MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IHAVE often wondered why it is that art experts should be so quarrelsome. Some years ago I raised this problem in a " Marginal Comment," hoping that, in reply to my humble commentary, some gifted Kunstforscher would copse forward with incisive" if truculent explanations. I received no such response: all that I received were a few quick cold looks. Members of other specialised professions do not, in my experience, generate the same high temperatures as between themselves. Philatelists, for instance, or wireless engineers maintain perfectly amicable relations and will often have tea together, exchanging, as they munch their doughnuts, ideas regarding the nature of the beautiful and the good, or even information as to the progress of their craft. Writers on the whole are a co-operative race, being quite kind to each other often, some- times even deriving pleasure from the company of their competitors, and being careful to see that such malice as they may feel towards a rival is only exercised behind his back. The medical profession, I suspect, is frequently addicted to jealousy and even venom, but has adopted as a protection against internecine combat an elaborate apparatus known as etiquette. Architects, I agree, are often animated by feelings of hostility towards each other and cherish thoughts of arsenic when one of their number obtains a commission undeserved. Yet in their case there exists the excuse of supply and demand ; few indeed are the commissions that can enable an architect to maintain his overhead expenses or to feel that his name will be associated in later centuries with some massive monument or building, adorning or defacing the streets of our eternal capital. After all, it is no final catastrophe for an author if some other author publishes a book on the same subject simultaneously with his own: but it is a bitter moment for an architect when some despised rival is commissioned to build New Delhi or the City Hall. I have much sympathy for architects and am not surprised that they should sometimes feel cross.
* * * *
Such jealousy as may occasionally well up in the troubled heart of the architect is, however, but a transitory breeze in comparison to the hurricane of rage and loathing by which the locks of the art expert are continuously disarranged. I have seen men of mature age actually slobbering with fury at the suggestion that the Chapeau de Paine may have been too industriously cleaned. A )(imager art expert of my acquaintance was deliberately cut by a 'league when engaged in fighting his country's battles in the -nidst of the First World War. Although wearing a steel helmet it the time, my friend was stung to the quick by the look of .oncentrated venom cast at him by his fellow expert as they idianced to meet the enemy. The dive bombers zoomed above them and the bullets screamed. My friend, cowering behind a y-stack, pondered anxiously as to what crime he had committed to justify so potent a glance of contempt from a comrade-in-arms.
"Of course," he remembered, " we were on opposite sides at the ilie of the Giorgione controversy." Only recently, if the story be true, an art expert, eminent alike for his charm and scholarship, lias so enraged by the way a colleague had hung, or rehung, some Pictures at an exhibition that he stamped loudly on the floor, tore his catalogue into little pieces of paper, cast this confetti upon the Parquet and strode out into the street, drunk with what Byron so aPtly calls " the wine of passion, Rage." I know of no instance of an author tearing up his manuscript in order to revenge himself on his publisher. We are assured that poets arc an irritable clan. But no poet that I have ever met enjoys battle so passionately as does the art expert.
* * * *
I have no solution to offer for this riddle. There seems to me to ettst no reason why the art expert should be more sensitive, more combative or more hysterical than other intellectuals who live by Ind on their nerves. It may be that art-criticism, being a parasitic ether than a creative form of energy, creates a special neurosis of di own. But, if that be true, why should literary critics be in comparison so equable and mild ? It may be that the scholar who devotes his life to the analysis of the visual arts is rendered more desperate than the literary critic, bothboth by the obtuseness of the public and the ignorance of the painters and sculptors of the art they practise. Yet the literary critic is charmed, rather than annoyed by the fact that so many of the masters of literature have themselves been illiterate. It may be that the study of the com- parative history of art requires such intense concentration, such specialised application, that an acute mood of tension is generated, incomparably more vibrant than any sustained emotions experienced by those who study books. Or it may be that the art expert, as distinct from other scholars or critics, is rendered feverish by the conflict between his own conviction that he is correct in any given diagnosis and his inability to prove it. The impossibility of mathe- matical proof combines with the intensity of his personal certainty to provoke a turmoil in the mind. He thus seeks to strengthen what can at best be no more than a theory, a speculation or a hypothesis by injecting into his idea the warm blood of passion. All this renders him suspicious of his rivals, egocentric, extremist and often very angry indeed. I should hate to live in such a whirlwind of animosity.
The ordinary citizen, when he visits the great exhibitions that are held from time to time in London, sees only row upon row of pictures hanging sedately upon the walls. He passes from picture to picture, holding his catalogue in one hand and in the other a pencil. He does not realise the blood and tears and sweat that have gone to the organisation of the exhibition, or reflect that many a warm heart has been broken, many a firm friendship sundered, by the strain of getting all these pictures together, of arranging them in appropriate order, and of writing a catalogue such as will instruct the ignorant and satisfy the learned. At the present moment there are two, and indeed three, exhibitions being held at Burlington House. If you turn to the left on entering, if you pay two shillings for admission and one shilling and sixpence for the catalogue, you will find an exhibition of Holbein and his contemporaries together with another exhibition of Seicento paintings. If you turn to the right on entering, if you again pay two shillings for admission and one shilling for the catalogue, you will find a riotous exhibition of the Ecole de Paris. The former catalogue contains a preface by Sir Gerald Kelly indicating some at least of the difficulties that he and his assistants had to surmount. The original idea had been to hold an exhibition of German Art from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1800, but the German museum authorities proved obstinate and the idea, excellent in its inception, had to be abandoned. It was, therefore, decided to substitute a collection of Holbein portraits, to supplement this by the drawings and by examples of Holbein's English contemporaries, and to add a group of the finest Seicento pictures. " But serious difficulties," writes Sir Gerald, "again arose." This element of confusion and improvisation appears even to have affected the adjoining exhibition of the Ecole de Paris. It is difficult for the
amateur to penetrate the secret, and perhaps jocular, order in which these entrancing pictures have been arranged. Were they out to jumble or to tease ?
* * a *
It is only when we realise the strains and stresses that have encumbered and disorganised the preparation of these exhibitions, when we reflect upon the hard labour entailed, that we can measure the gratitude that we owe to Sir Gerald Kelly and his advisers for having provided the public during these dark months with so much interest and enjoyment. The scholar may assert that this winter exhibition is too inchoate and unselective ; but to the ordinary visitor the startling variety that it offers provides additional zest. Admittedly this is not among the most impressive exhibitions that have been held at Burlington House ; but it is certainly one of the most interesting. The pictures,hang there in the calm that follows the storm: I find it a delicious ant] amusing calm.
Previous page
