Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty Beauty in Music Painting The Testimony of the History of Painting The Aesthetic Element in Painting The Aesthetic Experience in Painting Poor Art and Rich Art Poetry	THE AESTHETIC ELEMENT IN PAINTING Let us see what this means. Pater calls music the supreme art because of the complete identity of matter and form. Now, the more literal an art, the more obvious is the distinction between its subject and the handling of it. And literalness of art objects was precisely what the servitude of the artist to religion, morality, and politics implied, for the more realistic his work the better it served the purpose of adorning a tale or pointing out a precept. But the artist is not a mere craftsman, but a creator. He does not take pride or find joy in manual dexterity and skillfulness, or perfect pictorial reproduction. He labors for adequate expression of significant personal experience. Hence, with the gradual breakdown of ecclesiastical and political dictation the creative artist could follow his own creative bent in the choice of subject and treatment, so that the tone of art began to change from faithful duplication of set themes to free treatment of whatever was artistically significant to the creative mind. Let us consider some instances. All modern art is marked by its limitless variety of subjectmatter and its freedom from any moralistic implications. Poetry has expanded beyond the traditionally prescribed "nice" subjects of birds, flowers, spring, lovely ladies, moonlight, and rippling brooks, while the free-verse movement is making successful inroads upon the stultifying academic laws of metrical construction, and the novel is becoming progressively naturalistic in spite of the outcries of the humanists that writers have lost all sense of restraint and decorum, and no longer point the moral in their works of virtue rewarded and vice punished. The novelist finds his material wherever he is inclined to do so and paints life with free, broad strokes, being limited only in what he produces by his own creative power. But it is in the plastic arts that the advancing cause of free creative expression is most discernible, with Ingres, Cézanne, and Seurat as the precursors of a renaissance of painting as a pure creative effort, reaching fruition in the lyricism of Picasso and Braque. How did the transformation of painting from the literalism imposed upon it by priest, prince, magistrate, general, and schoolmaster, to pure lyrical, musical expression come about? Monet It is traceable, according to adequate authority, to the advent of the camera and the machine, which redeemed painting from its base and accessory functions. Prior to the nineteenth century artisanship was not only an honorable and lucrative occupation, but it was upon the artisan that society depended for the production of goods whose quality was in any manner or shape above that of base utility. The artisan was not an artist, but a primitive machine. And a machine has nothing to do with art. Occasionally there would, of course, arise among the artisans some exceptional fellow with an artistic urge to go beyond the demands of mechanical perfection, but he was a curiosity and treated as such. Hence, we find that in the art preceding that of our own epoch the delimitation between industrial goods and artistic products is not at all clear. True artistic touches, even when present, were covered up by the multifarious utilitarian services demanded of the artist as manufacturer, historian, or political henchman. With the advent of mechanical devices the artisan has largely disappeared, and even when he operates he is not confused with the artist, who could now obey his creative impulse due to his emancipation from the stifling influence of commercialism. Thus the modern artist became a free agent and could turn his attention from court, church, and market place, to nature that offered him an endless array of material for his creative purposes. What did the modern artist do with his new opportunities? What turn did painting take just so soon as the painter came into his own? In the answer to this question lies the test of Pater's claim for music. Is modern painting musical in quality? Let authorities answer this question. In his book, The Modern Movement in Art, Mr. Wilenski points out that for the Renaissance criterion of art in the service of religion, modern art has substituted that of the nature of art itself. This intrinsic criterion was operative no doubt, in all the great artists of Western Europe for the last five hundred years, but it is the modern artist who can follow it completely, unhampered. He writes: Medieval art in Western Europe was a complex cord composed of many strands. Justified fundamentally in the artist's mind by the idea of service to religion it embraced a number of activities within itself. As Émile Male has pointed out, the art of the early Gothic Cathedrals, which represented the culmination of medieval art in Western Europe, was the mirror not only of the religion, but also the mirror of the scientific and the moral concepts of the medieval Christian world, of that world's experience of past and contemporary history, and of its perception of architectural form. One by one, since those cathedrals were built, these constituents have been separated and made distinct in Western European thought. The religious fundament was the first constituent to be withdrawn. Religion first began to be thought of as a thing distinct from art; and the service of religion became an activity of a separate kind. Science, morals, social history, as time passed, followed the path taken by religion. Today each is in a separate compartment withdrawn from art. Specialists who make a living by specialization have attained to a detailed and elaborate experience in each and all these fields that is quite outside the artist's range. We do not look to the artist today for our science, our ethics, or our history any more than for our religion. Today, moreover, we have the camera, the cinematograph, and camerasculpture developed by specialists into instruments of such recording skill that we have learned to look to them for records of our mechanical vision. What is the idea of art that has been substituted for art in the service of religion? Mr. Wilenski answers that it is the idea of architecture as the typical art, and it is of germane interest here that architecture has been called frozen music. The art of architecture, as distinct from mere utilitarian building, is the expression of formal experience. The modern artist's ideal is to create architectural pictorial form: A basic idea of the modern movement is . . . that the business of the architectural artist is fundamentally the same as that of the architect. It is held as a first principle that the artist must be free, as the architect is free, to introduce representational details or not; that representational details are no more a necessary part of a picture or a piece of sculpture than they are a necessary part of a cathedral. It is also held that if the painter or sculptor decides to introduce such details he must do so by the architect's procedure; that he cannot achieve an architectural construction by degrading his perception to mechanical vision and imitating the momentary appearance of some fragment at some point of time and space. It is held that he must not copy fragments in photographically naturalistic technique, but must (a) reinforce his vision to actual or imagined perception; (b) perceive not fragments, but formal relations; and (c) force his perception to the point of creating a definite, organized, and complete formal symbol compounded of smaller symbols homogeneous and consistent one with another and with the symbol as a whole. But what is this artistic perception? The artist, says Mr. Wilenski, does not paint what he sees, but what he perceives. Perception is personal, individual; seeing is impersonal, general. We all see a tree, but the tree does not look the same to all of us; it does not look to the lumberman as it does to the painter, nor to any one painter as to another. So the architectural form that the painter creates of the tree, landscape, or human face, is the unique perception of the artist. The artist is simply the man who possesses a higher degree of artistic perception than the normal man, and "who has the power to realize his actual or imagined perception (of any calibre) to the point of inventing symbolic concrete form to express it." Let us turn to another authority on the modern movement in painting. Mr. Bell discusses modern art with the bias of his theory of significant form, yet, his account of its salient quality as art is not unlike that of Mr. Wilenski. Of PostImpressionism he writes: There is no mystery about Post-Impressionism; a good Post-Impressionist picture is good for precisely the same reasons that any other picture is good. The essential quality in art is permanent. PostImpressionism, therefore, implies no violent break with the past. It is merely a deliberate rejection of certain hampering traditions of modern growth. It does deny that art need ever take orders from the past; but that is not a badge of Post-Impressionism; it is the commonest mark of vitality. Even to speak of Post-Impressionism as a movement may lead to misconceptions; the habit of speaking of movements at all is rather misleading. The stream of art has never run utterly dry: it flows through the ages, now broad now narrow, now deep now shallow, now rapid now sluggish: its color is changing always. But who can set a mark against the exact point of change? In the earlier nineteenth century the stream ran very low. In the days of the Impressionists, against whom the contemporary movement is in some ways a reaction, it had already become copious. Any attempt to dam and imprison this river, to choose out a particular school or movement and say: "Here art begins and there it ends," is a pernicious absurdity. That way Academization lies. At this moment there are not above half a dozen good painters alive who do not derive, to some extent, from Cézanne. Superficially, I say, because, essentially, all good art is of the same movement: there are only two kinds of art, good and bad. Nevertheless, the division of the stream into reaches, distinguished by differences of manner, is intelligible and, to historians at any rate, useful. The reaches also differ from each other in volume; one period of art is distinguished from another by its fertility. For a few fortunate years or decades the output of considerable art is great. Suddenly it ceases; or slowly it dwindles: a movement has exhausted itself. How far a movement is made by the fortuitous synchronization of a number of good artists, and how far the artists are helped to the creation of significant form by the pervasion of some underlying spirit of the age, is a question that can never be decided beyond cavil. But however the credit is to be apportioned--and I suspect it should be divided about equally--we are justified, I think, looking at the history of art as a whole, in regarding such periods of fertility as distinct parts of that whole. Primarily, it is as a period of fertility in good art and artists that I admire the Post-Impressionist movement. Also, I believe that the principles which underlie and inspire that movement are more likely to encourage artists to give of their best, and to foster a good tradition, than any of which modern history bears record. But my interest in this movement, and my admiration for much of the art it has produced, does not blind me to the greatness of the products of other movements; neither, I hope, will it blind me to the greatness of any new creation of form even though that novelty may seem to imply a reaction against the tradition of Cézanne. Like all sound revolutions, Post-Impressionism is nothing more than a return to first principles. Into a world where the painter was expected to be either a photographer or an acrobat burst the PostImpressionist, claiming that, above all things, he should be an artist. Never mind, said he, about representation or accomplishment--mind about creating significant form, mind about art. Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching a likeness or displaying address. Every sacrifice made to representation is something stolen from art. Far from being the insolent kind of revolution it is vulgarly supposed to be, Post-Impressionism is, in fact, a return, not indeed to any particular tradition of painting, but to the great tradition of visual art. It sets before every artist the ideal set before themselves by the primitives, an ideal which, since the twelfth century, has been cherished only by exceptional men of genius. Post-Impressionism is nothing but the reassertion of the first commandment of art--Thou shalt create form. By this assertion it shakes hands across the ages with the byzantine primitives and with every vital movement that has struggled into existence since the arts began. Mr. Roger Fry, in summarizing the modern movement as "the re-establishment of purely aesthetic criteria in place of the criterion of conformity to appearance--the rediscovery of the principles of structural design and harmony," writes further that: So long as representation was regarded as the end of art, the skill of the artist and his proficiency in this particular feat of representation were regarded with an admiration which was in fact mainly nonaesthetic. With the new indifference to representation we have become much less interested in skill and not at all interested in knowledge. We are thus no longer cut off from a great deal of barbaric and primitive art the very meaning of which escaped the understanding of those who demanded a certain standard of skill in representation before they could give serious consideration to a work of art. In general the effect of the movement has been to render the artist intensively conscious of the aesthetic unity of the work of art, but singularly naïve and simple as regards other considerations. The foregoing accounts of the nature of the modern movement in painting speak one language, and that language is not much unlike that of Pater in designating music as being the measure of the arts, since the result of the substitution of the idea of art as the painter's objective for that of service to religion is that, irrespective of its label as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, or whatever else, modern painting tends strongly towards the complete identification of matter and form. Any painting executed in the spirit of the modern movement fits in well with Pater's contention that its significance is neither literary nor poetical, but lies in "that pictorial quality which lies between (unique pledge of the possession of the pictorial gift) the inventive or creative handling of pure line and color, which, . . . is quite independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject it accompanies." When a painting is neither romantic, nor descriptive, nor representational, it is reduced to pure form, drawing, and coloring, in which, "the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--" is "nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling;" and in which this form, this mode of handling, therefore, becomes the end, and penetrates every part of the matter. Such a painting is, of course, not music, due to its sensuous material, from which it receives its distinctive aesthetic quality, but it parallels music in its identity of form and matter.