5
Max Raphael: Aesthetics and Politics
This chapter began life as a talk for a University College London seminar. As such, it is personal and selective, since only a long book could give a comprehensive account of Max Raphael. My aim was to introduce him to an audience for whom he was little more than a name, and at the same time to convey the pleasure and understanding he gave me. Today he is an all but forgotten critic, certainly in Britain, despite several attempts to resurrect him (see Addendum). Yet as I hope to show, there are aspects of his work that remain exemplary, if not always in its solutions, at least in terms of the problems it addresses.
Who was Max Raphael? The following biographical details are mostly taken from Herbert Read’s introduction to Raphael’s book The Demands of Art.1 For a detailed bibliography with comments I refer the reader to John Tagg’s edition of Raphael’s Proudhon, Marx, Picasso (1980).2 Max Raphael was born a German Jew in west Prussia in 1889. He studied the history of art, philosophy and political economy at the universities of Berlin and Munich. Two of his teachers in Berlin were Heinrich Wölfflin (art history) and Georg Simmel (philosophy). Wölfflin’s rejection of his doctoral thesis meant that he would never secure an academic post in Germany. Like Walter Benjamin, who suffered a similar rejection, he became an intellectual outsider for the rest of his life.
Munich at the time of Raphael’s studies there was in a state of creative ferment. Kandinsky had settled in the city in 1908 and had initiated the first form of Abstract Expressionism. In the same year Wilhelm Worringer published his treatise Abstraction and Empathy, which was to provide important historical and philosophical foundations for the subsequent development of modern art and whose influence is evident in Raphael’s early work. Several other artists who were to become founders of Expressionism, such as Alexei von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc and August Macke, were in Munich at about this time. Other artists who were to join the the Blauer Reiter group included Max Pechstein, who became a close friend. From his association with these artists Raphael developed an interest in modern French painting, and probably for this reason decided to pursue his study of philosophy in Paris, where he attended lectures by the intuitionist philosopher Henri Bergson, then at the height of his fame. He met Rodin and the young Picasso and became familiar with the work of Matisse. Out of these experiences came his first book From Monet to Picasso, published in Munich in 1913, but never translated into English.
In 1911 he went back to Germany to complete his philosophical studies, but returned to Paris in 1912, remaining there until the end of the following year. Now he was working on Poussin and French medieval art, especially on the architecture, sculpture and stained glass of Chartres. A need for solitude took him to Switzerland where, until the outbreak of the First World War, he turned his attention to a variety of subjects, among them geology, biology, botany and sociology. He also made an extensive study of Shakespeare’s plays and wrote a dramatic trilogy and a comedy that he later destroyed. He was conscripted into the German army during the First World War, wrote a diary, Spirit Versus Power,3 which he subsequently extended into a dialogue (likewise unpublished) called Ethos, dealing with the moral foundations of human rights and anticipating his later theory of knowledge.
Deserting from the army, Raphael returned to Switzerland and resumed contact with the world of art. He met Ernesto De Fiori, Hermann Haller, Ernest Wiegele, Alfred Schock and other artists well known at that time and published short articles on their work. In 1919 he wrote his first aesthetic study, Idee und Gestalt (Idea and Form), subtitled A Guide to the Nature of Art, also untranslated – only a few of his works are available in English. He left Switzerland in 1920 for Berlin where he lived almost continuously until 1932. Here he became a Marxist, though I have no evidence of his having joined the Communist Party. Indeed, according to John Berger, he was dismissed by the Party as a Trotskyist. Certainly, his criticism of the proposed Palace of Soviets in Russia suggests that he was no great admirer of the Soviet Union.4 And his art criticism differs radically from the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, as I shall indicate.
His interests remained as diverse and complex as before. He wrote several articles on Newton’s rules of reasoning. He toured the Rhineland and the region of Würzburg to study the architecture of medieval German churches. He joined the staff of the Berlin Volkshochschule, an adult-education institute where he taught on Rembrandt; on Aristotle; on Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic for whom he had a special affection; on Hegel, Marx and Lenin; on Husserl, Scheler and phenomenology; on the Doric temple; and on the history of dialectical materialism in Greece. This last theme, which was planned for the winter semester of 1932–33, close to the Nazi rise to power, was rejected by the institute’s directorate and Raphael resigned. He turned the lecture on the Doric temple into a detailed study of the temple of Poseidon at Paestum which he had already researched in southern Italy and Sicily. In 1931 he published an article on Valéry’s prose style and a longer piece on Pyrronist Scepticism.
During the opening years of the 1930s, as fascism unrolled in Germany, Raphael spent long summers in the Swiss alps and it was here that the first draft of The Demands of Art was written, appearing in English in 1968 with an additional essay on Picasso. In 1932 Raphael moved to Paris and stayed there until 1941, when he emigrated to New York, remaining there until he took his own life in 1952. In Paris he developed a sociology of art, epitomised in the book Proudhon, Marx, Picasso. And he wrote a monograph on the work of his friend, the architect André Lurçat.5 Architecture for Raphael was the coping stone of the arts, although he wrote most of all on painting. He planned a book on sculpture which was never realised, apart from a section on Egyptian reliefs. His most important philosophical work, The Theory of Knowledge of Concrete Dialectics, later to be called Theory of Intellectual Creation on a Marxist Basis, was published in German in 1934. There followed critical articles on the architectural theories of August Perret and the project for a Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (see above). In 1939 he completed a summation of his sociological studies of the 1930s entitled Workers, Art and Artists: Contributions to a Marxist Science of Art.6 Impressive and far from complete as this list is, Raphael also began work on a major study of Flaubert during this period.
The outbreak of the Second World War prevented him from continuing a promising work on Racine. But even during his temporary detention in concentration camps in France he wrote the draft of the first half of a general theory of art, which is included as an appendix to The Demands of Art, not to mention studies on Homer, Shakespeare and Spinoza. In the United States he concentrated on the problem of art history as a science, suggesting that the analysis of art would only become objective when it was mathematical, a conception which informs his new studies of Prehistoric Cave Paintings and Prehistoric Pottery and Civilisation in Egypt, both of which have been published in English.7 But already in many of his earlier essays, for instance, on Chartres or Giotto, the mathematical fascination is present. Herbert Read, who met Raphael once in Paris, felt that he ‘was in the presence of one who shared the angelic nature of his mentor, Meister Eckhart’.8
His suicide mirrored the fate of a number of German refugees from fascism: Walter Benjamin, Kurt Tucholsky, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Toller, Walter Hasenclever, Carl Einstein. Ever since Wölfflin’s rejection of his doctorate, Raphael had eked out a meagre living, a state of affairs that continued and worsened during his exile. In America he sought material assistance from Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt Institute,9 and the art historian, Meyer Schapiro, but found none – although Schapiro had probably been instrumental in getting permission for Raphael to travel to the United States in 1941. Raphael also dedicated a copy of his Theory of Knowledge of Concrete Dialectics to Schapiro. The circumstances of his death are obscure, but it seems he was affected by increasing isolation, penury and self-doubt, occupying a tiny apartment in lower East Side New York and living on the pitiful income that his wife brought home as an office cleaner.
I have limited discussion of his art criticism to Picasso’s Guernica for reasons I give later. (The list of painters he has engaged with is tantalisingly profuse. Such studies are mostly unpublished, but some have appeared in Germany.) My sources for his critical theory are restricted to The Demands of Art; Proudhon, Marx, Picasso; Prehistoric Cave Paintings and The Doric Temple, all of them in English translation except for the last. I have offered some critical perspective and indicated a context that he shared with other Marxists, but there is no detailed criticism or background. At the end of this chapter I append and comment on the few appraisals of Raphael that have appeared in English since Herbert Read’s ‘Introduction’ of 1968. That they exist at all is salutary, but on their own they could not give Raphael the place he deserves in our intellectual life, which has taken an entirely different direction.
The first reason I was drawn to Max Raphael was the following. In The Demands of Art he discusses the limits of creativity. ‘On the margin of what man can do’, he says, ‘there appears that which he cannot or cannot yet do – but which lies at the root of all creativeness.’ ‘All great creators,’ he goes on,
have felt this and have often expressed it in religious language. When Moses wished to look upon God’s glory he was told: ‘Thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen.’ And Homer says: ‘And when a god wishes to remain unseen, what eye can observe his coming or going?’
Deprived of direct and total vision, Raphael remarks, ‘the creator’s pride is broken in its encounter with objective reality, with the “absolute” of his epoch, and in this encounter a renewal of creative force takes place.’ ‘Were creativity possible without the “absolute”,’ Raphael adds, ‘the first creation would be the last.’10 He quotes Goethe’s maxim that the purpose of art is to probe the knowable and quietly revere the unknowable.
Goethe’s maxim offered a corrective to the more triumphalist side of Marxism which promised to solve the riddle of history, although in other parts of his work Raphael himself subscribes to this anticipation. I had long wondered how or whether certain values, which had their roots in religion – such as reverence, grace, benediction, prayer – might be translated into a materialist vocabulary. It seemed to me that Marxism would lose if they were not. Ernst Bloch had done most in this direction. And Raphael appeared to be doing the same at this point, while elsewhere he is a militant atheist. Here he retains the radical mysticism of his mentor Meister Eckhart, applying the following dictum of the latter to the activity of true art:
To keep busy is to be involved with things superficially; to do something is to be informed by reason, and involved wholeheartedly. Only men who do are in the midst of things without being submerged by them. In the very thick of things, they yet stand at the very outermost circle of heaven, close to eternity.’11
The true artist is such a man, according to Raphael.
My second attraction to Raphael lies in the declaration that ‘the work of art holds man’s creative powers in a crystalline suspension from which it can again be transformed into living energies’.12 It is a definition that has dazzled every critic who has encountered Raphael. Peter Fuller used it as a stick to beat John Berger with for his technicist Ways of Seeing.13 And Berger, a great admirer of Raphael, takes it up in his fervent piece ‘Revolutionary Undoing’ (see Addendum). The release of ‘man’s creative powers’ occurs in three stages, according to Raphael. First, when we look at a work of art, ‘we are freed from accidental, individual determinations and rendered capable of pure contemplation; next we are freed from pure contemplation and rendered capable of re-creating creation; and finally we are freed from re-creating and rendered capable of ourselves creating’14 – creating in the widest sense – not necessarily our own art, but our social selves. Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education spring to mind. But where Schiller’s aesthetic education takes place apart from the world, as a preliminary to re-entering it, Raphael’s spectators educate themselves in the ‘midst of things’, at the heart of social conflict.
The ‘crystalline suspension’ of the artwork ‘de-materialises’ the outer world of society and nature – the source of the artist’s subject matter. Conversely, the artist’s consciousness – his feelings, will and ideas – are materialised in the same process. A new world is established which is independent of both external and inner reality and becomes a reality of its own, relatively autonomous, with its own, artistic laws. It is a domain of freedom greater than what is given by society and nature or by the mind. In his Cézanne essay Raphael describes the process in relation to nature: The artist perceives in himself and in nature untold things that lie beyond the confines of accepted cultural conventions. He goes back to the ‘Mothers’, to the region where man and the cosmos have their common origin, and he brings both together between points of depth and height, centre and periphery, where they had never before met. The ‘natural’ nature which had served either as a starting point for the experience or as a point of support for the realisation seems banal, superficial, meaningless, in contrast with the revelation of the hidden to be found in ‘painted’ nature. The created form will always contain more than what the artist put into it consciously. The created form is not to be found either in ‘natural’ nature or in man.
The Mothers are goddesses of the underworld who guard the images of the dead. They figure in the second part of Goethe’s Faust and, I believe, nowhere else. Faust wishes to retrieve Helen of Troy and bring her up to the world of the living. With Mephistopheles, he makes the journey in fear and trembling, but he succeeds, at least for a time – Helen has to return to Hades, her sojourn in modern times is temporary. Helen represents perfect beauty and therefore perfect form. Form is nothing other than ‘the crystalline suspension of living energies’. Helen is a transient visitor, but her union with Faust engenders modern art in the figure of Euphorion whom Goethe associated with Byron. To create form, Raphael declares, always entails risk and mystery, and Goethe remarked that ‘form is a secret to most people’,15 a secret that for Raphael can only be captured, if just temporarily, by one who has trodden the path to the Mothers, ‘to the untrodden, not to be trod’, to ‘the deepest, furthest depths’.16
Form is creative, not imitative. It creates values or values are created through it, it does not reproduce them. Raphael chides Proudhon for asserting that art perceives beauty. No, art creates beauty. This, Raphael argues, is the difference between religious and secular art. Whereas in the former, God is the cause, in the latter He is the conclusion, He is created. From the father he becomes the son. In his rejection of a mimetic theory of art, Raphael differs radically from the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. And, although there are many resemblances with Lukács (whom he does not mention), the latter’s work is based on a reflection theory which Raphael rejects. It is certain that Lukács and the Socialist Realists would both have regarded Raphael’s theory of form as idealist, and denied that an artwork could possess the inner autonomy and independence from mind and matter that Raphael ascribed to it.
Raphael concedes that this autonomy is relative insofar as it is conditioned by economic relations and the various elements of the superstructure to which those relations give rise. The inner freedom of the artwork will, he argues, depend on the progressiveness and productivity of the particular class it serves. As these are flexible, so too is the autonomy of art. I remind the reader of Raphael’s quotations from the Bible and Homer, stressing that the artist must always fall short of his or her ideal or, as he puts it, the ‘absolute’ of their age. In other words, they must always reckon with necessity, and this struggle not only determines how much autonomy they will enjoy, but structures the formal process itself. Only as we approach a classless society, giving us more control over nature and social relations, will this gap between inner and outer, between freedom and necessity grow closer. In declining bourgeois society, he observes, artists tend to close their eyes to necessity, because prevailing social values are so hateful and threatening. But these artists are not truly oppositional, they have no basis in a revolutionary class and so forfeit any objectivity; they are condemned to caprice, subjectivism and l’art pour l’art.
Raphael condones the ‘tendentiousness’ of early proletarian art on the grounds that it represents a still insecure class that has not yet found the means of expression adequate to its content. The task of the revolutionary artist, he says, is to create these means of expression, indeed to force the pace of history to achieve them. The ability of art to transcend its material conditioning is a constant preoccupation of Marxist critics from Marx onwards. But forcing the pace of history goes beyond this and is perhaps applicable, if at all, only to proletarian art in a socialist society. Raphael disliked Soviet art and presumably the Soviet Union, the only available socialist society at the time. Russian Futurism did indeed espouse this idea, but it was not a movement of which Raphael approved. In any case his exhortation is no more than an assertion.
No such voluntarism exists in the traditional Marxist view of transcendence, which argues simply that art both reflects, and reacts on, the world and, if significant enough, will outstrip the limits of its time, not that it has the capacity to push history forwards. The question then is: How does art do this? By its own power? That is not a Marxist answer. By an ability to reflect objective reality? From what position? By satisfying the needs of subsequent social forces? Which are they and how do they relate to our own aspirations as socialists? Marx was aware that historical development was uneven and could not be accounted for by a simple model of base and superstructure in which economic relations determined the nature of political and legal institutions, and the higher reaches of religion, morality, philosophy and art. In particular, he valued classical Greek art ‘as a norm and as an unattainable model’.17 He attempted to explain this unevenness in three ways. Firstly, by contrasting the advantages of a particular kind of pre-capitalist society like the Greek with the capitalism of his own day in which exchange and commodity production predominated over use value, in which specialisation and alienation crippled human potential and in which the ensuing abstractness of human relations endangered the sensuous world of art. Secondly, by pointing to the unique mythology of the Greeks, which for the first time humanised its gods. And thirdly, by adapting a view, popular since the eighteenth century, that the ancient Greeks were the ‘normal children’ of humanity. ‘A man cannot become a child again,’ he remarks, ‘or he becomes childish.’ But ‘does he not find joy in the child’s naïveté. And must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage?’ – a notion which Marx applies to each new historical period: ‘Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?’ He concludes that this charm, far from conflicting with the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew, is inextricably bound up with the fact that these unripe conditions ‘under which it arose, and could only arise, can never return.’18
Raphael rejected this conclusion as having nothing to do with Marxism and was forever trying to reformulate Marx’s explanations in more satisfying terms. He denied that Greek art was normative, especially in view of the continuing discovery of cultures outside the western orbit. On the contrary, he argues, Greek art was made normative through its various revivals by the feudal Christian church, the Protestant Reformation and secular capitalism. Since Christian mythology lacked plasticity and sensuality, what better source to borrow from than the Greek to give its art stability and worldly appeal? What better model for the humanist Enlightenment and the abstract slogans of early bourgeois democracy? What better facades for the edifices of advanced capitalism?
This is an instrumental view of the history of art, similar to the ‘vulgar sociology’ which Lifshits contested in Russia (see my chapter on him) and to Hauser’s sociology of art. But Raphael returns to a normative interpretation of Greek culture in the following passage:
The arts of all other nations we have known (except perhaps for a portion of Chinese art) express particular metaphysical conceptions; they are dogmatic, whatever freedom they may attain in representing their subjects. Greek art is the only one that is anti-dogmatic in an absolutely radical sense, that is, dialectical. Each content it expresses is accompanied by its opposite; in other words, by giving artistic expression to the content of a myth, Greek art transforms this content in such a way that each time an opposite subject is introduced. The image of the scale with the balancing pans, an image on which the Greeks have so often drawn from the Iliad though to the Oresteia, and ending with Pyrrho’s scepticism, expresses in parable the essential tendency of the Greek imagination, namely, the balance between statement and counterstatement, and their synthesis in artistic form; in short, it expresses the dialectical tendency of the Greek imagination.19
It falls to the revolutionary proletariat, he declares at the end of his study of The Doric Temple, to rescue the Greek myth from the bourgeoisie and to deploy it against the chaos of our times. What we do with Hellenism, he concludes, is a political matter of the greatest importance.20
Here a sociological and a normative approach conjoin: Greek culture appears as a universally applicable model, at the same time it passes instrumentally from class to class until the proletariat can use it for the sake of humanity. A striking passage from his book Prehistoric Cave Paintings (1946) dispenses with this instrumentalism altogether. The artist, Raphael observes, faces society in two ways – with his will and his talent:
Within his will the artist has only two alternatives: either to take the side of the ruling class of his time or to propagandize the cause of the ruled class. A social–critical attitude is the utmost limit beyond which it cannot go. But the artist’s ability is less subjected to society than his will. With his talent he can not only uncover the unconscious ideas underlying the ruling interests, not only disclose the concealed developmental tendencies of the ruling class before this class has the will and strength to assert them, he can go beyond this and see the universally human values in the historically determined conditions of his time and express the former in the latter in such a manner that his work – although a product of his time – transcends all temporal limits and acquires in Marx’s phrase ‘eternal charm’ … ‘that is to say, validity for all times and of imperishable value’.
Indeed, Raphael emphasises, it is paradoxically the artwork most profoundly determined by its time that is the one likely to survive into timelessness. ‘Only the great artist,’ he remarks a little later, ‘can grasp and master the whole historical reality, lesser artists cling to the fragments of this reality that float on the surface.’ Among the lesser artists it is clear that he counts most moderns from the Impressionists onwards. The present passage concludes soberly: ‘But if the artist, by his creative effort, rises above his time, he will nevertheless remain the social slave of the compulsions of his time, of the ideas of the ruling class.’21 The idea that an artist can embrace objective reality both despite and through his historical limitations is common to Lifshits, Lukács – and Marx.
Two other things promote the longevity of the artwork, according to Raphael – the aesthetic dimension and the artist’s relationship to the viewer. Unlike Kant’s ‘disinterested pleasure’, Raphael’s aesthetic includes all the faculties starting with the sexual, its object is ‘the whole of man’s experience’. As in Kant, play is at the centre and is a synonym for freedom. But, like freedom, it is held in a dialectic relationship with necessity which contracts as a classless society approaches. (In Kant the two are entirely separate.) However, from Raphael’s absolute point of view, the act of play is free even from these relative restraints. For since, as he explains, art transforms the external infinite into an internal infinite, so play, which has no need of immediate gratification, can be prolonged indefinitely.
Secondly, the (great) artist, according to Raphael, includes the viewer in his work, compelling the latter and subsequent viewers to absorb the full impact of the work and to renew that effect over and over again. In so doing, the spectator participates in the form-creating process itself. Every time we take in a work, he says, we re-create it and so promote its longevity. Or, as Berger interprets this: ‘Raphael shows us that the revolutionary meaning of a work of art has nothing to do with its subject matter in itself, or with the functional use to which it is put, but is a meaning continually awaiting discovery and release.’22 John Tagg compares Raphael’s collaboration between artist and viewer with the similar programme put forward by Benjamin in ‘The Author as Producer’.23
To sum up the theoretical part of this chapter, here are Raphael’s final words in The Demands of Art on the study of art:
Creative instinct manifests itself with greater freedom in art than in any other domain. A creative, active study of art, is therefore, indispensable to awaken creative powers, to assert them against the dead weight of tradition, and to mobilise them in a struggle for a social order in which everyone will have the fullest opportunity to develop their creative capacities. The details of this social order cannot be anticipated without falling into utopian dreams. We can and we must be satisfied with the awareness that art helps us to achieve a truly just order.
As a good Marxist he adds that ‘the decisive battles…will be fought at another level.’24
By contrast to his theorising, Raphael’s practical discussion of individual artworks starts very empirically, considering lines, angles, shapes and colours in the most minute detail before he permits himself an ideological conclusion. Let us turn to Raphael’s analysis of Picasso’s Guernica, ‘Discord between Form and Content’, the last of his essays on individual works in The Demands of Art. All the other examples are ones that Raphael believes to have achieved some degree of unity between form and content. (The works are Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, Degas’s Leaving the Bath, Giotto’s Lamentation over the Body of Christ and The Death of Saint Francis and Rembrandt’s Joseph Interprets Pharaoh’s Dreams.) There is no space to discuss his interpretation of any of these. I have chosen the essay on Guernica because the painting has become an anti-fascist and humanist icon, whereas Raphael believes it is trapped in a bourgeois ideology. The essay is very long, complex, dense and unsummarisable. What follows is a collage of his argument.25
Raphael places Guernica in the tradition of the history painting, doubting however whether this genre is possible in a world dominated by the abstract powers of money and the machine:
No representational style is adequate, perhaps, to portray these new powers which have degraded mankind to mere material and have elevated bombs to the metaphysical status of a new omnipotent devil; at all events, no such style has as yet been invented.26
What kind of painting has Picasso produced?
Raphael begins characteristically with the composition, noting the clear division of the surface into three parts: two more or less equal at the sides, and a central area about three times as wide. The triangular form in the middle connects the two bottom corners of the picture surface with its centre on the top. But the effect of the two equal sides is played down because the right side of the triangle runs on the surface, while the left side runs into depth; moreover, before they meet, both sides are interrupted by forms that shift the centre of gravity out of the triangle to the left of its apex.
Raphael notices that ‘contrary to all our reading and writing habits, the painting reads, both compositionally and in terms of subject matter, from right to left.’ ‘But even so,’ he argues,
it may be questioned whether the painting should not rather be read from both sides simultaneously. If so, the major emphasis would fall on the triangular composition in the middle, as indeed suggested by its great width; in the former case, however, the left side would be emphasised as the resolution, more important than the content of the middle. Accordingly, our evaluation of the various components of the content will also vary. The effect of all this is to put the viewer in a state of uncertainty and irritation ruling out any easy assimilation of the work. But it also heightens the feeling of isolation, destruction and seeming disorder for the viewer, who is thus repeatedly shocked out of his habitual ways. At the same time the artist has protected himself against any a priori outside his own personal will and has thus reinforced his control over the painting, the viewer, the subject matter and his right to be arbitrary. He makes himself the sole creator of order in the midst of chaos.27
Raphael compares this composition with the medieval altarpiece and the Greek pediment which, according to him, Picasso is trying to deconstruct, seeking a figuration similar to signs found on prehistoric Spanish ceramics and Paleolithic cave paintings and evidenced in Guernica by the acute angle open either at the top or the bottom. If this is the case, Raphael continues, the scene of death by fire at the right has been deliberately placed inside the female life form (V), the life-and-death struggle between man and horse in the middle has been placed within the male death form (Γ) and, finally, the juxtaposition of mother with child and bull – an allegory of fertility and procreation – had been set inside a V shape in the first stage and later inside a Γ shape.
But, Raphael observes,
the viewer cannot be expected to know what the signs mean and is probably unaware of their presence; they remain bits of erudition, even when he has learned to decipher them, esoteric knowledge without social or historical roots in our time.
To be sure, Raphael concedes, Picasso is free to ‘associate death by burning with the sign of life and thus to suggest the end in the beginning, the fact of death in the continuation of life’.28 But he can only do this by combining two languages: the representational and the symbolic, and he is unable to resolve the oppositions between the two within one artistic form.
The signs and meanings in Picasso’s painting are in fact allegorical rather than symbolic, Raphael tells us. Like the allegory, the symbol may have multiple meanings, but they are interrelated and deepened in a phased progression from finite to infinite, acquiring a necessary character on the way; whereas the allegory is unable to form a sensuous connection with the infinite and is susceptible to endless, arbitrary decipherings. At most, it can connect in a short-circuited fashion with an abstract universal, which, Raphael argues, is what it does in Guernica and which I shall elucidate in a moment. Picasso’s allegory, Raphael adds, is also private, rooted neither in his own age nor in tradition; and he alone possesses the key to it. And, even if he gave us the key, the allegory would remain private and arbitrary.
The allegory embroiders a more profound principle in the painting that finds embodiment in Picasso’s use of neutral or self-identical colours, blacks and whites and their variants. Raphael relates this principle to the pre-Socratic arche, a primal category constituting the ground of all changing and transitory things. In regard to Picasso, Raphael calls this principle ‘conscious-being’, that is a consonance between consciousness and being which, as we have seen, Raphael holds to be impossible and which, in an earlier pre-Marxist essay on Picasso, he describes as mystical. At the moment of Guernica, Raphael suggests, when the painter felt the world and himself to be threatened with destruction, he put his faith in an indestructible and immutable absolute unity. Colour is stripped of brightness and light does not vibrate between light and dark; Picasso retained only a uniform white, black and grey, without nuances, though not without variations. In order that the colours could keep this unchanging self-identity, all material characteristics of objects and living bodies had to be eliminated because their surfaces were continually altered by the action of light from the outside and the circulation of the blood from the inside. Raphael describes black and white as metaphysical colours: ‘White produces fullness and density and thereby urges definition – the mere possibility of definition, no specific definition. Black…eludes definition, seems to have a tendency to elude even an attempt at definition.’29
Line, which is rooted in movement, contrasts with colour. While colours are metaphysical, static and ‘pre-emotional’, lines are empirical, dynamic and driven by an emotion that takes the form of serial explosions of pain and terror. When Picasso brings colour and line together, we have ‘the torment of the finite, frozen in its explosion, in the face of absolutely silent conscious-being, none of whose potentialities are realised. This,’ Raphael remarks,
is a world without hope of salvation; mankind is reduced to a scream. Of the nine figures represented in this painting (counting both the human and animal figures), eight have their mouths open and seven are uttering cries of anguish.30
No inner connection between colour and line is achieved. Colour never crosses into sensuality or objectivity, while line remains caught in the empirical and can never transcend itself into an arche.
After summarising a number of diverse interpretations of the painting, Raphael provides his own reading, trying, not very successfully, to steer clear of allegorical meanings. Raphael starts from the right with the woman on fire, wildly extending her arms while the rest of her body seems to be sinking into a funnel-shaped form. Picasso, he says, follows history here, showing the effect of the bombing and assuming that the viewer will know what caused the fire. At the left, he points out, the counterpart of this panic terror is a kind of imperturbability. While here, too, there is a panic scream, a mother in despair over her dead child, above her is the stoic ataraxia of the bull, whose head is turned round, a posture familiar from Paleolithic art, where the bull’s head is given in profile, the horns in frontal view. The animal’s mouth is open just above the mother’s and the protruding tongues imply that some oral transfer of energies is taking place. The bull, the active male standing over the receptive woman, is an agent of fecundation of which the mother, in an agony of sorrow, is yet unaware. The suggestion is that of new life succeeding destruction. Perhaps the bull denotes the sexual energy of the Spanish people or simply of life in general.
In the middle of the painting there are the dying horse and the dying man beneath. Was the man riding the horse and were both killed together by the same external cause? Or was there some sort of struggle between man and horse in which each mortally wounded the other? Or were they struck down by some external cause while they were struggling? What suggests the struggle is the spear-like weapon that pierces the horse and a small wound which may have been a blow from the sword. What suggests an external cause of death is the large wound in the shape of an up-ended lozenge, in which case the warrior would stand for a soldier of Republican Spain and the horse for Franco or fascist Spain. Raphael calls this an odd mixture of the representational and the allegorical, because it is not the actual struggle of the Civil War which is portrayed so much as the two figures succumbing to death. He assumes that the form above the horse’s head is an allegory for the Nazi bomb despite the fact that an electric light bulb was drawn inside it at the last minute; and the form seems to reproduce the Greek symbol of lightning. Raphael notes that this middle section, although it depicts a struggle, is the most ambiguous part of the painting. It is also the only space on which Picasso uses stippling, abandoning the density of colour and the tension between planes surrounding it, and suggesting to Raphael an irritating void. Leaving aside the objects and examining the feelings conveyed here, we can describe this scene as the realm of the demonic, located between panic on the right and ataraxia on the left.
What of the woman with the lamp? Contrasting her with the woman at the bottom right, who provides a physical transition to the centre as she escapes from panic into struggle, the woman with the lamp provides a more spiritual transition. She is not running but trying to see; the night lamp gives a poor light, however. Held as it is right next to the bomb, it expresses deep irony: the world being destroyed is as obsolete as the night lamp and the wooden sword; the world in process of being born will not have to cope with dead tradition. Is the woman an allegory of truth? Her arm is strong, her grasp firm, and her profile incisive; she suggests something positive, the power of reason and enlightenment. Earlier studies for the painting, where the bull was shown in its full width, indicate a more unmistakable connection between the allegories of truth and fecundity: the woman’s arm was level with the bull’s back and almost touched it.
There are many other riddles in the painting to be explained and Raphael suggests that their formal intent may be to keep the viewer occupied with them. But, he warns, the longer the viewer remains under the painter’s magic spell, the less likely is he to be moved to act; the artistic details obstruct and destroy the political impact. ‘The primary effect Picasso has aimed at is shock,’ Raphael remarks, and it is worthwhile quoting him at length here:
Two elements may be distinguished: surprise that so energetic a shock has been produced (for we do not see how the energy was accumulated) and that the shock, despite the intensity of the energy behind it, is so quickly ended (for we witness only its explosion). Nor is affect presented for its own sake: no more than the sensory perception is it permitted to last; were it so permitted, we might take sentimental pleasure even in the situation of terror. The after effects of any one explosion are not felt because, like waves, each is directly followed by another, so that all the after effects tending to secure the autonomy of the emotion are destroyed. Here, too, Picasso brutally assaults the viewer’s sensibilities. He cuts short the development of emotion; he drives the viewer from affect to affect. The monotonous repetition of shocks shows that Picasso does not intend the shocks to be enjoyed for their own sake; he makes use of affect only to dissolve it into affectlessness. This purpose is served by the twofold development – across the painting, from panic to ataraxia and, from bottom to top, from the dead soldier to the rather exhibitionistic allegory of Reason. Both the physical and the spiritual allegory to some extent resolve horrified shock, but they do not produce catharsis in the viewer because the resolution has not arisen inevitably from the catastrophe and because the catastrophe itself is not a human one but inhuman, antihuman. The bomb was produced by a dehumanised society and its victims are portrayed as self-alienated. The former is rooted in the essence of our age, the latter in the limitations of Picasso as artist unable to transcend present history and only able to respond to its destructive forces in an allegory of hope for the future, comforting but not cathartic.31
As I copied out this paragraph, I thought of two critics: Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Raphael uses a sentence from Benjamin’s early Origin of German Tragic Drama as an epigraph to the chapter on Picasso: ‘Allegories are in the realm of ideas what ruins are in the realm of things.’32 Later, Benjamin located both allegory and shock as the necessary components of a modern aesthetic which would replace the organic work of art with a more fractured form based on technology or adapted to a technological age. He had in mind film and Brecht’s epic theatre. I imagined Adorno could have read the passage quoted with complete approval, for the features that Raphael lists as negative are precisely those which Adorno valued most in contemporary literature and art and found exemplified in Picasso among others. Raphael still had faith that the class struggle would bring prehistory to an end. Adorno believed that history had reached its end in the fully administered, reified, corporate capitalist world and that any kind of organic art would offer no more than a sentimental surrogate for reality.
Raphael is a classic Marxist and perhaps, like Marxism itself, he now seems old-fashioned. As neo-Marxists, Benjamin and Adorno are more fashionable and, although contemporary with Raphael, they mark out the boundary between his absolutist outlook and the relativist intellectual environment we live in today. Raphael belongs to a generation of Marxist art historians – Frederick Antal, Francis Klingender, Arnold Hauser and Meyer Schapiro – who are largely ignored now, with the exception of Schapiro. To compare him with them is a task I cannot address here, although I have suggested a partial similarity with Hauser. If Raphael’s writing is often dense and awkward, there is also a sybilline majesty that breaks through from time to time and that belongs to another epoch.
John Berger’s essay ‘Revolutionary Undoing’ was written for New Society in 1969, that is, a year after the publication of The Demands of Art, and the events of May 1968 in Paris. His enthusiasm for Raphael breathes all the fervour of that period: ‘…Raphael will show us as no other writer has ever done the revolutionary meaning of the works inherited from the past – and of the works that will be eventually created in the future.’ He has no criticism of Raphael, praising him as ‘the greatest mind yet applied’33 to the revolutionary meaning of art. Berger dedicated his book on Picasso to Raphael (among others), and his comments on Guernica bear similarities to Raphael’s. Raphael had prophesied that the future of art in the twentieth century would depend on a reconciliation of Courbet’s materialism with Cézanne’s dialectics. Berger found this reconciliation in Cubism, which he called logically though bizarrely ‘the only example of dialectical materialism in painting’.34 It is doubtful whether Raphael would have agreed with him.
Among the British art-historical New Left, John Tagg was the most important scholar of Raphael.35 References to his various contributions to the study of Raphael can be found in the notes to this chapter. In the last of these, the article ‘The Method of Max Raphael: Art History Set Back on its Feet’, published in Block in 1980, he draws extensively on Workers, Art and Artist, published for the first time in Germany five years previously, which I discovered too late for my own contribution. Tagg takes us through Raphael’s method and theory of value, and acquaints us with two further picture analyses by Raphael – those of Le Nain’s Peasant Family and Poussin’s Apollo and Daphne, the former exemplifying a ‘materialist’ painting, the latter a ‘dialectical’ one. He notes the mystical element in both Raphael and Benjamin without pursuing the topic. Though scarcely critical of Raphael, Tagg appends to the Block article an ominous quotation from Pierre Macherey, the Althusserian critic, attacking the idea of an organic work of art. Soon Tagg himself would be wholeheartedly embracing Althusser’s anti-humanist Marxism, which opposed everything that Raphael stood for.
There is a political motivation in the essays of Berger and Tagg that belongs to their two decades and that was lacking in the 1980s, when cultural studies had become part of the university establishment. The Althusserian epidemic had by then died down, but its legacy continued in the various academic pursuits of ‘cultural materialism’, ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘deconstruction’. In a theoretical world where the ‘subject’ has been banished there is no room for aesthetics (or ethics). Michèle Barrett was perhaps the first to put the discipline back on the agenda in her 1987 article ‘Max Raphael and the Question of Aesthetics’. Decrying the exclusive concern with the production of meaning in cultural studies, she finds Raphael useful insofar as he ‘tried to explore the connections between meaning and the senses, and between meaning and aesthetic form’.36 On the other hand, she feels that he fetishises the work of art, ignoring the social dimensions of reception and value, and she detects an ‘unresolved conflict in his theoretical framework between an emphasis on artistic production (in the spirit of Walter Benjamin) and a profoundly Lukácsian subsumption of art to the category of ideology’.37 This is a misreading of Lukács, but the criticism is acute. Both Raphael and Lukács stand for an organic theory of art. For this reason Barrett rejects Raphael’s interpretation of Guernica, suggesting that the painting ‘is treated more effectively through ambiguous and allegorical means than it ever could have been in a realist mode’.38 But she overlooks the mystical element in Raphael, which is an important source of his aesthetic theory and is quite absent from Lukács.
Nevertheless, she opened up a potentially fruitful debate about Raphael and aesthetics. In the meantime, post-structuralism passed into postmodernism where Raphael could obviously find no place. Any discussion of aesthetics had to go against the grain, at least from a Marxist or left-wing point of view. Even Terry Eagleton’s groundbreaking Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) made little difference to the general current. And, from a Marxist point of view, it fell short of those connections in Raphael’s work between meaning and the senses, meaning and form that appealed to Barrett. Eagleton polarises the aesthetic into ideology on the one hand and a philosophy of the body on the other. He does not mention Raphael. Nor was there any reference to him at an international conference held in London in 2002 on Marxism and the Visual Arts Now, where classical Marxism got short shrift, apart from a paper from the erstwhile Althusserian, Nicos Hadjinicolaou, and where Adorno ruled the day.
Hölderlin wrote after the failure of the French Revolution: ‘Wozu Dichter in durftiger Zeit?’ (‘Wherefore poets in bleak times?’) We may ask the same question of classical Marxism, certainly of its art history. The popularisation of Raphael may help us answer it, for he was both a poet and a Marxist.