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SOME FIGHT BECAUSE they hate what confronts them; others because they have taken the measure of their lives and wish to give meaning to their existence. The latter are likely to struggle more persistently. Max Raphael was a very pure example of the second type.

He was born near the Polish–German border in 1889. He studied philosophy, political economy and the history of art in Berlin and Munich. His first work was published in 1913. He died in New York in 1952. In the intervening forty years he thought and wrote incessantly. Only a fraction of his work has been published, and most of that is out of print and unobtainable. He left thousands of pages of manuscript which his widow and friends are ordering and hoping to publish. Their subject-matter ranges from palaeontology to classical architecture, from Gothic sculpture to Flaubert, from modern city planning to epistemology.

For five years I tried to interest European publishers in his work. In vain. A fact which I mention only because in a few decades it will be hard to remember how unknown and unrecognised Max Raphael still was in 1969.

His life was austere. He held no official academic post. He was forced several times to emigrate. He earned very little money. He wrote and noted without cease. As he travelled, small groups of friends and unofficial students collected around him. By the cultural hierarchies he was dismissed as an unintelligible but dangerous Marxist: by the party communists as a Trotskyist. Unlike Spinoza he had no artisanal trade.

To appreciate the possible role of the book under review,¹ we must be clear about the present situation of the arts. (Nobody who is not prepared to grapple with fundamentals should approach the book.) It is a situation of extreme crisis. The validity of art itself is in question. There is not a significant artist in the world who is not asking himself whether his art is justified – not on account of the quality of his talent, but on account of the relevance of art to the demands of the time in which he is living.

Raphael quotes a remark of Cézanne’s in the context of a quite different analysis:

I paint my still lifes, these natures mortes, for my coachman who does not want them, I paint them so that children on the knees of their grandfathers may look at them while they eat their soup and chatter. I do not paint them for the pride of the Emperor of Germany or the vanity of the oil merchants of Chicago. I may get ten thousand francs for one of these dirty things, but I’d rather have the wall of a church, a hospital, or a municipal building.

Since 1848 every artist unready to be a mere paid entertainer has tried to resist the bourgeoisation of his finished work, the transformation of the spiritual value of his work into property value. This regardless of his political opinions as such. Cézanne’s attempt, like that of all his contemporaries, was in vain. The resistance of later artists became more active and more violent – in that the resistance was built into their works. What Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and so on, all shared was their opposition to art-as-property and art-as-a-cultural-alibi-for-existing-society. We know the extremes to which they went: the sacrifices they were prepared to make as creators; and we see that their resistance was as ineffective as Cézanne’s.

In the last decade the tactics of resistance have changed. Less frontal confrontation. Instead, infiltration. Irony and philosophic scepticism. The consequences in Tachism, Pop Art, Minimal Art, Neo-Dada, and so on. But such tactics have been no more successful than earlier ones. Art is still transformed into the property of the property-owning class. In the case of the visual arts the property involved is physical; in the case of the other arts it is moral property.

Art historians with a social or Marxist formation have interpreted the art of the past in terms of class ideology. They have shown that a class, or groups in a class, tended to support and patronise art which to some degree reflected or furthered their own class values and views. It now appears that in the later stages of capitalism this has ceased to be generally true. Art is treated as a commodity whose meaning lies only in its rarity value and in its functional value as a stimulant of sensation. It ceases to have implications beyond itself. Works of art become objects whose essential character is like that of diamonds or sun-tan lamps. The determining factor of this development – internationalism of monopoly, powers of mass-media communication, level of alienation in consumer societies – need not concern us here. But the consequence does. Art can no longer oppose what is. The faculty of proposing an alternative reality has been reduced to the faculty of designing – more or less well – an object.

Hence the imaginative doubt in all artists worthy of their category. Hence the fact that the militant young begin to use ‘art’ as a cover for more direct action.

One might argue that artists should continue, regardless of society’s immediate treatment of their work: that they should address themselves to the future, as all imaginative artists after 1848 have had to do. But this is to ignore the world-historical moment at which we have arrived. Imperialism, European hegemony, the moralities of capitalist-Christianity and state-communism, the Cartesian dualism of white reasoning, the practice of constructing ‘humanist’ cultures on a basis of monstrous exploitation – this entire interlocking system is now being challenged: a world struggle is being mounted against it. Those who envisage a different future are obliged to define their position towards this struggle, obliged to choose. Such a choice tends to lead them either to impotent despair or to the conclusion that world liberation is the precondition for any new valid cultural achievement. (I simplify and somewhat exaggerate the positions for the sake of brevity.) Either way their doubts about the value of art are increased. An artist who now addresses the future does not necessarily have his faith in his vision confirmed.

In this present crisis, is it any longer possible to speak of the revolutionary meaning of art? This is the fundamental question. It is the question that Max Raphael begins to answer in The Demands of Art.

The book is based on some lectures that Raphael gave in the early 1930s to a modest adult education class in Switzerland under the title ‘How Should One Approach a Work of Art?’. He chose five works and devoted a chapter of extremely thorough and varied analysis to each. The works are: Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire of 1904–06 (the one in the Philadelphia Museum), Degas’s etching of Madame X Leaving Her Bath, Giotto’s Dead Christ (Padua) compared with his later Death of Saint Francis (Florence), a drawing by Rembrandt of Joseph Interpreting Pharaoh’s Dreams, and Picasso’s Guernica. (The chapter on Guernica was of course written later.) These are followed by a general chapter on ‘The Struggle to Understand Art’, and by an appendix of an unfinished but extremely important essay entitled ‘Towards an Empirical Theory of Art’, written in 1941. The editing, production and translating of the present volume – under the direction of two of Raphael’s friends – are a model of an efficient labour of love.

I shall not discuss Raphael’s analysis of the five individual works. They are brilliant, long, highly particularised and dense. The most I can do is to attempt a crude outline of his general theory.

A question which Marx posed but could not answer: If art in the last analysis is a superstructure of the economic base, why does its power to move us endure long after the base has been transformed? Why, asked Marx, do we still look towards Greek art as an ideal? He began to answer by speaking about the ‘charm’ of ‘young children’ (the young Greek civilisation), and then broke off the manuscript and was far too occupied ever to return to the question.

‘A transitional epoch’, writes Raphael,

always implies uncertainty: Marx’s struggle to understand his own epoch testifies to this. In such a period two attitudes are possible. One is to take advantage of the emergent forces of the new order with a view to undermining it to affirm it in order to drive it beyond itself: this is the active, militant, revolutionary attitude. The other clings to the past, is retrospective and romantic, bewails or acknowledges the decline, asserts that the will to live is gone – in short, it is the passive attitude. Where economic, social, and political questions were at stake Marx took the first attitude; in questions of art he took neither.

He merely reflected his epoch.

Just as Marx’s taste in art – the classical ideal excluding the extraordinary achievements of palaeolithic, Mexican, African art – reflected the ignorance and prejudice of art appreciation in his period, so his failure to create (though he saw the need to do so) a theory of art larger than that of the superstructure theory was the consequence of the continual, overwhelming primacy of economic power in the society around him.

In view of this lacuna in Marxist theory, Raphael sets out to ‘develop a theory of art that I call empirical because it is based on a study of works of art from all periods and nations. I am convinced that mathematics, which has travelled a long way since Euclid, will someday provide us with the means of formulating the results of such a study in mathematical terms.’ And he reminds the sceptical reader that before infinitesimal calculus was discovered even nature could not be studied mathematically.

‘Art is an interplay, an equation of three factors – the artist, the world and the means of figuration.’ Raphael’s understanding of the third factor, the means or process of figuration, is crucial. For it is this process which permits him to consider the finished work of art as possessing a specific reality of its own.

Even though there is no such thing as a single, uniquely beautiful proportion of the human body or a single scientifically correct method of representing space, or one method only of artistic figuration, whatever form art may assume in the course of history, it is always a synthesis between nature (or history) and the mind, and as such it acquires a certain autonomy vis-à-vis both these elements. This independence seems to be created by man and hence to possess a psychic reality; but in point of fact the process of creation can become an existent only because it is embodied in some concrete material.

The artist chooses his material – stone, glass, pigment, or a mixture of several. He then chooses a way of working it – smoothly, roughly, in order to preserve its own character, in order to destroy or transcend it. These choices are to a large measure historically conditioned. By working his material so that it represents ideas or an object, or both, the artist transforms raw material into ‘artistic’ material. What is represented is materialised in the worked, raw material; whereas the worked raw material acquires an immaterial character through its representations and the unnatural unity which connects and binds these representations together. ‘Artistic’ material, so defined, a substance half physical and half spiritual, is an ingredient of the material of figuration.

A further ingredient derives from the means of representation. These are colour, line and light-and-shade. Perceived in nature, these qualities are merely the stuff of sensation – undifferentiated from one another and arbitrarily mixed. The artist, in order to replace contingency by necessity, first separates the qualities and then combines them around a central idea or feeling which determines all their relations.

The two processes which produce the material of figuration (the process of transforming raw material into artistic material and the process of transforming the matter of sensation into means of representation) are continually interrelated. Together they constitute what might be called the matter of art.

Figuration begins with the separate long-drawn-out births of idea and motif, and is complete when the two are born and indistinguishable from one another.

The characteristics of the individual idea are:

1.It is simultaneously an idea and a feeling.

2.It contains the contrasts between the particular and the general, the individual and the universal, the original and the banal.

3.It is a progression towards ever deeper meanings.

4.It is the nodal point from which secondary ideas and feelings develop.

‘The motif is the sum total of line, colour and light by means of which the conception is realised.’ The motif begins to be born apart from but at the same time as the idea because ‘only in the act of creation does the content become fully conscious of itself’.

What is the relation between the pictorial (individual) idea and nature?

The pictorial idea separates usable from unusable elements of natural appearances and, conversely, study of natural appearances chooses from among all possible manifestations of the pictorial idea the one that is most adequate. The difficulty of the method comes down to ‘proving what one believes’ – ‘proof’ here consisting in this, that the opposed methodological starting points (experience and theory) are unified, brought together in a reality of a special kind, different from either, and that this reality owes its pictorial life to a motif adequate to the conception and developed compositionally.

What are the methods of figuration?

1.The structuring of space.

2.The rendering of forms within that space effective.

The structuring of space has nothing to do with perspective: its tasks are to dislocate space so that it ceases to be static (the simplest example is that of the forward-coming relaxed leg in standing Greek figures) and to divide space into quanta so that we become conscious of its divisibility, and thus cease to be the creatures of its continuity (for example, the receding planes parallel to the picture surface in late Cézannes). ‘To create pictorial space is to penetrate not only into the depths of the picture but also into the depths of our intellectual system of co-ordinates (which matches that of the world). Depth of space is depth of essence or else it is nothing but appearance and illusion.’

The distinction between actual form and effective form is as follows: Actual form is descriptive; effective form is suggestive, i.e. through it the artist, instead of trying to convey the contents and feelings to the viewer by fully describing them, provides him only with as many clues as he needs to produce these contents and feelings within himself. To achieve this the artist must act not upon individual sense organs but upon the whole man, i.e. he must make the viewer live in the work’s own mode of reality.

What does figuration, with its special material (see above), achieve?

Intensity of figuration is not display of the artist’s strength; not vitality, which animates the outer world with the personal energies of the creative artist; not logical or emotional consistency, with which a limited problem is thought through or felt through to its ultimate consequences. What it does denote is the degree to which the very essence of art has been realised: the undoing of the world of things, the construction of the world of values, and hence the constitution of a new world. The originality of this constitution provides us with a general criterion by which we can measure intensity of figuration. Originality of constitution is not the urge to be different from others, to produce something entirely new; it is (in the etymological sense) the grasping of the origin, the roots of both ourselves and things.

One must distinguish here between Raphael’s ‘world of values’ and the idealist view of art as a depository of transcendental values. For Raphael the values lie in the activity revealed by the work. The function of the work of art is to lead us from the work to the process of creation which it contains. This process is determined by the material of figuration, and it is within this material, which Raphael discloses and analyses with genius, that mathematics may one day be able to discover precise principles. The process is directed towards creating within the work a synthesis of the subjective and objective, of the conditional and the absolute within a totality governed by its own laws of necessity. Thus the world of things is replaced within the work by a hierarchy of values created by the process it contains.

I can give no indication here of the detailed, specific and unabstract way in which Raphael applies his understanding to the five works he studies. I can only state that his eye and sensuous awareness were as developed as his mind. Reading him, one has the impression, however difficult the thought, of a man of unusual and stable balance.

Through the text of this book one can feel the profile of an austere thinker who belonged to the twentieth century because he was a dialectical materialist inheriting the main tradition of European philosophy, but who at the same time was a man whose vital constitution made it impossible for him to ignore the unknown, the as yet tentative, the explosive human potential which will always render man indefinable within any categorical system.

Since we cannot know ourselves directly, but only through our actions, it remains more than doubtful whether our idea of ourselves accords with our real motives. But we must strive unremittingly to achieve this congruence. For only self-knowledge can lead to self-determination, and false self-determination would ruin our lives and be the most immoral action we could commit.

To return now to our original question: What is the revolutionary meaning of art? Raphael shows that the revolutionary meaning of a work of art has nothing to do with its subject matter in itself, or with the functional use to which the work is put, but is a meaning continually awaiting discovery and release:

However strong a given historical tendency may be, man can and has the duty to resist it when it runs counter to his creative powers. There is no fate which decrees that we must be victims of technology or that art must be shelved as an anachronism; the ‘fate’ is merely misuse of technology by the ruling class to suppress the people’s power to make its own history. To a certain extent it is up to every individual, by his participation in social and political life, to decide whether art shall or shall not become obsolete. The understanding of art helps raise this decision to its highest level. As a vessel formed by the creative forces which it preserves, the work of art keeps alive and enhances every urge to come to terms with the world.

We have said that art leads us from the work to the process of creation. This reversion, outside the theory of art, will eventually generate universal doubt about the world as given, the natural as well as the social. Instead of accepting things as they are, of taking them for granted, we learn, thanks to art, to measure them by the standard of perfection. The greater the unavoidable gulf between the ideal and the real, the more inescapable is the question: Why is the existing world the way it is? How has the world come to be what it is? De omnibus rebus dubitandum est! Quid certum? ‘We must doubt all things! What is certain?’ (Descartes). It is the nature of the creative mind to dissolve seemingly solid things and to transform the world as it is into a world in process of becoming and creating. This is how we are liberated from the multiplicity of things and come to realise what it is that all conditional things ultimately possess in common. Thus, instead of being creatures isolated among other isolated creatures we become part of the power that creates all things.

Raphael did not, could not, make our choices for us. Everyone must resolve for himself the conflicting demands of his historical situation. But even to those who conclude that the practice of art must be temporarily abandoned, Raphael will show as no other writer has ever done the revolutionary meaning of the works inherited from the past – and of the works that will be eventually created in the future. And this he shows without rhetoric, without exhortation, modestly and with reason. His was the greatest mind yet applied to the subject.