Occasional Prose (15 page)

When I go on to art historians and critics, some slight improvement will be noticeable. A rare critic or art historian appears to be divinely inspired, an enraptured angel with fire-tipped wings as in some Florentine painting; beauty
has
been infectious. It has cast a glow over those eager features; he stands at the lectern with a pointer, happily calling for a new slide: he himself an Annunciation. Yet such unusual figures are found not only in the field of art history but in science, mathematics, theology, philosophy, Shakespeare studies. And one curious point is worth noticing: quite a few of those illumined art historians have spent their home lives in ugly, utilitarian, or generally tasteless surroundings. Their communion with the beautiful did not endow them with the faculty known as taste and help them in the selection of furniture or even in the modest acquisition of works of art. Art historians, in general, astonish their students and acquaintances by having quite hideous little personal collections, of which they are often proud. Lack of money cannot be the explanation for this blind spot. You do not need to be rich to collect. Bernard Berenson, who became a rich man and was famous for his eye, was criticized by his younger friends for having a “dowdy” or “tacky” house and a third-rate (with some exceptions) lot of pictures.

In any case, art critics and historians, on the average, are in no way superior, morally and aesthetically, to judges and doctors; from the samplings I have taken, I would rate them considerably below. Again, it is the same story as with curators and art dealers. Their relation with the beautiful is compromised by quasi-commercial factors. The calling is highly competitive and productive of jealousy and vicious backbiting. There is continuous rivalry in expertise. That is true for most academics—economists and sociologists and professors of literature. But the historian or critic of art is in a special position: the beautiful is a commodity with a market value. A professor of poetry who is underwriting Yeats, say, while his rival is committed to Eliot, does not stand to lose anything material—nor to lose anybody else anything—if Yeats’s stock goes down and Eliot’s rises; only his infallibility is at stake. But the art critic or art historian utters opinions that are expressible to others in terms of currency. His judgments affect the real market, sending prices up or down.

If his field is old art, he must pronounce on the genuineness of past works; his attribution of a drawing to Raphael rather than to some obscure follower is of immense interest to a dealer and to the eventual buyer. He is paid, of course, by the dealer for his authentication, which will be quoted and eventually turn up in a catalogue. If other art historians, when the drawing is shown, deny that it is a Raphael, the suspicion may arise that he has taken a cut of the sale price. Maybe he hasn’t, maybe he was only stating his honest conviction, but there are more subtle forms of bribery and more subtle ways of cheating on an attribution.

If, on the other hand, our friend’s field is contemporary art, he soon discovers that he can “make” an artist by favorable reviews. The artist or his grateful dealer will want to reward him with gifts of paintings—payments in kind whose market value will accrue over the years. There is nothing wrong here necessarily. An artist, naturally, will feel friendship for the critic who “discovered” him, and if the poor artist comes around with a painting or a sketchbook, how can the critic refuse? In contrast to the appraisers of old art, he may feel like a pure, non-commercial spirit. But he too is part of the art business. Where the old-master specialist authenticates a drawing as being by Raphael, he authenticates new work as being art.

For both the old-master specialist and the critic or advocate of contemporary art, friendship may be a corrupting element. The contemporary critic has multiple friendships with artists and dealers, where the historian tends to be close to curators and buyers. But anybody who is involved with the appraisal of art is courted by rich people who need guidance in forming their collections. The historian is wined and dined and brandied, taken in private planes to view the Hermitage collection in Leningrad, met by chauffeurs when he arrives in a strange city, whisked out to villas and châteaux and elaborate country houses. His path is smoothed; he becomes familiar with butlers; wherever he goes, in this company, it is as though a silencer had been set down before him, like the pad you put under the cloth on a dining-room table or, in those circles, under the Aubusson rug. The contemporary critic is “hosted” by a different type of rich person, the informal type, as with “informal” art, and the itinerary is different—the Kroller-Müller museum in Holland, the Ludwig collection in Aachen may be opened at off-hours for him, he will be emplaned for the Venice Biennale and the exposition at Kassel—but he too grows familiar with prodigality. The introduction into the life of wealth, even semi-servantless American wealth, is almost bound to uglify the uneasy recipient of its favors.

Either he becomes intensely snobbish or he turns cynical and jeering, often both at the same time or in abrupt alternation. He mocks the well-disposed people who entertain him as soon as they are out of earshot and sometimes before. When he is back with his real friends—bohemians or professors—he boasts of the houses and collections he has visited while disparaging their owners. The trouble with the beautiful is that either it belongs, as I have said, to nobody, which means museums and crowds, or it belongs to somebody. There is always some sort of fence around it, and scaling that fence, for the outsider, involves unbecoming acrobatics, acrobatics that leave the art historian and his younger, brasher brother, the discoverer-critic, with an occupational deformity.

Let us turn finally to the owners, ignoring restorers and framers. If we stopped to examine them, it would be the same as with dealers, curators, and critics: beneficial effect of association with art nil or practically nil. With owners, we might expect it to be a little different, especially if we leave out fashion-followers (for whom the beautiful will not stay still but keeps dizzily changing its locus) and brutalized speculators who buy pictures because they have been assured it is an investment, “like money in the bank.” But if we stay with real ownership, based on love or infatuation or family ties (inheritance), we seem to be on familiar territory. Most of us have owned or lived for a time with small particles of beauty and have found that a source of security, like any close rapport. Yet we must admit to something else: the longer we live with some object or objects we think beautiful, the more we cease to be aware of them, as with a long-married couple. There are pictures on my walls and little objects on my mantelpiece that I do not “see” for weeks, maybe months, at a time just as you cease to hear a clock ticking in a room. Possibly that is not true if you live with a great painting—a Rembrandt, a Vermeer, a Goya—I have not had the experience but I imagine that the command on the attention-span in those cases would be more powerful, and it would be days rather than weeks or months during which they hung unnoticed, mere vague presences. I suppose that if for a whole year you do not “see” a Dutch drawing or a little Greek vase you own, it is time to give it away, on the principle that if you find you have not worn a dress for a year, you ought to get rid of it, although it is still “good.” But nobody is willing to do that: with the dress, yes, but with the vase or drawing, no, decidedly not. And if some moralist insisted, we might argue that there is another kind of seeing different from conscious looking: how can we measure the influences beautiful objects have been exercising on us, subliminally, all the time we thought we were not noticing them?

But, accepting that argument—the only defense really that can be offered for living with more than our senses can absorb—what is the influence and how does it work? Instead of scrutinizing ourselves in relation to our small treasures, let us look at big collectors, who should be subject to more influences. I am afraid we are no better off than we were with art dealers and museum custodians, at least in the moral sphere. Think of Goering. I have known gentle art collectors, mild and philanthropic where the arts are concerned, glad to lend and serve on boards, even one or two who are liberals (in the American sense, i.e., slightly to the left) in politics and devoted to human rights—this is a very rare species. But the majority, I must say, are not very nice people. Living with beautiful things, inherited or acquired, has not enlarged them; one could almost think the opposite. It would be interesting to study the evolution of a collector of art. Was he small, narrow, selfish, and deeply reactionary to start with or did devotion to his
things
bring those traits out in him? Or put it this way: is the owner of choice furniture and superb paintings better or worse than the ordinary rich philistine? My guess would be worse, though he may be a little easier to talk to, at least at the start.

Quite poisonous people, on the whole, are attracted by the visual arts and can become very knowledgeable about them. This is much less true of literature: a bookish rich man or country gentleman is likely to be a quite humane and responsive individual (I do not mean a bibliophile, who is just an art collector with a slightly different field of activity). A bookish man will be an omnivorous reader, obviously, but he will not be greedy: by consuming more reading matter than is customary he does not deprive anyone else of his share, and this is probably an important difference. The same could be said of music.

But to return to the question of the influence that we think ought to be exercised by daily exposure to works of art. Is there any rub-off at all? Well, in the case of the collector, I think one is discernible. He inherits or acquires taste. Not always but often. Sooner or later, those who are covetous of beauty, whether they are Renaissance popes or tyrants or modern collectors, generally develop a faculty of discriminating that often extends to other departments of life, particularly to the table. Though not to the moral or intellectual sphere. So that it comes down to this: the taste one develops from association with beautiful things equips one to select more of them. That is all: a rather vicious circle. Yet the idea of taste (something, by the way, that artists themselves often lack) as the sole increment or residue of days and nights spent in company with Botticellis, Rembrandts, Titians, African masks, Meissen, pre-Columbian totems, is not what we meant when we thought wistfully of the privilege of living with beautiful things. There must be something more. Perhaps the mistake we have been making is to consider the matter in terms of individual ownership and private enjoyment (important as that is for quiet communion with the visual), rather than in terms of whole cultures. A city of spacious parks, communally owned statuary erected in public squares and looking down from the façades and rooftops of public buildings, a city of handsome residences and noble civic structures, must be better, we feel sure, to live in than a shanty-town, and not just because it is more hygienic, and more pleasurable to the eye. Such a city ought to inculcate virtue.

Certainly that belief was widely held in the ancient world. The city was pictured as a teacher, and the more beautiful and stately the city, the better the civic lesson. Machiavelli thought so: of the love of liberty characteristic of small free republics, he wrote in his
History
that “the public buildings, the halls of the magistracy, and the insignia of free institutions” would remind the citizens of their liberty even after it had been lost for generations. Nothing in these old conceptions had anything to do with forming the
taste
of the citizenry—only a taste for virtue. Architecture and sculptured ornament, as well as free-standing statuary, daily visible to everyone, imprinted a coded message, as in genetics, or so it was assumed, and the first act of an invading enemy was to raze the city and all its monuments, so that no memory of civic life would remain. Similarly with church building and decoration; the component of beauty and splendor in the stone fabric was part of the edifying element, although opinions differed among the monastic orders as to how large a part the sensuous ought to play—the Cistercians thought that the rounded apse was sinful (curves were more wicked than right angles), and their churches have a flat east end. The modern notion of sparing beauty in warfare—hit the railway yards, men, not the cathedral—was undreamed of, since beauty was, in those days, inseparable from the messages it carried to the people.

As cities became bigger and more ugly, with the advance of the Industrial Revolution, the faith in architecture and sculpture (painting to a much lesser extent) as nurturers of virtue was replaced by faith in Nature. Natural beauty was seen as a character-former; a child brought up under its influences was regarded as particularly fortunate. The Romantic, Wordsworthian belief in Nature’s beneficent powers is still with us, but we now think of it in terms of vacations, camp, pack trips, sailing.

All these sets of belief in the ennobling power of beauty are justified by subjective experience. Beauty communicates an instant sense of joy that arrives like a revelation. Seeing a spring apple orchard, a field of wild flowers, a Greek temple, a Renaissance fresco, a Henry Moore makes us feel not only good but “good.” Since we know this, empirically, since the experience of instant well-being is unfailing, how can we doubt that civilizations that provide such experiences on a daily basis are “better” than those that don’t? Otherwise a child, considered as a spirit, would be just as well off being brought up in a trailer camp or a Holiday Inn. Of course you don’t believe that; neither do I. Nothing could
make
me believe it. Yet the evidence, such as there is, is rather shaking. Let us take Germany. The most beautiful parts of the country, everyone agrees, are Bavaria and the Rhineland. Nature is far more beautiful there, in the Black Forest, along the Rhine and the Moselle, in the Bavarian Alps, and man’s works are too—cathedrals, churches, palaces, bridges, town architecture. The Rhenish towns and cities, and Munich, Nürnberg, Würzburg, Bamberg, Regensburg are the treasure-houses of Germany—they also had the best artists. Yet Bavaria and the Rhineland had much the worst Nazis, and Bavaria is still a neo-Nazi stronghold; I am not sure about the Rhineland. In Italy, you found something similar; the worst Fascists, the most irreducible, were in Machiavelli’s city of Florence, with its halls of civic virtue still standing. The analogies can be carried to my own country. The prettiest parts, I understand, contain some of the most vicious people: unreconstructed mountainous sections of the South, Carmel Valley in California.