Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
"FEELING" AND ART
I know this
anecdote places me in a problematic position and will at once put me offside
with some readers. But tell it I must.
In London recently, I walked into
the Tate Modern, nosed around among some of my favourite modernist and
surrealist works, and laughed at the clumsiness of other things hanging there.
Then I found myself in a gallery
in which three huge pieces were hanging. They were gigantic daubs – red paint
smeared on canvas in circular patterns and curly-whirly movements, with much
dripping of the paint. My reaction was the same as I suspect your’s would be – or
at least your’s before you start to rationalise and tell yourself what
profundities you can see in it because it is in a prestigious gallery, after
all, and it must mean something.
My reaction was: “This required no talent. It’s a joke.
Basically it’s rubbish, which you or I could do in five minutes on a day when
we had nothing better to do. How did get here in the first place?”
Now I am educated enough to know
that it is not socially acceptable to dismiss what is hanging in the Tate
Modern. Indeed, it is most unsophisticated to criticise any recent art. For if
you are dismissive of much that now takes up gallery wall space, you will be
told (a.) that you are an uneducated philistine who doesn’t know the latest art
theory and is probably an advocate of “artism” to boot. And (b.) that you’re just like those Nazis who persecuted
the modern art of their day, pillorying it in an exhibition of Entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”) in
the 1930s and thus damning much of what we now consider masterpieces of
impressionism, surrealism, expressionism and non-representational abstraction.
(Sometimes I think that Hitler and Goebbels did a good turn to many a crap
painter by giving them a free pass card. “If
you criticise my work you must be a Nazi!” But I digress.)
I am not advocating Entartete Kunst exhibitions. I am not in any way saying that modern
art should be closed down or that artists and their patrons (yes, it is a money
game) should be prosecuted or persecuted. Let free expression proceed, I say. I
am just asserting my right to an informed opinion. And, dear reader, it is informed because I have looked at the
art and not at the theory – which is the only way to be informed about art.
I expressed my opinion of the
three talentless Tate Modern daubs by posting a photo of one of them on
Facebook and making a comment. It was not a complimentary comment.
My posting elicited one very odd
response. I was asked if I preferred “skill
without feeling” to “feeling without
skill”.
Implicitly, my correspondent was
suggesting that “feeling” is of itself a component of art, and this I believe
to be a great fallacy.
To set “feeling” against “skill”
in appreciating art is a false dichotomy. “Feeling” may inspire a work of art.
A work of art may engender “feeling” in viewers. But in and of itself,
“feeling” is not what makes art art. Skill in artistic technique does. A baby
cries loudly when he has wet himself. He shows great feeling. But it is not
art. A child stamps her feet with rage and holds her breath until she turns
red. Again, huge reserves of feeling, but not art. A teenager falls in love and
feels sentiment mixed with lust. Certainly it is feeling, but it won’t be art
until the teenager can express it skilfully in artistic form. Art is not
essentially feeling. The art is in the skill, not in the feeling. My
correspondent was assuming that if whoever did the daub felt great feeling in
doing it, then we should give it the benefit of the doubt and salute it as art.
The notion of “feeling” as a criterion for judging art is really the same as
describing art as “self-expression”, which is another easy trap in art
appreciation.
Now where did this mistaken, but
widespread, notion come from?
I think it came from the romantic
myth of the artist as an inspired person who simply lets inspiration come and
then proceeds to let rip on the canvas. This myth seems to be validated by the
evidence of many artists who were wild livers (Caravaggio), eccentric
(J.M.W.Turner), mentally unbalanced (Van Gogh), tubercular and depressive
(Mogdiliani) etc. The fiction grows that they presented raw, untutored genius
to the world – to hell with technique – and that is what made them great
artists. QED.
But after visiting two other
exhibitions of art on my pilgrimage, I have fairly solid proof that this
fiction is complete bollocks.
First Exhibit for the Prosecution: I paid a visit to the venerable
Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-on-Tyne, where an exhibition was being held of
the English landscape tradition between c.1780 and c.1820. Centrepiece of the
exhibition were lesser-known pieces by Constable and J.M.W.Turner.
Turner is one of those painters
who is seen (by the semi-informed) as a “wild inspiration” man. I mean, how
could he be anything else? His canvases are so filled with “feeling” aren’t
they? This is the man who, in such luminous masterpieces as Rain, Steam and Speed and The Fighting Temeraire, devised his own
Impressionism about half a century before the term was even invented. Look at
those brushstrokes. Look at those vague but suggestive outlines. This must be
pure inspirational genius working at the canvas, right?
In fact, wrong.
For by displaying many of the
more obscure works of Turner’s youth and young manhood, the Laing Art Gallery
exhibition showed that Turner spent a long artistic apprenticeship learning his
craft by learning his technique from other artists. He pegged away for years at
watercolours and at small canvases in the conventional, classical style of Claude
Lorrain. Only when he had mastered such skill and craft did he gradually
develop his own artistic vocabulary.
Is there inspiration and force
and “feeling” in the mature Turner? Of course there is, but it is built on a
solid foundation of technique. Look at the perspective, that neat division of
the canvas, that departure from objective reality of having the fire on the
outside of the train in Rain, Steam and
Speed, and you are looking at the learnt skills and technique upon which
genius and inspiration could work. The inspiration and “feeling” would not have
become art without the learnt technique.
Second Exhibit for the Prosecution: Even more powerful, this one,
because the mental states of the artist were more extreme and he has almost
become the archetype of the wild, inspired artist.
In Amsterdam, I spent some
inspiring and instructive hours in the Vincent van Gogh Museum. It is a
wonderful and large collection of the artist’s work. True, it does not contain
some of his most celebrated works (the famous painting of the Arles café
terrace at night, for example, or the starry night which is, I believe, in MOMA
in New York). But it does contain many of the best-known self-portraits, the
postman, the view of his bedroom, the sunflowers, and other canvases that are
recognised internationally.
Because van Gogh’s canvases have
been arranged (more-or-less) chronologically in the Amsterdam museum, you are
able to see the artist developing and growing in style and technique.
Do you know him only from the
colourful canvases he painted in the south of France? Do you think of him
simply as the guy who had an unstable mind, was hospitalised after a major
mental breakdown, seems to have made an attempt to kill himself and once cut
off part of his ear? Therefore, do you think it was an inspired and disoriented
mind alone that produced the
masterpieces – that they are the fruit of “feeling”?
Now it’s true that van Gogh’s
years in France were among his most fruitful and it’s true that he renewed
himself as an artist first in Paris and then in the south. (It’s hard not to
think of him as being as much a French painter as a Dutch one.) His mental
disturbance did indeed contribute greatly to his last works.
But walk through the Amsterdam
gallery and look at van Gogh growing and learning
and polishing his technique
throughout his career. Look at all those early and sombre paintings of dark
Dutch peasant cottages under stormy skies, which perhaps those with only a
casual knowledge of van Gogh would not readily recognise as van Gogh’s work. They
are so different from his last works. Look at his respect for objective reality
in his patient accounts of Dutch peasant life, culminating in what some see as
his first masterpiece The Potato Eaters.
Certainly it is not photographic realism (consider the modelling of the
head of the man on the left of the canvas – I’d call it expressionism). But it
is not the work of a man riding on blind inspiration either.
And then look at how consciously,
and in experiment after experiment, he modified his style once he was
influenced by his French contemporaries.
To look at a large body of van
Gogh’s work like this, taken from all periods of his artistic career, was to
discover an artist who knowingly and with a rational mind worked on his style,
modified his technique and perfected himself as a painter. This was not a man
who got up each day and waited for inspiration to zap him. This was a man who
worked hard at his art.
Of course “feeling” fed into his
work. Of course his disturbed mind was a big factor in his final works. But the
feeling would have been only feeling,
and not art, without the years and years spent learning and growing in
technique and skill.
Because in this long editorial I
have raged so much against “feeling” as a criterion in judging art, I hope you
will forgive an apparent self-contradiction as I end. When I came to one of the
last paintings in the Amsterdam gallery – a painting long considered to be van
Gogh’s last – I found myself almost choking up and crying. I refer to the
jagged, the disturbing, the beautiful Wheatfield
with Crows, painted in 1890, shortly before van Gogh died.
But you’ll note that I’ve
admitted works of art can engender strong feeling in viewers. My feeling in
viewing Wheatfield with Crows was
both shock and wonder in being drawn into its unique view of the natural world;
and a realisation that the artist’s lifelong working at his skills brought him
to this masterpiece.
But my feeling was not the art.
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