About Painting
The Old Paradigms: Are they still with us?
Dennis Young
In 1846, the 25-year-old French poet
Charles Baudelaire published a 72-page, pink-covered book reviewing the
Paris Salon. It was his second attempt at art criticism, and he was
feeling bold enough to commend very little of what he had seen. He paid
tribute to Delacroix and Ingres and a few others, but went as far as
declaring his hatred for the work of Horace Vernet. "We are in the
hospital of painting," he said. "We are probing its sores and its
sicknesses." And he identified these sicknesses as the "chic," the
"stereotype" and the "eclectic," concluding with his now familiar
assertion that the "great tradition" had been lost. It is the paradigms of
this tradition that, in the main, I propose to examine in what follows. I
shall also comment further on Baudelaire and his review.1
Let me emphasize at the start that the "paradigms" refer
to painting rather than to "art;" for painting existed long before the
wider concepts "art" and "artist" we use today -- concepts scarcely 300
years old. 2 Michelangelo, for instance, was known simply as a painter,
architect or sculptor, depending on what he was up to at the time, and
French texts still referred to him as an "artisan" in the 18th century --
there was no other term to use. When his younger friend, the painter and
self styled historian Giorgio Vasari, wrote his account of Michelangelo
and their predecessors, he therefore called the book The Lives of the
Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, not The Lives of
the "Artists." Yet this latter is the title under which it is often
misleadingly translated. Similarly, the French Academy began as L'Acadmie
Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and only became L'Acadmie des
Beaux-Arts in 1816. So my subject is painting, and, since the
significant paradigms of painting developed over a period of 500 years, I
shall move back and forth over the centuries to demonstrate their waxing
and waning. In the Middle Ages, it was commonly supposed that a painting
would be carried out "in the accustomed manner." Paintings were useful
objects, tendentious, didactic and ritualistic, and paid for according to
the amount of lapis lazuli or gold leaf specified in the contract, their
size, or the number of figures to be painted-- and their production was
regulated by the local guild, if indeed a painters' guild existed (if it
did not, painters were usually required to join the local saddle makers'
guild, since their occupation was frequently that of painting saddles). As
for aesthetics, Johan Huizinga, in his Waning of the Middle Ages,
and Umberto Eco, in his Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, agree
that if Medieval writers experienced anything like what is today called
"aesthetic," they thought of it as communion with God and expressed it in
terms of amazement, rather than beauty, even though theories of beauty
figured in their writings. "Beauty," for them, was entangled with the
pleasures of interpreting symbols, with the cosmic proportions of the
universe, with Platonist "divine light," with "goodness" and moral
harmony, and sometimes even with size -- in contrast to the hedonistic
pleasure provided by richly embellished objects, which was recorded at
length by Abbot Suger at St. Denis (and denounced, predictably, by Bernard
of Clairvaux). It is not until Poussin, in the mid-17th century, that we
find a painter claiming that the aim of visual art is "delectation" -- a
statement that Erwin Panofsky regarded as revolutionary. 3 Eco concludes that
"the medieval philosophy of beauty was cut off from its artistic practice
as if by a sheet of glass." It would have been more correct for him to
have said "artisanal practice," for the reason I have given; but, that
apart, he is obviously correct --the artisans were too lowly for anyone to
want to get inside their heads, whether they were weavers, shoemakers,
jewellers or painters.
An occupation known as painting
The evolution from "painters" to "artists" was slow, and
for our purposes may be said to have begun in a manuscript book written
around 1400 by the Italian painter Cennino Cennini (none of whose actual
works have come down to us). This book he called "Il Libro dell
Arte"(correctly translated as "The Craftsman's Handbook"
because, to underline the point again, "arte," like the word "craft" in
Germanic languages, in those days meant "skill"). Cennini tells us that he
is writing about "an occupation known as painting." This occupation, he
says, "calls for imagination and skill of hand" -- and he goes on
about the "aim" of such skill, which turns out to be "to discover
things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural
objects." I interpret this as a statement about the noumenal, or spiritual
-- or, about ways of signifying these (I realize that "noumenal"
is a term invented by Kant, but Cennini's reference to "things hiding
themselves under the shadow of natural objects" is surely close). Equally
important, Cennini moots the word "imagination" for the first time since
antiquity, even though "imagination" by no means then implied that the
painter could depart from the traditional repertoire of images (given free
reign in that regard, imagination was seen as potentially diabolical and
likely to produce what today we might call "the return of the repressed").
The appeal for "imagination" was simply for more freedom in the
composition of the prescribed images, which Cennini connected to something
he called "individual style." He says that, having acquired the manner of
one master, the painter, if he has "any imagination at all," should be
able to proceed to a style individual to himself -- curiously
enough by "copying from nature." Exactly what he meant we can never know,
though it sounds like an embryonic version of what we mean today.
Nevertheless, set in their 14th century context, these prescient
assertions, evoking "imagination," "individual style," and "copying from
nature" (as opposed to using pattern books), create a nice paradox: the
painter is supposed to copy nature, but his aim in doing so is to signify
something supernatural or noumenal that nature obscures from everyday
vision. Cennini thus stands, Janus-like, at an end and a beginning -- for
the idea of copying from nature was to gather momentum so rapidly that
talk of "things not seen" was largely eclipsed within 30 years of his
book. True, it would return briefly at the end of the 1400s as
Neoplatonism, and again in the 19th century in the doctrines of
Swedenborg, Blavatsky and Steiner, to give us The Symbolist
Manifesto of 1886, but for the best part of the 500 years following
Cennini, painters would work within the paradigm formed by his notions of
imagination, copying from nature, and individual style.
Cennini also promoted the opinion that painting deserved
better than its classification among the so-called "Mechanical Arts,"
where saddle-making was itself only a sub-section of armouring, and where
it was often painting's dismal fate to have to look up to both. And his
solution was ambitious -- he packaged his new theses as an appeal for
painting to be reclassified among the so-called Seven Liberal Arts of the
universities (by the side of rhetoric, dialectic and grammar and, above
all, geometry). Such a move would have stood to raise the social status of
painters nearer to that of poets, although it would not have found much
support among poets themselves (who were often wealthy amateurs) or among
the theologians and philosophers who had entrenched the medieval division
of labour in terms of a numerology laid down by their classical forebears.
As far as they were concerned, there was an absolute barrier between the
intelligentsia of the seven liberal arts, who worked with their heads and
communicated in Latin, and the rest of the world, including painters, who
worked with their hands and spoke and read, if they read at all, in the
vulgar tongue.
Perspective
However, the status of painters was to take a
significant jump due to something Cennini had not foreseen -- for within
20 years or so of Cennini's handbook, the architect Brunelleschi was to
announce the first unified method of monocular perspective. The fact that
unified perspective should have been rationalized by an architect has
never been adequately explained, for painters themselves had long
struggled unsuccessfully to achieve it. However that may be, by 1435 the
elements of perspective drawing had not only been invented but laid out
theoretically in a treatise by Leon Battista Alberti, in complete
opposition to Cennini's assertion that the role of painting was "to make
visible the invisible." The aim of painting now became the reproduction of
the visible. Thus, on the very first page of his treatise, Della
Pittura, "About Pictures," Alberti states specifically "The painter
has nothing to do with things that are not visible." And he adds, "a
picture is nothing other than a cross-section of a visual pyramid upon a
certain surface." Painters, he says, take a surface and "present the
forms of objects on this surface as if it were transparent glass."
This new paradigm of the canvas surface as "transparent" came not only
with a perspective formula for creating the illusion, but with much more.
For instance, Alberti took up Cennini's assertion that painters should
have the status of poets, and, going further, launched the idea of the
"learned painter" -- learned in geometry and perspective, but also in
classical mythology and the Christian stories.
In contrast to Cennini, Alberti wrote from a
philosophical point of view that may be called Aristotelian, or even
positivist, in its emphasis on observation and experiment -- and if we
look at the rejection, 450 years later, of his view that "painters have
nothing to do with things that are not visible," that rejection (by the
French Symbolists whom we have already noted), was accompanied,
predictably, by polemics against positivism and materialism --
and even for hierarchy, as opposed to democracy.
Perspective drawing, then as now, relied upon a fictive
monocular peephole, through which the painter was assumed to be regarding
the world as he built up an illusionist representation of it. So, to
experience the illusion perfectly, the viewer should really have stood at
a peephole with her eye in a position replicating the painter's. However,
painters took little regard of the fact that viewers might never be able
to place themselves at such a spot and that they would for this reason
actually receive a distorted, or "anamorphic," view of the representation.
In fact, this anamorphosis had been understood, and compensated for, prior
to Alberti, in the Gothic cathedrals, where sculptures to be seen from
below were often elongated. However, we have all had the experience in the
movies where our perception quickly compensates for the anamorphic
distortions that occur when we sit at the side of the screen, and it would
have been odd if the early perspectivists had not understood it too.
Indeed, by 1550, highly distorted anamorphic images began to proliferate
just for amusement -- and 200 years after Alberti the Baroque muralists
even solved the anamorphic problems presented by painting on the inside of
a dome. However, it is likely that no painting, however ambitious,
conforms to every last refinement of perspective theory -- which would
mean not only the precise positioning of the observer but also a specially
conceived concave surface to support the painting at a constant radius
from the eye.
Of course, there is no such thing as binocular
perspective (though Cézanne seems to have attempted a kind of binocular
painting with shimmering contours), and perspective was not really a
science, though it was often called such. Perspective was an invented
tool. Still, its raison d'ètre was, like that of science, to
provide ordered representations of the phenomenal world, and until the
invention of photography it remained, in this, supreme. Nor did the advent
of photography end its utility -- for it became something called
"engineering drawing" without which the design of the machinery of the
industrial age would have been impossible -- an ironic ending to what
began as a humanistic triumph of the intellect.
Correspondences
However, the Renaissance conquest of the phenomenal
world did not immediately eclipse the medieval concept of "things not
seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects," a concept
which gained new legitimacy on the formation in Florence, in 1457, of an
academy for the study of the manuscripts arriving there after the fall of
Constantinople. This academy expanded a notion from Plato, dear to various
medieval philosophers, that the final aim of human existence was a vision
of beauty and light -- a notion that evolved into a species of sun worship
that even seems to have been behind the theory of the heliocentric
universe proposed by Copernicus (one of the great paradigm shifts of all
time). Michelangelo attended this Neoplatonist academy from the age of 15,
and, like Botticelli, derived from it the inspiration for some of his more
bizarre imagery (as in the tomb of Giuliano de'Medici). Leonardo, in
contrast, defied the trend and effectively backed Alberti, insisting that
truths must be tested by the senses ("all else is clamour," he is supposed
to have said).
As the Catholic Church's Counter-Reformation began,
however, Neoplatonism waned for several centuries, until the Symbolists
resurrected it. For instance, Gauguin's adoption of Symbolism was
coincident with his encountering a circle of younger artists who claimed
to be reading Plotinus and the Cabala and adopting the cult of Mithras.
Hence the appearance of dreamscapes and of the Tau cross in his paintings
of that time. The circle also read fragments from the self-styled 18th
century mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg, who had borrowed from Plotinus a
theory of "correspondences" which held that all things in the phenomenal
world have a corresponding echo in the spiritual. This convenient
discovery had been taken up by Baudelaire in an essay of 1855, and
elaborated in a poem by him, actually called "Correspondences," in 1857.
Indeed, Baudelaire was so intrigued by the ideas of Swedenborg that the
hero of his early novel Le Fanfarlo was cast as actually keeping
a copy of Swedenborg's writings by his bed; and Baudelaire's poem, whose
Swedenborgian first line states, "Nature is a temple -- with living
pillars," thus became an anthem for the symbolist movement. In the same
poem Baudelaire also confirmed his interest in synaesthesia (that colours
could be heard and sounds be seen as colours, and so on), something that
Kandinsky was later to claim he actually experienced (hence Kandinsky's
woodcuts called Klange: "Sound"). The poet Mallarmé, who
succeeded Baudelaire among the Paris intelligentsia, also espoused the
noumenal, which he thought could be achieved by, among other methods, what
he called "vagueness." Hence the vagueness of formal definition in
faux naïf paintings of that time by Vuillard, Bonnard and others,
and hence the later co-opting of Monet to the symbolist camp at the time
of his almost unreadable paintings of the façade of Rouen cathedral (a
complete turnaround from the earlier casting of him as a "positivist" with
the other impressionists). Ultimately, the theory of vagueness amounted to
offering a poem or a painting as an object open to a multitude of shifting
perceptions: an object that supposedly carried intuitions of the noumenal
by its very manner of being in the world. This idea still clings
to the arts, in spite of the critique from semiology which asserts that
what we really see or hear are the signifiers of a theory, and it
is surprising how many abstract painters have rationalized their work this
way: not only Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, but also Rothko and Barnet
Newman, and, most recently, the American painter Brice Marden. Commenting
on this in the 1890s to his son Lucien, the aging socialist vigilante,
Camille Pissaro, saw it as "the bourgeoisie restoring superstition to the
people," while the great 20th century skeptic, Marcel Duchamp, one of the
few people of the past century who actually made a study of perspective,
began a monumental work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors,
Even, which displays astonishing perspective skills in order to
collapse the tension between noumenal and phenomenal in sardonic laughter.
As you may know, Duchamp then went on to invent a method of creating
stereoscopic illusions for persons with only monocular vision --
something that until then had been thought impossible.
Academy
The institutions within which the old paradigms evolved
were, of course, the academies. The first academy of visual arts came
about in Florence in 1563. It was a product of complex motives, but it
will suffice to say that it came in response to appeals by the aging
Michelangelo and his friend Vasari (who wrote the "Lives"), who together
persuaded the Medici family to do for painting, sculpture and architecture
what their earlier "Academy of Letters" had done for the Tuscan language.
The result was a drawing academy (the Academia del'Disegno) emphasizing
perspective, mathematics, geometry, optics, and the study of the human
frame. Indeed, the emphasis on geometry in the drawing academy was so
strong that one of the two chairs of mathematics in the University of Pisa
was transferred to Florence, and in 1610 Galileo himself moved there. This
was encouraging: painters and sculptors now met with practitioners of the
liberal arts on a more equal footing, and with the official sanction of
the state. Indeed the title of "academician," conferred on selected
painters from time to time, became a minor order of nobility. However, the
academies did not teach painting. You learnt to draw in the academies, but
to learn to paint you had to enrol in the studio of a painter, preferably
a member of the academy, very much as the medieval apprentice had been
indentured to a master painter of the painters' guild -- and your
experience there would have been similar. After all, the academicians
needed cheap labour too.
Silent Poetry
Needless to say, academic theory leaned on Alberti's
Della Pittura, since it is there that we first read that the aim
of painting should be to retell the history and myth found in biblical or
classical writings. Indeed, soon after Alberti, it was popular to quote
the Greek Simonides, who had decreed that painting should be seen as
"silent poetry" and poetry heard as "a speaking picture." Leonardo,
standing aside from his contemporaries, as usual, and actually attempting
to raise painting above poetry, made fun of this and called poetry
"painting for the blind." But the academies made it a doctrine, and
seeking other snippets from the past came upon an essay, The Art of
Poetry, by the Latin poet Horace, which produced the phrase "ut
pictura poesis" ("as painting, so poetry").4 They also adopted
Aristotle's Poetics, where, in his section on "the objects of imitation,"
Aristotle says that poets, like painters, imitate men in action
and make them better or worse than average -- a statement taken to mean
that the human body in action gave a picture of the human soul.
As these bits and pieces were distilled over the years,
they were assembled into a theory formalized around the time of the
Drawing Academy by Ludovico Dolce. This formalization of the paradigm
"ut pictura poesis" produced five restrictive precepts that were
to serve the academy for almost 300 years. The precepts concerned
"instruction and delight," "imitation of classical models," "invention,"
"decorum" and "expression," and I shall discuss them in that order.
The first restrictive precept, that of "instruction and
delight", came from both Horace and Aristotle -- it meant that the aim of
the chosen story (the "istoria", or "history painting," as it
came to be called), must be to instruct the viewer in noble and decorous
behaviour, though in a manner that would please the eye, as poetry pleased
the ear. This marriage of "instruction" and "delight" survived for 200
years, and began to falter only after the death of Louis XIV of France,
when "delight" was severed from the equation during the period of the
regency, to became an excuse for hedonistic and erotic indulgence, as
portrayed for instance in the works of Watteau, and later actually
realized in the paintings of Boucher (what the theorists of the rococo
period called "divertissement"). You can follow this hedonistic
element through revivals of the rococo, like that which produced Renoir's
Bathers, through Gauguin and art nouveau, and then
through Bonnard and Matisse -- the latter writing his own hedonist
manifesto in 1908. After World War II, the New York critic Clement
Greenberg actually appealed for a "bland Apollonian art" (a way of
characterizing Matisse's hedonism). It can be argued that to some extent
his appeal was successful, but the existentialist temper of the time
frowned upon it and painters were always averse to seeming "merely
decorative" (something Matisse managed to avoid).
However that may be, the didactic aspect of "instruction
and delight," though increasingly ignored, was not entirely discarded,
since a travesty of it remained in the state propaganda machine,
particularly in the form of portraits. Furthermore, aristocratic hedonism
was to provoke a bourgeois moralist reaction that produced the
sentimentality of Greuze and, eventually, a return to themes of Roman
republican virtue, in the work of Jacques-Louis David, which helped to
bring about the downfall of the aristocracy itself. And, of course, a
version of "instruction" continued through the 19th century, both for and
against the various regimes, producing Goya's attacks on corruption and
war, Courbet's "Realism," the journal Le Réaliste and, as the newspaper
industry flourished, a mountain of caricature dominated by Daumier. Later,
in Stalin's Soviet Union, Zhdanov transformed it into Socialist Realism,
and a variation is alive today in the tendentious works of Hans Haacke,
and text pieces by Les Levine, Barbara Kruger and others -- but not really
in painting.
The second restriction within "ut pictura
poesis," that on "imitation," followed from the "instruction" idea. It
was pointed out that, for instruction in ideal human nature, it
was no use looking to living people -- and the painter should therefore
look to classical sculptures. Hence the portrait painter's sitter would be
posed after an image from the antique and hence David's quotations from
such sources -- and hence also the practice of drawing from the antique in
art colleges that continued through much of the 20th century, where
students were to be found, drawing from casts of the antique, whose
instructors were ignorant of the high-minded reason for which the practice
had been initiated.
The third restriction was on "invention," which had
remained unchanged since Cennini declared that it could apply only to the
composition, not to the subject, of the painting. In other words,
Christian stories and classical myths were supposed to provide the themes
by which "instruction" in noble behaviour would take place, and painters
were not encouraged to provide themes of their own, unless they chose
inferior subjects. In fact the academies for this reason created an actual
hierarchy of subjects based on the antiquated "Great Chain of Being" --
antique stories, or "history paintings," coming at the top, along with
portraits of the monarch, then portraits of the nobility (often with poses
taken from classical sculpture); then animal paintings; then landscapes
(because trees were lower in the Great Chain than animals); then still
lifes; and finally "genre" or "low life" paintings not fit to be seen in a
palace. The ideological implications of this are obvious to us but were
not, of course, to the painters themselves, although, not surprisingly,
painters of prestige bridled under such restraints. For instance, when
Veronese was brought before a tribunal of the Inquisition in Venice, for
being over-inventive in his portrayal of The Last Supper, he not
only pleaded that painters had been granted the same license as poets,
but, when ordered nevertheless to alter the work, he avoided doing so by
changing its title to Christ in the House of Levi, a theme where
the same restraints did not apply! Thus was the way prepared for
Baudelaire, in his reviews, to actually give marks for "invention."
It is the fourth and fifth of these restrictions that
are the most interesting. The fourth, that of "decorum," forbade excesses,
exaggerations and repulsive scenes, and required that every gesture of
limb and drapery be appropriate to the purpose of the story portrayed.
Horace (the Latin theorist) had insisted on similar limits, though his
examples seem odd. For instance, he warned against joining a human head to
a horse's neck or spreading varicoloured plumage over the limbs of
animals. This almost sounds like a tract against 20th century surrealist
imagery (after all, the so-called "surrealist marvelous" was supposed to
come exactly from the "chance encounter" of such incompatible things).
However, although the concept of decorum had been tested from time to time
(think for instance of Carravagio painting St. Matthew with dirty feet),
its erosion was slow. According to Walter Benjamin, as late as 1830 de
Vigny's translation of Othello failed because it was unacceptable
for a handkerchief to figure in a tragedy! However, de Vigny was still
alive to see Baudelaire make his notorious and calculated break with
decorum by the publication in 1857 of his collected poems, Flowers of
Evil. Baudelaire's poem "Carrion" in that book already sounds like
something from Salvador Dali: "Flies swarmed over the putrid belly / From
which emerged black battalions / Of maggots, which flowed like a thick
liquid / Along those human rags...." The success de scandale of
Surrealism came from similar breaches of decorum. Indeed, without a
principle of decorum, scandale would be impossible -- just as,
with few taboos to break today, scandals have become an uphill task for
painters and poets alike.
Expression
The final precept in the doctrine of "ut pictura
poesis" concerned "expression." In its earliest form, this was a
matter of getting right the gestures and facial emotions in the painted
images, so that viewers might experience those emotions themselves through
an assumed "sympathetic" faculty (something that psychology has to some
degree confirmed -- pointing out that if you contort your face to
look sad you can actually feel sad). However, in
practice it is not so easy. Even Alberti's Della Pittura had come
with a discussion of the problems that arise in depicting emotions:
"Think," says Alberti, "how, if you try to paint a laughing face, it can
come out as a weeping face." The problem remained so pressing 200 years
later that the first president of the French Academy, Charles Le Brun,
attempted a so-called "Anatomy of the Passions," based on Descarte's
theories about the pineal gland, which aimed at communicating the emotions
directly. At first glance this book seems astonishing: "rage"
really seems to communicate rage. But then you find that so does "fear,"
and you begin to see why he needs labels! In fact, he had unwittingly
devised a code, with the book as its key -- and unmediated
communication was as far away as ever. It was still in dispute only 20
years ago, when the editor of the journal Modern Painters, the
late Peter Fuller, referring to the classical sculpture of Laocoön and his
sons being strangled by serpents, asked historian Grizelda Pollock, "How
do we know that Laocoön is supposed to be in pain?" and she replied,
"Because we have studied the mode of production prevailing in Greece at
the time, and the signifying practice to which it gave rise." "But," said
Fuller, "Laocoön is being strangled by a sea monster!" and her
response was, "Yes, but just by looking at the sculpture we have no way of
knowing he is not enjoying it." Fuller seemed to think that she had
thereby reduced her case to absurdity, but many think that she had not.
Psychology has shown that although visual forms may be "expressive," it
helps to have cues to tell us what they are expressive of (tears of joy,
or of sorrow?). I am reminded of an experience I had years ago when,
glancing at a muted television, I saw a crowd of obviously Arabic people
waving white scarves and dancing in what appeared to be a jubilant parade
-- then I turned up the sound and learnt that they were people from the
village where President Sadat of Egypt had been born, who were mourning
his assassination in a fashion customary to Egypt. I should have
remembered my Alberti.
Expressionism
However, the limiting of "expression" to the figures
portrayed was to die with the advent of van Gogh, who, as he acquired
the knack of the Impressionist brush stroke and encountered Gauguin's use
of colour, thought he could convey his own state of mind through
clashing colours, writhing contours and the ostensibly vigorous
application of the paint . Thus began the view that "expression" need no
longer be confined to the figures acting out their theatrical roles within
the picture, as decreed by "ut pictura poesis." Instead,
"expression" could be extended to the painter whose colours and marks
brought into existence the figures on the picture surface -- colours and
marks which by their lurid nature and agitated handling, in paintings by
Van Gogh, Munch or Nolde, could transmit the painter's own
exacerbated emotional states. However, it has to be said that claims to
communicate emotional states directly by colour and the handling
of paint are at least as problematic as Le Brun's efforts to do so with
physiognomy. It can be shown here too that suchclaims are mistaken and
that Expressionism is in fact a second order image repertoire,
relying, like all pictorial art, on external sources, contexts and cues --
such as the letters that Van Gogh wrote to his brother Théo, or the
journals in which Munch once wrote "Art is your heart's
blood."
It is no accident that the idea of
expressionism, as a movement, became fashionable just as the
Nordic/Teutonic countries of Europe were creating new national identities
(Germany was unified in 1871, the composer Sibelius completed his
Finlandia Suite in 1899 just prior to the independence of Finland, and
Munch's Norway separated from Sweden in 1907). In short, an important part
of their nationalist agenda was a disengagement from the classical
heritage of Greece and Rome that had been enshrined in "ut pictura
poesis." The Swedish novelist Pär Lagerkvist, writing "anguish,
anguish, is my heritage" as the epigraph to all his books, can scarcely be
confused with Rabelais. The cultural side of such nationalistic
differentiation, warranted perhaps by what we now call "seasonal affective
disorder," followed from theories of cultural relativism set afoot by the
German "Storm and Stress" movement of the late 18th century -- theories
that were later condensed into the snappy catch phrase, "race, milieu and
moment," by the French theorist Hippolyte Taine, professor of art history
and aesthetics at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1863 (a
significant date, as we shall see). It is worth adding that Baudelaire,
who had discussed the contrast between Northern and Southern temperaments
in his Salon of 1846, proposed a formula that cited "l'èpoque, la
mode, la morale, la passion" as the determinants of style -- adding a
dandyish note to his compatriot's scientism.5
Grand Manner
As we have already said, the paradigm "ut pictura
poesis" determined the ranking of painters within the academy, where
the highest ranked painters were always the painters of the
istoria (the "history" painters) -- and not without
justification, since the skills involved in the design of a grand figure
composition were considerable, and the demand for such works in public
places, palaces and churches was heavy. "We measure a king by the grandeur
of his surroundings", said Jean-Baptiste Colbert, soon after the French
Academy was formed. This was a sentiment understood later by both Napoleon
I and Napoleon III, as well as by Louis XIV's successors, and dozens of
petty tyrants since. Colbert, who was both the Controller General of
Finance and Superintendent of Buildings under Louis XIV realized early in
the construction of the palace of Versailles that to fulfill his agenda of
aggrandisement it would be as well to have more academies -- so, besides
the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture, he created academies of
music, dance, architecture and science and even an academy of medals, as
well as a French Academy in Rome and the famous Rome Prize to go with it.
And, with Charles LeBrun, whom he appointed Director of the Académie, he
then determined a style suitable for his project -- the style known as
"The Grand Manner." Needless to say, the (now hilarious) subject set by
Colbert for the first Rome Prize competition turned out to be "Fame
Proclaiming the Marvels of the Reign of Louis XIV and Presenting his
Portrait to the Four Corners of the Globe," while six years later it was
"The King Granting Peace to Europe." It is interesting to note that the
Rome Prize competition was not to be abandoned until 1969, following the
French campus rebellions of 1968 -- when it was replaced by letters of
recommendation similar to those used for Canada Council grants today.
There was trouble in the French Academy from the start.
Le Brun's chief rival refused to join at all, and others joined mainly to
object to Le Brun and his promotion of Poussin. These were the followers
of Rubens -- led by a theorist called Roger de Piles who produced an
assessment of the great painters of history in order to give high marks to
Rubens and lower though not disrespectful marks to Le Brun and Poussin. Le
Brun, the leader of the Poussinistes, held views so rationalistic that he
had not only drawn up the physiognomy of the emotions that we have noted,
but had refused even to discuss colour, because it was not determined by
reason -- a somewhat extreme version of the attitude of formalist painters
down to the present day.
Inspired Genius
This lengthy quarrel, between the Poussinistes and the
Rubenistes, was to end in favour of the Rubenistes with the redefinition
of two ancient concepts -- those of "inspiration" and of "genius." The
Greeks had understood "inspiration" (being "breathed into" by your muse)
mainly as it affected actors and professional rhapsodes -- the reciters of
poetry. But Plato, with his distrust of poets, had laughed at it in his
dialogue Ion, and, since it was held that inspiration could not
be taught, the academy, like Plato, had given it a back seat.
However, with the redefinition of the word "genius," as the word we know
today, "inspiration" also got a lift.6 In classical times, that is to say, "genius" had
referred simply to the "spirit of the family," or the genetic makeup that
fathers handed on to children, and for the medievals it had even been
associated with the demonic because of its link to concupiscence. However,
as "inspiration" was rehabilitated and "genius" redefined, they were, as
we shall see, not only to encourage the more painterly, sketch-like
approach of the Rubenistes', but were to undermine the notion that
rigorous training was necessary to become a painter. They were also to
encourage the hyperbole of Shelley, who had actually translated Plato's
Ion yet in whose essay "The Defence of Poetry," we find the claim
that poets (and, by implication, painters) are "the unacknowledged
legislators of the world" who, like the ancient seers, are able to read
"the shadows which futurity castsupon the present" -- a notion amplified
from Aristotle's identification of poets as melancholics, to cast them as
pondering the human predicament from a lofty mountain top, disdainful of
the world below. This theme was also available from the Latin poet Horace
who had coined "ut pictura poesis." Horace had dismissed the
common people with the phrase profanum vulgus -- an expression
that two thousand years later lay in wait for Shelley's contemporary
Delacroix to repeat in his journal.
Genius and Sketches
The paradigm that equated inspiration and genius
with the painters' sketches was less lugubrious and became
enormously influential. Its traces survive even today. It too was first
mooted in Vasari's Lives, where he observes, "Many
painters achieve in their first sketch a boldness as if guided by the
fires of inspiration while, in finishing, the boldness vanishes." But, in
this, Vasari was once again ahead of his time, and the idea only took off
during the 18th century mutation of the word "genius" that we have just
described. This occurred alongside the emergence of art criticism -- so
that an early critic, Denis Diderot, having been electrified by watching
the painter Greuze make sketches (and almost certainly recalling Vasari),
could write, "A sketch is the artist's work when he is full of inspiration
and ardour, before reflection has toned things down. It is the artist's
soul expressing itself on canvas." If the word "authenticity" had been
around in those days Diderot would no doubt have used it too. Diderot's
contemporary, the German art historian Winckelmann declared the same about
modeling in clay, saying, "Modeling in clay is to the sculptor what
drawing on paper is to the painter in the soft clay, the genius of the
sculptor is seen in its utmost purity and truth." Diderot, of course, had
been the principal editor of the great Enlightenment project, The
Encyclopaedia, where it is explained for everyone to see, that
"genius" and "enthusiasm" are innate -- that they are "natural" and
therefore cannot be taught, any more than "inspiration" could be taught in
classical times. Such thinking added fuel to the dying embers of the
quarrel between the Poussinists and Rubenistes -- the Rubenistes arguing
for the marks of "genius" inscribed during the sketch, or what the Academy
called the "generative," phase of the composition, while the Poussinistes
believed that the "generative" phase must be followed by an "executive"
phase in which the work would indeed be completed. Thus the quarrel
between the Poussinistes and the Rubenistes became transformed into a new
dispute, during the 19th century, between the so-called "sketchers" and
the "finishers". Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus was not only
condemned for lack of decorum but also for his "failure" to distinguish a
painting from a sketch, -- though his critics were to moderate their
language later as the tide began to turn in favour of the "sketchers."
Sketch and Salon
The dispute was particularly exacerbated by the method
of examination for the Rome Prize.7 This required that a painted sketch be completed
on the first day of the competition and a tracing of it left with the
examiners -- the student being expected to research the project over the
next weeks and produce a "finished" painting that exactly matched the
sketch. Students thus spent time rehearsing the all important "generative"
or "sketch" phase of the process, at the expense of "finish." The chief
promoter of this method of examination was the painter Geurin,
significantly the teacher of both Géricault and Delacroix -- both in their
different ways Rubenistes. However that may be, the situation permitted
students with less and less training in "finish" to enter the competition,
and encouraged well-trained artists to entrench themselves against the
sketchers -- so that the conflict quickly embroiled the juries of the
Salon (the annual exhibition event of the Academy, was called the "Salon"
because it was at first located in the Salon Carré in the Louvre
Palace). From its very beginning, it had been important for a painter to
get work into the Salon. And from the beginning the juries had manifested
bias -- both political, and art-political. So much so that, after his
rejection in 1769, the painter Greuze was to boycott the Salon for the
rest of his life, and to prosper without it. The event caused such turmoil
that the French Revolutionaries declared an unjuried "Open" Salon in 1791,
which was followed in 1806 by a "Salon des Refusés" (an exhibition to show
the rejects). There was a show of rejectsin a dealer's gallery in 1827,
and during the 1848 Revolution, 5,000 works were shown in another "Open"
Salon -- all of them setting a precedent for the famous Salon des Refusés
of 1863.
The jury for the official Salon of 1863 was to reject
roughly 4,000 paintings, among which were works by Manet, Cézanne,
Jongkind, Bracquemond, Pissarro, Fantin-Latour, Legros and Whistler -- the
last three of whom, all admirers of Delacroix, were to found the first
explicitly avant-garde group of painters, the societé des trois
("We three, we shall be the front runners," wrote Legros to Whistler). The
protests that followed this massive rejection, were so vociferous that
they persuaded Napoleon III not only to decree that the refused paintings
should have a show of their own, but also to decree that instruction at
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with its insistence on "finish," had suppressed
the "creative genius" of students and that the Academy would therefore
lose control of the teaching there. The decree of 1863 may thus be said to
mark the triumph of the "sketchers." Not surprisingly, Ingres, who had
himself boycotted the Salon for the preceding 30 years, called the decree
"the destructive language of Romanticism which expects to know
everything without an effort to learn anything."
Opaque
Napoleon III, himself, might never have sponsored these
changes (the "sketchers" were not exactly Bonapartistes, and portraits of
Napoleon and his family were painted mostly by Winterhalter, an expert in
"finish"), but Napoleon was in the process of a liberalization of his
regime, partly as the result of a series of articles by the architect
Violet le Duc, who had pointed out that the British World's Fair of the
previous year had revealed the Brits ahead of France in numerous sectors
of the economy, and also in design. It is true that after Napoleon III was
deposed in 1871, the Academy regained control -- but things were never to
be the same. The "sketchiness" of the late works of the British landscape
painter Turner, advocated by John Ruskin, became popular in France, and
were to influence not only Monet (whose "sketchy" Impression:
Sunrise came eight years after the decree), but also Whistler, the
first painter to pour liquid paint onto canvas, and the first to appeal to
the public to look not through the painted surface, but
at it -- exactly reversing Alberti's "transparent glass"
metaphor of 400 years earlier, and stressing instead the "opacity" of the
canvas surface and the "foregrounding" of the medium. Whistler, as
you may know, was to sue the critic John Ruskin, over the question of
whether his paintings could be called "finished," and though he was
awarded only a penny in damages, he nevertheless did win his case, his
success confirming in law, as it were, the paradigm of the sketch
-- a paradigm where temperament alone, or even eccentricity, could be seen
as the sufficient basis on which to produce a painting, eventually
persuading even Emile Zola that art was simply "nature seen through a
temperament." It is worth adding that this "foregrounding of the medium"
was also vindicated by the Italian Giovanni Morelli who created from it
his influential theory of connoisseurship, by taking photos of the least
"finished" details in paintings, such as ears or fingernails, where he
theorized that an artist's personal calligraphy would show best. In this
way, from 1880 onwards, Morelli was actually able to reattribute a series
of old master works in galleries throughout Europe.
Silent Music
The mention of Whistler brings us to the paradigm of
music. During the 3,000 years when painting was regarded as mimetic it was
easy enough to claim its parallel with poetry, because according to the
ancients, they both "imitated" human action (Greek poetry not being
published in books, but in public forums where it was declaimed
theatrically by the reciter, or rhapsode -- he whom Plato had
mocked in Ion). Aristotle even discussed music as mimetic, though
he did not marry it to painting as he married poetry. Then, too, in a
quite other dimension we find that the Seven Liberal Arts of the classical
period placed music side by side with geometry -- a classification so firm
that 1,500 years later, on the Royal Portal of the cathedral at Chartres,
there is a depiction of Pythagoras himself holding a musical
instrument. And he appears again in Raphael's School of
Athens, working on the mathematics of musical intervals. This was
because the Pythagorians had investigated the relation of musical pitch to
the length of the monochord in single string instruments, and had thereby
bequeathed a musical substratum to all geometric proportions -- including
those of architecture and painting. Thus Poussin quoted Greek musical
parallels and Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the British Royal
Academy, held that "architecture applied itself directly to the
imagination, like music," because it came without the mediation of
subject matter (more problematic semiotics). And, just prior to
Reynolds, there was a chapter in Charles Avison's Essay on Musical
Expression, of 1771, that affirmed the parallel of music and
painting not only by expounding on the Pythagorian references to
geometrical proportion, but also by adding a concept of "expressiveness"
which, according to Avison, had the power of "exciting the most agreeable
passions of the soul."
The heavy duty philosophers of the following century
were to identify music with Kant's noumenon -- as "the thing in itself,"
where all else was "merely appearance." Music, according to Schopenhauer,
represented the "will" (or life-force) directly; and Schiller
asserted that "The plastic arts at their most perfect must become music,
and move us by the immediacy of their sensuous presence." The
key, as Reynolds had said, lay in music's "immediacy," something that
painting lacked because its subject matter (its "iconicity" or "mimesis")
supposedly got in the way. Nevertheless, in 1834 the critic Gustave
Planche, writing on Delacroix's highly mimetic Women of Algiers,
was to see in that work "the art of painting itself, reduced to its own
resources without the aid of a subject"! It is significant that
among Delacroix's friends were the great musical virtuosi Paganini and
Chopin, and that Delacroix had painted sketchy portraits of both, naming
music as the source of his deepest artistic experience. Thus Delacroix
could write in his journal of "an arrangement of colours, lights and
shadows...that is called the music of the picture," and add, "before
knowing what the painting represents you can be caught by this
musical harmony." In his "Salon of 1844," the critic Théophile
Thoré took up the same theme in reviewing Delacroix's work, asking, "What
is the dominant note in the harmony of the picture?" and replying,
"Velasquez would have said, 'I am in the silver-grey tones,' and
Delacroix, 'My symphony begins in purple major and continues in green
minor'." Similarly, Baudelaire, an admirer of Delacroix, as we saw
earlier, wrote in his Salon of 1846, "A good way to tell if a painting is
melodious or not is to look at it from a distance too great to understand
its subject. If it is melodious, it already has meaning." These references
all suggest that the paradigm of painting as silent poetry was
about to be replaced by the paradigm of painting as silent music
-- an absolutely radical change brought about as attention was drawn to
the colour and facture of the paint on the canvas surface, by the
quarrel between "sketchers" and "finishers" that we have just discussed.
In fact, the new paradigm was made explicit in 1859, in an article in the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts by the critic Louis Viardot, who coined
the phrase "ut pictura musica" to replace what he Whistler began
to call his paintings "symphonies," "nocturnes" and "arrangements," and
that in 1890 Seurat, in a now well-known letter to his friend Maurice
Beaubourg, outlined a quasi-scientific theory of how to create mood in
painting by the use of line and colour.
Abstract Language
However, it is the English essayist, Walter Pater, to
whom we turn for an ultimate definition, which we find in his 1877 essay
"The School of Giorgione." In this essay, Pater asserts that all art
"aspires to the condition of music" and even speaks of an "abstract
language" and of "abstract colour" (words then only beginning to gain
currency). However, it is significant that in this epoch-making statement
Pater speaks of the condition of music -- he is not suggesting
that paintings become music, since he insists that "each art has
its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm - its own special
responsibilities to its material" -- and he adds that the function of
criticism is to "estimate the degree to which a given work fulfils that
responsibility." Seventy five years later, the New York critic Clement
Greenberg was shamelessly to claim these insights as his own by rephrasing
them as the "area of proper competence of the medium," and demanding from
criticism the same measuring rod, without mentioning his source in
Pater.
The musical analogy was continued in the 20th century,
André Derain even taking a cue from Schoenberg's "emancipation of the
dissonance" of 1906 and announcing the same dissonant principle in the
painting of the Fauves. The broader paradigm spread to North America at
the time of World War I, and Greenberg used it somewhat obliquely during
World War II. I shall come back to that in a moment. Meantime it is worth
noting that the painter Jackson Pollock and the sculptor Anthony Caro,
endlessly discussed by Greenbergians, both invited the viewer to see their
work as "music," and in 1989 Gerhardt Richter, for whom Greenberg had
not the slightest affection, said the same. It seems they understood
music as a surrogate for the idea of the aesthetic object as "autotelic,"
as the thing that is an end in itself -- that has no purpose other than
its own existence. It was a way of avoiding further speech.
Medium Specificity
These notions of Pater's and Greenberg's may be said to
take up a discourse on "medium specificity" begun in an essay of 1766 by
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. This essay, written at the very time that
Avison's musical analogy hit the streets, actually sets out to attack the
theory of "ut pictura poesis" by another route -- by criticizing
an interpretation of the sculpture we have already visited in our
discussion of the semiotics of expression, the sculpture of Laocoön and
his sons being strangled by serpents. The subject is found in a poem of
Virgil's, and Lessing points out that in the poem Laocoön lets out a cry
of anguish as he struggles, whereas in the sculpture he seems only to
sigh. Here, says Lessing, is an example of sculpture (and, pari
passu, of painting) not doing what poetry does -- the
explanation being that they exist in different media. In a diachronic art
like poetry, he says, you can have someone scream (because the
scream is only a fragment of time in the unfolding story), whereas a wide
screaming mouth in a synchronic art like sculpture remains fixed for all
time, looks hideous and does a disservice to the artist's aim. It may well
be said that while Lessing here successfully attacks "ut pictura
poesis," he is at the same time inadvertently defending its principle
of decorum in his assertion that a screaming mouth is beyond the limit.
Certainly Edward Munch saw it this way, because it was after reading a
new translation of Lessing that Munch set out to make a painting of a
"scream" in defiance of both arguments. Following the trend of the time
that we have already noted in Taine's "race, milieu and moment," Munch
evidently set out to create the signifier of the Nordic-Teutonic
expressive temperament, by theorizing that a scream can be
portrayed without a breach of decorum -- so long as the painter is
Norwegian!
The fact was, however, that what Lessing also wanted to
do was to start a debate on the semiotics of the different media by
contrasting the signs of which pictorial art is composed (what today we
call iconic, or "motivated" signs) and the words of which poetry is
composed (what we call "arbitrary" signs). In fact, in that way, Lessing's
essay makes an excellent introduction to the high cubism and papiers
collés of Picasso's and Braque's, where the two types of sign (the
iconic and the verbal) are welded together -- except that Lessing is a
century and a half too early.
The combination of Pater and Lessing, both of them
demanding respect for what Greenberg came to call the "proper competence"
of the medium, resulted in an essay of Greenberg's of 1940, significantly
entitled "Towards a Newer Laocoön," where he identifies progress towards
"the area of proper competence" as the task of Modernism itself, and in an
essay of around the same time, "Avantgarde and Kitsch," he draws on
semiotics to reinforce the point, taking on even Aristotle himself, over
Aristotle's view that music imitates the state of the soul "immediately."
Here, Greenberg astutely points out that Aristotle omitted to say that the
Greeks used music only to accompany verse and that the words of the
verse therefore actually mediated the meaning of the music. Greenberg
quotes Plato's earlier saying that "when there are no words it is always
difficult to recognize the meaning of the music or to see that any worthy
object is imitated by it," and he, Greenberg, goes on to say that as this
function was abandoned, as the words and music got separated, music was
forced to withdraw into itself to discover its own raison d'être -- as
has been the case with painting of the modern period. This withdrawal
of painting into itself, he says, has meant that the best artists become
"artists' artists" and are cut off from a public unwilling to become
initiated into their esoteric discourse -- with the result that the
survival of culture is threatened as the field is left to "kitsch." This,
with significant qualifications (for it is really too simplistic), is
still true, though it is not my intent to elaborate upon it here. It may
be added, however, that a species of "reductivist" painting was to follow
Greenberg's, though without his blessing, further restricting the idea of
"proper competence" to the processes by which the paint might be
applied -- a paradigm still functional in North America today.
Sublime
Some artists of whom Greenberg thought well,
particularly Barnett Newman, evoked an old paradigm that he did not
espouse. This was the "Sublime," a concept of the late 17th century that
had grown from an examination of ancient writings on rhetoric, especially
where rhetoric discussed the kind of elevated speech that produced
"marvelous" effects (early translations even contained the word
"marvelous" in their title). By the mid- 18th century, however, the notion
had been developed, particularly by Edmund Burke, into an aesthetic of the
terrifying applied to such events as shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions,
hurricanes, sharks and so forth, that over-awed the viewer by their
incalculable power, size or violence -- whether portrayed or actual. The
concept was made fun of by Pope, whose formalist aesthetics were opposed
to it,8 and
there are critics today who view it as reduced to the "ridiculous" by
advertising; but when one realizes that the hypnotic horror of the twin
towers exactly fits Burke's definition, the sublime bears further thought.
Like the notion of genius, it was a timely idea for the Romantic movement.
It gave permission for everything from "Gothic" novels to the nightmare
paintings of Fuseli and the molochism of Delacroix's Death of
Sardanapalus. At the end of the century, Emmanuel Kant found it
necessary to deal with the sublime, in his "Critique of Judgement," as an
issue apart from the beautiful (which for Kant was always experienced in
front of things bounded or contained, and never evoked by the vast and
unbounded). Kant's account is complex, but the fact that he tackled it at
all helped to perpetuate Burke's more available conception -- which in the
20th century became the "Futurist marvelous" when applied to the love of
danger, war, speed, electric tramcars and confrontations with the public,
and the "Surrealist marvelous" when applied to the indecorous results of
various chance procedures,9 becoming briefly respectable again in the New York of the
1940s, as the "abstract sublime," from which was eventually to come that
Canadian cause célèbre Barnett Newman's Voice of
Fire.
A variant of the sublime has been promoted by
Jean-François Lyotard as the essential motor of modern art -- though, on
examination, this turns out to be a version of the symbolists'
preoccupation with the noumenal -- an important but by no means sufficient
source of the modern. In proposing it, however, Lyotard had a motive --
which was to undermine what he calls the "grand narratives" of
historiography, like those produced by Marxian theory, and to substitute a
mixed bag of "less oppressive" little narratives; though it remains
unclear whether the two are mutually exclusive.
Modern Life
The "great tradition" that Baudelaire had proclaimed
lost, in his Salon of 1846, was essentially that of "ut pictura
poesis," or what he called there "the habitual, everyday idealization
of ancient life." Of course, by "lost," he meant, as much as anything,
"enfeebled;" and, though he had espoused the musical analogy that would
later feature in the shaping of abstraction, he suggested, as the remedy
for this enfeeblement, a dose of "modern life." Unfortunately, the only
exponent of modern life that he could find was the tepid, minor
painter-illustrator, Constantin Guys. You might have thought he would have
mentioned Gustave Courbet, just two years his senior, who by 1853 would
paint his portrait. But Courbet's heart was with the peasants of Ornans
with whom he had grown up, while that of Guys' was in the great faubourgs
of Baudelaire's Paris. In the end, the painter who would come to fill the
bill was Edouard Manet; but he was just 14 in 1846, with no idea that he
would be inspired by Baudelaire, on meeting him in 1859, to produce his
first mature work. This was a sketchy, "low life" painting called The
Absinthe Drinker, in seamless lineage with the "great tradition" but
viewed today as signaling the modern period -- the promised land that
Baudelaire, who died in 1867, was not to see.
Milling About?
So: are the old paradigms still with us? Obviously, some
survived, somewhat transformed, throughout the modern period and some did
not, while some were "partially eclipsed" (a phrase that Malevich in 1914
actually inscribed on a collage that displayed the Mona Lisa).
Their history may be seen as that of the rewriting of earlier achievements
in new terms -- terms which, once established, modified the template taken
for granted in the production of paintings, the template of what was
"given". It was this that Marcel Duchamp understood in 1912 when he began
the notes towards his so-called "Large Glass" with the phrase "Etant
Donnés" ("Being Given"). In Duchamp's eyes, the rate of paradigm
change had so accelerated as to make nonsense of the current definitions
of art, and to make this point the "Large Glass" was to become a
portmanteau into which he stuffed various old paradigms, however
disjunctive -- to disrupt once and for all the race for the new and
introduce a definition of art that would accommodate his "Readymades."
Once the implications of this were understood some 50 years later, it
became possible for philosophers like Arthur Danto to declare the
history of art to be over, and all the old paradigms thus made
available, if only through a rear-view mirror in a Looking-Glass world
ruled by irony. This seemed to be a cause of consternation among painters
on the panel "Issues in Abstract Painting," promoted by the Dalhousie
exhibition Hungry Eyes. The panel several times repeated the
view that words like "pluralism" and "post-historical" define the current
situation. They gloomily surmised that "forward-looking trends affiliating
several artists" were dead, and that, instead of "movements," what we had
was a "directionless milling about" that left no scope for originality,
except through nuanced reruns of abstraction from the past.
But the paradigm changes that were once called
"progress" can equally be seen as the creation of an expanding universe of
texts, all "nuanced reruns" from the past (there really isn't an
alternative to that): a view that still leaves viable the old formula
"instruction and delight," that does not limit the scope of painters to
raise our consciousness of some issue, private or public, with enough
freshness, subtlety or éclat to hold our attention; nor limit
intellectual enterprise, or forthright, hedonistic works -- though there,
of course, the painter, skating around obstacles of taste, between high
art and kitsch, will find thin ice. But that is every artist's lot,
remembering that kitsch (what Baudelaire complained about in 1846 without
that word to hand) need not be held at bay only by novelty, transgression
or scatology. And as for the "sublime," it begs for rehabilitation in the
face of current theories of the "abject"; for paintings also can be made,
like those of Anselm Kiefer's, that speak the rhetoric of tragedy, of
guilt and solitude and desolation, as no other medium can. We might all
ponder that.
Notes
1. A lecture given at Dalhousie
University Art Gallery in November 2002, during the city-wide
collaborative exhibition About Painting
2. See P.O.
Kristeller: "The Modern System of the Arts," part 1; Journal of the
History of Ideas, Oct. 1951
3. Erwin Panofsky:
Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), p. 10. Panofsky
acknowledges that "delectatio" was understood by certain medieval
writers as the signifier of beauty, but he emphasizes that they never
claimed that it should be the end of painting.
4.See Rensselear
W. Lee: Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New
York, 1967).
5. What Baudelaire
actually said was, "Beauty is a divine gateau around which the period, its
fashion, its morale and its passion form a titillating crust to the
eternal element inside" (emphasis added). He was to elaborate exactly this
in a more complete account of his aesthetics, published in the newspaper
Le Figaro, in 1863 under the title "The Painter of Modern
Life."
6. Early
indications are in Vasari, who refers to Michelangelo's "divine talent"
(divinis ingegno) anachronistically changed to "inspired genius"
by George Bull in the 1965 Penguin Classics edition. Vasari also refers to
"tre nobilis arti" (three noble crafts), translated by Bull as
"three fine arts," a category not then available (see Kristeller, op.
cit.)
7.See Albert
Boime: The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century
(London, 1971).
8. Alexander Pope:
Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727).
9. In the 1930s,
the dissident Surrealist, Georges Bataille, attempted to subvert Breton's
"marvelous" by promoting what he called the "abject," the very obverse of
sublime. He developed this, ultimately scatological, program in largely
unpublished notes, translated by French psychoanalyst Julie Kristeva in
her Powers of Horror (1982). Scatalogical imagery, mostly
humourous, has always existed at the margin of the visual arts and the act
of painting as a barely sublimated version of infantile faecal daubing is a
commonplace of psychoanalysis. Bataille therefore aimed at what he called
desublimatory "transgressions," some of which showed up at the
time in works by Miro and Dali. Leaning on Kristeva's book, they showed up
again in the aesthetically deprived 1990s - as an act of desperation.
