IMITATION AGAIN
Painter and Space, or The Third Dimension in Graphic Art. By Howard Russell Butler. 8vo. 178 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $4.
MR BUTLER'S writing is a confusion of pedantries. His thesis is so heavily encumbered with solemn nonsense, so highly saturated with academic ink, that the modern painter with a sense of humour might get a laugh out of it, were it not for the fact that it adds another cloud to the critical obscurity lying between the public and the creative artist. Any person of ordinary intelligence, with a fair sense of human values and a flair for art, who is looking for a little knowledge of the methods of painting, would be profanely repelled by the assemblage of irrelevant mechanics herein presented. Reasonably he would exclaim: "If this is representative of creative procedure, if this is the sort of stuff involved in the technique of construction, then art is merely a quasi-scientific plaything, ingenious perhaps, and somewhat amusing, but not worthy of serious consideration!" It is hard to be tolerant with the author of Painter and Space. At certain happy moments, those of us who have advocated the human value of aesthetics are inclined to feel enthusiastic over the advance of modernism—and then Mr Butler comes along and puts us out of humour, and forces us to return to the elementary stages of our efforts. It would seem that the hypothetical person of average intelligence seeking information must be led back to first principles—so let us cry out once more in unison, "Art is not imitation, but reconstruction!" We shall have need of this truth so long as books are written on the assumption that reproductive accuracy, in any of its forms, is a criterion of art.
Both Leonardo da Vinci and Aristotle were accustomed to speak of art as the imitation of nature. It would be a simple matter to annihilate that pernicious word by recasting their definitions in modern terminology; but such an adaptation becomes unnecessary when one compares Leonardo's monumental conceptions with the photographic painting of to-day, and Greek tragedy with the unimaginative accuracy of journalistic description. The drama of the Greeks and the plastic art of the Renaissance are obviously creative symbols and not mere records or imitations of experience—the old writers on aesthetics were less explicit in their use of terms than the psychological critics of the present time.
The completely equipped modern painter must, of course, be familiar with external nature, and to a certain extent with the laws governing it; but to attach much importance to the latter in a book devoted to structural problems is a waste of time. The study of scientific laws belongs to a relatively narrow and insignificant field of painting, a technical field which includes the chemistry of pigments, the permanence of grounds, the qualities of media, and the mechanics of intermixtures in tone and colour. What is needed just now is not a discussion of general descriptive laws—works of this character when applied to artistic activity always turn out to be pseudo-scientific and false—but a psychological inquiry into the relations between our direct perceptions of nature and the consequent aesthetic expression.
Mr Butler's conception of realism has no basis in experience; it is an old and academic set of laboratory deductions, bearing practically no connexion with our emotional contacts, and therefore of little use either to artist or layman. It is a truism that art is born only in our emotional contacts, and that it is forwarded and pushed to completion, however intellectual the processes called into play, by distinctly emotional impulses. To the author's credit it must be said that he understands pure optics; but inasmuch as this branch of science is mainly theoretical, existing only in text-books and testing rooms, his knowledge is of small service to art. It does not occur to him that the peculiarities of optical illusion are part and parcel of our daily experience, and that we build up our world by inference over and beyond them. The artist has no interest in the dead level of scientific law; he aims to give us his own world with all its special characteristics, and to him the important elements of life are the emotional deviations forming the living fibre of experience. The world that confronts us on looking out of a window is not simply an optical phenomenon; concentrate upon it for a moment and the entire range of visual sensations is dissolved in memories and a general psychic awakening absolutely inexpressible by scientific optics as resumed in the laws of perspective and the gradations of colour-tones under atmospheric conditions. The simple recognition of three dimensions is almost exclusively an imposition of mind upon sensation—we construct the hollows of valleys and the thicknesses of hills by inference from a thousand points which go directly through vision into memory and imagination.
Is the artist to be only a camera, a machine to give us a fainter and less vibrant nature? Is his space to be that of one particular focus? Or is he to render what his mind has added to the scene, the personal realization and reconstruction?
Mr Butler does not completely overlook the value of the personal equation, but he commits the common academic blunder of separating it from the processes embodied in plastic composition. He does not seem to grasp the fact that our various ways of seeing things, of going up against the world, demand in our different expressions very special interpretations, and that a distorted perspective and a violently forced tonality may be not only adequate, but necessary to enhance certain emotions of depth. My own observation of painters working to attain great depth and high relief has left me with little faith in geometrical perspective, and none whatever in natural tone; I have seen the laws of both constantly violated with an increase rather than a lessening of effectiveness in achieving depth. Impressionism was essentially a tonal method, an art of values (values in the technical sense, the relative intensity of colours according to their constituent amounts of light and dark); it contained little or no drawing, and was destitute of the architectonic qualities which produce high relief; it impresses us to-day as flat—emotionally flat—and yet it is infinitely closer to the values of nature than are the profoundly recessive landscapes of Rembrandt and Rubens.
Mr Butler explains the term values with unusual clarity, but vastly exaggerates the participation of natural values in the construction of the third dimension. The logic of composition—the fundamental need for congruity—demands a balance of light and dark throughout the canvas, a distribution of tonal areas approximately equal in intensity, but entirely at variance with literal values: nature, faithfully transcribed, reveals an unduly prominent foreground and a blurred stretch of distance; and a picture thus composed is inharmonious and unconvincing. Similarly, the proportions arrived at by simple vision cannot function in any design penetrating deeper than the surface of the canvas, for the reason that the orientation of volumes, in a truly spatial art, is fully as necessary as the placement of tones. In plain language, no intelligent painter wishes to cluster all his important forms in the foreground of his picture—an inevitable condition, if he adheres to scientific descriptions, or isolates the purely visual parts of his experience. Actually, of course, objects near the eye are more sharply defined; but if we followed this rule, there would be no rhythmical connexion between the planes of a canvas; and I have yet to see a good picture in which a pronounced orientation of light and dark is not felt throughout its whole depth.
Our emotions of colour and volume are equally applicable to things near and far; and since these emotions arise for the most part from mental constructs, they must have mental rather than visual modes of interpretation. In consequence, Cézanne's treatment of landscape is eminently justified. Pictorially, the interaction of line and mass does not always conform with correct geometrical perspective; and the most successful painter of depth is he who combines his lines and masses so that the inherent dynamism is one with the special problem of recession and relief. He is a sort of sculptor in great extensions, carving in light and shadow and colour instead of marble. Cézanne was such a painter—but the author believes that "Cézanne did nothing to aid in the rendering of the third dimension."
Mr Butler's idea that pictures should be manufactured according to the optical sensations of binocular vision is moderately interesting as a tour de force, but it has no place in creative work. It reduces art to the superficial mechanics of imitation; and until writers have learned that the reconstruction of our emotional experiences is a mental and not a physical process, we shall make no progress in aesthetics.