Painting and Language

by Etienne Gilson

Abundant as it is, the literature published about paintings concerns but a small proportion of painted works. By far the largest number of paintings have no history. They silently disappear without leaving any trace. Many of them are amateur work, fully justified by the pleasure they have given their authors but of little interest to the rest of the world. Other pictures are commercial stuff, produced either for industrial purposes or else for various classes of customers whose needs, although different, agree at least in this, that they are but indirectly related to art: family portraits of adopted ancestors for buyers of colonial houses, pictures of famous landscapes or views of foreign cities—in short, all the freshly painted canvases that crowd the Christmas market with mountain lakes, log cabins on the slopes of snow-capped peaks, sailboats tossed about on angry seas, hunting scenes, drinking bouts, and countless other images whose only function is to preserve memories of the past or to provide the kind of dream we all need to embellish the present.

This kind of production has always existed, and since it serves legitimate purposes, there is nothing to say against it. Why should not everyone take his pleasure where he can honestly find it? But masterpieces have another destiny. As soon as they leave the studios of creative artists, their works become so many signs of contradiction. Articles, books, and lectures pile up around them; specialized libraries collect writings about art; professors, teachers, and commentators of every denomination accumulate explanations, interpretations, condemnations, or justifications of masterpieces with an abundance that recalls the commentaries of the Middle Ages on Aristotle or those of modern times on Kant and Hegel.

And yet, one might well wonder why it should be so, because there is a difference in kind between using words to write commentaries about paintings and using words to write commentaries about other words.

I. Language and Aesthetic Experience

The misunderstandings that arise between painters and their public are as manifold as their causes, but one of these causes is included in all the others. Painters are men who have made their choice of a silent medium; they express themselves by means of images, whereas practically all men express themselves by means of words. Some artists have had to make an early choice between becoming writers or becoming painters. This is always a momentous decision for such men. The novelist Ramuz, for instance, whose first education had been among painters, always regretted having at his disposal only the abstract words of the writer while his mind was full of vivid images and of the colors and lines by which painters can so perfectly express the visions of their mind.¹ On the contrary, when artists to whom such a choice was possible decided in favor of painting, they renounced the resources put at their disposal by spoken and written language. Naturally, to be a painter does not make it impossible for an artist to be also a writer, but he cannot be both at one and the same time. True painters know full well that, while they are painting, they are neither writing nor talking.

This proposition is easy to understand, but it is harder to realize the fullness of its implications, and to conform one's conduct to what these consequences prescribe is harder still.

The first and more general one is the heterogeneity of the art of language and the art of painting. Taken literally, this proposition means that, because paintings and words themselves are heterogeneous in nature, it is as impossible to paint by means of words as it is to speak by means of paintings. To this, of course, the ready objection is that, in point of fact, paintings do explain things, so much so that, in many cases, a good picture is considered, and is, infinitely easier to understand than many words. This is true, with this reservation only, that, when it acts as a substitute for language, a picture is not a painting. This is to say that, in Maurice de Vlaminck's own words, "When a picture can be explained, when it can be made to be understood, or felt, by means of words, it has nothing to do with painting."²

A corollary of this conclusion is that, when there is a great deal to be said about a painting, one has reason to fear that the work at stake belongs less to painting than to literature. It is a bad sign for a painting when it inspires people with an urge to translate it into words. In articles published in the Revue independante, November 10 and 25, 1847, the art critic Louis de Ronchaud had devoted a study to French murals and, on this occasion, had praised the work done by Delacroix for the Senate as well as for the Chambre des Deputes in Paris. Naturally, Delacroix felt pleased by this homage, but it also caused him misgivings. He wrote at once to George Sand: "If it were not about myself that all this has been said (forgive the modesty), I would tell you that it is just too bad for the kind of painting that makes people see so many things. The beauty of this art mainly consists in things that the language is not able to explain."³

This truth can be verified by the art lover as easily as by the painter himself. There is no greater pleasure than to share the privilege of aesthetic experience with others. Thus admired in common, the beautiful simply is fulfilling its vocation, which is, since it partakes of the nature of good, to diffuse itself and to communicate itself in virtue of some innate generosity. Let us suppose that, once more, the miracle has been performed. Beauty certainly is there, and we see it. As the saying goes, we are "struck speechless" with admiration. How could one say it better? We all know the peculiar kind of silence created by the presence of recognized beauty; but man is a talking animal, and it is certain that, sooner or later, someone will break the silence by expressing his admiration. This is a most natural thing to do, and it even is a harmless one so long as the admirer does not attempt to justify his feeling by means of words. If, on the contrary, he starts telling us why the painting that all admire is indeed an admirable one, his remarks are sure to break the spell. Even when men agree on beauty, they seldom agree on its causes or, at least, on the words to define such causes and thus to render them perceptible to others. Usually, if a painter is there, he is most likely to disagree with all the rest of the group. At any rate, his own approach to the painting will be an entirely different one. The unanimity so often observable on the objects of our common admiration very seldom extends to the motives by which this feeling can be justified.

Older men usually know how to keep their peace in the middle of such discussions and, better still, how to keep away from these controversies. Yet it is most natural that such disagreements should arise; their cause lies in the very essence of the beautiful. If, as has been said, the beautiful is being itself as an object of a pleasing apprehension, then it must share in the intrinsic characters of being, which, because it is the first principle in reality as well as in knowledge, escapes description and definition. If we say of a being that it is this rather than that, we simply define it by itself. In short, we can absolutely not think otherwise than in terms of being, which is the very reason we cannot place it in front of us as an object to be seen. The same is true of the beautiful. If and when it is there, it confronts us with the wonder of a man-made being whose apperception alone is enough to fill us with pleasure. Whatever one can say about it will really be about something else. This is a primary ontological experience; as such, it is ultimate in its own order.

The aesthetic judgments that express these primitive experiences are, on account of their very immediacy, almost impossible to compare. They usually exhibit two strikingly opposed characters: on the one hand, they are passionately dogmatic assertions; on the other hand, they are as fickle and inconsistent as they are dogmatic. For the same reason, they are practically incommunicable. To be sure, the formulas in which they express themselves are easily communicated, but it is extremely difficult to communicate their justifications. It is of the essence of teaching that the teacher can cause the truth present in his mind also to become present in the mind of his pupil. If he can follow the order of the demonstration, the pupil is bound to assent to the conclusion that is propounded to him as true. Not so in the case of aesthetic judgments. Because these ultimately rest on sense experience, one cannot make somebody admire a certain work of art on the strength •of any demonstration. Suggestion is always possible, and it sometimes works. Between kindred spirits of comparable culture and sensibility, such exchanges are possible, but even then "contagion" would be a better word than "communication" to describe them. Since aesthetic experience takes place in a universe other than that of language, how can it communicate itself by means of words?

Still, aesthetic judgments are in no way arbitrary, objectless, or without foundation in reality. On the contrary, they gather certitude to the extent that, instead of seeking for their justification in combinations of concepts essentially foreign to the nature of their object, they rather seek for it in the unique relationship that the matter of every painting entertains with its form. Metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, social sciences, and many other disciplines offer themselves to the choice of the human intellect avid of concepts, reasonings, and conclusive demonstrations. Each one of these sciences has its own method, its own object, And its own approach to communicable truth. Plastic beauty, with which we are here concerned, is of an altogether different kind, and although there is little hope ever to discourage men from arguing about it, true art lovers should not be allowed to consider themselves as wasting their love on mere trifles for the sole reason that aesthetic experience cannot be communicated by words. They can follow with good conscience artists of all times, all countries, and all the styles in their constant quest for the still unknown forms of creatable beauty. Nor should they feel ashamed of not having demonstrations to proffer in support of their aesthetic judgments. In deepening our understanding of the paintings of which it can truly be said that they are, and these can only be understood in pleasurable contemplation, we are practicing the only kind of art criticism that is not wholly foreign to the nature of its object. For, indeed, when paintings are at stake, judgments of existence and judgments of beauty are one and the same thing.⁴

But why speak of judgments? Aesthetic experience includes no other judgment than the delight of the spectator in the object of his apprehension. True enough, this experienced pleasure is partly determined by the sensorial and intellectual gifts of the spectator; all his past is involved in every one of these new adventures, and all that which, because he has had to become it, he now is. Yet, in the last analysis, the experiencing of beauty in a painting first consists in letting oneself go, or, rather, in offering oneself to the domination of art wherever art is to be found. It is not enough for art lovers to consent to their pleasurable defeat when it comes; they go out of their way to provoke it and to expose themselves to it. When the aesthetic experience takes place, their quest has once more reached one of its possible ends, and yet it must go on and on, as long as life lasts, because, good in itself as it is, every beautiful painting is but one among many other goods, each of which is desirable in itself and none of which is absolute beauty or absolute being.

2. Painters and the Talking World

By "talking world" or world of language, we understand the world of nonpainters, including painters themselves while they are talking instead of painting. And they certainly do talk. "Painters," Andre Lhote says, "are great chatterboxes."⁵ And he should know, being one of them. Even when they do not write, which many of them love to do, and do very well indeed, they cannot always help talking about their art. When they do, their remarks usually deserve to be carefully weighed, especially when they spring from the personal experience of the artist and attempt to formulate it. Yet, even in the most favorable of cases, a writing painter is a writer, not a painter.⁶ The most unfavorable cases are those in which, instead of analyzing his personal experience, the painter sets out to philosophize. He then becomes little more than a weak echo of trite philosophical ideas, as we saw Reynolds become in his doctrine of nature and type. As to the never-ending flow of discourse about painting that springs from nonpainters, perfectly legitimate in itself as it certainly is, the main question it raises is to know to what extent it truly is about painting.

The most general of all approaches to painting, outside that of painters themselves, is that of philosophers. On this point, painters agree to a man that they do not understand what philosophers are talking about; at any rate, they cannot believe that what philosophers are talking about is what they themselves call painting.

Among the many experiences that can be quoted in support of this contention, a particularly remarkable one is that of Delacroix invited to attend a lecture by the philosopher Ravaisson, going there, and availing himself of the first break to run away from it. What lends a particular interest to this anecdote is the fact that Ravaisson was not only the author of an excellent study on the metaphysics of Aristotle, but also a great art lover, an educationist deeply interested in the teaching of drawing in French schools, and therefore a man highly qualified to speak intelligently about art. Yet, in so far as Delacroix was concerned, the experiment was a failure. "After the first part of the lecture," Delacroix says, ". . . I slipped away, perhaps rather disgracefully, but I was encouraged by seeing one or two other people who, like myself, felt that they had been sufficiently edified on the subject of the Beautiful."⁷ Such was the effect produced on a painter by what Delacroix himself rather irreverently calls in his Journal: "a lecture on art, or on the progress of art, by a certain M. Ravaisson."

The same lack of enthusiasm makes itself felt in his remarks about an article on Rubens published in the Journal des debats "by a certain M. Taine." Besides, Delacroix had not waited that long to form an opinion about the author of The Philosophy of Art. "I had already decided," Delacroix says, "from other things he has written, that he was a thorough-going pedant and full of the faults of which I have just been speaking. He, too, says everything, and then he says it all over again."⁸ Who would blame Delacroix for his harshness? Or, for that matter, any one of the painters who have expressed similar opinions about philosophers and their aesthetics? What philosophers can say about art is too abstract to fit the subject.⁹ In point of fact, philosophers may well avail themselves of art as an occasion to philosophize, but what they say is not art, it is philosophy. No wonder that artists do not recognize themselves in it!

Painters should have more luck with writers who, though using different media, are themselves busy producing works of art, but such does not seem to be the case. What has just been established concerning the incommunicability of aesthetic experience applies to this new problem. Precisely because their own medium is language, writers have no other choice than to limit themselves to those of the problems related to art which can be handled by means of words. In this respect, their ingenuity has no limits. Leaving aside art criticism, whose problems require a separate treatment, writers can, if they are novelists, undertake to depict painters in their novels, which provides them with an opportunity to express their own opinions about the art of painting; but the painters thus described by novelists are little else than writers who pretend to be engaged in the task of doing pictures, and the opinions about painting they are supposed to hold are those of men unacquainted with specifically pictorial problems.

Van Gogh's judgments on the achievements of Zola in this matter do not permit any illusions.¹⁰ If he has not the creative imagination of the novelist, a writer can at least write biographies of masters, studies on their spiritual evolution, psychological portraits, etc. The genre has never been as flourishing as it now is, but painters themselves have their doubts as to the relevancy to art of most of the facts related or invented by such biographers. The wildest speculations about heredity, the influence of the environment, the sentimental life of the artist, the climate, the historical moment, the so-called spirit of the time—in short, about countless circumstances either real or imaginary but always unrelated to the art of the painter—are brought into play in these studies. As Paul Klee aptly said: "Captivating though it may be to tackle problems of personality such as van Gogh or Ensor, far too much biography gets muddled with art. This is the fault of the critics, who are, after all, literary men."¹¹

The same complaint applies to the countless studies devoted by writers to the critical history of the art of painting. The impossibility of translating forms and colors into words has surprising consequences, the most common one of which is that art historians sooner or later have to eliminate their hero and to substitute their own work for his. Such is particularly the case with the endless descriptions of "subjects" in which these writers willingly indulge because it is for them an interesting exercise of virtuosity in artistic transposition; but the result is the literary description of a scene, not the description of a painting.

Andre Fontainas has given an excellent written description of Delacroix's Noce juive au Maroc: "The glaring light of a southern sky grows more subdued as it overflows the tops of bright walls. Men are standing or sitting in that light. On the left . . . better sheltered women watch the supple and flexuous movements of a dancing girl," and so on up to a complete verbal description of the picture. Let us now listen to what a painter has to say about it. In the Souvenirs of his collaboration with Delacroix, Louis de Planet has left us an entirely different set of notes about the same picture: first, what brushes to use; how to lay in the gray underpainting; then how to do the whole painting, including buildings, objects, and figures, in the same gray upon gray tones, always proportioning the sizes of the brushes to that of the painted objects; when he comes to colors, Planet not only quotes each of them by name, but also says in what order Delacroix wants them to be placed on the palette, and for what reason madder lacquer and Robert lacquer No. 7 or 8 should be placed well apart, on the left, isolated from the rest, so that they are always at hand, to be used either pure, or broken, or again for glazing. Four full pages of these sorts of cooking recipes fill up the Souvenirs of Louis de Planet, and, indeed, for a painter this is exactly what this painting actually is.

The difference is clear: while Fontainas has not said a word about colors, Louis de Planet is speaking about nothing else; he says nothing about the subject. And, indeed, why should a writer worry about brushes, palettes, colors, and all those material tools whose use is unknown to him? Were we to believe the excellent Fontainas, the whole art of a painter could be explained in terms of exceptionally acute and remarkably well-balanced intellectual qualities: "The gifts of invention that dominate Delacroix are never disorderly in him; one could not exhibit more sensibility or more precision than does Delacroix in composing a picture; only, before establishing his composition, he has allowed his poetic spirit to warm up; the movements that express it have grown passionate, ardent, epic; in fine, when these movements have reached the highest point of expressive perfection of which they are capable, after they are fixed in the memory of the painter, now sure of his vision, his skillful and exacting sagacity transfers their image to his canvas."¹²

How simple, indeed, all this is! If nature has imparted to one such a wonderful gift of invention, all he has to do is to transfer its images to the canvas! The most vivid imagination, the most skillful and exacting sagacity, in a painter has finally to incarnate itself in some matter by means of his hand. The dramas of the painter's technique do not seem to be known to men whose problems are wholly contained in their mind.¹³ This is the reason the literary effusions of writers about pictures are generally considered unrelated to the art of painting by painters.

The masters of words, are they more successful when they apply language to art criticism? There is at least one case to which most of the preceding reservations should not apply: it is the case in which a painter himself assumes the responsibilities of the art critic. Even though he may be writing about it, a painter cannot mistake his own art for another form of literature. Yet, as is too well known, nothing is more monotonous than the list of the active dislikes and sometimes of the downright hostilities that have opposed some famous painters. On this point, however, it is necessary to introduce a distinction between the art criticism of painters and the art criticism of the public.

In a sense, the painters, too, are part of the public. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the aesthetic judgments of painters and those of mere art lovers—namely, that the judgments of painters are part and parcel of their creative effort. Here again, the personal temper of the artist has to be taken into account, but creators with a marked personality usually have little patience with the art of other artists. Having to make a choice between their own form of creative work and that of other artists, they do not hesitate a moment. If there ever was a clear case of struggle for life, this is one. Creative artists are very far from feeling always pleased with their own ego, but they certainly have no use for anything that is entirely foreign to it. In this battle between sameness and otherness, otherness has simply no right to exist.

No systematic survey of the artistic tastes of artists has ever been conducted. On the basis of limited and personal inquiry, however, it appears that the tastes of each creative artist form an organic whole endowed with a coherency similar to that of a living organism.¹⁴ In simpler terms, this means that, in agreement with the old Greek saying that everything likes its own like, we generally find great painters liking the artists whose works seem to justify their own, while, on the contrary, they utterly dislike painters whose works imply an opposite conception of art.

The obvious implication is that the possibility of his own work is at stake in each and every one of an artist's aesthetic judgments. This inference is the more likely to be correct if one restricts it to the field in which this artist does creative work. Like all personal tastes, those of artists are wholly unpredictable outside their own art.¹⁵ Still more precisely, even if we knew what kind of music a painter liked to hear, this would still tell us nothing about the kind of music he would aspire to write if he were a creative musician. There is nothing surprising in the fact that such a classical painter as Ingres, who literally worshiped Raphael in the order of painting, should have preferred Mozart to all the other musicians; but when Ingres describes the kind of music he would have liked to write for the Sistine Chapel, even Hector Berlioz looks tame in comparison.¹⁶

The summary way in which some painters dispose of their fellow painters should therefore not distress us too much nor induce us to believe that, since such great artists utterly disagree in some of their aesthetic judgments, we ourselves should consider all opinions about art a matter of indifference. The antagonism that always existed between Ingres and Delacroix, for instance, can be accounted for by the direct opposition between their respective styles.¹⁷ Since we ourselves are not painters, we should have no objection to the fact that Ingres favors drawing rather than color, or, inversely, that Delacroix stresses the importance of color rather than that of drawing. But if we were Ingres, being convinced as he was that the whole art of painting was at stake, we would be just as intolerant as he was. Rather, since much more than a matter of speculative opinions is here at stake, instead of speaking of intolerance, let us rather say that the uncompromising exclusiveness of his judgments expresses a quasi-biological necessity. If the art of painting was what Ingres thought it was, then such a man as Delacroix should not have been permitted to paint. Other artists than these two great men have exhibited the same spirit of absolutism,¹⁸ and nothing is more common among painters than complete disagreement about the value of paintings.¹⁹ In all such cases, we should remember that the aesthetic judgments of a painter are part and parcel of his own art.

The part of the public that consists of the art critics raises such thorny problems that one hardly dares to touch them. All painters admit that, from time to time, there appears an art critic more comprehensive than the common run, but they hasten to add that, as a rule, art criticism is irrelevant to the reality of art. Naturally, such feelings have been expressed with particular energy by those among the painters who have been exceptionally unfortunate with their critics. Delacroix could hardly mention critics without betraying a secret irritation, and the fact that, as often as not, critics exercise their arbitrary power through the no less despotic authority of newspapers did nothing to reconcile him with what he always considered an unnecessary evil.²⁰ But however long, varied, and picturesque it may be, a list of anecdotes has never proved anything. It should be more rewarding for us to consider the reasons, according to painters, such a fundamental disagreement exists between them and their critics.

The first and most important of these reasons has been summed up in a terse sentence by Delacroix: "Criticism follows the works of the mind as the shadow follows the body."²¹ If art criticism itself were aware of the fact, little harm would be done; unfortunately, it so happens that, in virtue of its own essence, art criticism considers itself the qualified judge of art. The root of most misunderstandings on this point is an illusion of perspective that induces the shadow to imagine itself preceding the body it follows.

This illusion is practically inevitable. The painter is concerned with the problem of bringing a certain germinal form to the full awareness of itself. As has been said in its place, he himself is not quite sure what his own work will be. He is not even sure, after its completion, that this is the very work it should have been. All the other problems a painter has to solve—choice of a technique and skill in execution—are asked and answered by him in relation to this living germ of the work to be done. On the contrary, since he has had no share in this creative work, the critic is bound to judge the new painting on the strength of rules he has had to borrow from his knowledge of works already done by other painters. Now, these other works were so many answers to problems different from the particular one the painter himself had to solve, so that the point of view of the critic and that of the painter are very different. To be sure, there are general rules eternally valid for all paintings at all times, but, precisely, the painter differs from the critic in this, that he has to rediscover anew how these universal rules should apply in a particular case. The critic judges the answer given by the artist to a problem whose data are unknown to him, so to speak, by definition.²²

This initial difference entails others. If there were no art, the men who now are art critics could exist, but they would have to exercise another profession. Such as they are, however, they consider themselves, if not on the same plane as the artists, at least engaged in an activity exactly as artistic.

The reason for this illusion has already been given when a distinction was introduced between two kinds of possibles. The proper ground on which the painter stands is that of the existential possibles; the ground occupied by the critic is that of the abstract possibles. The paintings the critic has in mind are dreams of his imagination; yet he does not hesitate to pit them against the concrete realities that originate in the art of the painter. The critic finds a justification for his attitude in the power inherent in him, since he is a writer, to turn everything into words.

Art historians, art critics, aestheticians, all have in common two main features: a great love for art and the lack of the natural gifts that enable a man to become an artist. Their writings about art are for them a sort of compensation for the works of art they cannot produce. Such is the normal way of turning plastic works of art into literature. It has been aptly defined as an easy means of dreaming what one cannot do and, by dreaming it, of achieving greatness in the plastic arts: "This means is literature. One only has to write the painted work; one only has to write the statue. . . . Through the substitute of literary imagination, all the arts are ours."²³

The will to judge reached its culmination when it became institutionalized. Official criticism carried by established academies has been tried at least once, in France, with the Academie des Beaux-Arts established by Colbert. Nothing is more tedious than the reading of its proceedings, except, perhaps, in the rare cases when, as happened with Le Brun's speech on Poussin's Rapture of St. Paul, the thing reaches the apex of the comic.²⁴ The most remarkable thing about this incident is that Le Brun himself was a competent painter full of admiration for the painting that was the subject matter of his speech. What officially recognized painters have not been able to do for their colleagues does not seem to have been more successfully done by the many self-appointed judges who, simply because they could express their impressions about art, considered

Whether such a result can be achieved in poetry and other literary genres is an entirely different question. Literary critics create literature about literature; they write about writings. But art critics do not write music about music, nor do they paint about painting; they express themselves in words about an art that is not an art of words.

Each of us has firsthand information about the attitude of the general public with respect to paintings. By and large, its dogmatism is ten times more self-satisfied and prompter to approve or to condemn than the most cocksure of art critics.²⁵ How many times has everyone heard the classical formula: "I know nothing about painting, but . . ."? Artists themselves are only too familiar with it—so familiar, indeed, that most of them cease to listen when men begin to judge. The Reverend John Fisher, one of Constable's oldest and most faithful friends, wrote to him, on September 26, 1821, to tell him that a "grand critical party" was sitting in judgment on Constable's painting, Stratford Mill.²⁶ Short as it is, the anecdote is inexhaustible. First, after vainly arguing whether there was not too much sky in the picture, Fisher brought out of his portfolio two prints by Wouvermans and a van der Neer, "where the whole stress was laid on the sky, and that silenced them." A remarkable example, indeed, of the way onlookers have to rely on precedents. For, indeed, if too much stress on the sky was wrong in Constable's case, why not apply the same rule to all four paintings? The good Fisher must have thought something like this, for his next reflection is a rather melancholy one: "While in every other profession the initiated only are judges, in painting, all men, except the blind, think themselves qualified to give an opinion. The comfort is, that the truth comes out when these self-made connoisseurs begin to buy and collect for themselves."²⁷

This latter class of onlookers would deserve a special study as being distinct from the common public, from the professional art critics, and even from the art collectors, although, in point of fact, the connoisseur often collects, sometimes carries on a small business in paintings, and always exercises his personal judgment in matters of art. Painters have a certain respect for the connoisseur to the extent that he also is a potential customer, but they know too well his propensity to give unsolicited advice not to be somewhat afraid of him. Let us symbolize this elite by the name of Sir George Beaumont, whom we meet at every one of the crucial moments in Constable's career. Leslie calls him "the amiable and accomplished Sir George Beaumont, at that time the leader of taste in the fashionable world. Few men better discriminated, than did Sir George, the various excellencies of the old masters; but he never considered how many beauties might remain in nature untouched by their pencils, and consequently he was averse to any deviation from their manner. It is curious that throughout the whole of his intercourse with Constable, Sir George assumed the character of a teacher."²⁸

Isolated facts or judgments do not constitute proof. Accumulated facts would still prove nothing, but this at least can be said, that it seems rather difficult to find evidence of any pre-established harmony between artists and the public. Nor is there any reason such a harmony should exist. Since they are its victims, it is only too natural that artists should take a gloomy view of the situation. Some of them at least seem to have entertained no illusions as to the aptitude of the common public to be open to the enjoyment of high art. "Taste is the best of judges," Cezanne once wrote to t mile Bernard; "it is rare. Art addresses itself to an excessively restricted number of individuals."²⁹ Yet, when the same Cezanne expressed his ambition to see his works exhibited in public art galleries, was he not implying that even his own art addressed itself to all? What is true is that, at the time of its creation and for a period of years afterward, art finds but an exceedingly restricted number of individuals whose taste is open enough to communicate with new plastic structures.

This is not surprising, for, indeed, the first friends of his works whom a painter meets, even when they themselves are not creative artists, must at least partake of a sensitiveness to forms and colors akin to that of the opener of new ways in the realm of art. Some of them may be art critics, others may be plain art lovers; in both cases, their number is bound to be very small, indeed. But they are the forerunners of the crowds that, in the years to come, will visit art galleries to enjoy those very same works, then become so many universally recognized masterpieces. The public taste is naturally limited on the creative side, but its powers of adaptation are unlimited. The traditional drama of the misunderstood artist, ignored by his contemporaries and worshiped by posterity, is probably destined to be reenacted to the end of time; it is a necessary consequence of the normal relationship that exists between artists and their public.

3. Paintings and Their Enjoyment

Religions have churches; books have libraries; sciences and letters have universities; music has conservatories and concert rooms; paintings have art galleries or museums of fine arts. The origin of these institutions seems to have been twofold. First was the desire to put under the eyes of the public all sorts of objects, curious, rare, or even very common, but apt to contribute to the information and education of the public. Secondarily, a museum was conceived as a possible aid to research,³⁰ but most museums were chiefly concerned with geology, natural history, or even national history rather than with paintings.

The second origin of modern art galleries was the private collections of pictures gathered by kings, princes, prelates, or wealthy men of taste in various countries. The psychological motives that impelled such men to collect works of art may have been diverse, and there is little doubt that they were not all of equal quality. What we are concerned with, in this study, is the general effect of these various motives—namely, the gathering together of collections of paintings and the increasing ambition of these collections to fulfill a public service.

This obvious fact confronts us at once with the main problem inherent in the very nature of public galleries of art. The natural tendency of public services is to justify their existence and the money they cost by rendering the public as many different kinds of services as possible. To limit ourselves to our own times, let us sum up the situation in the well-known formula: taxpayers should get something for their money.

To protest would be worse than useless; it would be foolish—the more so since, apart from any influence exercised by the growing pressure of the democratic spirit in public institutions, these institutions themselves are essentially distinct from the causes they are called upon to serve. Scientists are about the business of science, but universities are about the specifically different business of teaching science by organizing and keeping together more or less large bodies of teachers who, even when what they teach is science, are not necessarily themselves scientists. The same remark applies to philosophy: not a single one of the great seventeenth-century philosophers ever taught philosophy. And the same remark also applies to painting. The job of a painter is to paint his own works; the function of an art gallery is to collect, preserve, and exhibit paintings done in all possible styles, at all times, and in all countries, by artists upholding sometimes opposite notions of their art. When an art gallery opens its doors, it opens them to all the possible forms of art.

Renoir once asked the statesman Gambetta for a job as curator of some provincial art gallery at a salary of two hundred francs a month or so. Gambetta answered: "My dear Renoir, ask me for a job as professor of Chinese or as inspector of historic monuments, in short, for any job that is not related to your craft, and I shall help you; as to appointing a painter curator of an art gallery, everybody would laugh at us if I did."³¹ And let us add: rightly so. In a gallery of modern art directed by Delacroix, there would not have been two Ingres; in a gallery directed by Ingres, there would not have been a single Delacroix. Hard as the proposition may sound, it is literally true to say that galleries of art are about works of art, not about art.

This remark, which will perhaps be construed as a criticism of art galleries, should on the contrary justify them against many irrelevant objections. Some of these objections come from artists who protest against the sterilizing influence exercised upon painters by the constant exhibition of the masterpieces of the past. But even if the very same painters were not known to spend weeks and months copying some of these masterpieces in order to train themselves in self-expression, the central fact would remain that there is no law compelling anybody ever to enter an art gallery. Painters are welcome to avail themselves of this precious liberty. Nor would it be just on their part to prevent nonpainters from enjoying the works of the great artists of the past: simple art lovers have everything to gain and nothing to lose in exposing themselves to such influences. There would certainly be no harm done if all creative artists decided to keep away from art galleries and to abandon them to the rank and file of the visitors who, unable to increase the world's treasure of works of art, contented themselves with enjoying them.

On the strength of the same principle, museums and art galleries should feel free to organize themselves in view of serving the various needs of the community that sponsors their collections and provides for their keep.³² The greatest service art galleries can render is to collect, preserve, and exhibit paintings that no private persons could possibly own in such large quantities and for whose preservation nobody would like to feel responsible to the world. Museums provide homes for aged masterpieces. It is most natural that modern communities, while generously discharging these self-imposed duties, should assure to their members all the benefits that can be derived from such institutions.³³

Among these benefits, by far the most important one, in the sight of modern communities, is education.³⁴ Few authors have suggested the possibility, much less the advisability, of an education entirely based upon the practice and knowledge of one or several arts. The thing could undoubtedly be done, be it only for the reason that the thorough mastery of any discipline requires a general culture whose area is practically unlimited; yet, feasible as it is, such an education could be only an exception. It would meet the needs of future artists exclusively. What modern communities are expecting from their museums is a major contribution to each and every one of the many other types of educations represented in any social group of some importance. One cannot imagine a modern man going through the full curriculum of modern schools, colleges, and universities, and leaving them without a minimum of information about such major arts as architecture, sculpture, painting, and music. In so far as sculpture and painting are concerned, civic or national museums and art galleries are obviously the centers around which these parts of complete education should be organized.

This is what is now being done on an always larger scale, but even the most generous of human undertakings have their own difficulties. In some cases, a visitor in contemplation before a masterpiece he is seeing for the first and last time in his life is firmly invited to move on so as to make room for twelve little girls, each of them carrying her own folding stool and all of them ready for a lecture on the masterpiece. Much less charming are the conducted tours that now prevail in all the great art galleries of the world. No stools this time, but a lecturer surrounded with any number of adults anxious to complete their education and erecting the solid wall of their backs in front of the painting.

All this is of minor importance. In every great art gallery there are days and hours when one can see paintings without being threatened with receiving an education. The days of Louis XIV, who got the whole Louvre collections transferred to Versailles for his personal pleasure, are irrevocably past. To be sure, most of us would prefer a little more solitude around certain masterpieces, but all citizens should be able to enjoy art treasures that belong to all, and all social groups should be entirely free to make their own art galleries serve their educational needs in whichever way they prefer. It is often said that since the public museum is a civic institution, its existence is justified to the extent that it serves the needs of the people. And nothing can be truer; but this is precisely the reason that, in the case of paintings, the more they are concerned with education, the less museums are concerned with art.

The dangerous pedagogical inflation that has taken place in modern times is one more instance of the growing aggressiveness of the disciplines of language. It should be the more fearlessly denounced since, on account of it, education itself is in danger of defeating its own purpose. Let us first make it clear that we are here speaking about art, and that any inference from what is being said here to anything other than art, and, within art, to any other art than painting, should be considered irrelevant. There is no such thing as useless knowledge; there is no knowledge related to the subject matter of any experience, be it even the contemplation of a painting, that cannot feed it and enrich it, provided it becomes really one with it. The only point we are enforcing is that, since aesthetic experience itself cannot be taught, whatever is teachable is only indirectly related to aesthetic experience. The great peril that threatens the future of the art of painting in modern democracies is the growing belief that there is no "distinction in principle between enjoyment and learning."³⁵

Only the pedagogical imperialism of some modern educators can account for the possibility of such a statement. To be sure, there is no opposition between enjoyment and learning, but if there were between them no essential distinction, the feeling for the beauty of every art would reach its peak in the conscience of its archaeologists, which, to say the least, is not always the case. Inversely, we could enjoy nothing in a museum without having first absorbed as much information as possible concerning the objects of our enjoyment. Clearly enough, this never is the case. What we know about a work of art is what we had better forget at the very moment of enjoying it. Fortunately for us, we have very little to forget while admiring most of the masterpieces exhibited in one of the world's great galleries of art. Unless we are professors of archaeology, art history, or, at least, general history, what acquired knowledge can we combine with our apprehension of Egyptian paintings, Greek painted vases, engraved Etruscan mirrors, Byzantine mosaics and paintings? Let us discount the treasures of Chinese, Japanese, and Hindu art, whose beauty so often overpowers our senses, despite our complete ignorance of the origin, date, and historical significance of these works. There is a great danger in letting people imagine that they do not "understand" art because they "know" little or nothing about it. If the mere sight of certain painted Greek vases does not fill a man with ineffable joy, he will vainly read the colossal literature accumulated on the subject in the hope of acquiring the aesthetic experience which, if he has an eye for beauty, the most unlearned of men will enjoy at once and without effort.

The fact that should dominate the discussion is the interiority of aesthetic experience with respect to any form of discursive knowledge. Reflection comes second, and even when it contributes its share to the perfection of aesthetic intuition, a still incomplete aesthetic intuition has initiated the movement of discursive knowledge and reflection. We all are familiar enough with this experience, and there is no need to confirm it by the testimony of any artist. The art lover is competent to deal with the nature of his love, and the fact is that our love extends far beyond the reach of our knowledge. Nature has set no scholarly conditions to the enjoyment of beauty.

It is said that Kojiro Matsukata, a shipbuilder who also was a great art lover, having erected a museum near Tokyo, gave it the name of Kyoraku Bijutsu Kwan, which means, in Japanese, the Pavilion of the Pure Pleasure of Art. It is hardly possible to say with more precision and in fewer words what an art gallery will always remain to art lovers, quite irrespective of the many other legitimate and noble uses to which it can be put by civic communities. If people want to learn, by all means let them do so, but not there, because schools and universities, not art galleries, are the proper centers of learning. If museums of paintings should be compared with something else, it would be much wiser to liken them to places of enjoyment than to places of learning. Rather than give so many men and women a bad conscience on account of their ignorance in such matters, let us tell them that all they are invited to do is to enjoy themselves. Above all, let us avoid making them believe that all the mass of information put at their disposal is something they must learn to love if they wish to love painting. All men ultimately desire to know what they love, and find great joy in this kind of knowledge, but in aesthetic experience love comes first.

It is therefore up to us to put museums to good use and to avail ourselves of the multiplied possibilities of aesthetic experience that they place at our disposal. Even so, there are more stumbling blocks on the path to the enjoyment of art than most visitors to art galleries realize. To a great extent, walking through the exhibition rooms of the most modern of museums is like visiting the ruins of a past that cannot he brought back to life. Each and every picture we see in museums has first been meant to serve a purpose and to play its part in an ensemble that has now ceased to exist. It would be silly to deplore the fact, since what little is now left of such masterpieces often owes its survival to the fact that they have been torn away from their natural environment. The Elgin marbles should not now be in London, but if they had not been transferred to the British Museum, would they still exist? These are complex problems, often tied up with the political history of nations and about which philosophers have nothing to say.

The result, however, is there. As a consequence of wars, countless paintings have been forcibly removed from their mother countries; as a consequence of revolutions, many more masterpieces have been torn away from the places for which they had first been painted, removed from royal palaces or from churches and transferred to those repositories for homeless paintings which we now call art galleries. Like aged people, they are exceedingly well cared for, but they too now seem to have reached the age when it is time for them to retire and stop work.

This does not apply only to paintings removed from public buildings. Anonymous family portraits, pictures representing historical scenes whose memory we have lost, wall decorations for dining rooms or drawing rooms that have long ceased to exist, rows upon rows of still lifes or genre paintings, a single one of which used to be enough to confer beauty upon a whole house, all these and many other similar cases belong in exactly the same class as Last Suppers, Crucifixions, and Virgins and Child that lost their architectural frame and have ceased to exercise their normal functions.

Is it necessary to repeat that neither protest nor blame is here intended? Much worse might have happened to some triptychs than to be distributed among three cities, or even countries, one third for each. Their timely removal from their primitive homes has often saved masterpieces from being buried under the ruins of ancient buildings. But the fact that nobody is to blame for a given situation does not make that situation an ideal one. If it is not, to know how things stand is better for all concerned. Reduced to its essentials, the problem is that, although they themselves continue to live, paintings in art galleries have found a haven of safety at the loss of their normal connection with life. This deeply modifies the conditions in which it still remains possible to enjoy them; aesthetic experience is not the same in a private home and in a museum of fine arts.

The relationship between onlooker and painting is different in these two cases. The man who has seen a painting, has loved it, has coveted it, and has finally consented to a sometimes heavy sacrifice because he wanted it to grace his home is not in the same relationship to it as he is to the thousands of masterpieces that a nominal fee permits him to see in a museum. If he is not one of those art collectors who turn their homes into private art galleries, he can see every one of the few paintings that he owns in normal surroundings. He can see them only one at a time, and engage with each of them in a leisurely dialogue that can be interrupted and resumed at will.

Not so in art galleries. Modern museums have done wonders to avoid the peril of overcrowded exhibition rooms. Space has been generously provided, and it is now possible, in modern art galleries, to see one picture without having to see, at the same time, the sides, tops, or bottoms of at least four other ones. The grouping of paintings according to schools, periods, and styles likewise eliminates most of the shocking discrepancies that once permitted paintings freely to nullify one another in the eyes of onlookers. The problem does not rest with the art galleries so much as with their visitors, and visitors themselves are not always to blame. The roots of the problem ultimately lie in the nature of man and in the nature of things.

The more clearly to discern its nature, let us sum it up in the simple question of how to spend fifteen days in Venice. There are art galleries in Venice, among which the Academy would suffice for the happiness of a lifetime. But one of the admirable things about this glorious city is that, by and large, most of its masterpieces are still to be seen in public buildings, in churches, in scuole of various denominations, even in private homes or palaces, since Venice is the sort of city in which a man can rent murals by Tiepolo along with a house. The average art pilgrim knows from bitter experience that a fortnight in Venice happens every other twenty-five years or so. At such a rate, his present visit may well happen to be the last one. What is he going to sacrifice? The Palazzo Dogale? San Giorgio Maggiore? The Tintorettos of the Scuola San Marco, the Carpaccios of San Giorgio dei Greci, one Titian here, two or three Tiepolos there? What should one give up in order to derive the maximum enjoyment from such an art pilgrimage without losing one's sanity? The visitor to an art gallery is at grips with a similar problem. Our aptitude for artistic enjoyment is limited. It does not increase with the repetition of aesthetic experience. Museum giddiness is the price to pay for getting "painting-drunk."

Nobody is obliged to get drunk, even on paintings. The point is that, in virtue of their very nature, art galleries provide permanent possibilities for intoxication. A comparatively wise and sober man would not dream of looking at more than two or three masterpieces a day, no more than he would dream of sampling hundreds of symphonies and concertos during the two hours of a single concert. When he begins to feel that his head is swimming, the wise man gives up the fight. One single painting per room becomes a maximum until, utterly defeated, he suddenly decides to run away under the eyes of still more and more pictures whose mere presence sets the seal on his undoing.³⁶

We wish we could make it clear that no such problems arise in connection with any other use that can be made of an art gallery. If it is a question of learning, any human being with a good visual memory can absorb names, facts, and figures about a large number of pictures without putting anything precious in jeopardy. On the contrary, if we consider the problem from the point of view of general culture, historical information, sociological studies, or nationalistic propaganda, there never will be too many conducted tours, too many specialized exhibitions, too many glorifications of this and that country's "national" art. Man can absorb practically unlimited doses of propaganda, information, and even learning,³⁷ but not of pleasure, not even when it is a question of the noblest ones.

It is therefore up to us to learn how to make good use of the museums at our disposal. The most modest ones usually suffice for the happiness of a lifetime, and from the point of view that is now our own, no statistics, no comparative sociological studies, will ever be able to say what has been the real significance of any one of them for the spiritual growth of some of its visitors. The attendance in conducted tours, the number of specialized shows and visitors, can be expressed in terms of numbers, but the comptometer that says how many people have passed a certain turnstile during the course of a year does not yet say how many of them entered the lofty building as a simple pavilion of the pure pleasure of art, and found it there. Yet, whatever else we may be looking for in an art gallery could be found as well, if not better, in any one of the universities or institutes for art history or for archaeology that have long ceased to be scarce. But the pleasure of art itself can be found only where art itself is—that is, neither in books nor in speech, but in paintings.

The presence of the word "democracy" among the supporters of the contrary position is in itself a sure sign that the discussion is no longer being carried on the sole ground of art. It is difficult enough to form a clear notion of the art of painting without adding to the task the practically desperate undertaking of defining democracy. This, however, should be said: whatever its correct definition may be, there is no place for the notion of democracy in the definition of art in general or of painting in particular. Art does not include democracy, nor does it exclude it. Painting has been very brilliant in societies that cannot be better described than as aristocracies, and one could easily find, in our own day, self-styled democracies that have reduced art to a state of servitude incompatible with its prosperity. In point of fact, there are two opposite ways to misuse the word "democracy" in such matters, and we should strive to shun them both.

The first one consists in saying that, since it is democratic to place the very best at the disposal of all, democracies should not take an interest in that part of the very best which cannot be enjoyed by all. Democracy is a social and a political ideal; it is not a fact of nature. On the contrary, to the extent that it identifies itself with equality, democracy manifestly is an effort to counteract the effects of natural inequalities. Nature is not democratic; the survival of the fittest, which is exactly what happens when nature is left to itself, is an aristocratic law. No democracy pretends to replace natural inequality with a politically achieved physical, intellectual, and artistic equality. There is nothing antidemocratic in being an Olympic champion or in being a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, an Einstein, or simply a man endowed by nature with the gifts, much more modest but no less necessary, that are required for the comprehension of Shakespeare or Einstein as well as for the enjoyment of Michelangelo. Even if the number of those who enjoy true art were much smaller than it actually is, this still would be no reason for the democratic state to change the primitive vocation of the public galleries of art, which consists, first and last, in being places where all can go, if they so choose, to find what the austere Poussin himself considered the true end of art: delectation.

The second error consists in inferring from the spreading of democracy in modern times that, since not all men are capable of aesthetic enjoyment, or not all to the same degree, democratic states will necessarily be the end of art. "Art," Andre Gide once wrote, "is doomed to disappear from the earth; progressively; completely. It used to be reserved for an elite; something closed to the common run. For these, the vulgar joys. But today the elite themselves are putting their own privileges in jeopardy; they do not admit that anything should be reserved for them. With a silly magnanimity, the best people today want the best for all."³⁸

If it is democratic to want the best put at the disposal of all, then we all should hail this new era with unrestricted enthusiasm. The survival of such an antiquated specimen of the dog in the artistic manger as Gide seems to have been is enough to mark the reality of the progress achieved by democracy, as well as its importance. What is silly is not to want the best for all, but, rather, to think that the pure pleasure of art is in inverse ratio to the number of those who experience it. It is in the true interest of all that the best should be put at the disposal of all, despite the fact that not all are capable of enjoying the best. Extremely brilliant minds and gifted artists in certain domains are absolute Philistines in other domains.³⁹ This is an old commonplace: non omnia possumus omnes. The greatness and generosity of the democratic ideal consists precisely in this, that it aspires to make it possible for each and every citizen to develop his personal capacities, whatever they are, as fully as possible. This may mean the end of the aesthetic privileges of the happy few; it certainly does not mean the end of art.

What would portend the end of art—and, indeed, of all that is excellent—is the tendency, only too perceptible in certain minds, to think that because it goes by the rule of majority in the political order, democracy is bound to extend the same rule to all the orders of human activity. But there is no necessary reason this fatal error should be committed. Every political regime has its own main temptation to overcome; the blind hatred against personal superiorities, in short, plain envy mistaking itself for the love of justice, is undoubtedly the pet sin of democracies. At any rate, it certainly is the disease of which they die. They often confuse political aristocracies, which are self-perpetuating social classes, with an elite, which simply comprises all the superiorities, manual or intellectual or both, by which every social group lives and progresses at every moment of its history. Democracies rightly strive to rid themselves of their aristocracies, but they themselves cannot survive without their own elite. Nor is it enough for a democracy to tolerate the presence of such an elite. Because, unlike aristocracies, an elite is not a self-perpetuating social class, democracies have no other choice than to ensure its constant recruiting from all social classes, if there are classes, and without any distinction in the economic status of its citizens.

If the end of art is a certain kind of spiritual delectation caused by the perception of plastic structures and the contemplation of their secret intelligibility, then the true democrats are those who will not let the people believe that painting is a particular variety of the art of imagery. Their thirst for justice will not tolerate that an esoteric and true notion of what painting is should be considered the exclusive property of the happy few. On the contrary, because they want the best for all, such democrats will see to it that the best be permanently maintained at the free disposition of all. The best is the perfection of the good; if there is a democratic conception of the good that excludes the best, we do not want to have any quarrel with it; we shall simply decline to visit its art galleries. The only democratic galleries of art are those whose collections are good enough for the people because they would be good enough for a king.

Endnotes

1. Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, Questions, pp. 7-12.

2. Portraits avant deces, p. 177.

3. Correspondance generale, II, 332,

4. See above, pp. 131-32.

5. De la Palette a l'ecritoire, first sentence of the Preface.

6. Nevertheless, an amusing study could he devoted to the personal experience of Delacroix in this respect. Deceived by the facility with which he was writing his own Journal (the easiest of all literary genres), he began to wonder why writing was so much easier for him than painting. This lured him into writing an article on Poussin. Problems of literary• composition then entered the picture and nearly drove him to despair. See the Journal, p. 182 (May 10, 1853).

7. Journal, pp. 179-80 (May 4, 1853).

8. Journal, p. 382 (July 27, 1858).

9. See Renoir's outburst about a newspaper article that contained something on Art (capital A!) ; the article was signed "Henri Bergson" (Vollard, En ecoutant Cezanne, Degas, Renoir, p. 277). Under this form the anecdote is slightly suspect; Bergson was not given to writing in newspapers. — Compare the vicious attack against a philosophy of painting based upon the doctrine of L. Brunschvicg (Vlaminck, pp. 169-70). — Cf. also Paul Klee's remarks on the hairsplitting that he regrets in Lessing's Laokoon (Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 98).

10. Van Gogh read Zola's essays, Mes Haines. It taught him to know "the weak sides" of Zola, whom he found full of prejudices and ill informed about painting. Speaking of Zola's articles on the Salon (Lettres de van Gogh a van Rappard, p. 177) : "I find them very poor and entirely wrong, except, in part, his appreciation of Manet. I, too, find Manet first class, but it is interesting to hear Zola talking about art. It is as interesting as, for instance, a landscape done by a portrait painter." "Zola has this in common with Balzac, that he does not understand much about painting. I only find two types of painters in the works of Zola. Claude Lantier, in Le Ventre de Paris, and the other one, in Therese Raquin, are comical shadows of Manet, impressionists of a sort. Well . . . In Balzac, the painters are ponderous and boring personages." (P. 178.) "I wish to add, however, how pleased I am to see him [Zola] let fly an arrow against Taine. Serves Taine right, for indeed Taine is sometimes annoying with his mathematical analyses." (P. 178.)

11. Grohmann, p. 10. This sentence is borrowed from Paul Klee's Journal, 1909. Critics are sometimes also biographers, but the two varieties should be, if not isolated, at least distinguished.

12. Andre Fontainas, Histoire de la peinture francaise au vingtieme siecle, pp. 128-29 and p. 113. Louis de Planet, Souvenirs, pp. 23-27.

13. See the remarks made by Vlaminck, Portraits avant aces, p. 37.

14. Such a consistent system of reactions is observable in Vlaminck, Portraits avant dices. A self-taught artist, Vlaminck regularly refuses to study with his friend Derain at the Academie Julian; this appears to him a sort of betrayal of their personal efforts and technical discoveries (pp. 71-72) ; the problem for him is to preserve his own personality intact (p. 116; cf. p. 71, a personal "order," "a way of being," a "character") ; this applies to his subjects as well as to his technique; Vlaminck goes to Provence on Derain's invitation, but he brings back practically nothing from a country where everything, "landscape, people, and sky," was foreign to him (p. 102) ; although he considers himself a born "revolutionist," even an "anarchist" (the best symbol for the Fauves is the anarchist Ravachol), Vlaminck detests cubism as born of Negro art (pp. 107-15) ; he is against traveling, at least for artistic purposes (p. 116) ; born in simplicity, the work of art "must continue to live in the same climate, in the same atmosphere" (p. 117). To travel or to visit art galleries in order to renew oneself is, for a painter, to admit that he has nothing more to say (p. 118) ; the new fad is "invention," the changing of themes and of technique, or "manner," so much so that, to our contemporaries, such "homogeneous" monuments as the works of Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Corot, or Renoir seem to be lacking in "modern qualities" (p. 119). Hence Vlaminck's criticism of Gauguin's "mad craving for invention" (p. 140; see the extraordinary pp. 140-41: Gauguin's work is that of a man who has deserted wife and children) ; he does not like Degas (see below, n. 18) ; "the painting of Cezanne is the art of a repentant" (p. 146) ; on the contrary, as compared with Manet, who is a dandy, and with Cezanne, who is always hinting at "possibilities," Courbet is a fighter, a man without afterthoughts and always expressing himself by acts, never by reasonings (pp. 147-51).

These reactions are of a piece with Vlaminck's early refusal to study with Derain at any kind of school; they also agree with the remarkable stability of his manner and technique (as opposed to the subtle evolution of Matisse and Derain: in the case of Matisse, even Fauvism was already an evolution) ; in short, Vlaminck's reactions are those of a painter who places nothing above his uncompromising faithfulness to his own artistic personality. To the extent that he embodies this grim independence, he is well founded in considering himself an "anarchist." His vicious attacks against the "about-faces" of Picasso (p. 186), and still more against the facilities offered by cubism to those who want to paint without knowing how to do it (pp. 187-90), spring from the same conviction that, in an artist, change is incompatible with sincerity.

15. Laurent, the librarian of the Chambre des Deputes, once said to Delacroix that he was "the Victor Hugo of painting"; Delacroix answered, "Sir, I am a pure classique." See Joubin's introduction to the Journal de Eugene Delacroix, I, xxi. A classique—that is, in French, the opposite to a romantique. In this respect, the musical tastes of Delacroix are interesting to observe. He prefers Mozart to Beethoven (Journal, p. 109). "Beethoven seems to us more moving because he is a man of our own time. He is romantic in the highest degree" (p. 70). He detests "this monstrous work, Le Prophete," by Meyerbeer, but he also dislikes "men like Berlioz and Hugo and other would-be reformers" (p. 98). Among these is Richard Wagner (p. 299) : "This fellow Wagner wishes to revolutionize music and he is convinced that he is right. He suppresses many of the musical conventions believing that they are not based on any law of necessity." Delacroix sincerely admired Chopin. — On the musical tastes of Chopin himself, see the admirable passage by Franz Liszt, F. Chopin (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 4th edn., 1890), pp. 194-97. In the works of the masters, Chopin looked for that which corresponded to his own nature only; see his reservations on some brutalities in Beethoven, on harsh moments in Schubert, and even on some commonplace passages in Mozart's Don Giovanni: "His cult for Mozart was not diminished thereby, but it was, so to speak, saddened" (p. 197).

16. See Ingres' note, Florence, 1821 (Ingres raconte par lui-meme, pp. 113-14). Just after hearing Mozart's Requiem, Ingres notes that, if he could write the music of a Mass for the dead, he would add to it certain devices to create unusual effects of terror or of pity, as in the Eumenides of Aeschylus: "I would make voices of dead men come from underground, howlings, orchestral effects as in Gluck . . . the laughter of the devils and the tortures of the damned. . . . One would not see the musicians, so that nothing would divert the mind from the effects of the music itself in this so terrible and so solemn subject. The Church, obscure; tombs here and there," etc. So this classical painter, who considered Haydn the "daily bread of whoever studies music" (p. 115), imagined before Wagner to conceal his dream orchestra and went much further than Berlioz ever did in the romantic stage setting of his imaginary music.

17. Ingres' god was Raphael: "Raphael was not only the greatest of painters; he was beautiful, he was good, he was everything" (Ingres raconte par lui-meme, p. 97). He would have had Gericault's Raft of the Medusa removed from the Louvre (p. 111). To his pupils going to the Louvre, Ingres recommended (pp. 182-83) going straight to the Raphaels and, if they had to go through the Rubens rooms, to do so without looking at his pictures. Some anecdotes on his attitude toward Delacroix are not perfectly safe (Amaury-Duval, L'Atelier d'Ingres, p. 93)—for instance, the scene in which, after stumbling upon Delacroix in the room of the Louvre whose ceiling he had just painted (Homer's Apotheosis), Ingres is supposed to have said, "Open all the windows; it smells of sulphur." One thing at least is sure: Ingres voted eight times against Delacroix for the Academie des Beaux-Arts. Delacroix was more understanding. He occasionally admired Ingres' technique (Amaury-Duval, ibid.) and even his results ("a delightful Ingres," Journal, p. 29 [April 11, 1824]). What he really detested was the neo-Gothic style of some of Ingres' compositions (Journal, p. 131) and his constant glorification of the past. "People like Ingres never get them [i.e., the authorities] out of their system" (Journal, p. 194 [October 10, 1853]). "Ingres was lamentable; he has a completely warped mind; he can see only one point of view. It's the same in his painting: no logic whatsoever, and no imagination: `Stratonice,"Angelique,' the 'Vow of Louis XIII,' his recent ceiling with `France' and 'The Monster' " (Journal, p. 220 [March 24, 1854]). "The proportions of his [Ingres'] ceiling are really shocking [i.e., The Apotheosis of Napoleon I, in the Hotel de Ville, Paris, which Delacroix has just called "The Monster"]. . . . Pretentiousness, clumsiness, and a certain suavity in the details, which are charming in spite of (or perhaps because of) their affectation—this, I think, is about all that will remain for our descendants." (Journal, pp. 228-29 [May 10, 18541.) "Saw the Ingres exhibition: highly ridiculous, the complete expression of an incomplete mind!" (Journal, p. 276 [May 15, 18551.) ". . . the mixture of the Antique and bastard Raphaelism of Ingres" (Journal, p. 407 [November 25, 1860]). — Paul Cezanne was for Delacroix and against Ingres, whom he considered "a very small painter" (letter to Emile Bernard, July 25, 1904, in Correspondance de Paul Cezanne, p. 265). — On the contrary, Renoir used to prefer Delacroix, but he refused to be blind to Ingres' merits, especially in the Portrait of Mme de Senonnes, at Nantes, and even in La Source, in the Louvre (Vollard, pp. 274-76).

18. Thomas Couture on Delacroix: "Although he is no creator, he wants to play the part of one. . . . There is in him something of a Titan and something of a monkey." (Methodes et entretiens d'atelier, pp. 198-99, as quoted by Tabarant, Manet et ses oeuvres, p. 11.) — "I despise all living painters, except Monet and Renoir" (Correspondance de Paul Cezanne, p. 250). "You will soon be turning your back on the Gauguins and the van Goghs" (p. 260). — "I do not like Degas" (Vlaminck, p. 142). "A painter? Lautrec is not a painter any more than Degas is" (p. 144).

19. During the short time they spent together, van Gogh and Gauguin used to disagree about many things, but especially about painting. In Gauguin's own words: "He [van Gogh] admires Daumier, Daubigny, Ziem, and the great Theodore Rousseau, all people that I cannot stand. On the contrary, he detests Ingres, Raphael, Degas, all people whom I admire." (Lettres de Gauguin a sa femme, p. 154.) Accordingly, being both in Arles and looking around, van Gogh would see things a la Daumier to paint, while Gauguin himself was rather seeing something like a Puvis de Chavannes, only with more color and a touch of Japan in it (p. 151). — On the three nineteenth-century painters whom "one cannot excel"—i.e., Millet, Delacroix, Meissonier—see Lettres de van Gogh a son frere Theo, p. 313.

20. Against critics: "L—, like most men living on the outskirts of the art, and like followers and attendants on armies, etc., is a great talker of what should be, and this is not always without malignity. Such persons stroll about the foot of Parnassus, only to pull down by the legs those who are laboriously climbing its sides" (Constable, in Leslie, p. 107). Cf. pp. 125-26. — "Impotence and insolence . ." etc. (Delacroix, Correspondance, III, 121). This letter to George Sand is extremely violent: "Those people simply believe that they are making you, that you are their work, that their charitable advice, holding you in leading strings, has progressively opened to you the doors of the temple that they themselves will never enter . . ." etc. Cf. letter to George Sand, December 17, 1859 (Correspondance, 1V, 139) ; letter to Charles Baudelaire, October 8, 1861 (IV, 276-77). — On the errors of even Baudelaire in matters of modern art, Tabarant, p. 49. — Collection of silly judgments on Ingres, in Ingres reconte par lui-meme, pp. 263-65; Keratry thinks that, in the Grande Odalisque, the drawing is weak! — Similar collection concerning Corot, in Corot raconte par lui-meme, pp. 195-99; J. K. Huysmans, the novelist and self-appointed art critic, distinguishes himself in this group by annihilating Corot's landscapes: "It was a disaster; his light pipe smoke had flown away . . ." etc. (p. 198). — The same phenomenon is observable in music; see Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective. We do not know of any such collection of foolish judgments in the matter of painting in general, but abundant material is waiting to be collected. It is multiplying at such a rate that it will become more and more difficult to catch up with it.

21. Journal, p. 332 (January 13, 1857). Cf. Delacroix, Oeuvres litteraires, vol. I, pp. 1-7.

22. "The French critics have begun with me, and that in the usual way, by comparison with what has been done. They are angry with the artists for admiring these pictures, which they 'shall now proceed to examine,' etc. . . . All this comes of being regular critics." (Constable, in Leslie, p. 128.)

23. Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les roves, p. 95.

24. Text reprinted in Lhote, De la Palette a Pecritoire, pp. 87-91.

25. "The painter himself is totally unpopular, and ever will be on this side the grave; the subjects nothing but the art, and the buyers wholly ignorant of that" (Leslie, p. 190).

26. Incidentally, see the description of this painting by Leslie, himself a painter (p. 77). It is a graphic description: "On the extreme left of the spectator, the wheel and part of a water-mill are seen. In the foreground are some children fishing. . . . To the right . . . a barge lies . . ." etc. Not a word is said about what makes this piece, not a snapshot, but a painting.

27. Leslie, p. 84. Cf. Silvestre, Les Artistes francais, I, 1-8.

28. Leslie, p. 98. Cf. p. 126, the intervention of Sir George to make Constable try "the Venetian secret of colouring" recently discovered by a lady. On Mr. Ottley, introduced by Sir George: "He is more of a connoisseur than an artist, and therefore full of objections. A good undoer, but little of a doer, and with no originality of mind" (p. 127). Cf. p. 146. Sir George probably is the man whom Constable had in mind when he wrote the following deep remark: "Connoisseurs think the art is already done" (p. 273). Another character related to the connoisseur is the arbiter of taste in matters of painting; see the visit paid to Constable by Mr. Seguier (p. 216) : "Did you do this? Really! Who made that drawing, you? really! very good indeed." After the visit of Mr. Wells, of Redleaf (p. 218) : ". . . my pictures do not come into his rules or whims of the art, and he said I had 'lost my way.' I told him that I had, 'perhaps, other notions of art than picture admirers have in general. I looked on pictures as things to be avoided, connoisseurs looked on them as things to be imitated; and that too with such deference and humbleness of submission, amounting to a total prostration of mind and original feeling, as must serve only to fill the world with abortions.' .. . What a sad thing is it that this lovely art is so wrested to its own destruction!" — For similar cases on the French side, Vollard, pp. 257-65.

29. Letter to Bernard, May 12, 1904 (Correspondance, p. 261).

30. Alma S. Wittlin, The Museum, Its History and Its Tasks in Education (especially pp. 109-12). — We are not including in the notion of "museum" the "imaginary museum" or "museum without walls" advocated by Malraux in The Voices of Silence. Delacroix had called painting a "silent art"; to him, this meant that painting has no voice, but Malraux has insisted that silent arts should talk. Accordingly, he has decided that, since "the plastic arts have invented their own printing press" (p. 16) , it was becoming possible to have "museums without walls"—namely, illustrated books in which all the plastic works of art can be reduced to a certain uniformity of substance, size, and shape, and thus rendered comparable from the point of view of "style." Two remarks should suffice. First, the metaphor of the "printing press" is misleading, for, indeed, a printed word is still a word, but a printed painting is not a painting. Next, to turn all the plastic works of art--"miniatures, frescoes, stained glass, tapestries, Scythian plaques, pictures, Greek painted vases, details of paintings, and even statuary"—into so many plates is simply to annihilate them, qua plastic works of art, by eliminating the matter without which they do not exist. In Claude-Edmonde Magny's perfect words, this is "a Buchenwald of the plastic arts" ("Malraux le fascinateur," Esprit, CXLIX [Oct., 1948), 525).

31. Vollard, p. 197.

32. This complexity of motives in public institutions is well exemplified in the history of the Louvre (as told by Wittlin, pp. 118-20). The nucleus of the collection was the private collection of King Francis I. It was first decisively enlarged because Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, bought a large number of pictures and drawings: "Colbert . . . wished to contribute to the training of contemporary artists by providing them with an opportunity of studying good pictures, and thus to further the interests of -the country. True to the spirit of mercantilism, Monsieur Colbert regarded a country's independence from foreign import as the most favourable economic solution, and it appears that as a staunch rationalist he ranked works of art among other goods." Later on, "the collections began to form the background of intellectual and artistic activities" (p. 119), particularly the Academie de Peinture et Sculpture (1692), which initiated a consistent propaganda in favor of "academic" painting, and the Salon. French "academicism" was the price paid for this turning of an art gallery into a teaching institution. The problem is not a specifically French one. The usually mild John Constable could write like Marinetti and other futurists when he thought of the harm done by such institutions: "I could not help feeling as I did when I last wrote to you of what I saw at the British Institution. Should there be a National Gallery (which is talked of) there will be an end of the art in poor old England, and she will become, in all that relates to painting, as much a nonentity as every other country that has one. The reason is plain; the manufacturers of pictures are then made the criterions of perfection, instead of nature." (Leslie, p. 97.)

33. These fundamental functions properly belong to what Wittlin aptly calls the storehouse museums and the display museums. This excellent author, however, upholds the view that these two functions are better performed by two distinct types of institutions (p. 191). The functions proper to the "storehouse museum" are the storing of specimens and the longest possible preservation of these specimens, all done with maximum economy of cost. To these two functions, the same author adds a third that, as far as we can see, goes way beyond the aim and scope of a storehouse—namely, "to prepare for loan with the aid of experts in various fields, exhibitions on a variety of facts and ideas, in keeping with the progress of contemporary knowledge and standards of general education as recommended by educationalists untrammelled by party politics, commercial interest, or any other sectional bias" .(pp. 191-92). The language alone suggests that the problem at stake is no longer exclusively related to art.

34. This is no place to discuss the notion of education in general. Still, I beg to suggest that the desire to get an education is one of the main obstacles on the road that leads to it. The idea that education is an end in itself represents the point of view of the educators. Since it is their task to provide it, they consider all the spiritual realities subservient to the end of their educational activity. This is the reason there is so much education in the schools and so little in their pupils.

Education is not an end to be pursued for its own sake; it is the by-product of the disinterested quest for all that deserves to be sought and loved for its own sake. If a man seeks beauty in view of acquiring an education, he will miss both education and beauty, but if he seeks the enjoyment of beauty for its own sake, he will have both beauty and education. Seek first truth and beauty, and education will be added unto you.

35. Here is the complete statement of the position at stake (Wittlin, pp. 190-91) : "No justification seems to exist for a distinction between 'education' and 'enjoyment' as two separate functions of a museum, especially in connection with objects of esthetic qualities which are sources of general education contributing to intellectual and emotional sensitivization. It should indeed be one of the tasks of the museum of the future to convince people of the fallacy of a distinction in principle between enjoyment and learning, and of the ample possibilities of combining both in one and the same experience." — There is much to be said in favor of the remark made by J. A. Gaertner: "The best education for art is simply education, which, if rightly performed, obviates all special art education" ("Art as the Function of an Audience," Daedalus, LXXXVI [1955], 84).

36. See Paul Valery's essay "Le probleme des musees," Pieces sur l'art, pp. 93-99. Valery first confesses that he does not like museums too much. First impression of con­straint and regulations (no walking sticks, no smoking). A chaos of gesticulating creatures, "each of which demands, without obtaining it, the nonexistence of all the other ones." Entering the rooms dedicated to paintings, he finds himself in a strange place "partaking of the temple and of the drawing room, of the cemetery and of the school. . . . Did I come here to learn, or in search of my delight, or else to fulfill a duty and for decency's sake?" All this is inhuman. Nothing of this is pure. There is a paradox in thus placing side by side artistic marvels, each of them self-sufficient and yet mutually adverse, and the more so when they happen to be more alike (p. 95). The ear would not bear hearing ten orchestras at one and the same time. These paintings are "rare objects, which their authors would have wanted to be unique. As they sometimes say: This painting KILLS all the others around it" (p. 96). Still, they act all at once on our mind and our sensibility. What can we do? "We become superficial" (p. 98; italics Valery's).

37. There is an incidental problem, which few would dare openly discuss, but which it would not be quite honest to conceal. Where are we going to find the qualified teachers or lecturers to introduce the public to the truth of paintings themselves rather than to any kind of truth about paintings? Is there no peril in letting teachers or lecturers spread among people the false belief that an artistic education consists in acquiring elementary information about facts incidental to art? In suggesting a syllabus for a "course in curatorship," Wittlin (pp. 252-53) observes that it would be beyond the capacities of a single man "to possess thorough knowledge of all aspects of work in a museum." Such a man would have to be a chemist; "a student of an almost encyclopedic range of interest"; an efficient buyer; a good educationalist; "a psychologist conversant with problems of human perception, memory, etc."; an organizer. Taste does not seem to be required, which, since taste cannot be taught, is most natural. One absolutely must read (pp. 253-54) the syllabus of the one-year course that will turn candidates (preferably, but not necessarily, graduates of a university or those holding a teacher's diploma) into so many acceptable curators. The first two subjects are "(1) The History of Civilization, illustrated by specimens of material culture and presented in relation to the facts of geology, geography and science; (2) General Outlines of the History of Arts and Crafts." Any commentary could but weaken such remarkable statements. Among the readings prescribed for future curators, a place should be made for Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet.

38. Journal, II, 227 (April 19, 1943).

39. G. K. Chesterton could hardly pass for a man deprived of artistic gifts, be it only in the field of literary art; yet, see his article "Our Note Book," Illustrated London News, March 10, 1923, and the passionate reply of Eric Gill (in Letters, pp. 177-80) : "Mr. Chesterton has been a champion of mediaeval civilization. Yet he is so far a child of the Renaissance that he is ready to join company with a merely dextrous portrait-painter in spurning a great creative period and to suggest that Christian art only began with Giotto! Giotto, alas! was the end, not the beginning. But he is hailed as the beginning because he was the first great illustrator, and illustration, portraiture, criticism are the only functions of art honoured in an age in which men are no longer 'partners with God in the making of beauteous works,' in which artists are a class apart, spoiled & petted so long as they are able to purvey the lovable to their employers."

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