The Act of Creation (56 page)

en face
and part
in profile, sometimes with a third eye or limbs shuffled around, rely
on the beholder's knowledge of the female form and on his willingness
to participate in the master's experiments with it; like Leonardo's
experiments with his chimeras, they are a challenge and an invitation to
explore the possible worlds implied in the visible world. At the opposite
extreme of the scale we find the meticulous realism of a series of great
portrait painters -- from Holbein to, say, Fantin Latour. From a purely
optical point of view they seem to be completely explicit statements;
and yet they contain a mystery in another dimension -- the mystery of
character and personality summed up in a single expression, breathing
through the pigment of the canvas. A photograph can convey the truth of
a moment; a portrait can intimate the truth of a whole life.

 

 

Thus there exist various dimensions of infolding -- various directions
in which the beholder must exert his imagination and complete the
hint. One is reflected in the development which started with the
veiled
sfumato
and the loose, evocative brush -- with Eastlake's
'judicious unfinish of the consummate workman' -- and ends, for the time
being, with the baffling challenges offered by contemporary art. Another
is the avoidance of any too overt appeal to the emotions -- whether in a
human face or in a Neopolitan sunset. The less there is left to divine,
the quicker the process of saturation sets in, which rejects any further
offer of the mixture as before as sentimental, melodramatic, pornographic,
or just slushy kitsch. Rembrandt's famous warning to the spectator to
keep his distance -- 'don't poke your nose into my pictures, the smell
of paint will poison you' -- could be reversed: 'don't turn your canvas
into flypaper to catch my emotions, I can' t bear the feel of it.' Even
patterns of unity-in-diversity, for all their archetypal echoes, become
boring if they are too obvious -- as rhythm becomes monotonous unless
its pulsation is perceived beneath the surface only of a complex musical
or metric pattern.

 

 

The Japanese have a word for it:
shibuyi
. The colour-scheme of a
kimono so discreet, subdued, and apparently dull that there seems to be
no scheme at all, is
shibuyi
. A statue whose grace is hidden by a
rough, unpolished, seemingly unfinished surface, is
shibuyi
. So is
the delicious taste of raw fish, once the acrid tang which hides it is
overcome. The Chinese, however, discovered the law of infolding much
earlier on. A seventeenth-century manual of painting advocates the
technique of 'leaving out', illustrated by drawings of the familiar
kind where the simple outline of a face, minus features, serves as a
surprisingly expressive formula: 'Figures, even though painted without
eyes, must seem to look; without ears, must seem to listen. There are
things which ten hundred brushstrokes cannot depict but which can be
captured by a few simple strokes if they are right. That is truly giving
expression to the invisible.' [6]

 

 

But economy of means and avoidance of the obvious should not
be misinterpreted as lack of spontaneity or a tendency towards
moderation. Sesshu, perhaps the greatest of Japanese painters (a
contemporary of Leonardo's), was a master of the leaving-out technique;
yet he used not only his brush, but fisffuls of straw dipped in
ink to impart to his landscapes their powerful and violent sense of
motion. Goya's 'Disasters' combine a maximum of economy with a maximum
of horror. On the other hand, Royal Academy portraits in the approved
tradition display all the virtues of moderation, yet in their pedestrian
explicitness 'deprive the mind', to quote Mallarmé once more,
'of that delirious joy of imagining that it creates'.

 

 

The artist's aim, we saw at the beginning of this book, is to turn his
audience into his accomplices. Complicity does not exclude violence --
but it must be based on a shared secret.

 

 

 

 

 

XXIV
CONFUSION AND STERILITY
The Aesthetics of Snobbery [1]
In 1948, a German art restorer named Dietrich Fey, engaged in
reconstruction work on Lübeck's ancient St. Marien Church, stated
that his workmen had discovered traces of Gothic wall-paintings dating
back to the thirteenth century, under a coating of chalk on the church
walls. The restoration of the paintings was entrusted to Fey's assistant,
Lothar Malskat, who finished the job two years later. In 1950 Chancellor
Adenauer presided over the ceremonies marking the completion of the
restoration work, in the presence of art experts from all parts of
Europe. Their unanimous opinion, voiced by Chancellor Adenauer, was that
the twenty-one thirteenth-century Gothic saints on the church walls were
'a valuable treasure and a fabulous discovery of lost masterpieces'.
None of the experts on that or any later occasion expressed doubt as
to the authenticity of the frescoes. It was Herr Malskat himself who,
two years later, disclosed the fraud. He presented himself on his own
initiative at Lübeck police headquarters, where he stated that the
frescoes were entirely his own work undertaken by order of his boss,
Herr Fey; and he asked to be tried for forgery. The leading German
art experts, however, stuck to their opinion; the frescoes, they said,
were without doubt genuine, and Herr Malskat was merely seeking cheap
publicity. An official Board of Investigation was appointed, and came to
the conclusion that the restoration of the wall-paintings was a hoax --
but only after Herr Malskat had confessed that he had also manufactured
hundreds of Rembrandts, Watteaus, Toulouse-Lautrecs, Picassos, Henri
Rousseaus, Corots, Chagalls, Vlamincks, and other masters, and sold them
as originals -- some of which were actually found by the police in Herr
Fey's house. Without this corpus delicti, it is doubtful whether the
German experts would ever have admitted having been fooled.
My point is not the fallibility of the experts. Herr Malskat's exploit is
merely one of a number of similarly successful hoaxes and forgeries -- of
which the most fabulous were probably van Megeeren's faked Vermeers. The
disturbing question which they raise is whether the Lübeck saints
are less beautiful, and have ceased to be 'a valuable treasure of
masterpieces', simply because they had been painted by Herr Malskat and
not by somebody else? And furthermore, if van Megeeren can paint Vermeers
as good as Vermeer himself, why should they be taken off the walls of
the Dutch and other National Galleries? If even the experts were unable
to detect the difference, then surely the false Vermeers must procure
as much aesthetic pleasure to the common run of Museum visitors as the
authentic ones. All the curators would have to do is to change the name
on the catalogue from Vermeer to van Megeeren.
There are several answers to this line of argument, but before going
into them I want to continue in the part of the devil's advocate by
considering an example of a forgery in a different field: Macpherson's
Ossian
. The case is so notorious that the facts need only be
briefly mentioned. James Macpherson (1736-1796), a Scottish poet and
adventurer, alleged that in the course of his wanderings in the Highlands
he had discovered some ancient Gaelic manuscripts. Enthusiastic Scottish
littérateurs put up a subscription to enable Macpherson to pursue
his researches, and in 1761 he published
Fingal, an ancient Epic Poem
in Six Books, together with several other poems composed by Ossian, the
Son of Fingal
. Ossian is the legendary third-century hero and bard
of Celtic literature. "Fingal" was soon followed by the publication of a
still larger Ossianic epic called
Temora
, and this by a collected
edition,
The Works of Ossian
. The authenticity of Macpherson's
text was at once questioned in England, particularly by Dr. Johnson
(whom Macpherson answered by sending him a challenge to a duel), and
to his death Macpherson refused, under various unconvincing pretexts,
to publish his alleged Gaelic originals. By the turn of the century
the controversy was settled; it was established that while Macpherson
had used fragments of ancient Celtic lore, most of the 'Ossianic texts'
were of his own making.
Yet here again the question arises whether the poetic quality of the
work itself is altered by the fact that it was written not by Ossian
the son of Fingal, but by James Macpherson? The 'Ossianic' texts were
translated into many languages, and had a considerable influence on
the literature and cultural climate of Europe in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. This is how the
Encyclopedia Britannica
sums up its evaluation of Macpherson (my italics):

The varied sources of his work and its worthlessness as a transcript
of actual Celtic poems do not alter the fact that he produced a work
of art which . . . did more than any single work to bring about the
romantic movement in European, and especially in German, literature
. . . Herder and Goethe . . . were among its profound admirers.

These examples could be continued indefinitely. Antique furniture, Greek
tanagra figures, Gothic madonnas, old and modern masters are being forged,
copied, counterfeited all the time, and the value we set on the object
is not determined by aesthetic appreciation and pleasure to the eye,
but by the precarious and fallible judgement of experts. And it will
always be fallible for the good and simple reason that genius consists
not in the perfect exercise of a technique, but in its invention;
once the technique is established, diligent pupils and imitators can
produce works in the master's idiom which are often indistinguishable,
and sometimes technically more accomplished than his.
Some years ago, at a fancy-dress ball -- in Monte Carlo, I believe --
a competition was held to decide which among the dozen or so guests
masquerading as Charlie Chaplin came nearest to the original. Chaplin
himself happened to be among them -- and got only the third prize. In
1962, the Fogg museum of Harvard arranged a private exhibition for
connoisseurs, where some of the exhibits were fakes, others genuine; the
guests were to decide which was which. Included were, among other items,
an original portrait by Annibale Carracci, one of the most influential
painters of the Italian baroque, and a contemporary copy thereof; also
an original Picasso drawing of a Mother and Child, and two forgeries
thereof. The result was similar to that of the Chaplin competition;
among those who plumped for one of the forgeries were the chairman of
Princeton's Art Department and the Secretary of the Fogg; the director of
the Metropolitan Museum refused to submit to the test, while other experts
'scored themselves on sheets of paper, compared their verdicts with the
officially announced facts, and quietly crumpled their papers'. [2]
Let me repeat: the principal mark of genius is not perfection, but
originality
, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done,
the conquered territory becomes common property. The fact that even
professional experts are unable to point out the difference in artistic
merit between the true and the false Picasso, Caracci, or Vermeer,
is conclusive proof that no such difference can he registered by the
layman's eye. Are we, then, all snobs to whom a signature, an expert
testimony based on X-ray photography, or the postmark of a period is more
important than the intrinsic beauty of the object itself? And what about
the contested works of Shakespeare and Johann Sebastian Bach? Are their
dramatic and poetic and harmonic qualities dependent on the technical
controversies between specialists?
The answer, I believe, can be summed up in a single sentence: our
appraisal of a work of art or literature is hardly ever a unitary act, and
mostly the result of two or more independent and simultaneous processes
which interfere with and tend to distort each other. Let me illustrate
this by a story which I have told elsewhere at greater length. [3]

A friend of mine, whom I shall call Catherine, was given as a present
by an unobtrusive admirer a drawing from Picasso's classical period;
she took it to be a reproduction and hung it in her staircase. On
my next visit to her house, it was hanging over the mantelpiece in
the drawing-room: the supposed reproduction had turned out to be an
original. But as it was a line-drawing in ink, black contour on white
paper, it needed an expert, or at least a good magnifying lens, to show
that it was the original and not a lithograph or reproduction. Neither
Catherine, nor any of her friends, could tell the difference. Yet
her appreciation of it had completely changed, as the promotion from
staircase to drawing-room showed. I asked her to explain the reason
for her change of attitude to the thing on the wall which in itself
had not changed at all; she answered, surprised at my stupidity,
that of course the thing had not changed, but that she saw it
differently since she knew that it was done by Picasso himself and 'not
just a reproduction'. I then asked what considerations determined her
attitude to pictures in general and she replied with equal sincerity
that they were, of course, considerations of aesthetic quality --
'composition, colour, harmony, power, what have you'. She honestly
believed to be guided by purely aesthetic value-judgements based on
those qualities; but if that was the case, since the qualities of the
picture had not changed, how could her attitude to it have changed?

I was labouring a seemingly obvious point, yet she was unable to see that
she was contradicting herself. It proved quite useless repeating to her
that the origin and rarity-value of the object did not alter its qualities
-- and, accordingly, should not have altered her appreciation of it, if
it had really been based on purely aesthetic criteria as she believed it
to be. In reality, of course, her attitude was determined not by those
criteria, but by an accidental bit of information -- which might be
right or wrong, and was entirely extraneous to the question of aesthetic
value. Yet she was by no means stupid; in fact there is something of her
confusion in all of us. We all tend to believe that our attitude to an
object of art is determined by aesthetic considerations alone, whereas
it is decisively influenced by factors of a quite different order. We
are unable to see a work of an isolated from the context of its origin
or history; and if Catherine were to learn that her Picasso was after all
a reproduction, her attitude would again change according to the changed
context. Moreover, most people get quite indignant when one suggests to
them that the origin of a picture has nothing to do with its aesthetic
value as such. For, in our minds, the question of period, authorship,
and authenticity,
though in itself extraneous to aesthetic value
,
is so intimately mixed up with it, that we find it well-nigh impossible
to unscramble them. The phenomenon of snobbery, in all its crude and
subtle variants, can always be traced back to some confusion of this type.
Thus Catherine would not be a snob if she had said: 'A reproduction of
this line-drawing is to all practical purposes indistinguishable from the
original, and therefore just as beautiful as the original. Nevertheless,
one gives me a greater thrill than the other, for reasons which have
nothing to do with beauty.' But alas, she is incapable of disentangling
the two different elements which determine her reactions, and to a greater
or lesser extent we are all victims of the same confusion. The change in
our attitude, and in the an dealer's price, when it is discovered that
a cracked and blackened piece of landscape displaying three sheep and
a windmill, bears the signature of Broeckendael the Elder, has nothing
to do with beauty, aesthetics, or what have you. And yet, God help us,
the sheep and the mill and the brook do suddenly look different and more
attractive -- even to the hard-boiled dealer. What happened was that
a bit of incidental information cast a ray of golden sunlight on those
miserable sheep; a ray emitted not by the pigment but by the cerebral
cortex of the art-snob.
The Personal Emanation
Let me now present the case for the defence. The appraisal of a work of
art is generally the result of two or more independent processes which
interact with each other. One complex process constitutes the aesthetic
experience as such, which has been discussed in previous chapters; it
implies a system of values, and certain criteria of excellence, on which
we believe our judgement to be based. But other processes interfere with
it, with their different systems of values, and distort our judgements. I
shall mention two types of such interfering systems.
The first is summed up in the statement of a little girl of twelve,
the daughter of a friend, who was taken to the Greenwich Museum,
and when asked to name the most beautiful thing she had seen there,
declared without hesitation: 'Nelson's shirt.' When asked what was so
beautiful about it, she explained: 'That shirt with blood on it was
jolly nice. Fancy real blood on a real shirt which belonged to somebody
really historic.'
Her sense of values, unlike Catherine's, was still unspoilt. The emotion
that she had experienced was derived from the same kind of magic that
emanates from Napoleon's inkpot, the relic of the saint carried in the
annual procession, the rope by which a famous murderer was hanged, the
galley-proof corrected by Tolstoy's hand. Our forbears believed that an
object which had been in the possession of a person became imbued with his
emanations, and in turn emanated something of his substance. 'There is,
I am sure,' a columnist wrote in the "Daily Express", 'for most of us
a special pleasure in sinking your teeth into a peach produced on the
estate of an Earl who is related to the Royal Family.' [4] You might
even come to feel that you are a member of the family if you persist
long enough in this somewhat indirect method of transubstantiation.