Three Essays on the Painting of our Time

Adrian Stokes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136444128
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1961 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

I. THE LUXURY AND NECESSITY OF PAINTING

I. The Luxury and Necessity of Painting

Not even those who detest art will be averse to the presence of picture galleries near luxurious shops. For a moment luxury may satisfy greed and provide the riches that separate us from loneliness. We sniff a bountiful air at shop windows, contemplating possessions not yet allotted, and sometimes unenviously any magnificence, the width of a street or the span of a doorway. Entertainment seeks to bring in train such bounty, experiences that are of the nature of meals ; though they but symbolize suppers, surfeit supervenes. It comes about, then, that when we are at table we may hope to incorporate far more than our food; as we watch others they appear to reabsorb what we imagine to be predominant experiences. I have had this fantasy when watching directors of galleries that exhibit paintings, at a restaurant. It seemed that theirs was very fine nourishment, with associations that differed greatly from a stuffing or emparcelling: indeed, so enduring and so various is the luxurious stain upon directors of good paintings that their actual nourishment appears to lend them the overtones of lasting reassurance that may visit others only occasionally, should the satisfaction of various appetites coalesce in the pleasure of the table.

Of course good paintings are extremely valuable, a richness that lends itself to these imaginative richnesses. The gallery director has them on his walls. He may suffer from various difficulties in connection with food; nevertheless, a modicum of the fantasy of the luxuriousness of his eating will, I am sure, occasionally at least, be his as well.

To his sanctum I attribute some Italian Baroque paintings, small, boldly painted with the raw touches that will eventually prove to have heralded the modern pictorial era. The canvases were studies and sketches for large paintings, or for their details. In one a mushroom cloud of angels grows, as it were from the compost of an ecstatic saint who grovels upward from below : the picture vibrates with rays of a sudden flowering, but lines in one corner indicate a hard architecture, the pillars and the underside of a cornice whose grooved, stepped mass embraces the shrinking or resurgence of figures as does a basin that both holds and spills the fountain’s play. The union is ennobling, an interchange or commerce we would have in ourselves between passions and the stone, since the architecture symbolizes our rational disposition unberated by death and decay, embodies a Parnassus-like bent whereby proportion and space envelop our emotions, dispersing litter on a desk and the rhythmless rush of noises from the street that link us to a chaos, otherwise inescapable, throughout the length and breadth of London ever ignoble where this painting is noble.How few are the colonnades, those tunnels with pierced sides, how small the perpetuity of silent flank and orifice, how little by which to recognize our own ideal states. . . . As well as of the rational disposition, a good building is the monument to physique.

But it is unlikely that this director has much interest in architecture: it is not necessary today for devotees of painting: they do not acknowledge building to be the root of any grandeur and the presiding genius of graphic art. The lapse is due to failure, and to a resurgence that is taut, of architecture in our time; even more because, in view of this failure from the middle of the last century, painting, while avoiding as a rule an obvious architectural balance, has itself been inspired to fill the void, to provide the more intimate architectural pleasures, striving to envelop and to feed us without ceremony by means of clamant textures, to enwrap us with a surface, to drive us by shock into a place of safety, to declaim from a wall the need for tactile passages and transitions that were once available in lovely streets. The primacy of architecture, mother of the arts, is not first as the school of proportion and design but as the universal witness to the luxuries of art, to the aesthetic translation of mental process, as well as the scenes of living, into the terms of an absorbable substance, or of our envelopment by an object. But simultaneously there exists an emphasis upon the separateness of the artifact, upon the cake that survives our eating of it. Thus, in the name of object self-sufficiency and corporeal wholeness, art may bestow another luxury in the enshrinement of even the greatest misery, a luxury gained from the putting together of fragments of experience that have been dispersed, so that even pain coheres, owns features : a service is done thereby, a good restored. Graphic boldness and idiosyncrasy satisfy more people today than fine building surrounded by ill-advised curves and strong material and dreary roofs and the blatant, negative pretension of all urban scenes. Surely there has never before been so sterling and durable a debasement, multiplied in instances by the million, of members and materials that were once well used. It will be some time before late Victorian and Edwardian miasmas will have yielded their present air of universality.

Envelopment by building, by street, is almost unknown to Englishmen as a reassurance, but is universal in experiences of confusion or of the drugs that alleviate, such as the droplet comfort in a cottage roof, in a quaint lamp-post or a causeway too windswept for advertisements. Even so, our director has enjoyed visits to Rome; his pleasure in his Baroque paintings reminds him of cobbled roads and their smooth houses with apertures that are tall: and he has read in Wittkower of a conscious Baroque aim to envelop the spectator. ‘With Caravaggio the great gesture had another distinct meaning; it was a psychological device, not unknown in the history of art, to draw the beholder into the orbit of the picture . . . Bernini’s St. Theresa, shown in rapture, seems to be suspended in mid-air, and this can only appear as reality by virtue of the implied visionary state of mind of the beholder . . . Miracles, wondrous events, supra-natural phenomena are given an air of verisimilitude’ (Wittkower, 1958). The power of this art to envelop us suggests confidence in the phantasy that an interchange infuses the complexity of relationship between substances themselves, between objects, between different arts though employed to represent a single vivid happening. Architecture, sculpture, painting merge in the representation of St. Theresa’s ecstasy, just as river-god, shell, dolphin are as one with the water of the Barberini fountain.

Architecture is limited to forms without events; in many styles or periods an architectural exemplar has provided the model for translating graphic subjects into the terms of a concatenation built upon a ground bass. There are Italian masterpieces, for instance the operas of Vincenzo Bellini, whose continuous simplicity remains poignant, whose lyricism remains unmatched in a firmness far from romantic, suggesting sunlit or shaded loggias and above them, upon the wall, smooth apertures that give light, and above again the jutting features of a cornice-head.

The churches of Rome reign easily over the noisiest traffic in the world; even in this wretched sanctum in the West End of London, the Baroque paintings lend a Theatine quiet unseparated from the life of the town, as if a burst pipe that floods a building’s face in patches might yet convey the image of a spring. We hang our paintings to convert not only our houses but our neighbourhoods and our neighbours.

Little understood by our director, the Baroque paintings are a side-line relegated to this narrow room. Modern paintings are his livelihood and his life. Let us go into the galleries. There he is, in the hour before the midday meal, doubtless still stimulated by pictures whose appeal fails only at the tap of another example. They titillate the appetite to absorb all things: who can say where limitation lies since these artists’ aims have been to show the unknown as uniform in strong impact with the known ? We have here the manner of endless bodily function as well as of hardly touched states of mind, more muscular, more independent than the resonance of images in a dream yet, when viewed in terms of the intellect’s categories, vague and boundless as are the spongy images of sleep so often tied to an inconsequent context, equalled occasionally by the name the modern artist puts upon his painting in the catalogue.

‘I no longer invite the spectator to walk into my canvases,’ writes the American Action painter, Grace Hartigan (1959), ‘I want a surface that resists, like a wall, not opens like a gate’. The wall, Leonardo’s homogeneous wall with adventitious marks which, he said, encourage fantasy to reinforce their suggestion, has been an especial spur from the time of the Impressionists, from the time of the new negative significance of buildings in our epoch for which the picture plane, the picture surface, has become an affirmative substitute; so much is this so that much modern painting ceases to have parts or pieces, in the sense of parts that when abstracted from the whole would remain objects of beauty as of value. What price a section of an Action painting (of one section rather than another), or even of a Cubist painting or a Mondrian? The modern stress upon unity and purity, upon strict aesthetic relevance, connotes a stress upon homogeneity: in some styles the picture plane in fact resembles a blank wall to which is entrusted the coalescence of dissonances or blows directed at the spectator. Even when this is not so, we are likely to discover the kindred notion of something unlimited. Unspoken experiences, bodily and mental, have always been incorporated into art through the appeal of formal relationships: but when, as now, they are offered without the accompaniment of any other symbolic content—or if there is another programme, when it is distorted or simplified even to a greater extent than in a style that has been strictly conventionalized—they readily suggest the unlimited, a concept always present to the mind in terms of a boundless, traumatic bad or a boundless, bountiful good, by which we suffer envelopment or from which we would perpetually feed.

Now, the simplest relationships, the most sporadic marks, have deep meaning: we have been shown it beyond all question. We have today an art without manners, without veneer, arresting, knock-you-down yet unbraced and unlimited, it appears, in scope: that is one reason why it must continually change so much: what is novel affords a sense of boundless possibility with which we may exchange ourselves in lieu of achievement. Modern art tends thus to be romantic, somewhat at the expense of the other fundamental draw of the work of art, as a self-sufficient entity, though this character too has been isolated and worked upon. The palpable textures of modem painting express the division and disintegration of culture as well as the ambivalent artist’s restitution, often carried no further than an assembly of scaffolding. We are then left with an unceremonious image that seems to symbolize the process of art itself, of the hidden content, always immanent, whereby mere space and shape touch in us sensations of pain, struggle, anxiety, or joy that we have already begun to translate into tactile and even visual sensations, since a parallel amalgam is ceaselessly registered in some part of the mind. Appreciation is a mode of recognition: we recognize but we cannot name, we cannot recall by an effort of will: the contents that reach us in the terms of aesthetic form have the ‘feel’ of a dream that is otherwise forgotten. This ‘feel’ too may be lost until it is recalled by an action in the street, by some concatenation of movement or of substances: in just this way much modern art offers us the ‘feel’ of our own structure, sometimes overriding the communication of particular feelings. Painting usually presents as well a specific subject-matter equivalent to the manifest content of a dream, in terms of an image of the waking worl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• I. The Luxury and Necessity of Painting
• II. Some Connections and Differences between Visionary and Aesthetic Experience
• III. Is-ness and Avant-garde