Friday, 31 July, 2015, 7pm
Some complex thoughts on art from Mark
Rothko’s book ‘The Artist’s Reality, Philosophies of Art’, Yale University
Press, written 1941 and published for the first time in 2004.
Art, Reality and Sensuality
Artists' pigments, like printers' inks, have many uses apart
from the creation of art. The advertising artist, the illustrator, the
portraitist, the stylist, and the decorator all employ the plastic and
pictorial devices of the artist. Yet their chief preoccupation, the purpose and
function of their effort, is other than the creation of art. It is the
commercial artist's job to enhance the desirability of marketable goods. The
illustrator vies with the written word in the description of places or facts
and the reporting of events. The portraitist must flatter his patron, while the
stylist and decorator adorn his figure, streamline his gadgets, and embellish
his property. There may be a resemblance to the outward appearance of art. But
the intrinsic relationship is no closer here than that which exists between the
composition of birthday greetings, recipes, or advertising copy and the
creations of the poet, though the identical phrase and syntax may be used in
both.
No doubt, the confusion between art and that which merely
resembles it is as eternal as the effort to distinguish between the two. The
painter and poet have always suffered its untoward effects. yet, in the case of
the painter, there is an element which aggravates this confusion, from which
the poet is comparatively free. This element is the ambiguous character of the
word art itself, which is legitimately applied to any kind of skill. We have
therefore the Art of Love, the Art of War as well as the Art of Cooking. But in
common usage it describes, particularly, the skill of manipulating plastic
materials to pictorial and decorative ends. Hence, while the reporter is seldom
confounded with the poet, the illustrator, the decorator, and innumerable
others - named or unnamed above - all are properly alluded to as artists. The
housepainter and hat-trimmer, too, whose fee is sufficiently high, share this
appellation.
This common participation in the Trinity of Line, Form, and
Color has founded a promiscuous fellowship which, while promoting the respect
for skill, promotes to a far greater degree the misunderstanding of art. For
skill in itself is but a sleight of hand. In a a work of art one does not
measure its extent but counts himself happiest when he is unaware of its existence
in the contemplation of the result. Among those who decorate our banks and
hotels you will find many who can imitate the manner of any master, living or
dead, far better than the master could imitate himself. But they have no more
knowledge of his soul than they have knowledge of their own. We all know how
little skill avails, how ineffective are its artifices in filling the lack of
true artistic motivation. His "less is more," is Robert Browning's
famous evaluation of this problem in comparing the imperfections of Raphael's
art to the impeccability of Del Sarto's. "I should rather say that it will
be more difficult to improve the mind of the master who makes such mistakes
than to repair the work he has spoilt," Leonardo wrote. Neither Giotto nor
Goya exhibited half the skill of Correggio or Sargent, either in the complexity
of their undertakings or the apparent virtuosity of execution. The artist must
have the particular skill to achieve his particular ends. If he has more, we
are fortunate not to know it, for the exhibition of this excess would only mar
his art. You may be sure that the artist whose method is muddled betrays less
his technical inadequacy than the incoherence of his own intentions.
This brief statement by no means exhausts the discussion of
skill. The whole
question of what constitutes skill and what does not, the
difference between surface and expressive skill, and the fascinating
relationship between method and concept will be fully discussed in another
place. These can be better resolved when we have further explained the purpose
of the art with which its method is inextricably allied. Our intention here is
to show how short is the reach of skill, and to what lengths one can be misled
by apprehending art through this common similarity.
To understand either art or commercial art, we must
penetrate the mind of their creators. Any parallels or classifications which
can be useful in understanding these forms must discard this kinship of
material and method and seek instead the motivations and objectives in their
creation. The vernacular, too, hints vaguely at this distinction by drawing the
jagged line of differentiation between the "fine" and
"applied" arts.
From the viewpoint of mind and purpose, no one resembles the
artist less than those others who share his devices. The art of the advertising
artist can be understood only by the study of the mind of the salesman. The aim
of each is to sell his respective product by exaggerating its virtues and
suppressing its defects. The illustrator will find his soul mate in the news
reporter or the tabloid photographer. The verisimilitude of his descriptions
will depend upon what appears real to his employer. The fashionable portrait
painter is closest to those courtly flatterers whose hipocrisy is the ladder to
material success. While the man who contrived his pictures so they look well
above a sofa, as well as the decorator and stylist, shares the intentions of
the confectioner, whose function it is to season luxury with the pleasures of
the senses.
Objective lmpressionism
The impressionism which is connected, in the vernacular,
with art such as that of Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro, is really the
continuation of the integrity of the light factor in a picture, and from that
point of view is no departure from the interests of painting since the end of
the myth. These artists, like their predecessors, continued to use light as the
chief sensual coordinator - the common denominator which bound all the elements
of the picture - and maintained the use of the resultant mood as the emotional
source of the picture. Their chief contribution was the discovery of the
possibility of achieving these effects without reliance on tone, and they
showed the possibilities of reducing the extended spectrum palette into the
domain of impressionism.
Now the use of color for its own sensual ends as well as for
its structural ends had greatly deteriorated since the time of Giotto.
Perspective displaced the use of the organic quality of colors, which had
previously, in and of themselves, produced the tactile effect of recession and
advancement. Painters who wished to push distance further and further into the
canvas, away from the frontal plane, and who were interested in the
illustration of the illusion of space, had found perspective a more suitable
demonstration of these desires. Also, the development of atmospheric
perspective had emphasized the tonal values of color as they appeared at
various distances from the frontal plane, and abstracted colour from its
sensual effects to the functional ends it served. A painter was not interested
in giving the sensation of colorfulness but rather the sensation of the
recession of color, that is, in its various intervals of gray as it receded.
Also, instead of affecting the emotions sensually by the interaction of colors
the artist affected mood through the pervasion of the entire surface by a
single color mood in much the same way we described the use of color mood in
the modern theater.
For these reasons, the colorfulness of painting since the
Renaissance had been greatly reduced. Colors might have been used with a
certain amount of brilliance to portray a specific local material, but they
always had to participate in the general grayness of tonality. We know, in
contrast, that as the last step in painting a canvas some of the old masters
would sometimes cover the entire canvas with a glaze of a single color in order
to achieve the one color tonality. To achieve a similar effect, the Venetians
worked on colored backgrounds wherein the basic color was allowed to function
everywhere through the other colors superimposed upon it. And we of course are
all familiar with the general brownness and grayness of the Dutch and English
and French pictures. Even Delacroix, who had a passion for the sensual
qualities of color, never really understood the problem. He succeeded simply in
producing more sensual and more dramatic tonality. That is, instead of browns
he used red tonalities, which gave his pictures more dramatic moods than those
of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. The use of fatty oils and
varnishes also gave the pictures a more unified tonality, for the reflection of
the shiny surfaces made them all participate in the mysterious depths which
these materials created.
Now French impressionism did not alter the objectives of the
painters in relation to this tonality, but set out rather to render this
tonality, this ultimate grayness, by means of a greatly extended palette. In
other words, while this technique made it possible for the artist to actually
have a greater number of pure or brighter colors on his canvas, the quality of
grayness as the ultimate effect could still be preserved. This approach was
sparked by the discovery that the optical apparatus actually synthesized. That
is, the fundamental or basic materials received by the eye were really
different bits of color, which the eye proceeded to combine into the various
tonal relationships characteristic of the laws of color perspective. These
researches and laws are well known to everyone by now, and we need not go into
their explanation here.
The important thing for us to consider at present is: what
relationship to the general sense of reality did these new preoccupations
mirror? Why did art preoccupy itself with this particular type of analysis
after centuries of being satisfied with the representation of light as it gave
form and emotion to particulars? Why this new fascination with how these
actually appeared to man's visual intelligence?
Our answers will be found in the examination of all the
scientific and philosophical preoccupations of that age. Until this time, man's
investigation was chiefly centered upon the study of the objects of sensation,
of the things man saw, touched, heard, and smelled in the world we call the
objective - external to the senses themselves. But now the analysis extended to
the examination of the apparatus of those organs by which man received those
sensations. Man here differentiated between his intelligible perception and the
methods by which he received sensations and finally perceived them. ln other
words, the senses themselves were removed from the body, turned about, and
examined.
Up to this point man and his organs were an inviolable
whole, but now specialization was viewed as beginning within the organism
itself, and man himself was no longer an indivisible unit, but the compound of
many interacting separate elements, which in their turn produce a new unity.
Psychology was born, but it was a mechanistic psychology and it was reserved for
a later time to make further divisions that produced still new notions of
reality and new unities which in turn needed to be addressed.
Fifteen hundred years earlier Plato had proclaimed that
things were not what they seemed. However, he had never conceived of the
physical or mechanistic basis that served as an intermediary between seeming
and being. We know today that impressionistic synthesizing is merely one of a
great number of intermediaries whose properties or scope we have hardly begun
to know. Plato's differentiation was of course moralistic as well as scientific
and hence found more pertinence in art. Christianity accepted Plato's
differentiation and embodied it in a mystical human myth. The Renaissance, of
course, rejected Platonism, along with the Christian notion of reality, and
committed the Christian sin of considering appearance as reality.
Here, then, with French impressionism we find a swing back
toward Plato, and in fact, many later artistic developments bridge the gap
between the world of appearances and that of ideas. Actually, these
developments gave a physical embodiment to his notion of pure forms and even
constructed new systems, which, through the employment of abstract symbols
divorced from particular appearances, referenced the experience of ideal
prototypes.
We have noted that in this sense, the impressionism of the
last quarter of the nineteenth century began the movement away from the
acceptance of particular appearances as the notions of reality. Here Cezanne
came on the scene, and in the world of plastic philosophy he played an
important part.
We might say that Cezanne was a reaction to Monet. We may
say, too, that he played the same part toward the laws of impressionism that
those Renaissance artists who discarded the demonstration of the laws of
perspective as the objective of art played during those times. Essentially
Cezanne was a pragmatist. He saw clearly that with the pursuit of Monet's
preoccupations, all visual phenomena would be disintegrated into a series of
equally material color blobs; that it would be the dissolution of all reality,
for the result would be an ultimate monotony wherein the similar would
annihilate all differences; a situation which is not consistent with our
conscious awareness. For he knew that man was sensitive to limitations, to
differences of weight or sharply differentiated forms, and to a variety of
intrinsic properties. He knew that a cornerstone of mental life was the
apperception of distinctions based upon reference to similarities and that
emphasis of sameness leads to the death of consciousness of contrasts. Thus, to
heighten awareness of distinctions would be a tool to further emphasize the
reality of our sensible perceptions; that it is to this end we should employ
our plastic means rather than use them toward the dissolution of differences.
Since Cezanne's preoccupation was particularly one of giving
augmented tangibility to the physical existence of objects, in particular the
demonstration of that existence through weight, we find that the process
developed a series of other manifestations that point to the developments of
art which were to follow. Cezanne was not interested in the appearance of
particulars of objects. His painting was a demonstration of our sensation or
apperception of the abstraction of the real existence of the weight of objects
as units. This was a reaction to the dissolution of the unity of particular
shapes found in Monet's impressionism. Hence one might say that his painting
was the demonstration of the abstraction of weight differences, for it was only
through the picturing of comparative solidities that he could give an
embodiment of that kind of form to particulars. As a result, his demonstration
reduced his particular forms to abstractions, as it was in this manner that he
could best impart the clear picture of structural relief. And so, unwontedly,
he indicated the direction in which later art developed: toward a plastic
equivalent to Plato's notion of abstract ideas. Since he, too, used color
structurally to enhance his apperception of the existence of color, he needed
to discover the structural function of color.
Cezanne was not blind to the corollaries which came as a
result of his preoccupations. For as they developed, one by one he changed the
factors in his demonstration to use these new developments. He began by
attempting to give a sense of relief by the method of a sculptor, producing an
actual sculptural relief by the use of impasto. He augmented the sense of
relief by having these accrued protruding masses turning into the space by the
means of color. Then he abandoned this method because he realized that color
within itself had a tactile function and hence this sort of actual relief was
unnecessary. He discovered that the sensation was most directly affected by the
color quality itself. He also realized the nature of what he was demonstrating,
and spoke of his employment of shapes as abstractions for the purposes of those
demonstrations. In this sense he understood and stated the symbolic function of
all of his elements in the pictures, and later we find him abandoning his
romanticism - that is, the representation of human emotionality - for tactile,
plastic sensuality.
In other words, his was a reaction to the notion of the flux
and a reaffirmation of the principle of stability. The corollary task was the
restatement of the importance of the stability of the ultimate equilibrium of
the whole picture, and of all those devices of distortion and abstraction. It
also resulted in a general immobility that he imparted even to his presentation
of live organisms.
Yet he always remained an impressionist. For like the
others, he was interested in the reaffirmation of reality through the agency of
light, which is the conveyer of visual reality to man, the agency by which man
knows reality through the world of appearances. Thus, while he abstracted the
shapes of the appearances, he still retained their particularities, for he
never lost sight of his original and constant objective: the reaffirmation of
the visual reality of the world, of the reality of the things that we accept as
real in our visual experience. All his use of the abstract factors were for the
purpose of the augmentation of the sense of the world of appearances. This is
the direct opposite of those who developed his methods for the demonstration of
the participation of experience in the generalizations of the world of ideas.
Cezanne also accomplished the structural reconstruction of
painting. As we have said, it was his purpose to reaffirm the reality of the
world of appearances. This reality wasn't one simply of the individual objects,
but had to be applied to those objects' interrelationships as well because the
generalization of the validity of appearance meant the extension of that
validity to the perception of the solidity of all their interrelationships. He
therefore imparted this solidity to every square inch of the picture. This
again was a reaction to those who dissolved the concreteness of both space and
the objects within it into the uncertainties of romanticism. Painters, in their
overemphasis upon mood, became slip-shod in depicting the reality of those
elements to which their mood was applied. The portions that were not as
important as the central object of their romantic illustrations fell more and
more into neglect. Painting had become the extension of mood to perceptible
objects when there were no longer any objects to receive these extensions. In
that sense, Cezanne's art was a protest in two directions against the
dissolution of the world of matter; it argued against the sacrifice of the
tactile for romantic emotion, even as it countered the dissolution of tactile
appearance, that is, he moved away from the manner in which Monet and others
had divided tactile appearance by its division through the representation of
the mechanics of vision.
In that sense he was the exact opposite of the painters who
came after him. For he was mindful of the world of appearances and spent his
life in the reaffirmation of that world's existence. His followers, however,
while imbibing and continuing his predilection for structural integrity,
abandoned the direct world of appearances and sought to affirm that structural
integrity through references to the generalizations of forms.
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