Look, no handling

Andrew Wilton

CONSTABLE by Malcolm Cormack

Phaidon, £35

Constable is the Englishman's painter. Of all artists, he is the one we respond to with an instinctive recognition, as if his pictures were the nature they depict. And that is what he wanted: his great aim was to reproduce what nature is actually like. 'My pictures will never be popular for they have no handling,' he said. 'But I do not see handling in nature.' A whole philosophy of art is summed up in that retort, and a revolutionary philosophy it was. It swept aside with the audacious innocence of an earnest young countryman in the metropo- lis all the assumptions about art that the Academicians had inherited. He accused

them of 'preferring the shaggy posteriors of a Satyr to the moral feeling of a landscape'. He was supremely honest, and indeed, his art seems to share the honesty of Nature herself: his life's ambition was to be at one with the landscape he loved.

Given his crystalline simplicity of pur- pose and the precocious directness of technique that it inspired, Constable's pic- tures are extraordinarily hard to write about. They preclude discussion, as a beautiful summer day does not require words to explain it. Yet books on Const- able continue to be written, and at the moment the need to talk about him seems to be particularly urgently felt. In addition to the appearance of half of the first full catalogue raisonne of his work, there has been a spate of 'reassessments', putting him into focus as the recorder of rural conditions at a particular moment in the history of the rural working classes, and of their employers; and generally placing the subject-matter of his paintings in its con- text of contemporary literature and aesthe- tic theory. These are valuable clarifica- tions, a healthy redressing of the balance which had, perhaps, swung too far towards an unquestioning acceptance of Constable as the apostle of a 'natural peinture'. Many of his exhibited paintings, after all, are full of precisely detailed information about life in early 19th-century Suffolk, information that can be given greater weight by re- search and exegesis. Let art history do its job, and spell it out.

And yet — and yet. The meaning of Constable's art, reflecting as it does his desire to give a direct account of natural effects, cannot lie in any social or economic glosses we may choose to give it. It lies in the feats of inspired technical virtuosity with which he abolishes everything art had ever had to say about nature, in favour of his own integrity of vision. It lies, ultimate- ly, in our recognition of nature in the pictures themselves. Marxist and other progressive commentators on Constable have based their position on a false pre- mise, one which they, with their almost exclusively political mentalities, assume to be valid: that an artist's social position and political opinions must provide the key to any interpretation of what his work `means'. Sometimes this is so; but we don't have to look far to find great artists whose work is either too personal or too compre- hensive to admit of a strictly socio- economic interpretation. Van Gogh is a case in point, and Malcolm Cormack shrewdly draws a parallel between him and Constable. Mr Cormack takes due account of what has been said of Constable's political, social and literary interests, and how these are reflected in his art; but he argues that 'the time is now ripe for a synthesis' without 'inexact historical spe- culation', as he calls it. In practice, his book is much more concerned with the paintings themselves than with the context of Constable's career; indeed, he has little time for more than the briefest excursions into the outside world. But by linking a detailed and passionate account of Const- able's art with a survey of his life (all delivered with the somewhat helter-skelter syntax that is born of true enthusiasm), he builds up a vivid presentation of one of the most extraordinary figures of Roman- ticism.

There are times when his insistence on analysing all the great masterpieces in turn

seems wearisome; especially as we come to

realise that each major picture is but a redistribution of the elements of the others. But gradually the technique is found to bear unexpected fruits. Const- able's own obsessiveness is enacted in the descriptions, and we emerge with a new understanding of both the strengths and weaknesses of his work: why it can move us and, in the late paintings, irritate us at the same time. Mr Cormack gives just the right weight to the problem of Constable's `snow', and his bee in the bonnet about `chiaroscuro'; he brings out the significant connection between 'the broken rugged- ness of my style', as Constable described his later work, and the traditional formulas of the Picturesque. He can allow the symbolism of ruins in the bereaved and disillusioned artist's later pictures just the right degree of extra-visual meaning, with-

out being tempted to see allusions every- where. As Constable himself said of a proposed interpretation of 'symbols' in a Ruysdael: 'How are we to discover all this?'

The steady accumulation of well" observed description enables Mr Cormack to sum up with conviction that there is 'a genuine and abstract late style, concerned solely with air and paint'. He shows us an artist almost perversely confident of the rightness of his mission to render the truth of Nature, yet pathetically unsure of his own professional standing, willing even In his maturity to take the advice of amateurs: an artist neurotically incapable of letting a picture alone, and yet able, in youth as well

as old age, to knock off rapid open-air studies that even now seem daring. Cer-

tainly, there is no correlation between a

politically conservative temperament and an aesthetically radical one: Constable's

life and work demonstrate that this is not

so; why, then, should any other connec- tions between politics and art be insisted upon? It is ironic that he, of all painters, should have become one of the battle- grounds on which the issue has been fought.

This is a handsome book. Phaidon seal to have emerged from the wilderness of

recent years with something of a flourish.

The pages are not cramped, and there is a wealth of goodish, if rather strident colour,

plates, vital in the circumstances. Many °I

them are reproduced sideways: you have to turn the book, but they are much larger. Would that more publishers would follow this easy recipe for satisfying all but the laziest of readers.