MODERN ART: The Rise Of Modernism

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

Today marks the 30 year memorial of Peter’s passing, below is Matthew Colling’s BBC tribute to Peter from 1990.

The Rise Of Modernism

by Peter Fuller

This series of seminars began by pointing to a weakness in the traditional Marxist approach to art, a weakness manifest in the writings of Marx himself, which is immediately raised when we ask the question: How do works of art outlive their origins? I suggested that Sebastiano Timpanaro had pointed to the direction in which we might look for an answer by emphasising the relative biological constancy of ‘the human condition’, a constancy which underlies socio-economic historical variation. I further argued that psychoanalysis, at least psychoanalysis understood as a theory of biological meaning, could thereby be expected to provide a significant component in any materialist aesthetics.

In these last two seminars we will look at what would be another Achilles’ heel of Marxist approaches to works of art, were it possible to have more than one. We will approach the problem of abstraction, or, more generally, why it is that certain types of art which seem to bear no discernible relationship to the perception of the objective world not only appear to us to be ‘good’ but are also capable of giving us intense pleasure.

However 1 am afraid that once again it is going to be necessary to burrow towards tentative answers in a rather labyrinthine way. To hark back to our last session, it may well appear to you at times that I have arrived here with a bag of disjointed fragments. But I would ask you to bear with me. Although it may sometimes seem that we are toying with an extraneous left foot that got attached to the torso of the argument in error, I think, in fact, it does add up.

I would like to begin by referring to a book called, On Not Being Able to Paint, written by Marion Milner, and published in 1950. This book is well-known among educationalists and psychologists, though not, I think, among artists, nor indeed anywhere within the art world. In one sense I suppose that is not surprising: what title could be more seemingly irrelevant to someone who does paint than, On Not Being Able to Paint! In fact, however, Milner’s book is among the most interesting of all texts by practising psychoanalysts on art.

In her introduction, Milner explains how she had spent five years in schools making a scientific study of the way in which children were affected by orthodox educational methods; she found herself subject to growing misgivings about this work and felt that these misgivings were connected with the ‘problem of psychic creativity’. Gradually she came to the view that ‘somehow the problem might be approached through studying one specific area in which I myself had failed to learn something that I wanted to learn.’1 That something, for Milner, was painting:

‘Always, ever since early childhood, I had been interested in learning how to paint. But in spite of having acquired some technical facility in representing the appearance of objects my efforts had always tended to peter out in a maze of uncertainties about what a painter is really trying to do. ’2 The choice of painting as the means towards finding out something about ‘the general educational problem’ was facilitated when Milner discovered that ‘it was possible at times to produce drawings or sketches in an entirely different way from that I had been taught, a way of letting hand and eye do exactly what pleased them without any conscious working to a preconceived intention.’ The book chronicles her attempt to learn to paint largely through the making of drawings in this way. Now I cannot summarise the richness of Milner’s text here, but I do want to focus upon two moments within it. One is what she has to say about her problems with perspective; the other concerns the nature of outline.

Milner explains that at first instead of ‘trying to puzzle out the meaning’ of her free drawings, she carried on ‘trying to study the painter’s task from books’. Up until this point she had assumed that all the painter’s practical problems to do with representing distance, solidity, the grouping of objects, dif­ferences of light and shade and so on were matters for common sense, combined with careful study. ‘But,’ she writes, ‘when I tried to begin such careful study there seemed some unknown force interfering.’ It soon became clear to her the difficulty was that ‘the imaginative mind could have strong views of its own on the meanings of light, distance, darkness and so on.’ A particular instance of this was the interference of imagination in perspective drawing. This is how Milner describes it:

‘In spite of having been taught, long ago at school, the rules of perspective, I had recently found that whenever a drawing showed more or less correct perspective, as in drawing a room for instance, the result seemed not worth the effort. But one day I had tried drawing an imaginary room . . . and after a struggle, had managed to avoid showing the furniture in correct per­spective. The drawing had been more satisfying than any earlier ones, though I had no notion why. ’3 It then occurred to her that ‘it all depended upon what aspects of objects one was most concerned with’:

‘It was as if one’s mind could want to express the feelings that come from the sense of touch and muscular movement rather than from the sense of sight. In fact it was almost as if one might not want to be concerned, in drawing, with those facts of detachment and separation that are introduced when an ob­serving eye is perched upon a sketching stool, with all the at­tendant facts of a single-view-point and fixed eye-level and horizontal lines that vanish. It seemed one might want some kind of relation to objects in which one was much more mixed up with them than that.’4

Now at first it seemed to Milner that her ‘unwillingness to face the visual facts of space and distance must be a cowardly at­titude, a retreat from the responsibilities of being a separate person.’ But it did not feel to her entirely like a retreat; it felt, she writes, ‘more like a search, a going backwards perhaps, but a going back to look for something, something which could have real value for adult life if only it could be recovered. ’5 Milner had read that ‘painting is concerned with the feelings conveyed by space’, but she realised that before she herself set out to learn to paint she had taken space for granted and never reflected upon what it might mean in terms of feeling:

‘But as soon as I did begin to think about it, it was clear that very intense feelings might be stirred. If one saw it as the primary reality to be manipulated for the satisfaction of all one’s basic needs, beginning with the babyhood problem of reaching for one’s mother’s arms, leading through all the separation from what one loves that the business of living brings, then it was not so surprising that it should be the main preoccupation of the painter ... So it became clear that if painting is concerned with the feelings conveyed by space then it must also be to do with problems of being a separate body in a world of other bodies which occupy different bits of space: in fact it must be deeply concerned with ideas of distance and separation and having and losing.’6 Milner also comments:

‘There were many other aspects of the emotions conveyed by space to be considered. For instance, once you begin to think about distance and separation it is also necessary to think about different ways of being together, or in the jargon of the painting books, composition. ’7 Thus Milner came to see that original work in painting ‘would demand facing certain facts about oneself as a separate being’, facts, she felt, ‘that could often perhaps be successfully by­passed in ordinary living. ’

I now want to turn to what Milner says about outline. It was, she writes, ‘through the study of outline in painting that it became clearer what might be the nature of the spiritual dangers to be faced, if one was to see as the painter sees.’ She then points out that, until she set out on this attempt to learn to paint through free drawings, she ‘had always assumed in some vague way that outlines were “real” ’. In a book about drawing, however, she read that ‘from the visual point of view . . . the boundaries (of masses) are not always clearly defined, but are continually merging into the surrounding mass and losing themselves, to be caught up again later on and defined once more.’8 She then started to look at the objects around her more carefully and found that this was true:

‘When really looked at in relation to each other their outlines were not clear and compact, as I had always supposed them to be, they continually became lost in shadow. Two questions emerged here. First, how was it possible to have remained unaware of this fact for so long? Second, why was such a great mental effort necessary in order to see the edges of objects as they actually show themselves rather than as I had always thought of them?’9 Milner then says that outlines put objects in their place\ this seemed the crux of the matter. ‘For,’ she writes:

‘I noticed that the effort needed in order to see the edges of objects as they really look stirred a dim fear, a fear of what might happen if one let go one’s mental hold on the outline which kept everything separate and in its place.’ Milner then goes on to describe a key experience:

‘After thinking about this I woke one morning and saw two jugs on the table; without any mental struggle I saw the edges in relation to each other, and how gaily they seemed almost to ripple now that they were freed from this grimly practical business of enclosing an object and keeping it in its place. This was surely what painters meant about the play of edges; certainly they did play and I tried a five-minute sketch of the jugs . . . Now also it was easier to understand what painters meant by the phrase “freedom of line’’ because here surely was a reason for its opposite; that is, the emotional need to imprison objects rigidly within themselves. Milner began to perceive that we believe outlines are real (unless we learn to paint) despite the fact that they are, as one ‘Learn to Paint’ book puts it, ‘the one fundamentally unrealistic, non- imitative thing in this whole job of painting’. But because the outline represents the world of fact, of separate, touchable, solid objects, ‘to cling to it was therefore surely to protect oneself against the other world, the world of imagination.’12 Milner thus came to see that insistence upon the reality of outline was associated with:

‘. . . a fear of losing all sense of separating boundaries; par­ticularly the boundaries between the tangible realities of the external world and the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea; in fact a fear of being mad. ’13 She even ventured the aside:

‘. . . I wondered, if perhaps this was one reason why new experiments in painting can arouse such fierce opposition and anger. People must surely be afraid, without knowing it, that their hold upon reason and sanity is precarious, else they would not so resent being asked to look at visual experience in a new way, they would not be so afraid of not seeing the world as they have always seen it and in the general, publicly agreed way of seeing it.’

Later, we will return to the question of the relationship between insistence upon perspective and outline and history; however, for the moment let us leave Milner with her intriguing problems over objective space and the rippling boundaries of her jugs, at least for the time being, and pick up another of the pieces that I am trying to fit together in this seminar.

This section, as a matter of fact, concerns me intimately: we have reached what seems to have become a regular feature in these seminars, the autobiographical interlude. Now I want to tell you something about the changes, I would say the growth, in—I’ll keep the word for the moment—my ‘taste’ since childhood.

As far as I can remember, I first became interested in paintings when I was seven or eight years old. My father had a great many illustrated art books, and I would take these down from his shelves and look at them. My family also frequently visited art galleries and stately homes but, significantly perhaps,

I think I got more at least at first, from the art books. Initially there was an element of naked sexual investigation about my looking. I saw a lot of different works of art in reproduction, but by and large I was most impressed by those of women without their clothes. At first my art appreciation was ac­companied by some guilt feelings; the books belonged to my father and I did not have his permission to gaze upon them. The Oedipal component in this looking is so transparent that it is hardly worth commenting on. Incorporation of visual images is one of the ways in which from infancy to old age we take possession in fantasy of that which we cannot (but wish we could) possess in reality. But despite the primitive character of my interest in art at this time, it would be wrong to suppose that it was entirely without that which someone like Clive Bell might have diagnosed as a rudimentary ‘aesthetic sensibility’.

Let me explain more fully: at first, I did not make much distinction between medical books (of which my father also had a great many) and art books. But soon I was aware of a sense of goodness when I set eyes upon, say, the Rokeby Venus in reproduction, which I did not feel when I looked at, say, Plate V of ‘An Atlas of Gas Poisoning’ contained in a Medical Manual of Chemical Warfare which illustrated, as it so happens, ‘Blistering of the Buttocks by Mustard Gas’. Now this sense of ‘goodness’ could not be explained by reference to the im­mediate sensuousness of the subject matter alone, which was often similar in those art books and medical manuals which interested me—though in the latter, of course, it tended to be more explicit. Nor, I think, could it be wholly accounted for by saying that art allowed me to indulge my unacceptable ‘in­stinctual’ voyeuristic impulses in an acceptable way. This could be no more than a part of the truth, if that. Borrowing art books was no less an offence than borrowing medical books. Despite the specificities of the latter I soon came to prefer the former.

This rather vague sense of ‘goodness’ which I derived from certain paintings, even in black-and-white and colour repro­ductions, had much to do with the development of my ‘taste’. If I was a certain kind of writer about art, I would no doubt claim that this sense of ‘goodness’ and my quest for it represented the awakening of a pure, unsullied, autonomous, ‘aesthetic sensibility’ to ‘Significant Form’, or something of the kind, in the midst of all that crudely sexual researching. But personally, I am inclined to doubt this.

To speak formally, for a moment, it seems to me when I look back that my pursuit of ‘goodness’ was bound up, among other things, with a growing capacity to take greater risks with outline in my perception and enjoyment of images. At first, I was not greatly interested in either colour or what is now called the ‘materiality’ of the paint. Subject matter and drawing were what concerned me most, which was why a black-and-white reproduction was almost as good as the real thing. I began by liking Ingres, where the woman’s body was tightly contained within a constraining outline. I progressed towards Botticelli: despite his ‘naturalism’, his paintings had an abstracted, arabesque quality which was somehow much less insistent on being ‘real’. For example, I was fascinated by the fact that in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus you can still see where the artist changed the position of the outline of the right arm, a degree of ambivalence which would have been quite inconceivable in a major painting by Ingres. Then I became interested in Modigliani, a painter again who insists on the reality of line— where would Modigliani be without it?—but who often hints at a kind of mergence between the figure bound in by the outline and the background against which she is set. (There are some Modiglianis in which it is hard to tell whether a particular passage of paint is depicting flesh, wall, or both.) Later still, I became interested in Matisse—yes, still outline of course, but in him it becomes provocatively fluid, as tremulous and variable as we see it in the real world, rather than as rigid as the non­painters among us often imagine it to be.

I remember that I was stimulated both to start looking seriously at modern art (which was, of course, ignored when it was not derided within the ‘19th century’ culture in which I spent my childhood) and to paint myself through a triggering contingency: seeing Tony Hancock’s film, The Rebel. I was fourteen at the time. Some of you may remember what, in truth, was a rather banal plot. Hancock plays a ‘modernist’ artist of little ability who shares a Parisian garret with a representational artist of great ability. The only thing they have in common is that they are both poor and unknown. One day, Hancock is in the garret and is ‘discovered’; however, he is assumed to be the producer of his friend’s works. These are duly exhibited and Hancock is celebrated on account of them. But soon the pressure is on him to produce more canvases of similar quality, which, of course, he cannot do. Eventually his friend, who for reasons I cannot recall colludes with the mistaken identity, supplies him with a fresh batch of works. These turn out to be abstract paintings; Hancock is horrified and convinced that ‘his’ career is finished. But the backers and critics acclaim these abstract works as loudly as they did the representational ones. Hancock, who thought it was all a question of style, shrugs his shoulders and gives up any attempt to make sense of the art world.

All right: the film was silly enough. I’m certainly not recommending it. It may well have been intended as a satire on the values of the art world, but the message I took away from it was that facility in ‘objective’ representation was not decisive. Up until this time, I had always been relatively indifferent to drawing and painting myself because I was hopelessly inept at what seemed to be the essentials of these practices, and which had indeed been taught as such in my preparatory school, i.e. mastery of such things as perspective and ‘realistic’ outline. Perhaps at this stage in my life I was simply too dissociated from the external world: anyway, I could not even begin to draw in that sort of way. But, when I saw The Rebel, it confirmed a dawning realisation that these were not the only things which counted in image making: this was given tremendous en­couragement by a sympathetic art teacher at public school. And so I entered into a prodigious period of pictorial productivity which really persisted, whatever else I was doing, until I was twenty-one. This was checked, at various times, by a desire— never to be fulfilled—to master the ‘objective’ aspects of drawing. I remember my art teacher once patiently trying to teach me how to draw light and shadow using the surface of an egg as a model—at my own request. It was no use, and I gave up in despair. On another occasion, I abandoned all imaginative explorations, and tried to study artist’s anatomy, and ‘How to Draw the Nude’ books. That did not last either. These two images—both done about the same time, when I was sixteen—indicate the discrepancy between my capacity to depict, as it were, representations of objects in my ‘inner’ and in the ‘outer’ world.

As a matter of fact, that discrepancy never was resolved in terms of my practice as a maker of visual images. My ‘taste’ however did not develop in harness with my creativity. I continued to admire those who were exemplary of that which I was least able to do myself. (I spent many hours gazing at Leonardo’s drawings in a book in the school library.) Of course,

I did become increasingly interested in abstract painting; by the time I was fifteen, I had developed a passion for Mondrian. I even remember writing a poem about him in the style of Robert Browning’s marvellous ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’. Looking back on the development of my relationship to abstract art I am inclined to the view that what was important for me was the affective meaning of the space, and that there was a sense in which at times, though not often and not for long, I could do without the presence of the figure itself. At least I am aware that, once established, the trajectory of my pursuit of abstract painting closely paralleled that of my changing interest in the figure. I got to know Mondrian largely through colour reproductions: I did not realise, therefore, just how painterly some of his works are. I read him essentially as a painter of outline, an Ingres, if you like. I responded to something almost clinical, contained and restrained, linear and ‘objective’ in his ‘classical’ works. Nonetheless, it was through Mondrian that I went on to look at Kandinsky, and later still, Klee, where I felt lost in a world of almost magical transformations and transfigurations. (On looking back at the copy of Klee’s On Modern Art which I had in adolescence I was interested to note that I had underlined the words, ‘I do not wish to represent the man as he is, but only as he might be’15—an idea which was to play a central part in my later aesthetics.)

The painters I was able to appreciate last were those whose space seemed to me to be an attempt to fuse internal and ex­ternal: this was, of course, something I responded to affectively (often initially by defensive boredom) rather than something I thought through intellectually. Although I looked voraciously at everything I came across, I had difficulty with impressionist painting for a long time, because the concrete world just seemed too subjectivised there, too insubstantial, too close to diffusion and dissolution. (I think the lateness of my interest in colour had much to do with this, too. Again, to speak af­fectively rather than epistemologically, colour seems to be the most subjective of an object’s properties; to depict the world through colour alone felt, to me, like depriving it of actuality and solidity, qualities which, psychologically speaking, were difficult enough for me to recognise anyway.) Much the same went for Cezanne, too. Cubism simply did not interest me, or enter my world, until I was at least seventeen.

But, as my interest in painting deepened, artists who were involved in this fusion came to interest me more and more. For example, among painters of the female figure whom I began to enjoy after initial indifference with what I can only somewhat pompously describe as a sense of ‘awakening goodness’ were Bonnard and De Kooning. I am not sure when I first began to like Bonnard: I saw the Royal Academy show in 1966. It must have been about that time. But it is only very recently that I have allowed myself to realise just what an important painter he is for me. In his work, the woman is entirely unleashed from her outline. Berger has brilliantly described what he calls ‘the risk of loss’ in a Bonnard painting, the fact that the figure is ‘simultaneously an absence and a presence,’ because she is ‘potentially everywhere except specifically near.’16 He describes how in a Bonnard painting one is confronted with ‘the image of a woman losing her physical limits, overflowing, overlapping every surface until she is no less and no more than the genius loci of the whole room.’17 You can see this most literally in paintings like The Open Window of 1921—and it is by no means the only one like this—where you sense the fleshly presence of a woman in the whole picture surface, but you do not at first (and sometimes not even at length) notice that Bonnard has literally included an equivocal representation of a woman, in this instance in the extreme bottom right-hand corner of the picture. Although Berger has described this aspect of Bonnard better than any other writer I have read, he is rather critical of it, indeed of Bonnard’s work as a whole.

For myself, let me just say at this stage that this apparent loss of the physical limits of the woman’s body, this restless overlapping, was, I think, what prevented me from enjoying Bonnard when I first saw his work. I was frightened by it, and I covered my fear, as is so often the case, with a veneer of in­difference. Later, the painter Robert Natkin told me the story of a visit by Balthus to an art gallery where a Bonnard hung between a Picasso and a Soutine. Balthus looked at the Picasso, and then at the Soutine, and finally at the Bonnard—at which he exclaimed, ‘Ah! At last, real violence.’ I knew what he meant at once. Today I would say that it is this very in­determinacy of outline, the peculiar kind of space one gets in Bonnard which both is, and is not, based on a perspectival pictorial structure, which, in its imagery as well as through the way that it is painted fuses inner with outer—(it is no accident that one of Bonnard’s favourite themes is an open window simultaneously revealing interior and exterior, another a body almost literally dissolving in water)—that accounts for the intensity of pleasure which I can derive from looking at his works. Do you know Bonnard’s drawings? His lines at first seem to be a literal con-fusion: he seems to me to draw fluently in a way which Milner was struggling towards in that moment with her two jugs.

Pierre Bonnard, The Open Window, 1921

Now Bonnard offers a highly equivocal sort of space. When he paints a woman, an interior, or a landscape, he makes it very unclear indeed who is separate from what, what merges with whom, who belongs where, out there, or in here. I see works of this kind as almost, but not quite, the culmination of that search for ‘goodness’ which began, I suppose, when I noticed that slight blurring or warm fuzzing in the outline of the Rokeby Venus which differentiates it from Ingres, and in­cidentally from pin-ups. Now I am aware that much of my interest in certain ‘abstract’ painters, like De Kooning, Rothko, and Natkin, could be seen as the final step in what has been a relatively continuous, if uneven transformation of an aspect of my taste from the time when I first started poring over Ingres in reproduction. Harold Rosenberg once wrote of De Kooning that in his mature work, ‘landscapes and the human figure become in Shakespeare’s phrase “dislimned and indistinct as water”.’18In Natkin one just goes right over the edge. Out­line vanishes altogether; one is confronted with a sensuous skin of paint which then bursts open into a limitless vista. One moves into a painted world where nothing is locked by line and everything exists in a boundless and plenitudi- nous state of transformation and becoming. I look upon it, and find it ‘good’, though more than a trace of the fear that would have stopped me looking at Natkin at all a few years ago remains. Now I will have a lot more to say about this change in my taste later on. Next time, I will talk in detail about the affective meanings of the space in Natkin and Rothko. But, for the moment, I want to stop here and pick up another of the pieces out of which this seminar is made. This will involve us in a little art history.

Some of you may have an idea of the particular historical perspective with which I have surrounded my art criticism over the last few years.19 However, for the purposes of our argument it is necessary to outline it briefly here.

I try never to let people forget that the idea of ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) is of extremely recent origins. In England, we do not find the words ‘Art’ and ‘artists’ used in the sense in which they are used today, i.e. as referring to imaginative skills and practitioners, rather than to just any skills, until the end of the 18th century. The word ‘Art’ came into being with the rise of the middle-classes and the emergence of a professional'Fine Art tradition. The nature of the Fine Art tradition varied con­siderably from country to country: for example, in the Italian city states at the time of the Renaissance some artists seemed to spring directly out of the indigenous craft traditions; they were acclaimed as men of ‘genius’ and, unlike the ‘primitives’, their own name was attached to their work. In Britain, however, such immediate transcendence out of the craft traditions was not possible. The craft traditions had fallen into decadence before the waning of High Feudalism; they were obliterated through the iconoclasm of the British Reformation. Until the 18th century, fine artists were effectively imported. However, everywhere that national Fine Art traditions established themselves they were characterised by a particular training. Professional fine artists acquired the skillful use of a specific set of pictorial conventions: conventions of pose, anatomy, chiaroscuro and above all perspective. Now these were not taught as historical variables, but as being the way of depicting ‘The Truth’. Hitherto, with Berger, I have argued that these conventions equipped fine artists to depict the world from the point of view of that class which they served, and that only the exceptions tried to defy their training by, as it were, forcing the conventions they had learned to serve the point of view of another class. I still consider that there is much truth in this. Nonetheless, I would now maintain that the science of ex­pression, as elaborated theoretically by Alberti and as practised by such artists as Leonardo and Michelangelo, had a concrete, cultural and class transcendent basis in anatomy, which prevented it from being reducible to a mere ideological in­stance.

It is, however, undeniable that the growth of professional Fine Art traditions was accompanied by the efflorescence of an accompanying ideology of ‘Art’ which was elaborated by artists, art historians, critics, and later museum officials. This ideology turned ‘Art’ into a transhistorical universal and projected it, together with its values, back into the earliest known social formations. As the great archaeological discoveries of the 19th century were made, fine artists came more and more to see themselves as the consummation of an unbroken continuum of ‘Art’ stretching back from the Royal Academy to prehistoric caves.

However, the reality behind this ideological mystification was rather different. Although in every known civilisation men and women had always made visual images of one sort and another, they had done so in a great variety of different ways, and these images had served a multitude of different functions. (Nonetheless, and this is a point insufficiently emphasised in my previous analyses, certain specific practices, most notably painting and sculpture, can be shown to have a material continuity since the beginnings of human civilisation.) Prior to the rise of the professional Fine Art traditions, there was no equivalent of either ‘art’ or artists; but Fine Art’s mystification of itself allowed it to disguise the fact that its status was changing profoundly with the development of new means of visual image making—like photography and lithography. These really came into their own when monopoly capitalism displaced the old entrepreneurial capitalist system, and the bourgeoisie as a progressive class began to wither. Associated with the emergence of monopoly capitalism was the ef­florescence of what I have designated as ‘The Mega-Visual Tradition’: by that I mean that whole welter of means of producing and reproducing images which includes not just photography, mass colour printing, lithography, and hol­ography, but the moving pictures of cinema and television, too. Indeed, I argue that just as free-standing oil painting was the dominant form of static visual imagery under en­trepreneurial capitalism, advertising is the dominant form of static visual image making under monopoly capitalism.

Now this process of displacement of the old Fine Art tradition from the task of conveying the world-view of the bourgeoisie initially had the effect of opening up possibilities for the imaginative artist. He was no longer pinned down within a particular ‘visual ideology’. For a very brief period— roughly from the time of Cezanne’s maturity in the 1880s until the death of Cubism — what I would characterise as a ‘progressive’ Modernist movement (or rather plethora of related movements) thus came into being.

Certain of the artists in some of these movements at­tempted—in some instances consciously, in others not—to act as visual prophets of the new world order which they felt was in the process of coming into being. We must not forget the exhilarating promise which seemed to be implicit in the advance of the bourgeoisie throughout the 19th century, a promise which seemed to be on the very threshold of realisation in the technological progress associated with emergent monopoly capitalism. An attainable vision of the transformation of the world into a place where the problem of need had been solved and natural resources fully socialised seemed to be at hand. I agree with Berger when he depicts Cubism as an attempt (even if it was not recognised as such by those engaged in it) to struggle out of the old perspective-based Fine Art conventions towards a half-expression of a new way of seeing and represent­ing the world appropriate to what seemed to be the new, emergent world order.20 Actually, this initiative was smashed to pieces by the First World War and the long, and still con­tinuing, series of historic calamities and catastrophes which put an end, forever, to hopes for a peaceful, ‘evolutionary’ tran­sition to the new Utopia.

By and large, it is possible to characterise Modernism after the decline and disillusionment of the great avant-garde movements as a retreat, by artists, from even the attempt to articulate a historic world-view to replace the now displaced 19th century, middle-class optic and perspective. The reasons for this retreat appear to have been two-fold: on the one hand, history seems simply to have dazed and outstripped artists; on the other, the ‘Mega-Visual Tradition’ continued to pump out an ever escalating quantity of banalising lies as the century progressed, swamping, marginalising, disrupting and eclipsing the products and practices of fine artists.

Thus Berger has described most post-First-World-War Western Art as a sort of epilogue to the European and American 19th century professional Fine Art traditions, an epilogue in which painting is reduced to a dialogue with itself, about itself, because there is no other area of experience upon which it can touch meaningfully, except itself. I have elaborated the notion of the kenosis or self-emptying of the Fine Art tradition: kenosis is a term I borrowed from theology. I am using it to refer to the apparent relinquishment of the professional and conventional skills by Fine Artists and to the abandonment of the omni­potent power the painter once seemed to possess to create, like God, a whole world of objects in space through illusions on a canvas. I see this general kenosis as having been ruptured at various points—most notably after the Second World War in Europe, New York, London, Chicago and elsewhere—by tremendous outbursts of expressionism in which artists at­tempted to find ways of speaking meaningfully of their ex­perience, including historical experience, once more. Nonethe­less, the process of kenosis, with these occasional regenerative hiccups, proceeds.

That is the historical perspective which underlies my critical practice. By and large, it still seems to me to be a truthful and a useful analysis. But I now want to modify it slightly. I want to approach the problem in a rather different way.

To this end, I now wish to produce the next fragment of that statue which I am piecing together. It consists of a book by Clive Bell, called simply Art, first published in 1914, that pivotal year in the destiny of the old professional Fine Art traditions and, as it turned out, of much else besides. Together with Roger Fry, Bell is often regarded on the Left as the source of all the trouble. Fry and Bell are seen as the theoretical precursors of the self-critical formalism of late Modernism. In them, we find the elaboration of the idea that ‘Art’ constitutes an autonomous, self-contained, entity which we can only truly experience if and because it evokes in us certain types of sui generis emotion, which have nothing to do with other human emotions, or with lived experience beyond the experience of art. Art, they maintain, should thus be appreciated without reference to the representational, psychological, social, politi­cal, religious, or other non-aesthetic considerations which it might evoke.

Let me say straight away, to preclude the possibility of misunderstanding, I am absolutely not about to re-habilitate Bell: he was opinionated, arrogant, ultimately down-right reactionary—one of the nastiest weeds to have flourished in Bloomsbury, and he got it all (or almost all) wrong to boot.21 But equally, if I am not going to rehabilitate Bell, I am not going to kick him either: that would be much too easy. The brand of aesthetic formalism to which his kind of critical thinking gave rise has been getting an atrocious press recently. Formalism is no longer a cultural danger or a worthy opponent. On the other hand, I would maintain not just that Bell’s book is a key text in the emergent ideology of late Modernism (which it is), but also that embodied within it are kernels of truth which have escaped almost all of those who have put forward critiques of formalism from left positions. With a little help from psychoanalysis, I want to isolate one of those kernels of truth, to extract it, unravel it, and preserve it. It not only constitutes something germane to my argument, but also that which ‘Social Criticism’, the rising orthodoxy, seems in danger of losing sight of altogether.

Let me explain.

Bell claims to offer ‘a complete theory of visual art’, and in many ways it is a very simple theory. He argues that ‘all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of “works of art” we gibber.’22 He then asks, ‘What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?’ And he arrives at what seems to him the only possible answer:

‘—significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant Form’’; and “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of visual art. ’23 You can spot right away the sort of clangers which this rope of reasoning is going to wring from our Bell. What can be the status of ‘works of art’ which fail to stir his aesthetic emotions? According to the theory, they must lack Significant Form, and therefore, cannot by definition, be thought of as works of art at all. It is, I suppose, to Mr. Bell’s credit that he pushed this view through to its logical conclusion: most works of art are not works of art at all. The book is peppered with such observations as:

‘I cannot believe that more than one in a hundred works produced between 1450 and 1850 can be properly described as a work of art.’24 Or again:

‘. . . the Impressionists raised the proportion of works of art in the general pictorial output from about one in five hundred thousand to one in a hundred thousand. . . . Today I daresay it stands as high as one in ten thousand.’25 You also quickly come to realise that whatever stirs Clive Bell’s aesthetic emotion, it is not the products of the professional Fine Art tradition. It is no exaggeration to say that Bell had an almost hysterical disregard for the Renaissance (although he modified this position in his later works) and especially for its discovery of perspective. He calls the Renaissance ‘a strange new disease’, and ‘nothing more than a big kink in a long slope’. He often makes such comments as, ‘the decline from the 11th to the 17th century is continuous,’ or, ‘more first-rate art was produced in Europe between 500 and 900 than was produced in the same countries between 1450 and 1850,’ or:

‘This alone seems to me sure: since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cezanne. ’26 Now the curious thing about the way in which Mr. Bell argues is that it is precisely ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) in the historically- specific sense which he effectively denies to be art at all. Art, for Bell—i.e. that which stirs his aesthetic emotions—flourished among the so-called European Primitives of the Dark and Middle Ages, was all but extinguished by the Renaissance and that which followed it, and came to life again with Cezanne who ‘founded a movement’, a movement which Bell (writing before the First World War at a time when he would still have described himself as some sort of socialist) described as ‘the dawn of a new age’.

What did Bell have against the Renaissance? Well, he felt that during it ‘Naturalism’ and ‘Materialism’ had driven out what he called ‘pure aesthetic rapture’. He compalined that in the art of the Renaissance, ‘intellect is filling the void left by emotion’, and that the work of artists was being supplanted ‘by Science and culture’. These things, in Bell’s view, had nothing at all to do with art: he was even more scathing about 17th century Holland, another place where, he felt, art barely existed at all. ‘We have lost art,’ he wrote of Dutch painting of this period, ‘let us study science and imitation.’27 In short, he complains that ‘the outstanding fact is that with the Renaissance Europe definitely turns her back on the spiritual view of life.’28 Bell could not even accept the Impressionists, because, in his view, they were too scientific.

At this point, I simply want to raise the fact that Bell’s view of art is exceptionally close to his conception of religious ex­perience. He says that ‘Art and religion belong to the same world. Both are bodies in which men try to capture and keep alive their shyest and most ethereal conceptions. The kingdom of neither is of this world.’ He describes art as ‘an expression of that emotion which is the vital force in every religion . . . We may say that art and religion are manifestations of man’s religious sense if by “man’s religious sense’’ we mean his sense of ultimate reality.’2'' At one point, he even exclaims, ‘from the beginning art has existed as a religion concurrent with all other religions.’

Is all this, as Bell himself might have said, mere ‘gibbering’? In one sense, yes, I am afraid that it is: but, like religious piffle itself, it does contain that vital kernel which I referred to earlier. It is not enough simply to laugh at Bell and to throw ‘aesthetic emotion’ otlt of the window as so many of both the ‘left’ social critics and ‘right’ formalists have done. We have to do to Bell’s aesthetics what Feuerbach did to Christianity: we have to invert them, to locate the experiences which they describe in this world, to resolve them into their anthropological and biological determinants. I think this may be possible. For the moment, let us leave Bell with a passage in which he contrasts ‘the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation’ with ‘the snug foothills of warm humanity’. The latter, he writes, is ‘a jolly country’:

‘No one need be ashamed of enjoying himself there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little crestfallen in the cosy valleys. And let no one imagine, because he has made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art.’30

We will return to examine those thrilling raptures and those cold white peaks later, but I hope that by now at least some of you will be beginning to see where all our threads are going to be tied. I am suggesting that there is something significant in common between the difficulties Milner had with perspective and outline; the development of my taste from Ingres to Natkin and Rothko; the historical crisis in the Fine Art tradition; and Bell’s rejection of the most characteristic products of that tradition in favour of raptures on those cold, white peaks. That something was not just a retreat from experience: it was also a retrieval of it.

You will remember that I made some reference to Adrian Stokes’ ideas about ‘modelling modes’ and ‘carving modes’—a distinction which, of course, he regarded as being as relevant within painting as sculpture. Stokes, a Kleinian, tended to associate the carving mode with ‘the depressive position’, with the separateness, autonomy and otherness of the object; whereas he links the modelling mode with the ‘paranoid- schizoid’ position, with flatness, decoration, and failure to establish a separate identity, or to recognise the distinction and space between the self and the mother.

For a moment, I want to talk in gross generalities. I want to say, preposterously, that, prior to the Renaissance, the ideology of space and its representation in visual images was essentially a projection of the fused and con-fused infantile space of what Stokes calls the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position. Before I make what I mean by this a little clearer, I want to offer a warning: it is very difficult indeed for us to think ourselves back into an earlier spatial system, whether we are talking about an his­torical, or a biographical-developmental one. The commonest mistake when attempting to do so is to assume that the spatial system out of which one is, oneself, operating must have dawned upon those who first began to discover it like a self-evident truth, whereas in fact, of course, they felt it as a violent disruption of self-evident truths.

Let me give you a good example of this. Writing in 1876, Leslie Stephen commented on how the emergence of a new cosmology through the rise of modern science changed men and women’s perception of themselves and their world:

‘Through the roof of the little theatre on which the drama of man’s history had been enacted, men began to see the eternal stars shining in silent contempt upon their petty imaginings. They began to suspect that the whole scenery was but a fabric woven by their imaginations. ’31 Now that image seems to me vivid and good: but what is in­teresting is that elsewhere in the same book, speaking of his own late Victorian age, which was the inheritor of a world in which the old stage cloths had finally been, if not torn down, then ripped to shreds, Leslie Stephen could write:

‘Our knowledge has, in some departments, passed into the scientific stage. It can be stated as a systematic body of established truths. It is consistent and certain. The primary axioms are fixed beyond the reach of scepticism; each subordinate proposition has its proper place; and the conclusions deduced are in perfect harmony.’32

In other words, he saw the Victorian scientific world-view in very much the same way that a medieval school-man regarded his own cosmological world-view as a ‘systematic body’ of eternal truths existing in ‘perfect harmony’. Stephen, per­ceptive as he was, had no intimation of the fact that within thirty years of writing this passage, his cosmology would begin to be devastated as thoroughly as when Newtonian science finally revealed the ‘imaginary’ character of the medieval world-view. In the first of these seminars, we considered the way in which that water-shed of history, the First World War, was associated with the disintegration of the Victorian way of conceiving of the world, part of which was the rise of a new physics which put everything once more well within the reach of scepticism.

With that warning, let us turn to a text by the mathematician Kline about ‘early Christian and medieval artists’ who, he says:

‘. . . were content to paint in symbolic terms, that is, their settings and subjects were intended to illustrate religious themes and induce religious feelings rather than to represent real people in the actual and present world. The people and objects were highly stylized and drawn as though they existed in a flat, two dimensional vacuum. Figures that should be behind one another were usually alongside or above, Stiff draperies and angular attitudes were characteristic. The backgrounds of the paintings were almost always of a solid colour, usually gold, as if to em­phasize that the subjects had no connection with the real world.’33

That sort of description of medieval art seems true enough to us: essentially, I think that it is true; but it also leaves out of the account the degree to which the medieval painting was a depiction of ‘the real world’ as the medieval painter conceived it. Certainly, medieval painting is highly conventionalised, but then, as we have seen, outline and perspective are themselves conventions. It may be that there was a much greater correspondence than this quotation implies between the flat, planar earth of medieval cosmology, with its ascending and descending angels not subject to the laws of gravity, and its over-arching dome of a heaven above, and a hell below, and the flat, two-dimensional, ‘unreal’ way in which the painter depicted the world. I suspect that there is a sense in which the space in medieval paintings is expressive of the way in which men and women felt themselves to be within their world. We must therefore be careful when we say that the medieval painter worked ‘in symbolic terms’. Such statements are not entirely untrue. However they greatly over-emphasise the degree to which the painter conceived of the ‘real’ world in one way and then turned away from it and set about painting another ‘unreal’ or ‘religious’ world of symbol.

What I am saying is, of course, that the medieval painter was—as Milner put it when she had problems with per­spective—much more mixed up with his objects than were the painters of the Renaissance. He made much less distinction between internal and external space—and religious ideol­ogy encouraged, indeed enforced, this confusion. Religious cosmology was effectively the institutionalised version of a projection of a subjective space into the real world. Up there, you have the good heaven with its sustaining "and nurturing deities; down there, the bad hell into which all one’s own evil, destructive and aggressive impulses can be projected. The ‘real world’ is no more than an integral part of this system, which is freely peopled with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ father and mother imagos, and with winged and weightless creatures representing benign impulses, and hooved and cloven ones standing for bad. This, of course, is what I mean when I say that the conception of space prior to the Renaissance was, if we accept the Kleinian terminology, ‘paranoid-schizoid’.

The Renaissance changed that. To persist with our ex­travagant generalisations, the Renaissance involved that sifting out of mind from matter, of self from other, that recognition of space, distance and separateness which in individual de­velopment characterises the achievement of the ‘depressive - position’. Evidently, this can today be seen most clearly in those Renaissance paintings in which the conventional means were found for the introduction of the third dimension, that is, the rendering of recessive space, of distance, volume, mass, and visual effects. The initiation of these conventions, particularly through the re-creation of perspective, is, for me at any rate, what makes the painting of Duccio, Giotto, Lorenzetti, and Van Eyck so exciting. By the early 15th century, in the work of Brunelleschi—the elaborator of a complete system of focused perspective and the tutor of Donatello, Masaccio, and Fra Filippo—painting became very like a science; not only was it based upon its own laws and mathematical principles, but it had also become a significant means for the investigation and propagation of knowledge about the external world.

Perspective, too, was conventional; I do not wish to be thought to be saying that it allowed ‘truthful’ representations of the ‘real’. Like the medieval spatial representations before it, perspective did not even represent as the eye sees:

‘The principle that a painting must be a section of a projection requires . . . that horizontal lines which are parallel to the plane of the canvas, as well as vertical parallel lines, are to be drawn parallel. But the eye viewing such lines finds that they appear to meet just as other sets of parallel lines do. Hence in this respect at least the focused system is not visually correct. A more funda­mental criticism is the fact that the eye does not see straight lines at all . . . But the focused system ignores this fact of perception. Neither does the system take into account the fact that we ac­tually see with two eyes each of which receives a slightly different impression. Moreover, these eyes are not rigid but move as the spectator surveys a scene. Finally, the focused system ignores the fact that the retina of the eye on which the light rays impinge is a curved surface, not a photographic plate, and that seeing is as much a reaction of the brain as it is a purely physiological process. ’

As I have already suggested, perspective also became inflected by the class interests of those whom the professional artists who elaborated, practised and developed it, served. Nonetheless, when all this has been said, it remains true that perspective was essentially an attempt to explore the character of the world out there, the external world, and the properties and material relations through which exterior space was constituted. Tech­nically, perspective involved a literal carving, pushing or cutting back through the surface of the picture plane. Neither artists, nor other men and women, were any longer so ‘mixed up’ in the objects which they perceived. Affective representa­tions of space became increasingly rare.

As Bell perceived, we can (ignoring for a moment all the possible exceptions, of which there are many) say crudely that this separation out of men and women from the ‘paranoid- schizoid’ space of the medieval world characterised the task of the painter from the decline of Primitive Christian Art (which, you will recall, Bell loved) to the rise of Cezanne (whom he also loved). Michelangelo’s paintings, for example, seem to me in general less masterful than his sculptures because, in the paintings, he is, as it were, endeavouring to constitute ‘real’ bodies within what is essentially the older spatial modality and mythology.) During the long period from the rise of the Renaissance, until the emergence of Modernism, painters were, to continue with the Kleinian terminology, working through, or at least within, the ‘depressive position’.

At the time of Cezanne, however, we have already seen that the ideological obligation upon artists to elaborate an external world-view was rapidly diminishing. As the painter’s cultural position was usurped through the rise of the Mega-Visual tradition, he became in one sense at least, freer. I would also emphasise that, by the end of the 19th century, with the emergence of a new physics—i.e. a new conception of the nature of the physical world—and the transformation of science, the old system of ‘objective’ perspective representation was itself exposed, except for those who were ideologically over­committed to it, as largely a conventional and historically relative means of representing the world. This was one reason why, as we saw in the first seminar, the generation of Freud’s mechanist teachers became interested in the depiction of movement. But, evidently, the camera and film played a large part in that too.

At this point, I want to raise a question mark about Cezanne. Much has been written about Cezanne by other Marxist writers, for whom I have the greatest respect. One theory suggests that Courbet produced a ‘materialist’ view of the world; Cezanne a ‘dialectical’ view; and the Cubists a 'dialectical materialist view. ’ It is a ‘nice’ argument, but I am not sure that it is entirely true.

Certainly, Cezanne’s work poses a new kind of relationship between the observer and the observed: it is with Cezanne that we begin to be made aware that what I see depends upon where I am and when. He shows us landscape in a state of change and becoming, from the point-of view of an observer who is himself no longer assumed to be frozen and motionless in time and space. But I wonder whether this perceptual reading of Cezanne is not sometimes greatly over-done. Perhaps the real sense in which Cezanne was ‘The Father of Modern Painting’—and certainly the sense in which writers like Bell responded and over-responded to him — was that for the first time since prior to the Renaissance, Cezanne mingled a subjective with an ob­jective conception of space, but of course he did so playfully and in an explorative rather than a dogmatically decreed fashion. Bell, it is worth noting here, constantly emphasises in his book, Art, that what he takes to be the ‘religious’ com­ponent of Christianity can be separated out from its dogma: ‘religion’was, for him, the perception of this mingling of inner and outer. Thus, too, Greenberg writes of Cezanne, ‘What he found in the end was, however, not so much a new as a more comprehensive principle; and it lay not in Nature, as he thought, but in the essence of art itself, in art’s “ab­stractness”.’35 I consider that what Greenberg calls here its ‘abstractness’ is its capacity to be expressive of psychological experience. What we get from Cezanne, I would suggest, is exactly that sensation which Milner was looking for, that ‘some kind of relation to objects in which one was much more mixed up with them’ than classical, focused systems of perspective allowed.

Interestingly, it was the abstract painter Robert Natkin, of whom I will have more to say next time, who first led me to perceive this aspect of Cezanne when he pointed out how, in many of Cezanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, some­thing very peculiar goes on between the foreground and the background of the picture. At moments a branch on a tree in the front seems to be depicted only feet away from others; but soon after, it seems to touch the slopes of a mountain which is ‘in reality’ twenty miles or so away. This sort of playful toying with his perception of the external world, which involves both the acceptance and also the denial of distance and separation, seems to me to have a lot more to do with the re-introduction of certain kinds of affects into painting than with Cezanne’s perceptual responses alone.

This is confirmed, I think, when one considers the theme of naked figures in a landscape, with which Cezanne was always fascinated. Towards the end of his life the way in which he handled this subject changed; he became less interested in the eroticism of appearance. Although each of the figures in his groups retained its autonomy, Cezanne sought ways of rep­resenting them in which they were simultaneously indissoluble from the ground, water, sky and trees which surrounded them. Women Bathing was painted within four years of his death: although the whiteness of the canvas surface plays its part, the painting is anything but loose or unfinished.

Cezanne made it in his studio; if he relied on petites sen­sations they were in the form of memories, rather than of things immediately seen. Anyway, he learned as much from looking at Poussin as at Provence. Like Poussin, Cezanne offers an attempt at a total view of man-in-nature, but it is a very different kind of view from that of the 17th century master. Cezanne refuses focused perspective and breaks up and re-orders his picture space in a radically new way. His memories have been realised, through an elaborate structuring of coloured planes, into a vision of a new kind of relationship between human beings and the natural world which they inhabit. Poussin’s totalisation was one of eternal stasis. Cezanne’s (although, as I shall argue, it involves a retrieval of affects belonging to an early phase of life) is essentially a promise, characterised by becoming. It revives the emotions of his individual past, to speak of a possible transformed future.

Paul Cezanne, Grandes Baigneuses, 1899-1906.

And now, I hope, you will be beginning to see the point I am getting at. Although the modern movement failed, for reasons we have already explored, to realise a new ‘world-view’ through painting, in the work of Cezanne himself and of at least some of his successors —e.g. Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Klee, and later De Kooning—it did re-introduce to painting an aspect which had been absent from it, or at least heavily muted, during the era of the dominance of professional Fine Artists. These early modernist painters certainly acknow­ledged the external otherness, the separateness and ‘out- thereness’ of the outside world, but having acknowledged it, they sought to transfigure and transform it, to deny, or otherwise to interrupt it, as a means of expressing subjective feelings too. Their new forms emerge as neither an indulgence nor an escape from the world, but rather as an extension into an occluded area of experience.

Now I think that it was only when painters attempted to do this that Bell experienced his ‘aesthetic emotion’, those strange indefinable yearnings on which he places such great im­portance. But the point is that this was actually a new thing for those who made visual images to explore and to attempt to do. Bell made the mistake of identifying this as the essence of ‘art’, universalising it, and projecting it back through history, so that any work which did not show this quality could be dismissed as not really worth looking at. (Bell wrote off not just the ‘world­view’ painters of the Renaissance, of 17th century Holland and of 19th century England, but also, of course, those who were trying to elaborate new world-views through painting in the 20th century—the Futurists and Vorticists, for example.)

This leads us to an important point. Stokes’ taste, for most of his life, was for work in the ‘carving mode’, for art in which the depressive position had been worked through, for the Quattro­cento and the High Renaissance. Bell’s taste, on the contrary, was for the modified ‘modelling mode’ (though of course the terms would have been quite foreign to him) for the Christian Primitives and the Post-Impressionists, for an art which as it were, pushed back even further emotionally from the ‘depressive position’ towards the prior ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position. (Actually, this polarisation is not fair to either of them. As I said last time, unlike many Kleinian aestheticians, Stokes was prepared to recognise the importance of feelings of mergence and fusion in aesthetic experience. In later life, he became ever more sympathetic to the modelling modes. Whereas Bell, of course, modified his vituperative dismissal of Renaissance ‘world-view’ painting.)

Bell disguised this. He insisted that he was talking about an autonomous, irreducible aesthetic experience, when in fact he was responding to the capacity of a certain type of visual image to evoke and arouse a certain type of relatively inaccessible—not everyone, he stressed, was capable of aesthetic sensibility— human emotion which he and (I better admit it) I, too, find intensely pleasurable. The nature of that exquisite aesthetic emotion is, I think, rendered all but manifest in that passage about the raptures that can be experienced upon the cold white peaks of art. Bell found in the modern movement, and enjoyed there, a capacity of painting to revive something of the spatial sensations and accompanying ‘good’ emotions which the infant feels at his mother’s breast. By this, however, I mean much, much more than that Bell liked art because he found it to be a symbol of the ‘good’ breast in the Kleinian sense. Let me ex­plain.

Bell’s Art is full of indications of resistance: he is peculiarly keen on dismissing any attempt to penetrate or reduce aesthetic emotion. He also engaged, as one might expect, in polemic against psychoanalysis. For example, in a communication called ‘Dr. Freud on Art’, Bell tells how he once begged a roomful of psychoanalysts,

'. . .to believe that the emotion provoked in me by St. Paul’s Cathedral has nothing to do with my notion of having a good time. I have said that it was comparable rather with the emotion provoked in a mathematician by the perfect and perfectly economical solution of a problem, than with that provoked in me by the prospect of going to Monte Carlo in particularly favourable circumstances. But they knew all about St. Paul’s Cathedral and all about quadratic equations and all about me apparently. So I told them that if Cezanne was for ever painting apples, that had nothing to do with an insatiable appetite for those handsome but to me unpalatable, fruit. At the word “apples” however, my psychologists broke into titters. ’

Yes, the word was ‘titters. ’

‘Apparently, they knew all about apples, too. And they knew that Cezanne painted them for precisely the same reason that poker-players desire to be dealt a pair of aces.'"’

It is not clear whether Bell was aware of the transparency of the symbolisation he recorded here. In any event, he goes on to say that the real reason Cezanne used apples was because ‘they are comparatively durable’ (unlike flowers) and can be depended upon ‘to behave themselves’ (unlike people). If this story is correctly reported, it is hard to say who was the more stupid: the tittering analysts who uncritically interpreted the figurative elements in Cezanne’s painting as being straight­forward breast symbols; or Bell himself. What we need to ask of psychoanalysis is not a capacity to unmask subject matter or manifest figurative symbols in painting, but rather whether it can help us to understand those subjective spatial represen­tations which begin to appear with the rise of Modernism, and with Cezanne. I think that psychoanalysis does have much to contribute here, or, to be more exact, I think there is much to be learned from a particular tendency within psychoanalysis, the British object relations school, to which Milner, for example, belongs. But before I can clarify this, I have to produce another fragment from my bag of pieces, and that is a short chunk of psychoanalytic history and theory.

Some of you may have noticed the direction in which we are moving through this series of seminars. In one sense, this corresponds simply enough to the chronological development of psychoanalytic theory. We begin with Freud; we moved on to Klein; and now we are about to find ourselves standing in the clear, bright light of British ‘object relations’ thought. But this trajectory also corresponds to an inverse chronology of human development. My first paper, with Moses as its focus, revolved around aspects of the infant-father relationship and its survivals in adult life. In my second paper, we were involved with the mother, albeit as an ‘internal object’, and the nature of the reparative processes which could be lavished upon that object when it was felt that it had been damaged or destroyed through the subject’s own hate and aggression. In these last two sessions, we are concerned with the earliest infant-mother relationships, but we are focusing on the nature of the infant’s experience before he (or she) has become fully aware of himself (or herself) as a being separated from the mother or the world.

Moses by Michelangelo

I want, now, to return to the British School, and to sketch out aspects of the way in which theory developed there after the arrival of Melanie Klein. You will recall that Freud himself conceived of the infant as auto-erotic and narcissistic. In Freud’s view, the baby was motivated by the desire to secure instinctual pleasure by evading tension. Freud postulated three phases of libidinal development—oral, anal, and phallic—prior to the Oedipal conflict and the emergence of so-called ‘genital sexuality’ involving the desire for objects outside the self. Freud supposed that the infant was only interested in the mother insofar as she served the purposes of the child’s auto-erotism, by gratifying instinctual desires such as that for food. As a matter of fact, Freud had only the dimmest conception of the nature of the infant’s relations to the mother, which he did not discuss until as late as 1926. Indeed, Freud often writes as if the relationship with the father was more important. (The reasons for Freud’s blindness in this respect were at least in part defensive; he never satisfactorily analysed his relationship with his own mother, a fact which led to distorted inflections in his theoretical formulations. There were also cultural factors: given the relative status of fathers in the 19th century, European, middle-class homes, Freud was often unable to see beyond the authority of Moses. As we saw, he was indifferent to the Venus.)

Venus De Milo

Klein’s theories, evidently, were in this respect a real advance on Freud’s. Klein gave a centrality to the infant’s early relationship with the mother, to the degree that, as Brierley put it, Freud’s more orthodox followers found it ‘difficult to reconcile Melanie Klein’s assumption that the infant very soon begins to love its mother, in the sense of being concerned for her, with Freud’s conception that in the earliest months the infant is concerned with its environment only in relation to its own wishes.’37 Nonetheless, despite Klein’s formal assurances to the contrary, it remains true that in her system the course and character of this relationship is determined not so much by the quality of the mothering which the child receives as by the way in which the child plays out its innate, instinctual ambivalence. As we have seen, Klein was concerned with what she took to be the working out of an instinctual opposition between love and hate, which was not greatly affected by the nature of the environment. In general, Klein emphasised, indeed over­emphasised., orality, feeding, etc. As Guntrip puts it, ‘Mrs Klein states that “object-relations exist from the beginning of life”. . . but this seems to be something of an irrelevance; it does not matter much whether they do or not if they are merely incidental to the basic problems. ’38

A decisive step in psychoanalysis, however, was the replace­ment of dual instinct theory, whether of the Freudian or Kleinian variety, by a full object relations theory, i.e. by a theory in which the subject’s need to relate to objects plays a central part. Psychoanalysis arrived at this focus in Britain long before it did so elsewhere. (Only during the 1960s did some American analysts also become involved in this area of work.) The way in which this came about involved a number of disparate, and often seemingly incompatible strands and elements. Flere, I can only sketch a few of the more significant.

Some came from the serious critiques of psychoanalysis which were being elaborated outside the movement itself. For example, in the 1930s, analysts were often involved in theoretical jousting with members of the Tavistock Clinic. (Glover has written that within the British Psychoanalytic Society, ‘suggestions that a closer contact might be made even with more eclectic medico-psychological clinics, such as the Tavistock Clinic, were frowned on.’)39 Nonetheless, at the Tavistock, J. A. Fladfield, who was far from totally rejecting analytic findings, argued against Freud’s auto-erotic conception of infancy that the fundamental need of children was for protective love. In the early 1930s, Ian Suttie was one of Hadfield’s assistants. Suttie died at the age of 46, in 1935, but the following year his critique of Freud’s psychology, The Origins of Love and Hate, was published.

Suttie provides a systematic account of man as a social animal, whose object-seeking behaviour is discernible from birth. Suttie abandons Freud’s concept of Narcissism arguing that ‘the elements or isolated percepts from which the ‘‘mother idea” is finally integrated are loved (cathected) from the beginning.’ Thus Suttie found it possible to speak of the infant’s love for an external object, the mother, from the earliest moments of life. This was not sentimentalisation of the infant-mother relationship; he identified its biological basis clearly:

‘I thus regard love as social rather than sexual in its biological function, as derived from the self-preservative instincts not the genital appetite, and as seeking any state of responsiveness with others as its goal. Sociability I consider as a need for love rather than as aim-inhibited sexuality, while culture-interest is derived from love as a supplementary mode of companionship (to love) and not as a cryptic form of sexual gratification.’41 Suttie was not approved of by the psychoanalytic establish­ment in his life-time. Today, however, many of the criticisms he made of Freud—including his observations of the latter’s ‘patriarchal and antifeminist bias’—are very widely accepted, even within the psychoanalytic movement itself. Indeed, by the 1940s, hostility between the Tavistock and the Institute of Psychoanalysis was diminishing. For example, John Bowlby was analysed by Joan Riviere, one of Klein’s foremost followers; Klein herself was one of his supervisors when he was a trainee analyst. In 1946, Bowlby joined the Tavistock, without relin­quishing his psychoanalytic associations. Bowlby was further strongly influenced by the work of ethologists, especially Tinbergen and Lorenz. Bowlby acknowledges a debt to Suttie, but in his own work he elaborated a. thorough-going critique of Freudian instinct theory: ‘in the place of psychical energy and its discharge, the central concepts are those of behavioural systems and their control, of information, negative feedback, and a behavioural form of homeostasis.’42 Bowlby strongly opposed the idea that the infant’s relationship to the mother was based on primary need gratification, such as the wish for food. Bowlby emphasised the need for ‘a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship’ with the mother ‘in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment’. He held that the ‘young child’s hunger for his mother’s love and presence was as great as his hunger for food.’4' Although retaining psychoanalysis as his frame of reference, Bowlby drew on a mass of empirical data from other disciplines. The fact that he stands at the inter­section between psychoanalysis, behavioural studies, ethology, biology, and contemporary communications theory should have rendered his work of enormous significance to all of us on the left who are looking for a rigorously materialist account of the early infant-mother relationship. Instead, socialists have tended to revile his work without attending to it but that is another story.

Other influences were also inflecting the unique course which psychoanalytic theory was taking in Britain. You may remem­ber that in my last seminar, I referred to Sandor Ferenczi, a close colleague of Freud’s until his latter days, and Klein’s first analyst. Ferenczi was the leader of the psychoanalytic com­munity in Budapest, until his death in 1933. Guntrip has ac­curately described the differences between Ferenczi and Freud, differences which were to have tragic consequences for the former:

‘Ferenczi recognised earlier than any other analyst the im­portance of the primary mother-child relationship. Freud’s theory and practice was notoriously paternalistic, Ferenczi’s maternal- istic. His concept of "primary object love” prepared the way for the later work of Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Balint, Winnicott, and all others who to-day recognize that object-relations start at the beginning in the infant’s needs for the mother. Ferenczi held that this primary object-love for the mother was passive, and in that form underlay all later development.’44 Many of those gathered round Ferenczi developed his approach. Hermann, for example, pointed towards such components in the infant’s relation to the mother as clinging and clasping, which could not be accommodated within the traditional Freudian perspective. Alice and Michael Balint began to develop a more radical critique of Freud’s theory of narcissism, but Hermann’s observations enabled them to progress beyond Ferenczi’s essentially passive conception of the infant’s relation to the mother, to a fuller characterisation of this ‘archaic’, primary object-relation. In the Balints’ view, the infant was ‘born relating’, even if its mode of loving was egotistic.45 Early object relations possessed autonomy from erotogenic activities. The Balints came to live and work in Britain, where their ideas had a considerable influence'among some Kleinians.

But, within Kleinian circles, parallel critiques and extensions of classical theory had already sprung up independently. Among the most significant was that put forward by W. R. D. Fairbairn, an analyst who, in the middle and late 1930s, was strongly under the influence of Klein. However, between 1940 and 1944, Fairbairn published a series of controversial papers— including, ‘A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses’ of 194 1 46—in which he essentially revised psychoanalytic theory ‘in terms of the priority of human relations over instincts as the causal factor in development, both normal and abnormal’. Fairbairn described libido as not pleasure-seeking, but object-seeking; the drive to good object relationships is, itself, the primary libidinal need. In the words of Guntrip, his most devoted disciple:

‘From the moment of birth, Fairbairn regards the mother- infant relationship as potentially fully personal on both sides, in however primitive and undeveloped a way this is as yet felt by the baby. It is the breakdown of genuinely personal relations between the mother and the infant that is the basic cause of trouble. ’47 Fairbairn, like Klein before him, was something of a systems builder: I do not think that there are many analysts today who make use of all his bizarre terms and constructs. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that Fairbairn’s work—together with the influences coming from Budapest, and the ‘Tavistock’ critiques of psychoanalysis—paved the way for a great deal of original work in the post-Kleinian tradition on the nature of the infant- mother relationship. D. W. Winnicott, Marjorie Brierley, Marion Milner, Harry Guntrip, John Padel, Masud Khan, and Charles Rycroft were among those who contributed sub­stantially to the development of object-relations theory. Evidently, I am talking about a heterogeneous tradition, one which was characterised by internal contradictions, polemics, and controversies—nonetheless, in my view this tradition represents the most constructive development within psycho­analysis, and that which, incidentally, has the most to tell us about the nature of creativity, visual experience and their enjoyment.

In our next seminar, we will be examining the work of D. W. Winnicott in detail, in relation to certain types of abstract art. Here, I merely wish to point out that it is in the work of Winnicott and his colleagues that we find a focusing upon a transient phase of development which is between that of the ‘subjectivity’ of the earliest moment, in which even the mother’s breast is assumed to be an extension of the self, and the more ‘objective’ perceptions of later childhood. As Winnicott himself put it:

‘I am proposing that there is a stage in the development of human beings that comes before objectivity and perceptibility. At the theoretical beginning a baby can be said to live in a subjective or conceptual world. The change from the primary state to one in which objective perception is possible is not only a matter of inherent or inherited growth process; it needs in ad­dition an environmental minimum. It belongs to the whole vast theme of the individual travelling from dependence towards independence.’48

I will have more to say about this phase next time; meanwhile, I would just point out that it is characterised by tentatively ambivalent feelings about mergence and separation, about being lost in the near, of establishing and denying boundaries about what is inside and what is outside, and concerning the whereabouts of limits and a containing skin, so that the infant, while beginning to recognise the autonomy of objects, nonethe­less feels ‘mixed up in them’ in a way in which the child or adult does not.

Now all this work has been done since that moment when the psychoanalysts ‘tittered’ at Bell for saying that ‘if Cezanne was for ever painting apples, that had nothing to do with an in­satiable appetite for those handsome but to me unpalatable fruit.’ To say that for Cezanne (or Bell) the apple was a symbol of the breast tells us rather less than nothing: to say, however, that the kind of space which Cezanne constructs, with its ambivalences between figure and environment, foreground and background, and between concepts and perceptions, is in some way related to the way in which the infant relates himself to the breast, the mother and the world is to say a great deal. It is in the light of this later analytical work that we can best begin to arrive at a materialist anlaysis of what happens in the out­standing paintings of the modern movement. Through this work, I can give some theoretical spine to my deeply held feeling that there are moments in the now threatened modern movement which are not just examples of kenosis and epilogue, but genuine extensions of the capacity of painted images, and spatial organisations, to speak of certain aspects of human experience in ways which simply could not be reproduced in other media, where space cannot be imaginatively and af­fectively constituted in the same way.

Winnicott himself was very much aware of correspondences between his findings and the work of many writers and artists; unfortunately, however, few of those involved in theoretical aesthetics, or critical work, have attended to his texts. Indeed one has to confront the fact that although British ‘object relations’ theory is well known among clinicians, therapists and educationalists, it has had very little impact upon culture beyond those specific disciplines. Perry Anderson, editor of New Left Review, commented on this in his historic 1968 text, ‘Components of the National Culture’.4'’ Although he acknowledged that the British School of psychoanalysis was ‘one of the most flourishing’ in the world, he pointed out that its impact on British culture in general has been virtually nil. Psychoanalysis ‘has been sealed off as a technical enclave: an esoteric and specialized pursuit unrelated to any of the central concerns of mainstream “humanistic” culture.’50 Anderson relates this to his ‘global’ analysis of British culture, to the failure of the British bourgeoisie to elaborate a world-view, to the resultant ‘absent centre’ of British culture, and its resistance to alien ‘impingements’. His analysis is one with which, by and large, I am in substantial agreement. But why has the British achievement in psychoanalysis been so widely ignored on the left which opposes itself to that ‘mainstream’ whose lacunae Anderson describes? I have not, after all, noticed much discus­sion of Klein, Winnicott, Rycroft, etc. in the pages of New Left Review.

I cannot attempt a complete answer to this question here, but I would like to throw out two indications. Firstly, I am con­vinced that what Suttie called ‘a taboo on tenderness’ operates among many intellectuals, a taboo which is characterised by a radical distrust of those areas of experience which, by their very nature, cannot be fully verbalised. (I have in mind here, for example, the tendency of certain Althusserian writers on art to seek to replace the experience of the work with a complete, they would say ‘scientific’, verbal account of it.) Winnicott wrote that ‘the individual gets to external reality through the omni­potent fantasies elaborated in the effort to get away from inner reality.’51 There are those on the left who never stop elaborating such omnipotent fantasies in the attempt to obliterate the encroachments of a subjectivity which they deny. This is one reason why so many who have any interest in post-Freudian psychoanalysis scuttle across the channel to the structural- linguistic models through which Lacan endeavours to describe the infant-mother relationship. In effect, the very forms in which Lacan casts his work, with all its pseudo-algebraic pretensions, are a denial of the affective qualities of precisely that which they purport to describe, whereas Winnicott’s ‘metaphoric’ mode does not allow one any such escape into the irrational ‘rationality’ of a closed system.

There is another, related reason which is perhaps more ex­cusable: in many of these psychoanalysts there is a trace, and sometimes more than a trace, of philosophical idealism. What they discovered about the early infant-mother relationship sometimes led them, for example, to direct or indirect apologetics for religion. (This was true of Brierley, Guntrip, and Suttie.) But the point is that these writers and researchers were uncovering the material, biological, roots of such phenomena as religious and aesthetic experience: by this, I mean, they were exposing their rootedness in a certain definite, developmental phase. There are times in which, lacking a historical materialist perspective, some of these writers tended to conflate the specific social, cultural religious and artistic forms within which such experiences and emotions were structured and accommodated with those experiences and emotions themselves. (This was never true of Winnicott, or of Rycroft who has, for example, drawn attention to the way in which certain theological con­cepts were, prior to developments in object relations theory, the most adequate accounts of certain kinds of experience, for which non-theological explanations are now possible.) How­ever, in developing an ideological critique of those social and cultural forms, the Marxist left has, in my view, sadly neglected the major advances made by the British psycho­analytic school into what it is that is structured through such forms. This is one reason why, as yet, there is no adequate Marxist analysis of religion, music, or abstract painting.

In this respect, the Marxist left may be said to resemble Freud himself. We have already had occasion to note how Freud dreaded any potential contamination between psychoanalysis and ‘mysticism’. But again, it is important to ask whether in his opposition to certain definite cultural forms, such as religion, and his pathological indifference to others, such as music, and non-representational art, Freud was manifesting not just his commitment to ‘science’ and rationality, but also his denial of significant areas of his own experience.

For example, in his discussion of religion, Freud talked about a mystical state which he described as a feeling of being at one with the universe, which he correlated with feelings of dependency and being overwhelmed. Freud described this feeling as ‘oceanic’—a term he got from a friend—but confided that he had never, himself, experienced anything like it. Freud explained this feeling as a regression to the early infantile state when the child’s ego is not differentiated from the surrounding external world. Anton Ehrenzweig has observed that Freud is thus claiming that the feeling of union is no mere illusion, but the correct description of a memory of an infantile state otherwise inaccessible.52 In telling us that he never experienced such emotions Freud is indicating an area of his personality which would appear to be subject to defensive denial: he is pointing to a failure in his historic self-analysis. The oceanic feeling of union does not only manifest itself in mystical or religious forms: it seems to be an important element in certain types of auditory and visual aesthetic experience, too— experiences to which, as we know, Freud was notoriously in­sensitive. On all such experiences and areas of human life, Freud has almost nothing of interest to say: his silence, I am sure, may be correlated with his indifference to and denial of the real nature of the infant-mother relationship, as described in the work done by the British object relations school over the last quarter of a century.

Freud, you will remember, admired the Moses of Michelangelo, but had nothing to say about those ‘unfinished’ or ‘incomplete’ works—now almost universally more widely admired—in which the figure seems to be struggling to free itself from (or is it to submerge itself back into) the matter out of which it has been wrought. Evidently, this was partly culturally as well as psychologically determined: in the 19th century, Michelangelo’s late drawings were widely regarded as merely the products of a senile old man who had lost his touch; today, there are many who would acclaim these figures with multiple, ebbing outlines as among the finest which the artist did.  My point is that these drawings speak of significant areas of experience which, in the past, tended to be either locked within the mystifications of religion, or denied altogether.

Perhaps I can demonstrate this by referring to a writer whose ‘taste’ and whose psychoanalytic theories can both meaning­fully be described as being somewhere between Freud’s and my own, E. H. Gombrich. Gombrich, you will remember, can certainly appreciate the art of Post-Impressionism; he has, howev.er, never enjoyed abstract painting: In his essay, ‘Psycho- Analysis and the History of Art’,53 Gombrich draws heavily upon Michelangelo, Crucifixion. The ideas of Edward Glover, and especially on the latter’s study, ‘The Significance of the Mouth in Psycho-Analysis’.54 This was written before Glover was deeply influenced by Melanie Klein. (Later, you may remember, he polemicised strongly against her: when her ideas obtained partial acceptance within the British Society, Glover, who had been among its most influential members, resigned and joined the Japanese Society instead.) Gombrich here suggests a wholly oral ontogenesis of aesthetic taste, describing ‘oral gratification as a genetic model for aesthetic pleasure’. Gombrich proposes two polarities in taste, the ‘soft’ and the ‘crunchy’, which, through Glover’s ideas, he correlates with the ‘passive’ and the ‘active’, and with ‘sucking’ and ‘biting’ oral modes respectively. Gombrich implies that the ‘soft’ is more primitive and infantile; while the crunchy corresponds with sophisticated, civilised taste.

To make his point, Gombrich takes an atrocious academic painting of the Three Graces by Bonnencontre, and, as he puts it, tries to ‘improve the sloppy mush by adding a few crunchy breadcrumbs’. He does this by photographing the picture through wobbly glass. ‘You will agree,’ he writes, ‘that it looks a little more respectable’. And, indeed, he is right. It does. Gombrich explains this by saying, ‘We have to become a little more active in reconstituting the image, and we are less disgusted.’'6 He repeats the experiment by taking another photograph through the same glass at a greater distance, so that the figures are even more shadowy, and their outlines blurred and dissolved. He comments, ‘By now, I think, it deserves the epithet “interesting”. Our own effort to reintegrate what has been wrenched apart makes us project a certain vigour into the image which makes it quite crunchy. ’

Gombrich goes on to say:

‘. . . this artificial blurring repeats in a rather surprising way the course that painting actually took when the wave of revolt from the Bouguereau phase spread through the art world. ’57 He comments on the blurring achieved by Impressionism which ‘demands the well-known trained response—you are expected to step back and see the dabs and patches fall into place’; and Cezanne, ‘with whom activity is stimulated to even greater efforts, as we are called upon to repeat the artist’s strivings to reconcile the demands of representation with obedience to an overriding pattern.’58 Interestingly, all Gombrich’s examples— the Bonnenconue, Impressionist, and Cezanne’s—here are of the female nude. His conclusion is that whereas ‘taste may be accessible to psychological analysis, art is possibly not’.

Now evidently there is much that is true in Gombrich’s account, but what is wrong with it is his underlying assumption that the infantile relationship to the mother is instinctual in character, that is, realised exclusively through the mouth and the search for oral satisfactions and reducible to a matter of taste in a limited, oral sense. I doubt whether the reason why the blurred Bonnencontre is more ‘interesting’ now is simply, or even at all, due to a maturer preference for a later oral phase, for biting over sucking, for crunchy over soft. There are hints that Gombrich, too, realises this because the way he develops the notions of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ with reference to the pleasure to be derived from the attempt to ‘reintegrate what has been wrenched apart’ suggests the kind of Kleinian notion of the restoration of internal objects which we discussed at the end of our last talk. (The differences between the Bonnencontre original, and the ‘wobbly glass’ versions can be compared with those between the Hiram Powers sculpture and the Venus de Milo.) But we, ourselves, are now ready to go beyond even such Kleinian accounts. I would say that the reason the distorted Bonnencontre is more ‘interesting’ has to do with its capacity to begin (however thinly and vaguely) to evoke that critical phase, to which Winnicott referred, between experience as wholly subjective, and the achievement of objectivity and per­ceptibility, when the child is relating to another whose otherness is at once recognised and denied; when the existence of the boundaries (outlines) or limiting membranes of the self and of its objects are at once perceived and imaginatively ruptured. An explanation of this order allows us to see the developments in Modernism, to which Gombrich refers, as much more than a change of taste, or the addition of a few breadcrumbs to mush. We can begin to take into account the affective expressiveness of pictorial spatial organisations them­selves. In comparison, Gombrich is merely engaging in a slightly more sophisticated variant of that psychoanalytic ‘tittering’ in front of Cezanne’s apples than that which so understandably irritated Bell.

Indeed, I hope that you will now be able to see that we are ready to leave the Kleinian aesthetics which, up until now, have served us so well. Adrian Stokes, you will remember, found elements belonging not only to the ‘depressive position’, but also to the prior ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position in both artistic creativity and aesthetic experience. For Stokes, the sense of ‘fusion’ was combined, though in differing proportions, with the sense of ‘object-otherness’. This led to criticism from more orthodox Kleinians, who felt that, by associating aesthetics and creativity with the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, and its mechanisms, Stokes was characterising them as regressive. But Winnicott rejects the notion of a ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, with its overtones of primary insanity, and disjuncture. Indeed, in the work of many of those involved in the British ‘object relations’ tradition—as Anton Ehrenzweig put it—‘the concept of the primary process as the archaic, wholly irrational function of the deep unconscious’ underwent a ‘drastic revision’.5'' Marion Milner once wrote that this revision ‘has been partly stimulated by the problems raised by the nature of art’,60 not least, of course, by much of the art of the modern movement.

We do not have time to go into all the implications of these revisions of psychoanalytic thinking on the nature of the primary process here. Suffice to say that Freud’s view of them as something menacing in later life, to be defeated by ‘science’ and the Reality Principle, or Klein’s view of them as an analog of madness have been increasingly eclipsed. To cite one specific example, Ehrenzweig drew attention to a distinction between ‘the narrow focus’ of ordinary attention, and the ‘diffused, wide stare’ which had its origins in the infantile gaze. This has considerable importance in our understanding of the difference between, say, perspective painting and abstract expressionism. Rycroft has done more work demolishing the view that the primary and secondary processes are mutually antagonistic, and that the primary processes are maladaptive. He has pointed out how the attitude of psychoanalysis towards these processes derives from a paradox:

‘Since psycho-analysis aims at being a scientific psychology, psycho-analytical observation and theorizing is involved in the paradoxical activity of using secondary process thinking to ob­serve, analyse, and conceptualise precisely that form of mental activity, the primary processes, which scientific thinking has always been at pains to exclude.’61 Rycroft, however, emphasises the importance of primary process thinking in many imaginative, creative, and aesthetic en­deavours. One might say, therefore, that the re-appropriation of these modes within the modernist tradition was not simply a regressive evasion of the world.

In her theoretical paper on art, Milner says:

. .the unconscious mind, by the very fact of its not clinging to the distinction between self and other, seer and seen, can do things that the conscious logical mind cannot do. By being more sensitive to the sameness rather than the differences between things, by being passionately concerned with finding “the familiar in the unfamiliar” (which, by the way, Wordsworth says is the whole of the poet’s business), it does just what Maritain says it does; it brings back blood to the spirit, passion to intuition.’62 But Milner is not suggesting that the primary processes belong in adult life to a separate category, of no use in understanding the real, as opposed to the imagined or imaginary world. In­deed, she says that ‘it was just this wide focus of attention’, as described by Ehrenzweig, which made the world ‘seem most intensely real and significant’ for her. Thus, we might say, those spatial organisations constructed by the early modernists are not merely enrichments of nostalgic fantasy life, but also potentially of our relationship to the world itself. (This seems to me the real secret of Cezanne.)

At one point, while she was trying to overcome her inability to paint, Milner found herself thinking about a statement of Juan Gris, who once defined painting as being ‘the expression of certain relationships between the painter and the outside world. ’ ‘I felt,’ writes Milner, ‘a need to change the word “ex­pression” of certain relationships into experiencing certain relationships; this was because of the fact that in those drawings which had been at all satisfying there had been this experiencing of a dialogue relationship between thought and the bit of the external world represented by the marks made on the paper. Thus the phrase “expression of’ suggested too much that the feeling to be expressed was there beforehand, rather than an experience developing as one made the drawing. And this re-wording of the definition pointed to a fact that psychoanalysis and the content of the drawings had forced me to face: the fact that the relationship of oneself to the external world is basically and originally a relationship of one person to another, even though it does eventually become differentiated into relations to living beings and relations to things, inanimate nature. In other words, in the beginning one’s mother is, literally, the whole world. Of course, the idea of the first relationship to the outside world being felt as a relationship to persons was one I had frequently met with in discussions of childhood and savage animism. But the possibility that the adult painter could be basically, even though un­consciously, concerned with an animistically conceived world, was something I had hardly dared let myself face.

Looked at in these terms the problem of the relation between the painter and his world then became basically a problem of one’s own need and the needs of the “other”, a problem of reciprocity between “you” and “me”; with “you” and “me” meaning originally mother and child. ’63 And now that I have exposed all the fragments of my statue—at least all of those which I have to hand—it only remains for me to attempt to fit them into place. I am suggesting that there is something significant in common between Milner’s difficulties with perspective and outline in her attempts to learn to draw; the shift in my taste from Ingres’ linearly cloistered figures to the paintings of Bonnard, Rothko and Natkin; the kind of space which begins to manifest itself in paintings with the eruption of the modern movement—say in Cezanne’s trees touching and not touching those distant mountains; and poor, dim-witted Mr. Bell’s exquisite raptures on his cold white peaks of art.

I am suggesting that what these phenomena have in common is a relatedness to a significant area of experience, that per­taining to a critical phase in the infant-mother relationship; I do not conceive of that relationship as ‘a matter of taste’, or instinctual orality, so much as a determinative moment in the self’s discovery of, and exploration of its relationship to, its world. The nature of the ‘primary processes’ in this early phase is no longer necessarily opaque to us: ‘object-relations’ theory, as it developed in the post-Kleinian tradition in Britain, permits us intellectual and affective understanding of this infant-mother relationship. It also causes a revaluing of the ‘primary processes’, and of the part which they play in the realisation of the full potentialities of the relationship of the self to others and its world. To speak crudely, in the medieval era, the ‘primary processes’ constituted the lived relation of self to the world (e.g. in religious cosmology). But, particularly with the 19th century emphasis upon ‘Science’, rationality, and inevitable progress, these areas of experience tended to be excluded from the dominant culture, or locked into mystified enclaves—such as religion.

Not even classical psychoanalysis succeeded in penetrating this terrain. In part, this was the result of the deficiencies of Freud’s self-analysis, his inability to reach back towards the affects pertaining to this determinative phase in the infant- mother relationship, and his consequent misconstruing of the nature of the primary processes. But the world-view of that culture within which Freud was enmeshed reinforced his prejudices and defences, his ambiguous belief in the value of ‘science’ over and above that of the imaginative faculties. However, 1914-1918 saw the final shattering of that world­view. Those areas of experience which had been denigrated, distorted, eclipsed or excluded flooded back—sometimes in their most archaic and mystifying forms. For example, in the later 19th century Liberal Protestantism in Germany, from Ritschl to Harnack, had effectively purged Christianity of its religious content, through a theology of immanence in which Jesus was nought but a particularly well-behaved bourgeois. The First World War shattered this ‘progressive’, middle-class faith, and gave birth to a ‘mystical’ revival, exemplified in Otto’s The Idea of the Holy of 1917, and a ‘Crisis Theology’ (soon to be known as ‘Neo-Orthodoxy’) which re-asserted the transcendence, and unutterable otherness of God. At this time, too, a species of cosmic idealism flooded back into physics as the Newtonian conception of the universe seemed to collapse.

In art, as we have seen, the validity of the focused system of perspective was shattered. But the Modernist enterprise does not seem to me to have been just an escape, or a retreat into idealism and ‘subjectivity’ (although, of course, there were elements within it that could be so characterised). It was almost as if the painter had to go back to experiences at the breast (and before) in order to find again, in a new way, his relationship to others and the world. This, I think, was what happened in the best elements of Modernism—and it was what Bell responded to, though he structured his response in terms of ‘aesthetic emotion’ and ‘significant form’.

Perhaps I can here elaborate an analogy of a kind which I would suspect if it was put forward by anyone except myself! Michael Balint describes a certain type of pathology as a manifestation of what he calls ‘basic fault’. In these instances the patient’s whole mode of being in the world, of relating to it, and to others is faulty and false; he maintains this can only be overcome if the patient is allowed to regress to a state of dependence on the analyst, in which he can experience a ‘new beginning’. (This corresponds to a distinction Winnicott makes between ‘true’ and ‘false’ self.) In a certain sense, 1914-1918 exposed the ‘basic fault’ of European culture: the kenosis of modernism (at least in certain of its aspects) may be compared with the individual patient’s necessary regression towards a position from which a ‘new beginning’ (in this instance, presumably, a new realism) was possible. Although he does not draw this comparison, Balint himself implies something similar in his 1952 paper, ‘Notes on the Dissolution of Object- Representation in Modern Art’. Balint refers to the disap­pearance of ‘the sovereign, sharply defined and delineated object’ from both physics and art; but he ventures the view:

‘The present narcissistic disappointment and frightened withdrawal, degrading the dignity of the object into that of a mere stimulus and laying the main emphasis on the sincere and faithful representation of the artist’s subjective internal mental processes, will very probably give way gradually to a concern for creating whole and hearty objects. (This is meant in a purely descriptive sense and no value judgement is either implied or intended with it.)64 Balint goes on to ‘the unavoidable integration of the discoveries of “modern art” with the demand of “mature love” for the object.’65 But this is already to look forward to the subject of our final seminar, that of the ‘promise’ inherent within certain of the most emptied-out examples of full abstraction.

MODERN ART: Fine Art After Modernism

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

The arts across the world are under attack right now, the telling comments by the likes of Rishi Sunak that artists should ‘re-train’, clearly show the administration’s priorities when it comes to supporting the arts at this time. I know that my father would have had a great deal to say about this. So you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during lockdown! I will be posting regularly.

FINE ART AFTER MODERNISM

by Peter Fuller, 1978

The London art community is very like a gymnasium. Every time you enter into discourse with your colleagues you first have to take a look around and see what posture everyone is adopting today. The collapse of the central, modernist consensus has led to exceptional enthusiasm among those who were once its High Priests for the volte-facing horse. For example, one critic, really quite recently, argued — and I quote — ‘the ongoing momentum of art itself’ is ‘the principal instigator of any decisive shift in awareness’. He dismissed all but a handful of ultra avant-gardists gathered around an obscure Paddington gallery as ‘obsolescent practitioners of our own time’. He assured us that the future would ‘overlook’ all but this minority he had identified.1 Thus he adopted the classical modernist position. Today, this same critic has spoken of his blinding experience on the road to Wigan; he is now urging upon us the joys and necessities of collaboration without compromise. I have never been of an athletic disposition : the sight of the vaulting-horse filled me with terror as a child, and it still does. Unfortunately, this means that those of you who have been following the over­heated polemics and debates which have been going on within the art community, and in the art press, may therefore find many of my arguments, some of my examples, and especially my overall position, familiar. I can only apologize for my rheumatic fidelity to a position which expresses the truth as I perceive it. I hope you will bear with me.

When I was asked to come to this conference to discuss the artist’s ‘individual’ and ‘social’ responsibilities under the rubric, ‘Art: Duties and Freedoms’, I sensed, perhaps wrongly, the subtending presence in the very terms of the debate of that common, but I believe erroneous, assumption that the artist’s individual freedoms and social responsibilities stand in some sort of irreconcilable and potentially paralysing opposition which is somehow destined to reproduce itself in one historical situation after another.

In fact, there are many historical situations in .which this opposition cannot take us very far. For example, an artist who works under the ‘Socialist Realist’ system in, say, the USSR can fulfill his social responsibilities only by an apparently individualist defiance of his ‘social duty’, at least as that is externally defined by the official artists’ organizations, the Party, and the State. Not every artist who defies the ‘Socialist Realist’ system is necessarily exercising social responsibility; but for those who attempt through their art to bear witness to the truth as they see it, individualistic defiance constitutes social responsibility. Take Ernst Neizvestny : in all of the USSR there was probably no artist with a comparable individualistic, narcissistic energy. But Neizvestny rejected his so-called ‘social duties’ and harnessed his narcissism for the creation of new and monumental sculptural forms which function not only as a great visual shout for the exploited, the suffering and the oppressed everywhere, but also imply within the way that they have been made that there is hope for a changed and a better future.2

Ernst Neizvestny

The situation for Fine Artists in Britain is very different, but here too the simple opposition of individual freedoms and social responsibilities does not work. The post-war Welfare State has invested the artist with no official ‘social duty’ which he can choose to transform into genuine social responsibility; in return for state patronage and support our artists are not required to depict cars coming off the production line at British Leyland, Party Conferences, or ‘glorious’ moments from Britain’s imperial past. Indeed, they are not required to do anything at all. The Fine Art tradition has thus become marginalized and peripheralized, and Fine Artists find they have been granted every freedom except the only one without which the others count as nothing : the freedom to act socially. It is only a mild exaggeration to say that now no one wants Fine Artists, except Fine Artists, and that neither they nor anyone else have the slightest idea what they should be doing, or for whom they should be doing it. Thus, far from there being an awkward tension between ‘social duty’ on the one hand and individual freedom on the other, it is possible to say that a major infringement of the freedom of the artist at the moment is his lack of a genuine social function. This, as I see it, is the paradox of the position of the Fine Artist after modernism. But how has this situation arisen?

Raymond Williams has pointed out how in the closing decades of the eighteenth and the opening decades of the nineteenth centuries the word ‘art’ changed its meaning.3 When written with a capital ‘A’ it came to stand not for just any human skill (as previously) but only for certain ‘imaginative’ or ‘creative’ skills; moreover, ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) came also to signify a special kind of truth, ‘imaginative truth’, and artist, a special kind of person, that is a genius or purveyor of this truth. Subtending this etymological change was the emergence of a historically new phenomenon for Britain, a professional Fine Art tradition.

Given the state of national economic and political development, the arrival of this tradition was exceptionally tardy: the causes of this belatedness (which inflected the course of the subsequent development of British art) are to be sought in that peculiar lacuna in the national visual tradition which extends from the beginning of the 16th century until the emergence of Hogarth in the 18th. The medieval crafts had been eroded by baronial wars and technological advance and had fallen into terminal decay in the later 15th century; they were effectively extinguished by the mid 1530s. Although, as Engels remarked, a new class of ‘upstart landlords . . . with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal’ was coming into being at this time, a prevalent iconoclastic puritanism, associated with the dissolution of the monasteries and the formation of a national church, was among those factors which inhibited the development of a secular painting peculiar to this new class. At the level of the visual, Britain thus lacked a ‘Renaissance’: no ‘humanistic’ world-view emerged within a flourishing tradition of ecclesiastical representation, to transcend and supersede it, as happened, for example, in the Italian city states. In Britain the prior medieval tradition was literally erased during the Reformation.

Subsequently, the courts required only portraiture: competent practitioners above the artisanal level tended to be imported. Henry VII patronized a Flemish artist, Mabuse;

Henry VIII, Holbein. Successive monarchs employed immigrant painters: Scrots, Eworth, Gheeraerts, Van Somer, Mytens, Van Dyck and Lely. These artists brought with them a heterogeneous assortment of European modes. Although some took on individual pupils and apprentices, in no sense did this amount to a national visual tradition. The principal exception accentuates the predicament: Nicholas Hilliard arguably emerged out of the subtending artisanal tradition to produce a peculiarly English world-view of Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers. But Hilliard’s pictorial conception was that of a miniaturist who looked back towards the represen­tational modes of medieval manuscript illumination. The retardate character of English painting can be gauged when one recalls that Hilliard — the most illustrious figure not only of Elizabethan painting but among all indigenous artists during the long visual lacuna — was born some seventy years after Titian. (Historical materialism has as yet no way of assessing how far this peculiar stunting of visual expression can be correlated with the precocious efflorescence of literature in the same period.)

The agrarian capitalists who consolidated their power in the 17th century created a demand for two limited but indigenous genres of painting, country-house conversation pieces, and sporting paintings — particularly of horses; but visual practice was suspended in a vacuum between aristocratic patronage and an open market. ‘Art’ and artists had yet to come into being. Horace Walpole believed this was ‘the period in which the arts were sunk to their lowest ebb in Britain’. Change came with Hogarth: he was conscious of the need to found a national visual tradition, and to oppose debased European imports. By making use of mass sale engravings, he forged a new economic (and aesthetic) base for image-making which opened a potential space (allowing for satire) between himself and the ruling class. This enabled him to refer to areas of experience — poverty, oppression, sexuality, work, criminality, cruelty and politicking — previously excluded from painting. Uniquely, he depicted the whole social range from the Royal family to the derelicts of gin lane. His real subject — rare enough in any branch of British cultural activity — was English society in its totality. But his project was only briefly possible. Although largely freed from agrarian class patronage, he opposed himself to the professionalization of painting, especially to the establish­ment of a national academy. He thus came into being between two traditions and was able to achieve something in terms of scope and audience which had never been before in English painting, and would never be again.

During the later eighteenth century, the outlines of the professional Fine Art tradition became increasingly dis­cernible. It was characterized by the establishment of an open market in pictures. (This had the effect of turning the artist effectively into a primitive capitalist rather than a skilled craftsman.) The old system based upon apprenticeship and direct patronage broke up and was eventually almost entirely displaced. All sorts of related developments accompanied this change: art schools began to appear; professional organiza­tions and institutions including a Royal Academy, were established; exhibitions open to the public, salons, journals dealing with modern art, professors of painting, and very soon museums too began to appear for the first time. None of these had existed previously. When we talk about the problems, duties, and freedoms of artists, even today, we are not talking about a transhistorical category, but about the achievements, difficulties, and potentialities — if any — of those who are working within a professional apparatus which came into being in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which now appears to be threatened.

John Constable

The emergence of the professional Fine Art tradition was associated with, indeed was a direct product of, the transformation of the economic structure in Britain by the emergence of industrial capitalism. It would be simple if we could say that professional Fine Artists emerged and expressed the point of view of the industrial bourgeoisie; but you have only to look at the pictures themselves to realize that this cannot be the whole story. In his discourses Reynolds may have yearned for a new ‘history’ painting which we might interpret as the metaphorical vision of a class conscious that it was forging its own history; but what he produced in practice consisted largely of portraits of My Lords and Ladies embellished with flourishes of the aristocratic, European Grand Manner. Similarly, in the early nineteenth century John Constable expressed the desire to develop landscape painting as a branch of ‘Natural Philosophy’. He made impressive advances in the precise representation of the empirical world in the richness of its momentary changes and the processes of its natural becoming. But even he seems to have been held back and inhibited in his work; the economic necessity of continuing to produce ‘country house portraits’ also seems to have involved him in the internal retention of the point of view of the rural landlord. Despite the sketches there is a peculiar identity between his known political views and the nostalgic, noon­day stasis of many of his larger pictures, especially perhaps The Cornfield. Similarly, the main difference between the Royal Academy and the European salons lay precisely in the fact that it was a Royal Academy, whose finances were guaranteed by the monarch himself. Thus, although it is true to say that the new Fine Art tradition was a product of the industrial revolution, we cannot simply identify the practice of its painters with the vision of an emergent, industrial middle class.

The causes of this peculiar disjuncture lie deep in the history of the social formation in Britain: here I can do no more than indicate them schematically. Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn have pointed to the way in which capitalism was established throughout the countryside in Britain by the destruction of the peasantry, the imposition of enclosures and the development of intensive farming long before the industrial revolution.4 They have suggested that no major conflict arose between the prior agrarian class and the rising industrial bourgeoisie because these classes shared a mode of production in common: capitalism. Thus there was no real social, political, or cultural revolution associated with the coming into being of an industrial bourgeoisie. Although the latter effected the titanic achievement of an industrial revolution, socially, politically, and culturally — after surmounting the tensions which came to a head in the 1830s — they fused with the old formerly aristocratic, agrarian elements to form a new hegemonic ruling bloc with a highly idiosyncratic ideology. Thus that selfsame bourgeoisie which unleashed the transforming process of the industrial revolution, conserved the Crown, Black Rod, a House of Lords, innumerable other ‘ornamental drones’ and goodness knows what other clutter from feudal and aristocratic times: it developed no new world view peculiar to itself. Now it was precisely for the benefit of, and hence through the spectacles of, this highly eccentric ruling bloc that professional Fine Artists were required to represent the world. I believe that this why so much Victorian painting seems to us to combine heterogeneous elements, to possess, albeit unwittingly, an almost surrealist quality. I also believe that the famous flat or linear aspect of British art in part arises because the flattened forms characteristic of feudalism (e.g. in stained glass windows, altar pieces, and manuscript illumination) were never thoroughly challenged and overthrown by an indigenous bourgeois realism which emphasized the tangibility and three- dimensional materiality of things. The rise of the bourgeoisie in Britain culminated in Burne-Jones’s angels, and the flat ethereality of Pre-Raphaelitism, not in the concrete sensuousness of Courbet’s apples, rocks and flesh.

Burne-Jones

It is characteristic of ruling classes — even bourgeois ruling classes shot through with feudal and aristocratic residues and encumbrances — that they like to represent everything which is peculiar to themselves, their own historically specific values, as if they were universal and eternal. John Berger has demonstrated how the representational conventions of the professional Fine Art tradition, conventions of pose, chiaroscuro, perspective, anatomy, etc., came to be taught not as the conventions which they were, but as the way of depicting ‘The Truth’.5 The same was also true of the emergent ideology of art itself. Many artists, and the new practitioners of art history too, began to propagate the view that there was a continuum of ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) extending back in an unbroken chain to the Stone Age. Thus they identified the images produced by the Fine Art professionals of nineteenth-century capitalism as the apoth­eosis or consummation of an evolutionary tradition of ‘Art’ almost magically constituted in theory without reference to lived history, with its ruptures and divisions.

This sort of thinking, exemplified in the lay-out of museums and public art galleries, helped to create what can best be called the historicist funnel of ‘Art History’. Art historians accepted as legitimate objects of study, even if they sometimes labelled them as primitive, a very wide range of images from, say, a decorated Greek mirror to a Roman mosaic, or a Christian altar-piece. Such things had served disparate functions within disparate past cultures. All that they had in common was that they were images made by men and women. On the other hand, from existing bourgeois societies art historians accepted only the particular products of the professional Fine Art traditions. Everything else was excluded.

This kind of distortion of history should not blind us to the fact that, say, in most feudal societies there was nothing which even approximated to ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) and certainly no tradition of professional, trained Fine Artists who produced free-standing works for an open-market, nor any ideology which associated the creation of visual images with ‘specialness’, or the expression of individual, ‘imagina­tive truth’. Thus it was not ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) that formed an unbroken continuum stretching back into the earliest social formations but rather the production of images of one sort or another which took very different forms in different cultures; in Western, medieval, feudal societies such images were often realized through manuscript illumination, stained-glass windows, tapestries, wall paintings, and so on: never through free-standing oil paintings on canvas.

By and large, the professional Fine Art Tradition in Britain served the composite ruling class very well; artists went to art schools where they acquired the skilful use of certain pictorial conventions which they then put to work in representing the world to the ruling class from its point of view. These conventions were capable of fully expressing only the area of experience peculiar to that class. Some artists tried to extend them, to put them to uses — such as the depiction of working- class experience — for which they were not intended; such attempts in Britain, however, tended to be mechanical. Because the British lacked a progressive bourgeois vision they could produce a Ford Madox Brown but not a Daumier or a Millet. The peculiar ataraxy of the bourgeois aesthetic in nineteenth century England goes far beyond subject matter; after Constable the attempt to depict change to find visual equivalents for ‘moments of becoming’ in the natural and social worlds simply freezes. The Victorian world view, as expressed through Victorian paintings, is one of stasis. Even in the later nineteenth century no indigenous minority tendencies like the Impressionism of France, Cezanne’s dialectical vision, or the later manifestation of Cubism arose; all these aesthetics were characterized by a preoccupation with the depiction of change and becoming. Compare, say, a Rossetti painting with an Alma Tadema. These artists occupied polar opposites within the British Fine Art tradition and yet today we are more likely to be impressed by their similarities than by their minor differences, so narrow was the range of painting in this country in the last century. In the absence of a progressive bourgeois culture, artists fulfilled the ‘social duty’ demanded of them by the ruling class almost with servility and, despite the ideology of artistical ‘specialness’, without even that degree of imaginative distancing which led, on the continent, to the creation of Bohemia.6

Although the work of the professional Fine Artists thus dominated the visual tradition, as they re-constituted the world in images for the bourgeoisie, throughout the nineteenth century we can trace the gradual emergence of modes of reproducing and representing the world based on conventions distinct from those of the Fine Art tradition. Between 1795 and the turn of the century lithography, or chemical printing from stone, had been invented; within thirty years a colour process was in commercial use. By 1826 photography too had come into being.

Now it is sometimes suggested that it was simply the invention of these new techniques which led to the displacement of the Fine Art tradition. I cannot accept this. Professional Fine Artists, with their aesthetic conventions and their ideology of ‘Art’, remained the unquestioned, culturally central, hegemonizing component within the visual tradition until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The professional Fine Art tradition was not displaced until the competitive, entrepreneurial capitalism (whose interests it had come into being to serve) was itself superseded in the late nineteenth century and the earliest years of the twentieth century, by the emergence of the monopoly capitalist system. Among the myriad of global changes associated with this monumental upheaval of the base was the emergence of a new kind of visual tradition, peculiar to the new social and economic order. This constituted a far more profound transformation of the way that images were produced and displayed even than that which had been brought about by the rise of the professional Fine Art practitioners in the eighteenth century. The complexity, diversity, and sheer ubiquity of the visual tradition under monopoly capitalism, involving new mechanical, electrical, cinematic, and most recently holographic means of reproducing all manner of static visual images, entitles us to refer to it as the first ‘Mega- Visual’ tradition in history — a tradition which of course soon included moving as well as static images.

Now the question which really confronts us when we talk about the duties and freedoms of Fine Artists today is what has happened to the old professional Fine Art tradition in this radically changed situation. I have previously used the example of Henry Tate, of Tate Gallery fame, to illustrate this change. The example is a good one and so I hope those of you who have heard or read of it before will forgive me for citing it again.

Henry Tate was born in 1819 and apprenticed to a grocer at the age of thirteen; by the time he was twenty our budding capitalist had his own grocery business; aged thirty he had a chain of shops; aged forty he became partner in a firm of sugar refiners and soon sold off the shops to buy out his partner. In the early 1870s, at the depth of the slump, he patented the revolutionary Boivin and Loiseau sugar refining process rejected by his larger competitors. He then scrapped his original capital investment in the old method, gambled all on the new plant, and won. Soon after he patented the sugar cube. His profits rocketed. As befitted a self-made, entre­preneurial millionaire he frequented the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy where he bought great numbers of paintings by Hook, Millais, Orchardson, Riviere, Water­house and so on to decorate his Streatham home. He gave these to the nation as the kernel of the Tate Gallery, which opened in 1897; and two years later he died.7

Tate had made his very considerable fortune in bitter-sweet competition with other sugar refining families, the Macfies, Fairries, Walkers and Lyles, but within a matter of years of his death all these rival firms had been swallowed up into a new swollen amalgam: Tate and Lyle’s. The growth of such monopolies meant that the kind of individualist, capitalist trajectory which Tate had so successfully pursued in the nineteenth century was much rarer in the twentieth, and with the endangerment of that species of bourgeoisie began the withering, atrophy, and shunting out towards the margins of cultural life of the academic, professional Fine Art tradition which had so efficiently represented the world to the nineteenth century middle classes.

Of course, this is not to say that the new monopolists and their burgeoning corporate empires did not require artists to produce static visual images for them as every ruling class in every known culture had done in the past. On the contrary they had an insatiable, unprecedented greed for images. At first some of the most famous Fine Art professionals benefitted from this. For example, in 1886 Levers, the soap firm, spent a grand total of £50 on advertising; but the previous year their leading rivals, Pears, had taken on Thomas Barratt as a partner. Barratt passionately believed in the value of the new-fangled advertising methods and in 1886 he spent £2,200 in purchasing Millais’ Bubbles to promote his company’s product. To go back to Lever’s accounts we now see that in response, over the next twenty years, they spent a total of £2m, or £100,000 a year, on advertising.

This increase reflected a general trend in Britain and America. In their important study, Monopoly Capitalism, Baran and Sweezy report that, in America, in 1867 expenditure on advertising was about $55m; by 1890 this had reached $360m; and by 1929 it had shot up to $3,426m. The authors point out, ‘from being a relatively unimportant feature of the system [the sales effort] has advanced to the status of one of its decisive nerve centres. In its impact on the economy it is out-ranked only by militarism. In all other aspects of social existence its all pervasive influence is second to none.’8 This may be to exaggerate the relative importance of the sales effort; nonetheless there should be no need to emphasize its significance, or the important role which visual images play within it.

As early as 1889, M.H. Spielmann, writing in The Magazine of Art, was able to predict, ‘we may find that commerce of today will, pecuniarily speaking, fill . . . the empty seat of patronage which was once occupied by the Church’.9 Certainly, the development of monopoly capitalism led to the efflorescence of a new public art, but what Spielmann failed to foresee was that the old Fine Art professionals would get less and less of the new cake. The demands of the monopolists soon created an entirely new profession which established, much as the prior Fine Art profession had done in the late eighteenth century, its own professional organizations, institutes, training courses, journals, codes of practice, and ideology, which notably excluded both concepts of artistic ‘specialness’ and imaginative truth. Ir fact, it might be said that just as monkish manuscript illumination constituted the dominant form of the visual tradition in certain feudal societies, free-standing oil painting produced by Fine Art professionals constituted the dominant form in certain entrepreneurial capitalist societies; but under monopoly capitalism, wherever it established itself, the dominant form of the static visual tradition was advertising.

This is of very great importance. For example, there is a tendency among the more cavalier type of Marxist critics to endeavour by a deft sleight of hand to equate the crisis in the arts, i.e. the indubitable decadence of the professional Fine Art tradition, with the alleged crisis of monopoly capitalism itself. But if we attend to the visual tradition as a whole, and not just to the Fine Art tradition, however much it goes against the grain we are compelled to concede that far from being in a moribund condition monopoly capitalism must be diagnosed as being unnervingly alive. I have already mentioned holograms: it is no accident that their develop­ment and display has been sponsored by Guinness. Within a few years, perhaps sooner, we will have to endure the sight of forty foot bottles projected into the night sky over the Thames, and no doubt 100 foot three-dimensional images of British Leyland trucks will be roaming above the hills and valleys of Wales.10 You may not like this prospect: I personally view it with dismay. It does not however indicate the tottering visual bankruptcy of the existing order.

Perhaps more common is the argument that in some sense or other advertising does not really count; nowadays the old continuum theory is sometimes dressed up in smart, leftist fancy dress, significantly usually by those whose leftism is first and foremost an academic, art-historical method. We tend to hear a lot about the enduring ‘autonomy’ of art, and so on. But this position can be defended only through the kind of sophistry which accepts, say, the markings on a Boetian vase, or Lascaux cave paintings, decorated Greek mirrors, Cycladic dolls, Russian icons, or Italian altar-pieces as art, but which denies that billboards, colour supplements, or posters belong to this category while going on to assert that certain (but not all) piles of bricks and certain (but not all) grey monochromes do. I believe that it really only makes sense to talk about the visual tradition as a whole as constituting a relatively enduring and autonomous cultural component. There will always be images but under different social formations they will emerge in different forms and be put to different uses. There is nothing about the institutions or ideology of the professional Fine Art tradition which makes it more likely to endure and to continue to occupy the centre of the visual tradition than, say, the great medieval tradition of manuscript illumination.

Indeed if we look at the Fine Art tradition from the closing decades of the nineteenth century until the present day it is clear that not only has it become progressively less central culturally and socially but internally it has itself been ebbing away. In the late nineteenth century in Britain theologians developed a concept which can usefully be adapted to the Fine Art situation. They found themselves pondering a persistent problem in Christian dogma: Jesus was manifestly often wrong in his judgements and limited in his knowledge yet how could this be if he was really very god of very god, who was, of course, supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient. Charles Gore, a theologian of the Lux Mundi school, attempted to resolve this tricky problem by reviving the idea of kenosis, or divine self-emptying. He held that the knowledge possessed by ‘The Christ’ during his incarnate life was limited because in taking to himself human nature god had actually emptied himself of omniscience and omni­potence. Now it is just such a process of kenosis or self­emptying that characterizes the Fine Art tradition from the late 1880s onwards. Paintings and sculpture acquire an ever more drained out, vacuous character, as if artists were voluntarily relinquishing the skills and techniques which they had previously possessed. But those skills have not vanished altogether. They have been picked up by advertising artists.

W.P. Frith was one of several Victorian artists who complained that the new advertisers were pillaging and pirating his paintings for their own purposes: his picture, The New Frock, had been incorporated without his permission into an ad for Sunlight Soap. If we look at an image like his better known Derby Day we can see how easy it was for this displacement to occur. According to Frith himself, Derby Day was the culmination of fifteen months’ incessant labour. He employed a team to produce it, including 100 models, a photographer who took pictures on the race-course for him, and J. Herring, a specialist, who added the horses. Frith knew exactly whom he was aiming his picture at; when it was first shown at the Academy the crowds were so great that they had to put a special rail round it. Frith then issued a popular print which sold in tens of thousands. It is inconceivable that any professional Fine Artist today would invest so much time, labour, and skill in a single picture. Even if he did so, it is even less conceivable that a crowd of thousands would throng round at its first exhibition. However, the elaborate work on location, the use of numerous models, the hiring of specialist skills, and indeed the eventual mass audience itself are all typical of the way in which the modern advertising poster artist constitutes his images. Indeed, Frith’s image was so close to the conventions of the new tradition that quite recently it was simply taken by the Sunday Times’s advertising agency and blown up with a superimposed slogan to fill their bill-board slots.

Whatever judgement we may wish to reach on Frith’s project, we cannot deny that he was deploying definite skills which enabled him to relate effectively to an audience capable of responding without difficulty to what he was doing. The same is also true of the modern advertising artist. Like Frith’s, his skills too are identifiable and teachable. This is by no means so manifestly true of what the professional Fine Artist does today. A recent sociologist’s study reported that ‘half the tutors and approaching two-thirds of the students of certain art colleges agreed with the proposition that art cannot be taught.’ Understandably the authors then asked, ‘In what sense then are the tutors tutors, the students students, and the colleges colleges? What if any definitionally valid educational processes take place on Pre-Diploma courses?’ The authors reported that nearly all tutors ‘rejected former academic criteria and modalities in art’ — but none had any other conventions to put in their place.11 The kenosis within the professional Fine Art community has reached such an advanced stage that although the apparatus of a profession persists, no professionalism, or no aesthetic, survives to be taught; such a professionalism would be dependent on the social function which the Fine Artist does not have.

Why then has the professional Fine Art tradition not withered away altogether? Why has advertising not supplanted Fine Art in a more definitive sense? Even if we cannot attribute absolute transhistorical resilience to ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’), we can say that the Fine Art tradition has acquired a relative autonomy, through its institutional practitioners and intellectuals, which allows it to reproduce itself like the Livery Companies of the City of London, or the Christian Church, long after its social function has been minimalized and marginalized. Its survival has also been assisted by the disdain of the intelligentsia for the new profession of advertising. John Galbraith has pointed out that to ensure attention advertising material purveyed by bill­boards and television ‘must be raucous and dissonant’. Fie writes:  ‘it is also of the utmost importance that’

advertisements ‘convey an impression, however meretricious, of the importance of the goods being sold. The market for soap,’ he continues, ‘can only be managed if the attention of consumers is captured for what, otherwise, is a rather incidental artifact. Accordingly, the smell of soap, the texture of its suds, the whiteness of textiles treated thereby and the resulting esteem and prestige in the neighbourhood are held to be of the highest moment. Housewives are imagined to discuss such matters with an intensity otherwise reserved for unwanted pregnancy and nuclear war. Similarly with cigarettes, laxatives, pain-killers, beer, automobiles, denti­frices, packaged foods and all other significant consumer products.’ But, Galbraith goes on, ‘The educational and scientific estate and the larger intellectual community tend to view this effort with disdain... Thus the paradox. The economy for its success requires organized public bamboozle­ment. At the same time it nurtures a growing class which feels itself superior to such bamboozlement and deplores it as intellectually corrupt.’12

Although the intellectuals knew that they deplored advertising and indeed all the mass arts, they were much less certain about what images they wanted the residual professional Fine Artists to produce, though they knew that they wished them to continue to be ‘real’ artists who took as their content and subject matter not soap-suds but all that was left after the kenosis, i.e. art itself. This is spelled out in the critical writings of the American modernist-formalist critics. Clement Greenberg, for example, has written: ‘Let painting confine itself to the disposition pure and simple of colour and line and not intrigue us by associations with things we can experience more authentically elsewhere.’13 Geldzahler, a sub-Greenbergian hatchet man of late modernism, has explained that art today ‘is an artists’ art; a critical examination of painting by painters, not necessarily for painters, but for experienced viewers.’ This ‘artists’ art’ was, he said, limited to ‘simple shapes and their relationships’. He thoroughly approved of the fact that ‘there is no anecdote, no allusion, except to other art, nothing outside art itself that might make the viewer more comfortable or give him something to talk about.’ Very soon, of course, even the intellectuals preferred the texture of soap-suds, or whatever, and so there were very few viewers either. This did not worry Geldzahler unduly: ‘There is something unpleasant in the realization that the true audience for the new art is so small and so specialized,’ he wrote. ‘Whether this situation is ideal or necessary is a matter for speculation. It is and has been the situation for several decades and is not likely soon to change.’14

In Britain, the position of the residual professional Fine Art tradition was worse even than in America. There was almost no basis for the acceptance of modernism among the intellectuals with the exception of those few who were themselves involved in the art community. Furthermore, in contrast to the US, the domestic picture market in modernist work failed to boom. Indeed, after the last war an impartial observer might well have come to the conclusion that the Fine Art tradition was about to contract into a residual organ, rooted in the Royal Academy, but with perhaps a ‘populist’ penumbra, serving the needs of a shrinking squirearchy and the continuing demands of clergy, army, Masters of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, chairmen of the board, sporting men, etc. for portraits of themselves, their fantasies about the past, and animals, boats, and trains.15 But in 1954 Sir Alfred Munnings, sometime President of the Royal Academy and campaigner against ‘Modern Art’, wrote to The Daily Telegraph describing a day out at the Tate with Sir Robert Boothby when they roared with laughter at new English works which, he wrote, ‘today rival the wildest and drollest of French and other foreign cubists, formalists, and expressionists of the past’. The ‘drolleries’ were to flourish, and culturally, at least, to eclipse the residual academic works.

For just at the moment when the professional Fine Art tradition in Britain seemed destined to go the way of manuscript illumination, politics stepped in to save it. Although, unlike the CIA,16 MI5 did not choose to promote modernism throughout the world as a cultural instrument in the Cold War, the post-war Welfare State became heavily involved in the patronage of it. Keynes advocated increased intervention in the economy to ameliorate the worse effects of capitalism. One of the first institutions of the Welfare State to be set up after the declaration of peace was the Arts Council. So far as visual arts policy was concerned, the Arts Council committed itself to the exhibition and subsidy of the professional Fine Arts tradition alone; it commissioned nothing and imposed no constraints on artists of any kind. According to the Council, professional Fine Artists were supposed to be ‘free’ in an absolute, unconditional sense. The early Arts Council reports make clear that this policy was intended to show the world that in the so-called ‘Free World’ artists produce works of great beauty and imaginative strength, whereas the Soviet ‘Socialist Realist’ system produces only hollow, rhetorical, academic art officiel. Keynes himself wrote of ‘individual and free, undisciplined, unregimented, uncontrolled’ artists ushering in a new Golden Age of the arts which, he said, would recall ‘the great ages of a communal civilized life’.17 Moreover the Arts Council itself was no more than the cherry on the top of the state patronage cake. This included increased subsidies to museums and above all the rapid expansion of the art education system.

The injection of money into the Fine Art tradition on what has come to be called the ‘hands-off’, or totally unconditional basis, has proved an unmitigated failure. Far from producing the new Golden Age, the splendid efflorescence envisaged in the Keynesian dream, it has ushered in an unparalleled decadence. Piles of bricks, folded blankets, soiled nappies, grey monochromes, and what have you, can hardly demonstrate to those nasty Russians, or to anyone else for that matter, the creative power with which ‘freedom’ invests our artists in the West.

What went wrong? The real comparison was never between the residual Fine Art professionals in the West and the ‘Socialist Realists’ in the USSR, but between their respective visual traditions as a whole. Thus advertising artists served the interests of the ruling organizations in the West just as ‘Socialist Realists’ served the Party and the State in the USSR. The majority of artists under monopoly capitalism were thus hardly more ‘free’ than under the Soviet system. As servants of the great commercial corporations they were required to produce visual lies about cigarettes, beer, cars and soap suds, whereas Socialist Realists were required to produce parallel lies about the condition of the peasantry and the proletariat in the Soviet Union. Monopoly Capitalism thus had its art officiel, too, which, if anything, was more pervasive, banalizing, and destructive of genuine imaginative creativity than its equivalent in the USSR.

Meanwhile, it soon became apparent that whatever freedoms subsidized professional Fine Artists in Britain had been given, they had been deprived of the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to act socially. What were they supposed to be doing? For whom were they supposed to do it? They just had to be artists, and neither the Arts Council, nor the Tate, nor anyone else was prepared to tell them what that meant. Some sought to escape merely by imitating what the Mega- Visual professionals were doing: hence Pop Art. But it became more and more apparent that the subsidized Fine Art professionals were becoming like Red Indians herded into a reservation. Their state hand-outs meant that they could not die a decent death, nor were they likely to drift off and take up some other activity in the world beyond the art world corral. And yet, by the very fact that they were artists, they were insulated from lived experience, from social life beyond the art world compound. As people on reservations are wont to do, many committed incest: i.e. they did nothing but produce paintings about paintings, and train painters to produce yet more paintings about paintings, leading to an endless tide of vast, boring, thoroughly abstract pictures, expansive in nothing except their repetitive vacuity. Others of course went insane, and, abandoning their ‘traditional’ crafts altogether, raced round the reservation tearing off their clothes, gathering leaves and twigs, sitting in baths of bull’s blood, getting drunk, walking about with rods on their heads, insisting that their excrement, or sanitary towels, were ‘Art’ — either with or without the capital ‘A’.

Recently it has become quite clear that something has to be done; but there is little agreement about what. False solutions abound: in 1978, a crude ‘Social Functionalism’ was paraded at several exhibitions, most notably the justifiably slated ‘Art for Whom?’ show at the Serpentine. Richard Cork, a recent convert to this tendency, ended a polemical article with the sentence, ‘Art for society’s sake ought to become the new rallying-cry and never be lost sight of again.’18 The kind of work he appeared to favour was either the most deadening, dull, derivative, work carried out in a quasi-‘Socialist Realist’ style or the sort of modernist, non-visual art practice which packages bad sociology and even more dreadful Lacanian structuralism and presents them as art because they would not stand up for one moment when presented in any other way. Now it may be that those who are peddling this solution at the moment are no worse than naive. Time will show. But one would be foolish to forget that it was under just such banners as ‘Art for society’s sake’ that the National Socialists made bonfires of ‘decadent’, that was very often truthful, art. When ‘society’ is posited as an unqualified, homogeneous mass in this way we are forced to admit that we have had altogether too much of ‘Art for society’s sake’. But, in the end, it is probably not necessary to take this ‘Social Functionalist’ charade too seriously. To revert to our earlier metaphor it is rather as if some Red Indians within the reservation rebelled by dressing up in factory workers’ overalls, without, of course, ever leaving the confines of the corral. This sort of protest tends to fade out through its own ineptitude. Unlike the ‘Social Functionalists’ I believe that it is absurd superficially to politicize overt content and subject matter and then to shout, ‘Look, we are acting socially!’ But, despite everything I have said, I believe the professional Fine Art tradition is worth preserving. Why? Simply because it is here and only here that even the potentiality exists for the imaginative, truthful, depiction of experience through visual images, in the richness of its actuality and possible becoming. This is not an idealist assertion: despite all that I have said about the ideological character of the concept of ‘Art’, I consider that certain material practices — namely drawing, painting, and sculpture — preserved within the Fine Art traditions cannot themselves be reduced to ideology — least of all to bourgeois ideology. It is not just that these practices have a long history antedating that of ‘Art’ and artists: the material way in which representations are imaginatively constituted through them cannot be reproduced through even the most sophisticated ‘Mega-Visual’ techniques in static imagery. (The hologram, for example, can only reproduce a mechanically reflected image.) For these reasons despite its roots in emergent bourgeois institutions, despite the historical specificity of its conventions, despite the narrowness and limitations of its past achievement in Britain, and its virtually unmitigated decadence in the present, despite all this, I believe that the professional Fine Art tradition should be defended. For this to happen, the art community must change position rather than posture. From a new position one can act effectively in a different way; a new posture is just for show. Concretely, this means the pursuit of changes in the existing system of state patronage, changes in art education, and changes in the museum system. For example, it could involve the development of machinery for implementing group or community commissioning of artists (with a right of rejection of the end product); the introduction of mural techniques courses into the Pre-Diploma syllabus; and an overhaul of the currently disastrous procedures through which the Tate makes its acquisitions in modern art. The Arts Council itself may have much to learn from those small-scale, local traditions of image-making which, far from the failure at the centre of the modernist compound, have persisted in relation to small, disparate, often localized, but very definite and tangible publics.

Although I regard measures of this kind as necessary, I see them as also being relatively independent of the question of aesthetics. The process of modernist kenosis means that the professional Fine Art practitioner has no aesthetic, by which I mean, in this context, no identifiable skills and no set of usable representational conventions in the present. There are those, including many ‘Social Functionalists’, who simply wish to revive the old 19th century bourgeois aesthetic and mechanically to apply it to contemporary social and working- class subjects. Self-evidently, this is a disastrous course. However, in more general terms, it may be said that what the professional Fine Artist lacks, whether or not he is reinstated with a genuine social function, is that initial resistance at the level of the materiality of his practice which Raymond Williams has described as the necessary constraint before any freedom of expression is possible, for writers; deprived of 19th century pictorial conventions, the Fine Artist appears to have no language. One way out of this impasse may be to begin to emphasise again the specificities and potentialities of those material practices, drawing, painting and sculpture, which are not reducible to the ideology of ‘Art’. Indeed, not all bourgeois achievement within these practices is necessarily so reducible: the classical tradition and science of ‘expression’, for example, owed much to the scrutiny of certain material elements of existence, and biological processes, which, though mediated by specific social and historical conditions, are not utterly transformed by them.

The preservation of the Fine Art tradition, and of these material practices, seems to me a political imperative. If we look to the possible historical future, I am not prepared to put it more strongly than that, to a future of genuine socialism, one can foresee that the genuinely free artist will be in a culturally central position again. In such a society, the truthful, imaginative, creative depiction of experience through visual images would take the place of both the drab ‘Socialist Realism’ we see in the USSR today, and the banal spectacle of corporate advertising. These artists will be free to act socially not in any travestied sense, but in the fullest sense, to act socially, that is, within a socialist society. What will their works be like? We do not know. We cannot even be certain that we know what the experiences they will be endeavouring to represent will be like. Nevertheless, in the present the visual artist must dare to take his standards from this possible future. He must, and I say must simply because in effect he has no choice if he is to produce anything worthwhile, try to produce, a ‘moment of becoming’, or a visual equivalent of that future which realizes a glimpse of it as an image now. The artist who does this, through whatever ‘style’ or composite of styles in which he works, will embody exactly that socially responsible individualism which I set out by hinting at.

It has sometimes been said that when I talk about ‘moments of becoming’ I am talking about a mystical or quasi-religious experience. I cannot accept this view. I am not advocating some vague utopianism. On the contrary, I would argue that we can learn about our future potentialities only by attending more closely to our physical and material being in the present. (If the concept of transcendence means anything to me it is transcendence through history, not above history.) Like the Italian Marxist, Sebastiano Timpanaro, I believe there are elements of biological experience which remain relatively constant despite changes at the historical and socio­economic levels.19 One such relatively constant component was effectively suppressed, or conspicuously ignored, for social reasons, by the Victorian Fine Art professional aesthetic: significantly, that was the experience of becoming itself. The new aesthetic which we can only hope to realize in momentary fashion, the new realism in effect, must contain an equivalent for that experience.

The physicist A.S. Eddington — who was, admittedly, an idealist ‘in the last instance’ — once contrasted the nature of the experience of colour with that of becoming. Eddington’s point was that the experience of colour is wholly subjective: what he calls ‘mind-spinning’, or mental sensation. Colour bears no resemblance to its underlying physical cause or its ‘scientific equivalent’ of electro-magnetic wave-length. Thus Eddington believed that when a subject experiences colour he does so at many removes from the world which provides the stimuli: ‘we may follow the influences of the physical world up to the door of the mind’, he writes, ‘then ring the door­bell and depart.’ But he goes on to say that the case of the experience of becoming is very different indeed. ‘We must regard’, he wrote, ‘the feeling of “becoming” as (in some respects at least) a true mental insight into the physical condition which determines it. If there is any experience in which this mystery of mental recognition can be interpreted as insight rather than image-building, it should be the experience of “becoming”; because in this case the elaborate nerve mechanism does not intervene.’ Thus Eddington concludes: ‘ “becoming” is a reality — or the nearest we can get to a description of reality. We are convinced that a dynamic character must be attributed to the external world. I do not see how the essence of “becoming” can be much different from what it appears to us to be.’20

I believe that imaginative image-building has to attempt to find a visual equivalent for becoming: indeed, the hope for a new ‘realism’ may depend upon this. Some of those artists who are attempting to use their freedom with social responsibility by taking their standards from the future may at least hope to make some progress by further exploration of this possibility.