The New Republic/Volume 1/Number 1/Panic in Art
Panic In Art
ONCE a year for the last six years art has been reborn and named successively: Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Synchromism and Vorticism. And each conception is assumed to have the finality of a miracle. In the uproar of rival christenings the accredited Cubist pamphleteer announces "Cubism is painting itself." The Futurist manifesto proclaims; "We inaugurate a new epoch of painting." A Synchromist confided to me, "Ours is the last painters' movement; there can be no other." One conviction, however, they hold in common: art, which has been the courtesan of princes and the holiday playmate of republics, is dead. Painting, which began with Giotto, has completed its cycle, and a new art made possible by a new freedom is to begin.
We are faced with it, the freedom to paint hair green, thighs blue, and tables out of perspective; the further freedom to dismember any object and scatter its part in dynamic rhythm; the ultimate right to evolve whirlpools of color splashed by flaming pinwheels in which the last traces of the object is inundated. The critic attempts to bully the painter by declaring this stuff is not worth understanding. The painter promptly intimidates the critic by declaring that this is beauty too new and too strange for him to see.
Now it is essential to realize that not even the maddest of modern canvasses is a hoax nor the strangest a mystery. For in this new movement there is nothing mysterious we need approach with awe. Nothing is hidden except its motives. It is not primarily a revolt against the realism of Courbet or the impressionism of Money. The energy that animates it is nothing so trivial as a desire to scandalize the pontiffs of academic art. The new in recent art is the expression of two impulses, the first a panic-stricken attempt (Post-Impressionism) to recover our lost innocence of the eye, the second (Cubism, Futurism, etc.) a frantic endeavor to achieve forms so pure and beauty so abstract that they would be a new absolute. Both are ineffectual and both are significant because they are phases of an inevitable revolt against an unavoidable criticism growing every year more intolerable to the artist.
For the compilation of art history has grown so complete that no one can escape it. The process of enthusiastic allegiance to some historic type of beauty by which the artist educates his sense of design and form becomes an immense critical labor. Instead of an immediate native tradition there is a bewildering array of historic tradition to choose from. The sculptor, for instance, not only compares Greek statues with Egyptian, Hindu bronzes with Chinese monuments, but he must compare Phidian marbles with archaic Attic bas-reliefs, and later Egyptian monoliths with examples of the first dynasties. He cannot take Greek art in general, or any other art, as his model; his knowledge of it is already too complete Forty years ago the mere sight of the first Japanese prints to reach Europe determined Whistler's sense of composition, Van Gogh's draughtsmanship, Monet's secession from the Barbizon School. But already the painter knows that Hokusai and Hiroshige are decadent and merely popular illustrators to the Japanese themselves, and that if he wishes to school himself in Oriental art he had better learn to appreciate Harunobu or the Chinese landscape paintings of the Sung period, unless he finds that the Orient after all reached a more complete expression in Persian miniatures. The creative energy of our time is not only exhausted by enthusiastic erudition, but our power of appreciation is itself drained by incessant criticism, the necessity for a continual revaluation of all aesthetic values before we can achieve any aesthetic criterion whatsoever.
It is surprising that painters and sculptors ended with a forlorn sense of the wisdom of ignorance, that, utterly weary of the burden of sophistication, their only ultimate enthusiasm should be for every primitive period of art in which they could regain a sense of seeing with the uneducated gaze of the savage and the childlike eye? There followed ten or fifteen years in which every type of primitive simplicity was revived: the simplification of drawing, the distortion of the nude, the color schemes of pure reds, blues and yellows which raised shrieks of protest. The sculptor discovered negro wood-carvings of the African coast and "went in" for a barbaric feeling for form. Portraits were painted which had the ponderous strength of Byzantine mosaics, every feature heavily outlined in black. Landscapes became patterns as simple and direct as Persian tiles.
As in all revivals, much was recovered that was permanently valuable. Color achieved a new splendor. Painting acquired an intrinsic beauty of material, a sheer loveliness of texture, as of lustreless enamel or Italian majolica. Our sense of decoration was reborn. For any canvas of Matisse more genuinely ornaments a wall than a mural painting by Chavannes. All the elements for the making of a great tradition of mural painting were resurrected, but painting was too irretrievably obsessed with its search for salvation to use them. The nostalgia of eclecticism remained, while the conviction grew more and more irresistible that everything had been done and there was no use doing it over again. The ingenuity of the artist was finally browbeaten. The visible world was no longer real to him. Significantly enough, Picasso, collector of death-masks and totem-poles, was the first to emancipate himself from the object.
So we have had the rise of five or six "Damn-the-Object" schools. The cubists proclaim, "The mission of the artist is to divest objects of their banal appearance and to fashion the real image of the spirit." The painter is to search for "the plastic essence of the world," tending to express itself as "a colored mathematics of things." Observe the absolutist's contempt for the merely phenomenal world. Objects are appearances, thin and unreal things. Vision is only a form of illusion; reality is elsewhere. The artist pondering on the nature of his art begins to reflect on the nature of reality. And with phenomenal ingenuity he creates fantastic systems of graphic symbols to express naive systems of metaphysics. The cubists are particularly preoccupied with the nature of space and volume, and though they insist that "pictorial space" is "non-euclidian," they express their conviction in canvasses full of cones, cylinders and cubes. The futurist parodies Democritus: "Our bodies enter into the canopies on which we sit, the couches enter into our bodies, the autobus hurls itself into the houses it passes, the houses hurl themselves upon the autobus and merge with it"
The second revolution, like the first, ends in the past. The revolutionary painter, seeking the most uniquely modern goal he can imagine, has fallen victim to an ancient hunger—a poetic impatience to rend the veil of appearance, a poignant eagerness to be one with the hidden essence of being. He has expressed again his own weariness, a desire to lose himself in a world his eye can no longer dominate or understand. The latest pamphlet calls this "The Art of Spiritual Harmony." Well, it is an essentially mediaeval conception of the relation of man to his universe. It is a scholastic's answer to the problem, though the middle ages did not attempt to delineate it in paint. The cubist and the futurist are at best modern monks illuminating with fantastic grotesques the margin of an esoteric manuscript. And if certain of their canvasses of triangles and circles seem like cabalistic signs, it is because, like Faust, they are calling up the Earth-Spirit.
Yet there is no need of echoing Kenyon Cox that paining is going to the dogs, or of whimpering with all the instructors that art is dead. Whatever you may mean in death, be certain of one thing: Art may die innumerable deaths, if that is the metaphor you choose to adopt. It will not stop. The twin impulse to ornament and to play is an eternal passion. This kneading, thumping, hammering, cutting and smearing of materials into shapes and patterns is an incessant energy, and the habit of making easel pictures is only one of its phases. For the moment, painting is sealed in a test-tube of aesthetic experiments where form and color gleam and float in fiery disintegration.