_THE CALIPH’S DESIGN_
_Architects! Where is your bob Vortex?_
_BY_
_WYNDHAM LEWIS_
LONDON: THE EGOIST LTD.
23 Adelphi Terrace House, 2 Robert Street, W.C.2
1919
_By the same writer_:
TARR
(The Egoist, Ltd. 6/- net).
_CONTENTS_
PAGE
PREFACE 5
PART I.--THE CALIPH’S DESIGN
1. The Parable of the Caliph’s Design 11
2. The Bull Sounds 12
3. The Politician’s Apathy 15
4. How the Fact of Style Obstructs 18
5. Where the Painter would Benefit 20
6. The Public Chosen 22
7. Architecture 23
8. Child Art and the Naif 26
9. Machinery and Lions 29
10. The Artist’s Luck 31
PART II.--THE ARTIST OLDER THAN THE FISH
1. The Artist Older than the Fish 35
2. The Physiognomy of our Time 38
3. Fashion 41
PART III.--PARIS
1. French Realism 45
2. The Uses of Fashion 46
3. Cézanne 50
4. The General Tendency in Paris 51
5. Matisse and Dérain 53
6. Picasso 55
PART IV.--THE STUDIO GAME
1. Foreword to Part IV. 61
2. Our Æsthetes and Plank-Art 63
3. The Bawdy Critic 65
4. “We Fell in Love with the Beautiful Tiles in the
South Kensington Museum Refreshment Room” 67
5. The Vengeance of Raphael 70
6. General Nature and the Specialised Sense 71
_Preface_
I have assembled round my parable a series of short articles and notes.
They are all related to the idea that this parable embodies. The second
half of this pamphlet deals with that section of modern painting that
is incompatible with any constructive tendency. I give my reasons
for believing that it gains nothing from his incompatibility; and,
furthermore, that this incompatibility is a diagnostic of fatigue in
the painting in question.
The spirit that pervades a large block--cube, if you like--of the art
of painting to-day is an almost purely Art-for-Art’s sake dilettantism.
Yet you find vigour and conviction: its exponents, Picasso, Matisse,
Dérain, Balla, for example, are very considerable artists, very sure
of themselves and of the claim of their business. So you get this
contradiction of what is really a very great vitality in the visual
arts, and at the same time a very serious scepticism and discouragement
in the use of that vitality. How far is this the result of the
obtuseness and the difficulties set up by the scratch-Public on which
painters have to-day to rely? How far is it the result of a combination
of the speculative agility of the dealer and of the technical agility
among artists that is the flagrant result of the dissemination of
second-rate wit?
Then the pleasant amateur (the vindictive failure of more settled and
splendid ages) sees his chance. He drops down into the arena from
among the audience, flourishing a red pocket-handkerchief, and by
his pranks--some pseudo-professional, skipping like any Espada; some
an impudent buffoonery--adds to the general confusion. The little
bull laughs to see such sport, the crowds of degenerate and dogmatic
Toreros, popping with pedantic mirth, tumble in imitation of the
new-fangled clowns; the women hurl futurist javelins torn from their
hats, and transfix the bottoms of the buffoons and the billycocks of
the banderilleros! The little bull, at first amused, eventually, at the
end of the Corrida, expires of the most suffocating boredom, injected
into him by a pale urchin with side-whiskers and a hooked nose. Is not
that a fairly good picture of the bloody spectacle that we, Public and
Performers, present?
It is evident that the Public is at fault. Why does it not insist on a
better type of Bull in the first place, a more substantial type of art,
that would be capable of driving all but the best performers from the
Arena? If the public cannot think of a new type of Bull at the moment,
and is not willing to take a new brand of beast that we are rearing
on trust, let it at least put into the Circus some fine animal from
Nineveh or rake the Nile valley for a compelling and petulant shape.
But the painter or sculptor, too, might give a hand, and the (I hide my
face! I am almost too ashamed for him to utter his name) the Architect!
Why does not the Architect (and every time I have to use that word
I shall feel like apologising to you for mentioning such a poor,
forgotten, jaded, lamentable creature!)--why does not this strange
absentee, this shadow, this Ghost of the great Trinity, Sculpture,
Painting, and Architecture--for which I have substituted Design, from
a feeling of comprehensible pudeur, in referring to this unfortunate
Entity--_why does he not cheer us up by Building a New Arena?_
Constructing around the new Bull that we are breeding our new, very
active Art, a brand new and most beautiful Arena?
That question, I know, will remain unanswered. It is a tactless
question, I admit. It is not at all nice, even, to refer to
Architecture. You should say, perhaps, Usual Offices or something of
that sort!
I have thought of a way out for the Architect. It has often been
suggested of late that the Architect might become a branch of the
Engineering industry. But why should he take all his bric-à-brac shop
over to that clean, fresh, erect institution across the road? Rather
let the Engineer and the Painter fix up a meeting and talk over the
sadly-involved affairs of this decayed concern, which is, of all the
scandals in the Art-World, the most scandalous and discreditable. The
Painter and the Engineer could buy him out, going into partnership,
and produce what would neither be a world of boxes on the one hand,
as it would be if the Engineer controlled house construction (_vide_
skyscrapers), nor of silly antique fakes on the other, as happens when
the Architect has his sweet and horrible way. Let us divide up this
“ramshackle Empire” of Architecture. And we could even dispense with a
Caliph. There need not be any bloodshed. It is a fair and smiling world!
Now, of all painters who have ever breathed ponderously under a
copper-coloured Vlaminck sky, the Cubist painters of Paris, the
quantities of ponderous painters to be found cubing in that city, are
the best fitted to fill this rôle--of superseding, in a practical
liaison with the Engineer, the virtually extinct architect.
The energy at present pent up (and rather too congested) in the
canvas painted in the studio and sold at the dealer’s, and written of
with a monotonous emphasis of horror or facetiousness in the Press,
must be released and used in the general life of the community. And
from thence, from the life outside, it will come back and enrich and
invigorate the Studio. When accepted, modern painting is accepted as a
revolutionary oasis in the settled, dreary expanse of twentieth century
commercial art: a place where bright colours, exciting and funny forms,
a little knot of extravagant people, are to be found; and that it is
amusing sometimes to visit. It was the same with the Impressionists:
Whistler found himself beleaguered and interfered with in the same
way: Gauguin and Van Gogh had the same experience. Listlessness,
dilettantism is the mark of studio art. _You must get Painting,
Sculpture, and Design out of the studio and into life somehow or other_
if you are not going to see this new vitality desiccated in a Pocket
of inorganic experimentation. And on the other hand, you must put the
Architect, as he drags out his miserable if well-paid life to-day, into
the dustbin, _and close the lid_.
When in the course of this pamphlet I speak of the “Movement in
painting,” or “Modern Painting,” I mean all that is included by the
practice of such diverse painters as, for instance, Dérain, Matisse,
Picasso, Kandinsky, or Survage. These painters represent one æsthetic
current in the sense that they are none of them Impressionists, have
all one synthetic intention or another, and are all related roughly
in time and in enterprise. The complete non-representative character
of Kandinsky’s painting, or the weightiness and palpable logic of the
Cézanne-evolved Cubist, is really a portion of the same effort as
that made by Dérain or Matisse, who are neither Cubist nor Abstract.
Survage’s mixed phantasy is the same.
There are bound to be within this great general movement many
experiments and enterprises attempting to attract all the bulk of it
in one direction or another. One of the most powerful of these and one
that has held the stage for the last few years, is the Nature-morte
development of a group of Cubist painters, Picasso, Braque, and Gris
being three of the best known among them. Entertaining as some of these
things are, I can see nothing of permanent interest deriving from them.
Meantime, this exercise pursued for so long by these painters appears
to me to denote a bad weak spot in the quarters where it saw the light.
Again, Picasso, great artist as he is, and much as I admire him, looks
to me rather equivocal and unsatisfactory in the light of present
events. I devote considerable space to an adverse analysis of this
aspect of the general movement. But it is because I believe so much in
the wider movement, and because the spirit of this Nature-mortism--also
the David-Raphael eclectic classic wave--contradicts what I have
written this pamphlet to propose, that I deal with it so thoroughly.
One other point in this preamble. I have no fault to find with
Cézannism. Any faithful discipleship of that master is sure to be sound
art. All the same, Cézanne is such a lonely figure, and he has such a
weight of pups around him! No one man, even a Cézanne, should have on
his shoulders such a huge effort of initiation as his was. There should
have been several men. Ungrateful as it seems, one must say that it
is a misfortune that all the diversity of art and human talent of a
generation should have depended on this one old man, as has been the
case, since he was unearthed.
PART I
_The Caliph’s Design_
_Section_ 1. _The Parable of the Caliph’s Design._
” 2. _The Bull Sounds._
” 3. _The Politician’s Apathy._
” 4. _How the Fact of Style Obstructs._
” 5. _Where the Painter would Benefit._
” 6. _The Public Chosen._
” 7. _Architecture._
” 8. _Child Art and the Naif._
” 9. _Machinery and Lions._
” 10. _The Artist’s Luck._
_The Parable of the Caliph’s Design_
One day the Caliph rose gingerly and stealthily from his bed of gold
and placed himself at a window of his palace. He then took a pen of
turquoise, and for some hours traced hieroglyphs on a piece of paper.
They consisted of patches and lines, and it was impossible to say what
he was doing. Apparently exhausted by the effort, he sank back on his
bed of gold and slept heavily for ten hours. Waking up in the small
hours of the morning, he called for a messenger and despatched him in
search of Mahmud and Hasan, respectively the most ingenious engineer
and the most experienced architect in his dominions. He was in fine
fettle when they arrived. He pointed with a certain facetiousness
to his design lying outspread on a table. He then addressed them as
follows:--“I am extremely dissatisfied with the shape of my city, so I
have done a design of a new city, or rather of a typical street in a
new city. It is a little vorticist effort that I threw off while I was
dressing this morning.” He negligently curled the tip of his beard. “I
want you to look at it and tell me what you think of my skill.”
Mahmud and Hasan bent over the design, and, noticing that their lord’s
eye was dancing, they indulged in a few hurried guffaws, scraping their
feet and pushing each other.
The Caliph then said, “Oh, Mahmud and Hasan, that is a very funny
design. But it is my will that such a street should rise beneath the
windows of my palace, work starting on it at ten o’clock to-morrow
morning. It is your unpleasant duty to invent the shapes and conditions
that would make it possible to realise my design. You have till
ten to-morrow morning in which to produce the requisite plans and
instructions for such a work. Should you fail to do so your heads will
fall as soon as I have been informed of your failure, that is to say,
between ten and eleven to-morrow. Good-night, oh Mahmud and Hasan.”
Those two tremendously able men burst into a cold sweat. Their eyes
protruded from their intelligent faces. They clicked their tongues,
shrugged their shoulders, and shuffled out with gestures of despair.
After a half-hour of complete paralysis of their brilliant faculties,
they pulled themselves together, and by ten o’clock next morning a
series of the most beautiful plans that had yet been made in Baghdad
(retaining with an exact fidelity the masses and directions of the
potentate’s design) were ready for their master. And within a month a
strange street transfigured the heart of that cultivated city.
_The Bull Sounds_
We are all agreed as to the deplorable nature of the form-content and
colour-content around us. But there agreement ceases.
The divergence of opinion gathers round the following points: Is it
not preferable to have every manifestation of the vulgar and stupid
constantly, in an appetising, delicious form (something like the
“highness” of game), at the disposal of our superiority and wit?
What would Flaubert have done had France not bred Bouvards and
Pécuchets with rabbit-like fecundity? Can nature ever be thanked enough
for Sir Sampson Legend, Mantalini, Boswell’s Johnson, Falstaff or any
such types of Comedy, composed of the nastiest excrement and washiest
imbecilities? No one would diminish by one ounce the meat of art that
resides in folly or deformity; or see snobbery, gluttony or cruelty
reduced by one single exemplaire, once his mind was fixed on the
benefits that the æsthetic sense has received from their abundance in
Nature!
A less self-indulgent satirist like Aristophanes, it is true, will
attach a stink or some disgusting attribute to his absurd character,
relying on the squeamishness of his audience, sending his characters
about like skunks. But most authors are not so moral as to poison our
pleasure with these gases. A stupid form is for the painter the same
food as a stupid man for a writer like Gogol or Flaubert.
So it is very debatable whether without the stimulation of stupidity,
or every bestial, ill-made, tasteless object that abounds in life
to-day, the artist would be as well off and well nourished. Would he
not be in the position of a satirist, like Flaubert, without a Bouvard,
or of an artist like Boswell without his rich and very unusual dish?
The irritation with the particular French folly that surrounded him,
and that Flaubert ate every day as regularly as his breakfast; the
consequent pessimism that became the favourite manure for his thoughts;
we cannot see Flaubert without that, any more than we can conceive of
Rousseau the Douanier without his squab little bourgeois, and blank,
paunchy little villas.
The point rather lies in the _attitude_ that was Flaubert’s and
that was the Douanier’s. Flaubert hated Bouvard, and considered the
vulgarity and idiocy that he witnessed a very sad and improper affair.
The Douanier, on the other hand, probably admired his Bouvards very
much. It was with a naively respectful eye, it may be assumed, that he
surveyed the bourgeois on Sunday, and noted his peculiarities like a
child, directly, without judging.
Shakespeare, it is true, must have relished the absurd or deformed more
consciously; and Dickens made a cult of it. But with Shakespeare it
was against a vast background of other matter, and as comic relief,
or used in farces, and so labelled. It has never amounted to what has
practically become, in our day, a _rejection_ of anything as dull or
useless unless it lends itself to our appetite for the comic or the
“queer.”
But Wilde’s antithetic glitter, when used in journalism, may become the
most wearisome thing on earth. We long, confronted by such a monotony
of inversion as we get in Mr. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, for a
plain “dull” statement. In the same way, if the villainous stupidity
that has always been around every man since the world began (only he
has belaboured it with one hand while caressing it with the other)
became something like the religion of the educated--such education,
that is, as enabled you to enjoy it--and its pursuit and enjoyment the
one topic and habit of life, should we not sigh for the old variety;
the hero, the villain, the lovely lady and the Comic Relief? Should
we not also, if embedded in some bric-à-brac of stuffed birds and wax
flowers, and the languors of the “æsthetic period” of the article
I cite later in this pamphlet, look towards Karnak, a plain French
provincial town, or almost anywhere--with eyes of longing?
Surely all this sensibility of the “queer,” the “amusing,” the divinely
ugly, the exquisitely vulgar, will date, and date very quickly.
There would to-day, in the “modern” section of the art-world, be
as great an outcry if some philistine proposed that the lovely
embellishments of our streets, coloured signs, posters, beautiful
police-stations and bewitching tiled Tube stations should be pulled
down, as there would have been formerly, and is still by the
“beauty-loving public,” when some “picturesque old bit” or decaying
cottage is removed.
But, with men trying their hardest to eliminate ugliness, injustice,
imbecility and so forth from the world, has there ever been any absence
of these commodities for the sweet, or bitter, tooth of the artist? Is
there ever likely to be? It is true that the artist can gorge himself
to-day probably as never before. But is that the best thing for his
talent?
If twenty Christs charged abreast anywhere in the world, you would
still get in a remarkably short time, and within a half-hour’s walk
of their super-calvary, some such monument as the First Pyramid, the
result of such a block of egotism as had never been seen before, to
show you the weakness of the humane corrective. But I do not believe
you would ever get a pyramid builder without Christian hysteria.
Even in order to appreciate the “banal” you must not have too much of
it. And you must _pretend_ you do not like it even if you are incapable
of liking anything else. The reactionary Prussian theorists of
war--good, beneficent war--tyranny, and so forth were less useful than
the Pacifist, and less intelligent.
The arrangement seems to be that you spend half your time destroying
the cheap, the foolish, the repellent; and the other half enjoying
what is left over after your efforts! This evidently being how we are
intended to live, there is no excuse for slackness in the carrying
out of your unpleasant duty: that is to desire equity, mansuetude, in
human relations, fight against violence, and work for formal beauty,
significance and so forth, in the arrangement and aspect of life.
But to conclude. The great line, the creative line; the fine, exultant
mass; the gaiety that snaps and clacks like a fine gut string; the
sweep of great tragedy; the immense, the simple satisfaction of the
surest, the completest art, you could not get if you succeeded in
eliminating passion; nor if you crowned imbecility, or made an idol of
the weak.
Whereas you can always get enough silliness, meaningless form, vulgar
flavour to satisfy the most gargantuan or the most exquisite appetite.
_The Politician’s Apathy_
What is this ugliness, banality, and squalor to which we have
been referring? It is simply what meets your eye as it travels up
practically any street in London to-day, or wanders around any
Hotel lounge or Restaurant, or delects itself along the wall of the
official galleries at Burlington House. Next, what influences go to
the making of this horrible form-content and colour-content that we
can either offer up a prayer of thankfulness for, take no notice of,
or occupy ourselves with modifying, in our spare time? Exactly what
set of circumstances, what lassitude or energy of mind working through
millions of channels and multitudes of people, make the designs
on match boxes (or the jokes on the back of some), the ornamental
metal-work on the lamp-posts, gates, knife-handles, sepulchral
enclosures, serviette-rings, most posters, ornamented Menu cards, the
scenery in our Musical spectacles, chapter-headings and tail-pieces,
brooches, bangles, embossments on watches, clocks, carving-knives,
cruets, pendants in Asprey’s, in Dobson’s, in Hancock’s windows in Bond
Street; in fact, every stitch and scrap of art-work that indefatigably
spreads its blight all over a modern city, invading every nook,
befouling the loveliest necks, waists, ears, and bosoms; defiling even
the doormat--climbing up, even, and making absurd and vapid the chimney
pot, which you would have thought was inaccessible and out of sight
enough for Art not to reach; for the cheap modern thousand-headed devil
of design not to find it worth while to spoil?
We are all perfectly agreed, are we not, that practically any house,
railing, monument, wall, structure, thoroughfare, or lamp-post in this
city should be instantly pulled down, were it not for the “amusement”
and stimulus that the painter gets out of it?
A complete reform (were it not for the needs of the painter who _must_
have his bit of banality, bless his little heart!) of every notion
or lack of notion on the significance of the appearance of the world
should be instituted. A gusto, a consciousness should imbue the placing
and the shaping of every brick. A central spectacle, as a street
like Regent Street is, should be worked out in the smallest detail.
It should not grow like a weed, without forethought, meaning, or any
agency but the drifting and accident of commerce. A great thoroughfare
like Regent Street develops and sluggishly gets on its ill-articulated
legs, and blankly looks at us with its silly face. There are Bouvards
and Pécuchets in brick and stone, or just dull cheerless photographs.
There is no beautiful or significant relief, even, in this third-rate
comic spectacle.
Do politicians understand so little the influence of the Scene of
Life, or the effect of Nature, that they can be so indifferent to
the capital of a wealthy and powerful community? Would not a more
imaginative Cecil Rhodes have seen that the only way an Empire such
as he imagined could impress itself on the consciousness of a people
would be in some such way as all ambitious nations have taken to make
the individual citizen aware of his privileges and his burden? Whether
in the weight of a Rhetoric of buildings, or in the subtler ways of
beauty signifying the delights and rewards of success won by toil and
adventure; in a thousand ways the imagination of the multitude could
be captured and fixed. But beyond the obvious policy of _not_ having
a mean and indolent surrounding for the capital of what sets out to
be an “Empire,” simply for human life at all, or what sets out to be
human life--_to increase gusto and belief in that life_--it is of the
first importance that the senses should be directed into such channels,
appealed to in such ways, that this state of mind of relish, fullness
and exultation should obtain.
It is life at which you must aim. Life, full life, is lived through the
fancy, the senses, consciousness. These things must be stimulated and
not depressed. The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so
aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and
senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in
an overcrowded carriage.
This is worse, again, for the crowd than the luckier individual. The
life of the crowd, of the common or garden man, is exterior. He can
only live through others, outside himself. He, in a sense, _is_ the
houses, the railings, the bunting or absence of bunting. His beauty
and justification is in a superficial exterior life. His health is
there. He dwindles and grows restless, sick and troublesome when not
given these opportunities to live and enjoy in the simple, communal
crowd manner. He has just sense enough to know that he is living or
not living. Give him a fine, well-fed type of life, a bit dashing and
swanky, suitably clothed, with a glamour of adventure about it, to
look at, and he is gladdened, if his own stomach is not too empty.
Give him fine processions, and holidays, military display. Yes, but
there is something you are going to omit. By the deepest paradox he
knows that the plaster objects stuck up in Oxford Street outside
Selfridges for Peace Day are not a symbol of anything but commerce;
in which he equally, though not so successfully, is engaged himself.
There is nothing there that he could not do himself, and they do not
reach his imagination. Similarly, it is not such a tremendous critical
flight as you would imagine for him to connect in some subtle way in
his mind these banal plaster statues with the more careful but even
more effusively mean Albert Memorial, or any other monument that
meets his eye. Yet these he knows are the monuments that typify the
society of which he is a unit. This putrid dullness, hopeless deadly
stare of almost imbecile stupidity, that he is confronted with in the
art offerings from those above, as in their persons, can hardly be
expected to stimulate him, either to buoyancy, obedience, or anything
but boredom.
So if there are a hundred reasons why Painters should oppose any
modification of the appearance of our works, which is _Perfect_ in the
quaintness of its stupidity, there is no reason why the politician
should feel obliged to protect it.
_How the Fact of Style Obstructs_
The parable of the Caliph’s design describes the state of mind which
must be that of every healthy and active artist living in the midst
of the blasphemous stupidity, too much so even for health, that
surrounds us to-day. But alas! although like the Caliph, a vorticist,
I have not the power of life and death over the Mahmuds and Hasans
of this city. Otherwise I should have no compunction in having every
London architect’s head severed from his body at ten o’clock to-morrow
morning, unless he made some effort to apply a finer standard of art
in his own art-practise. I would flood those indolent commercial
offices, where architects pursue their trade, with abstract designs. I
am sure the result would be to cram the world with form and intention,
where to-day, as far as it is beholden to the architect, it has no
discernible significance or æsthetic purpose of any sort.
There is no reason at all why there should not be a certain number of
interesting architects. I can also see no reason why this pamphlet
should not bring them forth. I should be very proud of that, and
watch their labours with great interest. This, I think, is such a
modest optimism that I am sure you will allow it. I should like to
see the entire city rebuilt on a more conscious pattern. But this
would automatically happen should an architect of genius turn up who
would invent an architecture for our time and climate that was also a
creative and fertilising art-form. The first great modern building that
arose in this city would soon carry everything before it; and hand in
hand with the engineer, and his new problems, by force of circumstances
so exactly modern ones, would make a new form-content for our everyday
vision. So all we want is one single architect with brains, and we will
regard him with optimism.
Now the question of form-content is obviously one of importance to
every painter. Almost any painter, sculptor, or designer of an actual
type to-day will agree with you that Cheapside, Piccadilly, Russell
Square, Marylebone Road, are thoroughly dull and insignificant masses
of brickwork, laid out according to no coherent plan, bestially
vulgar in their details of ornament, and in every way fit for instant
demolishment. Similarly, he will agree that any large and expensive
West-End restaurant is an eyesore, and a meaningless sham.
Similarly, when you say to him that it is about time something were
done to get rid of this graceless and stupid spectacle, he will
agree, but will quickly change the subject. Every law of common-sense
precludes any possibility of an appreciable modification of this
detestable sight. He will either imagine that you are out for some
Utopia, or he will think that your notions hardly agree with the
fashionable fad-idea that all is for the best in the best of all
possible worlds--that whatever reality, accident, or your neighbour,
that is, flings at your head, your head should resound to, if it is
empty, as it ought to be.
Of course there are good arguments against you. I have made use of
those arguments myself. We have just been envisaging them in the
section of this pamphlet headed “The Bull Sounds.” But we will proceed
to sift out more thoroughly the Painter’s argument; this time not only
the painter or the amateur, but any painter.
Style, he will say, can transform anything into gold. Take a convenient
example. Should Rembrandt in one of his pen-drawings have had a more
interesting type of architecture before him for subject matter, in
place of the country mills by the side of the Dutch canals, would this
better form-content have made his drawings better drawings? You must
answer to that: “No, it would not.” But a windmill is a rough and
simple contrivance, and there is a sad difference between the rough
beauty and fitness of such objects stuck up centuries ago in Holland,
and similar rough and simple objects built to-day. One would do better
to imagine a Rembrandt, working in the same way that he worked, doing
similar drawings in an industrial country like England or Germany at
the present time. Still you have to admit that as fine an artist as
Rembrandt would, by the magic of his use of the medium he chose, by
his line, by his tact of simplification and elimination, make a _New_
thing of anything, however poor the original. And so, in considering if
it is worth while to change a single brick, even, or the most trifling
ornament, however offensive, you would be compelled to admit that, as
regards the production of the finest type of art you would be no better
off. The best half-dozen artists of any country, as regards the actual
beauty and significance of their work, do not depend on the objective
world for their success or stimulus.
As to all the thousands of artists, not amongst the most able or
imaginative, but possibly able to do something, it is another story.
_They_ depend on Nature, on the objective world, for their stimulus
or their taste. Set a rather poor artist down in a roadway, ask him
to draw a street of houses in front of him. If the houses were of
a good and significant build, he would be more likely to do a good
and significant painting than if they were such clumsy, and stupid,
lineless, massless, things as we invariably find ourselves in the midst
of to-day. If he has no particular invention or vision of his own, he
depends on Nature a good deal. Nature must do half the work.
But the fallacy in the contention about a good artist is this. That
although he does not depend on Nature, he certainly depends on life,
and is subject to its conditions. And this surely re-acts on his
painting. If he starves, is disturbed in his work, or has to do some
horrible type of present-day commercial painting or designing to make a
living, then his independence of objective form and colour-content is
of little use to him.
_Where the Painter would Benefit_
Apart from my conviction on this subject, a useful way of illuminating
it will be to consider how I, or an artist like me, stands towards it
on the practical ground. It reduces itself to this: I have nothing
materially to gain by your adopting these theories. You are perplexed:
painters are everywhere perplexed. I make you and them a present of
this analysis of these perplexities. I see the shapes that you would
see did the world for the moment contain more stimulation and effort in
the related arts. I do not need to have a house built with significant
forms, lines, masses, and details of ornament, and planted squarely
before my eyes, to know that such significance exists, or to have my
belief in its reality stimulated. But _you_ require that. I am, or
any painter you can see is, obviously here to do that. I am at your
disposal in this respect. But that is primarily a work for you and
not for me. I can get on quite well, the artist always can, without
this material realisation. Theoretically, even, a creative painter or
designer should be able to exist quite satisfactorily without paper,
stone or paints, or without lifting a finger to translate into forms
and colours his specialised creative impulse. It should be the same
with the painter, the architect, or the sculptor as it is with the
composer of music. The Interpreter is really only in the same category
as the bricklayer, or at best a foreman of works.
Still, I suffer somewhat all the same, from this lack of readiness, or
really of aptitude, on your part, to employ me usefully. And every true
artist I know, painter or sculptor, is in the same box. The trouble is
this: It does not matter what objective Nature supplies. The inventive
artist is his own purveyor. But the society of which he forms a part,
can, by its backwardness, indolence, or obtuseness, cause him a series
of inconveniences; and above all, can, at certain times and under
certain conditions, affect his pocket adversely and cause him to waste
an absurd amount of time. When no longer able to produce his best
work, it would not be a waste of time for a painter or for a writer
to lecture, for example, on the subject of his craft. The propaganda,
explanatory pamphlets, and the rest, in which we, in this country, have
to indulge, is so much time out of active life which would normally be
spent as every artist wishes to spend his time, in work, in a state of
complete oblivion as regards any possible public that his work may ever
have. Yet were one’s ideas on painting not formulated, and given out in
the shape of a lecture, a pamphlet, or a critical essay, an impossible
condition would result for an artist desirous of experimenting.
So when I say that I should like to see a completely transfigured
world, it is not because I want to _look_ at it. It is _you_ who
would look at it. It would be your spirit that would benefit by this
exhilarating spectacle. _I_ should merely benefit, I and other painters
like me, by no longer finding ourselves in the position of freaks, the
queer wild men of cubes, the terrible futurists, or any other rubbish
that the Yellow Press invents to amuse the nerves of its readers.
(Do you suppose that the art-man who reports on the French Show in
Tottenham Court Road and describes the “horror” of these pictures,
really _thinks_ that they are in any way blood-curdling? No. He knows
for every extra curdle he makes an extra quid.) It naturally does
not please me, or any other painter who paints pictures that appear
extravagant according to the pretty and facetious standard of this
time, to be described as a wild man, or a bolshevik in paint. No
pleasurable thrill accompanies these words when used about one’s own
very normal proceedings, since they appear to the painter the _only_
normal proceedings in the midst of the detestable capers of the usual
mild lunatic asylum we have to inhabit.
_The Public Chosen_
The Public I should like for this pamphlet is a rather different
one than that to which painters usually consider it worth while to
address themselves. In the first place, any individual belonging to
the rank and file of the Royal Academy is fond of regarding himself
as “a Craftsman”; as a specialist of the most prodigious, horny,
paint-and-dust-grimed, mediæval sort. The more furibundly ignoble his
paintings, the further he retires into the technical mysteries of his
craft. And so lay opinion he scorns.
Then another pale exists, an even funnier one, beyond which stand those
multitudes who have not been taught a delightful faintness, a cheap
catch of the voice, and the few dozen snobbish tricks of thought and
hand coined in each decade for the lucky young rich. A board school
master, an excise clerk, a douanier, for that matter, are usually
approached if at all with every nuance of amused condescension that a
disgusting stereotyped education can breed.
How sick such men must be with the wearisome and endless trifling that
they have come to associate with the word Artist!
I write in these notes for a socially wider and not necessarily
specialist public.
_Architecture_
Architecture is the weakest of the arts, in so far as it is the most
dependent on the collective sensibility of its period. It is so
involved, on the other hand, in utility, and so much a portion of
public life, that it is far more helpless than painting and literature
in the face of public indifference. Sculpture shares with it some of
this helplessness. There are many good sculptors wasted to-day as
thoroughly as anyone can be, through the absence of such conditions
as are needed to give them their chance of natural expression. Had
Gaudier-Brzeska lived, he would be doing an odd door-knocker or two,
and an occasional paper-weight, or portrait busts, for a living, with
all the limiting circumstance that personal vanity sets to that form
of art work. There only remains for the sculptor, as for the painter,
the art exhibition, and the freak-selling or commercial-selling of the
dealer’s shop. A man like Archipenko, for instance, quite capable of
finer things, is reduced to stunt-sculpting of a dilettante sort, on a
small scale, it may be assumed of a precarious nature on the material
side.
Have you ever met an Architect? I do not mean a well-paid _pasticheur_,
who restores a house or runs one up, in Tudor, Italian, or any other
style. But a creative architect, or a man with some new power in his
craft, and concerned with the æsthetic as well as the practical needs
of the mass sensibility of his time? I have not. And what is more,
should you wish to approach this neglected subject and learn more about
it, you will find nothing but a dismal series of very stupid books for
your information and reference. The best treatise I have so far come
across is W. K. Lethaby’s handbook, “An Introduction to the History and
Theory of the Art of Building.” It appears to me to be as sound a book
as possible: and if everybody were of Mr. Lethaby’s opinions we should
soon find that the aspect of this lifeless scene had changed for the
better. And this voice for the right and active vision comes from the
unlikeliest quarter. For Mr. Lethaby, I understand, is Chief Lecturer
on Architecture in the South Kensington School.
Listen to this admitted academic authority on the subject:
“Modern armoured concrete is only a higher power of the Roman system
of construction. If we could sweep away our fear that it is an
inartistic material, and boldly build a railway station, a museum, or
a cathedral, wide and simple, amply lighted, and call in our painters
to finish the walls, we might be interested in building again almost
at once. This building interest must be aroused.
“We cannot forget our historical knowledge, nor would we if we might.
The important question is, Can it be organised and directed, or must
we continue to be betrayed by it? The only agreement that seems
possible is agreement on a scientific basis, on an endeavour after
perfect structural efficiency. If we could agree on this we need not
trouble about beauty, for that would take care of itself.
“Experience must be brought back once more as the centre of
architecture, and architects must be trained as engineers are trained.
“The modern way of building must be flexible and vigorous, even smart
and hard. We must give up designing the broken-down picturesque which
is part of the ideal of make-believe. The enemy is not science, but
vulgarity, a pretence to beauty at second hand.”
What do you make of that? Does not Mr. Lethaby, Professor of
Architecture in the South Kensington Schools, speak to you in a tone
seldom heard in the art-schools? What English professor of painting
would you find recommending his pupil to paint in a manner “smart and
hard”?
Such books as C. H. Caffin’s contain nothing very useful. He refers to
the Woolworth Buildings in New York in the following way:
“Up to the present, the noblest example of this new movement is
the Woolworth Buildings, which is not only the tallest of the tall
buildings, but a monument of arresting and persuasive dignity. Such a
building supplies an uplift to the spirit.” Etc.
The Woolworth Buildings, one of the tallest in New York, consisting of
51 storeys, is a piece of rudimentary ecclesiastical nonsense, 25 of
its storeys being a spire. It is in every way less interesting than the
less ambitious skyscrapers, which are at least enormously tall boxes,
and by their scale “uplift the spirit” that wishes to soar so high, far
more than this monstrous, dull, Anglican church: that is not a church,
however, and has not even that excuse for its stupid spire.
In this connection, we hear a great deal of rubbish talked about the
sky-scraper. The sky-scraper, for the most part, is a tall box. So far
it has been nothing but that; except where, as in the Schiller Theatre
Building in Chicago, or the famous Woolworth Buildings, some dreadful
intervention of art has converted it into an acre-high advertisement of
the modern architect’s fatuity.
It has been a fashion lately to admire the sky-scraper in its
purely engineering form, and other forms of quite plain engineering
construction. But a box is always a box, however high. And when you
think of the things that could have been done by a liaison of the
artist’s fancy, once more, with all these works of engineering genius,
you wonder that there is not one single example which one can quote of
such a structure.
In the case of a dynamic shape like an aeroplane there is neither any
reason nor any need for the association of engineering inventiveness
with that of the artist. All such machines, except for the colouring of
them and a possible deliberate camouflaging to modify their shape, not
to deceive the eye of the enemy but to add significance or beauty to
their aspect, develop in accordance with a law of efficient evolution
as absolute as a tiger, a wasp, or a swallow. They are definitely, for
the artist, in the category of animals.
When we come to the static cell-structures in which we pass our lives
there is far more latitude and opportunity for the inventiveness of the
artist.
To begin with, let us by all means reduce everything to the box. Let us
banish absolutely the stylistic architectural rubbish. But even as to
the shaping of the box or series of boxes let the artist be used.
For if you say that the design and ornament over the body of the
building is the same as the clothes on a man’s back, there is still
something to be said about the naked shape of the man or even for
his skeleton. The nature of the body or of the skeleton will decide
what the character of the clothes must be. So the artist should come
in long before he usually does, or give a new consciousness to the
shaping of the skeleton of the Engineer. This should be invariable, not
occasional: that is when the first painters or sculptors have been used
for this purpose, instead of the horrible stock architect.
Remy de Gourmont has the following notion on the subject of the decay
of architecture in our time:
“Voilà le point capital de l’explication pourquoi on avait au
moyen-age le sens de l’architecture: on ignorait la nature.
Incapables de jouir de la terre telle qu’elle est, des fleuves, des
montagnes, de la mer, des arbres, ils étaient obligés, pour exciter
leur sensibilité, de se créer un monde factice, d’ériger des forêts
de pierre.
“La nature s’ouvrit à l’homme parce que la France et le centre
de l’Europe furent sillonnés de routes, parce que les campagnes
devinrent sûres et d’un commode accès.”
And he goes on to fancy that perhaps when Nature has become too cheap,
through its general accessibility, and men tire of it, that Art and
Architecture will once more have its turn.
Since a narrow belt of land like the Nile valley is more crowded
with buildings, or their remains, than any other territory, and
since the character of those buildings, the source of all subsequent
constructions, was evidently determined by the nature of the landscape
of Egypt, the hills, palms, and so forth, with which, further, the
builders were at least as familiar as any men could be with Nature, de
Gourmont’s theory would appear to be nonsense. It displays the listless
and dull eye that a usually keen journalist can turn to this Cinderella
of a subject.
_Child Art and the Naif_
The Child and the Naif are two of the principal mainstays of dilettante
criticism in this country. And this “phenomenon” with all the
sentimentality of which its exploitation clearly is susceptible, is
one of the trump cards in the Amateur’s game, and a fruitful source
of confusion. It is one of the most obvious avenues, flooded with an
effusive critical craft, by which the thoroughly undeserving can slip
through into a position of artificial respect.
“The Young Visiters” is swelling into fabulous editions. Pamela Bianca,
a child of nine, is fawned on by the hoary great. The Omega Workshops
have had an exhibition of children’s drawings. The Naif, too, is a
doll-like dummy that the trader on sentiment pushes in front of him in
stalking the public. The Naif is an elastic phenomenon and of earlier
date, as regards his boom, than the Child.
The Slade School produces regularly a certain number of Naifs. They
are frequently the most sophisticated individuals imaginable. Beyond
the fact that they wrestle with a slight incompetence, in addition to
possessing a pretty feeling for the sentimentalities of rustic prints,
although they never by any means capture the native charm of those,
they are no more naive than Mr. Horatio Bottomley. None that I know
are half as good manufactured naiveté as George Formby. They are very
cunningly simple, and their graces and queernesses pall as swiftly
as the tiresome mannerisms of a too clever child, exploiting its
childishness.
There are two types of Naif: the Child-Naif, and the Primitive Naif. It
is difficult to decide which is the more boring of the two.
The Child-Naif usually starts from a happy combination of an ingrained
technical incompetence and of a “nice feeling” for the things of art.
He is distressed that this “nice feeling” should be wasted owing to his
lack of power, and hits on the happy idea, or gradually drifts into
the habit (a sort of progressive _collage_) of bringing his lack of
painter’s prowess and his nice feeling for art together, and producing
the very marketable commodity, Naiveté!
Or he may be a bit more definitely naive than this. The woodenness of
his figures or trees, his rickety line, may really have a pathetic
charm for him. He genuinely pities his little wooden figures for being
so wooden and silly looking (a manner of pitying himself). He is sorry
for himself through them! And this sensation becomes a necessity with
him; he goes on doing them. If he has been touched enough; or, more
likely, if his is a nasty theatrical self-love, other people are
touched, and he in turn touches a little regular income in consequence!
Or the more general pathos may be absent. The weak pathetic line,
and silly meaningless forms, the unreal colour, are the object of a
certain emotion: something that I can only describe as a technical
pity; a professional pathos. The best is made of an unfortunate
limitation. This Naif may even become perfectly bumptious and
self-satisfied in course of time, everything turning out, in the
practical sphere, for the best: by the same process that produces the
infantile swank of the deformed.
The Primitive Naif may evolve rather in the same way as the Child-Naif,
or he may not. It may be a refuge of incompetence. Or it may be a
romantic mode, teutonic in character. Then the Child-Naif and the
Primitive Naif sometimes come together in the same artist.
There is no such thing as the _born Primitive_. There is the
_Primitive_ in point of view of historical date, the product of a
period. And there is the _Primitive voulu_, who is simply a pasticheur
and stylist, and invariably a sentimentalist, when not a rogue. When
he is not specially an _Italian_ or _Flemish Primitive_, but just a
_Primitive_ (whatever period he flits into _always_ a Primitive), he is
on the same errand and has the same physiognomy as the Period-taster,
or any other form of dilettante or of pasticheur. The Primitive voulu
acrobatically adapts himself to a mentality of a different stage
of social development: the pasticheur merely, en touriste, visits
different times and places, without necessarily so much a readjustment
of his mind as of his hand.
As to the Child proper. Of course the success of “The Young Visiters”
is partly due to its domestic appeal, partly due to its character of a
sentimental curiosity. The distillation of Middle-class snobbery, also,
presented in this pure and objectionable form, is sure to “attract a
wide public.”
Pamela Bianca, whose drawings are to be found in a publication called
the _Owl_, in _Vogue_, and so forth, is like Daisy Ashford at least
in one point: that _she is not a child_. She may be nine years old,
and “The Young Visiters” may have been written by a child of two. But
they both have every sad relaxed quality of the average adult mind.
They are as extinct as that. Pamela Bianca’s “libido” has naively
devoured the Douanier’s Fête National. But that is the nearest she
has come to naiveté. Otherwise she imitates Beardsley or Botticelli,
or some fellow-child, with as sophisticated a competence as any South
Kensington student. She is very exactly the æsthetic peer of the
professional painters who run the _Owl_.
The growth of the mind and of the body is so often not parallel, some
people’s “mature” lives so long, others almost non-existent, that it
is difficult to know where you are dealing with the art product of the
child, or the child-like art of the adult.
Presumably a powerful nature develops at once, disregarding the
schedules of human growth and the laws of probation. William Blake was
a case of a being who took little notice of the dawdling ritual of
growth. On the other hand, many individuals, highly developed in adult
life, have shown no precocity at all.
Genius no doubt has its system of working in a man, all the facts of
the case--the best time to strike--the mental resources--the character
of the gift to be hatched--in its possession.
As regards the Naif, Rousseau the Douanier is the only great naif as
far as I know. In his case Nature made on the one hand his Douanier’s
calling a water-tight case against sophistication; and then put
something divinely graceful and simple--that we associate with
“childhood” and that that abstraction sometimes has--at his disposal
for the term of his life.
Nothing seemingly could corrupt or diminish it; and it brought with
it, like a very practical fairy, or a sardine tin with its little key,
an instrument with which to extract all the genius from within this
Douanier of forty or fifty years old.
To return to the Child proper. The only case in which the drawing of
a child is of value, is when it possesses the same outstripping or
unusual quality that the work of a very few adult artists possesses.
The adult in question may have accomplished nothing himself as a child.
But the drawing of the child would seem perhaps to be his work at a
more immature stage. It is not a question of Child or Adult. It is a
question simply of the _better being_. Both belong to an exceptional
type of being.
There is also a fresh and delicate charm of very young life that some
children, not many, have the power of infusing into their drawings.
And there remains the melancholy fact that no infant’s pictures could
be duller than the average adult’s. And therefore there is every bit
as much justification for exhibiting any twenty children’s scribbles
as there is for exhibiting those of any twenty professional painting
adults.
_Machinery and Lions_
The Futurists had in their idée fixe a great pull over the sentimental
and sluggish eclecticism, deadness and preciosity of the artists
working in Paris.
But they accept objective nature wholesale, or the objective world of
mechanical industry. Their pæan to machinery is really a worship of a
Panhard racing-car, or a workshop where guns or Teddy bears are made,
and not a deliberate and reasoned enthusiasm for the possibilities
that lie in this new spectacle of machinery; of the _use_ it can be
put to in art. Machinery should be regarded as a new resource, as
though it were a new mineral or oil, to be used and put to different
uses than those for which it was originally intended. A machinery
for making the parts of a 6in. Mk. 19 gun should be regarded apart
from its function. Absorbed into the æsthetic consciousness it would
no longer _make_ so much as a pop-gun: its function thenceforward
would change, and through its agency emotions would be manufactured,
related, it is true, to its primitive efficiency, shinyness, swiftness
or slowness, elegance or power, but its meaning transformed. It is
of exactly the same importance, and in exactly the same category, as
a wave on a screen by Korin, an Odalisque of Ingres, a beetle of a
sculptor of the XVIII. dynasty. Ingres lived in the midst of a great
appetite for the pseudo-classic: the Egyptian sculptor lived in the
presence of a great veneration for the beetle. Korin’s contemporaries
possessed a high susceptibility and sentiment for the objects of
the natural world. Korin’s formal wave-lines is the same impulse as
Balla’s Linee Andamentali: the Beetle and the Odalisque are both sleek
and solid objects! Ingres probably did not believe in the Odalisque
as an Odalisque, although realising the admirable uses to which she
could be put. The Egyptian probably found the beetle objectionable
until transformed into stone. And there should be no obligation to
supply veneration, or to behave like a religious fanatic about a
sausage machine or a locomotive: other people can supply that, indeed
should do so about something or other. If the world _would only
build temples to Machinery_ in the abstract then everything would be
perfect. The painter and sculptor would have plenty to do, and could,
in complete peace and suitably honoured, pursue their trade without
further trouble. Else what is the use of taking all the useful Gods
and Goddesses away, and leaving the artist with no rôle in the social
machine, except that of an entertainer, or a business man?
Imagine Koyetzu, Signorelli, or the sculptor who carved the head of
Akhenaton or of the wife of the Sheik-el-Beled, alive painting and
carving, to-day. They would have been in the profoundest sense the same
artists. But just as a painter may use one medium one day and another
the next; so far more than simply traces of the fact that they had
seen the machines that play such a part in our existence would be found
in their inventions. Just as the sculptors of Nineveh put the lions
that were such immediate objects in their life, to good use in their
reliefs; or the painters of the Sung period the birds and landscapes
found by them in their wilfully secluded lives; so it was inevitable
to-day that artists should get into their inventions (figures,
landscapes, or abstractions) something of the lineaments and character
of machinery. An artist could excel, no doubt, who never suggested in
his pictures acquaintance with anything more ferreous than a mushroom.
But you would not be liable, I suppose, to pick a quarrel with the
artists of Asshur because they used the lions at their door?
This ground has to be gone over, and thus much reasserted, for the
purposes of the new adjustments I propose.
_The Artist’s Luck_
The best artists of the Sung period lived a secluded life, very luckily
for them. It was considered the thing to inhabit the fairly distant
country and live in intercourse with the objects of Nature. When this
fashion passed, and a painter had to live within hailing distance
of the court, the pictures produced showed an immediate decline in
quality. That is _one_ lesson.
The scenes in the Assyrian bas-reliefs from Nineveh were produced by
an artist who led an unlucky kind of life. He was hurried about by the
king in his razzias and hunts: no sooner had the party (a marauding or
a hunting one) returned to the city than the harassed sculptors had
to rush to their workrooms and produce by the next morning a complete
series of bas-reliefs describing in what was apparently considered a
flattering way the exploits of their diabolical idiot of a master.
For no sooner had he slept off the fatigue caused by the last of an
incessant series of displacements than he insisted on seeing what he
had looked like to his band of performing sculptors during the last
week or two. Their heads probably fell like apples in an autumn wind;
though there is seemingly no record of his ever having had sculptors
enough to build up their skulls into a pyramid. How they succeeded in
doing such good lions it is difficult to say. Perhaps the ones who
did the good lions were left in peace sometimes. But on the whole, a
sculptor fated to work for Asshur’s deputy would no doubt have regarded
the Sung hermit as the luckiest old yellow crab that ever painted.
It has occurred to me that we might be worse off than we are. But I
can see no reason why we should not be better off: hence, partly, this
pamphlet.