Li Po says somewhere: ‘By the stirring of the emotions and their expression the heart is set free’… And since the Arts both express and stir the emotions the Republic is benefited since a Republic of men with free hearts is the best sort of republic. The Artist is not concerned with these matters. His task is to make you see2 – to make you see what he either sees or remembers having seen or has felt whilst seeing. He may be looking at the leaning tower of Pisa and be reminded of a wave of the sea, mnemonic suggestions being queer affairs.
The beholder on the other hand may see only what is on the canvas – only the colours and the texture of the paint. Or he may see only the wave of the sea painted by the painter on seeing the leaning tower at Pisa. Or – the Artist cannot help this; it is not what he paints for but it is what happens – the beholder in turn, on seeing a picture, may feel a breeze on his forehead or smell the scent of new-mown hay or remember the walks he used to take with his grandmother. At any rate, on seeing a good, authentic piece of painting he will have his emotions stirred and, since the civilized man is one who is habituated to the stirrings of his emotion he2 is, that beholder, rendered more civilized… Yes, you will go out of Mr Crawford’s exhibition more civilized than when you went in.
And again, when you see a picture, you make a new acquaintance, a picture conveying a sense of the personality of the man or woman who has painted… And, still more, when you buy a picture – which is YOUR chief duty, you will take into your household for good a valued and soothing or stimulating fireside friend who will always be there. For I take it that if you do not like the personality expressed by a painting you will not buy it … That would be carrying a sense of duty too far.
The personality of Mr Crawford – I don’t mean the gentleman on two legs who has gone about to see the scenes presented on these canvases, I mean the personality that seems to look out at you, as if through a mirror, from behind the colours – that personality, then, is male, vigorous, honest, perceptive. It would make a good friend to have in the house. His colours have an infectious gaiety because they are clear and juxtaposed with knowledge the one beside the other. His composition is good, in the sense that the eye cunningly directed, has no difficulty in finding the place where the gaze should alight. It alights without shock and moves from place to place on the canvas, as the colours and forms direct it, until they have exhausted the picture. That again makes you gay, because what makes much of the world distressing and most pictures bad – what in fact the artist is there to cure – is that the eye is uncertain where the gaze should alight or where it should go when it has got there. That is all, in the domain of aesthetics, that you can ask of the artist and since Mr Crawford’s work possesses and gives out those qualities and vibrations of the sense, Mr Crawford has the right to assert that his labours give us that finest of all things… Fine Art.
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1 [American Precisionist artist and photographer, 1906–78. Ford’s note was written for an exhibition of Crawford’s paintings held at the Boyer Galleries, Philadelphia, March 10–30, 1937. There have been retrospectives of his work in New York at the Whitney Museum in 1985 (see the New York Times,11 October) and the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in 2001 (see New York Times, 11 May).]
2 [Ford frequently alluded to Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: ‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.’]