The
Beginnings Reader,
I think proper, before we proceed any farther together, to acquaint thee that I
intend to digress through this whole
history as often as I see occasion; of which I am myself a better judge than
any pitiful critic whatever, and here I must desire all those critics to mind
their own business, and not to intermeddle with affairs or works which no way
concern them; for till they produce the authority by which they are constituted
judges, I shall not plead to their jurisdiction.
Henry Fielding Since I consider myself a child of Whistler in
counter-criticism, I am going to return historically to where he left off: Europe around the turn of the century. He kept his critics in check, and if
he had had any help from his
immediate successors we might not find ourselves in the mess
we are in. There
was a coincidence at the end of the nineteenth century of artistic unrest,
which was mostly merited, and critical presumptuousness, which was not. The inventiveness of people like Courbet,
Whistler, Manet, Van Gogh, and Gauguin might justly have been seen as a proper
tonic to an over-academicized milieu.
But of course the critics misinterpreted all of them as replacements for
art history and tradition instead of additions to it. The critics saw every novelty not as an enrichment, a widening,
of artistic sensibilty and achievement, but as a redefinition of art and a
dismissal of all previous art. In part
the artists were also to blame. There
have always been artists, overexcited by their own achievements, who have
wanted to claim that they have reinvented art.
But no one ever took them seriously before; it was all braggadoccio,
and everybody knew it. The Modern
critic was the first person in history to take this claim
seriously. Why? Because the critics needed a new art every few years—only an art that is
constantly in flux needs the administration of a critical overseer. A hundred or a thousand artists all claiming
to be the originator and ne plus ultra of art opens the door to the
"purveyors of analysis" who will weigh all the claims and pronounce
judgment. It
is this kind of thinking that leads to a career like that of Picasso, who was
forced to redefine art every five or ten years or risk oblivion. Quality is no longer the issue: critical
acclaim, i.e fame, is. Picasso
is famous because he was able to come up with something really novel everytime
he needed to: he played the game perfectly and stayed always one step ahead of
the passe. He is like Liz
Taylor, keeping her name in the papers no matter what it takes—it may start
out with something tangible like beauty or grace or fine acting, but it ends
with divorce number seven, face lift number five, or perfume number three. It doesn't matter as long as one remains
interesting, as long as "they remember who you are." It may start out with a Blue or Rose period,
but it ends with pointless collages, scrap art, and scribbled line drawings and
throwaway doodles with big, super-recognizable signatures. As an example of the destructive critical attitude
that underlies such waste, let us go back to Cezanne and his apotheosis by the
critics in the 1890's and early 1900's.
In H.W. Janson's History of Art, there are side by side
reproductions of Cezanne's copy of Christ in Limbo, and the original by
Sebastiano del Piombo. Sebastiano and
the other Renaissance masters believed that line quality, paint quality,
richness of color—in short, the finish of the piece—were important artistic
considerations. But Clive Bell, Roger
Fry, and many other important critics argued that Cezanne's abstraction brings
the formal qualities, the primary aesthetic qualities, to the forefront. For them Sebastiano's finish and his dexterity
are distractions. These
"surface" qualities not only fail to complete or to synthesize the
formal qualities, they overshadow or usurp them. For Clive Bell, especially, Cezanne's painting was a great
advance because its forms are not simply a "means of suggesting
emotions," they are actually "objects of emotion." For Bell, this formal quality defines
painting—there can be no art without it.
Cezanne is not simply interesting because his abstraction
clarifies the role of form in visual art; he is, for Bell, better than
Sebastiano. He supercedes Sebastiano
and makes him obsolete because abstraction is, in fact, purification. For Bell, Renaissance art becomes the
outmoded muddleheadedness of semi-barbarians whose surface effects are only
pagan seductions or Christian ornamentation. But Bell errs in
thinking form the only defining quality of painting. It is necessary, but hardly sufficient. It is easy to show that Sebastiano's line, color, composition,
surface treatment, and content are all aesthetically
"significant." Bell never
proves that unabstracted art is necessarily insignificant, or that the surface qualities of Titian or Raphael
or Sebastiano, for example, are only "accretions." Without this proof the
"purification" of a Cezanne is only a simplification, and must be
judged as such.
Furthermore, Bell does not realize how much Cezanne relies on the whole
visual system created by Renaissance painters.
Even with Cezanne's abstraction there is more left than lost. Most importantly, Cezanne is still painting objects. Somehow, Cezanne's fruit remains terribly
seductive for us. As long as we
recognize the object, the fruit, it will seduce us as both fruit and form,
just as it does in real life.
Cezanne accentuates the form, brings it forward, without obliterating
the fruit, and makes us taste the fruit, as it were, without first recognizing
everything about it. We are
attracted to the fruit through its form rather than through the totality of its
characteristics. In simplifying in this
way, he reminds us of something we already know, but forget in the rush to eat,
to consume, the world: the world is beautiful, and we consume it, we are
attracted to its consumption, because it is beautiful. Cezanne's
abstraction distances us from the fruit enough to see beyond our hunger to the cause
of our hunger. A real pear becomes,
in the routine of life, inseparable from our desire for it. Our sight of it and our hunger for it are
simultaneous. A painted pear, an
abstracted pear, breaks down the immediacy of this recognition, and our hunger
is held off for a moment as we admire the pear as form, as beauty. We are not only attracted to it, for a
moment we understand why we are atrracted to it, and this understanding gives
us pleasure. Are we attracted to the
fruit or to the form? If to the fruit,
Bell would call us philistines. For
as fruit, it is still terribly impure: it is only a physical thing, having
no spiritual or ideational content. I
would call us human. The fruit and the
form are inseparable. If Cezanne's
pears did not appeal to our hunger, their form would not appeal to our sense of
beauty. To deny this connection is to
deny the physical with a Victorian squeamishness that Bell, I am sure, believed
he was above and beyond. Fruit, as
fruit, is an impurity, just as sex, as sex, is an impurity. But trying to appreciate a Cezanne pear only
as form is like trying to have sex in the dark, only for procreation. Cezanne's abstraction is successful because
it manages to accentuate the fruit, the object, not obliterate it. It clarifies without destroying. Amplification through simplification. In this way Cezanne's accomplishment is not
so novel: this was the theory of Velasquez, Hals, Sargent, and Rodin, among
many, many others. Why is Cezanne the
father of abstraction instead of, say, Velasquez? There were no critics in the court of Philip. If this paper was useful to you in any way, please consider donating a dollar (or more) to the SAVE THE ARTISTS FOUNDATION. This will allow me to continue writing these "unpublishable" things. Don't be confused by paying Melisa Smith--that is just one of my many noms de plume. If you are a Paypal user, there is no fee; so it might be worth your while to become one. Otherwise they will rob us 33 cents for each transaction. |
