I should start by laying my cards on the table and stating that as far as 'modernism' goes as an artistic movement (not very far one might add) I am an unabashed opponent, nay an enemy of it and everything it stands for. But I have been struck on reading 'Beauty and Art' by Elizabeth Prettlejohn on how flimsy a basis the whole idea rests, in fact as I shall argue today of the modernist movement first advocated by Roger Fry and his Bloomsbury coterie that the whole thing is really based on a misunderstanding.
The deep cultural collapse in the west which first began to make itself manifest in the closing years of the nineteenth century had no doubt many and varied causes. Today I shall be talking about Fry and his role in the collapse but it is important to remember that born in 1866 as he was, he was of the first generation to come to maturity in a cultural world already beginning to fall apart. It was in that atmosphere of decadence and revolt that he formed his theories of art which sadly have proved so influential, but although he is portrayed as in some ways revolutionary, in fact like all second rate thinkers he was absolutely in accord with his times.
When Fry first began lecturing about art in the early 1900's he was happy to talk about beauty in art and to acknowledge that part of the beauty was intrinsically linked to the subject matter of the painting in question. He was prepared to admit in other words that the artist's treatment of the subject literally 'informed' his approach, that is influenced his formal treatment of the abstract elements of colour, line, mass and so on. In Fry's own terminology he admitted the intertwining of 'pure form' and 'associated ideas' both in the mind of the artist and the spectator.
Later he had a bit of a re-think. In doing so he rejected the use of the word 'beauty' as a desirable quality in art on the not unreasonable grounds that the word is so over used as a response to so many and diverse things that it had become meaningless and didn't really describe the particular response one has before a work of art. The term he came up with to describe a favourable aesthetic response was, well, 'favourable aesthetic response', nothing if not literal our Roger! However that's not to say he was wrong to seek clarity, in his own words our response to a beautiful work of art was 'different from our praise of a woman, a horse or a sunset as beautiful' and thus a different term was required. What Fry was doing was separating our response to the formal quality of a painting from our response to 'associated ideas' but in so doing he rejected all of the later as worthless and indeed damaging to the former.
Now in my post on the two Botticellis in the Louvre I made it quite clear that I think our premier response to a work of art is to formal qualities, in that respect I can go along with Fry's argument. However it seems to me that the great misunderstanding came from his next step. Having decided that 'pure from' (the phrase was coined by Clive Bell but soon picked up by other critics) was the sine qua non of painting he was then obliged to find painting which seem to emphasis form at the expense of associated ideas. He found, as the world knows, Cezanne, and the rest is a very sorry history. The qualities Fry praised in Cezanne though was an emphasis on the forms of painting and a disregard for associated ideas. Cezanne painted banal still-lives, a few apples on a table, a jug and cloth that sort of thing but he did so clumsily, the process was evident the fact that the 'apples' were really just smudges of red or yellow paint made it apparent to Fry that if he had a 'favourable aesthetic response' to Cezanne it had to be to the paint - to the formal qualities of the work, because to put it frankly, there wasn't much else.
The problem of course, immediately apparent to anybody who is capable of looking sensitively at great art, is that the presence of associated ideas need not obscure the formal qualities of a work. It is precisely for this reason that I preferred the one Botticelli to the other and I believe that it is the reason why most of us prefer the pictures we do. Now, I do believe that associated ideas can be too forcibly expressed and if the artists makes too much of his subject it can detract from the artistry of the piece and I shall be talking more about this delicate balancing act in a later post. For now I just want to stress that it was a weakness in Fry's aesthetic sensitivity which made him unable to see the formal qualities of a picture unless they were unduly emphasised by clumsy handling. Incidentally Simon Schama revealed the same weakness in his lamentable series on art for the BBC a few years back. Happy to talk about complementary colours and the like in front of a Rothko, after all what else is there and a critic must say something! However in front of a Velasquez the beautiful tone poetry becomes invisible and he starts talking about the looks on people's faces, the story. Poor Velasquez, he took too literally the motto that the art was to conceal the art, and Schama could no longer see it!
Fry too makes a great play for example of the way Cezanne loses and finds his edges in a still life but Cezanne does it in a way that you can spot from the other side of a gallery by drawing a harsh outline and then in places striking through it with clashing diagonal strokes which make up the fruit. But was Fry really unaware that this play of edges has been a delight and a challenge to painters for centuries, and had he really never noticed the infinitely more subtle and pleasurable way great artists such as Titian or Vermeer had handled edges? Whistler famously remarked in court that trying to make a lawyer understand his painting would be like 'pouring notes into the ear of a deaf man', it seems , to extend the analogy that Fry could only hear a song if it was bellowed in his face.
Below we can see the still life by Cezanne of which Fry wrote so rapturously and by contrast a Vermeer, 'The Milkmaid.' I am not saying by any means that the Cezanne has no merit only that in the specific matter of handling edges it says loudly and clumsily what the Vermeer says with infinitely greater judgement and delicacy.
The tragedy is that because Fry was unable to see the formal qualities of a painting unless they were so unduly stressed, to the exclusion of all other qualities, he built a whole philosophy of art which encouraged and validated clumsiness and banality, the results of which are are still living with today. The great mistake is to think think that artists of the past even though they were concerned with subject were not concerned with the formal qualities of picture making, if they weren't then they wouldn't have been painters. Of course Fry being a 'modern' and anxious to make his way in the world realised he it would be difficult to attract attention to himself by pointing out the skill of a painter like Vermeer, others had done that already, so he cast about to find something contemporary and without a champion (in Britain at least) and thus led the campaign for the post impressionists and primitive art from Africa and elsewhere. It would though, for someone with more sensitivity, or perhaps, less ambition, have been quite easy to do a 'formalist' critique of this Vermeer picture in the style of Fry, dwelling on, apart from the play of edges, such things as the rhythms, the handling of tonal values, the opposition of complementary colours the juxtapostion of vertical and diagonal lines, all of these things were at the front of Vermeer's mind over the months, perhaps years, he spent creating this picture. All of these things work in a complementary way together with the subject to create a unified aesthetic experience, an experience modernism would deny us.
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