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Art School Thesis on Epic Painting

The graduates of art schools were required, beside a show of their work, to have written a thesis before the Scots Department of Education gave them a diploma. This was mine. Epics are dear to me because I had entered art school wanting to make myself both writer and painter of big works. In 1953 (my 2nd year) I decided my book should be, like Dante’s big Comedy and the Ulysses of Joyce, a national epic, for I had just read Tillyard’s The English Epic & Background, which said that the epic form combined every genre, and that future epics were likely to be novels. The self-conceit of this essay, written in ink upon folded sheets of lined foolscap, amazes the much more conventional old man I have since become. Hey ho.

EVERY WRITER ON VISUAL ART is condemned to use jargon – a set of words without generally accepted meanings and usually borrowed from other arts and sciences; words like Classic, Romantic, Heroic, Architectural, Literary. This is the penalty of dealing with one art through the medium of another. Such words rarely have the same meaning for two, even intelligent, even educated men. For instance the word “Classical” will suggest to some the culture of ancient Greece; but for one man this culture is represented by the clarity of Euclid and the splendid balance of the Parthenon, while for another it is represented by the doomed interplay of Gods, men and women in the great tragedies. To a third man “Classical” may not be associated with Greece at all, but with the symphonies of Beethoven. Every other word in the jargon of art-writing may be as differently understood.

There is a kind of painting I value above all others. The jargon adjective that fits it best is epic, I think – a word that was most commonly used in literature, before Hollywood producers began calling big films with casts of thousands screen epics. Ezra Pound said the literary epic was poetry with history in it. It was certainly the longest, most ambitious kind of poem, and as written by Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton, combined the politics of this world with the theology they thought universal. This thesis will describe paintings I think are also of that kind. To avoid as much vague jargon as possible I must clarify the meanings of my words, which can only be done by relating them to a philosophy. The thesis will therefore start by giving mine, thus. First, my view of mankind in the universe. Second, the use of creative artists to mankind. Third, the main artistic categories. Lastly, the epic category and some pictures belonging to it.

THE CONDITION OF MAN IN THE UNIVERSE

To understand the condition of man in the universe we must first put aside memories of any religious or philosophical system accepted from family or society. Systems are popular less for their truth than their comfort. This does not mean that popular systems are untrue. The men who originally preached them wanted to justify the world’s black horrible things, not to minimise them. But unless we begin by divorcing what the eye sees from systems, which try to explain what the eye sees, we will never fully be able to understand these systems, and our acceptance or rejection of them will be glib and shallow.

What we see in the universe is this: Everywhere life is fighting to dominate matter. Matter continually and unmaliciously engulfs life, which in many forms infests, tortures, kills and eats itself. Men exploit and murder each other, often unknowingly or unwillingly. Each one of us encloses thoughts, feelings, intuitions and sensations that frequently co-operate to help us survive but also often contradict each other.

Every philosophical and religious system accepts the truth of this vision, and has various ways of accounting for it. My own system is cobbled together out of bits from the work of various writers. I give it here, not to assert a doctrine, but to give my basis for the statements on painting in the last section of the thesis.

When introspective men examine the bit of the universe they know best – themselves – their proudest discovery is that their basic self is basic to all selves and looks out of all eyes – even eyes that glare belligerently into each other. Many of them also discover that their basic self is basic even to unliving things, as Wordsworth and Blake discovered.

Each grain of sand,

Every stone on the land,

Each rock & each hill,

Each fountain & rill,

Each herb & each tree,

Mountain, hill, earth & sea,

Cloud, Meteor & Star,

Are Men Seen Afar.

Such discoveries are only made after long terrible periods of self-doubt and self-questioning, and they are accompanied by a feeling of delight which does not last long; but to anyone who feels it the memory of that delight is a guarantee that the discovery was valid. The success of an artist or a mystic depends on his ability to share that delight with those who know his work; or at least to persuade them that he felt it. Those who participate most deeply in the delight are aware of something eternal, fundamental, unvarying and limitlessly generative underlying, supporting and infusing the apparent chaos of the universe, and they are identified with it for a rare moment. The delight is at once a sense of unity and a sense of expansion.

Note that this conviction of the universe’s underlying unity can be arrived at by scientific logic. Modern biology teaches that matter was once the womb of life, that our blood is moved by the impetus of its tides, that our feet stand on it’s platforms, that life is engulfed by the soil only to be resurrected from it. But when men have not felt this unity as a sensation of delight they cannot be moved by such logic. The fact that their bodies are under the same law as stones and water gives them no feeling of kinship with stones and water: it alienates them from their bodies. Therefore this delight is the one foundation and proof of my whole philosophy. From it I arrive at the three following definitions:

God is the name we give to something eternal, fundamental, unvarying and limitlessly generative, which cannot be proved, only felt. Life is God operating through matter to the extent of it becoming self-conscious. Mind is that bit of God which operates through self-conscious matter.

The difference between life and matter is that God is conscious in one and unconscious in the other; the resemblance is that he is fundamental to both. But in saying that God “is fundamental to” life and matter I imply that he is not completely identified with them, and there is an element of the universe which is not God. I do not believe this. The unity experienced throughout the delight must be absolute if it is to be true. All the universe is God, and men are parts of God. But if this is so why do we need to discover that God is fundamental to us and what surrounds? Why can we not always feel and see it? It is no answer to say that our sense of impropriety when children and old people are flayed by jellied petrol is founded on a delusion about the nature of things. Why, after accepting this brotherhood in eternity with the avalanche, the microbes of disease, howling wolves and murderers with bombs, must the thinker return to the universe of time and space and flight to eradicate them? Why is there evil?

To me the only answer is, that conflicts within the body of eternity are the conditions of its existence. God could not be, in his entirety, eternal, fundamental, unvarying and limitlessly generative, if his parts were not unbalanced and in unending conflict. Such evil as the deliberate scorching to death of innocent people will always be part of life in the universe of time and space, and so will the struggle with such evil. Without evil there would be no struggle, without struggle there would be no life. Though life can often relax a little while from the struggle it can only finally abandon it by dying. Our inducement to continue this struggle is, that those who are most active and use all their faculties to the fullest stretch are occasionally rewarded by the heightened sensation of eternity stretching itself through them. The delight of this usually justifies life for those who feel it.

A mind is a piece of eternity enclosing (as a balloon encloses air) an expanse of unknown and evil eternity, which is part of itself, and enclosed (as air encloses a balloon) by an expanse of unknown and threatening eternity of which it is part. Life is the mind’s struggle to explore the unknown and lessen the threat. When a mind has done a little of either it recognises its own eternity in what was previously ordinary, remote and horrible, and enjoys the short delight of extended consciousness.

Note: throughout this thesis the words “God” and “eternity” are interchangeable.

THE CONDITION OF THE ARTIST AMONG MEN Only a few men in any age are capable of the most rewarding sort of struggle to compel eternity from its dens inside the ordinary, the remote and the horrible. The majority prefer the comfort of acceptance to the delight of prolonged struggle. Delight is always a dubious, flickering thing. Comfort is stable, and can be protracted. It is got by accepting the result of a struggle (often somebody else’s struggle) and then struggling only enough to stay alive. It is essential that the majority should prefer comfort to delight, because the few who prefer delight are seldom given to that toil which supports a society – they are too busy forwarding it; besides, they often make poor parents. But adherence to comfort sometimes prompts men to muffle the discoveries of those who prefer delight, because acceptance of a new discovery often modifies an old one, and robs us of some of its comfort. When men need to defend their ignorance with censors, jails and executions it is a virtue to undermine their comfort, for the good has gone out of it.

A short time ago “human progress” was an over-rated concept, now it is an under-rated one. Unluckily so, because it contains an important truth. Both failures to understand the nature of human progress come from measuring it in terms of comfort. Shelley and Wells – who mark the beginning and end of the 19th century optimism – thought they were pioneers of a society where comfort would be universal, struggle unnecessary and delight cheap. They believed they were preparing for a concerted human effort that would plant a garden where the ordinary, the remote, the horrible prevailed. We of the 20th century have learned that life always borders upon these enormities, and that even the bit of eternity which is our birth right can sometimes only be kept with a hard fight, and that without such a fight the unknown and evil can encroach on us and make us bestial. This lesson has been made so hideously true to us by two World Wars that we are inclined to disparage the idea of progress, especially social progress. But if progress is measured in opportunities for delight – or more precisely, in opportunities to struggle for delight – then we have reason to believe that a modern society such as our own is superior to most of the societies preceding it – even the slave-supported but magnificent society of classical Greece. Those who gave our society everything that most furthers it preferred delight to comfort. The great painters belong among such men.

Anyone who classes painting with alcohol, nicotine and other expensive luxuries will see little reason to lump great artists with the scientists, politicians and religious enthusiasts usually regarded as the pioneers of civilization; for though no society has lacked great artists it is not easy to see how these influenced the events of their time. Perhaps artists do not influence the events of their time to any important degree. They do something altogether as solemn and important. They penetrate the external essence of contemporary events, make a lasting beautiful shape out of it and let that shape broadcast the significance of the event. Without artists there could be no history. Delight can be communicated and preserved through music, words, pictures and shaped minerals, but in not many other ways. Without being embodied by art in something we have made, no social delight would survive those who first enjoyed it:

London’s pride is tumbled down,

Down-a-down the deeps of thought,

Greece is fallen and Troy town,

Golden Rome has lost her crown,

Venice pride is nought.

But the dreams their children dreamed

Fleeting, wild, romantic, vain…

These remain.

This poem (I have misquoted it slightly, not remembering the whole) contains everyone’s justification for making what they do as well as they can. The artist expresses, and by expressing, perpetuates, the actions and discoveries by which his people glimpsed eternity. A society which does not make such things will add nothing inspiring to history, and be commemorated only in footnotes to books about other societies, as the Spartans are commemorated.

THE VISUAL ARTIST CATEGORY

Good pictures are maps of districts where an artist discovered eternity. “This is where I found eternity” says Turner “in rain and steam and speed.” Michelangelo found it in the bodies of athletes, the artists of Altamira in the bodies of bulls they hunted. Poussin found it in the organisation of a civilised landscape, Bosch in the tumult of a phantasmagoric subconscious one. Bad pictures are faulty maps of districts where the painter has never been but where he believes eternity is to be found, because some good painter of the past has struggled for it and won it there. Bad paintings shine with reflected delight. Bad artists often find it easier to sell their work than good ones, because they are peddling the comfort of the accepted. They rarely try to crib from contemporary good artists because in doing so they run the risk of joining the struggle and becoming good.

When we look at the world’s good paintings with the intention of putting them into categories we are depressed by their variety. Each painting seems a window into a different world, a world with its individual colours, proportions, inhabitants and emotional climate. The only common element is that each painting has an irrefragable unity. No line, tone or colour can be altered in any one without impairing the delight we feel in it. Apart from this it is clear that there are as many different sorts of artist as there are different sorts of men. Any likeness between the artists of a particular age is imposed by social pressure. The Byronic anarchic bandit painters of the past 100 years have been produced by a society which has not come to terms with its image makers, just as the priest painters of ancient Egypt were produced by a society which came too thoroughly to terms with them. To discover a way through the diversity of subject matter and attitude we will begin by resorting to the old over-simplifications. Here comes some jargon.

Visual artists are Classic, Romantic, Realist.

Classical artists subdue their passions through cool reasoning, test their subconscious intuitions against social analysis. Such artists ride on their emotions like rowing boats on calm water, their social consciousness adjusting and steering. Their politics are conservative. When they fail it is by turning their best ideas into repetitive academic forms. They often die rich and respected.

Romantic artists make their powers of reasoning and social analysis serve their passions and instinctive feelings. They are moved like yachts by the wind of their passions, the conscious intellect working to stop them overturning, which sometimes happens. Their politics are radical, sometimes revolutionary. They sometimes die through poverty and neglect, while delighting posterity.

Classical artists convey delight through the equilibrium of broad, general views. Romantic artists convey delight through the impetus of deep, intense views. Realists differ from both by their subject being modern life, using fewer examples from the past.

Problems arise when we try to enlist painters under one of these headings. No artist wholly belongs under any one. The pictures of Giotto, Poussin, David, Ingres and Cézanne have a carefully constructed calmness we may call Classical with a capital C. Giotto lived before that word was used of the visual arts, but the last four consciously strove to be Classical. But David – “he of the blood-stained brush,” as Walter Scott called him – was a political revolutionary. There is a turbulence in the compositions of Michelangelo, El Greco, Goya and Van Gogh, and this fits with the often tormented private lives of the first and last two, yet El Greco was an Orthodox Catholic whose work was as much commissioned by the Spanish priesthood as Giotto’s by the Italian. How can such words be attached to the works of Leonardo, Breughel, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Velasquez? All the big labels art historians, journalists and polemicists find so useful – Realist, Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Cubist and Surrealist – are too vague to suggest the quality of one fine work of art.

Art criticism is most helpful when it is most empirical, thus we know what is meant when a picture is called a crucifixion, nativity, portrait, nude, landscape and still life. When governments still bought huge paintings for their palaces and museums in the 18th and 19th centuries what were called History Paintings were thought greatest because they often used elements of all the foregoing kinds of picture. In the introduction I said I would describe the main artistic categories: there are only two: good and bad. All other categories are built upon individual preferences and biases among work that is generally agreed to be good. Therefore when I describe (with examples) the epic category of painting, and even construct a theory of the pictorial epic, understand that I am consciously working inside the limits of an individual psychology. Certain paintings have given me more acute delight than others, therefore I believe their painters had a more intense apprehension of eternity than others, therefore I think their scope sufficiently wide to be called “epic.”

THE EPIC CATEGORY

Grunewald’s polyptych at Colmar, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Mantegna’s Crucifixion, Tintoretto’s Last Supper and Gauguin’s What are we? Where do we come from? Whither do we go? are epic paintings. In each of them I feel that the artist looked intensely in and intensely out. He looked into the universe he contained and at the universe containing him, and he realised and explained in his picture a very important thing about the nature of them both. The discovery contained in these paintings is too vast to be merely tragic. They all deal with men in an open space – and that space is the universe. In Rembrandt’s painting the psychological depth of the portrait faces is as great and implies as much as the depth of space on the city wall on which they stand. The organization of the crowd is superb. This is not a rabble or a mob. It is not a disciplined troupe. It is moving, but not concertedly. There are drums, weapons, banners being carried and held, but casually. The gestures of the men are also casual, but important. But most significant of all is the unrelatedness of the individuals, the psychological gulfs between each of them. Obviously they are one group, but none of them seem to recognise that the others exist – or they recognise it only casually, almost somnambulistically. They are held together by the gulfs of light and shadow between them.

In Grunewald’s crucifixion there is greater awareness between the members of the group around the cross, but the awareness is an agony. Grunewald was terribly conscious of what the flesh was capable of sustaining. The terrible unremitting abyss of the universe. It is really against this that Christ is crucified. On the left side his mother sways back, supported by St John, with Mary Magdalene on her knees at their feet. Both women are working their hands together, in a way which is partly prayer, partly a way to distract their attention from the agony of Christ by making a physical sensual pressure against themselves. On the other side of the cross stands St Peter, feet slightly straddled, pointing to the agony on the cross with his forefinger in a gesture which is so undramatic and pedagogical that the horror of the situation is weighted more heavily.

Each of these paintings, in their own way, describes the condition of mind in the universe in pictorial images. Each is intensely aware of the unknown, the ordinary, the remote, the horrible: the ordinary in The Night Watch, the remote in Gauguin’s painting, the horrible in Grunewald’s; the inhuman precision of Mantegra’s conception exaggerates the everyday nature of the crime of the crucifixion, planted as the cross is in the geological stratas supporting a city; while Tintoretto behind a room whose marble floor is littered with kitchen utensils, shows dim divine presences lurking behind a busy crowd of eating men who seem unaware of their radiant halos.

Each of these paintings (with the possible exception of the Gauguin) is too vast and too stark for comfortable acceptance. Each is too full of the facts of our condition to be accepted with anything less than delight. These pictures are not tragic. Tragedy depends on the feeling that death has perhaps the last word. It is a literary conception. In these paintings life and vacuity, pain and struggle and man’s phenomenal persistence are shown as fundamental, eternal, and limitlessly generative. That is why I think them epic paintings.