BOOKS
Art or Philately?
B Y JOHN BERGER flow, if at all, has photography influenced painting? The question is usually considered in terms of the two activities rivalling one another: In terms of the painter setting out with his easel and the photographer with his camera to compete in front of the same subject. Yet in fact photo- graphy has influenced the visual arts most pro- foundly by combining with them—by making Possible the millions of reproductions of painting and sculpture which now exist. The existence of photographic reproductions of paintings constitutes both a blessing and a menace. On the one hand they facilitate scholar- ship and art education. They make possible com- parative studies of art, They reveal details on, say, the Sistine ceiling, which are almost impossible to see with the naked eyes. They enable thousands of people to be familiar with the appearance of Paintings and sculpture which otherwise they would never have the opportunity of seeing. To some extent they counteract the effect of the private ownership of works of art; a recluse may keep a masterpiece in his drawing-room, but people all over the world can visualise its image. The menace of reproductions is less obvious. 'They distort,' the purists may protest. But this Objection is a comparatively superficial and unimportant one. Somebody once asked Jack Yeats, who was one of the great painters of this century, why he would allow no book of his works to be published, adding, to reassure him, that the standard of reproductions was now very high. 'The better they are,' replied Yeats, 'the worse they are!' What I think Yeats meant by that is that the more accurate the reproduction the greater the danger that it will be considered an end-product in itself, so that the original painting is finally only thought of as a kind of prototype. To which the objection is not primarily economic—copy- right laws can be altered to guarantee royalties for the artist—but that this view of visual art would finally destroy its very roots. Painting and sculpture are essentially local arts: they depend upon their local context—the national tradition, the people, the light, the land- scape, the architecture for and from which they have been created. Perhaps to some extent the same applies to all the arts, but because the language of painting or sculpture is more par- ticular than that of music, and far less explana- tory than that of literature, the problem is more acute. Of course, Shakespeare can be performed in Tokyo. But Lear could not have been written by a man aiming at the audiences of international theatre festivals. No self-respecting artist paints consciously for world reproduction yet. But the widespread use and popularity of reproductions which inevitably detach works from their sur- roundings, can very easily encourage the belief that art is universal in the same way as the ether: whereas in fact is is only universal in the same way as human suffering and happiness which fortunately always arise from specific particular circumstances.
All this suggests the standard by which we should judge the numerous pocket art books that have appeared recently.* They are all largely picture books of reproductions. And so one can ask the critical question: are they more likely to extend knowledge and appreciation or only likely to supply yet more universal postage stamp dupli- cates?
The text of the Methuen booklet on Toulouse- Lautrec ends with the following sentence which is typical of the complacency of so many art pub- licists today. 'And the highly individual idiom of this painter, once rejected and now a classic, has won its way to universal understanding.' Has it? Or has it just won its way to the world premiere of the misunderstanding of Moulin Rouge? The last thing I want to defend is cultural snobbery. But in a commercial world the problem is immensely complex. And it is a dangerous over- simplification to assume that, for instance, the publication in these series of another three books about Picasso, and another four about Van Gogh, inevitably 'increases public understanding of these two artists; on the contrary, it may only aid the process of making their works yet more * FonrrANA BOOKS (Collins, 4s.: Cezanne, Rouault, Goya, Vlaminck, Courbet, etc.); LITTLE LIBRARY OF ART (Methuen, 2s. 64.: Van Gogh, Picasso, Klee, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo, etc.); ARS MUNDI (Heine- mann, 7s. 6d.: Degas, Titian, Picasso, etc.); PICCOLA SILVANA (Deutsch, 16s.: Duccio, Angelico, Giotto, etc.). 'universally familiar, reassuring and harmless.' Everything depends upon the choice of artists and their works and upon the method of presenta- tion. Pocket books on, say, Leger, Kokoschka, Ensor, Affandi, the modern Mexicans, David, Gericault, Signorelli, Veronese and Poussin would all be likely to increase knowledge usefully, because very few books are available on these artists at all. A presentation which somehow reveals the artist's real intentions is likely to serve the interests of his art. A presentation that is like that of a film trailer of the big film that will never be seen, is worse than useless. The Fontana library passes the test triumph- antly; the others do not. The Fontana list of twenty artists is wide and begins to include less usual and therefore useful names—Courbet, Holbein, Pissarro, The presentation, with en- larged fold-over details of the coloured plates beneath, is excellent. One is reminded that the picture is a painting painted by hand, and one has a sense of discovery—it is a little like opening, when a child, those books with pictures that stood up. The texts include drawings, photographs, quotations from the artist, earlier opinions on the work. And their price is, surprisingly, four shillings. The Methuen Little Library of Art is even cheaper, but the volumes are too small, too con- ventional in range, and altogether too dinky. Heinemann's Ars Mundi books are unnecessarily dull: if they can produce two pages like those of the colour plate and detail of Titian's Venus of Urbino, there is no reason why the rest should look like an antique dealer's catalogue. The Silvana library supplies respectable visual reference books for specialists in a dead language'.
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