Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 148

In line with the expanded remit of art history in the contemporary period, writers have begun to show interest in the work of certain European artists, including figures hitherto marginal in established art histories, because their work evidences interaction with other cultures. Examples include William Hodges (cf. IIb8)], who travelled to Oceania on the second Cook voyage and later worked in India, and the Irish artist Thomas Hickey, who also worked in India for many decades. Mutatis mutandis, the work of more canonical figures has likewise been scrutinized for evidence of what has been called an ‘imperial aesthetic’: to find traces, or encoded forms, in both visual and textual representations of assumptions about the priority of the academic tradition over the visual forms of other cultures; in a word, of Eurocentrism. The contents of Part II have shown ample evidence of such biases, indeed it would be strange if it were otherwise. Nonetheless, for all his centrality to the academic establishment of British art in the period, it has to be said that the published writings of Joshua Reynolds have very little to say about the art and culture of other countries. Reynolds was an avowed classicist, and leading advocate of the Grand Style, but he says little about its Others. In his Discourse VI, delivered on 10 December 1774, Reynolds does make a fleeting reference to artists needing to acquire knowledge ‘from the East and from the West’, but the context makes it clear that this is little more than a figure of speech. Nowhere in that Discourse’s discussion of the models which an artist must imitate in order to achieve excellence does he venture beyond classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance and the post‐Renaissance European canon. However, two partial exceptions to this general rule can be found in addresses a decade apart, in 1776 and 1786. In his Discourse VII, delivered on 10 December 1776, against a background of homage to Greece and Rome, Reynolds discusses the personal adornment of both Native Americans and the inhabitants of Tahiti. Reynolds had some experience of both. He had encountered a delegation of Cherokee Indians in London in 1762, and his full‐length portrait of Omai, the Tahitian who travelled to England with James Cook, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1776. In terms of fine art, Reynolds maintained absolute standards of taste and decorum, but in what were to him altogether slighter areas of ornament, he is surprisingly pluralistic about different canons of taste, even though ‘art’ and ‘ornament’ exist on a demonstrable continuum. In our second extract, from Discourse XIII, given on 11 December 1786, late in his career, Reynolds appears to be prepared to countenance the use of motifs drawn from outside the classical canon in order to bolster the imaginative aspects of art and its consequent impact on the spectator. In this respect he refers to the architect Vanburgh’s use of the Gothic, and William Hodges’ images of Indian – principally Mughal – architecture (cf. IIB8). For Reynolds, this is risky territory, but it seems that so long as the permitted cultural eclecticism remains in check, it may yet serve the higher ends of Art. It goes without saying that for Reynolds, those ‘higher ends’ would have remained sacrosanct. Our extracts are taken from Sir Joshua Reynolds. Discourses, edited with an introduction and notes by Pat Rogers, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 196–8 and 296–7. (Further extracts from Reynolds’ writings can be found in Art in Theory 1648–1815, IIIB9, IVA7 and VA2, pp. 532–8, 651–61 and 749–52.)

discourse vii

In poetry or eloquence, to determine how far figurative or metaphorical language may proceed, and when it begins to be affectation or beside the truth, must be determined by taste; though this taste, we must never forget, is regulated and formed by presiding feeling of mankind, – by those works which have approved themselves to all times and all persons. Thus, though eloquence has undoubtedly an essential and intrinsic excellence, and immoveable principles common to all languages, founded in the nature of our passions and affections; yet it has its ornaments and modes of addresses, which are merely arbitrary. What is approved in the eastern nations as grand and majestic, would be considered by the Greeks and Romans as turgid and inflated; and they, in return, would be thought by the Orientals to express themselves in a cold and insipid manner. […]

To illustrate this by the fashion of dress, in which there is allowed to be a good or bad taste. The component parts of dress are continually changing from great to little, from short to long; but the general form still remains; it is still the same general dress, which is comparatively fixed, though on a very slender foundation; but it is on this which fashion must rest. He who invents with the most success, or dresses in the best taste, would probably, from the same sagacity employed to greater purposes, have discovered equal skill, or have formed the same correct taste, in the highest labours of art.

I have mentioned taste in dress, which is certainly one of the lowest subjects to which this word is applied; yet, as I have before observed, there is a right even here, however narrow its foundation, respecting the fashion of any particular nation. But we have still more slender means of determining, to which of the different customs of different ages or countries we ought to give the preference, since they seem to be all equally removed from nature. If an European, when he has cut off his beard, and put false hair on his head, or bound up his own natural hair in regular hard knots, as unlike nature as he can possibly make it; and after having rendered them immoveable by the help of the fat of hogs, has covered the whole with flour, laid on by a machine with the utmost regularity; if, when thus attired, he issues forth, and meets a Cherokee Indian, who has bestowed as much time at his toilet, and laid on with equal care and attention his yellow and red oker on particular parts of his forehead or cheeks, as he judges most becoming; whoever of these two despises the other for this attention to the fashion of his country, which ever first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian.

All these fashions are very innocent; neither worth disquisition, nor any endeavour to alter them; as the charge would, in all probability, be equally distant from nature. The only circumstance against which indignation may reasonably be moved, is, where the operation is painful or destructive of health; such as some of the practices at Otaheite, and the straight lacing of the English ladies….

It is in dress as in things of greater consequence. Fashions originate from those only who have the high and powerful advantages of rank, birth, and fortune. Many of the ornaments of art, those at least for which no reason can be given, are transmitted to us, are adopted, and acquire their consequence from the company in which we have been used to see them. As Greece and Rome are the fountains from whence have flowed all kinds of excellence, to that veneration which they have a right to claim for the pleasure and knowledge which they have afforded us, we voluntarily add our approbation of every ornament and every custom that belonged to them, even to the fashion of their dress. […]

discourse xiii

Architecture certainly possesses many principles in common with Poetry and Painting. Among those which may be reckoned as the first, is, that of affecting the imagination by means of association of ideas … Hence it is that towers and battlements are so often selected by the Painter and the Poet, to make a part of the composition of their ideal Landscape; and it is from hence in a great degree, that in the buildings of Vanbrugh, who was a Poet as well as an Architect, there is a greater display of imagination, than we shall find perhaps in any other, and this is the ground of the effect we feel in many of his works, notwithstanding the faults with which many of them are justly charged. For this purpose, Vanbrugh appears to have had recourse to some of the principles of the Gothick Architecture; which, though not so ancient as the Grecian, is more so to our imagination, with which the Artist is more concerned than with absolute truth.

The Barbarick splendour of those Asiatick Buildings, which are now publishing by a member of this Academy, may possibly, in the same manner, furnish an Architect, not with models to copy, but with hints of composition and general effect, which would not otherwise have occurred….

The sound rules of the Grecian Architecture are not to be lightly sacrificed. A deviation from them, or even an addition to them, is like a deviation or addition to, or from, the rules of other Arts, – fit only for a great master, who is thoroughly conversant in the nature of man, as well as all combinations in his own Art.