_The Studio Game_
_Section_ 1. _Foreword._
” 2. _Our Æsthetes and Plank-Art._
” 3. _The Bawdy Critic._
” 4. _“We Fell in Love with the Beautiful Tiles in the_
_South Kensington Museum Refreshment Room.”_
” 5. _The Vengeance of Raphael._
” 6. _General Nature and the Specialised Sense._
_Foreword to Part IV_
Two things have conspired to exalt indifference in the painter to the
life around him, and the forms that life takes, to a virtue.
For a specialized visual interest in the débris of your table, or the
mandolin you have just bought, in copying the colours of the roofs
seen from your garret-studio, is _not_ the creative interest required
for art. It is a parasitic interest. Your interest in the forms around
you should be one liable to transfigure and constantly renew them:
to use the grand masses of life, in fact, as the painter uses the
objects on his table. He does not paint those objects as though he were
photographing them. He arranges, simplifies, and changes them in his
picture. So it should be with the larger form-content of general and
public life.
Braque and Picasso have _changed_, indeed, the form-content before
them, and with which they have dealt. Witness their little Nature-morte
concoctions. But it has only been the débris of their rooms. Had they
devoted as much of their attention to changing our common life, in
every way not only the bigger, but the more vital and vivid game, they
would have been finer and more useful figures: less precious, but not
less good, artists.
Two things, then, have made this indifference displayed by most
artists to their form-content come to be regarded as a virtue. One is
the general scepticism and discouragement which is a natural result
of the conditions of our time. Intellectual exhaustion is the order
of the day; and the work most likely to find acceptance with men in
their present mood is that work that most vigorously and plainly
announces the general bankruptcy and its own perdition. For the need
of expression is, in a sense, never more acute than when people are
imperturbably convinced of its futility. So the most living become the
most life-like wax-works of the dead.
The painter stands in this year in Europe like an actor without a
stage. Russia is a chaos; whether a good one or a bad one remains to be
seen. Writing in Paris has fallen among the lowest talents. Painting is
plunged into a tired orgy of colour-matching. A tessaract broods over
Cézanne’s apples. A fatuous and bouffonne mandolin has been brought
from Spain; an illusive guitarist twangs formal airs amid the débris.
Germany has been stunned and changed; for the better, pious hope says.
But for the present art is not likely to revive there.
A great new vivacity seemed to spring up some ten years ago in the art
of painting; and a number of the younger painters are embarked on an
enterprise that involves considerable sacrifices and discomforts, an
immense amount of application, and eager belief. This local effort has
to contend with the scepticism of a shallow, tired and uncertain time;
there is no great communal or personal force in the Western World of
to-day, unless some new political hegemony supply it, for art to build
on and to which to relate itself.
It is of importance, therefore, to a variety of painters, who have put
their lives into this adventure, that it should not be, through the
mistakes, the cupidity, or the scepticism of their leaders, or one
mischance or another, brought to wreck.
This part of my pamphlet deals with a track at the head of which a
board advising avoidance should be placed; or, rather, against two
tracks. For the Braque Nature-morte phase, and the David-Ingres phase
in which painters in Paris are at present indulging is the same sort of
thing, different as the results (a small abstract Nature-morte, and a
large painting à la David) may appear.
_Our Æsthetes and Plank-Art_
There are two attitudes towards the material world that, one or other
manifesting itself in him, an artist may very roughly be distributed
on one side or the other of a creative pale. These attitudes can be
approximated to the rôles of the sexes, and contain, no doubt, all
the paradoxes of the great arbitrary sexual divisions of the race. An
artist can Interpret or he can Create. There is for him, according to
his temperament and kind, the alternative of the Receptive attitude or
the Active and Changing one. One artist you see sitting ecstatic on his
chair and gazing at a lily, at a portion of the wall-paper, stained
and attractive, on the wall of his delightfully fortuitous room. He is
enraptured by all the witty accidents that life, any life, brings to
him. He sits before these phenomena enthralled, deliciously moved to an
exquisite approval of the very happy juxtaposition of just that section
of greenish wall-paper and his beautiful shabby brown trousers hanging
from a nail beneath it. He notices in a gush of rapture that the white
plate on the table intercepting the lower portion of the trousers cuts
them in a white, determined, and well-meaning way. He purrs for some
time (he is, Mr. Clive Bell will tell you, in a state of sensitive
agitation of an indescribable nature), and then he paints his picture.
He gushes about everything he sees. He is enraptured at the quality of
the curious clumsy country print found on the lodging-house wall; at
the beauty of cheap china ornaments, a stupid chair, a staring, mean,
pretentious little seaside house. When with anybody, he will titter or
blink or faintly giggle when his attention is drawn to such a winning
and lovely object. I am, you will perceive, drawing a picture of the
English variety of art man. The most frequently used epithet will be
“jolly” for the beautiful; and its pursuit will invariably be described
as “fun.” So we have before us, all said and done, a very playful
fellow indeed, who quite enters into the spirit of this “amusing”
life, and who is as true a “sportsman” as any red-coated squire; only
for the pursuit of “jolly” little objects like stuffed birds, apples,
or plates, areas of decayed wall-paper, and the form of game that
he wishes rather smirkingly and naughtily to devour, he must be as
cunning, languid, and untidy as his distinguished brother-sportsman is
alert, hearty, and coloured like a letter-box. For stalking a stuffed
bird you have, in the first place, to be a little bit dead yourself.
I have been portraying to the best of my ability the heir to the
æsthete of the Wilde period: the sort of man who is in the direct
_ligné_ of Burne Jones, Morris, and Kate Greenaway. And he is a very
good example of how to receive rather than to give.
Now all the colour-matching, match-box-making, dressmaking,
chair-painting game, carried on in a spirit of distinguished amateurish
gallantry and refinement at the Omega workshops, before that
institution became extinct, was really _precisely the same thing_, only
conducted with less vigour and intelligence, as the burst of abstract
nature-mortism which has marked the last phase of the Cubist, or
Braquish, movement in Paris. These assemblings of bits of newspaper,
cloth, paint, buttons, tin, and other débris, stuck on to a plank, are
more “amusing” than were the rather jaded and amateur tastefulness of
the Omega workshops. But as regards the Nature-mortists and Fitzroy
tinkerers and tasters, one or other have recognised the affinity. Both
equally are the opposite pole to the credence or intensity of creative
art.
_The Bawdy Critic_
Under a series of promptings from Picasso, then, painting in Paris has
been engineered into a certain position, that appears to me to bear
far too striking a family likeness, in its spirit, to the sensibility
of the English amateur to give one much hope for it. In the analysis
of what I see as a deep weakness, and a scholarly, receptive and
tasteful trend, rather than a creative one, I must put forward a little
testimony, and devote a little space to what are otherwise thoroughly
unimportant people. The important thing is obviously the painting in
Paris, and not the type of English dilettante mind to which I compare
it. But if I can make you see this real and striking community of
temperament and intention, you will know better where you are when
you find yourself in front of an arrangement of bits of newspaper,
cloth, cheese parings, bird’s feathers and tin. You might not otherwise
come to the truth of this mystery at once. For the law that assembled
these objects together will appear, and indeed is, more daring and
abstruse than the more nerveless and more slovenly colour-matching and
cushion-making to which I relate it. Again, it is really only what
happens in a picture that is not organised to attract the objects
that it depicts. Whether you stick a bit of wallpaper and a patch of
trouser-leg side by side on a piece of wood, or use these objects in
a picture painted on a piece of canvas, it is much the same. The only
thing that can be said of these particular experiments is that they
demonstrate an exasperated interest in media and the shop side of
painting, and a certain mental liveliness. But as regards them, there
the life stops.
A desire to accept and enjoy: to accept what is already in the world,
rather than to put something new there: to be in a state of permanent
pâmoison and rant about everything; the odder the thing, the _queerer_
that you should find yourself fainting and ecstatic about it, the
better--the _funnier_, you see? It is in the possession of this spirit,
at bottom, that I am associating these two sets of people.
A composer of music does not, in his best or most specialised moments,
fling himself into a luxurious ecstasy at a musical performance. The
painter, similarly, does not derive from his own paintings, or other
people’s, “æsthetic ecstasies” or anything nice like that. He derives
from the production of his own paintings, or should, a hundred times
more pleasure than any bechevelured hysterical amateur is likely to
find in front of _any_ work of art. As a matter of fact, in most cases
it is out of _himself_, not from the picture, or the art object, that
the amateur gets his satisfaction. Hence the arcanely masturbatory tone
in which some of them chant in the newspapers of their experiences.
“Connoisseurs in pleasure--of whom I count myself one--know that
nothing is more intensely delightful than the æsthetic thrill,” etc.,
croons one.
Unsatisfied sex accounts for much. You wonder if it is really a
picture, after all, and not a woman or something else that is wanted,
for the purposes of such a luxurious thrill. Is not most emotional
interest in Music or Pictures, unaccompanied by the practice of the art
enjoyed, sex? In fact, the painter or the musician are the only people
for whom it is _not_ sex. These bawdy connoisseurs should really be
kept out of the galleries. I can see a fine Renoir, some day, being
mutilated: or an Augustus John being raped!
_“We Fell in Love with the Beautiful Tiles in the South Kensington
Museum Refreshment Room”_
If we intend thoroughly to pursue our Pablo into the deplorable corner
into which his agile genius has led him, and others with him, we cannot
do better than marry him, in our minds, for the moment, to the erudite
form of Mr. Roger Fry. And if I devote a little space to the latter
amiable gentleman, it is only to use him as a glow-worm by which we can
the better examine Pablo’s peculiar plight.
I will give you a passage from an article of Mr. Fry’s which appeared
in the _Athenæum_ of July 11 of this year.
“Objects of the most despised periods, or objects saturated for the
ordinary man with the most vulgar and repulsive associations, may be
grist to his (the artist’s) mill. And so it happened that while the
man of culture and the connoisseur firmly believed that art ended
with the brothers Adam, Mr. Walter Sickert was already getting hold
of stuffed birds and wax flowers just for his own queer game of
tones and colours. And now the collector and the art-dealer will be
knocking at Mr. Sickert’s door to buy the treasures at twenty times
the price the artist paid for them. Perhaps there are already younger
artists who are getting excited about the tiles in the refreshment
room at South Kensington, and when the social legend has gathered
round the names of Sir Arthur Sullivan and Connie Gilchrist, will
inspire in the cultured a deep admiration for the ‘æsthetic’ period.”
Mr. Sickert you find embedded in the midst of this useful passage. He
is a living and genuine painter; and is in that galère, therefore, you
can take it, fortuitously. Notice, first, the stuffed birds got hold
of by Mr. Fry’s artist “for his queer game of tones and colours.” Mr.
Fry’s artist’s “queer game” is the same as Picasso’s ingenious sport.
Then we have a luxurious picture of “the collector and the art-dealer”
knocking at the artist’s door, and asking to buy his “treasures” (more
luxury)--the stuffed birds that have been used in his “queer game”--for
_Twenty Times the Price_ paid for them. Next we have a little picture
of the young students of the South Kensington School eating buns and
milk in the Museum Refreshment Room, and oozing infatuated nothings
about the tiles they find there; and going back with naughty, defiant
minds to their academic lessons, their dear little heads full of the
beautiful tiles they have seen while at lunch. “WE FELL IN LOVE with
the beautiful tiles in the South Kensington Refreshment Room,” to
parody the famous advertisement. We think of the sugary couple on the
walls of the Tube, that utter their melancholy joke and lure you to
the saloons of the Hackney Furnishing Company; and we know that Mr.
Fry’s picture is as sentimental a one as that--the student “getting
excited,” the gush, the buns, and the tiles.
The last sentence of the passage I cite prophesies that “the cultured
will at some future date conceive a deep admiration for the æsthetic
period.” After the tiles of South Kensington Museum, the faded delights
of the æsthetic period! Mr. Fry chooses the æsthetic period as the
subject of his prophetic vision because of a natural predilection that
he no doubt feels for it, because he is a little bit in advance of his
time in this respect. He already feels the thrill of such an admiration.
But you are to understand first that there is no mode of the human
mind, no “period,” no object of any sort or description, that will not
have its turn, and be enthused about either by the art-student, or the
“cultured”; and secondly that this is very much as it should be, and
that this universal tasting and appreciation is all for the best; quite
the most suitable way of envisaging the art of painting, sculpture and
design.
It was no doubt, in the first place, a very naughty piece of fun for
this scholarly and fastidious art-critic, with a name in Europe for his
taste and knowledge of Italian pictures, to find himself exclaiming
in rapture over some object as trivial as most of the objects he had
up till then dealt in had been rare. He naturally might find this
phenomenon absorbing. Theoretically he has no predilections. All
flowers are the same. But an especially conscious plant on which
he should chance to alight would feel from his method of settling,
the character of his tâtonnements, that he had not alighted for the
purpose of extracting honey at all. Such a critic, at the same time a
dilettante, is not curious about the _object_ that his mind approaches,
but is entirely engrossed with _himself_ and his own sensations. It
is _amusing_ to flit from petal to petal; the grace with which you
alight is amusing; it is amusing that people should suppose that you
are engaged in such a dulcet business as gathering honey; to bask in a
slightly intoxicating pollen-thickened atmosphere is delicious; but the
fun is only to _pretend_ to be a bee.
The eclecticism, then, as regards modes and periods of art, finds its
natural development in an eclecticism as regards objects. “A man’s head
is no more and no less important than a pumpkin,” from the article
already quoted. “Objects of the most despised periods may be grist
to his (the artist’s) mill.” Should art connoisseurs and dilettantes
all turn painters, the sort of art movement they would like to find
themselves in the midst of (we are supposing them fashionably-minded,
as many are) would be such a giant amateurism and carnival of the
eclectic sensibility as we are in for, if the dealers’ riot in Paris
succeeds, and if the votaries of Nature-mortism and the champions of
the eclectic sensibility here, are to be believed.
We see exhibitions of French painting written about in the tone of an
intellectual tourist, as though they constituted an entirely new thing
in the way of pornographic side-shows, to which the English tripper is
immediately led on his arrival in Paris. The “æsthetic thrill” obtained
at these shows is described in an eager and salacious key, and with
many a chuckle. The truth is that for the amateur turned critic, or
the amateur painter, these modern painter’s experiments still remain
imbued, as they do for the public, with a great deal of naughtiness.
The especially English philandering flapper-sensibility transpires
in every sentence of their accounts of shows. There we have then our
indigenous æsthete splayed out for our leisurely observation.
I will now give you a few lines of an interview with Picasso, which
appeared in the _Weekly Dispatch_ of June 1 of this year:--
“Picasso was enchanted with our metropolis (London). He waxed excited
over our colourful motor-omnibuses.
“And Picasso had a thrill of joy on discovering a pavement artist.
‘This good man knelt down and drew in coloured chalks on the stone. I
assure you, they are admirable.’”
The motor buses are the same as the tiles in the Refreshment Room. The
pavement artist is the eternal Naif or Gifted Child. When will the
Naif, the Pavement Artist and the Child resume their places, qua Child
or Naif simply: the very good Naif, like the very good Child, as rare
as anything else very good, alone remaining in our foregrounds?
And it is easy to see how Picasso, wonderful artist as he is, has
encouraged this hope of a thoroughly detestable state of amateurish
art--naughtiness, scepticism, and sham, setting in here and in Paris.
Certainly, if you do not want to be turned into a tasting-machine, you
will not have any truck with the studio-game into which the general
movement in painting to-day has been sidetracked.
_The Vengeance of Raphael_
David is the order of the day. David, the stiffest, the dreariest
pseudo-classic, has been seized on (as a savage tribe might take one
of their idols by the heels and drag him out), and has been told in
frenzied and theatrical accents that he must Avenge himself! And
being probably a rather peppery and bloody-minded little Frenchman,
revenge himself he will, if he is not stopped! Or, rather, M. Lhote,
his self-appointed executioner, will do the job for him. Picasso,
alleged to be doing portraits in the manner of Ingres, is the cloaked
and consenting, of course Spanish, figure in the background of this
“classical” razzia. “Raphael shall be avenged!” shrieks M. Lhote. I
have heard from people who have seen this artist in Paris in the last
month or so that he is really very excited, and that the Madonna-like
face of the Florentine master inspires him to very great fury: a fury
of idolatrous love, a determination to make short work of those who
have played ducks and drakes with their inheritance of Greek beauty.
The parrot-like echo of all this turmoil turns up punctually in our
Press. I saw this week in a current art article the first tinkle of
the eulogistic thunder that is shortly to burst, everything indicates,
around the Parthenon Frieze in the British Museum. Nasir Pal’s square
semitic shoulders may get a pat or two in passing. But it will be in
the Greek gallery where all the fun of the fair will rage. These draped
idealities have already been described as _distorted_, to bring them
into line!
Ingres, David, Raphael! Poussin and Claude! Easter Island carvings, El
Greco, Byzantium! But there is a vast field yet to cover: the friezes
from Nineveh, the heart of Sung, Koyetzu and Sotetzu, the Ajanta caves,
Peru, Benin; and the Polar regions have their unhappy dolls, harpoon
handles, and the Midnight Sun for some future ballet!
This is leaving out of count the tiles in the South Kensington
refreshment room and the “æsthetic period,” and a million other such
varieties. What incredible distances the art-parasite travels!
Is Western Europe too uncertain of to-morrow, the collapse of religion
too dislocating, Great Wars too untimely, for us to have an art that
is any more than locally or individually constructive? I am convinced
that the sooner the general European destiny of painting gets out of
the hands of the dealers’ ring in Paris the better for it. Also the
hysterical second-rate Frenchman, with his morbid hankering after his
mother-tradition, the eternal Græco-Roman, should be discouraged. And
I think that Picasso could be indicted of more than a personal and
excusable vacillation. And his personal limitations should be stated
and understood, as Cézanne’s, or any other individual man’s should be,
where they conflict with anything that is more living even than the
individual.
_General Nature and the Specialised Sense_
When it was necessary in this country and elsewhere to undertake a
rapid education of a Public of some sort, some exaggeration had to be
indulged in. If a man was persuaded of the reality of his enthusiasms,
the position had to be posed _too logically_ for reality, or to be
exact. Also everything in the innovation that contradicted the tenets
of the prevalent and tired sensibility had to be thrown into a crude
saillance.
But to-day this necessity no longer exists.
Yet writers supporting, more or less, the great movement in painting
going on everywhere in Europe, still repeat the lesson as it was given
them. The statement, for instance, that a man’s head is no more and
no less important than a pumpkin indicates a considerable truth: it
depends in what connection, only, that it is advanced and how applied.
The ideal of the pure visual has obviously no preoccupation but formal
and colour ones. But when you say that Cézanne, an heroic visual pure,
in his portrait of the two men playing cards, was emotionally moved
only by the form and colour, you are omitting a great sub-conscious
travail of the emotion which fashioned along with the pure painter’s
sense; dyeing with a sombreness and rough vitality everything that he
did. There is no painter’s sense, admittedly, so “unbiological” that
it can be independent of this extra-sensual activity of the painter’s
nature. His disposition, his temper, his stubbornness, or his natural
gaiety are all there in his specialised sense. Given the undoubted and
fundamental rightness of this sense, it is an open question how far the
emotional non-specialised activity of the mind should be stimulated and
how explicit its participation should be in the work of a painter.
The important thing is that the individual should be born a painter.
Once he is that, it appears to me that the latitude he may consider his
is almost without limit. Such powerful specialised senses as he must
have are not likely to be overridden by anything. He would laugh at you
if you came along with your “head and pumpkin.”
To sum up: On the subject of eclecticism, if there were no painters
and therefore no art, the dilettante would have nothing to be eclectic
about. Secondly, no good painter has ever been eclectic or very fickle
in his manner of work. And if the complexity and scepticism of his time
drives an artist into the rôle of the dilettante, or interpretative
performer only, that is unlucky for him. It is not in the interest of
painters, but only of the stunt amateur, or the dealer, to keep silent
on that point.
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Transcriber’s Notes
Retained inconsistent hyphenation.
Retained inconsistent capitalization of “Public”.
Retained inconsistent capitalization and hyphenation of “Nature-morte”.
p. 12 changed “Péchuchets” to “Pécuchets”
p. 23 added hyphen to “Gaudier-Brzeska”
p. 26 capitalized “Naifs” in “a certain number of Naifs”
p. 28 capitalized “Naif” in “the only great Naif”
p. 36 changed “Hawaian” to “Hawaiian”
p. 37 changed “castanettes” to “castagnettes”
p. 41 added accent to “Dérain”
p. 46 capitalized “Douanier” in “Rousseau the Douanier”
p. 61 retained spelling of “tessaract”
p. 65 changed “ecstacy” to “ecstasy” and “ecstacies” to “ecstasies”
p. 68 changed “dilletante” to “dilettante”
p. 71 changed “overriden” to “overridden”