BOOKS

The art of the impossible

Philip Hensher

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ART WRITING edited by Martin Gayford and Karen Wright Viking £25, pp. 620 Iam told that Van Gogh's letters exhibit a particular linguistic curiosity; the French colour adjectives do not agree with the nouns, but stay in a single form, so that he can write, for instance, 'les arbres vert'. It's an eccentricity which seems to insist on his painterly sense that colour is not a qualify- ing characteristic, but a substance; not phenomenal, but real. What, however, this makes one think more forcefully is the undeniable fact that writing cannot fully encompass art. Writing and art are not eas- ily compatible things; they are faculties, as Dr Jonathan Miller will leap to tell us, exercised by opposing halves of the brain. If painting, when it is at its most literary the narratives of Greuze, or Tom Phillips — is also at its most self-conscious and unrewarding, the task of writing about art is universally acknowledged to be a thank- less and, finally, impossible one. The lan- guage of colour description has long fascinated philosophers, cultural critics and historians; the classic questions (are blu and azzurro, subdivisions of what would be called blue in English, perceived as differ- ent colours by Italians? What did 'purple' signify to Shakespeare? If I ask you to think of something green, how do we know that our thoughts have anything in com- mon?) demonstrate what everyone quickly comes to understand, that writing about art is an impossible task.

All of which is to say that The Penguin Book of Art Writing might have been thin, sour and dry, the barrel-scrapings of a genre which shouldn't exist. Added to this is one's general opinion about literary anthologies, nine tenths of which seem to get by on meagre rations consisting of things you already know and things you don't mind not knowing, and you will understand that only the recommendation of the names of its editors — Martin Gay- ford is, of course, the Spectator's own, and Karen Wright the nicest of editors and least fatigable of London's lunchers could tempt one. You would be right, how- ever, to be tempted. It's a plum-pudding of an anthology; the editors have taken care to make it hilarious as well as penetratingly truthful, with a good line in the idiocy of artists and critics, moving easily from the celebrated moments in art history to curi- ous byways. It goes from Whistler asking 200 guineas in court for the knowledge of a lifetime and getting a farthing instead, to Damien Hirst at the Old Bailey in 1994 replying to the question 'Why are you an artist?' by asking, unanswerably, 'Why are You a lawyer?' It is without doctrine or prejudice, and is that rare beast, an entirely successful anthology of prose. Some people will mind that it more or less neglects liter- ary writing about art — we get the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', but not the Vicar of Wake- field's history painting, or Sir Leicester Dedlock's allegories in Bleak House. But it's a pleasure to see a lot of less familiar material; it looks, in the end, not like writing about art, but, as the title says, art writing.

Artists are mostly mad, as everyone knows, but one of the most enduring delu- sions of every age is that its artists are mad- der than those of previous ages. It's certainly tempting to think that the post- war avant-garde is unprecedentedly daft; the beautiful account here of the vernissage when Yves Klein displayed a completely empty gallery might seem to confirm that. Or one might turn to one of the works of art planned by Fluxus, the 1960s conceptualist group around Yoko Ono, as reported by Richard Dorment:

Have a quarter and a token and enter a sta- tion.

Use token for turnstile. Leave by nearest exit

Putting "Ex Libris" stickers on video tapes is really tacky.'

Buy one token at booth.

Say yam instead of thank you.

But one of the striking facts about the history of the visual arts is that many great artists have always been regarded by their contemporaries as incurably trivial. There is a thin line between Kurt Schwitters' works of art, for instance, and the superb if rather heartless practical joke, retold here by George Melly, by which he led a Han- nover ironmonger to assault an innocent stammering stranger. And artists whose works we now regard as beyond denigra- tion were often thought of as selling bizarre objects as a prank, or for no better motive than to offend. Sometimes, of course, this is due to the unpresentability of artists in person, like poor Soutine, so dirty that he stank 'like a rotting ox carcass', but they are more often offensive in subtler ways. Here is Whistler's 'Nocturne in Black and Gold,' flinging a pot of paint in the pub- lic's face', but also an account of Turner's famous performances at the Academy's varnishing days. The varnishing days were semi-public occasions for the finishing off of paintings to be exhibited; Turner grew famous for his anarchistic performances, such as the famous occasion described here when, by placing a brilliant red buoy on a seascape, he contrived to annihilate the effect of every painting within range.

Nor are artists further back in history necessarily more conventional or tactful. Research has recently demonstrated that when the King of Spain married his niece, the two so closely resembled each other that Velazquez, in painting the new Queen, simply dug out an old portrait of the King and slapped a wig, a frock and some rouge on it, to distinctly Dame Edna effect. Most celebrated is the case of Veronese's still rather shocking 'Last Supper', which was so profusely and pointlessly ornamented with clowns and parrots and visiting Germans, for some reason, that it landed him in trou- ble with the Inquisition.

Q. In this 'Supper' which you made for SS Giovanni e Paolo, what is the significance of the man whose nose is bleeding?

A. I intended to represent a servant whose nose was bleeding because of some accident.

In the end, Veronese got off the hook by changing the title of the painting from 'The Last Supper' to 'The Feast in the House of Levi'.

But the richest and most rewarding things in this anthology are the comments on art by artists. Understandably, the most enjoyable of these are the bitchy put-downs. No one has ever bettered Michelangelo, as far as concision and rude- ness goes, when he remarked to one of his contemporaries, `Che bel marmo hai rovina- to!' (what a beautiful piece of marble you've ruined!) The tributes paid by one artist to another — and this is testimony to the good taste and judgment of the editors — are quite as memorable. I love Toulouse-Lautrec, who, instead of giving his dinner guests a pudding, made them put their coats on to go and look at Degas' `Dihau Playing in the Orchestra at the Opera' because he 'could imagine no more wonderful treat to round off a meal than the sight of a Degas'.

Often these descriptions by artists have an unarguable truth. Luca Giordano's won- derful description of 'Las Meninas' as 'The Theology of Painting' becomes truer the more one looks at it. Not so, alas, the com- ments of critics, who function in this anthology as a chorus of rude mechanicals, providing a good deal of inadvertent comic relief. Here is Michael Fried, reported by Rosalind Krauss, on Frank Stella's stripy paintings:

`What he would like more than anything else is to paint like Velazquez. But what he knows is that that is an option that is not open to him. So he paints stripes.' Fried's voice had risen. 'He wants to be Velazquez so he paints stripes.'

The booby prize, however, goes to David Sylvester contemplating one of Barnett Newman's awesomely simple abstract lithographs:

The more I looked at it, the more it made me wonder why painters since time immemorial had bothered to put in all those arms and legs and heads.

But the whole tendency of the anthology is to show exactly why they did bother, to entertain, to instruct and to amuse, and it is more satisfying for skating over the big questions, and always preferring an anec- dote. What is art? someone once asked Andy Warhol. 'Art?' he said. 'Isn't that some guy's name?