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So it has happened to me not rarely to find quicker, deeper feeling, more conviction
and confidence in the presence of works 0 art, among tailors, dressmakers,
haberdashers, and upholsterers in smart young men, and in dashing young women
than in most of us historians, critics, and aestheticians.
I cannot forget that one 0 the most admired authorities of my time, himself a painter, a
stylist in prose, and a pioneer in discovering ever new genius, asked me what I could
mean by movement in a line. I succeeded in making him feel it at the moment. He
was, however, already too famous, too generous in giving out, to have energy or
leisure left for taking in. As for the pundits who approach art through texts,
inscriptions, archives, and the written word only, I cannot recall many whose
publications betray that they have experienced the movement, quality, or style of line.
I said just now that I equate movement with quality. I go further and equate both with
style. I am well aware that much explanation may be required to make my meaning
clear, and much discussion before it can be accepted by others. Let me here take
occasion to remark that ‘good drawing’ is another synonym for movement. A correct
drawing may be a valuable artifact, full of desired in formation about the object
reproduced, but it remains a mere diagram unless it has movement as well. When it
has movement we can also affirm it has quality and style.
Before leaving the subject of movement in the sense proposed, let me recall the
anecdote of Apelles and Protogenes and ask whether it does not betray an identical
appreciation of line in movement: Apelles called on Protogenes and, not finding him
at home, left as a visiting card a line drawn on a panel prepared for painting. ‘Giotto’s
0’, recounted by Vasari, may also be brought into connection. I am tempted at this
point to ask whether Plato in the Philebus could possibly have thought of line in
movement when he says that by beauty of form he means straight lines and circles
and the plain and solid figures which are shaped by turning lathes and rulers and
measures of angles. He affirms that these arc not only relatively beautiful like
ordinary things but eternally and absolutely beautiful. It is to be feared that Plato had
in mind exactly what ‘abstract’ and ‘non-objective’ painters are producing now. But if
he returned to us at present he would find his wish fulfilled not so much by the
‘abstract’ and ‘non-objective’ paintings that are momentarily the fashion, as by our
machinery and our weapons. Their dialectic, their realization, their geometrical
perfection would surpass anything he could have imagined or conceived.
Essentials in Figure Arts
Having proposed definitions of ‘tactile values’ and ‘movement’, mere working
definitions, yet sufficient for the present, I return to the statement made earlier,
namely, that the essentials in a work of art are first ‘tactile values’ and then
‘movement’.
Not remotely would one suggest that they suffice to make complete and perfect works
of art. There is much besides tactile values and movement in all great painting and
sculpture. There are the proportions of the single figures and the arrangement of the
design; there is space composition; there is the matter of illustration, the question of
spiritual significance, over and above the core supplied by tactile values and
movement. It is my intention as this book proceeds to touch these elements of the
problem, and emphasize their importance. But I here repeat, that an artifact will
remain a work of art no matter what it looks like, if it possesses tactile values or
movement, or better still both.
With this conviction as a touchstone, we may roam the world over, and from the
earliest Aurignacian and Magdalenian re mains scratched and carved on rocks, daubed
and painted in caves, or modelled in clay, down to the achievements of to-day,
nothing need escape our appreciation, our delight, our love. Altamira and the caves of
the Dordognc as well as the more recent bushman have left mural designs that have
adequate movement and tactile values. So have Negro and Maya sculptures and
Indonesian and South Pacific and Scandinavian wood carvings; Irish illuminations,
Scythian bronzes, Shang and Chou vases, and the frescoes of Ajanta; Wei sculptures,
and Sung paintings, and ever so many artifacts that would not have seemed art at all
to my own educators some sixty years ago.
These educators still breathed in a world of shapes which alone seemed worthy of
regard as works of art; shapes confined for the most part to a couple of centuries 0
Greek achievement and its imitators, a generation or two of Gothic, the ‘High
Renaissance’, and a few individual artists since then, Guido, Rembrandt per haps, and
still doubtfully Velasquez. All else was ethnology or bad art. I recall as a boy having
my first glimpse of Chinese and Japanese carvings in natural history museums; and
are not the finest specimens of African, Pacific, and even Central American wood and
stone objects still to be seen only in ethnological collections? As for Romanesque
sculpture, who at that time knew of Moissac or Souillac or Saint—Gilics, or of the
wealth of twelfth— century statuary and reliefs all over Latin Europe, from Atlantic
Galicia to Danubian Hungary, from Bergen to Ban?
Yet those who (like the compiler of a recent picture book on Greek art, who
deliberately ignored all the masterpieces created between the archaic and the
Byzantine) dislike antique sculpture and dote on everything exotic have no cause to
sneer. They also see the shapes only, and it is enough that these arc not classical but
distortions of our traditional way of seeing, to give them the satisfaction of being up
to date as lovers of art. Yet all they arc doing is to curse the shapes that their elders
blessed. Those shapes went far towards constructing a desirable House of Life,
whereas the Fuzzy—Wuzzy ones, as mere shapes, can at best initiate us into the
civilization of a savage kraal.