6 NOVEMBER 1976, Page 38

Art in circles

Benny Green

Artists on Art: From the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century Compiled bY Robert Goldwater and Marco Treyes (John Murray £3.50)

Whether or not the creative artist would be better advised to leave the theorising to the theorists and get on with his work, there is it question that there arrive junctures in In° life of an author, composer, or painter, when the temptation either to lecture prospective buyers, or vivisect a fatuous critic, or Pr°' vide a few guide-lines for posterity, is to° strong to resist. Certainly there is something to be said for the idea that no matter hoo brilliant the polemics of a Blake or tl Whistler might be, we would exchange the whole package for a single etching. I am nol sure I agree. After all, was Blake a painter who wrote, or a writer who painted ? Was not Whistler as entertaining a literarY ironist as he was a painterly poet ? Having made that claim on behalf of the artist 0° evangelises either in his own or his pro. fessions's behalf, I have to admit that 3 great deal of the windy rhetoric belched otn bYdis • tinguished painters might as well be left unsaid for all the enlightenment or entertainment it gives us.

But what a priceless debate unfolds L

efore us when the opinions on art of all the artists are gathered together. Nothing, it appears, changes very much. Six hundred Years ago Cennini thought that an essential Part of the painter's equipment was fear of God; five centuries later Diego Rivera is saying the same thing, except that it is now the Proletariat instead. In the period separating those two theorists, art is scattered with desperate attempts by men seeking Perfection to find a formula, a theory, a mechanistic idea, which will lead to artistic absolution. Cennini with his fear of God, thought that an artist ought not to spend too much time with Women, while Rubens was very worried about the deleterious effects on Painterly technique of too much eating and drinking, to which the friendly fatties of his canvases would no doubt have replied, 1°0k who's talking.' Compare Ingres: 'bravving is the probity of art', with Delacroix 'Colour gives the appearance of Life'. Some put their money on intuition, while others try to formulate a code-book of ilnPeratives for aspiring geniuses. Fusel i r,clraws up his lists of Dos and Don'ts, while `°rot plumps for first impressions; Poussin e°mPoses a series of rules so carefully codified as to reduce the art he practises to Painting by numbers; meanwhile Rodin silriPlY says that all that matters is to see. And so the arguments rage, sometimes vvittilY, sometimes turgidly, but always with a depth of passion which makes compulsive dreading. The question of which voices echo ill3wn through the centuries and studios with ! most conviction and clarity is a purely 'tuoiective one, but for my own part I confess ° extreme partisanship for Blake as he wades into Reynolds—`Sir Joshua and his ang of cunning hired knaves', for poor old painsborough confessing in a letter to a riend, `I'm sick of portraits, and wish to walk off to some sweet village where 1 can 113.,aint landscapes and enjoy the fag-end of hi!e in quietness and ease', for Boudin, with is engaging 'Between ourselves, these traiddle-class men and women, walking on he Pier towards the setting sun, have they 4°. right to be fixed on canvas ?', for Monet twnh his `Pictures aren't made out of docrifles', and for Picasso, who cheerfully observes, 'What a miserable fate for a Dka. inter who adores blondes to have to stop tllInself putting them into a picture because IleY don't go with the basket of fruit'. Goldwater and Treves have attended ost lovingly to the task of gathering the lisParate spirits of painting and sculpture alit° a single volume which is easy to wield iirld a pleasure to handle. The occasional illustrations are exactly the right sauce the dish, and if I have any complaint at lit is that Sickert. one of the few considerle Painters to achieve the poise and flair ut a truly professional critic, has been badly nderPlayed. Whistler, on the other hand, s allowed to steal the whole show, as is only

right and proper, because he possessed, perhaps more than all the rest, the saving grace of a sense of the ridiculous, even when he was mistaken, as he surely was when he said, 'There is no such thing as English Art. You might as well talk of English Mathematics'. We forgive Whistler that sort of thing because of his declaration that with or without criticism, the mathematician would 'continue to make two and two come to four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five'. That remark, I think, and Courbet's riposte to the Minister of Fine Arts, 'The state is incompetent in matters of art... The day the state leaves us free, it will have done its duty towards us', are the most memorable of all in five hundred exhilarating pages. that engage their attention. These objects, which in less sophisticated times used to be called subjects, range from Cezanne's apples to Carl Andre's bricks and the mathematical formulae of Mel Bochner. Anyone who reads this book will of course recognise Cezanne. Many, who remember the Tate Gallery's bricks affair, may even recall the name of the artist involved. In Ellen Johnson's own words, 'only those who are supposed to know' will recognise that the written formulae of Mel Bochner are drawings, as much art as Cezanne's apples. But a careful study of this book might help the reader to 'know'.

Written by the Professor of Art at Oberlin College, Ohio, the book has its aesthetic judgments firmly centred in New York, the capital of all authentic opinion on the personality struggles of the contemporary visual art world since the late 'forties. It is of interest as a concise measure of who as well as what has been accepted into the canon. We are given some twenty, already published, short essays dating back to 1955, only three of which were written after 1970. These touch sympathetically on individual works by Cezanne and Picasso and on the obscure, to us at least, mid-nineteenth-century American painter of the mountains and lakes of his own country, John F. Kensett. Kensett, as early as 1840, had a vision of the ultimate triumph of American painting-'the day is not very far distant—it will assume a lustre that will dim by its brightness even the glory of the past'. The rest of the essays describe, by implication, the fulfilment of the prophecy from the late 'forties until the present, during which time nothing was allowed to disturb the self-confidence of New York.

This is all preceded by a piece, written specially for this book, which purports to introduce these earlier essays, deceptively strung together as though they composed a fully developed thesis about the evolution of art over the last century. In fact this is written from a different perspective and at a time when the cultural hegemony of New York is less self-assured. 'Legitimate' art is seen to have been created, even during the 'fifties and 'sixties, in other parts of the Western cultural landscape. Though many important European artists are excluded from this very brief recent survey, the inclusion of any at all is a healthy symptom of a wider consciousness of what the objects (in both senses) of art are now. Though some suggestive thoughts are stimulated by the other essays, it might have been more useful if this recently written piece had been expanded into something more substantial. As it stands, it is doubtful whether this book, by itself, will win many converts, either to bricks, or to formulae, as art.