Part 7 (1/2)

The contereat deal further than Manet and his friends pushed it, thereby distinguishi+ng itself fro we have seen since the twelfth century Since the twelfth century, in sculpture and glass, the thirteenth, in painting and drawing, the drift has been towards realism and away from art Now the essence of realis gives so i an air of reality as a ive eneration of art The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts But more than this was needed There were irrelevancies introduced into pictures for other purposes than that of stateer Since the twelfth century there has been a steady elaboration of technical coard the gsof condi of fires, and the shaping of white caps, as a fine art As for the eggs,--why that's God business: and ants o? Theis to be left in a work of art which merely shows that the craftsenerally turns out that Life and Art are rather more complicated than we could wish; to understand exactly what is o deeper into the mysteries It is easy to say eliminate irrelevant details What details are not irrelevant? In a work of art nothing is relevant but what contributes to fornificance

Therefore all informatory matter is irrelevant and should be eliminated

But what ns so complex and subtle that without soible For instance, there are rasped by a spectator who looks at theood seen upside down as upside up To be sure, very sensitive people can always discover fron itself how it should be viewed, and, without much difficulty, will place correctly a piece of lace or euide then it is te and, indeed, reasonable, for him to wish to provide a clue; and to do so he has only to work into his design soure, and the business is done Having established a nuhly complex forms, he may ask himself whether anyone else will be able to appreciate theanisation, and ease the way for our aesthetic eive to his forms so much of the appearance of the forms of ordinary life that we shall at once refer therasp n?

Enter by the back-door representation in the quality of a clue to the nature of design I have no objection to its presence Only, if the representative element is not to ruin the picture as a work of art, it n Itinformation, it nificant form

Let us make no mistake about this To help the spectator to appreciate our design we have introduced into our picture a representative or cognitive ele whatever to do with art The recognition of a correspondence between the forms of a work of art and the familiar forms of life cannot possibly provoke aesthetic enificant form can do that Of course realistic fornificant, and out of them an artist may create a superb work of art, but it is with their aesthetic and not with their cognitive value that we shall then be concerned We shall treat thenitive or representative element in a work of art can be useful as a means to the perception of formal relations and in no other way It is valuable to the spectator, but it is of no value to the work of art; or rather it is valuable to the work of art as an ear-trumpet is valuable to one ould converse with the deaf: the speaker could do as ithout it, the listener could not The representative eleood and it n; that is to say, it may deprive the picture of its value as a whole; and it is as a whole, as an organisation of forms, that a work of art provokes the most tremendous emotions

From the point of view of the spectator the Post-Impressionists have been particularly happy in their sin can be composed just as well of realistic forn co aesthetically underrated We are so immediately struck by the representative elenificance passes us by It is very hard at first sight to appreciate the design of a picture by a highly realistic artist--Ingres, for instance; our aesthetic emotions are overlaid by our huures as forms, because we in conitive clue (say a Persian carpet), if it be at all elaborate and intricate, is apt to non-plus the less sensitive spectators Post-I forms sufficiently distorted to disconcert and baffle human interest and curiosity yet sufficiently representative to call in, have found a short way to our aesthetic emotions This does not make Post-Impressionist pictures better or worse than others; it makes them more easily appreciable as works of art Probably it will always be difficult for the mass of men to consider pictures as works of art, but it will be less difficult for them so to consider Post-Impressionist than realistic pictures; while, if they ceased to consider objects unprovided with representative clues (_eg_ some oriental textiles) as historical monuments, they would find it very difficult to consider then, the artist makes it his first care to simplify

But h The infornificant The representative elen, ot to provoke aesthetic emotion That is where symbolism fails The symbolist eliminates, but does not assinificant forral parts of a plastic conception, but intellectual abbreviations They are not informed by the artist's emotion, they are invented by his intellect They are dead ht because they are not traversed by the rhythends that illustrators used to produce fron to visual art than the syhtsns In the faravings--”St Eustace,” for instance, and ”The Virgin and Child” (B 34 British Museued to convert a reater part of his work (_eg_ ”The Knight,” ”St Jeroested symbolism

Every fornificant; also every forenerally happens, the value of the parts coreater than the value of the sunificant whole is called Design; and an insistence--an exaggerated insistence son is the fourth characteristic of the Contemporary Movement This insistence, this conviction that a work should not be good on the whole, but as a whole, is, no doubt, in part a reaction from the rather too easy virtue of some of the Impressionists, ere content to cover their canvases with char overmuch whether or how they were co-ordinated Certainly this was a weakness in Ih by no means in all the Impressionist masters--for it is certain that the profoundest enificant foranised combinations can the artist express hiood design when, having been possessed by a real emotional conception, he is able to hold and translate it We all agree, I think, that till the artist has had his moment of emotional vision there can be no very considerable work of art; but, the vision seen and felt, it still remains uncertain whether he has the force to hold and the skill to translate it Of course the vast n because they correspond to no e failures are those in which the vision carasped The painters who have failed for want of technical skill to set dohat they have felt and ers of one hand--if, indeed, there are any to be counted But on all sides we see interesting pictures in which the holes in the artist's conception are obvious The vision was once perfect, but it cannot be recaptured The rapture will not return The supre There are holes, and they have to be filled with putty Putty we all knoe see it--e feel it It is dead matter--literal transcriptions from nature, intellectualthat was apprehended eh the first vision of a significant whole

There is an absolute necessity about a good design arising, I iine, from the fact that the nature of each form and its relation to all the other for exactly what he felt Of course, a perfect correspondence between expression and conception may not be established at the first or the second attempt

But if the work is to be a success there will come a moment in which the artist will be able to hold and express completely his hour or n will lack necessity For though an artist's aesthetic sense enables hi, only thishis vision enables hin possesses it; if I conjecture that the secret of cohesion is the complete realisation of that thrill which comes to an artist when he conceives his work as a whole, I shall not forget that it is a conjecture But it is not conjecture to say that e call a design good we mean that, as a whole, it provokes aesthetic eeries of lines and colours, individually satisfactory perhaps, but as a whole un

For, ultiood or bad only by discovering whether or no it o on to criticise in detail; but the beginning of all aesthetic judgment and all criticisin to notice that defective organisation of forround: it is only when I atte power of certain coet into the world of conjecture Nevertheless, I believe that uesses at truth, and that on the saood and bad drawing

Design is the organisation of for of the forms thele, but that is ais bad, I mean that I am not moved by the contours of the for and bad design I believe to be similar A form is badly drahen it does not correspond with a part of an emotional conception The shape of every form in a work of art should be imposed on the artist by his inspiration The hand of the artist, I believe,he has felt not only intensely but definitely The artist must knohat he is about, and what he is about ht, the translation intothat he felt in a spasaps will be ill-drawn

Forms that are not dictated by any emotional necessity, forms that state facts, forhtsmanshi+p, imitations of natural objects or of the forms of other works of art, for in fact,--all these are worthless Good drawing must be inspired, it must be the natural manifestation of that thrill which accompanies the passionate apprehension of form

One word more to close this discussion No critic is so stupid as tothat does not represent the elo, Mantegna, Raffael, &c played the oddest tricks with anatoures are less accurately drawn than those of Sir Edward Poynter; no one supposes that they are not drawn better We do possess a criterion by which we can judge drawing, and that criterion can have nothing to do with truth to nature We judge drawing by concentrating our aesthetic sensibility on a particular part of design What we ” is not doubtful; we nificant” Why so moves and some does not is a very different question I have put forward an hypothesis of which I could write a pretty sharp criticis hands Only this I will say: just as a competent musician knoith certainty when an instruh the criterion resides nowhere but in his own sensibility; so a fine critic of visual art can detect lines and colours that are not alive Whether he be looking at an embroidered pattern or at a careful anatomical study, the task is always the same, because the criterion is always the sa is, or is not, aesthetically significant

Insistence on design is perhaps the most obvious characteristic of the movement To all are familiar those circuive definition to forms and to reveal the construction of the picture For aler artists,--Bonnard is an obvious exception--affect that architectural enerally been preferred by European artists The difference between ”architectural design” and what I call ”in” will be obvious to anyone who compares a picture by Cezanne with a picture by Whistler

Better still, compare any first-rate Florentine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century with any Sung picture Here are two ood, so far as I can judge, and as different as possible We feel towards a picture by Cezanne or Masaccio or Giotto as we feel towards a Ro upwards, mass piles itself on mass, forms balance each other th to meet it

Turn to a Chinese picture; the for from above There is no sense of thrust or strain; rather there is the feeling of sos itself in exquisite festoons along the wall Though architectural design is a permanent characteristic of Western art, of four periods I think it would be fairly accurate to say that it is a characteristic so dominant as to be distinctive; and they are Byzantine VIth Century, Byzantine IX-XIIIth Century, Florentine XIVth and XVth Century, and the Contemporary Movement

To say that the artists of the n is not to deny that some of thereatest colourists that ever lived; Henri-Matisse is a great colourist Yet all, or nearly all, use colour as a n in colour, that is in coloured shapes Very few fall into the error of regarding colour as an end in itself, and of trying to think of it as so different fronificance The mere juxtaposition of tones moves us hardly at all As colourists the, ”It is the quantities that count” It is not by his , but by the shapes of his colours, and the conise the colourist Colour beconificant only when it becomes form It is a virtue in conteainst the practice of juxtaposing pretty patches of colour withouttheir foranise tones as to raise for that a generation of exceptionally sweet and attractive but rather formless colourists should be shocked by the obtrusion of those black lines that see They are irritated by pictures in which there is to be no accidental charm of soft lapses and lucky chiaroscuro They do not adand unbeholden to adventitious dainties They cannot understand this passion for works that are adn, this willingness to leave bare the construction if by so doing the spectator may be helped to a conception of the plan Critics of the Ie are vexed by the naked bones and muscles of Post-Ih these young artists insisted on a bareness and baldness exceeding anything we have yet seen, I should be far froanised prettiness insisted on the paran

III

THE PATHETIC FALLACY

Many of those who are enthusiastic about the movement, were they asked what they considered its ine, ”The expression of a new and peculiar point of view”

”Post-Impressionism,” I have heard people say, ”is an expression of the ideas and feelings of that spiritual renaissance which is noing into a lusty revolution” With this I cannot, of course, agree If art expresses anything, it expresses soeneral ees, and peculiar to none But if these sympathetic people mean, as I believe they do, that the art of the newdifferent froer than--itself, of a spiritual revolution in fact, I will not oppose thee as of another; and in the effort of artists to free painting fro conventions of the near past, and to use it as a ns of an age possessed of a new sense of values and eager to turn that possession to account It is i that we are back in a world not altogether unworthy to be compared with that which produced primitive art Here are men who take art seriously Perhaps they take life seriously too, but if so, that is only because there are things in life (aesthetic ecstasy, for instance) worth taking seriously

In life, they can distinguish between the wood and the few fine trees