Land of Caves
A Concise History of Modern Painting. By Her-
bert Read. (Thames and Hudson, 32s. 6d.) Cubism 1907-1914. By John Golding. (Faber,
73s. 6d.)
HERBERT READ'S book is an extremely good and concise history of the events and philosophies of the principal avant-garde movements of this century. The weight of the story is carried by Expressionism, Surrealism, Constructivism. Klee, Kandinsky, Gabo, Kokoschka--these are the artists with whom the author most warmly aligns himself. The book fully deserves the praise it has already received. However, there are two points about the author's attitude to his subject which I want to comment upon, as they colour the whole book, his selection of material, his evaluation and interpretation.
The first concerns his definition of his sub- ject: what distinguishes Modern Art is 'the intention, as Klee said, not to reflect the visible but to make visible.' This phrase of Klee's, full of meaning in its original context, becomes no more than a slogan when brandished expansively : how does it distinguish a Wifredo Lam from a Tintoretto? Read's willingness to accept it as a criterion illuminates his own enthusiasm more than its object; reflects a strong wish to believe Mat the modern artist is 'getting to the heart of things.' Words like 'surface,' superficiar are used ambivalently in a literal and a perjorative critical sense, and words like 'penetrate.' profound,' 'inner' are opposed to them rather in the spirit of such popular sayings as 'You can't judge a sausage by its skin,' He's a deep one.' At the end of his book Read paraphrases Collingwood on art in general : 'In retrospect the whole of this move- ment . . . must be conceived as an immense effort to rid the mind of that corruption which, whether it has taken the form of fantasy-building or repression, sentimentality or dogmatism, con- stitutes a false witness to sensation or experience.'
His account of the movement is like a report of a sapper's campaign; burrowing beneath surfaces, appearances, errors, his pioneer-artists drive their shafts towards some region of truth; one is re- minded of the imagery of Read's novel of twenty years ago, The Green Child, and its hero, ex- president Olivero of Roncador, who descended into a land of caves where sages contemplated crystals and saw the harmony of the universe reflected in them. Of course, this image of modern art corresponds to that held by most of the artists associated with expressionism and many others besides. But I can't help wondering whether Read's idealism hasn't insulated him from several of the essential qualities of modern art, expres- sionism included, its concreteness, its realism, its actuality; and at the same time has exposed him to many of its negative qualities, for it is precisely this way of thinking which has fostered in our time the fantasy-building, repression, sentimental- ity and dogmatism that constitute the natural enemies of art. The historian would do better to admit that most of what has passed for art in the twentieth century has consisted of no more than an effort to reinvest pictures with the old poetics; to see that the adventures of Gauguin and his descendants (and they include most of the modern movement) were no more than attempts to find a modern equivalent for the rhetoric and sentiment of old art, a modern equivalent for ut pictura poesisv ButiCubism does not descend from Gauguin. Thert iS a fundamental difference between Cubism and all other art movements since Fauvism, a difference which is parallel to the difference between Cezanne and Gauguin. Cubism was the only movement which did not embrace symbols and mysticism. It was an art without make-believe.
Herbert Read quotes Picasso: 'Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music and whatnot have been related to Cubism to give an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories.' It is the particular strength of John Golding's study, the first of its kind, that it proceeds from the evidence of the pictures themselves and not from any of the legends that have grown up round them. He looks at the pictures well and he has an essential but rare ability to consider the language of their forms objectively. It will not be so easy now for two at least of the fallacies about Braque and Picasso to reappear. Cubism was emphatically not a try-out for abstract art : time after time Golding establishes the connection between a new development in the pictures and a new thought about representation. Nor was it an art of theory and calculation alone. The author is particularly successful in characterising the elusive compound of ideas and intuition, logical forethought and blind adventure out of which the pictures must have been painted.
We are not yet at the point, though John Gold- ing's book will help us along, where we can say exactly what it was that happened between 1908 and 1914. But this much is clear : far from trying to reinstate the old poetics the Cubists were trying to cut a clearer and more concrete statement of the relationship between the picture and the out- side world. The enterprise was as complex and demanding as it was rich in possibilities.
There are other artists who have been engaged similarly, who have boldly accepted the actual and, so to say, reflected their meditations and their fantasies off real surfaces. Bonnard, Giacometti, Soutine, Morandi are four major figures of the twentieth century who are merely mentioned in passing in Herbert Read's book. This is my second objection to his approach : he tends to identify the value of modern art with the programmes and aspirations of the various movements which have
composed it and to equate the individuality of his artists with the novelty of their theories. Of course, Soutine and Morandi were not theoretically or technically adventurous, nor could anything that can be said about Expressionism or the Scuola Metafisica encompass what needs to be said about these particular painters. I know that Read has ardently identified himself with the expressed aspirations of modern art and that the transition from partisan to historian is not an easy one. But it should be clear by now that painters don't have to be avant-garde to be Modern and they don't have to be doing what their contemporaries say they are doing to be doing Art.
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