Art and Society
On Art and Connoisseurship. By Max Friedlander. (Bruno Cassirer and Faber. 21s.) • IT was not without reason that during the nineteenth century the man who did most to awaken an interest in visual art among the English-speaking peoples should, at the same time, have been the one with the keenest sense of real social values. Ruskin made many mistakes, as indeed do most men of genius, but with pro- found intuition he perceived and proclaimed a general law com- parable in far-reaching comprehensiveness to Newton's or Darwin's, namely, that all values in art are of the same order as those in human society. He attacked relentlessly the accepted practice of separating material from spiritual values, of trying to get the best out of and in two distinct and isolated worlds which (not unsup- ported by certain elements in Christianity) had consciously hardened into a sort of intellectual creed ; so that men professed on Sundays a belief in spiritual values which they not only ignored but vigor- ously opposed on week-days. In Unto this Last Ruskin exposed ' with unanswerable logic, the deceptions and illusions about wealth current among the economists of his day ; in his art-criticism he likewise attacked the too narrow notion of art for art's sake which he proclaimed to be as false as the correspondingly narrow "wealth for wealth's sake" theory.
But Ruskin was so far in advance of his day that it may be another hundred years before a new morality which will include all aesthetic values is formulated fully and precisely enough to win general understanding and consent. In the meantime any fresh revelation of values is of vital importance just now when men, in their terror before the present barbarism, are in danger of trying to put the clock back and to revive a morality which, favouring a fatal division between a present and a future life, has broken down and failed us. The human mind moves from synthesis to synthesis, each more comprehensive than the last. All ideologies are partial, and therefore, though necessary, dangerous. No sooner did Lenin proclaim: "Religion is the opium of the people (speaking of a largely superstitious and illiterate nation) than the late W. B. Yeats was found saying—in his realisation of the Western world's recent blinding obsession with science—" Science is the opium of the suburbs."
Under such popular influences as that of Mr. H. G. Wells— in whose materialistic Outline of History music was, for example, never mentioned—the truths and even the errors of science have in the minds of the young obscured the world of art for the last two generations. But here is a book which may help to redress the balance—at least, in vigorous and curious minds. Here we are put in touch with fundamental values. It is the best book on art that I have ever read, free from the weaknesses of the philosophers and aestheticians—the ablest of whom are apt to generalise brilliantly but, alas! unsoundly, through too small a share in the nature of the artist ; free, also, from the vague theorising and inexact terminology of most art-critics, and written by a man of uncommon intellectual power whose approach to art is essentially an artist's, in spite of the fact that he is only an art- historian and an expert.
Dr. Friedlander was head of the Berlin Picture Gallery in suc- cession to Dr. Wilhelm von Bode, and, as Dr. Tancred Borenius in his introduction says, "in normal times not a day passed on which pictures were not submitted to him for opinion from all parts of the world." Reading this book one discovers not only a scholar who has amassed an extraordinary amount of knowledge at first- hand, a critic of exceptional insight and instinct, but also an artist- nature gifted with the power to express in simple language the most profound and difficult ideas. "The' .eye sleeps until the spirit awakes it with a question," says Dr. Friedlander, and in this book will be found the right questions and unevasive answers on
a profusion of subjects such as art, symbol, form, colour, tonality, genius, talent, personality, taste, artistic quality, erudition, and "fairness of -form or truth to nature." Clarity and wit add to the extreme readableness of this buak and emphasise the importance . of its subject, whose social significance is only now slowly emerg- ing and beginning to be understood. The text has been well but not perfectly translated by Dr. Borenius, and is embellished with forty apposite illustrations. It only demands of the reader some natural love of art, and to those so gifted, even though ignorant, it is the best conceivable introduction to the subject.
W. J. TURNER.
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