The Act of Creation (55 page)

 

 

Tastes and distastes on the sensory level play, like consonances and
dissonances, only a subordinate role in the aesthetic experience, as
one among many patterns of unity-in-variety. The pre-condition of the
experience to occur is once more that the emotive potentials of the
matrices participating in it should form an ascending gradient, and
provide a hint, however tentative or teasing, of some hidden reality in
the play of forms and colours.

 

 

 

 

 

XXIII
ART AND PROGRESS
In the discussion which followed a lecture at an American university
on the subject of this book, one of the 'resident painters' I remarked
angrily:
'I do not "bisociate". I sit down, look at the model, and paint it.' In a
sense he was right. He had found his 'style', his visual vocabulary, some
years earlier and was quite content to use it, with suitable variations,
to express everything he had to say. The two planes of motif and medium
had become firmly welded together at a fixed angle, and the original
bisociative act had become stabilized into a skilled routine -- highly
flexible, but governed by a fixed code. It would be very foolish to
underestimate the achievements of which skilled routine is capable. By
working tirelessly to improve his technique, the pupil or imitator may --
as the history of doubtful attributions and outright forgeries proves
-- equal and sometimes surpass the master in technical perfection. But
technical virtuosity is one thing, creative originality another.
Cumulative Periods
Original discoveries are as rare in art as in science. They consist
in finding new ways of bisociating motif and medium. Art historians
who lived in periods of rapid transition, considered 'progress' in
terms of discoveries of new techniques: Pliny called each innovator a
heuretes
-- a 'finder' entitled to utter Archimedes' triumphant
shout. The innovations which he and Quintilian listed as quasi-scientific
discoveries were feats such as rendering difficult, contorted motions;
making the first statue with an open mouth; showing the course of the
veins; paying attention to light and shadow. They regarded each discovery
as a landmark on the road towards the mastery of reality; and during the
second great awakening, the Renaissance, Vasari, Leonardo, and Dürer
took a similar attitude. Vasari described the triumphant advance of
painting from Giotto to the sixteenth-century masters in terms almost
comparable to a history of sea-farers, where each of the great captains
puts a new continent on the map. Leonardo thought in all seriousness
that it was 'a wretched pupil who did not surpass his master'; and if
we recall that less than two centuries, or six generations, separate
Giotto and Ducio on the one hand, from Raphael and Titian on the other,
we can appreciate his point of view. Greek sculpture, from Polymedes of
Argos to Praxiteles (also a span of about six generations), and Italian
art from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, advanced
indeed in a cumulative way -- each genius 'stood on the shoulders of
giants' and could look a little further than his predecessors.
But here a dangerous misunderstanding might arise. 'Cumulative
progress' means in this context merely that each painter could make
use of the discoveries of his predecessors without having to make them
again. Foreshortening, perspective, anatomy, a whole series of steps in
the rendering of light and colour, of textures, movements, expressions;
these and many other innovations in the treatment of the medium and the
perception of reality, once made, could be easily absorbed by pupils
and imitators. When Leonardo spoke of the pupil's duty to 'surpass' his
master, he meant only this -- that the pupil was free to incorporate at
his ease the discoveries of his elders into his repertory and to look for
new pastures. But neither he nor Vasari meant that those who came later
were better painters in an absolute sense than those on whose shoulders
they stood. Moreover, Leonardo knew that the pupil was free not only to
accept, but also to reject the discoveries of his elders. The deliberate
distortions and asymmetries in the face of Mona Lisa, and the equally
deliberate ambiguities of contour in the corners of mouth and eyes, are
deviations from the canon; but they were based on a knowing rejection
of certain aspects of 'scientific realism' in painting -- not on naive
ignorance. In this sense the achievements of art are indeed cumulative
and irreversible, as those of science are. The artist can decide to go
against them, but he cannot ignore them.
'Florentine painting', wrote Eric Newton, [1] 'starts, like a sprint,
with a pistol shot, In 1280 it hardly exists. By 1300 it is racing
ahead.' Quite a number of modern art-historians share, with Pliny and
Vasari, a belief in cumulative progress of art. Ruskin and Roger Fry
thought the history of painting from ancient days was a progressive
shedding of prejudices and the recovery of our lost 'innocence of the
eye'. 'It has taken from Neolithic times till the nineteenth century
to perfect this discovery,' wrote Fry, 'European art from the time of
Giotto progressed more or less continuously in this direction, in which
the discovery of linear perspective marks an important stage, whilst
the full exploration of atmospheric colour and colour perspective had
to await the work of the French impressionists.' [2] Eric Newton sees
the development of European art 'as a great river system in which many
tributaries are gradually drawn together'; [3] and his diagram of the
outstanding artists and trends from 1300 to 1940 is a map of branches
and confluences representing 'the cycle of realism that had begun with
Giotto and ended with Cézanne'. Lastly Gombrich, though puzzled
by the representational skill of the prehistoric cave-painters, agrees
that 'all representations can be somehow arranged along a scale which
extends from the schematic to the impressionist'.
Stagnation and Cross-Fertilization
On the other hand, it is easy to match, in the history of every culture
or country, the relatively brief periods of rapid cumulative advances
with much longer periods of stagnation, onesidedness, mannerism and
estrangement from reality. The parallel between the dizzy zig-zag curves
in the development of the sciences and arts is obvious; and so is the
kinship between the defenders of scientific and of artistic orthodoxy
-- the phalanxes of inertia. 'The more we become aware of the enormous
pull in man to repeat what he has learned, the greater will be our
admiration for these exceptional beings who could break this spell and
make a significant advance on which others could build.' [4]
Because visual discoveries are so difficult to verbalize, we have hardly
any introspective records of the painter's 'moment of truth' which could
be compared to the accounts left by scientists; we do not know how the
games of the underground enter into the picture. But if we consider the
history of art as a whole -- in its aspect of a collective enterprise,
as Vasari saw it -- we shall find that the great innovators all stand
at draughty corners of world-history, where air-currents from different
culture-climates meet, mix, and integrate. The Greek awakening in the
sixth century B.C. probably started under the impact of the seemingly
incompatible Egyptian, Oriental, and Cretan art forms on the tribes
of northern origin -- when they became sufficiently settled to take an
interest in these matters. Later Alexander reversed the process: in the
wake of his conquests, Hellenistic art invaded Egypt, the Middle East,
and India; even the Buddha was made to put on a Greek smile. Gothic
art originates in the particularly draughty climate of the migrations
and incursions from the north, and led to the integration of pagan and
Roman-Christian traditions. Another great synthesis, of the Byzantine
and the Gothic, started the chain-reaction in Sienna and Florence;
the rediscovery of Greek statuary gave it a further boost. Brunelleschi
married the Gothic invention of vaults carried by pillars and ribs with
the columns and pillasters of classic Roman architecture -- and created
that wonderful hybrid, the Renaissance style. And so it goes on --
to Chinese Chippendale, the impact of Japanese colour-prints on Manet
and Degas, and of primitive African sculpture on the moderns. Equally
important were cross-influences from not directly related fields: the
discovery of the laws of perspective, and the rediscovery of Apollonius'
work on conic sections; the revival of anatomy (Leonardo himself dissected
more than thirty corpses); the invention of oil-paint, of the woodcut, of
lithography, and photography; the evolution of colour-theory in physics.
To sum up: it seems to be undeniably true, as Pliny was the first to
suggest, that art evolves, like science, in a cumulative manner -- but
only for a while, and within limits, until all that can be done has been
done along that particular line; at the great turning points, however,
which initiate a new departure along a new line, we find bisociations
in the grand style -- cross-fertilization between different periods,
cultures, and provinces of knowledge.
Statement and Implication
I have compared (
p. 72
f.) the cartoonist's
technique of reducing a face to its bare essentials, to the scientist's
technique of representing a process by a diagram, schema, map, or
model. In the third panel of our tryptich, the artist applies similar
techniques. He too is engaged in making models of phenomena in his
particular medium, using a particular set of formulae, and concentrating
on those aspects of reality, to the detriment of others, which are
significant to him, or to the fashions and conventions of his time. (Let
me repeat, though, that the reality which he represents need not be a
tangible object in three-dimensional space any more than the elusive
'objects' represented in the physicist's equations.) Thus unavoidably,
artist, scientist, and caricaturist alike must use the techniques of
selective emphasis
, exaggeration, and simplification, to underline
those aspects or features which seem relevant to them.

 

 

They must also observe the rules of economy. As the laws of physics become
more universal in character, the symbols which represent them become more
elusive and implicit. In the history of art we can trace the effects of
the 'law of infolding' in every period. On Egyptian tomb-paintings, each
part of the body is still shown explicitly, in its most characteristic
aspect; but the young girl picking flowers on a famous wall-painting in
Stabiae impertinently turns her back on us. What we see of her face is
only the merest hint of a profile, leaving it to us to extrapolate her
lovely features. The deliberate return of Byzantine art to pre-Hellenistic
rigidity and 'naivety', expressed a rejection of worldly realism in favour
of a more implicit manner of conveying its message. Much the same could
be said of the deliberate simplicity and discreet, almost apologetic,
use of perspective by Fra Angelico; and of all the later, unceasing
attempts by artists to escape saturation, evade the obvious, and appeal
to the beholder's imagination. It was Leonardo who invented "sfumato" --
the smoke-screen of ambiguous shadows, the blurred contours at the corners
of Mona Lisa's eyes, which kept people guessing through four centuries;
and it was Titian who in his later years invented the technique of the
bold and 'rough' brushstroke, those 'crudely daubed strokes and blobs'
-- as Vasari admiringly described them -- which, looked at from close
quarters, make no sense at all. A similar progression from the neat and
meticulous to the loose and evocative brush can be seen in Rembrandt's
rendering of textiles and embroideries: the law of infolding asserts
itself both in the evolution of individual artists and in the historic
development of any particular form of art. A striking example of the
latter are the two views of the same Venetian motif (the Campo San
Zanipolo) by Canaletto in 1740, and by Guardi in 1782 -- the first neat
and explicit like a photograph, the second suggestive, impressionistic,
and 'modern'.

 

 

One can hardly accuse Reynolds of exaggerated modernism; some of his
nice little girls hugging their nice little doggies have precisely
that sweet-and-sticky quality which, by its over-explicit attack on
the emotions, defeats its own purpose. But as he was an accomplished
master of his craft, he was capable of seeing the reverse of the medal;
and in his 'Discourse' commemorating the work of Gainsborough, there is
a surprising passage: 'I have often imagined that this unfinished manner
contributed even to that striking resemblance for which his portraits
are so remarkable. Though this opinion may be considered as fanciful,
yet I think a plausible reason may be given, why such a mode of painting
should have such an effect. It is presupposed that in this undetermined
manner there is the general effect; enough to remind the spectator
of the original; the imagination supplies the rest, and perhaps more
satisfactorily to himself, if not more exactly, than the artist, with
all his care, could possibly have done.'

 

 

From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, the trend towards the
implicit, the oblique hint, the statement disguised as a riddle kept
gathering speed and momentum -- so much so that it sometimes gave the
impression of art not merely 'folding in' but folding up. In impressionist
painting, Gombrich remarked, 'the direction of the brushstroke is no
longer an aid to the reading of forms. It is without any support from
structure that the beholder must mobilize his memory of the visible world
and project it into the mosaic of strokes and dabs on the canvas before
him. The image, it might be said, has no firm anchorage left on the canvas
-- it is only 'conjured up in our minds.' [5] From here it was only
a step to cutting the anchor and doing away with illusion as something
altogether too obvious. Picasso's women shown part