Art
Tchelitchew : Form and Content
Jr that very rough and unphilosophical distinction between the literary content and the formal qualities of a painting is allowed to have some meaning, an interesting problem arises about the proportion in which they have been mixed in various kinds of painting and about the manner in which the mixture has been effected. Or to put it in terms of chemistry, in some cases the result has been a mixture, in others a compound. For myself I take it to be axiomatic that the quantity of literary content in a painting is absolutely irrelevant. There are great paintings, like Seurat's La Baignade, in which the literary content is practically nil ; there are others equally great in which it is immediately and importantly moving, such as Masaccio's Crucifixion which, to those who had not seen it before, was one of the revelations of the Italian Exhibition at Burlington House. Equally there are wholly bad paintings -without subject matter, as for instance, second-rate cubist works and wholly bad paintings with the most affecting themes—The Last Day in the Old Home by Martineau. The crux of the matter therefore lies not in the quantity of literary content, but in the relation between it and the formal qualities.
As a subsidiary premise I would suggest' that a painter who has a complete control of the formal problems of painting can afford to indulge in more literature than one who is formally less secure. To take one of the examples I have already used, Masaccio in his more abstract paintings, like the fresco of the Tribute Money, proves himself a master of his particular kind of design. So when he came to treat a subject like the Crucifixion he was able to render all its dramatic implications and to force them into complete harmony with his formal design. He produced, in fact, a compound, not a mixture. The same is in general true of most Italian painting, for the tradition of honest, intellectual design was firmly established in Italy. But when we come to an artist like Holman Hunt the case is entirely different. English painting has never been conspicuously successful in the more abstract qualities and when Holman Hunt wanted to express the most elaborate literary and moral feelings in terms of paint his equipment was inadequate. He was so absorbed with the content that form went to the wall. To put it roughly, there was no fusion between the elements; the result is • a mixture, not a compound.
French painters have at various periods tried every sort of combination of the two elements but from about 1850 to 1925 the tendency was steadily towards the rejection of literary content and emphasis. on formal qualities. This tendency was begun by Courbet, carried on by Manet, estab- lished by Cezanne, exaggerated by Matisse and led finally to the extreme, form of abstract painting, Cubism. But since 1925 the reaction has set in. Surrealisme definitely asserts the importance of the unexpected non-pictorial relations of objects in a painting and with it painting has swung back to the extreme opposite to Cubism.
Certain artists, on the other hand, have kept a middle course and of these a good example is the Russian, Pavel Tchelitchew, who is now holding an exhibition at Messrs. Tooth's Galleries. Tchelitchew, taking his inspiration largely from the works of Picasso's Blue period, is not afraid to deal with subjects which border on sentimentality. He delights in depicting wistful clowns and melancholy acrobats, and one trembles to think what his Ophelia might have been in less able hands. But his technical ability and his superb draughtsmanship allow of his taking risks. His paintings are compounds, not mixtures.
AN'THONY BLUNT.
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