Clive Bell - Art
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Clive Bell >> Art
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Already I have suggested two characteristics of the movement; I have
said that in their choice of forms and colours most vital contemporary
artists are, more or less, influenced by Cezanne, and that Cezanne has
inspired them with the resolution to free their art from literary and
scientific irrelevancies. Most people, asked to mention a third, would
promptly answer, I suspect--Simplification. To instance simplification
as a peculiarity of the art of any particular age seems queer, since
simplification is essential to all art. Without it art cannot exist; for
art is the creation of significant form, and simplification is the
liberating of what is significant from what is not. Yet to such depths
had art sunk in the nineteenth century, that in the eyes of the rabble
the greatest crime of Whistler and the Impressionists was their by no
means drastic simplification. And we are not yet clear of the Victorian
slough. The spent dip stinks on into the dawn. You have only to look at
almost any modern building to see masses of elaboration and detail that
form no part of any real design and serve no useful purpose. Nothing
stands in greater need of simplification than architecture, and nowhere
is simplification more dreaded and detested than amongst architects.
Walk the streets of London; everywhere you will see huge blocks of
ready-made decoration, pilasters and porticoes, friezes and facades,
hoisted on cranes to hang from ferro-concrete walls. Public buildings
have become public laughing-stocks. They are as senseless as slag-heaps,
and far less beautiful. Only where economy has banished the architect do
we see masonry of any merit. The engineers, who have at least a
scientific problem to solve, create, in factories and railway-bridges,
our most creditable monuments. They at least are not ashamed of their
construction, or, at any rate, they are not allowed to smother it in
beauty at thirty shillings a foot. We shall have no more architecture in
Europe till architects understand that all these tawdry excrescences
have got to be simplified away, till they make up their minds to express
themselves in the materials of the age--steel, concrete, and glass--and
to create in these admirable media vast, simple, and significant forms.
The contemporary movement has pushed simplification a great deal further
than Manet and his friends pushed it, thereby distinguishing itself from
anything 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 realism is detail. Since Zola, every novelist has known that
nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant
facts, and very few have cared to give much else. Detail is the heart of
realism, and the fatty degeneration 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 statement. There were the irrelevancies of
technical swagger. Since the twelfth century there has been a steady
elaboration of technical complexities. Writers with nothing to say soon
come to regard the manipulation of words as an end in itself. So cooks
without eggs might come to regard the ritual of omelette-making, the
mixing of condiments, the chopping of herbs, the stoking of fires, and
the shaping of white caps, as a fine art. As for the eggs,--why that's
God business: and who wants omelettes when he can have cooking? The
movement has simplified the _batterie de cuisine_. Nothing is to be left
in a work of art which merely shows that the craftsman knows how to put
it there.
Alas! It generally turns out that Life and Art are rather more
complicated than we could wish; to understand exactly what is meant by
simplification we must go 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 formal significance.
Therefore all informatory matter is irrelevant and should be eliminated.
But what most painters have to express can only be expressed in designs
so complex and subtle that without some clue they would be almost
unintelligible. For instance, there are many designs that can only be
grasped by a spectator who looks at them from a particular point of
view. Not every picture is as good seen upside down as upside up. To be
sure, very sensitive people can always discover from the design itself
how it should be viewed, and, without much difficulty, will place
correctly a piece of lace or embroidery in which there is no informatory
clue to guide them. Nevertheless, when an artist makes an intricate
design it is tempting and, indeed, reasonable, for him to wish to
provide a clue; and to do so he has only to work into his design some
familiar object, a tree or a figure, and the business is done. Having
established a number of extremely subtle relations between highly
complex forms, he may ask himself whether anyone else will be able to
appreciate them. Shall he not give a hint as to the nature of his
organisation, and ease the way for our aesthetic emotions? If he give to
his forms so much of the appearance of the forms of ordinary life that
we shall at once refer them back to something we have already seen,
shall we not grasp more easily their aesthetic relations in his design?
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
must be fused into the design. It must do double duty; as well as
giving information, it must create aesthetic emotion. It must be
simplified into significant 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 element. This element has nothing 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 emotion.
Only significant form can do that. Of course realistic forms may be
aesthetically significant, 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 them as though
they were not representative of anything. The cognitive 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 who
would converse with the deaf: the speaker could do as well without it,
the listener could not. The representative element may help the
spectator; it can do the picture no good and it may do harm. It may ruin
the design; 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 simplification. As we know, a design
can be composed just as well of realistic forms as of invented; but a
fine design composed of realistic forms runs a great risk of being
aesthetically underrated. We are so immediately struck by the
representative element that the formal significance 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 human curiosity. We do not see the figures as forms,
because we immediately think of them as people. On the other hand, a
design composed of purely imaginary forms, without any cognitive clue
(say a Persian carpet), if it be at all elaborate and intricate, is apt
to non-plus the less sensitive spectators. Post-Impressionists, by
employing forms sufficiently distorted to disconcert and baffle human
interest and curiosity yet sufficiently representative to call immediate
attention to the nature of the design, 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
(_e.g._ some oriental textiles) as historical monuments, they would find
it very difficult to consider them at all.
To assure his design, the artist makes it his first care to simplify.
But mere simplification, the elimination of detail, is not enough. The
informatory forms that remain have got to be made significant. The
representative element, if it is not to injure the design, must become a
part of it; besides giving information it has got to provoke aesthetic
emotion. That is where symbolism fails. The symbolist eliminates, but
does not assimilate. His symbols, as a rule, are not significant forms,
but formal intelligencers. They are not integral 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
matter in a living organism. They are rigid and tight because they are
not traversed by the rhythm of the design. The explanatory legends that
illustrators used to produce from the mouths of their characters are not
more foreign to visual art than the symbolic forms with which many able
draughtsmen have ruined their designs. In the famous "Melancholia," and,
to some extent, in a few other engravings--"St. Eustace," for instance,
and "The Virgin and Child" (B. 34. British Museum),--Duerer has managed
to convert a mass of detail into tolerably significant form; but in the
greater part of his work (_e.g._ "The Knight," "St. Jerome") fine
conception is hopelessly ruined by a mass of undigested symbolism.
Every form in a work of art has, then, to be made aesthetically
significant; also every form has to be made a part of a significant
whole. For, as generally happens, the value of the parts combined
into a whole is far greater than the value of the sum of the parts.
This organisation of forms into a significant whole is called Design;
and an insistence--an exaggerated insistence some will say--on design
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, who were content to cover
their canvases with charming forms and colours, not caring overmuch
whether or how they were co-ordinated. Certainly this was a weakness in
Impressionism--though by no means in all the Impressionist masters--for
it is certain that the profoundest emotions are provoked by significant
combinations of significant forms. Also, it seems certain that only in
these organised combinations can the artist express himself completely.
It seems that an artist creates a good 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 majority of pictures fail in design because they correspond to no
emotional vision; but the interesting failures are those in which the
vision came but was incompletely grasped. The painters who have failed
for want of technical skill to set down what they have felt and mastered
could be counted on the fingers 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
supreme creative power is wanting. There are holes, and they have to be
filled with putty. Putty we all know when we see it--when we feel it. It
is dead matter--literal transcriptions from nature, intellectual
machinery, forms that correspond with nothing that was apprehended
emotionally, forms unfired with the rhythm that thrilled through the
first vision of a significant whole.
There is an absolute necessity about a good design arising, I imagine,
from the fact that the nature of each form and its relation to all the
other forms is determined by the artist's need of expressing 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 minute of
inspiration. If that moment does not come the design will lack
necessity. For though an artist's aesthetic sense enables him, as we
shall see, to say whether a design is right or wrong, only this
masterful power of seizing and holding his vision enables him to make it
right. A bad design lacks cohesion; a good design 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 when we call a design good we mean that, as a
whole, it provokes aesthetic emotion, and that a bad design is a
congeries of lines and colours, individually satisfactory perhaps, but
as a whole unmoving.
For, ultimately, the spectator can determine whether a design is good
or bad only by discovering whether or no it moves him. Having made that
discovery he can go on to criticise in detail; but the beginning of all
aesthetic judgment and all criticism is emotion. It is after I have been
left cold that I begin to notice that defective organisation of forms
which I call bad design. And here, in my judgments about particular
designs, I am still on pretty sure ground: it is only when I attempt to
account for the moving power of certain combinations that I get into the
world of conjecture. Nevertheless, I believe that mine are no bad
guesses at truth, and that on the same hypothesis we can account for the
difference between good and bad drawing.
Design is the organisation of forms: drawing is the shaping of the forms
themselves. Clearly there is a point at which the two commingle, but
that is a matter of no present importance. When I say that drawing is
bad, I mean that I am not moved by the contours of the forms that make
up the work of art. The causes of bad drawing and bad design I believe
to be similar. A form is badly drawn when 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, must be guided by the necessity of expressing
something he has felt not only intensely but definitely. The artist must
know what he is about, and what he is about must be, if I am right, the
translation into material form of something that he felt in a spasm of
ecstasy. Therefore, shapes that merely fill gaps will be ill-drawn.
Forms that are not dictated by any emotional necessity, forms that state
facts, forms that are the consequences of a theory of draughtsmanship,
imitations of natural objects or of the forms of other works of art,
forms that exist merely to fill spaces--padding 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 to
mean by "bad drawing," drawing that does not represent the model
correctly. The gods of the art schools, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Raffael,
&c. played the oddest tricks with anatomy. Everyone knows that Giotto's
figures 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 mean when we speak
of "good drawing" and "bad drawing" is not doubtful; we mean
"aesthetically moving" and "aesthetically insignificant." Why some
drawing moves and some does not is a very different question. I have put
forward an hypothesis of which I could write a pretty sharp criticism:
that task, however, I leave to more willing hands. Only this I will say:
just as a competent musician knows with certainty when an instrument is
out of tune though 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 same. What he has to decide is whether the
drawing is, or is not, aesthetically significant.
Insistence on design is perhaps the most obvious characteristic of the
movement. To all are familiar those circumambient black lines that are
intended to give definition to forms and to reveal the construction of
the picture. For almost all the younger artists,--Bonnard is an obvious
exception--affect that architectural method of design which indeed has
generally been preferred by European artists. The difference between
"architectural design" and what I call "imposed design" 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 methods of
achieving the same end, equally good, 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 Romanesque church; the design seems to
spring upwards, mass piles itself on mass, forms balance each other
masonrywise: there is a sense of strain, and of strength to meet it.
Turn to a Chinese picture; the forms seem to be pinned to the silk or to
be hung from above. There is no sense of thrust or strain; rather there
is the feeling of some creeper, with roots we know not where, that
hangs 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 movement insist on design is not to deny
that some of them are exceptionally fine colourists. Cezanne is one of
the greatest colourists that ever lived; Henri-Matisse is a great
colourist. Yet all, or nearly all, use colour as a mode of form. They
design 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 something different from form. Colour in itself has little or no
significance. The mere juxtaposition of tones moves us hardly at all. As
colourists themselves are fond of saying, "It is the quantities that
count." It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his
colours, and the combinations of those shapes, that we recognise the
colourist. Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form. It is
a virtue in contemporary artists that they have set their faces against
the practice of juxtaposing pretty patches of colour without much
considering their formal relations, and that they attempt so to organise
tones as to raise form to its highest significance. But it is not
surprising that a generation of exceptionally sweet and attractive but
rather formless colourists should be shocked by the obtrusion of those
black lines that seem to do violence to their darling. They are
irritated by pictures in which there is to be no accidental charm of
soft lapses and lucky chiaroscuro. They do not admire the austere
determination of these young men to make their work independent and
self-supporting and unbeholden to adventitious dainties. They cannot
understand this passion for works that are admirable as wholes, this
fierce insistence on design, 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 Impressionist age are vexed by the naked
bones and muscles of Post-Impressionist pictures. But, for my own part,
even though these young artists insisted on a bareness and baldness
exceeding anything we have yet seen, I should be far from blaming a
band of ascetics who in an age of unorganised prettiness insisted on the
paramount importance of design.
III
THE PATHETIC FALLACY
Many of those who are enthusiastic about the movement, were they asked
what they considered its most important characteristic, would reply, I
imagine, "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 now growing
into a lusty revolution." With this I cannot, of course, agree. If art
expresses anything, it expresses some profound and general emotion
common, or at least possible, to all ages, and peculiar to none. But if
these sympathetic people mean, as I believe they do, that the art of the
new movement is a manifestation of something different from--they will
say larger than--itself, of a spiritual revolution in fact, I will not
oppose them. Art is as good an index to the spiritual state of this age
as of another; and in the effort of artists to free painting from the
clinging conventions of the near past, and to use it as a means only to
the most sublime emotions, we may read signs of an age possessed of a
new sense of values and eager to turn that possession to account. It is
impossible to visit a good modern exhibition without feeling 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.
As for art, they know that it is something more important than a
criticism of life; they will not pretend that it is a traffic in
amenities; they know that it is a spiritual necessity. They are not
making handsome furniture, nor pretty knick-knacks, nor tasteful
souvenirs; they are creating forms that stir our most wonderful
emotions.
It is tempting to suppose that art such as this implies an attitude
towards society. It seems to imply a belief that the future will not be
a mere repetition of the past, but that by dint of willing and acting
men will conquer for themselves a life in which the claims of spirit and
emotion will make some headway against the necessities of physical
existence. It seems, I say: but it would be exceedingly rash to assume
anything of the sort, and, for myself, I doubt whether the good artist
bothers much more about the future than about the past. Why should
artists bother about the fate of humanity? If art does not justify
itself, aesthetic rapture does. Whether that rapture is to be felt by
future generations of virtuous and contented artisans is a matter of
purely speculative interest. Rapture suffices. The artist has no more
call to look forward than the lover in the arms of his mistress. There
are moments in life that are ends to which the whole history of humanity
would not be an extravagant means; of such are the moments of aesthetic
ecstasy. It is as vain to imagine that the artist works with one eye on
The Great State of the future, as to go to his art for an expression of
political or social opinions. It is not their attitude towards the State
or towards life, but the pure and serious attitude of these artists
towards their art, that makes the movement significant of the age. Here
are men who refuse all compromise, who will hire no half-way house
between what they believe and what the public likes; men who decline
flatly, and over-stridently sometimes, to concern themselves at all with
what seems to them unimportant. To call the art of the movement
democratic--some people have done so--is silly. All artists are
aristocrats in a sense, since no artist believes honestly in human
equality; in any other sense to call an artist an aristocrat or a
democrat is to call him something irrelevant or insulting. The man who
creates art especially to move the poor or especially to please the rich
prostitutes whatever of worth may be in him. A good many artists have
maimed or ruined themselves by pretending that, besides the distinction
between good art and bad, there is a distinction between aristocratic
art and plebeian. In a sense all art is anarchical; to take art
seriously is to be unable to take seriously the conventions and
principles by which societies exist. It may be said with some justice
that Post-Impressionism is peculiarly anarchical because it insists so
emphatically on fundamentals and challenges so violently the
conventional tradition of art and, by implication, I suppose, the
conventional view of life. By setting art so high, it sets industrial
civilisation very low. Here, then, it may shake hands with the broader
and vaguer spirit of the age; the effort to produce serious art may bear
witness to a stir in the underworld, to a weariness of smug materialism
and a more passionate and spiritual conception of life. The art of the
movement, in so far as it is art, expresses nothing temporal or local;
but it may be a manifestation of something that is happening here and
now, something of which the majority of mankind seems hardly yet to be
aware.
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