ART AND AESTHETICS
By SIR TIMOTHY EDEN MY wife came down this morning in a blue pinafore with a blue square of linen on her head, carrying a broom. She looked like a Vermeer or a Chardin. How much better to look like a Vermeer or a Chardin than a Lavery or a Laszlo !
But then, of course, Society gets the painters which it deserves. Van Dyck for the Cavaliers, Lely for the Restoration demi-monde, Gainsborough for the wit and elegance of the eighteenth century, Winterhalter for Queen Victoria, Lavery for the present generation, all are absolutely right, absolutely proper, absolutely suitable to their subjects. Put down Titian in front of a Cabinet Minister or Rubens before a debutante of the present day, and they could do nothing with them !
The division of art—painting—into Ancient and Modern is a grave mistake. There is no modern art as opposed to ancient art, or should not be. There is only good art as opposed to bad. People say " Do you like modern art ? " A stupid question. The galleries and dealers encourage it. Some will only show pictures recently painted after the manner of Matisse or Picasso, or of van Gogh or Cezanne. Others will only hang cubes and " abstrdet " art. Others again will only accept the painters still influenced by the Barbizon school. Yet others, like the Royal Academy, will cling to a pro- fessorial interpretation of the Renaissance. None of them, so far as I know, will take a picture because it is good, regardless of the " type " or " class " to which it belongs. Yet there is far more affinity between a good picture of the school of Cezanne and a good picture of the school of Corot and a good ditto of van Dyck, than between a bad " Cezanne " and a good one, a bad " Corot " and a good one, a bad " van Dyck " and a good one.
" Art recognizes no frontiers." No more does it recognize the frontiers of ages. Hang a good modern picture over a refectory table or a Sheraton sideboard and you will see for yourself that they " agree." Hang most of the stuff called " modern " with tin furniture and jazz carpets and you will see again that they agree ! Rubbish will go with rubbish and excellence with excel- lence until the end of the ages. There are only two classifications in art—not ancient and modern, but good and bad.
* * We must not suppose that because a thing is ugly aesthetically, it is unpaintable artistically. On the contrary, the reverse is much nearer the truth. It is far easier to make a good picture of a monkey in a grey coat on a brown barrel-organ against a dirty street than of sunsets and rivers of gold. Why is this ?
The answer is that there is colour and movement in everything and an artist can always feel the relationship of colours and the essentials of movement, no matter what particular and fortuitous shapes they may adopt. But while it is comparatively easy to see artistically the relation between the monkey and the grey coat and the barrel-organ and the street—(I am talking of a good painter)—and not only to see them but to delight in them and to make of them a masterpiece of beauty, it is in- fernally difficult to do anything with a sunset, not because it is vulgar in itself (though it may be) but because the artist is hampered by accepted conventions and traditional ideas about sunsets which, willy-nilly, force themselves into his brain. Thus, he either accepts these ideas and consequently turns out rubbish to delight the many or, terrified of the sunset, he turns his back on it and paints the sordid street. Hence arises the tendency in art today to ridicule and avoid anything which has been accepted throughout the ages as aesthetically beautiful.
Yet though we can understand this, we cannot approve. There is no reason why the artist should not be an aesthete, no reason why he should put his dirty boots on the mantelpiece and refrain from combing his hair. The artist should be an aesthete, though not only an aesthete. He will never rival the great masters of the past until he has made up his mind to tackle the aesthetic artistically. The modern painter is a coward. lie takes refuge in his pots-de-chambre, his backyards and his chimney-stacks and funks the poplar, the drove of sheep, the moonlit sea—all things which really can be painted, which can be artistically we well as aesthetically beautiful, but which have become degraded and spoilt for him by associations of false sentiment, by the superficial observa- tion and the loud and ignorant approval of the multitude.
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