Chapter II: Part IV: The Studio Game

1. Foreword to Part IV. 61
2. Our Æsthetes and Plank-Art 63
3. The Bawdy Critic 65
4. “We Fell in Love with the Beautiful Tiles in the
South Kensington Museum Refreshment Room” 67
5. The Vengeance of Raphael 70
6. General Nature and the Specialised Sense 71

_Preface_

I have assembled round my parable a series of short articles and notes. They are all related to the idea that this parable embodies. The second half of this pamphlet deals with that section of modern painting that is incompatible with any constructive tendency. I give my reasons for believing that it gains nothing from his incompatibility; and, furthermore, that this incompatibility is a diagnostic of fatigue in the painting in question.

The spirit that pervades a large block--cube, if you like--of the art of painting to-day is an almost purely Art-for-Art’s sake dilettantism. Yet you find vigour and conviction: its exponents, Picasso, Matisse, Dérain, Balla, for example, are very considerable artists, very sure of themselves and of the claim of their business. So you get this contradiction of what is really a very great vitality in the visual arts, and at the same time a very serious scepticism and discouragement in the use of that vitality. How far is this the result of the obtuseness and the difficulties set up by the scratch-Public on which painters have to-day to rely? How far is it the result of a combination of the speculative agility of the dealer and of the technical agility among artists that is the flagrant result of the dissemination of second-rate wit?

Then the pleasant amateur (the vindictive failure of more settled and splendid ages) sees his chance. He drops down into the arena from among the audience, flourishing a red pocket-handkerchief, and by his pranks--some pseudo-professional, skipping like any Espada; some an impudent buffoonery--adds to the general confusion. The little bull laughs to see such sport, the crowds of degenerate and dogmatic Toreros, popping with pedantic mirth, tumble in imitation of the new-fangled clowns; the women hurl futurist javelins torn from their hats, and transfix the bottoms of the buffoons and the billycocks of the banderilleros! The little bull, at first amused, eventually, at the end of the Corrida, expires of the most suffocating boredom, injected into him by a pale urchin with side-whiskers and a hooked nose. Is not that a fairly good picture of the bloody spectacle that we, Public and Performers, present?

It is evident that the Public is at fault. Why does it not insist on a better type of Bull in the first place, a more substantial type of art, that would be capable of driving all but the best performers from the Arena? If the public cannot think of a new type of Bull at the moment, and is not willing to take a new brand of beast that we are rearing on trust, let it at least put into the Circus some fine animal from Nineveh or rake the Nile valley for a compelling and petulant shape.

But the painter or sculptor, too, might give a hand, and the (I hide my face! I am almost too ashamed for him to utter his name) the Architect! Why does not the Architect (and every time I have to use that word I shall feel like apologising to you for mentioning such a poor, forgotten, jaded, lamentable creature!)--why does not this strange absentee, this shadow, this Ghost of the great Trinity, Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture--for which I have substituted Design, from a feeling of comprehensible pudeur, in referring to this unfortunate Entity--_why does he not cheer us up by Building a New Arena?_ Constructing around the new Bull that we are breeding our new, very active Art, a brand new and most beautiful Arena?

That question, I know, will remain unanswered. It is a tactless question, I admit. It is not at all nice, even, to refer to Architecture. You should say, perhaps, Usual Offices or something of that sort!

I have thought of a way out for the Architect. It has often been suggested of late that the Architect might become a branch of the Engineering industry. But why should he take all his bric-à-brac shop over to that clean, fresh, erect institution across the road? Rather let the Engineer and the Painter fix up a meeting and talk over the sadly-involved affairs of this decayed concern, which is, of all the scandals in the Art-World, the most scandalous and discreditable. The Painter and the Engineer could buy him out, going into partnership, and produce what would neither be a world of boxes on the one hand, as it would be if the Engineer controlled house construction (_vide_ skyscrapers), nor of silly antique fakes on the other, as happens when the Architect has his sweet and horrible way. Let us divide up this “ramshackle Empire” of Architecture. And we could even dispense with a Caliph. There need not be any bloodshed. It is a fair and smiling world!

Now, of all painters who have ever breathed ponderously under a copper-coloured Vlaminck sky, the Cubist painters of Paris, the quantities of ponderous painters to be found cubing in that city, are the best fitted to fill this rôle--of superseding, in a practical liaison with the Engineer, the virtually extinct architect.

The energy at present pent up (and rather too congested) in the canvas painted in the studio and sold at the dealer’s, and written of with a monotonous emphasis of horror or facetiousness in the Press, must be released and used in the general life of the community. And from thence, from the life outside, it will come back and enrich and invigorate the Studio. When accepted, modern painting is accepted as a revolutionary oasis in the settled, dreary expanse of twentieth century commercial art: a place where bright colours, exciting and funny forms, a little knot of extravagant people, are to be found; and that it is amusing sometimes to visit. It was the same with the Impressionists: Whistler found himself beleaguered and interfered with in the same way: Gauguin and Van Gogh had the same experience. Listlessness, dilettantism is the mark of studio art. _You must get Painting, Sculpture, and Design out of the studio and into life somehow or other_ if you are not going to see this new vitality desiccated in a Pocket of inorganic experimentation. And on the other hand, you must put the Architect, as he drags out his miserable if well-paid life to-day, into the dustbin, _and close the lid_.

When in the course of this pamphlet I speak of the “Movement in painting,” or “Modern Painting,” I mean all that is included by the practice of such diverse painters as, for instance, Dérain, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, or Survage. These painters represent one æsthetic current in the sense that they are none of them Impressionists, have all one synthetic intention or another, and are all related roughly in time and in enterprise. The complete non-representative character of Kandinsky’s painting, or the weightiness and palpable logic of the Cézanne-evolved Cubist, is really a portion of the same effort as that made by Dérain or Matisse, who are neither Cubist nor Abstract. Survage’s mixed phantasy is the same.

There are bound to be within this great general movement many experiments and enterprises attempting to attract all the bulk of it in one direction or another. One of the most powerful of these and one that has held the stage for the last few years, is the Nature-morte development of a group of Cubist painters, Picasso, Braque, and Gris being three of the best known among them. Entertaining as some of these things are, I can see nothing of permanent interest deriving from them. Meantime, this exercise pursued for so long by these painters appears to me to denote a bad weak spot in the quarters where it saw the light. Again, Picasso, great artist as he is, and much as I admire him, looks to me rather equivocal and unsatisfactory in the light of present events. I devote considerable space to an adverse analysis of this aspect of the general movement. But it is because I believe so much in the wider movement, and because the spirit of this Nature-mortism--also the David-Raphael eclectic classic wave--contradicts what I have written this pamphlet to propose, that I deal with it so thoroughly. One other point in this preamble. I have no fault to find with Cézannism. Any faithful discipleship of that master is sure to be sound art. All the same, Cézanne is such a lonely figure, and he has such a weight of pups around him! No one man, even a Cézanne, should have on his shoulders such a huge effort of initiation as his was. There should have been several men. Ungrateful as it seems, one must say that it is a misfortune that all the diversity of art and human talent of a generation should have depended on this one old man, as has been the case, since he was unearthed.