Painting and Sculpture
A Miniature History of European Art. By R. H. Wilenski. (Oxford University Press. 4s. 6d.) Ws: at least never fail to know where we are with Mr. Wilenski. He has a point of view which we think is wrong, but he is consistent as well as persistent in what we believe is his fallacy. It is his contention, a kind of obsession with him, that, briefly, art is not to be regarded as the unfettered expres- sion of individual emotion, but is some sort of ordered, intel- lectual, and collective effort. Art, he would no doubt ulti- mately admit, is both, but the first, which most of us think is essential, he makes secondary, and will even, under the strain of argument, exclude altogether. It does not surprise US, therefore, that in this brief survey of European art Mr. Wilenski should emphasize its dictation by religious and social organizations.
The bisons at Les Eyzies were produced with some special, probably fearful intention. Egyptian and Assyrian art had a purpose both magical and dynastic, and Roman art was an extension of a like conception. In Byzantine fetters, Christian art was made the means of impressing the public with the holy might of Caesar as well as with the sanctity of holy Church, its later motive under the gentle spirit and observation of Saint Francis. With the Renaissance entered Science, and with it a new servitude to Church and State, and this in the seventeenth century broadened out in many directions. Rembrandt anticipated the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century which mistrusted all art that served. a public purpose and proclaimed the doctrine that the only art of value was art which expressed the artist's personal reactions as an individual man." Yet before Rembrandt's death Mr. Wilenski from his roof-tree sees Louis XIV inaugurate "a new era of dynastic art that rivalled the dynastic arts of the Pharaohs of Egypt and of the Cod-Emperors of Rome."
And so on, until we come to the time when, failing religious and social organizations to dominate it, art suffers the dictation of " artistic " Academies. These partial truths so shrewdly and confidently exposed by Mr. Wilenski, with a complete exclusion of aesthetic judgments, are clearly designed to justify a " modern " art in reaction from his pet heresy. The cult of individual sensibility and individual freedom is clearly an obsolete ideal, he tells us, in an age of order, centralized control, co-operation and discipline of which Cubism is the symbol. But there are great gaps in his argument. The exceptions of genius in the past, for example Rembrandt and Velasquez, remaining outside the implications of his theory, arc difficult to explain away. The pretensions of the " moderns " who are co-operating to develop the pattern of the new age seem to rest, after all, on the author's arbitrary selection. A term like Cubism does not cover them. It may be true, again, that one day some new organization will decide to use art as an instrument for imposing its ideas on the people as a whole, as Pharaohs and Caesars and the Church have so often used it in the past, and will find the artists willing. That is still irrelevant to the question at issue, which is whether there has ever been a time when the personal sensibility of the artist, not something less within his personality than outside it, counted for most in an artistic creation.
Mr. Casson incidentally discusses the same matter in his new volume on twentieth-century sculptors, and lie also declines to admit art, or at any rate sculpture, to be an expression by an individual of an individual. "That great art consists of the projection of the soul of an individual on to an 'easel-picture' in the case of painting, or a studio-study in the case of sculpture, seems to me to limit its flight and to reduce it to a process of purely psychological interest." But in his contention that art is an activity with a purpose. "stimulated by that artistic aillalus that entered the soul 01 the artist from outside," Mr. Casson is less thorough than M. Wilenski. Ile even disputes the antithesis implied in these two theories of art, so that to some extent at least the question with him resolves itself into. one of which or two elements in
artistic creation is the more vital. And one must note also that Mr. Casson cites the Cubists as examples of those who, far from being employed in collective effort, are engaged in the poor game of presenting the contents of one's emotional or intellectual attache-case as a noteworthy work of art.
Carl Mules, Paul Manship, Georg Kolbe, Arehipenko and Zadkine, the interesting Oswald Herzog representing the German "Inorganic" Echool, and our own Frank Dobson are the sculptors chiefly treated of by Mr. Casson in his book, in which the excellence of the illustrations deserves special mention. 'the chapters on these al fists are just and interesting appreciations by a critic with well-considered standards to apply to their work ; and of particular matters also discussed reference should be made to that of the sculptor's control of and by his medium, with special application to the art of Mr. and Mrs. Skeaping.
The new Director at Millbank is excellently equipped, ellicially and personally, to display the contents of the Tate Gallery. He brings to their survey, besides daily familiarity with them, professional knowledge, a particularly level- headed judgment, and no small gift of easy literary expression. Mr. Manson criticizes independently and often boldly, and is not overawed by great reputations. While concentrating on his gallery, he allows himself excursions into wider fields, and through a mass of imposed comment an individual appre- ciation blows like a fresh wind. Certainly there never enters into his survey the fallacy that ehments other than aesthetic matter. The illustrations to his volume are excellently chosen and well produced.
When Joseph Israels as a young man was copying the left- hand man in Rembrandt's " Syndics " in the Trippenhuis, he recognized, he declared, a presence, a personal genius, at ence identical and elusive, which his brush could not evoke. We think of this when Professor Laurie tells us that "the surface of Rembrandt's paint, as revealed by magnified photo- graphs, has a quality of its own, through all its variations, yr hich I have not found elsewhere." Only Macs and Govert Flinek among his pupils—and they but seldom—imitated the impost() of the Master. The sixty photographic prints in Pro- fessor Laurie's volume make it a study in technical criticism that is extremely fascinating. Certain well-authenticated pictures covering twenty years from 1640, with two of earlier date, supply the details of Rembrandt's brushwork, which can here be compared with that taken from paintings by Hats and eight of Rembrandt's followers. One is less surprised that the revelation of magnified photographs is the intense indi- viduality and personal quality of the brushwork of painters of the first rank than that pictures of the second-class painters, photographed in the same way, reveal slabs of paint and muddled jumbling. There must be, we fancy, a wide margin of lack of character in the brushwork of the inferior prac- titioners.
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