Contemporary Arts
The Last of His Kind
THE exhibition of drawings which the Arts Council has brought to its galleries in St. James's Square from the Ingres Museum at Montauban — demonstrating as they do net only the artist's genius but his pictorial methods—has reached London at a moment when they can be given a special poignancy by other current shows—by the selection of works from -the Paris Mode 'd'Art Moderne at Suffolk Street, by the anthology from the Guggenheim Collection at the Tate and by the round-up of British ,actionism' at the Redfern. By contrast these cast a specially revealing light upon the nature of Ingres's art and his place in the history of painting.
The game of trying to identify the first modern painter—El Greco or Rembrandt or Chardin dr Goya?—is an idle one, but I am ,tempted to put Ingres forward as the last great painter of a previous tradition, indeed of another kind of art and one as distinct from what has followed as land is from sea. He is the last master of myth and history, the last artist- to present with a direct conviction and undoubted mastery a world which was neither actual and contemporary nor a personal creation. He was the last of the great painters to use the nude figure as a vehicle of ideas and sentiments in a Renaissance way and not as a focus of esthetic experiment. But most significantly he is the last great painter who does not give the impression that the practice of paint- ing is a ecintest, alrial, a performance or a game.
Go from the Ingres exhibition to the Redfern, to a show dominated by what I have for brevity's sake called 'actionism,' or to the Tate, where some of the American and Parisian pro- totypes of the tendency can be seen, in Pol- lock or Kline or Riopelle. These pictures show an obsession with materials, with the use of brushes and other implements, with touch, with gesture, with the performance of a technique. The worst of them may be called rehearsals masquerading as performances and require us to give attention to a stumbling statement of insignificant processes which in any other of the arts would be even more intolerable. They leave me as exasperatedly dissatisfied as if I had been turned out of a concert hall after the orchestra had finished tuning their instruments.
Picture-making of this kind, which some critics are at pains to present as being so profoundly new or 'other,' in fact takes to the limit a condi- tion which has been typical now for more than a hundred years. A Courbet, a C6zanne, a van Gogh, confront us with art as a predicament, with painting as a contest, a trial, a problem. Ingres, in the way of a vast concourse of his predecessors, makes his compositions as a bee builds a hive or as one walks or runs, making no display of method. It is noticeable that he does not invite our pity or sympathy at his condition of being an artist. We look at the splendid C6zanne portrait in the Guggenheim show differently, as the outcome of a man's struggle with paint and painting. Our estimate of Cezanne or van Gogh or Gauguin takes into account the trials, even tragedy, we see in them and in their work : a David-Goliath duel, a labour of Hercules. A Marxist critic is devoted to Rich heroes because they can be presented not just as the martyrs which all of us can recognise, but martyrs who can be ideologically exploited, the martyrs of capitalism.
The nineteenth century is heavily populated with heroes of this kind, and while it is impossible to think of a Piero or a van Eyck in such terms, they have, of course, some predecessors. The twentieth century has not produced so many life-and-death contests between man and art, but even a painter of serene and happy pictures like Braque is liable to be presented in terms of struggle. It may trouble some that Picasso's career has not been marked by this vein of tragedy and martyrdom, hut the element of contest is present, nevertheless. Here is virtuosity, not in the Leonardo way, the way of man utilising an excep- tionally penetrative and ranging mind, a superla- tive manual control, but the virtuosity of one who makes a game of art, sometimes chess, some- times halma. In the pictures at the Redfern painting has become a game with the implication of tragedy or torment removed. And it is now the game and not the result which matters. ' As we do not pay just to-see the Queen hand the Cup to Manchester United—or Aston Villa—but expect to see the ball being moved about the field for ninety minutes, so now it is performance rather than result which counts.
:Ingres is the last great representative of a kind of painting which is so different as lo be distinct; to claim that Ingres and Jackson Pollock are essentially up to the same kind of thing or even that Ingres and van Gogh belong to one tradition is to land us in every kind of critical confusion. Ingres was most modern when he left the contents of his studio to Montauban and let the public into the technical secrets of his artistic life, but all the hesitations we can see in his drawings at the Arts Council, his changes of mind, the lines and crosses and verbal messages are properly
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