art owes to him it would be hard to compute. Without him the artists of
genius and talent who to-day delight us with the significance and
originality of their work might have remained port-bound for ever,
ill-discerning their objective, wanting chart, rudder, and compass.
Cézanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form. In 1839
he was born at Aix-en-Provence, and for forty years he painted patiently
in the manner of his master Pissarro. To the eyes of the world he
appeared, so far as he appeared at all, a respectable, minor
Impressionist, an admirer of Manet, a friend, if not a protégé, of
Zola, a loyal, negligible disciple. He was on the right side, of
course--the Impressionist side, the side of the honest, disinterested
artists, against the academic, literary pests. He believed in painting.
He believed that it could be something better than an expensive
substitute for photography or an accompaniment to poor poetry. So in
1870 he was for science against sentimentality.
But science will neither make nor satisfy an artist: and perhaps Cézanne
saw what the great Impressionists could not see, that though they were
still painting exquisite pictures their theories had led art into a _cul
de sac_. So while he was working away in his corner of Provence, shut
off completely from the aestheticism of Paris, from Baudelairism and
Whistlerism, Cézanne was always looking for something to replace the bad
science of Claude Monet. And somewhere about 1880 he found it. At
Aix-en-Provence came to him a revelation that has set a gulf between the
nineteenth century and the twentieth: for, gazing at the familiar
landscape, Cézanne came to understand it, not as a mode of light, nor
yet as a player in the game of human life, but as an end in itself and
an object of intense emotion. Every great artist has seen landscape as
an end in itself--as pure form, that is to say; Cézanne has made a
generation of artists feel that compared with its significance as an end
in itself all else about a landscape is negligible. From that time
forward Cézanne set himself to create forms that would express the
emotion that he felt for what he had learnt to see. Science became as
irrelevant as subject. Everything can be seen as pure form, and behind
pure form lurks the mysterious significance that thrills to ecstasy. The
rest of Cézanne's life is a continuous effort to capture and express the
significance of form.
I have tried to say in another place that there are more roads than one
by which a man may come at reality. Some artists seem to have come at it
by sheer force of imagination, unaided by anything without them; they
have needed no material ladder to help them out of matter. They have
spoken with reality as mind to mind, and have passed on the message in
forms which owe nothing but bare existence to the physical universe. Of
this race are the best musicians and architects; of this race is not
Cézanne. He travelled towards reality along the traditional road of
European painting. It was in what he saw that he discovered a sublime
architecture haunted by that Universal which informs every Particular.
He pushed further and further towards a complete revelation of the
significance of form, but he needed something concrete as a point of
departure. It was because Cézanne could come at reality only through
what he saw that he never invented purely abstract forms. Few great
artists have depended more on the model. Every picture carried him a
little further towards his goal--complete expression; and because it was
not the making of pictures but the expression of his sense of the
significance of form that he cared about, he lost interest in his work
so soon as he had made it express as much as he had grasped. His own
pictures were for Cézanne nothing but rungs in a ladder at the top of
which would be complete expression. The whole of his later life was a
climbing towards an ideal. For him every picture was a means, a step, a
stick, a hold, a stepping-stone--something he was ready to discard as
soon as it had served his purpose. He had no use for his own pictures.
To him they were experiments. He tossed them into bushes, or left them
in the open fields to be stumbling-blocks for a future race of luckless
critics.
Cézanne is a type of the perfect artist; he is the perfect antithesis
of the professional picture-maker, or poem-maker, or music-maker. He
created forms because only by so doing could he accomplish the end of
his existence--the expression of his sense of the significance of form.
When we are talking about aesthetics, very properly we brush all this
aside, and consider only the object and its emotional effect on us; but
when we are trying to explain the emotional effectiveness of pictures we
turn naturally to the minds of the men who made them, and find in the
story of Cézanne an inexhaustible spring of suggestion. His life was a
constant effort to create forms that would express what he felt in the
moment of inspiration. The notion of uninspired art, of a formula for
making pictures, would have appeared to him preposterous. The real
business of his life was not to make pictures, but to work out his own
salvation. Fortunately for us he could only do this by painting. Any two
pictures by Cézanne are bound to differ profoundly. He never dreamed of
repeating himself. He could not stand still. That is why a whole
generation of otherwise dissimilar artists have drawn inspiration from
his work. That is why it implies no disparagement of any living artist
when I say that the prime characteristic of the new movement is its
derivation from Cézanne.
The world into which Cézanne tumbled was a world still agitated by the
quarrels of Romantics and Realists. The quarrel between Romance and
Realism is the quarrel of people who cannot agree as to whether the
history of Spain or the number of pips is the more important thing about
an orange. The Romantics and Realists were deaf men coming to blows
about the squeak of a bat. The instinct of a Romantic invited to say
what he felt about anything was to recall its associations. A rose, for
instance, made him think of old gardens and young ladies and Edmund
Waller and sundials, and a thousand quaint and gracious things that, at
one time or another, had befallen him or someone else. A rose touched
life at a hundred pretty points. A rose was interesting because it had a
past. "Bosh," said the Realist, "I will tell you what a rose is; that is
to say, I will give you a detailed account of the properties of _Rosa
setigera_, not forgetting to mention the urn-shaped calyx-tube, the five
imbricated lobes, or the open corolla of five obovate petals." To a
Cézanne one account would appear as irrelevant as the other, since both
omit the thing that matters--what philosophers used to call "the thing
in itself," what now, I imagine, they call "the essential reality." For,
after all, what is a rose? What is a tree, a dog, a wall, a boat? What
is the particular significance of anything? Certainly the essence of a
boat is not that it conjures up visions of argosies with purple sails,
nor yet that it carries coals to Newcastle. Imagine a boat in complete
isolation, detach it from man and his urgent activities and fabulous
history, what is it that remains, what is that to which we still react
emotionally? What but pure form, and that which, lying behind pure form,
gives it its significance. It was for this Cézanne felt the emotion he
spent his life in expressing. And the second characteristic of the new
movement is a passionate interest, inherited from Cézanne, in things
regarded as ends in themselves. In saying this I am saying no more than
that the painters of the movement are consciously determined to be
artists. Peculiarity lies in the consciousness--the consciousness with
which they set themselves to eliminate all that lies between themselves
and the pure forms of things. To be an artist, they think, suffices.
How many men of talent, and even of genius, have missed being effective
artists because they tried to be something else?
II
SIMPLIFICATION AND DESIGN
At the risk of becoming a bore I repeat that there is something
ludicrous about hunting for characteristics in the art of to-day or of
yesterday, or of any particular period. In art the only important
distinction is the distinction between good art and bad. That this pot
was made in Mesopotamia about 4000 B.C., and that picture in Paris about
1913 A.D., is of very little consequence. Nevertheless, it is possible,
though not very profitable, to distinguish between equally good works
made at different times in different places; and although the practice
of associating art with the age in which it was produced can be of no
service to art or artists, I am not sure that it can be of no service
whatever. For if it be true that art is an index to the spiritual
condition of an age, the historical consideration of art cannot fail to
throw some light on the history of civilisation. It is conceivable
therefore that a comparative study of artistic periods might lead us to
modify our conception of human development, and to revise a few of our
social and political theories. Be that as it may, this much is sure:
should anyone wish to infer from the art it produced the civility of an
age, he must be capable of distinguishing the work of that age from the
work of all other ages. He must be familiar with the characteristics of
the movement. It is my intention to indicate a few of the more obvious
characteristics of the contemporary movement.
But how comes it that the art of one age differs from that of another?
At first sight it seems odd that art, which is the expression of man's
sense of the significance of form, should vary even superficially from
age to age. Yet, deeply considered, it is as certain that superficially
art will always be changing as that essentially it cannot change. It
seems that the ape-instinct in man is so strong that unless he were
continually changing he would cease to create and merely imitate. It is
the old question of the artistic problem. Only by setting himself new
problems can the artist raise his powers to the white heat of creation.
The forms in which artists can express themselves are infinite, and
their desire to express themselves keeps up a constant change and
reaction in artistic form. Not only is there something of the ancestral
ape in man, there is something of the ancestral sheep; there are
fashions in forms and colours and the relations of forms and colours;
or, to put the matter more pleasantly, and more justly, there is
sufficient accord in the sensibilities of an age to induce a certain
similarity of forms. It seems as though there were strange powers in the
air from which no man can altogether escape; we call them by pet
names--"Movements," "Forces," "Tendencies," "Influences," "The Spirit of
the Age"--but we never understand them. They are neither to be
frightened nor cajoled by our airs of familiarity, which impress the
public only. They exist, however, and if they did not we should have to
invent them; for how else are we to explain the fact that not only do
the artists of a particular period affect particular kinds of form, but
that even the spectators of each new generation seem to be born with
sensibilities specially apt to be flattered by them. In this age it is
possible to take refuge under the magic word "Cézanne"; we can say that
Cézanne has imposed his forms on Georgian painters and public, just as
Wagner imposed his on Edwardian musicians and concert-goers. This
explanation seems to me inadequate; and in any case it will not account
for the predominance of formal fashions in ages undominated by any
masterful genius. The spirit of an artistic age is, I suspect, a
composition that defies complete analysis; the work of one great mind is
generally one part of it, the monuments of some particular past age are
often another. Technical discoveries have sometimes led to artistic
changes. For instance, to men who have been in the habit of painting on
wood, the invention of canvas would suggest all sorts of fascinating
novelties. Lastly, there is a continual change in the appearance of
those familiar objects which are the raw material of most visual
artists. So, though the essential quality--significance--is constant, in
the choice of forms there is perpetual change; and these changes seem to
move in long flights or shorter jumps, so that we are able, with some
precision, to lay our fingers on two points between which there is a
certain amount of art possessing certain common characteristics. That
which lies between two such points historians call a period or movement.
The period in which we find ourselves in the year 1913 begins with the
maturity of Cézanne (about 1885). It therefore overlaps the
Impressionist movement, which certainly had life in it till the end of
the nineteenth century. Whether Post-Impressionism will peter out as
Impressionism has done, or whether it is the first flowering of a new
artistic vitality with centuries of development before it, is, I have
admitted, a matter of conjecture. What seems to me certain is that those
who shall be able to contemplate our age as something complete, as a
period in the history of art, will not so much as know of the existence
of the artisans still amongst us who create illusions and chaffer and
quarrel in the tradition of the Victorians. When they think of the early
twentieth-century painters they will think only of the artists who tried
to create form--the artisans who tried to create illusions will be
forgotten. They will think of the men who looked to the present, not of
those who looked to the past; and, therefore, it is of them alone that
I shall think when I attempt to describe the contemporary movement.[25]
Already I have suggested two characteristics of the movement; I have
said that in their choice of forms and colours most vital contemporary
artists are, more or less, influenced by Cézanne, and that Cézanne has
inspired them with the resolution to free their art from literary and
scientific irrelevancies. Most people, asked to mention a third, would
promptly answer, I suspect--Simplification. To instance simplification
as a peculiarity of the art of any particular age seems queer, since
simplification is essential to all art. Without it art cannot exist; for
art is the creation of significant form, and simplification is the
liberating of what is significant from what is not. Yet to such depths
had art sunk in the nineteenth century, that in the eyes of the rabble
the greatest crime of Whistler and the Impressionists was their by no
means drastic simplification. And we are not yet clear of the Victorian
slough. The spent dip stinks on into the dawn. You have only to look at
almost any modern building to see masses of elaboration and detail that
form no part of any real design and serve no useful purpose. Nothing
stands in greater need of simplification than architecture, and nowhere
is simplification more dreaded and detested than amongst architects.
Walk the streets of London; everywhere you will see huge blocks of
ready-made decoration, pilasters and porticoes, friezes and façades,
hoisted on cranes to hang from ferro-concrete walls. Public buildings
have become public laughing-stocks. They are as senseless as slag-heaps,
and far less beautiful. Only where economy has banished the architect do
we see masonry of any merit. The engineers, who have at least a
scientific problem to solve, create, in factories and railway-bridges,
our most creditable monuments. They at least are not ashamed of their
construction, or, at any rate, they are not allowed to smother it in
beauty at thirty shillings a foot. We shall have no more architecture in
Europe till architects understand that all these tawdry excrescences
have got to be simplified away, till they make up their minds to express
themselves in the materials of the age--steel, concrete, and glass--and
to create in these admirable media vast, simple, and significant forms.
The contemporary movement has pushed simplification a great deal further
than Manet and his friends pushed it, thereby distinguishing itself from
anything we have seen since the twelfth century. Since the twelfth
century, in sculpture and glass, the thirteenth, in painting and
drawing, the drift has been towards realism and away from art. Now the
essence of realism is detail. Since Zola, every novelist has known that
nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant
facts, and very few have cared to give much else. Detail is the heart of
realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement
is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have
introduced into pictures in order to state facts. But more than this was
needed. There were irrelevancies introduced into pictures for other
purposes than that of statement. There were the irrelevancies of
technical swagger. Since the twelfth century there has been a steady
elaboration of technical complexities. Writers with nothing to say soon
come to regard the manipulation of words as an end in itself. So cooks
without eggs might come to regard the ritual of omelette-making, the
mixing of condiments, the chopping of herbs, the stoking of fires, and
the shaping of white caps, as a fine art. As for the eggs,--why that's
God business: and who wants omelettes when he can have cooking? The
movement has simplified the _batterie de cuisine_. Nothing is to be left
in a work of art which merely shows that the craftsman knows how to put
it there.
Alas! It generally turns out that Life and Art are rather more
complicated than we could wish; to understand exactly what is meant by
simplification we must go deeper into the mysteries. It is easy to say
eliminate irrelevant details. What details are not irrelevant? In a work
of art nothing is relevant but what contributes to formal significance.
Therefore all informatory matter is irrelevant and should be eliminated.
But what most painters have to express can only be expressed in designs
so complex and subtle that without some clue they would be almost
unintelligible. For instance, there are many designs that can only be
grasped by a spectator who looks at them from a particular point of
view. Not every picture is as good seen upside down as upside up. To be
sure, very sensitive people can always discover from the design itself
how it should be viewed, and, without much difficulty, will place
correctly a piece of lace or embroidery in which there is no informatory
clue to guide them. Nevertheless, when an artist makes an intricate
design it is tempting and, indeed, reasonable, for him to wish to
provide a clue; and to do so he has only to work into his design some
familiar object, a tree or a figure, and the business is done. Having
established a number of extremely subtle relations between highly
complex forms, he may ask himself whether anyone else will be able to
appreciate them. Shall he not give a hint as to the nature of his
organisation, and ease the way for our aesthetic emotions? If he give to
his forms so much of the appearance of the forms of ordinary life that
we shall at once refer them back to something we have already seen,
shall we not grasp more easily their aesthetic relations in his design?
Enter by the back-door representation in the quality of a clue to the
nature of design. I have no objection to its presence. Only, if the
representative element is not to ruin the picture as a work of art, it
must be fused into the design. It must do double duty; as well as
giving information, it must create aesthetic emotion. It must be
simplified into significant form.
Let us make no mistake about this. To help the spectator to appreciate
our design we have introduced into our picture a representative or
cognitive element. This element has nothing whatever to do with art. The
recognition of a correspondence between the forms of a work of art and
the familiar forms of life cannot possibly provoke aesthetic emotion.
Only significant form can do that. Of course realistic forms may be
aesthetically significant, and out of them an artist may create a superb
work of art, but it is with their aesthetic and not with their cognitive
value that we shall then be concerned. We shall treat them as though
they were not representative of anything. The cognitive or
representative element in a work of art can be useful as a means to the
perception of formal relations and in no other way. It is valuable to
the spectator, but it is of no value to the work of art; or rather it is
valuable to the work of art as an ear-trumpet is valuable to one who
would converse with the deaf: the speaker could do as well without it,
the listener could not. The representative element may help the
spectator; it can do the picture no good and it may do harm. It may ruin
the design; that is to say, it may deprive the picture of its value as a
whole; and it is as a whole, as an organisation of forms, that a work of
art provokes the most tremendous emotions.
From the point of view of the spectator the Post-Impressionists have
been particularly happy in their simplification. As we know, a design
can be composed just as well of realistic forms as of invented; but a
fine design composed of realistic forms runs a great risk of being
aesthetically underrated. We are so immediately struck by the
representative element that the formal significance passes us by. It is
very hard at first sight to appreciate the design of a picture by a
highly realistic artist--Ingres, for instance; our aesthetic emotions
are overlaid by our human curiosity. We do not see the figures as forms,
because we immediately think of them as people. On the other hand, a
design composed of purely imaginary forms, without any cognitive clue
(say a Persian carpet), if it be at all elaborate and intricate, is apt
to non-plus the less sensitive spectators. Post-Impressionists, by
employing forms sufficiently distorted to disconcert and baffle human
interest and curiosity yet sufficiently representative to call immediate
attention to the nature of the design, have found a short way to our
aesthetic emotions. This does not make Post-Impressionist pictures
better or worse than others; it makes them more easily appreciable as
works of art. Probably it will always be difficult for the mass of men
to consider pictures as works of art, but it will be less difficult for
them so to consider Post-Impressionist than realistic pictures; while,
if they ceased to consider objects unprovided with representative clues
(_e.g._ some oriental textiles) as historical monuments, they would find
it very difficult to consider them at all.