ARTS
Painting and politics
George Walden
Listening to Professor George Steiner's elevated thoughts on Marxism and art history at the Courtauld Institute recently inspired me to record my own, more earth-creeping, observations. A few years ago, a friend of mine wrote a book called Marx en' Mort. Perhaps, but in art criticism his spectre is re-emerging like some malig- nant pentimento. As the grand edifice of art history crumbles (who can ever replace Sir Ernst Gombrich?), the ideological squatters are moving in. It is the sort of place which can be occupied without any- one knowing or caring, since it could hardly be further removed from the im- mediate social and economic battlefront, where Marxism and sociology are on the run. What better bolt-hole than art his- tory?
The problem was first brought home to me a year or two ago, when I witnessed a sad little scene in a Harvard lecture hall. A talented British art historian, of pro- nounced and predictable political opinions, was trying to whip up a little bit of class hatred around a bow tie. To illustrate the embourgeoisement of abstract art, he was contrasting — rather effectively — a powerful, first world war poster in Vitebsk with a large, smart and shallow work by the contemporary American painter, Larry Poons. In the slide, a number of museum donors in dinner jackets were grouped in front of the Poons painting. The lecturer's audience of respectful and respectable American undergraduates (some of whom may well have been wearing bow ties) reacted woodenly when they were en- joined to focus on the full horror of rich men in tuxedos.
I have since heard that, somewhere in Britain, there is something called the 'Art and Language Group'. God knows what they do to art, but it's awful what they do to language. The following is an unde- coded intercept from one of their publica- tions: a painting, it seems, is 'an act of production within a particular socio- economic setting which has also articulated for itself a more or less explicit verbal discourse about art and related values'. This kind of talk is to Roger Fry what modern sociology is to Mr and Mrs Ham- mond. All three oldies were saying some- thing new, important and intelligible, whether about Cezanne or the effects of agricultural enclosures on the village labourer. The 'discourse' of our new art historians is, I suspect, really just another branch of 'the science of vehement obscur- ity', as George Steiner has *scribed sociology at its most malign.
Unfortunately, there seems to be quite a lot of it around. Charles Harrison, a member of the Group, said in an insensi-
tively named textbook, Introductory Block on Modernism (is irony a bourgeois art form too?): 'A painting gets its position in history by virtue of the fact that we can rationalise its production by reconstructing the discourse which helped to produce it.' Not very life- or art-enhancing you might think, but there is worse to come, as an account of last year's Annual Conference of Art Historians in Edinburgh makes clear. The 'purely aesthetic approach' to painting is out, and things like the 'socialisation of vision' and the `encultura- tion of power in males' are in.
Sure enough, someone has had the horribly unimaginative idea of spraying defenceless old paintings with a brand new, interdisciplinary varnish compounded of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, liter- ary criticism and psychology. The result, we are told, could help to prolong the 'glance-life' of works such as David's 'Oath of the Horatii'. Viewed more closely, some of this theorising seems to boil down to a bit of retrospective feminism about people like Jane Morris, and to angry gestures in the void: Rossetti, for example, 'clearly manipulated his models to achieve particu- lar iconic effects'. I wonder how prolonged the `glance-life' of the new criticism will be?
No one in their right mind would deny links between art and politics. It is a diverting, but diffuse field, best approached with resolute whimsicality. Some politicians have done a lot for art. Without Charles I, the National Gallery would be a much poorer place (though without his aesthetic distractions, Charles I might also have been a better politician, and England certainly a different place). Artists themselves have often been politi- cally inspired: David, 'the Robespierre of the Brush', stabbed at his canvases as if eliminating enemies of the people; hence his vigorously stippled backgrounds. Picas- so talked of the French Communist Party as his `grande famille', though many of us were frankly relieved to learn from Mr John Berger that he was an inconsistent politician.
No one who saw the magnificent Art and Revolution exhibition in London a few years ago will need to be reminded how profoundly society influences art. In fact, the point is so obvious that, when you think about it, it becomes a very small thought indeed. It takes art-sociology to make such mildly illuminating obviosities profoundly tedious. After all these years, we learn that Manet depicted the social insecurity of the bourgeoisie. According to Michael Rosenthal's new book, it also appears that Constable deliberately coun- terposed the ornamental swans and toiling fishermen in his Wivenhoe Park', which turns out to have been a conservative political plug for an illusory social har- mony. In the same way, we are now told that modern abstract art provides the 'decorative needs of the bourgeoisie'. It presumably makes them feel more secure.
As anyone who has had the misfortune to see any socialist realist painting will know, pure politics kills art. In China, during the Cultural Revolution, politics killed artists too. Is it now going to kill — or at least disfigure — art history as well?
Letting the ideologues loose on painting is dangerous enough; giving them 'new interpretative tools' as well is lethal. Semi- otics in the hands of a leftist art critic are like computers at the fingers of sociolog- ists: whole new permutations of miscon- ceptions become possible. All those social symbols were bad enough. But now there are 'codes', 'signs' and 'signifiers' as well, blinking at us insistently from every point of the canvas until we get the discourse right. For as we know, 'an interpretation or critique bases itself on an account of the discursive content of production'.
Signs, signals, signifiers and symbols are there all right. But it does rather depend on who is putting out the message, and who is reading it — which is why most people learned long ago not to lather it all up into a pseudo-science. Millet is a good example of the pitfalls. You might think that all those labouring peasants convey their own unmistakable political message. In fact Millet himself was more concerned with the mystical bonds that tied his peasants to the soil than with their wretch- ed social lot, and resented the use of his work as propaganda. If you have eyer admired the granular, organic quality of his soil, I would guess that Millet knew what he was about. But perhaps, poor devil, he got his signifiers mixed up?
Contrast the loaded pretensions of the New Wave (if such it is) with Ernst Gombrich's complex but gracefully enunci- ated thoughts, which are not nailed to the canvas in a prefigurated pattern, but enrich the image as his mind plays around it. It was Sir Ernst, incidentally, who provided me with my only 'interpretative tool' — the Infallible theory of 'ping' and `pong', Whereby all aspects of art and life can invariably be classified under one heading or the other. This, of course, includes both Politics and painting; which leaves each of us to decide, with unabashed subjectivity, Into which category the new criticism falls.
The purpose of art history can surely Only be to increase the understanding and enjoyment of pictures. The really un- Pleasant thing about the new trend is that it iS obviously meant to deprive us of some of our sensuous pleasure in the painted sur- face itself, not by rational illumination, but by muffling our frisson retinien (Duchamps) in retrospective social guilt, or simply by talking pictures to bits. Fortunately, there are exceptions. Clement Greenberg, a left-wing, American art historian of a certain age, and a vigorous defender of abstract art, is one. Greenberg Is exceptional because he writes well and seems to like pictures. He once said that we can only dispose of non-figurative art by fighting our way through it, by which he seems to have meant that it must take its course. I hope that is not true of art- sociology too. Think of the poor students sopping up this thin gruel, and remember that while they are, they are presumably reading less Panofsky, Wolfflin, Burc- khardt, Fry, Gombrich or T. E. Hulme. %Lime (surely one of our greatest losses in the Great War?) kept politics in their Place, but once remarked in passing on the mildly subversive element in the works of some Bloomsbury painters 'who thought it so amusing to make Adam stand on his head, and the donkey's ear continue into tie hills' and whose `gentle little Cam- ridge jokes' were prized by 'the wives of Young and advanced dons'. It all seems a trifle harsher today. But art-sociology still does not deserve to be taken seriously, and certainly not by politi- cians. As Sickert said, 'art is not for those Whose minds are muddled with the dirt of Politics'. Which puts the left-wing critics in heir place. And me too, I suppose.
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