MASS CIVILIZATION AND MINORITY VISUAL CULTURE
Caravaggio, for Roger Fry, was the first popular artist. Though the “vast mass” of art had always been “mediocre or frankly bad,” Fry wrote in “The Seicento,” before Caravaggio the bad artist had at least played along with the standards and practices of the best artists of the time (141). The new tradition of “popular and commercial art” set out with a different strategy, one of direct and calculated appeal to the “uninstructed” public, with the “power of gaining immediate success” as the only standard that mattered (143). To achieve this end, artists had to make their work easy—to present no challenges of interpretation or understanding. Scenes of “sentimental and melodramatic emotion” were embraced so as to provide “a slope down which the imagination glides without effort” (143).
More generally, Fry wrote of works from the sixteenth century to the “Royal Academy, the Salon, and almost the whole art of the cinema,” such popular art “lacks style” (142–44). Such art deliberately abandoned form in favor of the direct and unadulterated description of the external world. Gone was the visible trace of the artist’s activity that provided a kind of complicating screen for subject matter. In a painting like Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child with St. Anne (fig. 14), the artist’s “ultra-photographic realism” and concentration on particular dramatic moments “skilfully illuminates the dryness of theology with the vividness of cinematographic presentment. For whatever the scene,” on this way of working, “it must be presented in such a way that the spectator would be forced to concentrate his attention on certain facts, gestures or expressions” (159). Caravaggio, the “impresario for the cinema” avant la lettre, always aimed “to produce the most vivid shock of surprised acquiescence from any, even the least cultured, spectator.” (158–59).
Figure 14. Caravaggio, Madonna and Child with St. Anne, 1605–6. Oil on canvas, 292 × 211 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Licensed by the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Galleria Borghese.
Fry’s words are a vivid reminder that form was central to modernist constructions of high and low culture—a usage which dates back to at least the 1760s, when the first regular, fully public exhibitions of paintings in Britain began, and a raft of often-satirical commentary arose in response. With an expanded public now able to see and discuss contemporary art, one means of distinction for the expert commentator became the ridiculing of those who treated pictures as transparent windows onto their subject matter. Fry’s anxiety about the viewers who ignored “form” and saw only “description” was dramatized in tales such as the “country-fellow” at an exhibition, who on seeing depicted “the sign of the Green Man at Barnet, dogs and all . . . immediately fancied [himself] before the inn door, and called, in a loud voice, for Will Hopkins the ostler to take care of [his] horse.”1 But these worries about naïve looking extend far beyond Fry and British art writing, running through critiques of popular culture from the classical period to the present day. Stretching back to Plato’s attack on mimetic poetry in the Republic, the underlying idea is that art may be harmful if it offers experiences and representations that are consumed without reflection.2
Popular art is linked to unreflective consumption by its formalist critics precisely because, as Fry put it, it lacks style. The fine or high arts are distinguished by their ability to use the difficulty or “opacity” provided by form to force their audience into an active and aware mode of engagement with their content, while the “transparency” of popular or low arts make no such demands on their passive consumers.3 “Kitsch,” as the low has come to be called by many, is everywhere characterized by the “avoidance of difficulty”—the rejection of complexity in favor of the accessible, the legible, the undemanding.4 Even more troubling are the political consequences of the reduction of viewers to mere “spectators.”5 Low culture, rejecting the difficulty of the high, threatens to push unmediated views of a distorted world that are unquestioningly and blankly taken in.
Formalism, then, diagnosed and defended against some of the dangers of modern mass culture. And in order to do so, it made strong claims about the political and ethical potential of the objects viewed and the ways of viewing them. Grounded in formalist thinking about art, the demand for proper forms of attention involved grappling with the politics of high and low culture in the broadest sense. Literature, film, newspapers—these, too, were battlegrounds for the hearts and minds of the public. In this chapter, I explore how much of the controversy over the ethics and politics of formalism ultimately stemmed from the tension between the active and the passive, including the conflict between ideals of historically informed, imaginative engagement on the one hand and of entirely free looking on the other. The latter idea of a looking unconstrained by knowledge or history helped give rise to the series of attacks on aestheticist formalism and mass culture that have long misled historians. For as formalist theory based its deepest claims on having moved on from the aestheticism of previous generations, “bad” aestheticism and mass culture came to look remarkably like one another.
Passivity: The Critique of Low Culture
In 1909, when film seemed like a new technology yet to be consumed by the forces of commercialization, Fry had noted its profound potential. The cinematograph had the ability to distance viewers from what it pictured and, in doing so, allowed them to see and experience apparently familiar things with a striking new clarity. By the 1930s Fry was writing of the medium only in negative terms.6 Jean-Antoine Watteau, a partial outsider observing a new and freer form of social life in eighteenth-century Paris, had, on Fry’s account, paralleled cinema’s surface beauty and charm with a vision of a dreamlike world without consequence.7 Watteau’s world was an “art of escape” but an escape that Fry justified by situating it “just beyond the confines of personal desires”; gazing at Watteau’s painting, the viewer need not mourn the fact that they could not themselves “embark for Cythera.” The cinema, on the other hand, like the “popular novel,” offered an entirely different and more harmful form of escape. The cinema and novel allowed the consumer to enjoy “in imagination, a life of unrestrained luxury which he does not seriously hope to share.” Typical of much “popular art,” these were modes of escape based on “crude imaginative participation in a world where the desires which are frustrated in actual life are gratified.”
In the following sections of this chapter, I examine the way that the ideals of viewing expressed by Fry were used to ground defenses of modernism and high culture. In order to orient this discussion, it is first necessary to address the problem of low culture, which provides the foil to that of high. Why was it that the low meant gratification of “personal egoistic wishes,” as Fry put it, and that this particular form of escape might be so problematic for formalist writers?
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The early twentieth-century disarray of the British public sphere may seem only too familiar to the present. For contemporary critics the problems of the newly widened public sphere were rooted in a broad combination of new techniques of mass production with modern methods of commercial management and exploitation of audiences. All of these techniques and methods, the critics suggested, had been set in place to meet (or manipulate) the rises in leisure time and spending of the middle and lower classes.8 The growth of a press appealing to sensation and human interest, cheap and accessible fiction catering to the desire for escape from the real world, popular music and cinema designed for a similar form of pleasure, and even large dance halls and pubs severed from traditional folk music and community organization: all of these were thought to have distracted from the intellectual and emotional merits of more traditional high or folk art pastimes.
Culture had ended up in the hands of irresponsible capitalist producers interested only in turning a profit, creating a product aimed at the lowest common denominator, and bringing down in turn the level of the general audience.9 But the problem went beyond the corruption of mass taste by its exposure to cultural products created to be the very easiest sort of pastime. The pessimistic story of taste fed into the political fear shared by politicians, artists, and writers across the political spectrum of the irresponsibility of the passive and easily manipulated “crowd” or “herd,” given more power by the rise of mass democracy at the very point that increasingly “the multiplying mass of readers took their news and views from a diminishing band of newspaper magnates.”10 Cultural criticism itself in the interwar years took up the link between “modernity” and accelerating cultural decline.11 T. S. Eliot’s early 1920s “dissociation of sensibility” claim—that the seventeenth century saw a separation of thought from sensibility or feeling “from which we have never recovered”—gained notably widespread acceptance and influence as the basis for such pessimism.12 I. A. Richards meanwhile developed the teaching of English literature in order to train his subjects to counter the negative effects of the modern mechanized world filled with advertisements.13 In the 1930s this pessimism was coordinated and spread in books and essays such as F. R. Leavis’s 1930 Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, and, from 1932 on, in the pages of the Leavis-controlled journal, Scrutiny.
The social task of literary criticism, then, brought taste and politics together in its battle against the ignorance and deception that led to the habits of passivity, distraction, and stock response.14 This undertaking, despite its aim to reach into all areas of life, depended to a large extent on close study of the written text and the uses of language. In the words of a recent commentator, “The prolonged exposure to the kind of verbal artefact that is ‘a world by itself’ came to seem to be a privileged position from which to conduct the critical scrutiny of the failings of one’s own society.”15 As such, while the early to mid-twentieth-century reaction against the effects of industrialized modernity and commodity culture has been widely discussed, the formalism of writers on the visual arts such as Fry has tended to be separated off from the writing of Richards and Leavis. The latter are usually taken at their own word as having offered an alternative—“practical critical”—mode of engagement that from the 1920s onward superseded Bloomsbury’s purist aestheticism.16 The separation of literary and visual formalisms is especially problematic given that those who continued to espouse the ethical value of the visual arts into the mid-twentieth century, most notoriously Clement Greenberg but also Herbert Read, drew on a free mixture of the ideas found in theories of form and visual culture with the Cambridge English, Scrutiny, or New Critical traditions associated with the impact of Richards and Leavis.
The critique of low culture did not necessarily imply a rejection of mass or popular culture, but the common assumption was nonetheless that the two went hand in hand: the demands of mass industrial production had brought much of culture to a low state, which in turn had taken popular taste down with it. The link between low and mass or popular can be seen to underwrite the efforts to spread and institutionalize close visual attention to fine art objects—by institutions such as the British Broadcasting Council, the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE), and later the Arts Council of Great Britain—from the 1920s onwards. Fine art was assumed to be more difficult for the contemporary population and so was set against a general category of popular art, which took in everything from Royal Academy pictures and magazine illustrations to the more accessible side of contemporary film production.
In order to see this in more concrete terms, it is useful to turn to the critical and institutional attempts to reorient contemporary viewers in the direction of high culture. What the guidebooks of the 1920s and early 1930s shared—whatever their views of Fry and Bell—was the emphasis on the imaginative and active engagement that art proper demanded and the belief that such experience was to be governed by the structure of the artworks rather than being entirely personal and idiosyncratic. Sentimental and associative attitudes were attacked along with any preference for naturalism; the figure of “the philistine,” who just “knew what he liked,” was roundly criticized.17 As the painter Raymond Coxon put it in Art: An Introduction to Appreciation, art proper was about “communication through emotional response”; “a work of art which appeals solely on account of verisimilitude and external association is misread.”18 Another book, Arthur Milton’s The Lure of the London Galleries: A Record of Beauty and Romance, in being the closest there was to an exception, perhaps proves the rule. The book incessantly strove for popular appeal, even closing with a “conversation” about the best painting between the author and his aunt and uncle, during which he offered the stirring refrain, “Let the public decide!” (189). Sentimental stories were prevalent, and the final chapter on modern art was titled after a quotation taken from the author’s description of Paul Gauguin: “He was like a schoolboy, fired with the romantic desire to plough the Spanish Main; his motto might well have been Stevenson’s ‘Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum’” (180). Even in a book so oriented to mass appeal, however, the now-orthodox narratives of modern art seen in Fry’s account of postimpressionism were repeated. In their focus on the mastery of appearances, the impressionists “seem to have forgotten that an artist must be more than a recorder of Nature” (176–77). Paul Cézanne’s “Post-Impressionism” involved a turn away from pure naturalism to instead “introduce the artist’s own emotions when confronted with the scene before him” (177). Cézanne’s was an art of “human interests and emotions,” to be sure, but one that achieved these through formal means (178).
The view of the contemporary plight of the popular was carried into the 1930s by those involved with bringing art “to the people” on the radio and through other forms of adult education. Writers like the archaeologist and writer on sculpture Stanley Casson continued to mock the philistine audience that relied on personal association, a position that united figures who were otherwise opposed, such as Clive Bell and Herbert Read (who wrote that “in [Bell’s] great fight against the philistine I hope that I am on his side”).19 For many associated with the BBC (and especially its adult education side), the pervasive negative opinion of public taste was confirmed by the public’s inability to engage properly with their arguments. Reading letters on his “Design” talk series, the novelist Anthony Bertram noted with some surprise “how thin their [the public’s] suggestions and opinions were” and elsewhere suggested that the “democratic” view of art was “wrong. The opinion of the majority does not hold in matters of art. The instinctive appreciation of art is a very rare gift. The capacity to appreciate is, I believe, fairly common, but it must be trained.”20 After reading the letters sent by listeners and readers to J. E. Barton after his introductory talks series on modern art, Casson summed up the “astonishingly few” issues raised: “1. Why should not art be true to nature? 2. Is distortion possible in art? 3. How can I detect insincerity in art? 4. Should art teach a lesson? So poverty stricken is the imagination of the average listener in matters of art that that is really all that he can think of.”21
When the British Institute of Adult Education began its Art for the People traveling exhibitions later in the decade, the surveys of participants carried out were taken as empirical evidence of the prevalence of naïve looking amongst the public. According to the 1935 report, “Most of the inhabitants of Great Britain have been brought up to believe that a good picture must be a good representation; within that limit they show both patience and discernment in their appraisal. Beyond that limit they are lost.”22 The 1939 report was even more direct: “The normal attitude is (1) that the picture should be like something, and (2) that it should be like something that is liked.”23 The preference for sentimentality and verisimilitude was put down to the contingencies of education and experience—notably that the types of pictures the average person saw in photographic or cheap color reproduction were either popular old master works, popular works by royal academicians, or pictures with news, advertising, or sentimental value.24 The solution to the perceived problem lay in art appreciation that moved beyond mere likeness and association to things the public liked. The 1935 report concluded that: “It is equally clear from this experiment that this ‘illiteracy’ is chronic but not incurable. It exists not because people are stupid, but because their innate conservatism has never been educated by contact with new ideas.”25 The cure for this visual illiteracy was starkly formalist, with the viewers who responded to “effects of light and shade . . . balance of masses . . . effects of lines” approved as having responded to “painting as a fine art, rather than painting as reproduction.”26
The pessimism of R. G. Collingwood’s late 1930s view of the degradations of popular culture that had left the poor and the unemployed “functionless and aimless in the community, living only to accept panem et circenses, the dole and the films,”27 has since been described as “worthy of Leavis at his most irascible.”28 The nostalgia for a Ruskinian preindustrial workers’ harmony, it is said, places him “on the conservative wing of the so-called ‘culture and society’ tradition, with its deep yearning for modern life to go away.”29 Yet despite Collingwood’s clear suspicion of modern life, it should also be acknowledged that his writings and especially his Principles of Art formed part of a remarkably broad and influential contemporary tendency to apply Leavis-like values to visual culture. It is telling that Read reviewed the book in the highest terms, calling it the most important work on aesthetics published in English since George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty.30 Despite Read’s own genuine engagement with “mass” industrial conditions in works such as Art and Industry of 1934—as I examine in the next chapter—he echoed Collingwood’s sentiments in texts of the surrounding years. Three years after his review of Collingwood’s book, Read wrote of the contemporary “human being”: “If he is rich he can command amusements which soothe his exacerbated nerves without engaging his mind or intriguing his imagination; if he is poor he will plunge into the cheap make-believe world of Hollywood where he can enjoy vicariously the glittering life of the rich; or he will gamble his ill-spared shillings on the football pools in the expectation of one day being able to indulge in his own hectic spending. . . . But rich or poor, it is the same fever to escape from reality.”31 By this point such views were prevalent even outside of the taste reform movement. In 1941 the liberal social reformer Seebohm Rowntree echoed this exact rhetoric in speaking against the “new and attractive ways of spending leisure which make absolutely no contribution to physical, mental, or spiritual development”:32 “Undoubtedly the cinema shares with other forms of entertainment the danger that it may become to some merely a way of escape from monotony rather than a means of re-creation. True re-creation is constructive, and wholesome re-creation implies re-creating physical, intellectual, or moral vitality. As one among several ways of spending leisure, visits to the cinema may well be re-creative. But some cinema ‘fans’ rely on the cinema too exclusively as a way of passing their leisure hours. It becomes for them a means of escapism rather than of re-creation, and this arrests their development.”33 According to what came to be a standard construction, low culture was taken to be the negative shadow of properly imaginative art: objects of visual culture not conducive to imaginative and ethical projects because their ease of reception or reading meant they had no ability to stimulate the imagination to any great degree; in film and the visual arts, this implied that they were structured around straightforwardly illusionistic representations of objects and simple narratives.
None of this, however, makes it clear why imagination and form would be so inextricably tied together. It is that link to which I now turn.
Recreation: Aestheticism, Modernism, and the Defense of High Culture
When all of these critics pit the redemptive power of art against the ills of industrialized modernity, they might seem to evoke the ethical ideals of nineteenth-century figures like John Ruskin and William Morris, but the role of their reliance on close engagement with high art objects is still not clear.34 Twentieth-century art theory, it is sometimes said, abandoned both the arts and crafts ethics of “right making” and the Victorian morality of art based on uplifting subject matter.35 In this traditional view of formalist modernism, art’s deepest purpose shifted from social reform to an ideal of morally ambivalent self-expression by artists and mute or “disinterested” contemplation by viewers.
The traditional view of formalist modernism, however, contrasts dramatically with the politics of formalist aesthetics to which I now turn, for such aesthetics rejected passive spectatorship to instead model proper viewing as imaginative “re-creation.” The first hint that formalist theory did not abandon social concerns comes from the defenses of modernist culture that relentlessly stress the critical potential of art. For Greenberg writing in 1939, Western industrialization had given rise to kitsch, a falsifying mass art of “vicarious experience and faked sensations.”36 The great role of the modernist “avant-garde”—an unheard-of development spurred by the newfound critical-historical consciousness that developed in the nineteenth century—was its ability to “keep culture moving” faced with this situation, even if that meant a turn inwards to a critical examination of its own means.37 For T. J. Clark, writing around forty years later with Greenberg in mind,
there is a line of art stretching back to David and Shelley that makes no sense—that would not have existed—without its practitioners believing what they did was resist or exceed the normal understandings of the culture, and that those understandings were their enemy. This is the line of art we call modernist. . . . In the visual arts since 1850, it seems as if no work of real concentration was possible without it being fired—superintended—by claims of this kind. The test of art was held to be some form of intransigence or difficulty in the object produced, some action against the codes and procedures by which the world was lent its usual likenesses.38
I have already suggested that “intransigence or difficulty in the object,” the resistance to norms of representation, is grounded in a concept of form. To better understand this point, it helps to see how it emerged out of and in opposition to the aestheticism with which formalism has so often been equated. Far from passive appreciation, this reveals the stress on active engagement and even critical re-creation that came to underlie the defense of high culture and with it the special nature of modernism in the arts.
Since the late nineteenth century, “aestheticism” as a term has come to be linked with an extreme pursuit of pure beauty and art for art’s sake. The phenomenon was later neatly summed up in Leavis’s judgment that “an indulging of religious sentiment in a hushed cult of Beauty, of religiose sensuality, a retreat out of the profane world into an exquisite cloistral art; . . . this describes fairly enough the development from the Pre-Raphaelites and [Algernon Charles] Swinburne through [Walter] Pater and Oscar Wilde to the nineties.”39 By the 1910s modernist journals such as Rhythm and Blast were defining their love of art in terms that explicitly rejected and aimed to move beyond aestheticism, typically describing it as a dead end and calling for “an art that strikes deeper, that touches a profounder reality, that passes outside the bounds of a narrow aestheticism.”40
A sign of how widely the view spread is its adoption even by those who might be expected to come to aestheticism’s defense. Just a few years after his apparent hymn to art and aesthetic experience, Moments of Vision of 1954, Kenneth Clark wrote of aestheticism such as that of Walter Pater that it “judge[s] people and things, actions and ideas, by the standard of sensuous beauty.”41 For Clark, the opening pages of Pater’s essay “The School of Giorgione,” which talked of a great picture as having no more definite meaning than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow, foreshadowed the “pure æsthetic sensations which Roger Fry propounded so persuasively in the 1920s.”42 Aestheticism by this point, as Clark’s text shows, had come to be directly equated with the extreme or simplified formalism some found in Clive Bell’s Art and that I described in chapter 1: the contemplation of formal qualities alone in pursuit of nothing but transcendent aesthetic experience and the escapist attitude towards life that resulted.
This caricature of aestheticism meant that, in the early 1900s, critics of the aesthete as an escapist lover of beauty felt no sense of contradiction when they cited Ruskin’s and Morris’s ethical socialist views on art in support of the perceived role of art in the social world.43 One especially prominent contemporary critic of the aesthete was the Fabian socialist, arts and crafts advocate, and Times art critic Arthur Clutton-Brock, who in 1914 wrote of the “aesthetic discontent” registered in the ugliness and superfluity of the widely consumed art of the present as both a reproach to present day “civilization” and a “disease” affecting society: “We can make things such as men have never made before; but we cannot express any feelings of our own in making them, and the vast new world of cities which we have made and are making so rapidly, seems to us, compared with the little slow-built cities of the past, either blankly inexpressive or pompously expressive of something we would rather not have expressed.”44 For Clutton-Brock, Ruskin’s importance was as the first to make conscious the link between the growing and still-present sense of “aesthetic discontent” and a spiritual, rather than merely material, malaise, which resulted in the judgment of the creation of art as an activity of “man” taken as an aesthetic, moral, and intellectual whole (as William Morris followed Ruskin in doing).45 Ugliness was a symptom of the ethical wrongness of the activity and was not an aesthetic failing alone.
Morris’s favored solution to the problems of inauthenticity and passive consumption was to advocate the adoption by all of personal and practical creation, often understood in terms of actual craft or physical creation of other kinds. This faith in the primary importance of physical creation did not survive on the whole.46 But while physical creation was sidelined in the first half of the twentieth century, the ideals of creativity and the training of the imagination espoused by the advocates of form from the 1910s onwards gave a new legitimacy to themes associated with the early aestheticism of Ruskin and Morris. Contemporary art theorists advocated the idea (linked with Benedetto Croce) that “the significance and value of life are most plainly seen in its creative activities.”47 Herbert Read, A. J. Finberg, and others meanwhile attempted to recast Ruskin’s place in the history of aesthetics as the pioneer of the “Crocean” or “modern” theory of art as creative expression.48
How then to spur creativity and imagination through objects if not to actually make or create them physically? Turning away from practical creation and refusing rote learning or copying of past poetry or other works of art, early twentieth-century reformers instead took up the notion that proper experience of artworks could be an imaginative re-creation of artistic activity. Re-creation thus underpinned another answer to the problem of inauthenticity and passive consumption that drew as much from Ruskin and Pater as from Morris (though it had already been intimated in Matthew Arnold’s suggestions that though “the critical power is of lower rank than the creative,” criticism itself may still be a route to “a joyful sense of creative activity”).49 High art could sidestep the problem of the passive if the positive effects of creating the qualities of the artwork could be experienced, in Read’s words, “in a secondary and stimulating way, from the mental act of re-creating [those qualities] in contemplation.”50
Re-creation is key to understanding the breadth of formalism and its politics. Formalism, as I have outlined it in previous chapters, required not just the original creation or expression of the artist but a corresponding reaction in the successful viewer.51 Formalism’s resulting ability to close what John Dewey called “the gulf . . . between producer and consumer” directly contradicts the stereotype of a merely and passively contemplative mode of looking or a one-sided experience of the object by the viewer that amounts to an aesthetics of consumption rather than creation or production.52 The value of imaginatively experienced creative activity led Dewey, writing in America, to speak openly of the “instrumental” role of formally expressive art.53 On this basis, likewise, Richards’s celebration of the arts as a practically valuable “storehouse of recorded values” could be adopted by those writers on the visual arts who took up an increasingly popular kind of communicative formalism, even as many rejected what they considered an escapist Bloomsbury or aestheticist view.54
Re-creation has since been overlooked by historians in favor of the mass cultural initiatives related to design, due largely the prominence of design in the 1930s “good taste” movement and its notable influence on government-led drives to improve the quality of manufactured “industrial design.”55 I examine this in more detail in the next chapter. But what is missed in a focus only on design is the way in which the particular fine arts side of the more general effort to reform visual taste operated, in which it was the increasing prominence of the popularizing critics of the 1920s and their enlistment to the cause of creativity and aesthetic education through educational reformists that normalized the ideals of formalism, vision, and close looking as re-creative activity. The basic point had been explained in 1920 by Thomas Percy Nunn in the hugely influential tract Education: Its Data and First Principles as the fact that appreciation of the artwork was a truly creative activity. His explanation, invoking Croce, is worth quoting in full:
What we usually think of as the artist’s expression—the actual picture or statue or poem—is not the expression in Croce’s sense, but only a record of it and a means by which it can be communicated to others. The true “work of art” is, in his view, the perfect analytico-synthetic process that takes place in the artist’s mind. . . . It follows from Croce’s position that whenever we truly “appreciate” a work of art, we repeat ourselves the creative act in which the artist gave birth to it. This corollary is, no doubt, substantially sound, and is very important from the standpoint of aesthetic training. To lead pupils to “appreciate” is not merely to lead them to admire or to take pleasure in a beautiful thing, but to make them become in a sense its recreators.56
By the 1930s the doctrine of viewers as re-creators—and therefore of proper art appreciation as the action of “repeat[ing] ourselves the creative act in which the artist gave birth to [the work of art]”—was being espoused by such prominent art world figures as the head of the British Institute of Adult Education’s Art Committee (as well as Courtauld director), W. G. Constable.57 In his view either art practice or appreciation were adequate for creative purposes, as appreciation could be regarded as a form of “vicarious creation.”58 Constable once again provides an example of how apparently conflicting approaches were brought together. In the 1920 book Education, Nunn had linked Constable’s ideas of creativity and re-creation through art to Croce’s aesthetics, but Constable had begun as an art critic associated with Roger Fry, developed his ideas in reference to the practice of connoisseurship and the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, and justified the communicative ideal that underlay proper art appreciation with reference to the materialist theory of empathy (he was also a reader of the strongly anti-Crocean philosopher the Earl of Listowel).59 The canon of aesthetic theorists or art writers that such popularizers drew on—seen in the reading lists attached to the articles, pamphlets, and books they issued—tended to include not just Fry, Bell, Croce, or Berenson but a free mixture of all of these writers together with Heinrich Wölfflin, George Santayana, and other now more obscure figures, such as Margaret Bulley.60 The most dominant trope in the popularizing works was not mention of form—though a broadly understood formalism underpinned the aesthetic considerations—but instead the doctrines on the training of imagination and vitality. Repeated references were made to self-development, to coming to understand others, and to the language of art.61 These are ideas that connect the formalism of this moment with a whole host of writers, from early to mid-twentieth-century critics such as Richards in Britain and Dewey in the United States to later figures such as Michael Baxandall, who wrote at length of reenactment, as well as his ambition “to do a Leavis on visual art.”62
Understanding close looking this way reveals an important point about the politics intended by its practitioners. The requirement for a positive experience in the face of the artwork, which in some sense accorded with that of the artist, implied a measure of imagination, creativity, or generally active participation that a successful piece of art demanded from the viewer. This demand for a certain kind of contact with the work structured the widely endorsed split between the positive nature of active engagement and the potentially harmful nature of passivity. Proposed already by Fry in the 1910s, this was explained by Read in Politics of the Unpolitical of 1943 as a “distinction [in art criticism] which is more firmly established than most . . . that between art and entertainment.”63 According to Read, the distinction cast entertainment as “something which distracts us or diverts us from the routine of daily life” and “makes us for the time being forget our cares and worries” (147). Art qua art, “though it may divert us from the normal routine of our existence, causes us in some way or other to become conscious of that existence” (147).
It has since become common to oppose a detached formalist aestheticism in favor of a socially aware stance that connected art with life. In reality the criterion of ethical and political interest adopted by these writers was not a question of the importance invested in subject matter but instead was based on active versus passive forms of engagement. Only authentically expressive art could allow for such constructive engagement with the creative process and would project a world different enough from the everyday that it would demand some measure of imaginative work from its audience.
This is a perspective that brings earlier views interestingly into line with later ones. In his 1961 pamphlet for the Fabian Society, Socialism and Culture, Richard Wollheim provided a kind of summa of the formalist critique of low culture.64 Though he rejected liberalism in favor of socialism, he believed socialism had nonetheless appropriated “the old liberal ideal of autonomy.” (48). Culture should play a part in the production of free, self-determining individuals, and it was central to culture’s role in individual development that works of art proper “call for a certain amount of ‘reading’ or ‘projection’ on the part of their audience” (20). “A novel or play or painting that requires no interpretation from the reader or spectator, who can therefore totally immerse himself in it without in any way drawing upon the imagination or the intellect, is without that capacity to stimulate and enrich the mind which we have come to expect from the arts” (20). Easy cultural forms were dangerous social phenomena in as much as they drained the time and energy of participants in society into activity that was pointless (as a form of total escapism) or actively harmful (encouraging passive consumption of potentially false presentations of the world). Culture, gone wrong, would negate individual criticality and reinforce unquestioning receptivity to commonplace attitudes and emotions.
The view seen here is representative of longstanding assumptions about what art or culture, high and low, might do. Wollheim did not link his praise for art that necessitated interpretation to particular traditions, and the binary of active/passive engagement has since proven significant for a number of areas in aesthetics. Popularizers and neo-pragmatists have used it to contest the sharp divide of high and low in a variety of ways. Popular works may after all be actively put to use in the service of the same imaginative and ethical ends as high or modernist ones.65 And it may be that such active recasting will show the divisions of high and low to be contingent or merely based on the changing ways in which the works tended to be used.66 Or high art and entertainment may be equally valid cultural forms that simply serve different ends.67 More recent debates over literary Darwinist approaches to art grounded in evolutionary psychology have relied on the same value structure.68 For some, art’s evolutionary role lies in its training in imagination and empathy, while a competing view sees art as a pleasure-based activity valued for its escapism and entertainment.
It should now be apparent that we can trace a line of thought about the politics of high and low culture from early twentieth-century thinking through Wollheim and into the present. But even within this line supporters of modernism in the arts have come to see the rejection of the passive as a defining modernist trait: advocated by writers from Walter Benjamin to Clement Greenberg in the 1930s and reaffirmed later in the century in areas ranging from the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno; to the late modernist art history of T. J. Clark, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss; to the more recent recasting of the emancipatory possibilities of modernist culture in the work of Jacques Rancière.69 The continuation of the line from early twentieth-century thinkers to Wollheim through to the present is seen nowhere more clearly than in the writing of the British art historian and Art & Language collaborator Charles Harrison, even though Harrison himself saw earlier writers like Fry as interested in no more than significant form and aesthetic quality.70
In Harrison’s exemplary version of the avoidance of the passive, a work might emphasize the pictorial surface in a way that interfered with the painting’s “mimetic relation to the world.”71 We can see this in the way that the dabbed white paint in Lucas van Valckenborch’s Winter Landscape not only suggests a snow scene but also calls attention to the painterly artifice of the work (fig. 15).72 Pictorial “complexity” here results from the “significant lack of fit between the world as lived and the imaginary world the work of art proposes.”73 The difference of the pictorial world from what we expect, the barrier posed to effortless entry by the formed nature of the work, may then force the viewer into a “scepticism about appearances” that leads to an all-important “reconstruction of the artist’s practical enterprise” as part of the viewing experience.74 Paul Joseph Jamin’s painting The Vandal with His Share of the Spoils, for Harrison, stood for how artistically and ethically wrong a work that neglected complexity might be (fig. 16). Shown at the Paris Salon of 1893, it achieved its ends not through its ostensible (and faked) moralizing about barbarity but by the “imaginative anticipation of rape.”75 Such a fantasy was presented to the late nineteenth-century audience by the slickly transparent “surface of the painting” that offered “no barrier to the enjoyment of this prospect.”76
Figure 15. Lucas van Valkenborch, Winter Landscape with Snowfall Near Antwerp, 1575. Oil on oak panel, 61 × 82.5 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt. Photo © Städel Museum—U. Edelmann—ARTOTHEK.
Figure 16. Paul Joseph Jamin, The Vandal with His Share of the Spoils, 1893. Oil on canvas, 162 × 118 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Rochelle. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais
For Harrison the most “obvious” candidates to set against this example came from “art of the modern period,” with Manet’s Olympia a paradigmatic example:
The kind of painting I have in mind is one which presents some aspect of its own production as a bar to unreflective consumption, which renders problematic the relationship between what it represents and how it represents it, which figuratively embodies time as a necessary aspect of its own coming into existence, which is therefore not possibly perceived as a mere glimpse or scene or effect, but which imposes on the spectator a necessity for engagement with what it is of—an engagement that is disciplined by acknowledgement of the painting’s own factitious character, and that is objective to the extent that the spectator’s own preferences and predispositions are regulated by the priority of that acknowledgement.77
Olympia demonstrated how in foregrounding its “production,” a painting could present “a bar to unreflective consumption.”78 More than just self-consciousness prompted by Olympia’s gaze, it is the visibility even at some distance of the overtly marked (painterly) surface and the oddities in the depiction itself—the ambiguous scene, the unlikely cat—that force the spectator to engage with the “factitious character” of the painting. The experience of Olympia, properly understood, builds in a heightened self-consciousness, reflective of the thought that this was a work painted by an artist to be looked at in a particular way, an experience almost like looking at the work with the artist standing behind and looking at your looking. Manet, Cézanne, and other modernist painters, on this way of thinking, all created works that barred an unreflective relationship of fantasy to the subjects depicted and instead required a self-conscious and constructive viewing properly understood in terms of imagination.
This brings us, finally, to the political valence of the appeal to the imagination. Much of its contemporary significance derived from its connection with a cluster of concepts—freedom, autonomy, self-development—emphasized by the idea of a socialized liberalism. Various historians have suggested that the so-called strange death of liberal England before the First World War was a gross exaggeration but that subsequently the definitions of liberalism became so blurred as to make the continued influence of the orientation difficult to trace.79 The obscurity of liberalism’s continuation is partly explained by the fact that, towards the end of the 1910s, certain liberal principles had become dominant even as the decline of political liberalism had reached a near terminal stage.80 Despite this latter decline, the tradition of public moralists lived on in an intellectual elite that still desired to spread the moral qualities of individual and collective self-government, now with a noticeable inclination towards the cultural and aesthetic values of “civilization.”81 Dovetailing with a construction of the national character predicated on freedom, “self-reliance,” “autonomy,” and “self-realization” were all qualities praised in the development of the self-governing individual.82
The emphasis on the individual, however, is easy to oversimplify. Ethical socialists espousing social and aesthetic reform in Britain often spoke of the values of the community and the individual in the same breath, just as they suggested that art might reveal the deeper reality behind the social and natural worlds at the same time as they praised art as expression and self-fulfillment in a manner shot through with the liberal language of self-development and autonomy.83 The intertwining of universalist and expressivist rhetoric echoes the basic point of the socialistic New Liberalism of those who followed in the wake of the political philosopher T. H. Green—even though the point is now often described as communitarian and thus in absolute opposition to liberal thought—that the full development of autonomous human agents could only be realized within the context of their social community (or the sum of social institutions and practices that made up their society).84 The critique of anticollectivist individualism, in other words, did not entail a critique of individuality as such. Nor did the critique of mindless conformism mean a critique of community as such. Both New Liberalism and ethical socialism, instead, entailed an organic view of society that saw the individual as a significant element of a properly functioning whole.85 The general idea was summed up in a report on a conference attended by many of the educational reformers of the moment: “If the members tried to put shortly the philosophic basis of their view it would be to say that every human being was developed in and through society, but that human society owed its development and sustentation to the individuality and cooperation of its individual members.”86
This point is crucial to our understanding of how apparently escapist theories of self-expression through art could come together with more obviously socially concerned views of art’s role in communal life. Even as writers such as Read, highly supportive of the ethical socialist craft and design tradition, drew on contemporary science and philosophy to extend the arguments about the shared grounding of art and the social world in the laws of nature itself, they also stressed the new and special place of the individual in the modern world.87 Just like the socialism later espoused by Wollheim, the social anarchism that Read supported explicitly from around 1938 (and implicitly from the 1910s) was based on the interplay of individual expression and universalism or the realization of full and free development of the self, which only a properly functioning social sphere would allow.88 As Read put it, the ideal society, “itself reflecting the organic rhythms and balanced processes of nature, would give the individual the greatest degree of liberty consistent with a group organization. A group organization is itself a necessity only in order to guarantee this liberty.”89 For Read “such a society is anarchist” due to the rejection of the machinery of a political government as a necessary support.90 Nonetheless, the parallels with New Liberalism are obvious, especially given that the widespread emphasis on “the state” found in T. H. Green and other New Liberal theorists was often a specifically Hegelian usage—it involved social organization rather than strictly governmental activity.91
Looking back more closely at the political divisions of the moment, we can now see how an interest in the interrelation of the individual and the social whole ties various formalist writers into the socialism and anarchism that they often espoused—writers including Fry, Stokes, and Bulley at points expressed support for anarchism—as well as the liberalism to which they have more commonly been linked.92 And thus, far from expression as a selfish and escapist approach to art, the communication of expression and corollary development of imagination were seen to play a vital part in art’s social role: possibilities of self-development and autonomy were for many best embodied in the operations of such art that promised the creation of individual citizens able to operate freely and harmoniously within the communal context of modern democratic society.
Present-day polemics about the ethical potential of the aesthetic have resulted in us losing sight of this middle ground. Projects that make use of the aesthetic to institute an “ideological model of self-regulating and self-determining subjectivity” have recently been heavily criticized as characteristic of modern society’s desire to locate the law and state within the subject.93 Others, by contrast, have seen the strategic use of the aesthetic as the only way to authorize a true subjective freedom and capacity for anti-state resistance.94 As the strange cross-party consensus that formed in the early to mid-twentieth century shows, however, the formalist conception could appear ambiguous between freedom as ability to develop within preset boundaries and freedom as entirely autonomous self-direction. The conception was equally open on the question of relative endorsement or rejection of the state. Just as Read espoused the values of individual freedom in relation to anarchism, by 1961 Wollheim could write that socialism (as mentioned earlier) had taken up the liberal ideal of autonomy.95 Following from the tie of community and individuality, “It should be the ultimate boast of socialism that it decreases the possibility of bad upbringing, that it increases the possibility of good education, and that, having in this way realized the conditions upon which free choice depends, it further offers a man reasonable security that as he chooses, so in fact he will be able to live.”96
Aestheticism as Social Criticism
After this recovery of re-creation and the related potential of the aesthetic, what then of the political legacy of aestheticism? Aestheticism, if predicated on the experience of a pure aesthetic emotion in the face of high art products, is usually thought to be an adjunct of elite culture. But something else is implied by Collingwood’s assertions that art proper was a matter of interaction between artist and audience, that one-sided artistic self-expression was a disastrous consequence of nineteenth-century individualism, and above all that the twentieth-century degradation of popular culture into forms of passive receptivity was a direct outcome of the “vicious late nineteenth-century tradition of art for art’s sake.”97 When such unsympathetic commentators equated ideas of aesthetic emotion associated with Fry and Bell with mere passive and uncreative pleasure, one odd consequence was the relegation of the aesthete to the same category as the audiences for low mass cultural entertainment that craved an escape from life. Given the account above of the defense of high culture and critique of low culture, it is nonetheless possible to link aestheticism of a principled kind with social criticism.
Reading the many commentaries on Fry and Bell, then and since, that cast them as entirely pure, detached, or impersonal, it is relatively easy to see how the attack on an escapist Bloomsbury aesthetic could actually operate in tandem with the critique of mass culture. And it is worth turning to a writer connected to the Barnes Foundation for one of the most insightful explanations of this phenomenon. In a comment from the 1920s that gets to the heart of the matter, Laurence Buermeyer suggested of Fry: “In his separation of the ‘sensuous’ and the ‘emotional’ elements of design, he appears to be on the track of the legitimate distinction between decorative pattern and the structural or expressive form in which an artist expresses his personal and penetrating vision of the essences of things,” but Fry and Bell alike were nonetheless seen as fatally ambiguous on this fundamental “distinction between pattern and truly expressive form.”98 The writer pointed out that Fry’s account of imagination—based, as it seemed to be, in “detached” contemplation—was unable to fully distinguish between the appreciation of true art objects, which embodied an intention to communicate emotions, and the emptier experience involved in the contemplation of nonart items or even mass cultural ephemera such as magazine illustrations.99 Fry’s accounts of his method, in other words, left him open to the charge that his preferred mode of contemplation was precisely the pure and empty kind that was thought to characterize the worst excesses of both mass cultural consumption and late nineteenth-century aestheticism: in both cases a solipsistic stance that asked nothing and discovered nothing from the objects encountered. This, ironically, was a likeness that could be found in some of the very first attacks on Pater’s Renaissance.100
Fry explicitly attempted to distance himself from the narrow aestheticist attitude. In 1920, he qualified his previous criticisms of the moralism of Ruskin with the suggestion that the decorative had been used by Whistler and others to sweep away the ethical “perhaps too cavalierly,” with the “‘decorators’ fail[ing] to distinguish between agreeable sensations and imaginative significance.”101 He later wrote of the “decay of all standards of art” from the mid-nineteenth century when “on the one hand there crystallized out the commercial painting of the Royal Academy, moulded to suit the taste of the new-rich Philistine, and, on the other hand, in protest to that, a whimsical æstheticism utterly divorced from life and from good sense.”102 On this basis the Pre-Raphaelites were said to have “fled from contemporary life instead of facing and interpreting it,” and as such created work that “had no roots in life—it was an artificial hot-house growth. They had shut themselves off from new experiences, and so starved their own imaginative life.”103
Yet Fry’s very terms were turned against Bloomsbury as a whole, with the ambiguity in his theory identified by Buermeyer providing the grounds for attack. I. A. Richards associated Bloomsbury directly with the aestheticism of A. C. Bradley while defining himself against this position.104 Wyndham Lewis provided some of the most memorable attacks on Bloomsbury as a form of aestheticism, with his description in the mid-1910s of the Omega’s “skin” as “Greenery-Yallery” and in 1921 of the Bloomsbury painters as “a small group of people which is of almost purely eminent Victorian origin, saturated with William Morris’s prettiness and fervour. ‘Art for Art’s sake,’ late Victorianism, the direct descendants of Victorian England.”105 The import of the association for later writers was perhaps best expressed by Geoffrey Grigson, who wrote not just that in having described Bloomsbury art theory as nothing more than a reversion to late-Victorian aestheticism, “Mr. [Wyndham] Lewis estimated Roger Fry modestly and exactly” but also that “[Fry] withdrew and wanted everyone else to withdraw ‘from the passions of the instinctive life,’ but the only withdrawal possible is into the imaginative life, a vital sphere which Mr. Fry never did more than visit.”106
The link of formalism with aestheticism and the same contentless or unimaginative pleasure given by low cultural products has proven deeply influential.107 Most recently and prominently, T. J. Clark has written of his quarrel with “certain modes of formalism” as one with an “old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a trance-like removal from human concerns.”108 Clark describes his own interest as lying instead with a stress on “the specificity of picturing, and on that specificity’s being so closely bound up with the mere materiality of a given practice, and on that materiality’s being so often the generator of semantic depth—of true thought, true stilling and shifting of categories,” an account that he turns to the “possibility of resistance in a world saturated by slogans, labels, sales pitches, little marketable meaning-motifs.”109 Clark’s drawing together of high cultural values with a critique of contemporary image culture and attendant forms of passive spectatorship is clearly aestheticist in the sense identified by Wollheim that I discuss below: “To see the distance [of visual imagery from verbal discourse] narrowed day by day, and intellectuals applauding the narrowing in the name of some wholly illusory ‘transition from the world of the word to that of the image’—when what we have is a deadly reconciliation of the two modes, via the utter banalization of both—that is bitter to me.”110 But such concerns are now most likely to be thought of as marking a distinct break from traditions of formalism and aestheticism. It is striking that by the 1970s, formalist practice could have come to epitomize rather than stand in solidarity against “the various ways in which visual imagining of the world has been robbed of its true humanity and conceived of as something less than human, nonhuman, brilliantly (or dully) mechanical.”111
Looking back at late twentieth-century attacks on aestheticism and formalism, the way in which “aesthete” came to be a term of abuse in twentieth-century art writing appears to be one of its great ironies.112 The deep need or longing for the role that art and the aesthetic might play in the social world was one of the most prominent characteristics of those later champions of modernist art, a point that supporters like Clark and Harrison have continued to link to some notion of form.113 But because Victorian art for art’s sake aestheticism was regularly characterized as entailing a passive or escapist mode of relation to the world—the same used to critique mass culture—and because of the need to demarcate vital aesthetic experience from what now appeared to be a misguided past, Ruskinian standards of imagination and the importance of art were taken up by new hands in a battle against the formalist and the so-called aesthete. Formalist and “bad” aesthete, in short, were now equated.
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Nonetheless, the denigration of the aesthete obscures the instrumental role many gave to close attention to art and aesthetic experience, a point about which Wollheim at least was clear. Commenting on Adrian Stokes’s art writing from the 1930s, Wollheim later described real aesthetes as in a “middle position,” able to make their surroundings a partial vehicle for their fantasies, without ever turning away from acknowledgement of their true nature.114 In the same text Wollheim suggested, “It is in the tradition of the great aesthetes, though not necessarily of the great artists, to be social critics.”115 But he also recognized the danger that had by then led to the association of the aesthete with total surrender to fantasy: “It is only when men have been already reduced to the status of furniture or decoration, when they themselves have become part of a colourful or inert environment, that within the aesthetic creed their rights as percipient beings become slighted.”116 Wollheim’s comment is as clear a statement as could be had of the ethical necessity of acknowledging a thing’s status as having the particular history and nature that it does. Decoration in its negative sense emerges simply when something gets treated as if it has no history, but the treatment of real things as mere decoration was not true aestheticism; there was “a natural connection between these two roles” of aesthete and social critic, “and . . . it is the cases in which they do not coincide, in which the aesthete is indifferent to the conditions of his society, that require explanation.”117
According to the Stokesian view pursued by Wollheim, to develop one’s sensibility was to develop one’s understanding of the way that others used experience to make meaning out of their visual world.118 The vision of a (true) aesthete as social critic made the aesthetically engaged viewer the person best placed to understand and work against the “tyranny of a monstrous environment over many of our fellow beings,” “bullying us, humiliating us, inserting itself into us in a domineering and distorting fashion, and at the same time protecting itself from criticism by posing as an authority whose orders it is childish or wilful to question.”119 Stokes himself summed this idea up in a description of one of his own books: with its attention to “symbol, substitution, projection, whatever the aesthetic context is,” the work was intended as “a piece of cultural analysis. . . . For the prime subject matter is not myself, not architectural appreciation nor the . . . eye. It is the giant structure of substitution itself; humanism in my view.”120
With its focus on imaginative identification and partial intersubjectivity yielded by communicable experience and the danger of free and subjective response brought under control by the constraints of the (formal) properties of the object itself, the social project of formalist criticism at its most subtle was intended to reconcile what has been seen as the conflict in Ruskin’s method of “reason and imagination, of accuracy and vision.”121 Taking a broad and fully imaginative notion of seeing and vision, such critics essentially agreed with Ruskin’s doctrine that “the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see some thing, and to tell what he saw in a plain way.”122 To be empathetic to, and able to intervene in, the experience of the visual environment by others, while better able to control one’s own experience, was one way to keep in mind Morris’s dream of an earthly paradise, translated into Wollheim’s utopian ideal “that the outer world should exhibit a degree of harmony or integration comparable to that which man tries to establish within himself.”123
But unlike the collapsing of the realms of art and life that was key to the avant-garde reading of Morris, this form of aestheticism as social criticism relied on the particular instrumentality of authentically imaginative and expressive “fine” art.124 Though many popularizers used the language of the merging of art and life to support their promotion of fine art as an assurance that their communicative formalism would not be confused with the escapist or passive kind, such a strategy in reality did not respond to the disconnection of art from the public at large with attempts to make art and life one. Instead, as Wollheim approvingly noted of Stokes, the goal was “to narrow, perhaps to close, the cultural divide,” while at the very same time, “to defend, to justify, if need be to sharpen the conceptual distinction.”125
Wollheim’s views, like Clark’s, I hope it is clear, are not presented here as a move beyond early formalism so much as a development and exemplification of its ethical ideal. And while this ethical ideal carries a certain, almost seductive beauty—and, for some, has come to seem the very justification of the practice of close engagement with objects that is known as art history—it, too, was beset by the range of worries I raised in closing the previous chapter. It is the problems that attend this ethical ideal—and the possible move beyond it to a more modest use of form—to which the final chapters now turn.