by thorns — some of the thorns, broken, are still in the flesh. The circumstantial explanation is that the lacerations resemble the sores of the sick — in the bottom left-hand corner of the Temptation of St Anthony there is a man suffering from syphilis who is pock-marked in a somewhat similar way.

Yet the uniformity of the marks over the entire body makes both these explanations rather unconvincing. Surely the overall appearance of Christ’s body is more than anything else suggestive of a bird that has had its feathers plucked? Surely here Grünewald was being obedient to an imaginative compulsion, emotionally charged beyond the possibility of all narrative logic? Surely here he was saying: Christ, like the victims of Isenheim, dies in agony without the slightest comfort of hope because all his spiritual power has been drawn out of him by the degree of his suffering — because he has been stripped naked unto death.

1963

L. S. Lowry

Lowry was born in a Manchester suburb in 1887. He was a vague child. He never passed any exams. He went to art school because nobody was very convinced that he could do anything else. At the age of about thirty he began to paint the industrial scene around him: he began to produce what would now be recognizable Lowrys. He continued for twenty years with scant recognition or success. Then a London dealer saw some of his paintings by chance when he went to a framer’s. He inquired about the artist. A London exhibition was arranged — it was now 1938, and Lowry began slowly to acquire a national reputation. At first it was other artists who most appreciated his work. The public gradually followed. From 1945 onwards he began to receive official honours — honorary degrees, Royal Academician, freedom of the City of Salford. None of this has changed him in any way. He still lives on the outskirts of Manchester: modest, eccentric, comic, lonely.

‘You know, I’ve never been able to get used to the fact that I’m alive! The whole thing frightens me. It’s been like that from my earliest days. It’s too big you know — I mean life, sir.’¹

In 1964 the Hallé Orchestra gave a special concert in honour of Lowry’s seventy-fifth birthday: a number of artists, including Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore and Ivon Hitchens, contributed to an honorary exhibition: and Sir Kenneth Clark wrote an appreciation. In it, Clark compares Lowry to Wordsworth’s ‘Leech Gatherer’:

Our leech gatherer has continued to scrutinise his small black figures in their milky pool of atmosphere, isolating and combining them with a loving sense of their human qualities … All those black people walking to and fro are as anonymous, as individual, as purposeless and as directed as the stream of real people who pass before our eyes in the square of an industrial town.²

Edwin Mullins, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue of Lowry’s retrospective exhibition at the Tate in 1966, makes the point that Lowry is primarily interested in ‘the battle of life’.

It is a battle engaged between undignified pea-brained homunculi who pour out of a mill after a day’s work, or congregate round a street fight, pace a railway platform, whoop it up on V.E. Day, watch a regatta or football match, take a pram and an idiotic dog for a walk along the promenade.³

These quotations reveal the submerged patronage found in nearly all critical comment on Lowry’s work. This tendency to patronize is a form of self-defence: defence not so much against the artist as against the subject-matter of his work. It is hard to reconcile a life devoted to aesthetic expositions with the streets and houses and front doors of those who live in Bury, Rochdale, Burnley or Salford.

Lowry has been compared with Chaplin, Brueghel and the Douanier Rousseau. The curious mood of his work has been analysed, sometimes with considerable subtlety. His technique has been explained and it has been pointed out that technically he is a highly sophisticated artist. Many stories are told about his behaviour and conversation. He is indeed an original, dignified man for whom one can feel deeply.

I might add stories of my own, but there is something more important to say. The extraordinary fact is that nobody, faced with Lowry’s pictures whose subject-matter is nearly always social, ever discusses the social or historical meaning of his art. Instead it is treated as though it dealt with the view out of the window of a Pullman train on its non-stop journey to London, where everything is believed to be very different. His subjects, if they have to be considered at all in relation to what actually exists, are considered as local exotica.

I don’t want to exaggerate the meaning of Lowry’s work or give it a historical load which is too heavy for it. The range of his work is small. It does not belong to the mainstream of twentieth-century art, which is concerned in one way or another with interpreting new relationships between man and nature. It is a spontaneous (as opposed to a consciously self-developing) art. It is static, local and subjectively repetitive. But it is consistent within itself, courageous, obstinate, unique, and the phenomenon of its creation and appreciation is significant.

Perhaps I should emphasize here that this significance must be considered separately from, though not necessarily in opposition to, Lowry’s conscious intentions. He says he doesn’t know why he paints his pictures. They come to him.

I started as I often do, with nothing particular in mind; things just happen — they grow from nothing. When I had painted the figure of the woman on the left, walking away, I got stuck. I just couldn’t think what to do next. Then a young lady friend of mine came to the rescue. ‘Why don’t you paint another figure walking towards you,’ she suggested. ‘Shall I paint the same woman turned around?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that would be a very good idea.’ ‘All right,’ I replied, ‘but what can I call the picture?’ ‘Why not call it The Same Woman Coming Back?’ she said. And I did!⁴

Even allowing for the simplification Lowry makes in telling this story, it is clear that he works intuitively, without fixed aims. His aim is only to finish the picture. Any wider significance his work may have is the result of a certain coincidence between his own private half-hidden motivations and the nature of the outside world which he uses as raw material and to which he delivers back his finished pictures. On a certain level, he himself is probably aware of this coincidence: it is probably the substance of his conviction that what he has to say as an artist is, in some mysterious way, relevant. But this is very far from implying that he consciously intends the meaning which his pictures acquire.

What is this meaning? I have already suggested that its basis is social. Let us now try to place Lowry’s pictures within a context. First, they are very specifically English. They could be about nowhere else. Nowhere else are there comparable industrial landscapes. The light, which is not natural but which was manufactured in the nineteenth century, is unique. Only in the Midlands and North of England do people live — to use Sir Kenneth Clark’s euphemism — in such a milky pool.

The character of the figures and crowds is also specially English. The industrial revolution has isolated them and uprooted them. Their homemade ideology, except when they are led and organized by revolutionaries, is a kind of ironic stoicism. Nowhere else do crowds look so simultaneously civic and deprived. They appear to have as little to lose as a mob: and yet they are not a mob. They know each other, recognize each other, exchange help and jokes — they are not, as is sometimes said, like lost souls in limbo; they are fellow-travellers through a life which is impervious to most of their choices.

All this might seem at first to date Lowry’s paintings. One might suppose that they are more to do with the nineteenth century than with today when there are television aerials on the houses, cars in the back streets, hairdressers for mill girls, and a Labour government.

Yet, in order to place Lowry’s work within an historical as well as geographical context, we must distinguish rather carefully between different elements in it. Most of Lowry’s paintings are synthetic, insofar as they are constructed from his observation and memory of different incidents and places. Only a few represent specific scenes. If, however, one goes to the mill towns, to the potteries, to Manchester, to Barrow-in-Furness, to Liverpool, one finds countless streets, skylines, doorsteps, bus stops, squares, churches, homes, which look like those depicted by Lowry, and have never been depicted by anybody else. His paintings are no more dated than certain English cities and towns.

If one looks more carefully at the pictures one notices that the figures, even in the most recent ones, are wearing clothes which belong, at the latest, to the 1920s or early 1930s: that is to say to the period when Lowry first determined to paint the area where he had been brought up and where he was going to spend the rest of his life. Similarly, there are very few cars or modern buildings to be seen. He says that he hates change. And his pictures, both in detail, as cited above, and in general spirit, suggest an essential changelessness. (One sees this in a different way in his deserted landscapes and seascapes of endlessly repeating hills or waves.) The bustle of the crowds, the walk to the sea and back, the fight, the accident, the once-yearly excitement of the fair, the ageing of some, the crippling of others, changes nothing. In certain canvases this sense of unchanging time becomes an almost metaphysical sense of eternity.

Thus we can summarize: Lowry’s paintings correspond in many respects to existing places: certain details belong to the past: the artist’s vision exaggerates a feeling of changelessness: the three elements combine together to create an atmosphere of dramatic obsolescence. Stylistic considerations apart, there is in fact no question of these pictures belonging to the spirit of the nineteenth century. The notion of progress — however it is applied — is foreign to them. Their virtues are stoic: their logic is one of decline.

These paintings are about what has been happening to the British economy since 1918, and their logic implies the collapse still to come. This is what has happened to the ‘workshop of the world’. Here is the recurring so-called production crisis: the obsolete industrial plants: the inadequacy of unchanged transport systems and overstrained power supplies: the failure of education to keep pace with technological advance: the ineffectiveness of national planning: the lack of capital investment at home and the disastrous reliance on colonial and neo-colonial overseas investments: the shift of power from industrial capital to international finance capital, the essential agreements within the two-party system blocking every initiative towards political independence and thus economic viability.

The argument is not so far-fetched as it may seem if one pauses to consider the circumstances in which the pictures have been painted. Lowry has happened to live and work in an area where the truth of our economic decline has been far less disguised than elsewhere. His art is partly subjective, but what he has seen around him has confirmed, and perhaps even helped to sustain and create, his subjective tendencies. In the 1920s, Lancashire was a depressed area. (One tends to forget that before the depression of the 1930s, there were never less than one million unemployed.) What the 1930s were like has been described many times. Yet the relevance of their desolation to Lowry is seldom mentioned. Here Orwell is virtually describing a painting by Lowry:

I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag heaps in the distance, stretched the ‘flashes’ — pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore tears of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water.⁵

The poverty of the 1930s has passed. But in many parts of the north-west today there is a sense of profound exhaustion. There is nothing Spenglerian about this: it is the result of the scale of what has to be destroyed before anything can be renewed. Town-planners, investors, educationalists know it. I quote from the government’s North-West Study, published in 1965:

Slums, general obsolescence, dereliction and neglect all add up to a formidable problem of environmental renewal extending over a wide area of the region. It is plain that this problem cannot be disposed of in a few years and the question which arises is whether it is feasible to break the back of it in, say, ten to 15 years or whether the turn of another century will find Lancashire still struggling under the grim heritage of the industrial revolution.

In a different way many of the voters know it too. They have always voted Labour, believing in an alternative plan. Today they see Wilson thirty-five years later performing the same role as Ramsay MacDonald and abandoning any possibility of an alternative.

Historians of the future will cite Lowry’s work as both expressing and illustrating the industrial and economic decline of British capitalism since the First World War. But of course he is not simply that, as described in those remote terms. He is an artist concerned with loneliness, with a certain humour — somewhat like Samuel Beckett’s: the humour found in the contemplation of time passing without meaning. He is an artist who has uniquely found a way of painting the character of hand-me-down clothes, the sensation of damp rising from the ground, the effect of smog on the texture of the surfaces exposed to it, the strange closing of distance which smoke and mist bring about so that each person carries with him his own small parcel of visibility, which constitutes his world.

‘My three most cherished records,’ says Lowry, ‘are the fact that I’ve never been abroad, never had a telephone and never owned a motorcar.’ He is a man strongly attached to where he found himself. Everything in his work is informed by the character of a specific place and period.

I have tried to define that character. If Lowry were a greater artist, there would be more of himself in his work. (His ‘naïvety’ is probably an excuse for hiding his own experience.) It would then be far less possible to localize his work, either geographically or historically: emotions are always more general than circumstances. As it is, given his inhibitions as an artist, he intuitively chose correctly. He chose to paint the historic.

1966

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

To understand the work of Toulouse-Lautrec two current fallacies have to be demolished.

There are those — however surprising it may seem — who still argue that, despite some unfortunate incidents, Lautrec, the illustrious son of one of the noblest families in France, remains a credit to his background.

The second argument has more respect for the facts and the suffering involved. Even Lautrec’s last words on his death-bed at the age of thirty-seven are admitted. They were: ‘Le vieux con’ — and they referred to his father. But this argument maintains that his life was transcended by his art. In a sense this is true, but only if one also recognizes that his work was a direct expression of his life. The only miracle is art; but even in art, the facts count.

Lautrec was born with two terrible handicaps: the family around him and the disease in his bones. His father was mad about horses and women. His mother was a martyr to his father’s infidelities. It was a family of many châteaux, but also of empty rooms and absences. The ideals it instilled in the young Lautrec were exclusively extrovert ideals of physical prowess.

The disease struck when he was fourteen. It is sometimes thought that his legs stopped growing as the result of two falls. But recent medical opinion strongly suggests that this would have happened anyway and that the fractures were the result of an inborn dystrophic disease which was probably in its turn the result of his parents being first cousins.

The disease transformed the boy into a monster. Adolescence, instead of being the process of becoming sexually mature, became the process of becoming sexually obscene. It was not only a question of walking on stunted legs. His body, his organs, his face, his fingers, all coarsened as though swollen with the pressure of frustrated growth. The thickness of his lips made him splutter when speaking. It was as if at the moment of first recognizing his own sex, he discovered only the final price of debauchery.

He escaped into a Paris milieu of prostitutes, singers, dancers. This was the traditional field for the aristocrat’s other ‘sport’, but to him it offered a kind of peace. Here the absurdity of his ravenous sexual appetite could be temporarily forgotten in the business of satisfying it; here he could avoid (as he would not have been able to do in a circle of artists) all middle-class preoccupations with cause and effect, aims and purpose; here he could easily be allowed to kill himself by trying through sex and drink to achieve a momentary, impossible equality.

His art records this milieu. But his great paintings — nearly all of women by themselves, lying or sitting on beds, dressing, waiting, gazing — amount to far more than a record. They are also intensely moving. Why? Why do these off-duty moments of old, tired prostitutes seem hallowed? There is no appeal to religion or social conscience. There is no spirituality and, in the proper sense of the word, there is no evidence of compassion. Compassion shows what lies behind. Lautrec shows only what is there in front of his eyes.

Can we explain it by claiming that art is the pursuit of truth? Hardly, for we then have to ask what we mean by truth: and certainly Lautrec’s view of the truth was excessively limited. The truth was only what he could stare at. He was the most banally existential of all the great artists. Yet his work is never banal. The more clinical his observation, the more tender and lyrical the image becomes. Why?

The explanation is to be found in his own condition. The reality of other people’s daily lives and bodies was for him something unapproachable. Thus it was already an ideal — and he painted it as such. The closer he came to representing a woman as she was, the more ideal she became for him.

Lautrec, his posters apart, was no great innovator. It is the content of his best paintings which is unique. He makes us look at his models as though it were impossible to judge them (not just morally but in any way), as though they were a species never before seen, as though all we could wish to do is to watch them endlessly because they are there. We see a breast or an arm which normally we would consider prematurely worn out, and Lautrec makes us wonder whether it was not naturally and pristinely meant to be like that.

His actual technique of painting and drawing poignantly confirms this. He took from the Impressionists the system of painting with small, separate brushmarks. In the case of the Impressionists themselves, the Pointillists and later painters like Bonnard, these brushmarks form a kind of curtain of colour and light through which the scene appears or from which it emerges. In the case of Van Gogh the brushmarks actually imitate the substance of what is being depicted and become metaphors of paint.

Lautrec’s use of the same technique was quite different. Each brushmark is like a touch on the skin of what is being painted. The form as an idea or generalization is established by vigorously drawn contours, but all its particular, sensuous reality is built up by touch after touch, each qualifying the last. It is as if his models had nine skins, the ninth being paint from the touch of his sable brushes.

His method reveals his attitude. His intelligence instantaneously recognized and intermittently defined his subject — sometimes to the point of caricature. This was the ironic gift of a man watching others hurrying past him. The process of discovering the sensuous individuality of his subject was a very much slower one: a process of imaginatively touching her, of coming as close to her as possible again and again. The tentativeness, the delicacy of each touch had more to do with diffidence than tenderness. The touches are like the timid flicks of a lizard’s tongue. The diffidence was the result of Lautrec’s certain knowledge that he could never in fact approach as an equal this creature who let him watch her.

The resulting paintings imply an intimacy between seer and seen unparalleled in the history of art: an intimacy which precludes all judgement. This is not because the women were tired prostitutes who did not care who saw them. (They would have cared.) It is because of the intensity of Lautrec’s need to idealize. As so often, a terrible and extreme case throws light on the universal. Intimacy is in fact always an imaginative construction, and for all of us what distinguishes it from familiarity is our need to idealize. Lautrec’s need was greater and from it, paradoxically, he created his uniquely realistic art.

1964

Alberto Giacometti

The week after Giacometti’s death Paris-Match published a remarkable photograph of him which had been taken nine months earlier. It shows him alone in the rain, crossing the street near his studio in Montparnasse. Although his arms are through the sleeves, his raincoat is hoiked up to cover his head. Invisibly, underneath the raincoat, his shoulders are hunched.

The immediate effect of the photograph, published when it was, depended upon it showing the image of a man curiously casual about his own well-being. A man with crumpled trousers and old shoes, ill-equipped for the rain. A man whose preoccupations took no note of the seasons.

But what makes the photograph remarkable is that it suggests more than that about Giacometti’s character. The coat looks as though it has been borrowed. He looks as though underneath the coat he is wearing nothing except his trousers. He has the air of a survivor. But not in the tragic sense. He has become quite used to his position. I am tempted to say ‘like a monk’, especially since the coat over his head suggests a cowl. But the simile is not accurate enough. He wore his symbolic poverty far more naturally than most monks.

Every artist’s work changes when he dies. And finally no one remembers what his work was like when he was alive. Sometimes one can read what his contemporaries had to say about it. The difference of emphasis and interpretation is largely a question of historical development. But the death of the artist is also a dividing line.

It seems to me now that no artist’s work could ever have been more changed by his death than Giacometti’s. In twenty years no one will understand this change. His work will seem to have reverted to normal — although in fact it will have become something different: it will have become evidence from the past, instead of being, as it has been for the last forty years, a possible preparation for something to come.

The reason Giacometti’s death seems to have changed his work so radically is that his work had so much to do with an awareness of death. It is as though his death confirms his work: as though one could now arrange his works in a line leading to his death, which would constitute far more than the interruption or termination of that line — which would, on the contrary, constitute the starting point for reading back along that line, for appreciating his life’s work.

You might argue that after all nobody ever believed that Giacometti was immortal. His death could always be deduced. Yet it is the fact which makes the difference. While he was alive, his loneliness, his conviction that everybody was unknowable, was no more than a chosen point of view which implied a comment on the society he was living in. Now by his death he has proved his point. Or — to put it a better way, for he was not a man who was concerned with argument — now his death has proved his point for him.

This may sound extreme, but despite the relative traditionalism of his actual methods, Giacometti was a most extreme artist. The neo-Dadaists and other so-called iconoclasts of today are conventional window-dressers by comparison.

The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality — and he was concerned with nothing else except the contemplation of reality — could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of his staring at it. The act of looking was like a form of prayer for him — it became a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute. It was the act of looking which kept him aware of being constantly suspended between being and the truth.

If he had been born in an earlier period, Giacometti would have been a religious artist. As it was, born in a period of profound and widespread alienation, he refused to escape through religion, which would have been an escape into the past. He was obstinately faithful to his own time, which must have seemed to him rather like his own skin: the sack into which he was born. In that sack he simply could not in all honesty overcome his conviction that he had always been and always would be totally alone.

To hold such a view of life requires a certain kind of temperament. It is beyond me to define that temperament precisely. It was visible in Giacometti’s face. A kind of endurance lightened by cunning. If man was purely animal and not a social being, all old men would have this expression. One can glimpse something similar in Samuel Beckett’s expression. Its antithesis was what you could see in Le Corbusier’s face.

But it is by no means only a question of temperament: it is even more a question of the surrounding social reality. Nothing during Giacometti’s lifetime broke through his isolation. Those whom he liked or loved were invited to share it temporarily with him. His basic situation — in the sack into which he was born — remained unchanged. (It is interesting that part of the legend about him tells of how almost nothing changed or was moved in his studio for the forty years he lived there. And during the last twenty years he continually recommenced the same five or six subjects.) Yet the nature of man as an essentially social being — although it is objectively proved by the very existence of language, science, culture — can only be felt subjectively through the experience of the force of change as a result of common action.

Insofar as Giacometti’s view could not have been held during any preceding historical period, one can say that it reflects the social fragmentation and manic individualism of the late bourgeois intelligentsia. He was no longer even the artist in retreat. He was the artist who considered society as irrelevant. If it inherited his works it was by default.

But having said all this, the works remain and are unforgettable. His lucidity and total honesty about the consequences of his situation and outlook were such that he could still save and express a truth. It was an austere truth at the final limit of human interest; but his expressing of it transcends the social despair or cynicism which gave rise to it.

Giacometti’s proposition that reality is unshareable is true in death. He was not morbidly concerned with the process of death: but he was exclusively concerned with the process of life as seen by a man whose own mortality supplied the only perspective in which he could trust. None of us is in a position to reject this perspective, even though simultaneously we may try to retain others.

I said that his work had been changed by his death. By dying he has emphasized and even clarified the content of his work. But the change — anyway as it seems to me at this moment — is more precise and specific than that.

Imagine one of the portrait heads confronting you as you stand and look. Or one of the nudes standing there to be inspected, hands at her side, touchable only through the thickness of two sacks — hers and yours — so that the question of nakedness does not arise and all talk of nakedness becomes as trivial as the talk of bourgeois women deciding what clothes to wear for a wedding: nakedness is a detail for an occasion that passes.

Imagine one of the sculptures. Thin, irreducible, still and yet not rigid, impossible to dismiss, possible only to inspect, to stare at. If you stare, the figure stares back. This is also true of the most banal portrait. What is different now is how you become conscious of the track of your stare and hers: the narrow corridor of looking between you: perhaps this is like the track of a prayer if such a thing could be visualized. Either side of the corridor nothing counts. There is only one way to reach her — to stand still and stare. That is why she is so thin. All other possibilities and functions have been stripped away. Her entire reality is reduced to the fact of being seen.

When Giacometti was alive you were standing, as it were, in his place. You put yourself at the beginning of the track of his gaze and the figure reflected this gaze back to you like a mirror. Now that he is dead, or now that you know that he is dead, you take his place rather than put yourself in it. And then it seems that what first moves along the track comes from the figure. It stares, and you intercept the stare. Yet however far back you move along the narrow path, the gaze passes through you.

It appears now that Giacometti made these figures during his lifetime, for himself, as observers of his future absence, his death, his becoming unknowable.

1966

Pierre Bonnard

Since his death in 1947 at the age of eighty, Pierre Bonnard’s reputation has grown fairly steadily, and in the last five years or so quite dramatically. Some now claim that he is the greatest painter of the century. Twenty years ago he was considered a minor master.

This change in his reputation coincides with a general retreat among certain intellectuals from political realities and confidence. There is very little of the post-1914 world in Bonnard’s work. There is very little to disturb — except perhaps the unnatural peacefulness of it all. His art is intimate, contemplative, privileged, secluded. It is an art about cultivating one’s own garden.

It is necessary to say this so that the more extreme recent claims for Bonnard can be placed in an historical context. Bonnard was essentially a conservative artist — although an original one. The fact that he is praised as ‘a pure painter’ underlines this. The purity consisted in his being able to accept the world as he found it. Was Bonnard a greater artist than Brancusi — not to mention Picasso, or Giacometti? Each period assesses all surviving artists according to its own needs. What is more interesting is why Bonnard will undoubtedly survive. The conventional answer, which begs the question, is that he was a great colourist. What was his colour for?

Bonnard painted landscapes, still-lifes, occasional portraits, very occasional mythological pieces, interiors, meals and nudes. The nudes seem to me to be far and away the best pictures.

In all his works after about 1911 Bonnard used colours in a roughly similar way. Before then — with the help of the examples of Renoir, Degas, Gauguin — he was still discovering himself as a colourist; after 1911 he by no means stopped developing, but it was a development along an already established line. The typical mature Bonnard bias of colour — towards marble whites, magenta, pale cadmium yellow, ceramic blues, terracotta reds, silver greys, stained purple, all unified like reflections on the inside of an oyster — this bias tends in the landscapes to make them look mythical, even faery; in the still-lifes it tends to give the fruit or the glasses or the napkins a silken glamour, as though they were part of a legendary tapestry woven from threads whose colours are too intense, too glossy; but in the nudes the same bias seems only to add conviction. It is the means of seeing the women through Bonnard’s eyes. The colours confirm the woman.

Then what does it mean to see a woman through Bonnard’s eyes? In a canvas painted in 1899, long before he was painting with typical Bonnard colours, a young woman sprawls across a low bed. One of her legs trails off the bed on to the floor: otherwise, she is lying very flat on her back. It is called L’Indolente: Femme assoupie sur un lit.

The title, the pose and the art-nouveau shapes of the folds and shadows all suggest a cultivated fin-de-siècle form of eroticism very different from the frankness of Bonnard’s later works; yet this picture — perhaps just because it doesn’t engage us — offers us a clear clue.

Continue to look at the picture and the woman begins to disappear — or at least her presence becomes ambiguous. The shadow down her near side and flank becomes almost indistinguishable from the cast shadow on the bed. The light falling on her stomach and far leg marries them to the golden-lit bed. The shadows which reveal the form of a calf pressed against a thigh, of her sex as it curves down and round to become the separation between her buttocks, of an arm thrown across her breasts — these eddy and flow in exactly the same rhythm as the folds of the sheet and counterpane.

The picture, remaining a fairly conventional one, does not actually belie its title: the woman continues to exist. But it is easy to see how the painting is pulling towards a very different image: the image of the imprint of a woman on an empty bed. Yeats:

… the mountain grass

Cannot but keep the form

Where the mountain hare has lain.¹

Alternatively one might describe the same state of affairs in terms of the opposite process: the image of a woman losing her physical limits, overflowing, overlapping every surface until she is no less and no more than the genius loci of the whole room.

Before I saw the Bonnard exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in January 1966, I was vaguely aware of this ambiguity in Bonnard’s work between presence and absence, and I explained it to myself in terms of his being a predominantly nostalgic artist: as though the picture was all he could ever save of the subject from the sweep of time passing. Now this seems far too crude an explanation. Nor is there anything nostalgic about Femme assoupie sur un lit, painted at the age of thirty-two. We must go further.

The risk of loss in Bonnard’s work does not appear to be a factor of distance. The far-away always looks benign. One has only to compare his seascapes with those of Courbet to appreciate the difference. It is proximity which leads to dissolution with Bonnard. Features are lost, not in distance, but, as it were, in the near. Nor is this an optical question of something being too close for the eye to focus. The closeness also has to be measured in emotional terms of tenderness and intimacy. Thus loss becomes the wrong word, and nostalgia the wrong category. What happens is that the body which is very near — in every sense of the word — becomes the axis of everything that is seen: everything that is visible relates to it: it acquires a domain to inhabit: but by the same token it has to lose the precision of its own fixed position in time and space.

The process may sound complex, but in fact it is related to the common experience of falling in love. Bonnard’s important nudes are the visual expressions of something very close to Stendhal’s famous definition of the process of ‘crystallization’ in love:

A man takes pleasure in adorning with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love he is certain; he recites to himself, with infinite complacency, every item that makes up his happiness. It is like exaggerating the attractions of a superb property that has just fallen into our hands, which is still unknown, but of the possession of which we are assured … In the salt mines of Salzburg they throw into the abandoned depths of a mine a branch of a tree stripped of its leaves by winter; two or three months later they draw it out, covered with sparkling crystallizations: the smallest twigs, those which are no larger than the foot of a titmouse, are covered with an infinity of diamonds, shifting and dazzling; it is impossible any longer to recognize the original branch.²

Many other painters have of course idealized women whom they have painted. But straightforward idealization becomes in effect indistinguishable from flattery or pure fantasy. It in no way does justice to the energy involved in the psychological state of being in love. What makes Bonnard’s contribution unique is the way that he shows in pictorial terms how the image of the beloved emanates outwards from her with such dominance that finally her actual physical presence becomes curiously incidental and in itself indefinable. (If it could be defined, it would become banal.)

Bonnard said something similar himself.

By the seduction of the first idea the painter attains to the universal. It is the seduction which determines the choice of the motif and which corresponds exactly to the painting. If this seduction, if the first idea vanishes all that remains … is the object which invades and dominates the painter …³

Everything about the nudes Bonnard painted between the two World Wars confirms this interpretation of their meaning, confirms it visually, not sentimentally. In the bath nudes, in which the woman lying in her bath is seen from above as through a skylight, the surface of the water serves two pictorial functions simultaneously. First it diffuses the image of her whole body, which, whilst remaining recognizable, sexual, female, becomes as varied and changeable and large as a sunset or an aurora borealis; secondly, it seals off the body from us. Only the light from it comes through the water to reflect off the bathroom walls. Thus she is potentially everywhere, except specifically here. She is lost in the near. Meanwhile what structurally pins down these paintings to prevent their presence becoming as ambiguous as hers is the geometric patterning of the surrounding tiles or linoleum or towelling.

In other paintings of standing nudes, the actual surface of the picture serves a similar function to the surface of the water. Now it is as though a large part or almost all of her body had been left unpainted and was simply the brown cardboardy colour of the original canvas. (In fact this is not the case: but it is the deliberate effect achieved by very careful colour and tonal planning.) All the objects around her — curtains, discarded clothes, a basin, a lamp, chairs, her dog — frame her in light and colour as the sea frames an island. In doing so, they break forward towards us, and draw back into depth. But she remains fixed to the surface of the canvas, simultaneously an absence and a presence. Every mark of colour is related to her, and yet she is no more than a shadow against the colours.

In a beautiful painting of 1916–19 she stands upright on tip-toe. It is a very tall painting. A rectangular bar of light falls down the length of her body. Parallel to this bar, just beside it and similar in colour, is a rectangular strip of wall-papered wall. On the wall-paper are pinkish flowers. On the bar of light is her nipple, the shadow of a rib, the slight shade like a petal under her knee. Once again the surface of that bar of light holds her back, makes her less than present: but also once again, she is ubiquitous: the designs on the wall-paper are the flowers of her body.

In the Grand Nu Bleu of 1924, she almost fills the canvas as she bends to dry a foot. This time no surface or bar of light imposes on her. But the extremism of the painting of her body itself dissolves her. The painting is, as always, tender: its extremism lies in its rendering of what is near and what is far. The distance between her near raised thigh and the inside of the far thigh of the leg on which she is standing — the distance of the caress of one hand underneath her — is made by the force of colour to be felt as a landscape distance: just as the degree to which the calf of that standing leg swells towards us is made to seem like the emerging of a near white hill from the blue recession of a plain running to the horizon. Her body is her habitation — the whole world in which she and the painter live; and at the same time it is immeasurable.

It would be easy to quote other examples: paintings with mirrors, paintings with landscapes into which her face flows away like a sound, paintings in which her body is seen like a sleeve turned inside out. All of them establish with all of Bonnard’s artfulness and skill as a draughtsman and colourist how her image emanates outwards from her until she is to be found everywhere except within the limits of her physical presence.

And now we come to the harsh paradox which I believe is the pivot of Bonnard’s art. Most of his nudes are directly or indirectly of a girl whom he met when she was sixteen and with whom he spent the rest of his life until she died at the age of sixty-two. The girl became a tragically neurasthenic woman: a frightened recluse, beside herself, and with an obsession about constantly washing and bathing. Bonnard remained loyal to her.

Thus the starting point for these nudes was an unhappy woman, obsessed with her toilet, excessively demanding and half ‘absent’ as a personality. Accepting this as a fact, Bonnard, by the strength of his devotion to her or by his cunning as an artist or perhaps by both, was able to transform the literal into a far deeper and more general truth: the woman who was only half present into the image of the ardently beloved.

It is a classic example of how art is born of conflict. In art, Bonnard said, il faut mentir. The trouble with the landscapes and still-lifes and meals — the weakness expressed through their colour — is that in them the surrounding world conflicts are still ignored and the personal tragedy is temporarily put aside. It may sound callous, but it seems probable that his tragedy, by forcing Bonnard to express and marvellously celebrate a common experience, ensured his survival as an artist.

1965

Frans Hals

In my mind’s eye I see the story of Frans Hals in theatrical terms.

The first act opens with a banquet that has already been going on for several hours. (In reality these banquets often continued for several days.) It is a banquet for the officers of one of the civic guard companies of Haarlem — let us say the St George’s Company of 1627. I chose this one because Hals’s painted record of the occasion is the greatest of his civic guard group portraits.

The officers are gay, noisy and emphatic. Their soldierly air has more to do with the absence of women and with their uniforms than with their faces or gestures, which are too bland for campaigning soldiers. And on second thoughts even their uniforms seem curiously unworn. The toasts which they drink to one another are to eternal friendship and trust. May all prosper together!

One of the most animated is Captain Michiel de Wael — downstage wearing a yellow jerkin. The look on his face is the look of a man certain that he is as young as the night and certain that all his companions can see it. It is a look that you can find at a certain moment at most tables in any night-club. But before Hals it had never been recorded. We watch Captain de Wael as the sober always watch a man getting tipsy — coldly and very aware of being an outsider. It is like watching a departure for a journey we haven’t the means to make. Twelve years later Hals painted the same man wearing the same chamois jerkin at another banquet. The stare, the look, has become fixed and the eyes wetter. If he can, he now spends the afternoons drinking at club bars. And his throaty voice as he talks and tells stories has a kind of urgency which hints that once, a long way back when he was young, he lived as we have never done.

Hals is at the banquet — though not in the painting. He is a man of nearly fifty, also drinking heavily. He is at the height of his success. He has the reputation of being wilful and alternately lethargic and violent. (Twenty years ago there was a scandal because they said he beat his wife to death when drunk. Afterwards he married again and had eight children.) He is a man of very considerable intelligence. We have no evidence about his conversation but I am certain that it was quick, epigrammatic, critical. Part of his attraction must have lain in the fact that he behaved as though he actually enjoyed the freedom which his companions believed in in principle. His even greater attraction was in his incomparable ability as a painter. Only he could paint his companions as they wished. Only he could bridge the contradiction in their wish. Each must be painted as a distinct individual and, at the same time, as a spontaneous natural member of the group.

Who are these men? As we sensed, they are not soldiers. The civic guards, although originally formed for active service, have long since become purely ceremonial clubs. These men come from the richest and most powerful merchant families in Haarlem, which is a textile-manufacturing centre.

Haarlem is only eleven miles from Amsterdam and twenty years before Amsterdam had suddenly and spectacularly become the financial capital of the entire world. Speculation concerning grain, precious metals, currencies, slaves, spices and commodities of every kind is being pursued on a scale and with a success that leaves the rest of Europe not only amazed but dependent on Dutch capital.

A new energy has been released and a kind of metaphysic of money is being born. Money acquires its own virtue — and, on its own terms, demonstrates its own tolerance. (Holland is the only state in Europe without religious persecution.) All traditional values are being either superseded or placed within limits and so robbed of their absolutism. The States of Holland have officially declared that the Church has no concern with questions of usury within the world of banking. Dutch arms-merchants consistently sell arms, not only to every contestant in Europe, but also, during the cruellest wars, to their own enemies.

The officers of the St George’s Company of the Haarlem Civic Guard belong to the first generation of the modern spirit of Free Enterprise. A little later Hals painted a portrait which seems to me to depict this spirit more vividly than any other painting or photograph I have ever seen. It is of Willem van Heythuyzen.

What distinguishes this portrait from all earlier portraits of wealthy or powerful men is its instability. Nothing is secure in its place. You have the feeling of looking at a man in a ship’s cabin during a gale. The table will slide across the floor. The book will fall off the table. The curtain will tumble down.

Furthermore, to emphasize and make a virtue out of this precariousness, the man leans back on his chair to the maximum angle of possible balance, and tenses the switch which he is holding in his hands so as almost to make it snap. And it is the same with his face and expression. His glance is a momentary one, and around his eyes you see the tiredness which is the consequence of having always, at each moment, to calculate afresh.

At the same time the portrait in no way suggests decay or disintegration. There may be a gale but the ship is sailing fast and confidently. Today van Heythuyzen would doubtless be described by his associates as being ‘electric’, and there are millions who model themselves — though not necessarily consciously — on the bearing of such men.

Put van Heythuyzen in a swivel chair, without altering his posture, pull the desk up in front of him, change the switch in his hands to a ruler or an aluminium rod, and he becomes a typical modern executive, sparing a few moments of his time to listen to your case.

But to return to the banquet. All the men are now somewhat drunk. The hands that previously balanced a knife, held a glass between two fingers, or squeezed a lemon over the oysters, now fumble a little. At the same time their gestures become more exaggerated — and more and more directed towards us, the imaginary audience. There is nothing like alcohol for making one believe that the self one is presenting is one’s true, up to now always hidden, self.

They interrupt each other and talk at cross-purposes. The less they communicate by thought, the more they put their arms round each other. From time to time they sing, content that at last they are acting in unison, for each, half lost in his own fantasy of self-presentation, wishes to prove to himself and to the others only one thing — that he is the truest friend there.

Hals is more often than not a little apart from the group. And he appears to be watching them as we are watching them.

The second act opens on the same set with the same banqueting table, but now Hals sits alone at the end of it. He is in his late sixties or early seventies, but still very much in possession of his faculties. The passing of the intervening years has, however, considerably changed the atmosphere of the scene. It has acquired a curiously mid-nineteenth-century air. Hals is dressed in a black cloak, with a black hat somewhat like a nineteenth-century top hat. The bottle in front of him is black. The only relief to the blackness is his loose white collar and the white page of the book open on the table.

The blackness, however, is not funereal. It has a rakish and defiant quality about it. We think of Baudelaire. We begin to understand why Courbet and Manet admired Hals so much.

The turning point occurred in 1645. For several years before that, Hals had received fewer and fewer commissions. The spontaneity of his portraits which had so pleased his contemporaries became unfashionable with the next generation, who already wanted portraits which were more morally reassuring — who demanded in fact the prototypes of that official bourgeois hypocritical portraiture which has gone on ever since.

In 1645 Hals painted a portrait of a man in black looking over the back of a chair. Probably the sitter was a friend. His expression is another one that Hals was the first to record. It is the look of a man who does not believe in the life he witnesses, yet can see no alternative. He has considered, quite impersonally, the possibility that life may be absurd. He is by no means desperate. He is interested. But his intelligence isolates him from the current purpose of men and the supposed purpose of God. A few years later Hals painted a self-portrait displaying a different character but the same expression.

As he sits at the table it is reasonable to suppose that he reflects on his situation. Now that he receives so few commissions, he is in severe financial difficulties. But his financial crisis is secondary in his own mind to his doubts about the meaning of his work.

When he does paint, he does so with even greater mastery than previously. But this mastery has itself become a problem. Nobody before Hals painted portraits of such immediacy. Earlier artists painted portraits of greater dignity and greater sympathy, implying greater permanence. But nobody before seized upon the momentary personality of the sitter as Hals has done. It is with him that the notion of ‘the speaking likeness’ is born. Everything is sacrificed to the demands of the sitter’s immediate presence.

Or almost everything, for the painter needs a defence against the threat of becoming the mere medium through whom the sitter presents himself. In Hals’s portraits his brushmarks increasingly acquire a life of their own. By no means all of their energy is absorbed by their descriptive function. We are not only made acutely aware of the subject of the painting, but also of how it has been painted. With ‘the speaking likeness’ of the sitter is also born the notion of the virtuoso performance by the painter, the latter being the artist’s protection against the former.

Yet it is a protection that offers little consolation, for the virtuoso performance only satisfies the performer for the duration of the performance. Whilst he is painting, it is as though the rendering of each face or hand by Hals is a colossal gamble for which all the sharp, rapid brushstrokes are the stakes. But when the painting is finished, what remains? The record of a passing personality and the record of a performance which is over. There are no real stakes. There are only careers. And with these — making a virtue of necessity — he has no truck.

Whilst he sits there, people — whose seventeenth-century Dutch costumes by now surprise us — come to the other end of the table and pause there. Some are friends, some are patrons. They ask to be painted. In most cases Hals declines. His lethargic manner is an aid. And perhaps his age as well. But there is also a certain defiance about his attitude. He makes it clear that, whatever may have happened when he was younger, he no longer shares their illusions.

Occasionally he agrees to paint a portrait. His method of selection seems arbitrary: sometimes it is because the man is a friend: sometimes because the face interests him. (It must be made clear that this second act covers a period of several years.) When a face interests him, we perhaps gather from the conversation that it is because in some way or another the character of the sitter is related to the problem that preoccupies Hals, the problem of what it is that is changing so fundamentally during his lifetime.

It is in this spirit that he paints Descartes, that he paints the new, ineffective professor of theology, that he paints the minister Herman Langelius who ‘fought with the help of God’s words, as with an iron sword, against atheism’, that he paints the twin portraits of Alderman Geraerdts and his wife.

The wife in her canvas is standing, turned to the right and offering a rose in her outstretched hand. On her face is a compliant smile. The husband in his canvas is seated, one hand limply held up to receive the rose. His expression is simultaneously lascivious and appraising. He has no need to make the effort of any pretence. It is as though he is holding out his hand to take a bill of credit that is owing to him.

At the end of the second act a baker claims a debt of 200 florins from Hals. His property and his paintings are seized and he is declared bankrupt.

The third act is set in the old men’s almshouse of Haarlem. It is the almshouse whose men and women governors Hals was commissioned to paint in 1664. The two resulting paintings are among the greatest he ever painted.

After he went bankrupt, Hals had to apply for municipal aid. For a long while it was thought that he was actually an inmate of the almshouse — which today is the Frans Hals Museum — but apparently this was not the case. He experienced, however, both extreme poverty and the flavour of official charity.

In the centre of the stage the old men who are inmates sit at the same banqueting table, as featured in the First Act, with bowls of soup before them. Again it strikes us as a nineteenth-century scene — Dickensian. Behind the old men at the table, Hals, facing us, is between two canvases on easels. He is now in his eighties. Throughout the act he peers and paints on both canvases, totally without regard to what is going on elsewhere. He has become thinner as very old men can.

On the left on a raised platform are the men governors whom he is painting on one canvas; on the right, on a similar platform, are the women governors whom he is painting on the other canvas.

The inmates between each slow spoonful stare fixedly at us or at one of the two groups. Occasionally a quarrel breaks out between a pair of them.

The men governors discuss private and city business. But whenever they sense that they are being stared at, they stop talking and take up the positions in which Hals painted them, each lost in his own fantasy of morality, their hands fluttering like broken wings. Only the drunk with the large tilted hat goes on reminiscing and occasionally proposing a mock banquet toast. Once he tries to engage Hals in conversation.

(I should point out here that this is a theatrical image; in fact the governors and governesses posed singly for these group portraits.)

The women discuss the character of the inmates and offer explanations for their lack of enterprise or moral rectitude. When they sense that they are being stared at, the woman on the extreme right brings down her merciless hand on her thigh and this is a sign for the others to stare back at the old men eating their soup.

The hypocrisy of these women is not that they give while feeling nothing, but that they never admit to the hate now lodged permanently under their black clothes. Each is secretly obsessed with her own hate. She puts out crumbs for it every morning of the endless winter until finally it is tame enough to tap on the glass of her bedroom window and wake her at dawn.

Darkness. Only the two paintings remain — two of the most severe indictments ever painted. They are projected side by side to fill a screen across the whole stage.

Offstage there is the sound of banqueting. Then a voice announces: ‘He was eighty-four and he had lost his touch. He could no longer control his hands. The result is crude and, considering what he once was, pathetic.’

1966

Auguste Rodin

‘People say I think too much about women,’ said Rodin to William Rothenstein. Pause. ‘Yet after all, what is there more important to think about?’

The fiftieth anniversary of his death. Tens of thousands of plates of Rodin sculptures have been specially printed this year for anniversary books and magazine features. The anniversary cult is a means of painlessly and superficially informing a ‘cultural élite’ which for consumer-market reasons needs constantly to be enlarged. It is a way of consuming — as distinct from understanding — history.

Of the artists of the second half of the nineteenth century who are today treated as masters, Rodin is the only one who was internationally honoured and officially considered illustrious during his working life. He was a traditionalist. ‘The idea of progress,’ he said, ‘is society’s worst form of cant.’ From a modest petit-bourgeois Parisian family, he became a master artist. At the height of his career he employed ten other sculptors to carve the marbles for which he was famous. From 1900 onwards his declared annual income was in the region of 200,000 francs: in fact it was probably considerably higher.

A visit to the Hôtel de Biron, the Rodin Museum in Paris, where versions of most of his works are to be seen, is a strange experience. The house is peopled by hundreds of figures: it is like a Home or a Workhouse of statues. If you approach a figure and, as it were, question it with your eyes, you may discover much of incidental interest (the detail of a hand, a mouth, the idea implied by the title, etc.). But, with the exception of the studies for the Balzac monument and of the Walking Man which, made twenty years earlier, was a kind of prophetic study for the Balzac, there is not a single figure which stands out and claims its own, according to the first principle of free-standing sculpture: that is to say not a single figure which dominates the space around it.

All are prisoners within their contours. The effect on you is cumulative. You become aware of the terrible compression under which these figures exist. An invisible pressure inhibits and reduces every possible thrust outwards into some small surface event for the fingertips. ‘Sculpture’, Rodin claimed, ‘is quite simply the art of depression and protuberance. There is no getting away from that.’ Certainly there is no getting away from it in the Hôtel de Biron. It is as though the figures were being forced back into their material: if the same pressure were further increased, the three-dimensional sculptures would become bas-reliefs: if increased yet further the bas-reliefs would become mere imprints on a wall. The Gates of Hell are a vast and enormously complex demonstration and expression of this pressure. Hell is the force which presses these figures back into the door. The Thinker, who overlooks the scene, is clenched against all outgoing contact: he shrinks from the very air that touches him.

During his lifetime Rodin was attacked by philistine critics for ‘mutilating’ his figures — hacking off arms, decapitating torsos, etc. The attacks were stupid and misdirected, but they were not entirely without foundation. Most of Rodin’s figures have been reduced to less than they should be as independent sculptures: they have suffered oppression.

It is the same in his famous nude drawings in which he drew the woman’s or dancer’s outline without taking his eyes off the model, and afterwards filled it in with a water-colour wash. These drawings, though often striking, are like nothing so much as pressed leaves or flowers.

This failure of his figures (always with the exception of the Balzac) to create any spatial tension with their surroundings passed unnoticed by his contemporaries because they were preoccupied with their literary interpretations, which were sharpened by the obvious sexual significance of many of the sculptures. Later it was ignored because the revival of interest in Rodin (which began about fifteen to twenty years ago) concentrated upon the mastery of ‘his touch’ upon the sculptural surface. He was categorized as a sculptural ‘Impressionist’. Nevertheless it is this failure, the existence of this terrible pressure upon Rodin’s figures, which supplies the clue to their real (if negative) content.

The figure of the emaciated old woman, She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife, with her flattened breasts and her skin pressed against the bone, represents a paradigmatic choice of subject. Perhaps Rodin was dimly aware of his predisposition.

Often the action of a group or a figure is overtly concerned with some force of compression. Couples clasp each other (vide The Kiss where everything is limp except his hand and her arm both pulling inwards). Other couples fall on each other. Figures embrace the earth, swoon to the ground. A fallen caryatid still bears the stone that weighs her down. Women crouch as though pressed, hiding, into a corner.

In many of the marble carvings figures and heads are meant to look as if they have only half emerged from the uncut block of stone: but in fact they look as though they are being compressed into and are merging with the block. If the implied process were to continue, they would not emerge independent and liberated: they would disappear.

Even when the action of the figure apparently belies the pressure being exerted upon it — as with certain of the smaller bronzes of dancers — one feels that the figure is still the malleable creature, unemancipated, of the sculptor’s moulding hand. This hand fascinated Rodin. He depicted it holding an incomplete figure and a piece of earth and called it The Hand of God.

Rodin explains himself:

No good sculptor can model a human figure without dwelling on the mystery of life: this individual and that in fleeting variations only reminds him of the immanent type; he is led perpetually from the creature to the creator … That is why many of my figures have a hand, a foot, still imprisoned in the marble block; life is everywhere, but rarely indeed does it come to complete expression or the individual to perfect freedom.¹

Yet if the compression which his figures suffer is to be explained as the expression of some kind of pantheistic fusion with nature, why is its effect so disastrous in sculptural terms?

Rodin was extraordinarily gifted and skilled as a sculptor. Given that his work exhibits a consistent and fundamental weakness, we must examine the structure of his personality rather than that of his opinions.

Rodin’s insatiable sexual appetite was well-known during his lifetime, although since his death certain aspects of his life and work (including many hundreds of drawings) have been kept secret. All writers on Rodin’s sculpture have noticed its sensuous [sic] or sexual character: but many of them treat this sexuality only as an ingredient. It seems to me that it was the prime motivation of his art — and not merely in the Freudian sense of a sublimation.

Isadora Duncan in her autobiography describes how Rodin tried to seduce her. Finally — and to her later regret — she resisted.

Rodin was short, square, powerful with close-cropped head and plentiful beard … Sometimes he murmured the names of his statues, but one felt that names meant little to him. He ran his hands over them and caressed them. I remember thinking that beneath his hands the marble seemed to flow like molten lead. Finally he took a small quantity of clay and pressed it between his palms. He breathed hard as he did so … In a few moments he had formed a woman’s breast … Then I stopped to explain to him my theories for a new dance, but soon I realised that he was not listening. He gazed at me with lowered lids, his eyes blazing, and then, with the same expression that he had before his works, he came towards me. He ran his hands over my neck, breast, stroked my arms and ran his hands over my hips, my bare legs and feet. He began to knead my whole body as if it were clay, while from him emanated heat that scorched and melted me. My whole desire was to yield to him my entire being …²

Rodin’s success with women appears to have begun when he first began to become successful as a sculptor (aged about forty). It was then that his whole bearing — and his fame — offered a promise that Isadora Duncan describes so well because she describes it obliquely. His promise to women is that he will mould them: they will become clay in his hands: their relation to him will become symbolically comparable to that of his sculptures.

When Pygmalion returned home, he made straight for the statue of the girl he loved, leaned over the couch, and kissed her. She seemed warm: he laid his lips on hers again, and touched her breast with his hands — at his touch the ivory lost its hardness, and grew soft: his fingers made an imprint on the yielding surface, just as wax of Hymettus melts in the sun and, worked by men’s fingers, is fashioned into many different shapes, and made fit for use by being used.³

What we may term the Pygmalion promise is perhaps a general element in male attraction for many women. When a specific and actual reference to a sculptor and his clay is at hand, its effect simply becomes more intense because it is more consciously recognizable.

What is remarkable in Rodin’s case is that he himself appears to have found the Pygmalion promise attractive. I doubt whether his playing with the clay in front of Isadora Duncan was simply a ploy for her seduction: the ambivalence between clay and flesh also appealed to him. This is how he described the Venus de’ Medici:

Is it not marvellous? Confess that you did not expect to discover so much detail. Just look at the numberless undulations of the hollow which unites the body and the thigh … Notice all the voluptuous curvings of the hip … And now, here, the adorable dimples along the loins … It is truly flesh … You would think it moulded by caresses! You almost expect, when you touch this body, to find it warm.

If I am right, this amounts to a kind of inversion of the original myth and of the sexual archetype suggested by it. The original Pygmalion creates a statue with whom he falls in love. He prays that she may become alive so that she may be released from the ivory in which he has carved her, so that she may become independent, so that he can meet her as an equal rather than as her creator. Rodin, on the contrary, wants to perpetuate an ambivalence between the living and the created. What he is to women, he feels he must be to his sculptures. What he is to his sculptures, he wants to be to women.

Judith Cladel, his devoted biographer, describes Rodin working and making notes from the model.

He leaned closer to the recumbent figure, and fearing lest the sound of his voice might disturb its loveliness, he whispered: ‘Hold your mouth as though you were playing the flute. Again! Again!’

Then he wrote: ‘The mouth, the luxurious protruding lips sensuously eloquent … Here the perfumed breath comes and goes like bees darting in and out of the hive …’

How happy he was during these hours of deep serenity, when he could enjoy the untroubled play of his faculties! A supreme ecstasy, for it had no end:

‘What a joy is my ceaseless study of the human flower!

‘How fortunate that in my profession I am able to love and also to speak of my love!’⁴

We can now begin to understand why his figures are unable to claim or dominate the space around them. They are physically compressed, imprisoned, forced back by the force of Rodin as dominator. Objectively speaking these works are expressions of his own freedom and imagination. But because clay and flesh are so ambivalently and fatally related in his mind, he is forced to treat them as though they were a challenge to his own authority and potency.

This is why he never himself worked in marble but only in clay and left it to his employees to carve in the more intractable medium. This is the only apt interpretation of his remark: ‘The first thing God thought of when he created the world was modelling.’ This is the most logical explanation of why he found it necessary to keep in his studio at Meudon a kind of mortuary store of modelled hands, legs, feet, heads, arms, which he liked to play with by seeing whether he could add them to newly created bodies.

Why is the Balzac an exception? Our previous reasoning already suggests the answer. This is a sculpture of a man of enormous power striding across the world. Rodin considered it his masterpiece. All writers on Rodin are agreed that he also identified himself with Balzac. In one of the nude studies for it the sexual meaning is quite explicit: the right hand grips the erect penis. This is a monument to male potency. Frank Harris wrote of a later clothed version and what he says might apply to the finished one: ‘Under the old monastic robe with its empty sleeves, the man holds himself erect, the hands firmly grasping his virility and the head thrown back.’ This work was such a direct confirmation of Rodin’s own sexual power that for once he was able to let it dominate him. Or, to put it another way — when he was working on the Balzac, the clay, probably for the only time in his life, seemed to him to be masculine.

The contradiction which flaws so much of Rodin’s art and which becomes, as it were, its most profound and yet negative content must have been in many ways a personal one. But it was also typical of an historical situation. Nothing reveals more vividly than Rodin’s sculptures, if analysed in sufficient depth, the nature of bourgeois sexual morality in the second half of the nineteenth century.

On the one hand the hypocrisy, the guilt, which tends to make strong sexual desire — even if it can be nominally satisfied — febrile and phantasmagoric; on the other hand the fear of women escaping (as property) and the constant need to control them.

On the one hand Rodin who thinks that women are the most important thing in the world to think about; on the other hand the same man who curtly says: ‘In love all that counts is the act.’

1967