The Necessity for the Image

Leonard Baskin

UNLIFE the scholar, the artist does not live in an ambience of reflective judgment, but is rather a combatant in an arena of struggle. An act of creating is an act of commitment, a gesture that blazons forth an attitude, a position, a stand; it is nothing less than a building of a bastion housed and armed with absolutist beliefs, which are the artist’s only weapons.

If one accedes to the notion of an artist as an armored creature engaged in stylistic warfare, then one must, of consequence, allow for some artists the role of guerrilla fighters in this struggle. As a self-proclaimed member of a tiny guerrilla band, I make independent warfare on the larger camps locked in furious battle on the fields of Fifty-seventh Street, Madison Avenue, Fifty-third Street, and elsewhere.

To take so choleric a view of so divine an activity as creating works of art is surely one expression of the general “armed vision” of our time. One looks back with disbelief to eras of artistic calm and stylistic balm. The glow of nostalgia. I fear, grows quickly overcast with tedium. Just as our society as a whole has become atomized and splintered into dissident groups, assigning to themselves various quotients of discontent, from juvenile delinquency to excessive income tax, so too has the world of art become a medley of disaffection, a bellyful of schisms. And just as society has broken into two vast and lunatic camps, so too has the world of art tended to dispose itself into two large factions holding contrary points of view. William Blake, in the innocent eighteenth century, held that “the poison of the bumble bee is the artist’s jealousy.” This needs to be altered to accents more solemn and dread, and so when I with brutal simplicity say that avant-garde art is simple-minded, I say it with my cannon and shield in preparation.

In making so naked an accusation, I realize that I am going counter to opinion that universally holds to the contrary. I realize that so absurd an assertion superficially allies me with all that is backward-looking, negative, unhealthy, retrograde, and feeble in contemporary art. I repeat the assertion and stand prepared to do battle. I assert, further, that a new Philistine has arisen and with a borrowed and garbled jargon prates and brays a restrictive aesthetic of formalism: the once beleaguered phrases of formalism that accompanied the struggle of painters and sculptors to liberate their art from a convention that had become debased and debauched. The Philistines I mean are the artists themselves.

Can an art which is wholly devoid of figurative elements hold such wonder and glory as does so much of the art of the past? In traducing abstract expressionism, I am not unmindful of such qualities as it does have. What are these qualities? The release from specific imagery has permitted the abstract expressionist painters a freedom which is at once tempestuous and grand. They can, like some bizarre unleashed spirit, wander at will and in near paroxysms of ecstasy and cathartic release over the surface of canvases grown grotesque in breadth and Gargantuan in height. But is this freedom? A child’s freedom, yes. The freedom of a beast, yes. But, the freedom of a mind reined with intellect, no! for what is Ireedom?

Just as the insufferable tympanums of our courthouses proclaim that obedience to the law is liberty, so too is freedom the recognition of necessity. The savage, whether Rousseau’s or nature’s, living in seemingly unlettered freedom, is in reality the total slave of his constraining and demanding environment. Freedom means the control of reality, and control means the mastery of all the tools with which we fashion our physical and intellectual environment. A freedom that is not the issue of mastery is no freedom. It is, when it is violent, the expression of, at best, anarchic exuberance and childish irrationality. And if the end of abstract expressionism is to celebrate infantile chaos, then its calibration is acute and accurate.

But no abstract expressionist would accede to this. He would, I think, hold (confounding his exhortation with hall-digested Zen notions) that the truth of his art is contained within the irrationality of the violent act; that the act of painting is the crucial thing; that art has been liberated from its confining tradition; that its raison d’être is not to enlarge, not to ennoble, and not to inform; that it is no longer the prey of sentiment; that storytelling is no longer within its bounds; that, in the end, art is for art: in more sophisticated language — the language, that is, of the trade — formal manipulation, the physical fabric, the four sides of the canvas, the life of the forms are all entities and totalities unto themselves. This, I posit, is an aesthetic which most charitably can be called retrogressive. And, indeed, advanced painting and sculpture are not advanced. They merely pretend to be so. That an aesthetic which is compounded of so quaint an admixture of fin de siècle preciousness, pre-World War I plastic adventuresomeness, and misconstrued and misapplied philosophical notions from the Orient should masquerade as the most exhilarating of the most new is a wonder. Surely we are a confraternity of fools to be overawed at so shallow a charade.

What is the emotional life of these works? One would think that so large a measure of freedom, a loosing of all energies for a direct and elemental assault upon the canvas, would have enabled these artists to dredge up emotional attitudes and states beyond the dreams of the conventional artist; that the great surges and lunges, the vastness and range of the clamoring colors would have revealed emotional truths that pictorialiy, at least, were new. Alas, these works express little more than the most elemental and primitive emotional states. When they are supremely successful, they can, in a very general way, express sadness or joy. Nuances of emotional meaning are utterly outside their ken. One wishes that it were possible to recapture, in viewing these works, the heightened emotional state of the artist while he was at work; and I fear that it is only through an act of gigantic selldeception that one can re-experience the meaning of the act of creation.

A UNIQUE feature of this art is that no established criteria exist for aiding us to judge it. Amusingly enough, the most elevated philosophical altitude possible with these works is, I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like. For, indeed, can one say which is a good painting and which is not? One is reduced to saying, “This pleases me,” or “I like this.” By reducing judgment to so imbecile a level we become prey to arrant knavery and doleful charlatanry.

I have recently seen some prints by a young lady who has been working in the print mediums for but a few months. These prints exhausted the entire repertoire of devices made possible by the new print making. They were charged with a multitude of textures; surfaces were reticulated and coruscated to a remarkable degree. Great black welt like lines stood forth in bold relief, and the prints in general looked dangerously and awesomely professional. This young lady’s position is very much akin to that of Oscar Wilde, who in abject penury upon his deathbed asked for some champagne. When the champagne was delivered and Oscar had drunk it, he announced that he was dying beyond his means. In truth, this young lady is making prints beyond her means — in fact, one might say in harsher tones, “She does not know what she is doing.”

And in this sedulous aping of their elders by the young lies the great danger of the breakdown of critical criteria. I am old-fashioned enough to think that it is more difficult to become a consummate draftsman than to slash out an abstract expressionist painting. This probably strikes many people as the attitude of a Philistine. I have a vision, a dreadful vision, of young painters ten years hence, having grown disenchanted with a nonfigurative art, attempting to forge a new style and finding themselves helpless and impotent. Current training, with its lack of emphasis on what were once called the essentials, sends its young graduates into the field with no choice of weapon. The richness of stylistic variety which is possible when alternates are available becomes an impossibility when one way alone is fostered. It is only because some of the outstanding spirits of the modern painting have been thoroughly schooled and are well-equipped craftsmen that one must assess their work with seriousness. One recalls Matisse’s advice to a young painter: to submit himself to the most rigorous kind of training so that he may be able to realize successfully anything he undertakes in any manner.

The young are the victims of what their teachers and mentors hold to be proper. I dare say there is hardly a student professionally studying art who has not his eyes fixed in a glassy stare on Arts and Art News. There the fester is worsened. This is nothing less than a betrayal of our duty to the young.

THE essential subjectivity and violence of contemporary advanced art are, as has been pointed out upon numerous occasions, expressions of that breakdown of values which has accompanied us deep into the twentieth century. The urge toward noncommunicating, toward a retreat into the self, was the generative force for dadaism and surrealism. But how idyllic were the trenches of World War I compared to Hiroshima and Buchenwald of 1945! There is no question that the drive toward noncommunication in art is but one expression of man’s growing inability to communicate in general. Juvenile delinquency, for example, can be understood as adolescent inability to communicate. Within a single scientific discipline, the scientists can scarcely communicate with one another, so alien have become the dialects of specialization. Conformism is another expression of noncommunication. I would avow that Rotarians or Elks do not communicate, and the more boisterous and insane their behavior at national conventions, the more strident their noncommunication. The greater irony is that these noncommunicants are innocent of their noncommunicating.

Are we, then, trapped in an inevitable situation, the victims of our times, the slaves of our mores? Is Trotsky’s dictum true, that a decadent society must produce a decadent art? Could not the spur of consciousness and necessity drive us toward overcoming the imposition of a constraining Zeitgeist? To understand the societal forces of which this art is but an expression is by no means to condone it. The limitations of this art are so vast, its positive qualities so meager, that one would think that a reconsideration on the part of the artist would have been inevitable. And, from indications of a new spirit, as expressed in the new schools of figurative painting that are emerging in Chicago and San Francisco, such a re-evaluation is taking place. The shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called “The New Images of Man” and “Image and Idea” at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, reinforced this activity.

Lest anyone should suppose that in attacking abstract expressionism and impressionism I esteem any other current school of painting, I hasten to say that I find all academic painting, the so-called regional school of painting, and the dregs of socialist-realist painting even more repellent. I am in a position not unlike the man in Peter Arno’s cartoon who hates everyone, regardless of race, creed, or color. Although I have seemingly backed mysell into a most incommodious corner, I think, with that megalomania which is unique in artists, that there is a way out of this stultifying dilemma. The task for the intelligent painter or sculptor is somehow to synthesize the great discoveries of the modern movement and to graft that synthesis onto the stout, still-living trunk of tradition. This is obviously easier said than done. But done it must be. The alternative is to sink deeper and deeper into a morass of incoherent subjectivity and to produce works that can only be counted as acts of visceral despair and fecal delinquency.

The Renaissance humanists proclaimed that “nothing human must be considered alien.” And it is this dictum, with its grandeur and all-encompassing character, with its promise of what Emily Dickinson called “possibility,” that must serve us for a beacon. If I may call upon William Blake again, I would quote from his “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” the proverb “Bless Relaxes, Damn Braces,” which I read to mean: Damn all thaL constricts, all that narrows one’s vision, all that limits, all that renders meaner and closer, all that stultifies and hems in possibility; and bless all that enlarges, widens, broadens, and enhances. For all their vastness of size, the abstract expressionist canvases encompass a small segment of possibility. These artists are masters of a closet, and they have mistaken that closet for the chamber.

One could enlarge upon this theme almost endlessly, continuously Haying the leaders and their myrmidons for what amounts almost to a betrayal of the great struggle to make form and content fuse into one astounding entity. To isolate form, to produce art that is relevant only unto itsell, is frivolous. And I condemn these painters for producing arrant frivolities.

So what? From the towering heights of my outraged righteousness I reply, So nothing. Merely one eccentric holding forth, from an in position, that if painting and sculpture are not to rearrange themselves into an entirely new constellation, bearing little or no resemblance to all past art, then they must embark upon a path of rediscovery — a rediscovery of man and all of his works. For it is man that has been excluded; for it is man that has been denied.

Listen to Rico Lebrun: “Design is for me the speech of form tried and altered by vicissitudes. And because of this, the human figure is my favorite subject; I prefer its vertical, horizontal and oblique gestures to all other propositions of abstraction, being convinced that they are the richest and most alive in every sense.” And further: “I believe that if an authentic, unprecedented image of man is to appear, it will only be through a complete acceptance of that obligation to sponsor, reveal and celebrate man’s condition. This is a subject which cannot be prefabricated by conceits, but may condescend, now and then, to be measured by love; its terrain is immense. . . . Man is the organic and spiritual marvel and the text for revelations.

And then there are man’s works. One of the great ends of art is to tell a story. This assertion, which I firmly believe to be true, must outrage sophisticated sensibilities. And, indeed, storytelling holds no serious place in contemporary art. But is it so droll a notion? Must our Irame for considering this assertion be the vile Victorian caricature ol narrative? Let us rather think of Masaccio’s treatment of the expulsion, or Giotto’s telling of the life of Saint Francis. These are great and moving works. Is it true that these works are great despite their content, as Clive Bell or Ortega y Gasset would have us believe? The idea would have appalled Masaccio and Giotto as it continues to appall me. How fatheaded and loathsome to gauge these works by considering only their formal articulation. And this is what most contemporary artists do when confronted with these frescoes. Is the physical projection of anguish that shivers the bodies of Adam and Eve an adjunct of plastic manipulation? Or has this archetypal moment of divine rejection and human despair demanded for its realization the full range of Masaccio’s pictorial capabilities and genius? I am not suggesting priorities. But just as such gesturing and posturing would have been a sham if they were not buttressed with and built on a structure of total formal mastery, so too would the formal mastery alone be hollow and without substance. If you grant me this — and I fail to see how you cannot — then the necessity for the image is manifest. The Masaccio moves us. Indeed, it shakes us. And so do Grünewald, and Rembrandt, and Mantegna.

Have we, as twentieth-century humans, become so dehumanized that we can only participate in the art of the past as apprcciators and not as creators? Are we not kin to Goya? Then how can we abide an art that docs not bleed when we prick it? The art of our time is an art of cowardice, a triumph of the trivial, a squandering of treasure. The forging of works of art is one of man’s remaining semblances to divinity. Man has been incapable of love, wanting in charity, and despairing of hope. He has not molded a life of abundance and peace, and he has charred the earth and befouled the heavens more wantonly than ever before. He has made of Arden a landscape of Death. In this landscape we dwell, and with these images we must live.