The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/An Aesthetic Prophecy

by Thomas Craven

AN AESTHETIC PROPHECY

The Future of Painting. By Willard Huntington Wright. 12mo. 65 pages. B. W. Huebsch. $1.

MR WRIGHT, in his periodic excursions into the science of aesthetics, has committed himself to many ill-considered prophecies. His book, Modern Painting, written in defence of a certain school of contemporary artists called Synchromists, announced in unequivocal language the supremacy of abstract composition. With extraordinary cleverness and ingenuity he attempted to prove that the trend of art since Delacroix had been a sustained and inevitable progression toward the overthrow of representative form, and that the Synchromists, through an intellectual fusion of form and colour, partaking of architecture on the one hand and symphonic music on the other, had at last relieved art of its traditional illustrative integuments, and had achieved final plastic perfection. Painting could go no farther—its future was to be a new tradition of abstract harmonics in colour. This forecast was made in 1915, but since then much has happened. Mr Wright has made a discovery: he has realized that the underlying principle of all the art of the past is not colour, but drawing, and this fact has instigated new speculations.

His latest book is less dogmatic and challenging, but not less pretentious In its assertions: painting is dead; it was exhausted in the omniscient genius of Rubens; it was an experiment even with the Synchromists; and it survives to-day only in the hands of academic practitioners. But Mr Wright pronounces the requiem with a vision of hope—out of the ashes of the dead past he heralds the phoenix of a splendid dawn—the new art of colour. His lamentations on the obsolete art remind us of George Moore, who wept bitterly because English was a worn-out expressive vehicle, apparently unaware of a Polish expatriate named Conrad.

Mr Wright clings to the empathic hypotheses of a decade past, to such limited reasoners as Grant Allen, Lipps, Lee, and Thompson, who made a futile effort to reduce aesthetic expression and appreciation to physical reactions. He attributes all art values to materiality, confuses processes with meanings, and considers form as the simple result of psychophysical responses to objective stimuli. The "aesthetic emotion"—in truth, only a popular hack, no psychologist having succeeded in separating it from other emotions—serves as the basis of a treatise which presents the history of art as nothing more or less than mechanical expansion. Never philosophical, his conception of the beautiful is much too meagre to permit of any penetration into the intimate connexion between pigment and the subjective antecedents of human experience, and to recognize how deeply and inextricably bound to one's whole nature are those impulses which take form in the conventions of poetry, painting, sculpture, and the rest of the arts. To believe that a mechanical evolution in the technique of art is of any great aesthetic importance is an illusion arising from a profound misunderstanding of the history of the subject.

Aesthetics is a study of the relationship between the theoretic spirit and form, both of the building of form and the responses to it; the means by which form is delineated are of small consideration compared with the psychological states involved in construction and appreciation. All questions of drawing, colour, line, mass, et cetera, apart from the meaning they convey when combined into expressive symbols, are essentially mechanical; indeed they are as remote from true aesthetics as would be a knowledge of geology and botany in the analysis of the emotional appeal of a beautiful landscape. Technical manipulation, even among artists, has been at all times of far less concern than Mr Wright concedes. Except for the noisy mechanical flurry succeeding Cézanne, painters have from the beginning insisted on the pre-eminence of their spiritual message; they have been composers, not of lines and planes, but of ideas—and of ideas having but one inevitable medium of externalization. The visible world with its enormous array of suggestive material, and the memory with its accumulation of historical, practical, and emotional experiences, are the true motives of plastic expression.

While the artist is of necessity interested in procedure, that interest is always subordinate, in genuine creative activity, to conception. We find to-day among radical painters a growing preoccupation with ideas; and even from the first appearance of Modernism the main quarrel with the academy has been one of content, of meaning, and not one of processes. The academy in turn objects to the new movements on the ground that they exploit a brutalized and false conception of life.

Though we accepted Mr Wright's contention—the supremacy of what he calls "aesthetic procedure," his statement that Rubens closed once and for all the path of formal composition is erroneous. Rubens, despite his gifts, seldom succeeded in establishing an absolutely clear form. The intention of his compositions must be studied—it is never, as in the work of Masaccio and Giotto, emotionally effective. Masaccio, Giotto, and El Greco, more limited in the number and the extension of their forms, arrived much closer to emotionally complete design, that is, to forms which ex- pressed the whole content of their pictures. Rubens, a painter of mythological histories demanding an intricacy of forms and elaborate spatial projections, conceived his pictures in depth and complicated them according to the needs of his subject which was visualized in the flamboyant manner of his age; and while his designs are mechanically the most perfect in existence, they fail to arouse complete emotional responses. The reason is that the sequences of form from plane to plane are encumbered with exhibitions of virtuosity in textures and illumination—he was, for all his power, unable to restrain himself, and while technically he affords the student more than Giotto, El Greco, and Michael Angelo, he gives less in aesthetic pleasure. Practically speaking, his work is a vast stimulus to new ideas rather than a structure in which all plastic ideas have culminated.

As long as there are conceptions sufficiently moving to provoke expressional volition, new forms will be found to embody them. If it were true, as Mr Wright holds, that all compositional rhythms have been utilized, there would be no need for the new art of mobile colour; for this innovation at best could only restate in a new medium things which have already been fixed in the theoretic mind. Whether sequences of colour and form operate sensationally in time, or in the calmer intellectual world of pure contemplation, is of no moment—a change of vehicle implies no more than a surface alteration. I do not believe, however, that Mr Wright's opinions will have much weight in the new art which he sponsors. If such an art is feasible, it will introduce new designs compatible with its content, as in the case of the new movements in painting.

Whether it is possible for colour, when intensified to the glaring transparency of light, to stimulate us aesthetically by a mere indication of sequential action, I cannot say. The science of optics would be against the assumption; for the eye, unlike the ear, cannot accommodate itself to intense and prolonged sensations. This, however, belongs to the future, and Mr Wright only prophesies—he makes no definite explanations. He argues that the human organism in the exciting stress of modern life can no longer react to so tepid an art as painting. It would be well for him to consult the high-school texts in biology in order to learn how man under necessity can adjust himself to the exigencies of any environment. Besides, as I have affirmed again and again, it is not a question of aesthetics: the study of the beautiful is not a science of substance, but of meanings, and any research dealing exclusively with procedure is a technical matter..

It is to be hoped that the experiments of Mr S. MacDonald-Wright, the Synchromist, will prove successful; for they will open a field for those modern artists—happily decreasing in number—who are endeavouring to make a specious formula take the place of the philosophic content in painting. Mr S. MacDonald-Wright as a colourist is distinguished; he is artistic in everything he touches; and he is better equipped than any one I can think of to direct an enterprise devoted to the ordering of light sensations.

Thomas Craven