Lawrence Gowing

Art Before 1900

Impressionism and Beyond

Monument of Criticism […]

The discovery for which Wölfflin is celebrated, the discovery that visual art can fruitfully be discussed in strictly visual terms, has provided the chief excitements of twentieth-century art criticism. But those who come to Classic Art with this in mind may read a part of it almost with disappointment. The book represents an early stage in the development of Wölfflin’s ideas: his standpoint is already clear but the view is still coloured by the nineteenth century. Often the first words in praise of a picture, and the last as well, are concerned with its narrative content. This is reasonable enough, but here one is reminded forcibly of how far understanding of pictorial content had narrowed since the sixteenth century. The symbolic richness of illustration and the philosophic and poetic overtones which accompany it are almost entirely excluded from his view: essentially he conceives the content of Renaissance art as similar in kind to that of the academic history painting of the nineteenth century. Its form is more fully expounded; in this respect his responsiveness has never been bettered. But in the total view of artistic character that emerges there may be detected a limitation which amounts almost to shallowness: there is sometimes a suggestion that the virtue of a painter consists simply of a combination of structural deftness with the kind of tact required of a stage manager.

When the High Renaissance is under examination the idea of artistic progress is hard to resist. Wölfflin delighted in demonstrating the beauty of Renaissance art to students, and often his comparisons with the Quattrocento frame themselves, involuntarily as one feels, in terms of praise and censure. Even when the judgements of value are not, to our taste, unlucky (as they are in a comparison of St Jeromes

by Titian and Basaiti),

the character of a picture often seems not to be felt, so much as inferred from a general intellectual view. It may be possible to discover a ‘lucidity of geometry’ in the foreground of Raphael’s Transfiguration, but it is not a discovery that illuminates the convulsive power of the picture. When Wölfflin traces an impersonal perfection in the painting of Fra Bartolommeo we are in another age: for us it is the sense of personal uneasiness, the self-betrayal, in fact the imperfections, which give meaning to the painter’s works.

Wölfflin’s criticism has been, and remains, full of significance, and it would be ungrateful to fuss about details. In Classic Art, and in particular in its final section, we watch the unfolding of his majestic power of comprehending the formal character of a whole period in a single, coherent conception. It is an imaginative effort which remains without parallel in criticism: as an example of critical discipline the book has a lasting importance. If Wölfflin’s great generalisation no longer commands unquestioning agreement, it is because he has himself given us the equipment with which to disagree. Before him it was hardly possible to discuss style in objective terms, but now this very achievement is seen to carry its own danger and difficulty. We can hardly believe in any analysis which does not understand style as a function of the mental life of an individual. Wölfflin was debarred from this, which the train of his thought, time and again, demanded, by the lack in his time of a conception of mental life to correspond with the profound coherence and the intensity of personal purpose, which is felt in a work of art.

Mr Berenson’s Venice

Sixty-three years ago, at the age of 29, Bernard Berenson published the first of his essays, with their accompanying lists of pictures, on the Italian Renaissance. Now the Venetian lists, the latest descendants of that first volume, begin the monumental edition with which his life-work culminates, an edition which is also the most magnificent of tributes to him. Mr Berenson’s lists, in their latest revision, are to provide the basis for a corpus of illustrations there are more than 1,400 for the Venetian School alone which will reproduce something like a quarter of the immense amount of material left to us by the painters of the Italian Renaissance. The result is endlessly valuable and interesting: the Venetian volumes are surely the most important single instrument for understanding Venetian painting that we have. The tool is so good that one is tempted to use it at once for the most interesting purpose of all, to turn it, that is to say, on its author and see how the view of Venetian painting contained in the original essay with which the whole enterprise began looks now, two-thirds of a century after.

Mr Berenson started with the Venetian School because it meant most to art-loving people. The Venetians, he pointed out, were concerned primarily not with religion but with the natural appetites of men. Moreover, in Venice painting gave pleasure, in itself, like music. Painters dealt with the amenities of life, ‘with refined merry-making, with country parties or with the sweet dreams of youth’. Mr Berenson concluded that Venetian painting ‘thus became the first genuinely modern art’.

He was speaking for his time. The equation of ‘the actual needs of men’ with refined merry-making and the rest does not now seem distinctly modern. Some of his references from past to present as

world. The aesthetic method of this great man seems, looking across the centuries, strangely to involve a diminution of man, just because it disposes of the human value which style holds in itself when its consistency reflects the whole of human nature.

Professor Wittkower has studied the artist for a lifetime: he must have forgotten more about Bernini than most will ever know, and it is an achievement that the gulf should be so seldom evident. The positive temper of his writing, as much as the massive learning, is a continual pleasure: reading it calls to mind the writer as we know him on the rostrum, carrying great weight but carrying it athletically, rocking gently on the balls of his feet, intelligently and precisely balanced for the utmost responsiveness as he drives his solid argument along. The publishers, never better than when dealing with sculpture, have risen to the occasion with magnificent new photographs. (Someone has rashly redrawn the eyes of the Anima Dannata.) This is among the best of all the Phaidon books.

Review of Gian Lorenzo Bernini by Rudolf Wittkower, New Statesman and Nation, 17 December 1955

Privacy and Pride

‘Le peintre le plus peintre qui fut jamais’ Thoré’s description of Velázquez now seems less complete a vindication than it was in the epoch of Courbet and Manet. We understand the word painter rather differently: an aesthetic of painting which supposes so much of its richness to lie in how it is done, in how perfectly the technical business is despatched, is under suspicion. Indeed, any impersonal standard of perfection seems to overlook just what we value most in European art. Certainly the impersonality of Velázquez’s court portraits, the very perfection of the performance, often effectively conceals their force. They are the world of a painter without a public, like a willing captive from real life, an artist with time on his hands. Yet the man who produced them, whose brush (when he came to paint) followed with so elegant an obedience his obedient, courteous eye, had in his twenties discovered in his own nature, we cannot doubt a viewpoint and a use for art of a very different kind. The sombre creatures of the Seville pictures, secretively involved in themselves, holding their humanity darkly to them in the shaded labyrinths of tavern and kitchen, are doubly real. They have not only the common realism of the Caravaggesque style: they are in a profound sense real to their painter, the true inhabitants of his personal world. There is a meaning in them which hardly appears again.

Something of what was done by Velázquez in his early years in Seville, was never done again and the loss is irreparable. His own understanding of the metier of painter evidently altered: we imagine that he became another kind of man, and the personal thread connecting the two it elusive. Ortega y Gasset, whose observations (evidently much reduced) preface this book, is reported to have suggested in a version published in Spain that Velázquez never

wanted to be a painter at all. One sees what he means the paradox is attractive but the testimony against it is overwhelming. Even the most polite and summary of the later portraits speaks against it.

Velázquez was perhaps in a sense a victim, the victim of an appointment which few painters would have refused; the victim also of an example, the compelling example of Rubens. He was the victim, most of all, of an idea, a formal view of man: Gracian tells as much about Velázquez as does Castiglione in The Courtier about the portraiture of the High Renaissance. As a theme, human reality was replaced by the Man of Discretion, so completely that life was finally perceptible only as a vestige pathetically embedded in the general formality.

The curious thing is that this fate agreed with Velázquez so well. It was, indeed, something of a liberation: the shadowed, furrowed aspect of the early pictures gave place to a light and effortless clarity. The status of Rubens, his internationalism and the brush that moved freely and rhythmically at one remove from the physical reality, must all have seemed attractive: many painters trained in the Caravaggesque method were similarly affected. But the court style of Velázquez was entirely his own. If any influence was decisive, it was the quality of aristocratic disdain which he caught from the milieu. It would be beneath this style, in its final form, to particularise or describe, in the manner of the court styles of the rest of Europe: it would be beneath paint to seem to be anything but paint. Representation comes about as if by chance. The brush, passing as lightly across the forms as light itself, is independent of real matter. We understand that the court milieu had a special virtue for such a painter. The virtue was perhaps in the very fact that no intimacy was required or possible.

The milieu and the style with which he matched it, the very standing and isolation which they gave him, seem in fact to have provided a kind of solution of precisely what is oppressive, and poignant, in the early pictures. There the very sense of life is

melancholy. The painter’s grave attention discovers at the heart of his subject an element which resists him, a mute, inward principle of life which the eye cannot reach. Under the skin, locked irretrievably within, and implicit in all the functions of living in eating and drinking, in singing and the maidservant’s reverie is something secret and longed-for in which no spectator ever shares. We sense that for this painter to look closely, to depict physically, was to feel a painful deprivation.

The loss, and the liberation, of Velázquez was that his world gave him, as it were, permission to turn away from the issue that held the greatest personal meaning for him. What had been dwelt on directly in Seville, in the dark depth of common life, was in Madrid, in the cold theatre of royalty, reflected only obliquely in a distant refinement of style. The style was perfect: the disengaged, immaterial touch with which the visible veil of things was rendered carries its own related meaning. But absolute seriousness was progressively replaced by an absolute discretion. We might suppose the development inevitable, if Velázquez had not seen the grotesque representatives of common life kept for amusement in the retinue, and felt again the profound magnetism, his original motive. The three portraits, of two dwarfs and a buffoon (a fourth, the Sebastian de Morra, seems to be by someone else), regain a natural human substance: the painter looks directly and a real depth is momentarily uncovered. Such glimpses were exceptional: the great part of the court painting was on a different level. The use which he found for painting was in general a less profound one. There was a corresponding change in the character of the pictures: the typical works of the middle period, delicate and splendid patterns of lilac and powdery blue (of which no book but this one gives any idea), have, by contrast with the deeply felt unity of the early canvases, the consistency only of decoration. Velázquez came to look with elegant detachment even upon his own original theme. Pictures like the Mars (and what is perhaps the last of the jesters, Don Juan of Austria) have a double irony:

is perhaps of Delacroix’s grandiose non-achievement in this respect) that for complicated historical reasons only an English painter, and only one born about 1775, could begin to see that pictorial figuration is not necessarily dependent on the consistencies which had been evolved for the highly specialised arts of the figure. One must see Turner’s curious attitude to figure-drawing, and perhaps to humanity as such, as part of a process of unlearning which most of the artists of his generation were in one way or another impelled to (and all subsequent artists). Delacroix was unlearning the skills of neo-Classicism; Goya convulsively unlearned the subtle aptitudes of Rococo. Turner is the most extreme and forward-looking exponent of this, for his unlearning was directed to transforming not only the style and subject of painting and the idiosyncratic expressiveness that could be extracted from them, like the other men, but the whole figurative reference of the art. It is hardly expected, by the end of Turner’s career as a watercolourist a conclusion which is difficult to represent in any exhibition to find him laying patches of empty colour on paper (such colour as one can find around any studio nowadays) deploying in fact simply the basic substance out of which a new art was to be formed.

Review of Watercolors by J M W Turner from the British Museum at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, dc , Art News, vol.62, no.61, October 1963

Confidence and Conscience

in Two Centuries of Art

‘Corot,’ someone was saying, ‘the méconnu master who is respected only by good painters’. It was the kind of remark that leaves a trail of irritating questions. If there is one master who is understood, isn’t it Corot? He is respected, and doesn’t that tell the whole story? None of these supposed good painters is in any doubt that Corot is dead. What use is art to us if it is not in some disturbing sense alive? If there is one century we understand, surely it is the nineteenth century. The point about Corot the plein-airiste, not the picture-maker who took over when the outdoor painting season was over is that he unfolded in miniature the characteristic qualities of nineteenth-century painting. That in itself is enough to account for our attitude. Certainly Corot’s virtues were admirable and basic ones. The admission does not alter our view; it merely adds to it that tinge of guilt which is the common, hidden colour of what begins to bore us. Our fathers tired of hearing Corot called ‘Papa’.

It is like praising bread and butter. The simple and consistent standpoint in the face of nature, which Corot took up from the beginning, was the basic, original nourishment of modern painting. It supported all the great painting of the nineteenth century and it began with him, ‘Le beau dans l’art,’ he said, ‘c’est la verité baignée dans l’impression que nous avons reçue à l’aspect de la nature’. The translation that would avoid banality escapes one. It is the kind of maxim that comes to mean more than it said. Each word, ‘truth’, ‘nature’, ‘impression’ (even the sense of ‘immersion’), carries accumulated meanings that are the stuff of nineteenth-century painting, ‘The aspect of nature’, as it presented itself to Corot the sufficient source and impetus of painting is already akin to the ‘nature’ or, if you

prefer it, the ‘spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads before our eyes’, which inspired Cézanne.

Corot’s standpoint is evident from the moment he set foot in Italy in 1825, perhaps earlier. There are a few isolated precedents in neoClassicism and a sporadic tradition of oil-sketching goes back more than a century to François Desportes. Only one predecessor shared Corot’s consistent attachment to painting outdoors: Constable. Constable’s implicit dependence on nature and the freshness and force of the resulting style in the Hay Wain were more striking when it was shown at the Salon (at just the right moment) in 1824 than it is now. Possibly some of the smaller pictures which Constable sent to Paris were sketches from nature. The example certainly helped Corot; he recognised ‘a man who felt as I did’. Constable, he said, came to his aid.

But the comparison is not much help to us. Next to Constable’s sketches, those of Corot only reveal how distinct and separate from his sources and from the restless spirit of the time Corot’s essential attitude was. The quality of his plein-airisme as it developed from 1825 onward is quite different. It is possibly significant that, having had a glimpse of the luscious freshness which could be extracted from the Northern landscape, he made off in the opposite direction. His view of landscape is unrelated to Constable’s until at least ten years later. Neither freshness of colour, in itself, nor force of handling ever concerned him. His sketches, though as dependent on nature, are by contrast reticent, tonal, self-contained, with a delicate pictorial unity about them and a mysterious detachment.

Corot’s motto, he often said, was ‘Conscience et confiance’. No banner ever carried so innocent and humdrum a device. The conscience apparently concerned simply the conscientious rendering of the subject. His notebooks are full of memoranda about it: ‘The important thing is to do only what one sees and how one sees.’ The confidence required was confidence in oneself. No one speaks of confidence as often as Corot to whom quality, whatever it is, comes easily. History

is full of timid men who took courage behind an easel, but Corot’s position is a special one. To understand him we should need to know a good deal about what confiance, and the lack of it, signified to the whimsical bachelor and (into his fifties) obedient son.

Confiance certainly included a confidence in whatever it was that prompted him to begin a picture. ‘While seeking conscientious imitation, I do not lose for one instant the emotion that seized me. Reality is a part of art; sentiment completes it.’ These dicta of Corot’s now seem commonplace. Is it possible that his conscience was really as comfortable as it appears? It was certainly comparatively comfortable in his old age, from which many of the apparently sedative maxims date. The earlier notes are sharper and more practical, and the assurance is more hardly won. He won it by applying himself to tonal painting from nature. ‘Do things look black? Conscientiously one will put everything into relationship, and with time one will draw nearer to nature day by day. The important thing is to do only what one sees.’

Can we recapture the original quality of Corot’s composure and restraint? His faith in the emotion that seized him and his injunctions not to lose ‘the first impression that moved one’ are certainly of their time; but by contrast Constable’s assertion that painting was for him another word for feeling is outrageously Romantic. We can still feel its compulsion, as if detecting a sympathetic inward unbalance that required the most extroverted objectivity to keep it in equilibrium. With Corot we have no hint of what it was that sometimes looked so black; we only know the situation could be retrieved by an unremitting effort to put everything that was seen luminously and precisely en rapport.

We can recognise in Corot’s composure a mood akin to obedience. It is an obedience both to nature and to art. His slightest studies are composed composed in every sense: with all the closeness and restraint of their visual transcription they are also designed in the classic French tradition. Constable’s tribute to the same tradition

radiance and movement of an ideal southern milieu. Sometimes the theme was more mobile and flowing than anything he had painted for many years; the movement was like a dance. In the greatest of the papiers découpés, the soaring Souvenir of Oceania (1953), and the radiating spiral of The Snail (1953), the rhythm resides simply in the action and interaction of colours. The movement springs out of a progression that begins, characteristically, with emerald. It expands in every direction, moving in great lazy leaps out to the extremes of violet and orange-red. An ideal world was completely realised and the achievement, more than any other, discovered a new reality for painting.

Late in his life, a writer tried to persuade him to pronounce against the non-figurative tendencies of young painters. He answered:

It is always when I am in direct accord with my sensations of nature that I feel I have the right to depart from them, the better to render what I feel. Experience has always proved me right… For me nature is always present. As in love, all depends on what the artist unconsciously projects on everything he sees. It is the quality of that projection, rather than the presence of a living person, that gives an artist’s vision its life.51

In Henri Matisse: 64 Paintings, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966

51 Escholier, Matisse from the Life, op. cit.

Henri Matisse: Harmony in Red

In the manner of French masters a hundred years before him, Matisse at intervals punctuated his work with a demonstration picture, which was in the nature of a painted manifesto. With Matisse such pictures were not only large but largely conceived, and in a style unimaginable before, aimed both at extending current expectations from art and at realising a new potential in himself. None of these exploratory pictures was so unpredictable and ultimately so mind-stretching as that which we know as Harmony in Red.

As usual with Matisse, the story, which was to have this radiant and simple outcome, was more complicated than it first appears. Early in 1908 Matisse’s new patron, Sergei Shchukin, evidently mentioned the possibility of a decoration for the dining room of the Trubetskoy Palace in Moscow, where he lived. Whether or not a picture was explicitly commissioned, the canvas that eventually arrived fitted neatly between the wainscot and the cornice in the big rococo room.

At the same time, in the early spring of 1908, Matisse was moving from his apartment on the Quai St Michel and his studio in a former convent on the rue de Sèvres. He installed his family, his studio, and his school at the Hôtel Biron on the rue de Varenne, also lately a convent, into which Rodin moved at about the same time. (The rooms that Matisse occupied no longer exist and the mansion is now the Musée Rodin.)

The move from the quai, where Matisse had spent the whole of his adult life, is likely to have been disturbing. As usual to make himself at home he had recourse to painting his surroundings. So more than one factor contributed to his decision in the spring of 1908 to paint a domestic theme. The precise subject had deeper

overtones than appear. Matisse’s first success, La Desserte, which he had painted 11 years before on the suggestion of his master, Gustave Moreau, had been a dining room in which a servant was clearing the table. Moreover, that picture, which was a considerable though fairly conventional effort, had gained an impetus from his chief picture of the summer before, which showed a Breton maid in a tall lace cap serving a meal at his lodgings in Brittany. Both these pictures had been sparkling perspectives of light and space across which obliquely placed tables led the eye into the shadowed depth, an arrangement essential to his earliest style.

Of course much had happened in the ensuing ten years. Colour had replaced the values of light and dark. Frontal planes had supplanted diagonal recessions, and the scattered accents of the intervening years had finally vanished in the simplicity of pictorial areas. Yet the cumulative development of an artist is never without its paradoxes. Though the new picture was the recognisable successor to the old ones, it was necessarily quite unlike them. The picture that Matisse began was also very different from the one we have. The design was already the now-familiar schematic dining room, but it was freely brushed in transparent blue-green; the colour is still visible at some points around the edges of this canvas. Though it is hard to be sure, the indications are that the inspired innovation of the design, the pattern (borrowed from a printed fabric), which extends up to cover the wall as well as the table, already constituted the continuum that we know. So the inspiration, which associated the flat unity of painting with a fantastic continuity of pattern, had already dawned, heralded by an all-embracing blue-greenness like verdure tapestry.

This tentative beginning was then swept aside and the Harmony in Green vanished under a Harmony in Blue. This was based on the actual colour of his turquoise cloth, patterned with flower baskets and scrolls in dark blue. The effect of a spreading indoor garden, the imagined continuation of the view outside, was replaced by a scheme that was evidently invented, extrapolated from the printed design

of fabric. The all-over unity was now based on the omnipresence of an arbitrary colour. In this state the picture was seen by Matisse’s visitors in the late spring of 1908. It was framed and photographed by Druet, the dealer who had begun as a photographer. At this stage the whiteness of the trees in the garden was stippled sparingly around their contours and the garden and the pattern indoors (as well as the head of its denizen, the servant) were drawn in similar overlapping arcs, with a basically linear consistency.

The stippled whiteness of the tree at this stage had some appearance of blossoming fruit trees in the former convent garden; Matisse, when the photograph was put to him, ‘did not deny this’. The solid whiteness of the trees that now appear in Harmony in Red was said to have been painted, ‘as a spontaneous gesture after a late snowfall in the early spring’. Unfortunately, and I quote from a classic footnote in Alfred Barr’s book on the artist, Matisse and his wife confirmed the snow story but were:

not entirely clear whether this occurred in the spring of 1909… or 1908, in which case Matisse would have carried it in his memory… That the Blue Harmony was completed in the first half of 1908 is confirmed by Max Weber in a very circumstantial anecdote of his being present in Matisse’s studio late in the spring of 1908 when Odilon Redon made a call. Weber, deeply impressed by this meeting of two masters, vividly remembers how Matisse deferentially turned the Harmony in Blue around so that the older painter could give his opinion which Weber, who had discreetly withdrawn to the other end of the studio, could not hear.

Both Matisse and Mme Matisse denied emphatically that Redon ever came to the studio. ‘Weber left Paris about 1 August 1908, but returned in time to see the Harmony in Blue, he feels absolutely sure, for a second time at the Salon d’Automne. In any case Harmony in Blue was certainly seen well before the 1 October opening of the Salon

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