PART IV

_The Studio Game_

_Section_ 1. _Foreword._ ” 2. _Our Æsthetes and Plank-Art._ ” 3. _The Bawdy Critic._ ” 4. _“We Fell in Love with the Beautiful Tiles in the_ _South Kensington Museum Refreshment Room.”_ ” 5. _The Vengeance of Raphael._ ” 6. _General Nature and the Specialised Sense._

_Foreword to Part IV_

Two things have conspired to exalt indifference in the painter to the life around him, and the forms that life takes, to a virtue.

For a specialized visual interest in the débris of your table, or the mandolin you have just bought, in copying the colours of the roofs seen from your garret-studio, is _not_ the creative interest required for art. It is a parasitic interest. Your interest in the forms around you should be one liable to transfigure and constantly renew them: to use the grand masses of life, in fact, as the painter uses the objects on his table. He does not paint those objects as though he were photographing them. He arranges, simplifies, and changes them in his picture. So it should be with the larger form-content of general and public life.

Braque and Picasso have _changed_, indeed, the form-content before them, and with which they have dealt. Witness their little Nature-morte concoctions. But it has only been the débris of their rooms. Had they devoted as much of their attention to changing our common life, in every way not only the bigger, but the more vital and vivid game, they would have been finer and more useful figures: less precious, but not less good, artists.

Two things, then, have made this indifference displayed by most artists to their form-content come to be regarded as a virtue. One is the general scepticism and discouragement which is a natural result of the conditions of our time. Intellectual exhaustion is the order of the day; and the work most likely to find acceptance with men in their present mood is that work that most vigorously and plainly announces the general bankruptcy and its own perdition. For the need of expression is, in a sense, never more acute than when people are imperturbably convinced of its futility. So the most living become the most life-like wax-works of the dead.

The painter stands in this year in Europe like an actor without a stage. Russia is a chaos; whether a good one or a bad one remains to be seen. Writing in Paris has fallen among the lowest talents. Painting is plunged into a tired orgy of colour-matching. A tessaract broods over Cézanne’s apples. A fatuous and bouffonne mandolin has been brought from Spain; an illusive guitarist twangs formal airs amid the débris. Germany has been stunned and changed; for the better, pious hope says. But for the present art is not likely to revive there.

A great new vivacity seemed to spring up some ten years ago in the art of painting; and a number of the younger painters are embarked on an enterprise that involves considerable sacrifices and discomforts, an immense amount of application, and eager belief. This local effort has to contend with the scepticism of a shallow, tired and uncertain time; there is no great communal or personal force in the Western World of to-day, unless some new political hegemony supply it, for art to build on and to which to relate itself.

It is of importance, therefore, to a variety of painters, who have put their lives into this adventure, that it should not be, through the mistakes, the cupidity, or the scepticism of their leaders, or one mischance or another, brought to wreck.

This part of my pamphlet deals with a track at the head of which a board advising avoidance should be placed; or, rather, against two tracks. For the Braque Nature-morte phase, and the David-Ingres phase in which painters in Paris are at present indulging is the same sort of thing, different as the results (a small abstract Nature-morte, and a large painting à la David) may appear.

_Our Æsthetes and Plank-Art_

There are two attitudes towards the material world that, one or other manifesting itself in him, an artist may very roughly be distributed on one side or the other of a creative pale. These attitudes can be approximated to the rôles of the sexes, and contain, no doubt, all the paradoxes of the great arbitrary sexual divisions of the race. An artist can Interpret or he can Create. There is for him, according to his temperament and kind, the alternative of the Receptive attitude or the Active and Changing one. One artist you see sitting ecstatic on his chair and gazing at a lily, at a portion of the wall-paper, stained and attractive, on the wall of his delightfully fortuitous room. He is enraptured by all the witty accidents that life, any life, brings to him. He sits before these phenomena enthralled, deliciously moved to an exquisite approval of the very happy juxtaposition of just that section of greenish wall-paper and his beautiful shabby brown trousers hanging from a nail beneath it. He notices in a gush of rapture that the white plate on the table intercepting the lower portion of the trousers cuts them in a white, determined, and well-meaning way. He purrs for some time (he is, Mr. Clive Bell will tell you, in a state of sensitive agitation of an indescribable nature), and then he paints his picture.

He gushes about everything he sees. He is enraptured at the quality of the curious clumsy country print found on the lodging-house wall; at the beauty of cheap china ornaments, a stupid chair, a staring, mean, pretentious little seaside house. When with anybody, he will titter or blink or faintly giggle when his attention is drawn to such a winning and lovely object. I am, you will perceive, drawing a picture of the English variety of art man. The most frequently used epithet will be “jolly” for the beautiful; and its pursuit will invariably be described as “fun.” So we have before us, all said and done, a very playful fellow indeed, who quite enters into the spirit of this “amusing” life, and who is as true a “sportsman” as any red-coated squire; only for the pursuit of “jolly” little objects like stuffed birds, apples, or plates, areas of decayed wall-paper, and the form of game that he wishes rather smirkingly and naughtily to devour, he must be as cunning, languid, and untidy as his distinguished brother-sportsman is alert, hearty, and coloured like a letter-box. For stalking a stuffed bird you have, in the first place, to be a little bit dead yourself.

I have been portraying to the best of my ability the heir to the æsthete of the Wilde period: the sort of man who is in the direct _ligné_ of Burne Jones, Morris, and Kate Greenaway. And he is a very good example of how to receive rather than to give.

Now all the colour-matching, match-box-making, dressmaking, chair-painting game, carried on in a spirit of distinguished amateurish gallantry and refinement at the Omega workshops, before that institution became extinct, was really _precisely the same thing_, only conducted with less vigour and intelligence, as the burst of abstract nature-mortism which has marked the last phase of the Cubist, or Braquish, movement in Paris. These assemblings of bits of newspaper, cloth, paint, buttons, tin, and other débris, stuck on to a plank, are more “amusing” than were the rather jaded and amateur tastefulness of the Omega workshops. But as regards the Nature-mortists and Fitzroy tinkerers and tasters, one or other have recognised the affinity. Both equally are the opposite pole to the credence or intensity of creative art.

_The Bawdy Critic_

Under a series of promptings from Picasso, then, painting in Paris has been engineered into a certain position, that appears to me to bear far too striking a family likeness, in its spirit, to the sensibility of the English amateur to give one much hope for it. In the analysis of what I see as a deep weakness, and a scholarly, receptive and tasteful trend, rather than a creative one, I must put forward a little testimony, and devote a little space to what are otherwise thoroughly unimportant people. The important thing is obviously the painting in Paris, and not the type of English dilettante mind to which I compare it. But if I can make you see this real and striking community of temperament and intention, you will know better where you are when you find yourself in front of an arrangement of bits of newspaper, cloth, cheese parings, bird’s feathers and tin. You might not otherwise come to the truth of this mystery at once. For the law that assembled these objects together will appear, and indeed is, more daring and abstruse than the more nerveless and more slovenly colour-matching and cushion-making to which I relate it. Again, it is really only what happens in a picture that is not organised to attract the objects that it depicts. Whether you stick a bit of wallpaper and a patch of trouser-leg side by side on a piece of wood, or use these objects in a picture painted on a piece of canvas, it is much the same. The only thing that can be said of these particular experiments is that they demonstrate an exasperated interest in media and the shop side of painting, and a certain mental liveliness. But as regards them, there the life stops.

A desire to accept and enjoy: to accept what is already in the world, rather than to put something new there: to be in a state of permanent pâmoison and rant about everything; the odder the thing, the _queerer_ that you should find yourself fainting and ecstatic about it, the better--the _funnier_, you see? It is in the possession of this spirit, at bottom, that I am associating these two sets of people.

A composer of music does not, in his best or most specialised moments, fling himself into a luxurious ecstasy at a musical performance. The painter, similarly, does not derive from his own paintings, or other people’s, “æsthetic ecstasies” or anything nice like that. He derives from the production of his own paintings, or should, a hundred times more pleasure than any bechevelured hysterical amateur is likely to find in front of _any_ work of art. As a matter of fact, in most cases it is out of _himself_, not from the picture, or the art object, that the amateur gets his satisfaction. Hence the arcanely masturbatory tone in which some of them chant in the newspapers of their experiences. “Connoisseurs in pleasure--of whom I count myself one--know that nothing is more intensely delightful than the æsthetic thrill,” etc., croons one.

Unsatisfied sex accounts for much. You wonder if it is really a picture, after all, and not a woman or something else that is wanted, for the purposes of such a luxurious thrill. Is not most emotional interest in Music or Pictures, unaccompanied by the practice of the art enjoyed, sex? In fact, the painter or the musician are the only people for whom it is _not_ sex. These bawdy connoisseurs should really be kept out of the galleries. I can see a fine Renoir, some day, being mutilated: or an Augustus John being raped!

_“We Fell in Love with the Beautiful Tiles in the South Kensington Museum Refreshment Room”_

If we intend thoroughly to pursue our Pablo into the deplorable corner into which his agile genius has led him, and others with him, we cannot do better than marry him, in our minds, for the moment, to the erudite form of Mr. Roger Fry. And if I devote a little space to the latter amiable gentleman, it is only to use him as a glow-worm by which we can the better examine Pablo’s peculiar plight.

I will give you a passage from an article of Mr. Fry’s which appeared in the _Athenæum_ of July 11 of this year.

“Objects of the most despised periods, or objects saturated for the ordinary man with the most vulgar and repulsive associations, may be grist to his (the artist’s) mill. And so it happened that while the man of culture and the connoisseur firmly believed that art ended with the brothers Adam, Mr. Walter Sickert was already getting hold of stuffed birds and wax flowers just for his own queer game of tones and colours. And now the collector and the art-dealer will be knocking at Mr. Sickert’s door to buy the treasures at twenty times the price the artist paid for them. Perhaps there are already younger artists who are getting excited about the tiles in the refreshment room at South Kensington, and when the social legend has gathered round the names of Sir Arthur Sullivan and Connie Gilchrist, will inspire in the cultured a deep admiration for the ‘æsthetic’ period.”

Mr. Sickert you find embedded in the midst of this useful passage. He is a living and genuine painter; and is in that galère, therefore, you can take it, fortuitously. Notice, first, the stuffed birds got hold of by Mr. Fry’s artist “for his queer game of tones and colours.” Mr. Fry’s artist’s “queer game” is the same as Picasso’s ingenious sport. Then we have a luxurious picture of “the collector and the art-dealer” knocking at the artist’s door, and asking to buy his “treasures” (more luxury)--the stuffed birds that have been used in his “queer game”--for _Twenty Times the Price_ paid for them. Next we have a little picture of the young students of the South Kensington School eating buns and milk in the Museum Refreshment Room, and oozing infatuated nothings about the tiles they find there; and going back with naughty, defiant minds to their academic lessons, their dear little heads full of the beautiful tiles they have seen while at lunch. “WE FELL IN LOVE with the beautiful tiles in the South Kensington Refreshment Room,” to parody the famous advertisement. We think of the sugary couple on the walls of the Tube, that utter their melancholy joke and lure you to the saloons of the Hackney Furnishing Company; and we know that Mr. Fry’s picture is as sentimental a one as that--the student “getting excited,” the gush, the buns, and the tiles.

The last sentence of the passage I cite prophesies that “the cultured will at some future date conceive a deep admiration for the æsthetic period.” After the tiles of South Kensington Museum, the faded delights of the æsthetic period! Mr. Fry chooses the æsthetic period as the subject of his prophetic vision because of a natural predilection that he no doubt feels for it, because he is a little bit in advance of his time in this respect. He already feels the thrill of such an admiration.

But you are to understand first that there is no mode of the human mind, no “period,” no object of any sort or description, that will not have its turn, and be enthused about either by the art-student, or the “cultured”; and secondly that this is very much as it should be, and that this universal tasting and appreciation is all for the best; quite the most suitable way of envisaging the art of painting, sculpture and design.

It was no doubt, in the first place, a very naughty piece of fun for this scholarly and fastidious art-critic, with a name in Europe for his taste and knowledge of Italian pictures, to find himself exclaiming in rapture over some object as trivial as most of the objects he had up till then dealt in had been rare. He naturally might find this phenomenon absorbing. Theoretically he has no predilections. All flowers are the same. But an especially conscious plant on which he should chance to alight would feel from his method of settling, the character of his tâtonnements, that he had not alighted for the purpose of extracting honey at all. Such a critic, at the same time a dilettante, is not curious about the _object_ that his mind approaches, but is entirely engrossed with _himself_ and his own sensations. It is _amusing_ to flit from petal to petal; the grace with which you alight is amusing; it is amusing that people should suppose that you are engaged in such a dulcet business as gathering honey; to bask in a slightly intoxicating pollen-thickened atmosphere is delicious; but the fun is only to _pretend_ to be a bee.

The eclecticism, then, as regards modes and periods of art, finds its natural development in an eclecticism as regards objects. “A man’s head is no more and no less important than a pumpkin,” from the article already quoted. “Objects of the most despised periods may be grist to his (the artist’s) mill.” Should art connoisseurs and dilettantes all turn painters, the sort of art movement they would like to find themselves in the midst of (we are supposing them fashionably-minded, as many are) would be such a giant amateurism and carnival of the eclectic sensibility as we are in for, if the dealers’ riot in Paris succeeds, and if the votaries of Nature-mortism and the champions of the eclectic sensibility here, are to be believed.

We see exhibitions of French painting written about in the tone of an intellectual tourist, as though they constituted an entirely new thing in the way of pornographic side-shows, to which the English tripper is immediately led on his arrival in Paris. The “æsthetic thrill” obtained at these shows is described in an eager and salacious key, and with many a chuckle. The truth is that for the amateur turned critic, or the amateur painter, these modern painter’s experiments still remain imbued, as they do for the public, with a great deal of naughtiness. The especially English philandering flapper-sensibility transpires in every sentence of their accounts of shows. There we have then our indigenous æsthete splayed out for our leisurely observation.

I will now give you a few lines of an interview with Picasso, which appeared in the _Weekly Dispatch_ of June 1 of this year:--

“Picasso was enchanted with our metropolis (London). He waxed excited over our colourful motor-omnibuses.

“And Picasso had a thrill of joy on discovering a pavement artist. ‘This good man knelt down and drew in coloured chalks on the stone. I assure you, they are admirable.’”

The motor buses are the same as the tiles in the Refreshment Room. The pavement artist is the eternal Naif or Gifted Child. When will the Naif, the Pavement Artist and the Child resume their places, qua Child or Naif simply: the very good Naif, like the very good Child, as rare as anything else very good, alone remaining in our foregrounds?

And it is easy to see how Picasso, wonderful artist as he is, has encouraged this hope of a thoroughly detestable state of amateurish art--naughtiness, scepticism, and sham, setting in here and in Paris. Certainly, if you do not want to be turned into a tasting-machine, you will not have any truck with the studio-game into which the general movement in painting to-day has been sidetracked.

_The Vengeance of Raphael_

David is the order of the day. David, the stiffest, the dreariest pseudo-classic, has been seized on (as a savage tribe might take one of their idols by the heels and drag him out), and has been told in frenzied and theatrical accents that he must Avenge himself! And being probably a rather peppery and bloody-minded little Frenchman, revenge himself he will, if he is not stopped! Or, rather, M. Lhote, his self-appointed executioner, will do the job for him. Picasso, alleged to be doing portraits in the manner of Ingres, is the cloaked and consenting, of course Spanish, figure in the background of this “classical” razzia. “Raphael shall be avenged!” shrieks M. Lhote. I have heard from people who have seen this artist in Paris in the last month or so that he is really very excited, and that the Madonna-like face of the Florentine master inspires him to very great fury: a fury of idolatrous love, a determination to make short work of those who have played ducks and drakes with their inheritance of Greek beauty.

The parrot-like echo of all this turmoil turns up punctually in our Press. I saw this week in a current art article the first tinkle of the eulogistic thunder that is shortly to burst, everything indicates, around the Parthenon Frieze in the British Museum. Nasir Pal’s square semitic shoulders may get a pat or two in passing. But it will be in the Greek gallery where all the fun of the fair will rage. These draped idealities have already been described as _distorted_, to bring them into line!

Ingres, David, Raphael! Poussin and Claude! Easter Island carvings, El Greco, Byzantium! But there is a vast field yet to cover: the friezes from Nineveh, the heart of Sung, Koyetzu and Sotetzu, the Ajanta caves, Peru, Benin; and the Polar regions have their unhappy dolls, harpoon handles, and the Midnight Sun for some future ballet!

This is leaving out of count the tiles in the South Kensington refreshment room and the “æsthetic period,” and a million other such varieties. What incredible distances the art-parasite travels!

Is Western Europe too uncertain of to-morrow, the collapse of religion too dislocating, Great Wars too untimely, for us to have an art that is any more than locally or individually constructive? I am convinced that the sooner the general European destiny of painting gets out of the hands of the dealers’ ring in Paris the better for it. Also the hysterical second-rate Frenchman, with his morbid hankering after his mother-tradition, the eternal Græco-Roman, should be discouraged. And I think that Picasso could be indicted of more than a personal and excusable vacillation. And his personal limitations should be stated and understood, as Cézanne’s, or any other individual man’s should be, where they conflict with anything that is more living even than the individual.

_General Nature and the Specialised Sense_

When it was necessary in this country and elsewhere to undertake a rapid education of a Public of some sort, some exaggeration had to be indulged in. If a man was persuaded of the reality of his enthusiasms, the position had to be posed _too logically_ for reality, or to be exact. Also everything in the innovation that contradicted the tenets of the prevalent and tired sensibility had to be thrown into a crude saillance.

But to-day this necessity no longer exists.

Yet writers supporting, more or less, the great movement in painting going on everywhere in Europe, still repeat the lesson as it was given them. The statement, for instance, that a man’s head is no more and no less important than a pumpkin indicates a considerable truth: it depends in what connection, only, that it is advanced and how applied. The ideal of the pure visual has obviously no preoccupation but formal and colour ones. But when you say that Cézanne, an heroic visual pure, in his portrait of the two men playing cards, was emotionally moved only by the form and colour, you are omitting a great sub-conscious travail of the emotion which fashioned along with the pure painter’s sense; dyeing with a sombreness and rough vitality everything that he did. There is no painter’s sense, admittedly, so “unbiological” that it can be independent of this extra-sensual activity of the painter’s nature. His disposition, his temper, his stubbornness, or his natural gaiety are all there in his specialised sense. Given the undoubted and fundamental rightness of this sense, it is an open question how far the emotional non-specialised activity of the mind should be stimulated and how explicit its participation should be in the work of a painter.

The important thing is that the individual should be born a painter. Once he is that, it appears to me that the latitude he may consider his is almost without limit. Such powerful specialised senses as he must have are not likely to be overridden by anything. He would laugh at you if you came along with your “head and pumpkin.”

To sum up: On the subject of eclecticism, if there were no painters and therefore no art, the dilettante would have nothing to be eclectic about. Secondly, no good painter has ever been eclectic or very fickle in his manner of work. And if the complexity and scepticism of his time drives an artist into the rôle of the dilettante, or interpretative performer only, that is unlucky for him. It is not in the interest of painters, but only of the stunt amateur, or the dealer, to keep silent on that point.

Printed at the Pelican Press, 2 Carmelite Street, E.C.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Retained inconsistent hyphenation. Retained inconsistent capitalization of “Public”. Retained inconsistent capitalization and hyphenation of “Nature-morte”. p. 12 changed “Péchuchets” to “Pécuchets” p. 23 added hyphen to “Gaudier-Brzeska” p. 26 capitalized “Naifs” in “a certain number of Naifs” p. 28 capitalized “Naif” in “the only great Naif” p. 36 changed “Hawaian” to “Hawaiian” p. 37 changed “castanettes” to “castagnettes” p. 41 added accent to “Dérain” p. 46 capitalized “Douanier” in “Rousseau the Douanier” p. 61 retained spelling of “tessaract” p. 65 changed “ecstacy” to “ecstasy” and “ecstacies” to “ecstasies” p. 68 changed “dilletante” to “dilettante” p. 71 changed “overriden” to “overridden”