What is Painting?

‘Expression’, as I stated in chapter 1, has come to replace ‘pictorial representation’ (or ‘the imitation of nature’) as the most respectable job description for painting. To take a standard reference point: after explaining that it usually involves pigments and brushes, the current Wikipedia entry on ‘Painting’ goes on to define the practice as ‘a form of creative expression’. Once, painting was referred first of all to something out there, to nature. Now it gets referred to something inside: for the present definition would be incoherent if painters had nothing within themselves to express.

It seems that much of painting as we now know it depends on this premise. I should like to track some of the changes in thinking that have brought about this situation and that have taken us away from the former definition of painting. Thinking about expression will also involve asking broader questions: not least, what we mean when we talk of a ‘person’.

Persons are implicated in all talk about expression because the term itself is a physical metaphor for a mental process which belongs to individuals. There’s something inside wanting to show itself, there’s a medium or environment outside waiting to receive it, and a gets ex-pressed – literally, in Latin, pushed or stamped out – into or onto b. That seems to be the notion uniting the meanings that cluster around the term. In effect, expression is not so much an alternative to the processes of representation discussed in chapter 1, as a way of approaching them in terms of muscular effort. It implies that there is an energy forcibly pushing forth whatever we have within us, so as to turn it into physical sounds or sights.

We experience this process as an effort because there is an inward resistance, against which we must heave. This resistance, to see it one way, is our own stupidity; we want to say something but cannot find the words; we want to depict something but draw the wrong line, and have to correct it again and again. We are not like the printing machine that stamps out exactly what is put in, transmitting it ‘express’ (i.e. with nothing intervening between order and delivery); we have a certain inner grain that transmutes all our im-pressions before they emerge into outward form. To see it another way, this inner transmutation is a grace within us: expression can be what a performer adds to a musical score, turning a neutral notation into an emotional experience for others.

Piero Manzoni, Artist’s Shit No. 055, 1961

This experience of resistance and change is one of the things that tells me there is an inside to me – a mind. The fact that other people report or picture things differently, as they transmute them, is one of the reasons that I assume they have minds also. Mindlessness, we believe, is a property of printing machines, with their faithful transmission of impressions. (Until, that is, the machine refuses to obey us, revealing an evil ‘mind of its own’.)

Resistance and change are both sorts of pain. The fact that I experience pain that you say you do not feel tells me that there is an internal, limited thing that constitutes ‘me’. The limited extent of the pain defines me as a person, whether that pain is mental – the difficulty of expressing things correctly – or physical. (One bodily analogue for expression, in fact, is excretion: a thought not lost on Piero Manzoni, who in the 1960s canned, labelled and sold several tins of Artist’s Shit.)

All this explains why thinking about human expression, whether in paint or words, involves thinking about persons. But don’t we also need to think about some initial impression entering the person from outside – some content asking to be expressed? Not necessarily. Take the proverbial philosopher’s table as an example of such an object.

Chen Rong, Nine Dragons (detail), 1244

I try to draw it, but my drawing is inadequate. I feel that I am failing to express ‘what the table is like’, a quality that I consider belongs to the object, a quality beyond my immediate reach.

I try to tell you about its design, but cannot find the right words. I am failing to express my ‘meaning’ – a quality that is within my mind, but which refers to something I have seen without.

Turning round, I bump into it. I let out a yelp. I am expressing (successfully) my ‘feelings’ – qualities within me, which are caused by something external, but are not actually intended as references to it.

Finally, tiring of this wretched item of furniture and the interminable philosophical wrangles about it, I start gouging my initials on its surface with a knife. I am simply expressing ‘myself’.

In other words, our notions of what is expressed can move along a scale: from ‘intrinsic quality’ – the way things are – to ‘meaning’, to ‘feeling’, to ‘self’ – the place inside, where all the expression commences. People tend to chop up such a spectrum or scale of possibilities in different ways at different times. The emphasis put on expression in painting can move along the scale, from an emphasis on expressing the object beyond you to an emphasis on expressing the self within. ‘Right expression’ or ‘pure expression’ is always the most direct and unhindered bringing forth of the matter at hand. But that may range from the perfect transmission of the table’s appearance, to my perfect personal revenge on it with a penknife.

Murakami Kagaku, Autumn Willow (detail), 1938

We might aim to express a quality that inheres in objects around us, but that does not necessarily commit us to drawing tables. In Taoist thinking, for instance, it is a basic premise that there is a way – the tao – that things in general are. The world and everything in it have a certain grain, a certain distinctive nature. But it is equally fundamental that ‘the tao that can be spoken is not the eternal tao’; this essential quality of things cannot be converted into a set of words, a meaning. Nonetheless, the painter may hope to act as a conduit for the tao of nature, a source through which it emerges.

This kind of thinking lies behind the tradition of Chinese painting practice known as xieyi. Its procedures aim to align the painter’s personal sphere of activity – his eye, hand, mind, body, brush and ink – with that larger, unnamable complexion of things. He is to feel with its energies, emergent forms and patterns of growth and flow. To do this is a form of ‘right expression’. There is a place within it for the painter’s individuality and sense of self, but only insofar as being individual is one of the qualities within the world – rather as a stream has eddies, or timber has knots.

Cimabue (Cenni di Peppo), The Flagellation of Christ, c. 1280

These ideas, interacting with Buddhist lines of thought, have offered rich resources for Western painters wanting to look beyond their own traditions. Much of the exchange, however, has been conducted not with China itself but with Chinese painting as reinterpreted by the Japanese. We could instance the work of the early-20th-century Kyoto painter Murakami Kagaku as presenting alternative approaches to brushwork and pictorial space that many Westerners would seek to move towards.

In Christian cultures, however, the customary premise has been that the world does have qualities that can be more or less adequately expressed in words – above all those provided by scripture. Important painting – painting with a ritual function, located in churches and palaces – was meant to express such verbal content. What principally expressed it was not the painter’s own body working the materials, but the bodies of those he depicted – the main figures in the represented scene. How is it, to live in this world? Churches answered the question by pointing to images of a stripped and tortured Jesus, rather than to qualities in painters’ handiwork.

Charles Le Brun, Expressions of the Passions, 1692

Alberti’s 1435 theory of painting – secular in its drift, but couched in this tradition – emphasized that pictures affect viewers because they show ‘movements of the soul’ which communicate irresistibly: ‘We weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving.’ Figures in compositions helped express the picture’s purpose by physical gestures like those of actors in a play. In Alberti’s wake, Leonardo and many others, down to the French academician Charles Le Brun in the late 17th century, devoted much thought to facial and manual expression – the outward signs that marked these movements of the soul, ‘making visible the effects of passion’. Alongside this definition of particular expression, Le Brun set ‘general expression’ – the gift that enabled the painter to imitate nature convincingly, ‘marking the true characters of everything…It is through expression that all that is feigned appears to be true.’

In subsequent theories of painting, however, these two definitions of expression would begin to fuse. For the visible effects of passion would be sought not so much in the figures represented within the painting, as in the expression of the painter’s own creativity through the painting. Expression had come to concern, not meanings, but feelings, or rather the source of those feelings, the person: the value had thus moved all along the scale.

Christian content and Christian purposes were starting to become only nominally important in European painting academies by the time that Le Brun was theorizing and, during the century that followed, Enlightenment thought pushed them further to the margins. Parallel to this gradual conceptual transition that ran from the 15th to the 18th century, there was an economic shift – from evaluating paintings for what they showed of objects and events towards evaluating them on account of their attachment to the individuals who made them.

Economics may seem to operate on a separate plane to art theory, but to look clearly we need to keep both in view. Earlier, in chapter 2, I advanced paired images – the sprawling marketplace and the enclosed store. The former is the relatively unstructured space in which painters go about their daily business, working, selling and mingling. It may develop and expand, according to supply and demand: new practitioners, new genres and so on may set up stalls in unpredictable fashion. But a big store may also set up in business, overlooking that market. Thus since the Renaissance there has existed a self-conscious, theoretical construct named ‘Painting’, embodied, during much of that time, by the French academy, one of whose head theorists was Le Brun. This institution also responds to demand, but at the same time it may develop an internal dynamic, articulating policies and proposing product lines that the customers may not have known they wanted.

In this way, the market for paintings, in the developing capitalism of Europe from the Renaissance onwards, enlarged and became more complex as international trade and educated publics increased in scale. But the more there is a variety of representational styles on offer, the more you as a customer are likely to choose your product not simply to display the sights you wish to show on your wall, but to embody the kind of sensibility with which you wish to associate yourself. The broader choice encourages you to discover subtleties of cultural allegiance within the representation, to discriminate between nuances of delivery and of sentiment; in effect, to discern the distinctive ‘genius’ of contrasting artistic personalities. Art critics set up business to encourage this discrimination. At the same time, this sociological development of taste was matched within the philosophical institution by the development we saw in chapter 2: the acceptance of the idea that the mind’s experience of nature, rather than nature unqualified, was the only viable basis for speculation and therefore for painting.

This, then, was the double context in which paintings came to be associated with the person producing them, above and beyond the objects they represented. But to say this touches on another large issue. What do we mean when we speak of a ‘person’?

I suggest that, here, the Christian inheritance remains relevant, and that from the Enlightenment onwards it bequeathed to Europeans four common terms with which to consider persons: self, mind, spirit and body. (It is true that spirit has often since been renamed consciousness.) These had been supposed to come together, in orthodox Christian thinking, within the overarching category called soul. But as I see it, this last term has not much bearing on the post-Enlightenment culture of painting, whereas the other four have played significant roles in shaping it.

‘Self’ – that which is me, as opposed to that which is everything else – might seem to comprise a person’s entirety; but in fact ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ and ‘body’ keep opening out to areas beyond what we think of as ‘self’, as will become clear if we see how they have been expressed in painting. The point is that increasingly from the Romantic era – the era that began in 1798, when Friedrich Schlegel took stock of the condition of culture and proposed a new ‘Romantic’ ethos for the arts – painters have painted believing that they were expressing their status as persons in one or other of these ways. The personal might perhaps point to the transpersonal: another apostle of Romanticism, the painter Philipp Otto Runge, wrote in 1802 that his spiritual feelings were aroused by the way that the divine shone through nature; but without such individual feelings, he argued, his art would amount to nothing.

Mind and spirit were themes that mattered greatly to Romantics and post-Romantics during the century that followed. It was during the 20th century that the painting’s relationship to the physical body that is the painter came to the forefront; but the assertion of ‘self’ against ‘other’ has also been important for as long as painting has been treated as personal expression. It came to matter much more, in this pictorial culture, whose handiwork a painting was deemed to be. In other contexts, paintings have often been produced by workshops with a master presiding and many duties delegated. When it comes for instance to the products labelled Rubens paintings, the distinction between the author’s own hand and those of his assistants was an issue of low priority during his own lifetime. Nowadays, Chinese painting factories produce affordable oils in the manner of Pissarro, Burne-Jones and other popular painters. But there has come to be a social stigma attached to the display of this sort of ‘secondhand’ work, in a way that did not exist in Rubens’s time. For post-Romantic tastes, everything has to be authentically issued out of the painter’s own hand. A mere copy will not do; while the possibility of fakery can send viewers into agonies of doubt about their own visual reactions.

Moreover, not only have paintings to be true to the painter, but painters have to be true to themselves. They are prized by dealers and collectors for their inner authenticity. Their work must express a characteristic set of concerns, it must have a characteristic development. These in turn are to be systematically unpicked by the critics and biographers. Without them, the work lacks value; with them, the slightest of markings might become valuable once signed.

The directive underlying this whole culture is that you must look beyond the actual pictorial representation. This is a point that the critic John Ruskin, writing half a century on from the genesis of Romanticism, felt the need to insist upon. He poured scorn on imitation, on the worth of reproducing things in paint for its own sake: it was banal, it was vulgar, its pleasures were ‘the most contemptible which can be received from art’. ‘He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed,’ for ‘painting…is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.’

A hundred and fifty years later, the weight of social disapproval such as Ruskin’s – the idea that to look at paintings in terms of the objects they represent is ‘common’ – has been generally internalized. If something is pointed out to us as ‘art’, we immediately become alert to look behind the pictorial representation for minds and motives.

This is not, however, simply an effect of critical indoctrination. The shift of focus has been prompted by qualities within the paintings themselves. Painters have promoted a different culture of viewing by seeking out and developing aspects of painting that were particularly personally ‘expressive’.

What aspects are these? What in a painting ties it personally to its maker? Evidently, its manner and its content: the way things have been seen, and the choice of things to see. To think about the former involves thinking about colour; to think about the latter is to consider what we might hold in our memory and imagination, in our minds. We can approach the changes that the culture of expression brought to painting in the 19th and 20th centuries from these two angles: via the themes of colour and of mind.

One obvious candidate to carry the burden of expression in painting, it seems to us now, is colour. Colour is what we irresistibly associate with feeling: metaphors about ‘red anger’, ‘the blues’ and so on leap from eyesight to speech and back again, and linkages of this kind have probably always been evoked by painters. But could there be ways to coordinate these points of connection, so as to deliver a way of painting that becomes systematically expressive?

It depends on what paintings relate to. Approach them as representations of the world, and you might expect them to be constructed in the way that the world is constructed. The world, according to philosophers and scientists from Plato onwards, is first of all form. Forms – ideas – precede colour, which is a ‘secondary quality’, an icing on the cake. Paintings proceeded correspondingly. Lines were drawn, defining the forms, and then colouring was added, as it would have been to the unfinished panel (see page 126) by the North Italian painter Cima da Conegliano. It is true that you might value the end over the beginning, the effect over the cause, colour over line. A Rubens canvas, you might say, rejoices in surface effects which a Michelangelo drawing, zealously reaching for spiritual heights, might eschew. This Rubensian fullness of effect, Roger de Piles argued at the turn of the 18th century, was painting’s distinctive territory, its advantage over drawing or sculpture. While de Piles was trying to subvert the academic doctrines of French forebears like Le Brun, he was not overturning their assumption that all such effects depended on a prior mastery of linear structure.

As a result, issues of colour were less subject to systematization than issues of form, supervised as these were by the disciplines of perspective and anatomy. Dealing with pigments daily, painters worked out various rules of thumb and applied these to the schemes of meaning assigned for their work. To honour the Virgin Mary, her robe would be rendered in costly lapis lazuli, but for the blues of a landscape shown behind her, the cheaper pigment called smalt might suffice. Codes of symbolism, economic considerations and job-specific techniques (the usefulness for instance of terre verte, ‘green earth’, for the underpainting of flesh tones) overlapped to provide painters with a know-how, a lore.

Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, The Virgin Mary and Child with St Andrew and St Peter, c. 1500 (unfinished)

If, however, you think of paintings as expressing the painter – the shift we have been discussing – then how shall they be constructed? The painter is an individual who relies on his eyes, and when it comes to eyesight, colour is primary. ‘We see nothing but flat colours,’ Ruskin pronounced in 1857. ‘The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience’ – an analysis to follow on from the initial ‘childish perception of those flat stains of colour’, one from which we eventually derive a workable understanding of the outside world in general. Ruskin was articulating an approach to colour that might be traced back to Isaac Newton’s experiments with the prism, published in his Opticks of 1707. For the first time Newton showed how colour could be conceived as a cohesive range – a ‘spectrum’ – of variations in light. Johann Wolfgang Goethe at once depended on and disagreed with Newton when he published his own Theory of Colours just over a century later. Goethe wanted to switch the emphasis from scientific impersonality to the viewer’s own experience. ‘It is light, shadow and colour that come together and permit our vision to distinguish one object from another. With these three elements – light, shadow and colour – we construct the visible world and at the same time make painting possible.’

Michelangelo, Christ on the Cross with the Virgin Mary and St John (recto), 1555–64

Peter Paul Rubens, St Sebastian, c. 1614

To make new modes of painting possible – and 1810, the date of Goethe’s publication, was a time of fervent hopes for artistic innovation – you might therefore need to systematize the experience of colour. Goethe’s idiosyncratic efforts to do so were a stimulus to Turner in the 1830s and 1840s. During the same period, the principle of complementary colours was making its way into painters’ studios, informing them that paired opposites in the spectrum such as red and green or yellow and purple could stimulate the eyes once juxtaposed. Studio bookshelves also started to feature volumes by the likes of Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz, detailing scientific investigations into the experience of colour. Armed with their researches, painters such as Georges Seurat aimed to handle colour not by rule of thumb but by rational system: they could move on from lore to law.

The reversal of priorities gave a new logic to familiar intuitions about colour. Vision, by this new scientific approach, starts with colour, and moves on to form. Painting, by the new Romantic approach, starts with feeling, and likewise moves on to form. It follows that colour relates to form as feeling relates to form:

visionpainting

colour → formform → feeling

Take away the middle term, we converge on the obvious equation: colour = feeling. Both are immediate but vague experiences, waiting to be shaped. But another relation, too, can be brought into the analogy, that of:

music

sound → form

Musical analogies for painting, a rhetorical device for writers from the 16th century onwards, became a distinct programme from the 19th. Baudelaire in his Salon of 1846 rhapsodized about the ‘great symphony’ – the ‘succession of melodies’, the ‘complex hymn’ – which ‘is called colour’. The familiar tropes he played with – colour ‘harmonies’, and so on – were starting to impinge on studio practice. If only painting could be pure feeling, in the way that Beethoven had shown that music could be! If only it did not have all these subjects and references hanging round its ankles! In this spirit, Whistler preferred to entitle his townscapes and portraits ‘nocturnes’ or ‘symphonies’. Here we start to see how the objective of expression might end up at cross-purposes with that of pictorial representation.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Silver: Cremorne Lights, c. 1870

If the later-19th-century picture market had room for Whistler and his musical pretentions, this was because the hold of fixed categories such as ‘the portrait’ had slackened – as had the authority of academies that ranked these hierarchically. Metropolitan clienteles jumped genres in their search for sophistication, and landscapes might bear as much value as history paintings. From 1841, painters catering to their tastes could buy colours in metal paint tubes that were more transportable than any previous form of container. A direct response in colour to scenes observed outdoors became a viable option, as never before. ‘Without tubes of paint, there would have been no Impressionism,’ Renoir once claimed. After some initial resistance during the 1870s, the market also took to this new picturing that revolved around landscape rather than around figures, and that negated line in favour of a flux of colour stimuli.

Vincent van Gogh, Bedroom at Arles, 1889

In the following decade, Van Gogh – Renoir and Monet’s junior – came to Impressionism after a zealous self-education in line drawing. Rather than treating colour as primary sensation, he investigated, just as zealously, the way it could charge pictures with emotional content. ‘Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,’ he wrote in 1888, ‘I use colour more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly.’ He stripped down his linear structures and loaded them with paint from the tube. ‘It’s simply my bedroom,’ he wrote later the same year, ‘but the colour has to do the job here...Looking at the painting should rest the mind, or rather, the imagination.’

This simplification had been half foretold by Ruskin when he wrote that painters must recover ‘the innocence of the eye’ embodied in the ‘childish perception’ of ‘flat stains of colour’. ‘How do you see those trees? They are yellow. So put in yellow.’ This was Van Gogh’s friend Gauguin, instructing the younger Paul Sérusier on how to interpret nature at just the same time as The Bedroom was painted. Many avantgardists – not only Sérusier’s friends the Nabis in 1890s Paris – took such precepts as their cue. Bold expanses of unmixed colour could speak truth about the painter’s instinctual reactions while also steering the viewer towards some favoured state of mind.

Paul Sérusier, The Talisman/Le Talisman, 1888

Meanwhile other avantgardists around the turn of the 20th century leant on optical science for their ‘pointillist’ (or ‘divisionist’) analyses of vision, dabbing the canvas with contrasting colours that would recombine with added vibrancy once viewed. Both approaches to colour converged exuberantly among the painters whose 1905 Paris exhibition got them labelled les fauves, ‘the wild beasts’. In fact Matisse, the central figure in this generation, was anything but wild in his thinking. His 1908 Notes of a Painter, cited in chapter 3, declares that ‘the chief function of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible’, but makes it clear that the content to be expressed, within this ‘art of balance’, must be stable and harmonious. Chasing his intuitions about colour – boldly and joyously, but also with a nervy vehemence – Matisse aimed to reach beyond transient emotions: to arrive at a transpersonal, by way of the personal.

To consider colour is to consider how you see things, not what things you actually see. What would painters be depicting, in pictures that expressed the person painting them? Yes, obviously, they might try looking in the mirror: but self-portraiture, as normally defined, was less than the challenge that the exponents of Romanticism had in mind. ‘The world must be romanticized,’ the German poet Novalis wrote. The world would be romanticized when all its appearances had become personal feeling; when objects had become subject, in the terminology of a further theorist, Friedrich Schelling. For Schelling, this would be achieved through art – through poetry and painting.

What could this mean? Let’s return to those four ways of thinking about subjects or persons: as body, as mind, as spirit, as self. Since painting depends on vision, how do these terms relate to vision? This, very broadly, is how I would suggest they have arranged themselves around it in Christian Europe:

the body: a public, visible form with limits, moving through, and part of outward space;

the mind: a private, inward space without clear limits, containing ‘images’ (among much else);

the spirit (or consciousness): a source of light as it were, scanning these outward and inward spaces;

the self: the limited space that this particular light, as opposed to any other, can always scan.

As we have seen, the Romantic doctrines so much in evidence during the 19th century placed emphasis on that middle pair, the mind and the spirit. But if you start to scan internal mental space, what do you see? How deep is the mind?

According to the scenario that prevailed in Enlightenment times, not particularly deep at all. It is merely a smaller inward space for storing images from the larger outward space of the world – images gathered in by vision. That big space is coherently geometrical and perspective presents it clearly to the eye, which in turn re-presents it to consciousness. Consciousness lives within the small space of the mind, a space liable to distortion by dreams and prejudices; but these can be corrected by reason, an inner geometry, so that it too can be kept coherent and clear. Reynolds believed that painting is from the mind, but that the painter must always keep his eyes open to receive. As he wrote in 1774, ‘The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.’

‘The mind that could have produced this sentence must have been a Pitiful, a Pitiable Imbecility. I always thought that the Human Mind was the most Prolific of all Things & Inexhaustible.’ William Blake, scribbling in the margin of Reynolds’s Discourses some three decades later, set out the opposite scenario. The inward space of the mind is not simply without clear limits: it opens out on to infinity. Its stock of images from outside is not so much clouded by dreams and prejudices as illumined by visions and faith. The spirit, which is consciousness, is light from a divine inward source. If the outward space has perspective and geometry, these come strictly on loan from the reason of the inward. It is true that this last idea is from Kant, who was by no means Blake’s intellectual bedfellow; yet both writers concurred in overturning the empirical approach that Reynolds represented. That approach had gradually developed in European painting from the time of Giotto onwards. If, however, in the late 18th century, you resume painting from an inspirational approach – one which, arguably, takes you back towards the idea of divinely inspired prototypes which preceded Giotto in Christian painting – what follows?

One modus operandi is Blake’s. In it line becomes not a way of picking out and discerning form from the outward world, but the track of the active spirit, creating and evolving visibility out of its own continuous movements. Matter is rejected: Blake drew weightless figures, colouring them so as to let the light of the paper shine through, disdaining the fattiness and opacity of oil paints.

This approach would be taken much further by another painter working in the same tradition – a tradition that was indeed scribbled in the margin of contemporary discourse, pursued in considerable cultural obscurity. For Georgiana Houghton, whose work was exhibited in London in 1871, the spirit that guided her drawing hand in spiralling convolutions was literally beyond her self, her own area of control; the results of this mediumistic vision were among the first paintings in the Western tradition that we would nowadays class as ‘abstract’, lacking any discernible reference to the outward features of the world.

William Blake, The Simoniac Pope, 1824–7, from his illustrations for Dante, Divine Comedy

Houghton’s paintings were known, it would seem, at second or third hand to Vasily Kandinsky, the painter most often credited with inventing abstraction with his paintings from 1911 to 1914. He would have come across such images among the illustrations to the Spiritualist volumes that he was studying. A few other individuals – notably the writer Victor Hugo and the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint – had likewise already explored quasi-abstract imagery in the context of 19th-century Spiritualism.

There is an alternative way to give shape to the mind through painting: to reach for imagery that tests out its limits. Where would the mind’s eye arrive, if you gave yourself over to thinking? At a blank – for you would have to face the fact that some things are not for viewing. Our minds may be drawn towards God, infinity or death, but our imaginations remain forever baffled by them. Yet a painting might work on the eyes so as to push the viewer towards these cliff edges of the thinkable.

Georgiana Houghton, The Omnipresence of the Lord, 1864

Such a pointer towards what cannot be represented is the sublime: the kind of imagery that leaves the viewer giddy but enhanced; the experience that Kant said ‘gives evidence of a faculty of mind transcending every faculty of sense’. Of necessity, this has been a time-honoured principle in religious imagery. But as questions of taste replaced questions of piety during the 18th century, and particularly after Edmund Burke’s 1757 essay On the Sublime and the Beautiful, painters came to concern themselves with images of extremity – ruins, disasters, peaks, abysses, monstrosities and spectres – conceived so as to provoke and sensitize the mind’s recesses.

The edges of thought could be reached for by effects of scale. Size relations within Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (see page 57) suggest the immeasurably vast. Those within the paintings of Richard Dadd lead towards the deliriously diminutive. Equally, the painting itself can literally dwarf and disorient the spectator, as in the cataclysmic gloom of Francis Danby’s 1840 The Deluge, or Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka’s 1906 view of the Ruins at Taormina, which dizzies the eye as much through intensities of colour as through its twenty-foot width. Csontváry, a self-taught painter as ambitious and as gifted as the slightly senior Henri Rousseau, spoke of his pictures at once as proofs of God and of his own divine genius: the transcendence of one had become the transcendence of the other.

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, Ruins of the Greek Theatre at Taormina, 1904–5

Francis Danby, The Deluge, 1840

Vasily Kandinsky, Composition VI, 1913

Both Csontváry and Kandinsky were painting in a climate in which the ‘spiritual’, a concern marginalized while Realism and Impressionism dominated painters’ debates, had taken on a new centrality. In the 1880s Symbolism had become the vogue in Paris – a development that, strangely, is yet another of Baudelaire’s legacies to the culture of painting. When Albert Aurier, a leading theorist of Symbolism, wrote that painting should set itself not towards ‘the direct representation of objects…but to express ideas as it translates them into a special language’, or when Odilon Redon spoke of painting as ‘the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible’, they were picking up a Romantic agenda transmitted by Baudelaire’s criticism.

But unlike Baudelaire, with his distrust of ‘progress’ and passion for ‘art’, the Symbolist generation tended to view art itself as a form of progress. History was a matter of the human mind extending its sway over the natural world; but what must follow was the sway of the human spirit. The man-made environment should be clad in ‘a décor corresponding to the state of soul that we bring to our dwellings’, wrote the Art Nouveau designer Henry van de Velde; the craftsmen and engineers transforming it should employ ‘a dream of materials as malleable as sentences and as supple as thought’. Symbolism entailed initiatives hardly hinted at by its stock poetic imagery of morbid maidens and misty lakes; it meant taking art out beyond the picture frame, into the broad world. Matisse’s wish that his painting might relax the viewer ‘like a good armchair’ was a variation on the same line of thinking about art’s utility.

As Symbolist ideas got diffused during the 1890s and 1900s, their underlying premise that painting needed to be expressive, rather than imitative, increasingly settled in as a commonplace. Within the circle of acceptance thus created, avant-garde groups dedicated to the idea of progress saw that painting might need to be further redefined and to discard its previous remit of representing nature. The routes pursued by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, the three ‘fathers’ of abstract painting, all issue from this nexus of utopian thought.

The route Kandinsky took led to a new formulation: colour itself was the intrinsically spiritual within the world, its innere Klang or divine resonance. Declaring colour by itself, without recourse to preordained imagery, the painter could open out and unfold the realm of the spiritual, helping to bring a new world into being. The imagery of unfolding and exploration was developed further by Kandinsky’s friend and sparring partner Paul Klee, whose far-ranging investigations produced a comprehensive theory and a vast body of work demonstrating how painting could proceed from inward, organic principles.

All these progressive initiatives – the freeing of colour from form, the freeing of painting from imagery, the freeing of art from the frame – proceeded more or less organically out of what we might call the deep-mind scenario, the prospect opened up by Romanticism. They pitted art against the unwelcome outcomes of the shallow-mind scenario – the dead, inorganic accretions of ‘soul-less’, exploitative science and industry, the ‘long reign of materialism’ that Kandinsky deplored. In the 20th century, a new art – one that might be able to make its peace with science, an art based on proven laws of colour – would transform all that.

But there is another way of looking at the deep mind. The above scenario insists that mind extends beyond self; that it wells up from somewhere beyond the area in which I am me. But the springs feeding that well of mind need not be divine: they can be related to nature in another way, as part of its material organization. The mind is an organ of the body.

To arrive at such a description of the mind has been, and continues to be, one of the main aims of science. In the 19th century, it was the distant prospect opened up by Darwin’s work; while Helmholtz in his Physiological Optics aimed to account for vision as a part of the functioning of the body. Freud, working from the 1890s, dug further – behind the eye, and behind consciousness. Labelling the zone hidden beyond the scanning reach of the spirit the ‘unconscious’ or the ‘id’, he related this area to the biological functioning of the human animal.

From the 1920s onward, Surrealist painters leant on scientific psychology for a rationale as they claimed to construct pictorial bridges to the unconscious, and hence to the physical roots of the person. Self-possession was, in a sense, under attack: Salvador Dalí’s trompe l’oeil renderings of deliquescent flesh were meant to undermine it, even while asserting the painter’s own mastery. Other Surrealists, notably Joan Miró, explored techniques of rubbing, scratching, smearing, dribbling and blotting that brought the painting closer to being a record of the painter’s physical presence. Encountering such work, you rubbed up against excitations, irritations and discharges.

Salvador Dalí, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (A Premonition of Civil War), 1936

While some Surrealist practices – that of René Magritte, for instance – carried forward the Symbolists’ tastes for mystery and pictorial poetry, the years of disaster that historically separated the two movements caused an about-turn in intention. The great disillusioning caused by World War One was registered in many ways, against many forms of pre-war highmindedness: perhaps its most direct and brutal expressions came from Germany, in paintings by Otto Dix which had a physicality quite equal to Dalí’s. Paris Surrealism had started as the manifesto of a littérateur, André Breton, and it was making its protests against discredited frameworks on a more intellectual plane. In effect it used mind to denounce mind, much as Miró himself claimed to be using painting in order to ‘kill painting’. Surrealism assaulted the tactile boundaries of the self, promoting instead the visceral, the pre-verbal and the instinctual. At the same time, insofar as it co-opted painters who needed sales, it necessarily remained another marketable form of ‘self-expression’.

Joan Miró, Painting, 1927

For in talking about ways of defining what a person might be, we are inevitably talking about personas – the fronts behind which painters present themselves to those who might be prepared to keep them in business. Even the most earnest and hard-fought-for artistic radicalism has to engage at least a few viewers, in order that the painter may continue to produce. Surrealist circles buzzed with radical yearnings, voicing their hopes to leave behind all familiar conceptions of art. But the interwar period in which they flourished was brief and politically hemmed in. By the early 1940s, with the Nazis in control of Europe, the most that most artists there could hope for was merely to withhold despair. For those who emerged in mid-decade from the traumas of occupation and massacre, what style of persona remained viable?

Otto Dix, War-wounded, 1922

We have already (in chapter 3) taken note of Picasso’s 1937 Guernica as a conjunction of contemporary news and timeless myth, of outward politics and inward psychology. Picasso had spent the previous decade (his own middle age) in rapport with the Surrealists, likewise giving himself over to his id and committing his body-fixated art to his own lusts, rages, dreams and nightmares. Here we have a model for how artists might behave, post-1945. They might be expected to plunge their arms into deep, dark dirt – not only psychic dirt, but emphatically physical gunk – clotted impastos, matière in the studio jargon of the 1940s and 1950s. And yet their heads would be raised to look the world in the eye, gravely and defiantly. They would be bearers of witness – perhaps politically, perhaps existentially, insofar as the existentialism of Sartre and Camus was the era’s favoured creed. Let the artist’s gesture constitute the declaration ‘I exist’ in the face of tragic cosmic indifference.

One vivid presentation of this persona came from Francis Bacon, Picasso’s British devotee, who launched his career in 1945 with his Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion, monstrous figures serving as harbingers of contemporary crisis. Other prominent exhibitors in post-war Europe, ranging from Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet to Alberto Burri, also put forward bodies that were challenged or ravaged – in Burri’s case, via a wounded and sutured flesh of ripped and stitched sacking. But the emergent mid-century ethos cuts across the abstract–representational divide, and across the Atlantic. The New York painters who absorbed and moved on from the influence of Picasso and the Surrealists – Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline et al., the group known from 1946 as Abstract Expressionists – trusted in dramas of bodily confrontation. The artist’s more-than-life-size gestures, overawing and engulfing the viewer, proclaimed his heroic engagement with that person’s whole fabric. As Rothko put it, ‘The reason for painting my large canvases is that I want to be very intimate and human.’

Alberto Burri, Sacco 5P, 1953

The word ‘human’ is significant here. On account of such usage, many writers since have identified the prevailing rhetoric of mid-20th-century art, in all its earnest, embattled physicality, as ‘humanist’. ‘Humanism’ in this sense is not so much a creed contrasted to ‘theism’ (a common British and American opposition); rather, it concerns what the humanities, as opposed to the sciences, can supposedly supply – access to lived, felt, intimate experience. ‘Science manipulates things and gives up living in them,’ wrote Sartre’s colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher who found fresh ways to define the role of the painter in his writings at the turn of the 1960s. Merleau-Ponty contrasted science with painting, which ‘draws on the fabric of brute meaning which operationalism [i.e. purpose-oriented science and technology] prefers to ignore’. If the meaning is ‘brute’, that is because Merleau-Ponty’s painter is above all a physical, material entity: ‘It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings…Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.’ And thus the painting is the physical outcome of an interaction of internal and external physicalities: ultimately, all is body.

Mark Rothko in his studio, photographed by Hans Namuth, 1964

The label ‘humanist’ has been affixed to mid-20th-century painting in order to characterize it in contrast to opposing subsequent trends. And these succeeding art-world phenomena have been characterized not only as ‘anti-humanist’, but as ‘anti-expressionist’. Jasper Johns with his laconically nullified everyday symbols such as numbers or flags; the foregrounding of mass-produced material by Pop artists in the 1960s; the deliberate avoidance of physical handicraft by 1960s ‘Minimalists’ such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd (even if the former happened to be playing with ideas raised by Merleau-Ponty) – all these were meant as breaks with expressionism in general. Most particularly, with the Abstract Expressionists, a generation deemed self-indulgently melodramatic by its juniors.

Frank Auerbach, Head of J.Y.M., 1981

This stand-off then got replayed in the 1980s, when an international cohort of ‘Neo-expressionists’ – which ranged from Europeans such as Anselm Kiefer and Sandro Chia to American apostles of ‘bad’ painting such as Julian Schnabel – swung into view with claims to reanimate the languages of oil paint and of myth; only for this loud version of postmodernism to be faced down by wised-up, cooler-headed operators such as Jeff Koons, the ‘Neo-geo’ artists including Peter Halley, and Koons’s disciples in London, the so called ‘yBas’ or young British artists. The art historian Julian Stallabrass, explaining how things looked in Britain at the turn of the 1990s, conveys the flavour of the party politics. During the previous decade, he writes, highly regarded, old-fashioned painters such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, Stallabrass instances Glenn Brown’s remaking of Auerbach’s paintings – he simulated their very thick impastos in trompe l’oeil paintings done with a fine sable brush – as ‘a specific attack on painterly touch as a vehicle of personal expression’.

Glenn Brown, The Day The World Turned Auerbach, 1991

required the viewer to believe in the artist’s integrity, and in the idea that a temperament could find expression in paint…Between angst-ridden expressionist painting and calm, latter-day-hippie melding with nature, and strivings for metaphysical significance, the contemporary world was largely passed by. It was the soft humanism, so convenient for consensual politics, that made British art seem so worn out, for consensus had long since passed away (at least from the election of Thatcher in 1979)…

So the new generation of British artists had a strongly sceptical attitude towards the dominant art of the late 1980s…Among the statements sent up by the new work are the following: ‘art is good for you’, ‘art has an ethical content’, ‘art illuminates the human condition’, ‘art reveals deep inner truths that cannot be expressed in words’.

If these productions of Brown’s had any sort of value, it was as laboriously sardonic individual pranks, piggybacking on another artist’s high individual standing. To be anti-expressionist is not the same as being non-expressive, as the more substantial oeuvre of Jasper Johns bears out, with its forcefully truculent and also very hard-worked statements of attitude.

Non-expressive works – exhibits that do not point back to the individual who produced them – undoubtedly are possible. While I am obliged to mention names in order to talk about a Blinky Palermo ‘fabric painting’ or a Robert Ryman ‘white painting’, the works in question draw my attention to what the stuff is like, of which they are composed. They quietly encourage contemplation. But this is to say that these more or less minimalist pieces have made rather little noise on the art scene, compared to the loudly coloured, workshop-manufactured canvases of Warhol or Koons. And it is not primarily for the sake of their searing lemons and magentas that the latter items have commanded high prices. It is for the names.

For anti-expressionism is another persona, yet another mode in which the artwork expresses the artist and hence acquires value. This principle – an idea developed from the Romantic era through the values of authenticity, spirituality, sublimity and, more recently, through appeals to the corporeality of persons – has had incalculable effects on the development of painting in the last two centuries. No doubt most pictures in circulation continue to get valued for what they pictorially represent – that is why most photographs are taken. But it is probably true that most paintings are valued as personal expressions – they are priced by the signature, even by people who care nothing for the ideals of expression I have been discussing. We tend to think that that is the value of paintings, as opposed to photographs.

Personal expression has, in effect, opened up the world of painting we see today: its whole repertory of colours, textures and forms has grown up through that ethos. It underpins the common intuition that if painting nowadays has a social function, it is to provide therapy and respite from fractured and distorting conditions for living. Focused on flat surfaces and on the pleasure of playing with pigments and markers, damaged persons may find some wholeness through creative expression.

Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1965

They may. We all may. Within charmed circles of belief, urbanized painters may play out the unlikely role they have liked to claim for themselves after the modern rediscovery of palaeolithic cave art: that of the shaman, drawing on supernatural resources to heal the community. But let me put it brutally: expression is a joke.

Your painting expresses – for you. But it does not communicate to me. You had something in mind, something you wanted to ‘bring out’; but looking at what you have done, I have no certainty that I know what it was. Your colours do not say anything to me in particular; they are stuff to look at, but looking is not the same as catching meanings. Perhaps their array draws me in: I find myself, for instance, succumbing, like so many others, to awe before the paintings of Rothko. Perhaps your painting leaves me cold: so far, as it happens, it has only been by sheer willpower that I have found anything to engage me in the brushwork of Giacometti. As for your impastos and sutures that struggle to be tactile, my experience of them is purely by proxy; if I try to repeat your hands-on experience of the paint, the gallery attendant will come running.

You – this is the point – cannot determine how I go about my looking. And hence painting, insofar as it is not mechanical transmission, is not communication. Insofar as painting involves the painter as an agent working with materials of complex composition, the specific meanings and intentions on which communication depends are deflected, turned into something other. And that something other – the actual residue of pigment – is indeterminate in meaning. It has ‘meaning’, insofar as we open our eyes to it and allow them to wander and gaze in fascination; but that ‘meaning’ is not an idea or an emotion, not a specific, unequivocal message. What we see is what we get: a product, not a process, lies on the wall.

But we are not happy to accept this. We yearn for expression to be communication, for every wandering mark to find its home. As a result, alongside this two-centuries-old growth of the painting of personal expression, a massive institution of explanation has grown up to control and stabilize the market. Part of it is dedicated to attaching a person to each picture – to weaving stories around the image, like the sentimental myths of ‘the true artist’ used as a fictional stock-in-trade and pick-up line the world over.

Another part offers to explain the principles that this art allegedly exists to demonstrate, ideas such as those I have been outlining in this chapter. This wing of the ‘Art’ institution may generate directives for taste which override mere visual evidence, asking us to view products differently in the light of their producers’ historical and biographical circumstances. Naturally, this book belongs within that sector of the institution. It has been written for anyone who has been intrigued into entering the institution’s portals by those tantalizing, indeterminate markings called ‘paintings’.

Clemens von Oertzen (Viktor Orth), Untitled, no date

Yet the project in this case is to point a way through the institution’s dim interior, towards the exit. To steer a path through the maze of words, towards the complex, but largely wordless pleasures of looking – that is the broad intention of this text. Because it is written by a painter, someone committed to producing objects specifically for viewing.

As a painter, however, it ill behoves me to treat the mismatch of expression and communication as a joke. It is a laughing matter, but there is a level on which all painters are clowns – the level on which people accept us. They indulge us in our self-indulgence, generously granting us credit for creativity even if the results are no more intelligible than the painting shown here, the untitled production of a psychiatric patient named Viktor Orth.

Yet this record of creativity, of human expressive vigour, retains a power to affect if we open our attention to its striving gestures. The swipes and splodges of colour thrill, seeming to promise ‘meaning’, though meaning no one thing. For viewer, as for painter, communication functions as a hope.