| Leon Underwood
ART FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE
Notes on the philosophy of art to-day
by LEON UNDERWOOD
(Faber & Faber Ltd, London, 1934)
THE SUPPOSITION
No significant artist of to-day can work without a definite idea about the reconstruction of the world he & his fellows live in, for he realises that his function, in the future, is to bring about the replacement of War by the culture of Art as the first concern of the nations.
Notes on the Philosophy of Art to-day
DIAGNOSIS
Art and life have drifted apart. They have drifted branch-like from the main stem, and the main stem which is aesthetic culture has withered. It is of primary importance to have art and life converge and commingle again in the same stem, made robust.
TREATMENT
I would compel an interest in art by legislature. The result of legislature upon hygiene encourages me to this. Hygiene is no more natural to the average man than beauty, but nevertheless legislature has done a good deal in first making him appreciate and subsequently love cleanliness; all in a comparatively short time too!
THE MEANS
Of course, this result was achieved by the threat "You will die if you are not clean". We artists should say "You will not go to Heaven unless you love art" and, assuredly, he will not. In the high periods of art, the priests threatened to lock people out of Heaven if they were not religious, but at the same time they offered them art as the key to religion. To-day, we should offer them art as the key to Heaven itself - the sublimation of desires.
INTEGRITY OF THE ARTIST
There are many more of those virtues, identified with Christianity, in the mind of the artist than in the compounded text of all organised religions; because the text of organised religion was originally written by the mind of the artist. One drop of the living essence is worth a reservoir of its organised abstract.
"Art for art's sake" is a slogan that roughly expresses the artist's integrity after he has ceased to be employed by orthodox religion. Its origin is obscure; the church may have invented it and handed it to the discharged artist as a form of "good character"; a testimonial from an old employer. But now that the artist has been liberated from the serfdom of orthodox religion and no longer needs scriptural justification for his inventions his right is to claim authority direct in "Art for Heaven's Sake" for his motto. Education has at any rate put the enlightened interpretation of the artist's work within the grasp of everyone.
THE NEW RELIGION
Many have said it: "The world is in need of a New Religion".
The real essence of any organised religion has always been art. The priests have hidden the essence behind the effigies and attributes of personal gods. Now it is time we ceased to look externally for the solution of the good and evil problem - in the temperaments of jealous and wrathful gods. It is also time art were brought into the open and made the basis of practical religion. We must control fear; not allow it to control us. We must avoid the old creed; no matter how cunningly it may be repaired and amended by a materialistic priesthood to cater for growing indifference. Art alone is capable of satisfying the need of the masses, for whom reality is material and touchable, and also those outside the masses, for whom reality is immaterial and spiritual.
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS IN ART
The old philosophy of art was directed at revealing the artist in his art but hiding his aesthetics - "ars est celare artem". Some modern aesthetes have converted this into: "Reveal aesthetics & hide art (the artist)". This doctrine cannot endure, for it restricts imagination which is the individual. To distinguish art produced under this doctrine from the true art, I refer to it hereafter as "Cache-toi" art. A smoke-screen of obscurity is thrown over the true art. Let us come to more substance than smoke.
THE WISDOM THAT IS NOT WORTH KNOWING
At his exhibition Blake made an appeal to the public to rate art higher than popular aesthetics of his time. He forsook those aesthetic theories after having unsuccessfully tried to make use of them.
A FEW PEARLS IN THE VAST DESERT
I have been able to make use of some of the aesthetic theories of to-day. My difficulty with so many of them is that they are too abstract - too dissociated from life to hold poetry which runs out of them as out of a colander.
THE FILM OVER THE LENS
In the cache-toi doctrine, painting (art) & literature (poetry) are denied relevant unison. To submerge the individual in the organised aesthetics of a school is to spread a film before clear vision; as the cache-toi does when he tries to crystallise a separate identity in both "literature" and "painting" instead of focussing on their common identity in "poetic truth". If we multiply the symbols their significance becomes lost.
SYLLOGISTIC PROOF
a. If art (painting) has no business with poetry (literature) let us not call poetry art.
b. To say, as is done, that literature is included in painting is equal to saying: "The addition of art to painting is deleterious".
ORGANISATION KILLS ART
Two Englishmen, Turner and Constable, in a land that has no reputation for art, were firstly responsible for (anticipated) impressionism. Unconsciously, they germinated the organised research attitude of the cache-toi school, who merely made use of the aesthetic principles invented by Turner and Constable, but without regard for the true subjective purpose they were invented for. In England, most of us have had the good sense to abandon the development of these principles and all that has followed it, so that in England we have (collectively) avoided what is not art.
SYNTHESIS IS THE UNIVERSAL ORDER OF DEVELOPMENT
For the artist, everything counts - even breakages count - and the imaginative artist's selection, for his purpose, from everything that is available to him must tend towards complexity. His path is therefore one of synthesis, not analysis.
SIMPLICITY IN COMPLEXITY
I would like to re-paint and carve all the old subjective themes of art, using what seems to me useful of even the most abstract cache-toi aesthetics to help me to re-create them; as modern life is - and always will be - a re-creation of ancient life; in more complexity - on the path of synthesis. There is a limit to analysis in the imagination.
ENLIGHTENMENT THAT DARKENS INTELLIGENCE
In spite of the library of literature that accompanies cache-toi analytic art, it is surprising - rather it is not surprising - how little it is understood. But it has had the effect of causing the true art to be almost forgotten
PANIC ACTIVITY AND ART THE WAIF
The cache-toi painter goes on making art look as shabby as possible. He explores its wardrobe, item by item; line, colour, modelling, monochrome (duo and trio-chrome), atmospherics, isometrics, distortions (emotional & unemotional),form, alliterations, inversions, concavity-convexity, and so on. And while he is thus distraught, art is left without its garments.
FURTHER PANIC-EYEWASH
He uses the most recondite arguments to which he tries to give initial importance with a scientific twist: "Painting," he says, "is for the eye alone". He explains, or his apologists explain, that the common man has lost the faculty of using his eyes for seeing colours and forms for themselves, &c. This talk of his is his own eyewash. Nothing is lost to a common man who does not see colour as colour and line as line, but sees them only by implication. It is what the true artist does. The poor fellow who is supposed to have lost the faculty of seeing colour and line with his eyes, has really gained not lost. (I do not question the artist's right to analyse, if he wishes. I do question the furtherance of art by this argument.) The poor fellow is able to discriminate the most subtle shades of lines and colour for his own purpose; for example, when selective breeding requires him to improve his stock. Therefore he sees colour and line in life. This is real colour - let him not be led away from it by artificial abstractions. Because he will be led away from life. Art must return to life through the imagination - not to a partial aspect of it in science and its abstractions.
THE EYE OF IMAGINATION IS NOT WITHOUT REASON
The trained eye can see colours the untrained eye cannot see, just as, with the aid of a spectroscope, it can see colours which without it would be invisible. It is no less true that the imagination can see all colours. It can see all things - discovered or undiscovered - because discovery is only an objective process of confirmation to the imagination. No artist of imagination is ever "startled" by discovery, he expects it - no matter what it is. In other words, nothing exists which cannot be imagined. All existence has already been painted, not all imagination.
THE WARM WAY OF ART
The thing for the imaginative artist to do is to paint and carve so as to reveal his colours and lines by implication - "Ars est celare artem". And then perhaps, but only then, he will be in a position to direct the course of art back towards the main stem it should occupy with life.
THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL
I do not consider intuition better for being independent of reason. The ideal is a synthesis of the faculties, as Blake implies by "The marriage of Heaven and Hell".
ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION
There is an artificial respiration practised by the cache-toi school. Having painted all that exists & being loath to go out of business, it seeks to elude bankruptcy by repainting old subjects in dismembered parts. A dog's body is given a cat's head, incongruities are juxtaposed and the result offered as a substitute for monotony. "Dream states" are (with gratitude to Dr Freud) brought forward as inspiration for these monstrosities.
PLEA IN EXTREMIS
The idea that the artist is unable to understand any style but his own is heresy. It is said by some that the artist hardly knows he is an artist.
Though I do not understand such a condition as this, at moments when I am not narrow-minded I can credit it. On the whole, I would sooner be narrow-minded than constantly crediting things I do not understand.
SCIENCE IS COLD, ART WARM
Science has nothing to do with art - nothing. Beethoven, living to-day, might have his own execution of his works radio-ed to America instead of, as he did, render them only for his small world in Vienna. But in exchange for his living to-day & hob-nobbing with Science, his works would - with the modern habit of ignoring living art - have to wait until after his death before being considered worthy of being radio-ed. Unfortunate for Beethoven - for it would not make the slightest difference to him which way his works were heard so long as they were heard. It should matter to us which way he handle living music for we may come to regret it.
WHILE ART IS SICK, RECOGNITION IS A SNARE
The cache-toi doctrine is an inversion - due perhaps to thwarted recognition of the true principles of art. Its malady borders the field of pathology. The true art is left to the artist who refuses to circumvent a lack of recognition at a cost that threatens his integrity.
THE ROAD TO RUIN
To meet mitigated ideals, the cache-toi artist has found it necessary to leave poetry out of painting. For me, it is incomprehensible that, after taking this step he should have so much objection to reason in a painter's make-up: unless it is that he subconsciously realises that it was by faulty reason he decided to leave poetry out of it. Anyway, he refuses to talk. On his own admission - it is the artist's business to paint, not to talk; yet the cache-toi colporteurs write and distribute reams of explanation. They have not succeeded in separating literature from painting. Where painting once embodied a certain amount of literature it is now by them enchained in a vast literature of aesthetics.
IN BAD COMPANY
Commerce extends a certain recognition to cache-toi art, because it serves a turn. For commerce it is but a re-hash of pre-digested material, without poetic imagination but with a scientific twist that is easily assimilated by the psycho-analytic-fed mind of the public. Commerce does not understand, it employs art. Having diminished the essence of art which is the imagination (the individual) to a negligible quantity, it has nothing to fear.
OF A FEATHER, TOGETHER AND ALIKE AS TWO PEAS
When one looks at paintings that are not art, say reproductions, like a lot of those in recent illustrated books on art, they all look alike. To discover any differences that are not put in them to misguide, one is led by a host of hair-splitting obscurities away from life, and towards the analysis of technique. As an artist of imagination, I see and know these, their hair-splitting & obscure "points" - but I say they are foreign to true art because they are away from life. It is therefore my purpose, whenever I am able to make use of these "points" to lead them back, but with different connotations, to life in the way of living art.
DELAY HAS NO JUSTIFICATION
Eventually, I have no doubt, the findings of science will identify with the principles of true art. But it is too long to wait for this - besides, we must have art ready as a pattern for it when science comes to meet it.
A LEADING QUESTION
I address a leading question to the philosophic intelligence of the world: "Art we civilized; can civilization claim consistently the expenditure of untold millions - in lives and money - on a world war which terminates from the exhaustion of resources on both sides & then, after fifteen years' recovery, have either side unwilling to spend anything or do anything for aesthetic culture?"
Of all the sentiments that went out to conduct the war, some were not mistaken. There were good sentiments & much true idealism hopelessly wasted from being subjected to the false idealism that makes war at all possible.
THE HEAVENLY ATMOSPHERE CAN BE PROVIDED
The crafts must be regained. There are crafts to meet the capacity and equipment of every individual. Let those men who live in the machine-made home construct but one piece of its furniture by themselves - entirely out of their own craft. Teach them to see that the handcraft required to make a chair embodies an approach to those creative principles that are crystalized in the concept of a god and, in making but one chair (or piece of lace, typography or what not) they are also making a personal supplication to the presiding spirit of creation; and will not, in return for any imperfection, be made to feel uncomfortable by human jealousy & vengeance. The present unemployed could be taught the crafts - not with the idea of absorbing them into industry; industry has shown it does not want handcraft - but to enable each man to experience the creative capacity, according to his ability, & to provide us with any army of teachers of the new delight. Convert the churches from talkshops into workshops, with crafts for all appetites. To let people come into personal contact with the concept of a creator in this way would be to start a real world revelation. Revolution is not desirable. If the Church is intent upon taking an active part in instruction its followers in playing the harp, it must study music, art & life; such a way only will obtain the sweetest strains.
THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE
Out of the subject matter there is, in the mind of the artist, generated an additional force by the combination of lines and colours of imaginative painting. No matter what becomes of this subject matter subsequently - even if it be lost, as that of antiquity - its purport will yet remain pictorially translated for all time in this additional force, for poetry is concerned with truth.
... AND UBIQUITOUS IN ITS VOICE
The occult voice of art in carving and in painting is identical with that of all the muses; the voice of poetic truth. A title to a painted or sculptured work is a clue to its poetic truth. It can be taken away without hurt.
... IMMORTAL IN ITS PURPOSE
The wrong with representational art is that it represents the world alone perceivable to the eye. Neither the world nor the eye needs heralds. Art should present to the eye the imagination of the mind.
... UNIVERSAL!
No subject is of fit use unless it is universally expressible in all the arts.
CONCLUSION IN TRUCE
The only enlightenment that may be had from the Relativity Theory is that man journeys upon his upward pathway in two places at the same time. In his rearstep he moves through Earth & Air accompanied by science; in his forestep he moves through the undefined medium of his Heaven - accompanied by art*
*This note was written upon reading somewhere that Professor Einstein is devoted to playing the fiddle.
Reiteration in Summary
a. That, art has temporarily lost its place in human affairs, and the authority of reason should be used to regain stability. The only justification of "History" is that it may show us how to do this. As is revealed in the final analysis, the imagination of the artist is the most altruistic thing in the world.
b. That, in the parting of the ways, history has been ignored & allowed to repeat itself too soon, in that cache-toi art is another case of the confusion of the ways and means of art (the very thing it purposed to avoid!). And so aesthetics are again presented as the purpose of art.
c. That, for its substitute purpose, cache-toi art creates a whole desert system of abstraction; yet there are a few grains of wheat in this desert that are useless without water.
d. That, the abstractions - supposed to be enlightening elements - are obscure to the function of true art which lies in common experience. The abstractions are not even coherent because the artist thrives only when his subject matter, not the mechanics of his art, is organised for him - to the increase of his power of communication
e. That, synthesis is the true path, not abstraction which has led to panic and produced a panacea of eyewash and contradiction such as: "The artist is so individual he understands only his own work!" &c.
f. That, imagination cannot be restricted so as to conform to Science. Vice-versa must be the solution. Art alone has the warmth of life and the winter will see all excursionists back at its fireside - provided the fire is kept burning.
g. That, art's well-wishers can help only negatively. The love of art can be taught but not the creation of it.
h. That, art has no substitute - though many interpretations. That, it lies in freedom and identity, not in restriction and divergency. It is like the innocence of a child; universally understood and misunderstood. Yet it needs no defence. Its conquests are made by disarming.
LEON UNDERWOOD, 1934 |
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