Translated from the Russian by Brian Bean
Designed by A.~Serebryakov
Vladislav Zimenko (born 1919) is an eminent Soviet art critic, author of numerous books and articles on aesthetics and history of art, Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Iskusstvo (Art).
In this new work he deals with the humanistic essence of art---undoubtedly one of the most vital questions in world art today. It is examined with special reference to the works of Deyneka, Plastov, Saryan, Korzhev, and other Soviet artists. The author shows the humanistic content of socialist realism, and the unlimited scope it provides for employing a tremendous variety of styles, devices and manners.
The book also contains a critical analysis of anti-humanistic modern art trends such as Abstract Art, Surrealism and the ``accessible'' art forms of recent years---pop art, op art, kinetic art, and so on.
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© Translation into English. Progress Publishers 1976
First printing 1976
Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
[4] Contents Introduction 7 The Microcosm of Art 13 The Humanist Tradition in Art 39 The New Hero 107 The Work and Days of the People 137 The Beauty of the World 159 The Truth, Nothing but the Truth 185 The Diamond Facets of Realism Reflections on Easel Painting 201 List of Illustrations 239 [5] ~ [6] __ALPHA_LVL1__ IntroductionIs = there really any need to discuss the humanism of art, let alone establish the relationship between the two? After all, art is a human creation, and artistic images reflect and embody the finest human thoughts and feelings, dreams and ideals. Everything would appear to be perfectly simple and straightforward. And yet there is surely no other aesthetic question more complex and urgent than the question of the humanism of art.
The point is that in the world today two diametrically opposed approaches to the question of the humanism of art meet in irreconcilable conflict: the assertion of humanism in art and its rejection. Or if not an outright rejection of humanism, at least such an interpretation of it that terribly impoverishes, eviscerates and mutilates this great, important and highly complex concept. The problem of humanism in art actually derives from numerous other problems that reflect the sharp antagonism between two ideologies, the communist and the bourgeois, which leaves a characteristic, indelible mark on contemporary cultural life.
What is Man? Is it biological characteristics or social structure that determines the basic features of human life? What is man's place in the world and what is his role in relation to nature and society? What does the individual owe the group, society, and vice versa? In what ways and forms will the human personality develop now and in the future?
These and many other sociological and psychological aspects of the problem of Man are treated, examined and evaluated very differently in Marxist-Leninist sociology, ethics and aesthetics and various currents of bourgeois science today.
The practical results of theories thus elaborated and generally accepted by people are also quite different and often in direct contradiction. Socialist realist art, on the one hand, and the numerous currents in bourgeois contemporary art, both of a formalistic, modernistic character and of a naturalist salon kind, on the other, embody fundamentally different answers to the question of what Man is and the meaning of his life, and what the prospects and development of mankind are.
Humanism is not an abstract category where class differences and political tasks and goals somehow do not apply, as some bourgeois ideologists are wont to contend. The predication of abstract humanism, reducing humanism to anthropology, is one of the means used in the attempt to split the ranks of the opponents of capitalism and sow the seeds of conciliation. Man is not a purely biological or racial structure: the most important thing about him derives from 7 __RUNNING_HEADER_LEFT__ Introduction society, is produced by social relations. Only on the path of struggle for social progress and for revolutionary transformation of society in the spirit of the ideals of scientific communism do humanist ideas acquire a real meaning, particularly ideas concerning the free development of the human personality and aesthetic expression of its many requirements, liberated from the shackles of former ``mythological'' concepts, class, caste and other conventions.
One ``moral formula'' widely propagated by bourgeois ideologists today is ``freedom of the individual''. Taken in its aesthetic aspect it is presented as ``creative freedom'', ``artistic freedom'', the independence of the artist from the dictates of society, etc. All these concepts are often strangely identified by the preachers of the ``Western world'' with the supreme expression and flowering of human creative powers and with realisation of the ideals of humanism.
In actual fact, however, this is simply a cover for the directly opposite tendencies towards dehumanisation of life and all personal expression in bourgeois society, tendencies that are coming to have an ever more powerful and destructive impact in bourgeois culture.
Today, individualism and subjectivism are the inevitable companions of dehumanised sentiments and theoretical conclusions, in whatever form they might appear.
It is common knowledge that existentialism, which started by propagating the ``liberation of the individual'', ultimately arrived at the pessimistic formula of ``the alienated individual'', alone and misunderstood, which represented, in effect, a profound crisis in humanism. Yet the critics of existentialism came to the same conclusion, like Michel Foucault who regards the concept of ``man'' (and also ``humanity'' and ``humanism'') as a relic that does not correspond to present or future requirements'' (emphasis added---V.Z.).
Many other spiritual leaders of the bourgeois world today are inclined to draw frankly unhumanistic conclusions, while trying, however, to ascribe this consequence of their narrow class sympathies to the objective conditions of society. Representatives of the so-called ``real aesthetics'', the most influential of whom currently is Etienne Souriau, regard the formalisation of art as an aesthetic expression of man's present industrial power. Kindred views are held by Herbert Read, and even people who once called themselves Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse and Ivan Svitak. (The latter left socialist Czechoslovakia and found a nook among the active anti-communists of the Russian Institute at Columbia University.)
8 __RUNNING_HEADER_RIGHT__ IntroductionIn their opinion (which they constantly try to present as the ``objective truth'' arrived at through ``scientific analysis of social changes''), modern society, in undergoing a number of successive scientific and technological changes, has debased man and brought individuality and personality to naught. Alienation has assumed hyperbolic proportions: completely alone in the ``desert of the city'', man is a pawn in the hands of monstrously powerful forces of scientific and technological progress, living under the Sword of Damocles of the H-bomb, under the threat of ... why, even invasion from other worlds! . . .
Art, according to these aestheticians, must return to man his lost ``sense of security'' and ``self-assurance''. The way to do this is by ``self-assertion'' of a purely formal kind. Art becomes the ``sphere of free play of human powers'', in the process of which some ``poetic derealisation of the world'' supposedly occurs. A statement by the philosopher Charles Lalo to the effect that art makes it possible to play freely with serious life and enjoy this freedom is highly typical in this respect. But how can we speak of ``freedom'' when, according to bourgeois ideologists, man, the artist included, is anyway but a puppet in the hands of the superhuman forces of scientific and technological progress, for ``technology is the fate of our age''? All that is left is an illusion of freedom, which, like all illusions, is sooner or later going to come into cruel conflict with reality and the task of reflecting and apprehending it truthfully. It is surely no accident that all the latest varieties of bourgeois modernistic art---abstractionism, surrealism, tachism, pop art and op art, kinetic art, etc.---are militantly opposed to authenticity and scornfully reject the very idea of accurate depiction of reality. Instead they try to construct a ``new reality'', to materialise some mirage or dream, which, whether violent and repulsive or calm and soothing, is supposedly capable of taking one away from the even more unpleasant real-life world.
Such an approach cannot be regarded as affirming humanism, as its supporters are wont to insist. The best arguments against views of this kind are to be found in historical experience which teaches us to treasure the priceless core of the creative act---the artist's subjective transforming will inscribing itself naturally and organically in the objective system of nature's laws. That is why although the present book is in the form of essays on different subjects, an overall historical view of the problem of humanism is adopted throughout.
The question of the humanism of art must not, and indeed cannot, be treated in disjunction from politics, philosophy, sociology and ethics. But it would seem to be necessary to try 9 and illuminate this vital question more fully than is usually the case, without losing sight of the concrete image fabric of art and without worrying about the incompleteness or even contradictory nature of the answers frequently to be found in the history of artistic creation.
Marxist-Leninist science teaches that the truth is concrete. The humanism of art, like any other basic creative problem, is an historical category. The humanistic content of images in the art of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, medieval Russia, or Middle East or Gothic art, is in each case quite different. The great masters of the Renaissance, the geniuses of the seventeenth century and the outstanding artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, all had a different approach to man, and asserted and celebrated as positive values different aspects of him. But no objectively thinking person, whether an expert or simply an art lover who knows a few elementary facts about the history of art, can fail to note the preoccupation with man to be found in art throughout the ages.
Whether showing the perfectly developed human physique, plumbing the depths of man's psychological world, presenting a broad picture of the complex processes of social life, pinpointing its contradictions, celebrating labour and the natural environment, or, last but not least, glorifying man's creative power, the bold flight of his poetic dreams, the skill of his hands, obedient to his heart and mind, art spoke of man, expressing affection and respect for him. This has been the pivotal course of the entire history of mankind's aesthetic development.
The art of various epochs examined different aspects of man but always, provided it was genuine art, had as its object not an isolated, self-engrossed individual but man a social being, although possibly one-sidedly, partially or obliquely expressed.
A long line of bequests of the legacy of active social humanism links all the great ages in mankind's artistic development, uniting all that is genuinely talented in art. The Russian 19th century critic Belinsky was right when he said that ``man has always been and will remain the most fascinating phenomenon for man''.
The art of socialist realism, a vigorous live phenomenon in the history of world art, has introduced to it much that is new and fresh. It has enriched it with a hero of a new type, entirely unknown to the old society of coercion and exploitation, the combatant for the happiness of mankind, the collectivist man of labour and the internationalist. This art has created new means and forms for his artistic representation, reflection and affirmation, and is constantly searching for ever new ones, 10 perfecting the existing ones, for life flows on and new problems arise that require answers and solutions.
The image of man celebrated by Soviet art--- revolutionaryworker, hero of the days of the October Revolution, participant in the battles of the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War, active builder of socialist society, the creator of the new lifehas tremendous range and provides vast scope for subtle emotional gradations and stylistic variations. Realism in general, and socialist realism in particular, has never stood for the levelling of artistic talent, or uniformity of manner, idiom and forms. Monumental sculpture, the poster, large-scale murals, the easel-painting, whether portraits or subject pictures, graphic art---in all these art forms and styles the image of the new man has come to occupy a leading position, and although essentially kindred, has found highly distinctive individual embodiment.
But the problem of humanism in art is not exhausted by actually depicting man and aesthetically exploring his external appearance and inner world, by asserting his place in life. It also involves the questions of the freedom and high level of artistic technique and aesthetic education, artistic transformation of the social and natural environment, and much else besides. Not all these diverse aspects can be examined or even mentioned in this book. But the author nevertheless hopes to bring the following main points to the attention of the reader: that the historical novelty of Soviet art consists in the fact that it continues and carries forward, on a fundamentally new social and methodological basis, the great tradition of humanism inherited from the finest representatives of mankind's artistic culture, that it thereby opens up a broad road ahead for artistic talent and the public it is intended for, a far wider public, moreover, than ever before. Also that here for the first time beauty is interwoven with the mighty historical creative upsurge of the popular masses, which awakens and stimulates a mass growth of talent.
Communism and talent are kindred concepts, for the society which creates the conditions for the blossoming of all personal gifts needs talented people and cannot fail to attract their hearts. It provides men of talent with a supreme ideal and an inspiring background in which the seeds of beauty grow with a power and in a profusion unknown to any previous social system.
Soviet artists and writers strive to reflect the processes of our time and sing its heroism and unparalleled beauty. They discuss passionately ways to increase their own contribution to the blossoming of society. A vivid example of this was an 11 open letter by a group of eminent artists published on the eve of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution, entitled ``Communism Is the Era of Beauty''. An important debate is in progress on beauty as an inalienable quality of our activities, of all our labour. ``In the approaching era of communism,'' the letter said, ``the horizons for creative artistic labour will be boundless. In things great and small an artist must be able to see how beauty will become the everyday possession of the people and by its clear visibility and universal accessibility educate their minds and hearts. Not only must the artist's work in the generally accepted forms of painting, sculpture, graphic art, monumental and decorative-applied art, rise to new heights. Beauty must be placed constantly beside man, wherever he is and whatever he is doing.'' And at their Third AllUnion Congress, Soviet artists said that their art belongs wholly to the people.
Cold pedestrian technique, and empty, artless formalistic devices and counterfeits which exert a stultifying influence on the hearts and minds of artist and public alike, squandering talent, materials, time and life itself, are quite incompatible with bold inspired creativity by the actor, writer or artist producing real values eagrely received and cherished by the people. Society has every right to strongly object to such pseudoart and take steps to protect itself from the growth of tendencies of this kind.
"Soviet society today,'' said Comrade Brezhnev in his speech ``Lenin's Cause Lives on and Triumphs'', ``is the real embodiment of the ideas of proletarian, socialist humanism. It has placed the production of material values and the achievements of spiritual culture, the whole system of social relations, at the service of the man of = labour.''^^1^^
The life of the Soviet people building communism, which provides the main subject of Soviet art, is exceptionally diverse, and provides an extensive field for any creative inclinations, tastes and special talents the artist may have and care to express. Socialist realism does not involve any forced levelling or regulation of art. The whole history of our revolutionary art is evidence of this, and also of the fact that when an artist is bidden by his convictions and a passionate impulse of the heart to undertake a sincere and profound investigation of questions that are important in the life of the people, and carries = it out with a personal interest and involvement, in a spirit of inquiry and with inspiration, according to high standards of technique, his effort is rewarded with a satisfying development of his talent.
_-_-_~^^1^^ L. I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin's Course, Moscow, 1972, p. 270.
[12] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Microcosm of Art [13] ~ [14]The = path into the unknown is tempting and inviting. But very often it makes you stop and puzzle over its difficulties and the poor visibility ahead. Only very rarely do we try to dismiss the difficulties of science and suggest that the gaps in our knowledge are unfortunate pitfalls on its uneven paths. But in art the opposite tends to be the case. People are wont to make far too facile judgements, for both the achievements and the failures seem patently evident and clearly perceptible. This is understandable, for art by its nature is wide open to man, holds out its arms to us to take us in its fond embrace, attracts us and casts its spell on us with its bright colours, rhythms, and the vivid picture of life concentrated in its images.
In actual fact, however, the sphere of art is by no means as simple as it might seem: it only gives a lot to the person who is able to demand and take a lot. Although it ennobles man and lends him wings, instructs him and uplifts him, it does not do so automatically, as a matter of course: it requires an effort on his part. But the fact that such efforts are masked, concealed, often not objectively perceived as an effort, being inseparably merged as they are with the joy of aesthetic perception and delight in beauty, is one of the most attractive ``mysteries'' of art, which are a constant source of fascination to art critics and public alike.
When I say ``mystery'' I do not mean to imply that there is anything mystical, unfathomable or illogical about it. I simply feel that this word conveys the sense of surprise one usually is overcome with when apprehending the hidden wisdom, the unnoticeable but nevertheless vast organising and educative power of the poetic image. It is also appropriate because it holds the key to the ``epistemological springs'' of the aesthetic problem of the humanism of art, to which this book is devoted.
Art is one of the most distinctive forms of social activity, which, of course, has played the decisive role in shaping man and making him what he is today---in the emergence and the subsequent development of the human personality, the improvement and polishing of his physical and psychological structure.
Art is sheer hard work, exhausting and painful, demanding the exertion of all man's powers. Yet it is also---and this is extremely important and noteworthy too---joyous, inspiring and satisfying, and informed with beauty.
The very substance of human labour contains a powerful creative and transforming principle. Work is never an empty pastime, the free play of the generously developed vigour of the healthy organism. It is always purposeful action, assessable above all by its results. The social product of work 15 is the measure of its significance. But even the simplest work action is only really productive, and its result only acquires irreplaceable aesthetic elements when it is performed skilfully and produces satisfaction, giving pleasure to the performer of the action. Forced labour, mechanical, monotonous, stultifying work, or work performed unexpertly or without enthusiasm, are quite the opposite of creativity, and hence of beauty. ``The unskilful person never produces what he wants to produce because he is not master of his own action,'' Hegel shrewdly observed. ``Whereas that worker may be called skilful who produces an object just as it is meant to be and who in his subjective action finds no opposition to the aim.''
Total submission of the material to the working effort, and precise, sure and economical advancement towards a clearly perceived goal produces in work a joyous sense of freedom, perfection and artistry.
Man creates according to the laws of beauty, Marx said. Every expert work action has the beauty of a humanly considered purpose and its skilful implementation. But art began to be perceived from the very earliest days of its history as something that can serve as a standard in evaluating truly creative work. The artist creates freely. He comes to his workshop or studio by vocation. He is impelled to undertake the most complicated tasks by his talent, and does not rest until he has found a solution that at least for the time being satisfies him personally. The true artist feels compelled to create. Tolstoi, speaking of the writer, expressed the irresistible urge that every artist feels as follows: ``One should only write when one feels within one a completely new, important content, clear to oneself, but incomprehensible to other people and the need to express this content gives one no rest.'' And whatever difficulties might arise for the artist on the path between the birth of the idea and its realisation, he will spare neither time nor effort to bring the work to a high standard of skill. Such is the nature of artistic talent, the talent of a hard-working creative person.
Works of art represent the idea of the poetic essence of human labour, thereby exerting a tremendously powerful ennobling influence on man and society. It has often been noted that the most boisterous people tend to restrain themselves and behave very quietly in a museum, automatically suppressing negative emotions in themselves in the presence of works of art bearing the stamp of inspired, self-abnegating work.
In absolutely any sphere of transformative activity a person has a real chance to be creative, since they all provide an opportunity for improving the efficiency and quality of work, 16 __RUNNING_HEADER_RIGHT__ The Microcosm of Art
and finding more economic methods producing better results. Aesthetic elements are present in all this. It is important to note that the perfection of a product even of a purely technical nature often reflects in a way that is hard to describe but is clearly visible nonetheless its creator's unique personality. It is no accident that we are wont to speak of the ``touch'' of a particular turner, when referring to his qualifications.Art requires great efforts, but these efforts must not leave a stamp on the finished product. Pavel Korin says of the painter: ``The artist at work may have sweat on his brow but not on his canvas.'' The artist expends a great deal of physical and spiritual effort during the creative process, but being deeply engrossed in the creative act he does not notice fatigue and feels joyous excitement and exhilaration. As Gogol wrote: ``There is surely no pleasure more supreme than the pleasure of creating . . . .'' Much later, another humanist writer, Romain Holland, described artistic creation as one of the supreme expressions of human nature. ``Joy, joy in all its violence, sun illuminating everything that is and will be, the divine joy of creation! . . . All the joys of life are creative joys: love, genius, action, they are categories of power born in the flame of a single fire .... To create means to destroy death.''
The aesthetic element underlying human labour in general is most fully expressed in art, primarily because it is here that skill and perfection are most highly prized, since the product of work is removed from a direct utilitarian function. An ugly hammer is still useful for hammering in a nail, whereas an ugly sculpture is of no earthly use at all. Another important point is that the object of work here is far more malleable, flexible and changeable than real life, the field of application of utilitarian production.
Clearly, it is far easier to remake nature in a picture than in life, and relatively simpler to bring out the best in man by creating an artistic image than it is to reform a living person, and so on. This is not to say that artistic creation is easy and simple. We are here referring only to the degree of transformative efforts of the individual. Art has provided man with a special field or testing ground, free from unnecessary obstructions and impediments. That is why man has found in art satisfaction for his need to create on the scale of his human nature, to create a world transformed according to his own concepts, ideals and tastes. This is where he feels most sharply the exquisite delight of skilful transformative work, deriving profound satisfaction from the free play of his essential human powers, which easily overcome all the difficulties arising in the course of the work. This artistry, which is a very valuable part 17 of art, along with painstaking, meticulous execution, has always had a tremendous educative importance for mankind, and has exerted an ennobling influence on all other spheres of constructive activity.
__b_b_b__We frequently use the term creative artist, and quite rightly so. But to be truly aware of art as one of the finest and most beautiful of human activities is not so simple as it sometimes seems. There would appear to be no grounds for doubting that when you look at a painting, statue or drawing, read a poem or listen to a violin sonata you are dealing not with natural phenomena but with the creations of the human mind, heart and hands. But a work of art is objectivised, removed from its creator and appears to us, the public, in its own independent characteristic form, which is revealed especially patently, fully and completely, in the fine arts. This form is based on objects and phenomena in life, although there can be no question of identity.
Nevertheless, when we perceive a painting, sculpture or engraving we automatically and quite reasonably relate the forms we see to the forms of real-life objects, often even to the extent of forgetting that they are not identical. The joy of recognition of familiar objects tends to take precedence over the joy derived from their aesthetic reproduction and representation. This objective circumstance was described by Goethe in his well-known definition of the substance of artistic creation. ``The supreme and only desire of the greatest masters was to truthfully express the internal through the external. Not only did they strive to present the content of an object with all fidelity to reality: they wanted this representation to replace nature itself and even, in the case of the external phenomenon, surpass it.'' Of course, it would be wrong to take the great realist writer too literally here in a statement which generalises the experience of the great masters of the past, and conclude that Goethe was in fact advocating a dry, mechanical likeness in depicting reality. Least of all should we take him for a champion of naturalism, often aimlessly rivalling nature in order to achieve, as Goethe himself noted with irony, simple ``doubling of the object''. But the poet has shrewdly raised an important problem here.
A prerequisite for the development of the fine arts, the
figurative arts, was the need of social man to capture reality
in artistic images possessing the quality of closest proximity
to a plastic, visible and palpable picture of life. Neither music
nor poetry, nor any other art could represent the objects
of reality so accurately or saliently, thereby making it easier to
Nike of Samothrace
18 study and memorise them, and subsequently make use of them in social practice. True, the fine arts could not directly convey such an important aspect of reality as movement, could not show an object in its vital dynamics, flux and in development. Portrayal of a single moment in the existence of an object remained the natural and essential characteristic feature of the fine arts, despite all the original methods devised by artists in an attempt to overcome it. Is this a limitation? Well, yes, to a certain extent, of course, it is. But then in the same way we can speak of music and dancing being limited in that their images only live during the actual performance, or of poetry being limited in that it is unable to actually recreate the plastic form of a subject. But this limitation, or rather specific feature, of the fine arts was the basis of the clarity and definiteness of its images, that have a direct visual = quality.^^1^^But even in the simplest, most elementary exercise in the fine arts that goes beyond pure documentary presentation, there is a certain tendency to express something more than the actual image, to say something important to the viewer, and this is all the more true of a significant work of art. Suppose the artist is depicting a modest still-life composed of household objects: a clay jug, a plate with pieces of herring on it, a glass of wine and a loaf of bread (the 17th century Dutch artist Beyeren). The depiction is strictly true to life, simple and unadorned, and all the objects are presented very tangibly as regards form, texture and colour. We derive enjoyment and aesthetic pleasure from the purely pictorial accuracy and beauty of the picture. Moreover, we perceive in addition the tenderness with which the artist gazes on a close, lived-in world of things, his calm affirmation of simple, unpretentious domestic life, his clear, sober, optimistic view of the world. And we can sense in this picture echoes of the great progressive ideas of his age, freshened by the wind of the Dutch revolution of the 17th century. When the artist sets out to portray man or scenes of human and public life (the main task of art), he is even less able to confine himself to the documentary, descriptive aspect without trying to reveal at the same time vital internal elements and express his attitude to them. If he is creating a real work of art he inevitably illuminates the phenomena and events he is depicting from the inside, trying through suitably organised concrete forms to convey thoughts, feelings, aspiration and ideals, in other words, everything that constitutes the complex psychological and ideological content of the work.
The Swiss painter Liotard, who was prominent among the brilliant pleiadc of followers of Watteau and whose subtle, refined art represents an important facet of 18th century _-_-_
~^^1^^ Gothold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry.
19 painting, produced what is undoubtedly one of the most popular masterpieces of world art, La Chocolatiere. The graceful figure of the young woman, her fresh pink cheeks and fine hands gently carrying the tray are painted with extraordinary delicacy and lightness. The technique is so perfect that it creates the impression of a live, mirror-like reflection. But that is only the initial, superficial impression. In fact everything in the painting---the composition, the colour, even the tiniest detail--- betrays the hand of a consummate artist, his fine taste, his sense of harmony and perfection. There is absolutely nothing superfluous or fortuitous (there is method in the figure of the woman being placed against smooth background of a bright wall, its outline clear, extremely elegant and gracefully provocative).Representation always involves active interpretation of the subject. It is not to be confused with passive copying which expresses nothing, adds nothing at all to what we already know and does not serve to strengthen man's inner powers.
To assert, as Roman Ingarden does, that ``the representational layer of a picture is devoid of aesthetic values'' is incorrect. Representation in an artistic image cannot be separated from the ``subjective complex'', cannot be reduced to a literal copy, a protocol, to a mechanical reproduction.
Empty speculation in art does not convey any important conceptual and emotional information,- and nor does the flat statement of a purely concrete image-fact. The realist image proper, on the other hand, is remarkably attractive by virtue of its almost inexhaustible information-content, its active property of enriching and ennobling man.
In this connection, I should like to make it clear that in my opinion it is a great mistake to understand the extremely broad concept of information, which brings the most diverse natural and social phenomena together, in purely literal, factual terms, as an unbiased, objective transmission of a fact. Such a narrow view of information is the premise from which many aestheticians go on to try and minimise the cognitive value of art, on the grounds that the information conveyed does not exhaust the content of the artistic image, while others try to remove art from the sphere of the important affairs of contemporary man, engaged in the accumulation and exchange of information and data, and, at the very least, banish from art as `` oldfashioned'', ``out-of-date'' concepts all emotional, lyrical, psychological and other elements.
However, the distinctiveness and value of the aesthetic channel of information happens to lie in the fact that it is there and there alone that elements of emotional, ethical and aesthetic judgement of great human value and importance are 20 organically and fully comprised in the sphere of information and the concrete fact is regarded as typical, universally recognised and an instructive example right from the start.
We have grown accustomed to the idea of art using concrete material forms. This is so familiar to us as to have become a commonplace. But we tend to forget that the concrete in art and the concrete in real life are two very different things. The concrete artistic image is already generalised, so that perception of the concrete in art is both more equivocal and more precise than direct perception of the concrete in life. The concrete in art is ``clad'' in feelings, thoughts, and associations. Hence the complexity of the information content of the artistic image, sought by every genuine artist.
Art creates a special world organised by the will and wisdom of the artist, in which we are all the time aware of reflections of his artistic nature even where he has been at great pains to hide them. Let us recall, for example, what the outstanding Russian artist and brilliant art critic Kramskoi had to say about the paintings of the talented Russian landscape artist Vassilyev, in a letter to him about his Road in the Crimea.
``Have you noticed that I haven't said a word about your colours? That's because there aren't any, you see, none at all. Before me is a magnificent view of nature, I see woods, trees, I see clouds, I see rocks, and not only that, but a poetry of light moving over them, a kind of solemn silence, something profoundly thoughtful and mysterious: well, what a mere mortal can see any colours, any tone, in these conditions?''
One might suppose that Kramskoi is enthusing about how ``natural'' Vassilyev's landscape is. But the idea must not be taken out of context. The rest of the sentence clearly modifies this first idea, and indeed it could not be otherwise for Kramskoi confirmed on several occasions that he was perfectly capable of appreciating the most important thing in art--- profound human thought, the live feeling of the artist---and was not inclined to fetishise representational authenticity for its own sake. The latter after all can immediately destroy the aesthetic charm of a work of art, and lead to the acceptance of a mirror-like reflection as a brilliant creation of the highest order.
Realism does not consist in ``copying'' as accurately as possible what the artist's eye sees. Realism presupposes aesthetic expression, through external forms, of the inner essence of object, phenomenon or event, and its evaluation. In this connection it must be said that it is a grave mistake to suppose that the realist artist only deals with the objective material world as such. It is far more complicated than that. 21 In the creative process the artist operates with a set of psychological processes---perception, apprehension, imagination---in which reality already appears remade and transformed to some extent. Aesthetic, as indeed scientific, cognisance of reality starts with specially preparing reality for such study and cognisance. The mathematician, for example, before beginning to study three-dimensional space first organises it by introducing a system of coordinates. The artist organises his material primarily through rhythm. The space represented by the artist is always ``rhythmised''. A series of planes in it, or special zones, may be distinguished, or its structure may be captured through the sequence in which the dimensions are arranged, or again one may feel in it the presence of certain ``lines of force'' which either draw us in or repels us, to some extent altering the actual forms of the material objects. The extent to which this is done depends on the nature of the artistic tasks combined with the objectively existing structural features of real space. And in their perception the laws of perspective, applied freely and creatively, are very important.
Not that rhythmisation is limited to space. Every artist has his own rhythm of aesthetic perception of reality. The real rhythm of a motif is combined with the emotional rhythm of the artist's creative impulse, to produce the inimitable rhythm of the emergent work, which may excite and move, or soothe the spectator, as the case may be.
Scholars examining the work of the great French artist Daumier have frequently referred to two compositions of his. Both of them convey crowds of people on the move and are similar in size and certain features of their image structure, expressing the artist's own inimitable style. Yet even a cursory glance suffices to reveal the profound difference between the two, which lies primarily in the rhythm of the works. In one case the rhythm is energetic, vigorous and animated (the revolutionary army on the march). In the other it is slow and sluggish, and elegiac (the procession of emigres).
Van Gogh's canvasses often display a feverish ``syncopated'' rhythm, space itself being distorted by the passionate creative energy of the artist. The ground is hunched up, trees strain out towards the sky, their roots churning up the soil, and scorching sun blisters the earth, the starry sky above the sleeping town is like an eruption into the ``workshop'' of the universe, where fiery nebulae whirl and seethe and primeval giant stars roam .... This approach is not entirely justified from the point of view of realist art: the subjective element sometimes acquires an unwarrantedly large part in the creative act. But there is no denying that the artist thereby frequently achieves 22 remarkable expressive power. Moreover, as a rule his images are free of what can be the greatest danger of all in art--- indifference.
In art each element of the artistically treated form of the subject is extremely eloquent. There is no form without content and no element of form that is not related in some way to the spiritual and emotional content of the work. The composition, its architectonics, its rhythm, its colour, with the distribution of tones and areas of colour; the nature of the drawing and light and shade arrangement; the texture due to the use of this or that technique and the artist's ``touch'' reflecting his temperament and his direct creative impulse---all is literally imbued with thought and feeling, all inspired by content and inseparably fused with it, forming its own material facets without which it does not exist.
Any genuine realist coloristic solution is based on the natural colour key of the motif depicted, and the artist rarely departs from it. However, within the given range of colours and shades, and in each individual tone, the artist has extensive opportunities for a creative approach to colour, which again means that he is not creating a literal copy but a subjective image of the object. This is why we can commonly observe a particular favourite colour device in works by the same artist that are otherwise very different in their subject and mood: it is like a ``transposition'' of the music of his soul.
A sensitive artist always conforms the concrete colour solution to the internal character of the subject he is depicting. Thus, Renoir made a superb use of a ``pearl-like'' tone for his Nude, its irridescence, warmth and delicacy being in perfect harmony with the poetic image of the woman. In both Yermak's Conquest of Siberia (1895) and Suvorov Crossing the Alps (1889) the brilliant hand of Surikov is immediately recognisable, although on the whole the colour scheme in these two pictures---red-brown and grey-blue respectively---is very different. Although in these paintings the colour appears to be entirely dictated by the subject, it is nevertheless not difficult to note and feel a rather important evocative use of colour in Suvorov Crossing the Alps, for example, where the bluish tones and bright (though subdued) rose-red accents create a general mood of exhilaration and purity with a touch of severity. Sometimes the evocative ``charge'', so to speak, of colour is stronger and more pronounced, so that, for example, a black and white reproduction of it is so deprived of an essential meaningful element as to be practically unrecognisable. This can easily be tested by taking, for instance, Perov's Last Tavern at the Turnpike (1868), one of the most coloristically interesting
23 works in the whole of Russian 19th century painting. The unusual, sharp, indescribably cold and mournful yellow tone of the sunset in this picture (dominating the entire colour structure) has such an emotional and meaningful impact that without it the picture is inconceivable.Often colour expresses a sensual joy. Colours carry healthy decorative beauty so necessary and natural for a work of art. And Delacroix was doubtlessly right when he said that a picture should be ``a feast for the eyes''.
A real colourist will always strive deliberately or instinctively to fulfil this requirement, taking considerable trouble to ensure that his colours are harmonious and striking, that their combination not only helps to produce a fuller, more vivid expression of the ideas the work contains, but gives the viewer emotional pleasure.
__b_b_b__In analysing the movement of realist artistic forms reflecting the life of society at this or that period, its partialities and dreams, we frequently underestimate the ``subjective element'' in artistic creation and fail to give due attention to how hard and complex, and often contradictory, is its path of formation, the gradual emancipation of art from everyday trivia. Reality, the soil and basis of art, hypnotised the artist, as it were, with its profusion of detail, its infinite variety and changeability. The point is that creative activity could only be fruitful when the artist had mastered forms, lines, volumes, surfaces, and colours, and could reproduce a natural phenomenon accurately, powerfully and vividly, bringing to the fore its main, essential features. Such accuracy of a literal depiction was achieved, it must be said, only with great difficulty, and at one historical period represented a colossal aesthetic achievement. But it did not, and could not, become the purpose of art.
Modern times have produced many fascinating ideas as to how to overcome the limitations of purely ``natural representation'', which was often greatly admired as late as the 18th and 19th centuries, although earlier periods had developed a set of devices of artistic expressiveness that increased the emotional and idea content of a work, or as we would now say `` information content''. The 19th century realists extended these devices, paying special attention to those which permitted the fullest, clearest and most powerful expression of the social aspect and provided special opportunities for showing the object world in movement.
Two currents merge in the artistic image, each revealing man's creative power in its own way: one is cognisance of reality, of 24 its motives, objects, laws and the dialectic of its development, and the other is an expression of the inner world of the artist himself, perceived as a momentous aspect of the creative act. (We omit for the time being the question of the ``social component'' of this subjective world, and confine our attention to a few epistemological questions of artistic creation.)
Art historians usually note that starting roughly with the Impressionists the relative balance between these two currents was upset. While Impressionism is characterised by an excessive interest in objective reflection of an instant, a moment captured by the ``child-like'', naive gaze of a highly sensitive artist, void of philosophical views or ideas, the Post-Impressionists, on the contrary, attached an exaggerated importance to the problem of ``self-expression'', ``self-assertion'' of the artisf s personality, dominating an object, enveloping it in a thick web of his own fanciful and often illusory views, and bringing it into conflict and often tragic collisions with other objects.
It was at precisely this period that there arose a widespread interest in creative devices that made an emphasis on ``re-- creation'' of reality in the artistic image, ostentatiously revealed its internal structure, laid bare a characteristically individual manner of organising it, etc.
The taste for symbolic images, metaphorical images, the use of grotesque devices, exaggeration, simplification and schematisation in the construction of space and forms, heightened expression of line and splashes of colour was not such an absolute novelty. Many of these had been known to earliest artists.
The traditional flattening of space and ``lack of body'' found in medieval frescoes or icons cannot be ascribed solely to ignorance of scientific facts or a failure to observe nature. The real, basic reason lay in aesthetic affirmation of certain concepts of the world, in the artistic task of separating and contrasting the sinful earthly world and the ideal heavenly world. Naturally, in conveying the latter, which was regarded as the supreme artistic task, conventional devices were employed which placed a certain distance between it and what man observed around him in everyday life.
The icon of Boris and Gleb produced in Central Russia in the 14th century, which upon study of the evolution of Russian icon painting over several centuries shows ``how far Russian painting had come in approaching the earthly interests of people'' (Alpatov), nevertheless contains all the conventional features characteristic of medieval Russian icon painting, which confine the artistic image firmly within a special circle of ideas. The slender, somewhat elongated figures of the martyr princes, 25 full of noble dignity and serenity, are placed in smooth, almost bodiless silhouette against the conventional flat gold background. Their colourful attire, at once elegant and festive, the clearly visible rhythmisation of the colour patches and lines--- everything is intended to produce the effect of an image with a clear ``distance'' separating it from the world about us. This removal of art from reality had an historical basis, and was thus justified. The conventionality actually helps to convey the grandeur of the subjects' ordeal, creating an aura of glory around them. Another important point is that many of these conventional devices contain a great deal derived from the national aesthetic experience, such as the age-old Russian devotion to smooth, rhythmic, repetition, and bright festive colour combinations. But none of the above alters the fact that, as in many other features of icon painting of this type, we are dealing with a limited, and artificially restricted complex of real concepts and knowledge of reality. The ``stream of reality'' penetrated the sphere of art through a small crack, often having to overcome all kinds of barriers erected by the ``guardian of thoughts and feelings'' of people in those times, the Church. While delighting in the artistic beauty of the remarkable works of the Middle Ages, one cannot but regret that so many live sources of beauty remained outside the scope of art and that artistic creation was held firmly in the vice of strict canons and rules. But even in these conditions a powerful and convincing artistic solution was only achieved when the fertilising current of life invaded the artistic image. Alongside hundreds of superb examples of icon painting, we find thousands of skilful, but empty, cold, pedestrian works, constrained by the shackles of tradition. Indeed, even among these hundreds, masterpieces like Rublyov's Trinity were pretty rare, for geniuses are not born every day. However, the question arises whether we are really justified in judging the quality of works that basically renounce the material world by the degree to which they reflect this world. Are we not perhaps trying to forcibly ``update'' the creative situation and thereby sinning against historical truth?
No, not really, for it is immaterial from our point of view
that Andrei Rublyov, as a child of his age, undertook his Trinity
not with the aim of reproducing real personages in authentic
circumstances but as a moral and religious task of embodying
the Holy Trinity. Indeed, the loftiness of the task and the
artist's dedication to it ensured that all available expressive
means were brought into play in a supremely concentrated
form. The icon only made very limited use of cipher-symbols
devoid of emotional content but tended rather to employ
26
Icon of Boris and Gleb
[27] representative material symbols that had a stronger impact on believers. The artist, assuming a task of profound emotional importance, was guided towards reality by the logic of creative development of the forms of the icon painting. It was noted long ago that the poses of the three angels in Rublyov's work are highly distinctive not in their formal harmony, their ``musicality'', but also in their remarkable natural grace so out of line with the prescribed stiffness of pose. The noble calm in their faces is also very different from the prescribed cold detachment or intellectual and spiritual aloofness. This is the calm that emanates from a rich human nature that is the complete master of all its faculties. Note, too, the subtle differentiation in the emotional types of the angels, who nevertheless form a natural organic unity not only by being formally placed in a semicircle but because of certain shared psychological characteristics. All these subtle features of the structure and content of the work were the result not of a sudden flash of inspiration or ``revelation'' visiting the painter but of his sensitive interest in and contact with the world of men.Nevertheless, an icon painter, even the most gifted, did not and could not break away from the system of canonical conventions intended to ``subdue'' ``excessive vitality'', which fashioned a special ``icon space'' that lacked real depth and introduced its own time rhythm where hours were equivalent to centuries.
The difficulty of achieving a direct reflection of reality obliged the artist to search, find, develop and perfect channels, forms and means of reflecting life obliquely. We have spoken of conventional devices for organising space, working plastic form, introducing rhythmic lines and use of colour, and the solemnly static composition. All this reflects the dominant tendency of the time. But the artistic image is by its very nature not a copy of something in life, but a generalisation and concentration of a number of facts, and involves thoughts and aspirations merged with feelings. Thus, medieval artists were improving artistic means in devising and developing methods of indirect reflection of life, accomplished not in abstract but in relatively concrete forms. (The portrayal of saints was always anthropomorphic, and symbolism, if resorted to at all, was also based on material images that could be easily comprehended by ordinary people---suffice it to recall, for example, the symbols for the Four Evangelists, or the dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost).
While giving the best works of the Impressionists and PostImpressionists their due for enriching the aesthetic devices that make it possible to show the dialectical changeability of objective reality and expressing an active, creative approach of 28
Andrei Rublyov. Trinity. Icon
man to the world, one important point must nevertheless be
borne in mind. Their search involved a sharp growth in the
individualist pretensions of the artist and hence a frequent
weakening of control over real substance contained in the
artistic image. Nothing can compensate for such
impoverishment of the image, no amount of external expressive devices,
such as compositional colour-shifts, sharp rhythmisation of
29
lines, colour splashes, volumes and surfaces, textural
discoveries, etc. In the typical works of the Expressionists, Cubists,
and Fauvists, let alone the Abstractionists, the channel of
communication between artist and public is greatly narrowed.
Matisse expressed in a nutshell one of the basic commandments of his comrades in art: ``The plastic should convey as directly as possible and by the simplest means that which is perceptible to the feelings''. It is well known that Matisse was very fond of Russian icons and at one period (around 1905) even borrowed their festive colour to enrich the decorative quality of his own canvases. But the complex formal structure of the icon image, determined by a special and by no means primitive content, escaped his attention.
Quite different is the case of Petrov-Vodkin, an outstanding Soviet artist, whose talent was shaped at the same time and who also evinced a profound interest in Russian icons. He was not only interested in their decorative aspect, however. His painting Mother (1915) delights us with its remarkably bright and pure atmosphere, in which we can detect reflections of the old Russian icons. The calm sonorousness of the red of the Mother's skirt and the subtle rhythm of the folds of her open blouse are also partly derived from icon painting. But all this is creatively welded together with deep artistic perception of the world, displayed before us in a vivid scene that is true to life, although free from petty naturalistic detail. Everything is ordered, enlarged and weighted by the loving, assessing gaze of the artist, all details are organised in a system. The happy young peasant mother, seated on a bench in the corner of a lowly wooden cottage, is ennobled and poeticised by the artist's brush. While losing none of its plastic concreteness, her image is enlarged to become a symbol of motherhood. This is also achieved by so-called ``spherical perspective'' characteristic of Petrov-Vodkin, which seems to wrench the picture out of visually authentic space and places it in another wider, almost cosmic space. Yet all these active creative ``devices'' to `` recreate'' the motif depicted are firmly based on a strictly realistic plastic structure.
Speaking of the creative character of depiction and its idea charge, the importance of operational ``threshold'' of this specific information system should be stressed in particular. There is indeed a certain margin or narrow zone prior to which we are incapable of even recognising what is depicted. Only when certain characteristic structural elements are added are we able to grasp it. But what is even more important is that up to a point the form remains fundamentally meaningless or insignificant since it is incapable of conveying any extensive 30 spiritual and emotional information. If we lose sight of this circumstance, we may well find ourselves deprived of an essential criterion in assessing the tremendous diversity and multiplicity of so-called ``figurative'', but often in no way realistic, forms of depiction abounding in 20th~ century art.
If, for example, art sets out to create a human image but simply presents a schematic outline of the shape, it is thereby preventing itself from solving any psychological and social problems. This is obviously a departure from the general direction in which art has developed, from what artistic creation is all about.
This, indeed, is one of the grave defects of Cubism, as was noted bitterly by Fernand Leger, himself at one time an active supporter of the movement, but whose art does not fit into the narrow framework of its doctrines. He wrote that the Cubists broke, destroyed, and pulverised the subject, going on until they had reached the ``abstract'' picture. But once they had achieved this extreme position, total confusion ensued. A state of sheer anarchy reigned.
One of the most curious examples of this kind of aesthetic confusion and intellectual disarray is to be found in the reflections of the Russian ``Cubo-futurist'' Kamensky on the new system of painting. As he saw it, the artist's thoughts should be reflected through symbolic ``conventional signs'' quite unrelated to material forms, and art is ``the direct projection of conventional signs from the artist's brain into the painting''.
An artistic image is a synthesis of the objective and the subjective. But in this dialectical unity of object and subject, as in any other result of purposeful cognitive-transformative activity in which man engages, we can trace a main line, a super-objective, which is the mastering of reality, investigation of it and discovery of its objective laws and patterns.
No genuine artist can, or has the right to, ignore the long and arduous path of assimilating and comprehending the actual forms of reality, since he clearly realises that this is his ``language''. Outside concrete material forms even the most brilliant artist cannot say anything articulate, let alone powerful, vivid and expressive, that can be readily understood by a wide public.
Individuality in perception of a work of art is a very important quality. But it only involves a marginal sphere of its aesthetic and idea content. The essential thing in it cannot be placed on an unstable subjective base, for art is one of Man's means of eliciting the truth, developing knowledge of life and bringing it to the broad mass of people.
31This is why even the most sophisticated attempts by abstract artists to employ a language using abstract elements of real forms---lines, colour, volumes, unorganised by an objective structure---are doomed to failure. In these elements the logic of objective reality is contained in tiny, negligible quantities: they are detached, isolated from the wealth of dialectical links of real objects and phenomena, from the flux of life. That is why this language represents an extremely impoverished aesthetic system, which has some validity for decorative purposes but in easel painting can only be used to express the most elementary emotions and moods. And this after the works of Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Renoir, Surikov, and Serov, which delight us with their depth and their inexhaustible wealth of thoughts and feelings!
Among the early landscape works of the Russian artist Sergei Gerassimov is a small one entitled Flowers of the Field (1910). This is a modest, unpretentious work, but extremely interesting nonetheless. Especially since it provides a remarkably good opportunity to appreciate the distance that separates any abstract picture from a realist work, although the latter may be both internally and externally far removed from a naturalistic likeness. The writer Ivan Goncharov showed very well the vanity of the attempts of naturalists to compete with nature, ignoring the genuinely human, poetic means of art. ``Nature is too strong and original to take her, so to speak, wholly, match oneself against her with her own powers and stand right beside her: she simply does not submit. She has all too powerful means of her own. By taking directly from her all we get is a pitiful, powerless copy. She only allows us to approach her through creative fancy.
``Otherwise it would be too easy to be an artist. All one would need to do would be, as a character in Gogol's Departure advised, to sit by the window and write down what was going on outside, and one would have a play or a story."
There is absolutely nothing of this kind of direct copying from nature in Gerassimov's picture. The picture represents a carpet of bold, sweeping splashes of colour---blue, lilac, yellow and green. It is as though absolutely no attention has been paid to form, and we have just patches of colour conveyed with tremendous subjective freedom. Surely this is abstract art!
But on closer inspection we find that everything here speaks of nature, which emanates from everything and pervades everything: the patches of colour suggest ``growth'', there is perspective, a foreground and a background, a centre where the eye sees more clearly and vividly and marginal areas with rather more dimly discernible patches, while the succession of 32 colours is not arbitrary but follows a strict natural order of growth of flowers in proximity to one another. One looks in vain for all this in the pictures of abstract artists, who oppose the image to reality as a matter of principle and separate the world of art from the real world thereby impoverishing it beyond measure.
That is why even the most honestly inspired and sincere quests of the Abstractionists (especially in the early days of abstract art) have proved such a mistake and so disastrous for the development of art. One of the prominent protagonists of the early Abstractionists, Guillaume Apollinaire, wrote, describing the movement's credo, that they ``create new combinations out of elements borrowed not from visible reality, but created entirely by the artist''. But the subjective in the figurative image cannot be clearly, fully and powerfully expressed when it is separated from the objective. A line, or a surface, or a patch of colour in themselves cannot provide a sufficiently developed language for expressing the plentitude of the inner world of the subject, the artist, if he wishes to remain sufficiently complex and diverse and not descend to the lowest, most primitive level, confining himself to a few vague emotions and basic sensations. Only a concrete language, the depiction of objects and real things and the re-creation of their objective links permits the artist to express his subjective wealth, and meaningful perceptions, thoughts, feelings and associations.
``Compression'' of aesthetic information, packing rich content into the images, highly implicative poetic language, various undercurrents, the use of allegory, metaphor and so on and so forth, are all facets of one and the same tendency which is extremely widespread at the present time. It is only fruitful, however, provided the artist does not lose sight of an objective criterion in his work, and the spectator likewise in assessing its results.
Take, for instance, associative extension of the image. This is a real factor which is very valuable and greatly enriches our perception of art. But one has only to plant it in unfirm subjective soil and irreparable damage is done to the informative value of the work, since this multi-channel line of communication between artist and public will be clogged by interference. This brings to mind The Amber Seekers by the outstanding Latvian painter Iltner. In my opinion this picture is affected and pretentious, and I regard it as a failure. Yet it earned high praise from many critics because they read into it a beautiful and poetic hidden meaning, ascribing to it a nonexistent halo of associations.
33Yablonskaya's Spring, on the contrary, is externally very simple and strikingly unpretentious. What could be simpler, one might say, than this modest subject of a young mother with her child, and an old man, who have come out to enjoy the sunshine in front of their house on a warm spring day? But the attentive person who takes the trouble to look closer will at once feel warm waves of poetic associations, enveloping and expanding the image of this delightful picture, awakening serious reflections about human life, speaking of the relentless advance of time and simultaneously affirming the joy of being alive, the indestructibility and miraculous rebirth of beauty and happiness in every new successive generation. There is nothing arbitrary about this associative sphere, it is objectively present in the image and unfolds in our minds as naturally and easily as Ariadne's thread in the hands of Theseus.
The associative wealth of the realist image is based on the most important objective law of the cause and effect relationship. If, when regarding Konchalovsky's Strawberries we seem to be able to actually smell the fragrant aroma of fresh ripe strawberries, it is because a whole chain of links, established by experience between our visual perception of certain forms and our senses of taste and smell has come into operation. If the subtle gradation of cream-yellow tones and blue-violet ones in Yablonskaya's Spring re-creates superbly the warm atmosphere of a spring day, it is because they serve to activise our memorative associations. Then the gay blue of the window platbands and shutters and the green of the plant on the window-sill offsetting the slim, but strong figure of the young woman, forms a perfectly natural associative ensemble in a major key in contrast to the eligiac linear rhythm and dull red-brown hues of the figure of the old man.
The relationship of cause and effect between the image and the reality it expresses is also found in other important qualities such as volume, dimension, space, and time, although here, as a rule, it is also intimately associated with the specific form, genre and style of art. The rhythm of lines and colour patches is not the only way of indicating time. Stanislavsky is well known to have devoted great attention to making an actor aware of the rhythm of his role. It is possible not only to move, but to stand or sit in a particular rhythm. The use of a similar principle of time organisation provides the talented painter with an extremely flexible expressive means. A much-cited example is Repin's They Did Not Expect Him, where for each character time changes its pace, and the sharply compressed intensity of a moment crowded with thoughts and feelings is captured and fixed. Another example is Zhilinsky's Gymnasts 34 of the USSR. Here, too, we have a momentary situation, which easily unfolds in our perception as a keenly felt slice of time, for the unity and cohesion of the group is not achieved at the expense of crushing the individual rhythm of each of the characters, and we perceive the diversity of the rhythmic organisation as a live time process.
__b_b_b__The works of true artists embody a clear and simple aesthetic idea: art does not copy but re-embodies reality. The artistic image is a cleverly constructed, wisely organised world, related to the real one not by simple ties of similarity, but by the dialectic of correspondence and non-correspondence, analysis and synthesis, acceptance and rejection. This is a complex compound, containing the result of cognisance and the call to go on further, that which exists and that which is longed for or anticipated, reality and dream. And to all this is added the quivering, responsive heart of a poet, the whole having passed through the crucible of his passionate feelings.
With the geniuses of Antiquity and the Renaissance, and the titans of the 17th century---Rembrandt, Rubens and Velazquez--- with them the aura of history or the convention of legendary subjects automatically translates the image world of their works for us into a special elevated artistic sphere. And this often masks its original aesthetic meaning as the world of reality subjectively interpreted, apprehended and assessed. But one has only to compare for a moment such a genius with an ordinary run-of-the-mill artist, the poet and the skilful but pedestrian craftsman, and the priceless substance of art immediately showers us with diamond sparks ....
Probably tens of thousands of times artists in different countries have taken the madonna as their subject or painted pictures on biblical themes.
But Raphael's Sistine Madonna and Rembrandt's The Return ol the Prodigal Son are unique. In these paintings reality reveals its inner logic. The artist's thought leads us to the heart of things, making us see more clearly, feel more keenly, and think more wisely.
In Raphael's painting, the Madonna is advancing to meet the future, bearing her child in her arms, her most precious possession, dedicating him to life, creativity and struggle. The artist has not embellished her, but has painted her in a simple, straightforward, unadorned manner, severe but lofty. She ;s beautiful but perhaps thousand of other mothers, who, without suspecting it, inspired the artist's heart, were lovelier than she. For her loveliness is the noble beauty of art, in which poetry and the truth of life are crystallised.
35The prodigal son, returning home to his father's house after having had his fill of sufferings in his wanderings, has been portrayed by artists in very many ways. Rembrandt leads us into a complex, dramatic cross-fire of profound human feelings. This for him is the main thing. The trembling hands of the blind old man, the father, gripping the back of his kneeling son, are placed in expressive contrast to the latter's rough feet peeping out of his worn boots. How much the calloused bare sole tells us! What a brilliant touch! Everything is taken from real life here, yet how far are the composition, the characters and the colour of the scene from what might have been their real life prototypes!
Great artists authoritatively introduce into mankind's spiritual currency their own special perception of the world, their own values and criteria of life. This is not to say, of course, that art is a purely subjective sphere. The artist accumulates what is experienced by many many people and expresses it in a concentrated form, in vivid images. Class, society, time and history speak through the artistic genius. But he must speak eloquently, and his heart and mind must be sensitive to the ``currents'' of the time which determine society's way forward.
The reflection of life in art is a very active process. Art shapes the spectator, and the artist too. Art teaches a person to be creative, bold, daring, active in struggle and the work of transformation. Maxim Gorky put it magnificently: ``Basically art is struggle for or against, there is no indifferent art and cannot be, for man is not a camera, he does not `note down' reality, but either affirms it, or changes it, destroys it.'' The history of art is the history of development of man's active, transformative potentialities.
The affirming and destructive power of art, which is closely related to the artist's social views, his class loyalties and antipathies, his concept of the norm, the ideal, and finally his personal taste, derives from life and has life as its sphere of application. The art of socialist realism is unthinkable out of contact with life.
The ``malady'' of aestheticism, creating as it does favourable circumstances for ``art for art's sake'', art devoid of ideas, formalism and naturalism, is a departure from life and indeed from its fundamental problems. The artist who docs not conceive of himself apart from the mainstream of the life of his people, who finds it only natural to be in the forefront of the struggle for communism, never suffers from this ``malady''.
For such an artist there is not, and cannot be, any contradiction between the ideological and aesthetic tasks of art, for he 36
Raphael. The Sistine Madonna
solves them as one, as an inseparable whole. And he naturally
acquires that real creative freedom over which such
exaggerated concern is shown, particularly by those who have no
thought for their civic duty and stand aloof from important
social issues.
37
This is naturally not to say that there is an automatic dependence between ideological and artistic problems. Finding the most appropriate expressive solution for each organically chosen ideological task is a long and tortuous process involving tireless search and experimentation and often attended by partial failures. One of the dogmatic aesthetic ideas of the recent past that was fraught with dangerous consequences was the contention that a correct general idea is in itself sufficient to bring the artist to its satisfactory artistic realisation, its expression in images. In practice this led to a sterile illustrative style, cliche-ridden and stereotype. By no means all ideas can be expressed in artistic terms, and by no means every potentially artistic idea can immediately acquire satisfactory aesthetic embodiment.
Artistic creation, it must be stressed, is no bed of roses, it is not a walk along a well-worn path but an adventure into undiscovered country, however simple the task set by the artist in each case might appear at first sight. Only where inimitable ideological and aesthetic novelty has been achieved can we really speak of a work of art or an artist without depreciating the value of these fine words, which designate selfless, inspired effort and a person devoted to such work.
The artist is not a copyist of life, but its interpreter and transformer. But his transformative activity does not involve using his creative fancy to fly far away from the real world into an imaginary world of subjective illusions or to distort the material world until it is unrecognisable, ignoring its objective laws. The history of art is full of such Utopian attempts that ended in ideological and aesthetic bankruptcy. Only the realist artist is a real transformer of life. He is at once solicitous and yet merciless towards reality, his gaze penetrating into the depths of the essence of things, revealing all, stripping away all masks from its ungainly aspects, and joyfully celebrating its beauty. Only thus does he create a suitable aesthetic environment, educate people and produce impulses of aesthetic pleasure in their souls. Yes indeed, the artist ``makes the tree of reality sprout new branches'', but not by creating ``his own reality'', owing nothing to the former and quite dissimilar from it, but by making the buds of life burst forth as magnificent roses, so that it appears brighter, more complete, its facts concentrated by the magnifying glass of the human artistic talent, and its cold beauty imbued with warmth and passion, by being correlated with human life.
[38] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Humanist Tradition in Art [39] ~ [40]The = world of great ideas, important to society, was highly valued in art in all periods, in all countries and among all peoples. The Old Stone Age hunter who decorated his caves with pictures of bison and deer which still impress us today with their realism and artistic power, did so not simply in order to develop his artistic abilities and produce a pleasant decorative effect. He was moved to it by the idea of subduing the forces of nature, an idea that was vital for him and for society, although it took the mistaken form of magic. It was not simply to embellish a locality that the Egyptians built their splendid temples, the tombs of the pharaohs and sphynxes: they were primarily guided by the ideas of strong state power and glorification of their country which withstood numerous invaders, ideas that were essential to their way of life.
Idle experiments with form were not the purpose of Phidias and Aeschylus, Polygnotus and Lysippus, Rublyov and Masaccio, Michelangelo and Shakespeare, or any other great artists who created outstanding works of art. They brought their contemporaries and the successive generations progressive ideas that could teach, develop and uplift people and inspire them to strive for a better future.
It is noteworthy that art at its best has always glorified Man, poeticised his wisdom, strength and beauty and has always been an active means of affirming humanistic ideas which appeared along with man and gradually became organised into a system.
In the exquisite portrait bust of Nefertiti, carved in pale gold crystalline sandstone that conveys superbly the swarthy complexion of an inhabitant of a southern land, a brilliant ancient Egyptian artist who lived over three thousand years ago produced a veritable hymn to Man. The sculptor wielded his chisel with great precision truthfully conveying much that is individually characteristic in the appearance of the consort of the reformer pharaoh Amenhotep IV. This is in itself remarkable, but even more striking is the way all the features are Drought into an exceptionally harmonious balance, the image poeticised and inspirited. There can be no doubt at all that the sculptor, a child of his age, shared its view of the godlike nature of the pharaoh and his wife: the expression is serene and the eyes seem to be gazing into infinity, and there are certainly hieratic elements present. But the important thing is that the artist has managed to convey his own devotion to the earthly and real in this concrete historical image, and express his delight in human beauty.
The reliefs of the frieze of the altar of Zeus at Pergamum
(2nd c. B.C.) were executed at a time when the magnificent
Thutmosis. Sculptured portrait of Nefertiti
41 __RUNNING_HEADER_LEFT__ The Humanist Tradition in ArtAthena and Alcyoneus. A detail of a frieze of the altar of Zeus at Pergamum
aesthetic ideal of Hellenic art had already begun to decline.
The ideal hero had become aristocratised, had lost his popular
roots, and begun to shed his concrete earthly features. The
important thing for contemporaries was that the images of
gigantomachia which formed the subject of the reliefs on the
altar were clearly understood by them as an allegorical,
symbolic account of the victories of Pergamum over the Gauls.
The aristocratic hierarchy of the slave-holding monarchy
undoubtedly interpreted them in its own way, as affirming the
rule of the chosen, and as a warning to rebellious slaves. These
overtones certainly complicated, but did not completely shackle
the live humanistic idea which alone could inspire a remarkable
work: the images on the famous frieze glorify the triumph of
the noble, beautiful human being over fierce, blind forces of
evil. Typically enough, this idea is expressed not only in the
subject matter, in the way the giants are portrayed as mostly
already defeated with the Olympians clearly triumphant, but
plastically too. The very treatment of the figures shows the
disproportion between the two camps.
The giant Alcyoneus, struggling with Athena, has seized the
delicate hand of the goddess in his own rough hand, and is
pulling it downwards, but the smooth womanly hand shows
no trace of a crease even from the titan's strong grip, his
42
Raphael. School oi Athens. Fresco. A detail
strength is so paltry compared to the boundless power of the truly beautiful, divinified human being.With Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican Stanze we are in another age, a world of different images, another system of artistic thought, based on precise scientific laws and principles and reflecting far more complex social relations, and richer concepts of the world. Yet once again we are immediately struck by the indisputable humanistic nature of these masterpieces of High Renaissance art. It is interesting to note, however, that this is felt in a very special way in the actual presence of the frescoes, due to a very significant circumstance. The artist hit on a perfect disposition of the main compositions and the size of the figures, slightly larger than life-size. Combined with the clear plastic poses and expressive faces, this serves to strengthen the impression of monumentality, power and grandeur of the figures. At the same time they are not so much larger than life-size as to seem superhuman. Moreover, the compositions are placed in such a way as to appear to be a continuation of the actual room space, although at the same time separated by a small painted socle. As a result, when you observe Raphael's figures of ideal people, slightly
Raphael. School ol Athens. Fresco. A detail
[43]
raised above the real crowd of visitors in the small and rather
dim rooms, but not opposed to them, better, brighter and more
noble than the ordinary person but not so much so that the
latter despairs of ever rising to their level and joining them,
then you really feel the greatness of the humanistic idea of the
great artist and the perfection of its artistic execution.
Every society has its heroes and its own ideal of man, and affirms it aesthetically in its own particular way, using an historically determined artistic image system and its own devices and forms.
Medieval art was far from being a vale of darkness between the two bright ``summits'' of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. True, human thought was held in the straight jacket of religious dogma, and art was oriented away from the real, earthly world, and was regarded as a means of mystical uplifting of the spirit and communion with the ``Heavenly Kingdom''. But the stream of artistic creativity continued to flow through this narrow defile. A passionate dream of happiness, joyous wonder at the wealth and strength of the human spirit of deified man, albeit alienated from reality, and love for the illicit secrets of this world are all revealed in the Gothic cathedrals of France and Germany and the Orthodox churches of Kiev and Vladimir-Suzdal Rus, Novgorod and Pskov, in the icons and frescoes of Theophanes the Greek, Rublyov and Dionisius.
Nevertheless, humanistic sentiments were only expressed obliquely in the images of medieval art, generally immersed in mystical visions, although, perhaps in some ways art has never since been so imbued with the folklore element or drawn so extensively on the treasury of the poetic phantasy of the common people. Such were the real cruel contradictions in the aesthetic sphere, a reflection of the contradictions of the life of the age, which was cruel and bloody and characterised by ignorance and superstition, wars, and epidemics of plague and cholera ....
The works of the great Asian, African and American cultures of the Middle Ages form a special aesthetic world apart. They contain a great deal that is strange and unfamiliar to the eye of the European who, directly or indirectly, had absorbed the Greco-Roman tradition. One is frequently struck by their expressive power and complex symbolism, clearly marked by the influence of primitive magic with its ``cryptography'', a system of taboos, concrete personification and deification of the powers of nature, and cult of guardian spirits, along with the specific socio-historical forms and features of life of the various peoples. Natural environment also played a role. Thus, 44 the melody structure of eastern music, based on capricious stringing together of short interval sounds (parts of the European tone or even semitone) seems to embody the constant dream of a freely flowing stream of water, the source of life. Similarly, equally vital ideas and feelings that accompany man throughout his life like the air he breathes are embodied in the complex system of eastern ornamentation. Perhaps only in Buddhist art do we encounter a more direct and at the same time intellectually enlightened world of real observations. But here, too, the depiction of man was never completely free from restricting mystical and symbolic constructions (viz. The Birth of Buddha, one of the Ajanta Cave Frescoes, 5th--6th century).
Often even the discerning eye of the modern viewer is astonished by the consummate skill and freedom of the plastic solution and the refined composition testifying to highly developed poetic imagination taking its inspiration from the material world and man's natural environment. Whenever Buddhism was practised in less rigid conditions in different countries of the Far East, the poetry of this world acquired remarkable freshness and vividness in cult images, even a ``classical'' completeness and power. Such, for example, was the art of the Mongolian 17th century master Dzanabazar, whose versatile talent produced works, in particular sculptures, which are like an inspired song glorifying the harmony of two principles in man---the body and the spirit.
But even in countries where religious taboos greatly reduced the scope for artistic creation, limiting its subject matter (for instance, in the Islamic countries), aesthetic interest in man and human life was not so hopelessly stifled as is often erroneously supposed. Some of the most recent discoveries of medieval Azerbaijanian tombstones, for example, reveal a constant interest in everyday life themes and a well-developed system of plastic = representations.~^^1^^
Nevertheless, the whole system of rigid regulations characteristic of feudal society---in spiritual and moral relationships as well as in the sphere of property and political relations, and the predominance of religious dogmas in people's world outlook---were bound to hamper not only social but also artistic progress.
The affirmation of the objectively positive set of human individual and social qualities distinguished the historically progressive periods in art and was active in forming the humanist tradition, a fundamental one in world realist art. No wonder the age of Classical Antiquity, and the Renaissance present such a rich, inexhaustibly diverse source of bright aesthetic concepts that still inspire us today. For in both those _-_-_
~^^1^^ R. Effendi, ``Unknown Examples of Medieval Azerbaijanian Sculpture'', Iskusstvo No.~5, 1973 (in Russian).
45Tombstone from Agdam District of Azerbaijan
periods the artist's attention was focussed on the hero, the
strong, fully developed individual, and art composed superb
hymns to man tasting sweet victory over his weaknesses and
imperfections, over social evils and the blind forces of nature.
Perhaps these victories were still illusory (man's faith in them
breathes the naive unawareness of the complex dialectic of life,
and he has yet to comprehend the hidden ``mainsprings'' of
real-life phenomena and processes) and perhaps they remain
largely confined to aesthetic values, be that, as it may, we
treasure them not only as an example of ``good intentions'' but
because they are the real result of the actively humanistic
position of the artist who turns his gaze to man with loving
attention.
In speaking of the art of Antiquity and the Renaissance, one ought not to overlook an extremely important aspect of the art of these two great periods. Artistic creation was clearly orientated towards asserting certain social values, and was inseparable from a poetically integrated perception of reality. Was this an historical limitation? To some extent, of course, it was, because this integrity and poetic quality contained certain features of superficial contemplation and patriarchal 46 naivety. But in this also lies the great power and tremendous historical promise of the art of these periods, a fact noted by Marx and Engels on several occasions. They were attracted by the natural and organic character of this art, reflecting as it did an historical stage in the development of a class society when class conflicts had not yet permeated all cells of the social organism and led to a confrontation between two opposed class cultures, as was to happen in developed bourgeois society.
Was the predominantly affirmative element a temporary, fortuitous feature of the art of those far-off ages? Clearly it was not. Here were revealed essential qualities objectively inherent in art as a social phenomenon, qualities that are by no means transient, although undergoing a complex process of development, enrichment and modification.
Among the various functions of art is that of exploring and discovering the beauty of life, which, strengthened, is capable of activising the development of mankind. Only art is capable of concentrating ideal concepts of mankind in each concrete historical time into an integrated aesthetic ideal, and embodying it in appropriate plastic form.
All great ages in art, it can safely be asserted, were great because they proceeded from the natural view of art as a force affirming beauty, and saw the artistic image primarily as a means of showing and asserting the positive and the genuinely human.
In different ways, depending upon the concrete class character of a particular phenomenon in art, a selection of positive values took place. Phidias and Michelangelo, the masters of the Fayum Portraits, and Titian, Rembrandt and David did not affirm the same things or did so in the same way. Yet the central idea and the general direction of the affirmative element in art was invariably the same---Man. Art approached man in different ways and presented him in different aspects, but always, wherever we are dealing with true art, the figure of man is the object of aesthetic affirmation.
Let us take a look at a few examples of the forms the affirmation of the image of man has taken in modern times.
La Bella is hardly one of Titian's greatest portraits. Yet it is perhaps precisely for this reason, because it is not one of the great master's most significant and innovational works, that we can perceive so clearly the principles of portraying man that had established themselves in the art of the Renaissance. Calm dignity combined with inner vitality are the essence of the work. Hence, the clarity of the pose, the imperturbable expression, the outward simplicity despite the splendour and magnificence of the dress and jewelry. There is a certain degree 47 of individualisation but this is not stressed, so that the artist is mainly concerned with capturing the general traits and features of a particular type, character and social standing.
In comparison, the Flemish soldier in Velazquez's historical portrait The Surrender of Breda (1634--1635) is far more of a true portrait, richer in individual traits and details, although conceived as a generalised type, one of many. Here one can clearly see the tremendous change that occurred in the basic approach of the 17th century realist to depicting the individual, with what a sympathetic and penetrating gaze he studied the face of the subject, looking into his eyes, trying to read what is hidden in his soul, not shrinking from the incongruous or avoiding any contradictions of character, views or behaviour.
Let us now turn to the end of the 18th century. In France the monarchy had been overthrown, and thrones all over Europe were extremely shaky. The common people, rejoicing in their victory and having acquired a new awareness of themselves as a powerful historical force, were setting up republican institutions, not suspecting that they would soon be turned against them by those who have gained most from the great revolutionary drama and whom it had actually brought to power.
The revolutionary wave carried high on its crest the talent of the artist David. His sincere revolutionary ardour is demonstrated not only in his works executed before the revolution and at its peak, but also, for example, in his famous La Maraichere painted in 1795, when the revolutionary energy of the masses was declining and the ruling classes were undertaking harsh punitive measures. This portrait of a simple working-class woman shows a person full of strength and hope, prepared for trials and struggle. She is a symbol of the people who have proudly raised themselves up to their full height (it is significant that her dress is in the red-white-and-blue colour scheme of the tricolour, the republican flag). Here humanism has not only been democratised, it has been revolutionised too. The beauty of revolutionary protest and fidelity to the ideals of revolution are here defended aesthetically. Yet the affirmative element does not go as far as idealisation, that is, deliberate embellishment of the image.
Another vivid example of this approach is David's portrait drawing of Danton. David does not depart one iota from the concrete features and traits of this leader of the bourgeois revolution. The low forehead over the small eyes, the misshapen nose, and the thick coarse lips, all the individual characteristics are preserved in this remarkable profile sketch executed in short pencil strokes. Nor are these simply physical 48
L. David. La Maraichere
features: they stand for definite negative features of a despotic,
self-willed, callous character. Yet how complete and powerful
the image is in this laconic drawing. This is a noble and heroic
figure with great civic dignity, portrayed as though on a medal.
Nor is it an accident that the pencil lines are soft and wide,
yet at the same time incisive, as though cut with a chisel.
Not only man himself and his spiritual features, his plastic image, is the object of aesthetic affirmation, but also certain 49
D. Velazquez. The Spinners
human functions capable of improving and ennobling man, as
well as everything that can be regarded as allied forces helping
him in his transformative activity.
Even in the art of Ancient Egypt we find a portrayal of a wide range of productive work, of astonishing wealth and artistic expressiveness (an aspect which has not received due attention). We also encounter fine depictions of animals and plants, in a far closer relationship with man than in Stone Age art. They are naturally incorporated in scenes of working activities, freely grouped, stylised as necessary, yet without being deprived of their characteristic features or verisimilitude.
In later ages, in classical Greek art, for example, with its unprecedented achievement in poetic portrayal of man in a plastically perfect but isolated image, we find nothing of the sort. With the development of class society, productive labour gradually loses its aesthetic elements in the eyes of artists and the limited class views of the idle, leisured ruling classes begin to predominate, with the characteristic disdain for work as an ``inferior'' occupation.
Indeed, it is only since the quattrocento, and more particularly since the 17th century, with the growth of bourgeoisdemocratic elements in culture, that an interest in scenes of 50 work begins to reawaken. Velazquez's Spinners is one of the most poetic examples of the depth and strength of this newfound interest. But again, the ugly forms of social relations in exploiter society place a limit on artistic exploration in this direction: in order to be truthful, the artist is bound to speak of the onerousness of work, of joyless backbreaking toil, which does not uplift a man but crushes him, depersonalises him and deprives him of any individuality in the conditions of the capitalist factory system.
Art, however, irrespective of what is depicted, carries the idea of the essential poetry of human labour, and in this respect, as already noted, its educative role is equally valuable.
The gradual enrichment and growing complexity of man as society develops has been reflected in the aesthetic sphere in many various ways. The gradual polishing of powers of perception, feelings and emotions has been reflected in a sharper response to nature and a need for lyrical outpourings with deeper and more diverse implications. Music, the art form that is most directly linked to individual emotional life, has developed particularly rapidly in modern times and has influenced all spheres of art and culture. Differentiation of intellectual life, an exceptional growth in potential social conflicts and class struggle lead to a flowering of literature. Literature becomes the depository of thoughts actively shaping public opinion. The plastic arts are also affected by its powerful impact.
Entering the capitalist era, man found more and more that the very essence of the new system was profoundly hostile to both art and humanism.
The latter circumstance was clearly felt by the ever perceptive Hegel, and was noted and commented on by many other outstanding minds of the age, among them Alexander Herzen, who wrote the following angry lines: ``Art is uncomfortable in the prim, over-tidy house of the petty bourgeois . . . and feels that in this life it has been relegated to the role of external decoration, wallpaper, furniture~.~.~.~.''
But only Marxism was able to scientifically present the objective causes of the hostility of capitalism to art and explain the mechanism of its inhuman nature. Both are due to the rule of lifeless capital over man, to the way capitalism converts everything in the natural, social and spiritual environment into a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. To affirm in these conditions one had first to reject all that failed to conform to the normal concept of society, man, beauty, truth and duty from the positions of a progressive world outlook. Yet this is not the only merit of the realism of that period.
51Critical realism was a tremendous aesthetic accomplishment for mankind. For the first time detailed and profound social analysis of the individual and his environment came within the scope of art. Character began to be regarded as the product of social relations. Man was found to be involved in the most complex relationships with other people: family, everyday life, social, production, class and national relations.
Ingres was not a consistent realist. He was drawn to the distant past, and it was the great deeds of semi-mythical heroes of antiquity that captured his imagination most. But his Portrait of M. Berlin is evidence that he could see clearly, and indeed extremely clearly, his own age, too. His desire was to affirm, and he surrounded his subject with an aura of grandeur, almost heroism. Yet the veracity of the true artist took the upper hand. The result is a portrait of a strong and cynical predator. Undoubtedly clever, this bourgeois newspaper magnate, perfectly aware of his own and other people's worth, is not depicted as an isolated individual. He is in the thick of the social struggle, on the captain's bridge. In him are focussed numerous reflections of various phenomena which we can only divine. But the important thing is that the heavy-jowled face, the massive figure and grasping hands cannot but make us think about these phenomena.
Delacroix, as a romantic, placed more faith in his creative imagination than in precise, scrupulous attention to factual detail which, in his opinion, could kill poetry. His picturesque La Liberte guidant le peuple, one of the first works of an openly revolutionary, heroic nature, is not without traditional allegorical elements. But it is allegory of an extremely vital variety. The beautiful half-naked woman in the Phrygian cap holding up the flag is no denizen of a distant world but is an extremely down to earth figure, with the simplicity and grandeur of an ordinary working woman. She might well be the daughter of Maraichere. Delacroix was extremely attentive to the features of his age. His boy with the pistols is one of the most vivid examples of a child combatant in the whole of world art. Contemporary history with its burning problems knocked forcefully and insistently at the door of art, which was thrown open to admit it.
The great Russian painter Repin was not sinning against truth when he brought his destitute, ragged boatmen into the avant-scene of great art. His pictures aroused feelings of anger and protest among those who appreciated his democratic realism. In others it produced howls of protest over such an ``unbecoming'', ``scandalous'' subject. The artist keenly felt the pulse of his time and took a definite stand in the social 52
E. Delacroix. La Liberte guidant le peuple. A detail
struggle. It was not only because his picture showed the
unbearable burden of forced labour that stultifies the human heart
and mind that it became such a major artistic and social event:
it was also because it bore the great idea of the beauty,
53
grandeur, spiritual nobility and wisdom of the common man.
The strong social element and the idea that the individual was largely conditioned by society that made such headway in the progressive, democratic art of the 19th century to become one of its distinctive features, is also very much in evidence in the treatment of historical personages, for example, in the head of the redbearded strelets in Surikov's preparatory study for his painting Morning of the Execution of the Streltsi. He is quite inseparable from the concrete socio-historical environment and the given situation. Surikov drew his preparatory studies already knowing the exact position a particular character would occupy in the finished work. The character is only fully revealed and comes to life in the general context, whither we are irresistibly drawn by countless connecting threads, and especially the burning gaze. Who is he staring at so hard, we find ourselves asking.
The relationship between the character and a particular environment is again revealed very powerfully in Surikov's historical epic Boyarina Morozova. A major feature of the 19th century realism was its profound study of the individual representative of the common people.
Look at the vast gallery of ordinary Russian folk that were tangibly and poetically depicted by Surikov, the striking, highly individual figures of the old beggar woman, the Boyar's daughter, the nun, the merchant, and many, many others. Each has his own complex life. But the strength of these figures partly derives from the fact that they also represent concrete historical types of different sections of Russian society in the late 17th century. We find historicism to a greater or lesser extent present in many of the 19th century works with a social orientation. Indeed, this was the century when, in the critic Belinsky's words, ``historical contemplation penetrated forcefully and irresistibly into all spheres of the contemporary consciousness''. Further on, he remarks with great perspicacity: ``... Only historical reality can now provide painting with both live substance and contemporary interest".
By criticising and exposing negative features, the 19th century realist affirmed the positive principles which he was advocating. But art cannot exist without direct affirmation of an aesthetic ideal. This task always faces art in one form or another.
Nor did 19th century art avoid it, though it solved it in its
own rather special concrete historical forms and predominantly
in portraiture. Of course, we are not forgetting that Courbet,
Menzel, Munkacsy, Repin and many other Russian and foreign
artists of the latter half of the 19th century, when critical
54
I. Repin. The Volga Boatmen
realism reached its zenith, created numerous positive figures in historical and genre painting, too. Nevertheless, the centre of gravity in the solution of the aesthetic task in question clearly lay in portraiture.The great innovator and militant artist Gustave Courbet, whose political sympathies prompted him to become a communard, had great reservations about the word ``ideal'', which he regarded <v (Detrimental to ``real truth'', for him the most important thing of all in art. But in his portraits (his portraits proper, not the subject pictures wiii.h contained portraits), mainly of close friends, and revolutionaries, Courbet captured the essence of the sitter's character, and, what is more, presented a kind of ``programme'' personality. There is nothing surprising in the fact that such a convinced realist as he was should have revcaio. himself in works like Charles Baudelaire (1848), Alphnnsc Pr-wallet (1847) and Jules Valles (1866) not only as a [/e.uelrating analyst, but as a winged romantic.
Whistler's best portraits affirm a different concept of human dignity, the nobility of a person free from petty concern for ancumuia'tng material wealth. This American painter who fully shared the Impressionists' admiration for Velazquez's delicate and ``radiant'' pallette, responded perhaps more organically than any of them to the restrained but essentially passionate appeals of the great Spaniard's humanism.
55The Russian realist artists willingly turned to portraiture as a sphere less restricted by official rules and regulations and less subject to attack from the reactionary critics than, for example, genre painting (especially where the purpose was social criticism). They imbued the portrait with great social content, making it an effective vehicle for public discussion of important ideas, questions of politics and ethics and other problems, and a means of affirming a progressive aesthetic ideal.
The very choice of subjects was determined by the aim of immortalising the great sons of the nation, who had been ``of positive use'' (Repin).
The Wandering Exhibition of 1872 included practically all the portrait masterpieces of Vassili Perov, among them his portraits of Turgenev, Maikov, Aksakov and Dostoyevsky, the latter one of the most profound works of 19th century Russian portraiture.
The majority of portraits were commissioned by Tretyakov, who intended to set up a gallery of men of letters and leading representatives of Russian culture. Perov himself realised he had achieved something outstanding in his portrait of Dostoyevsky and in the portrait of Maikov, painted at the same time. In a letter to Tretyakov, he wrote: ``The saying `I can't say whether it'll be to your taste but at least it'll be hot' can be applied to these portraits ... I feel they express even the character of the writer and the poet.''
Dostoyevsky is portrayed seated, his hands clasped round
one knee, deep in thought. On the thin face with high
cheekbones and a sparse ginger beard and moustache marks of deep
affliction are visible. The whole figure conveys at once
wretchedness and inner power: the back is bent, the head is
slightly withdrawn between the shoulders, but the heavy,
powerful hands suggest strength; the inflamed eyelids are
watering but the brown eyes have lost none of their lively
sparkle and penetrating sharpness. And the whole is crowned
by the vast forehead of the thinker, especially noticeable
because the artist has presented it from slightly above. The
colours are simple and subdued, in perfect harmony with the
writer's figure. The tremendous tension one feels in the whole
figure, and the severe simplicity of the image, give us a hint of
the direction of his profound meditation. It is certainly not the
narrow world of egoistic interests, but important social
questions. Perov showed saliently in the Dostoyevsky of that time,
broken by years of penal servitude, already the author of the
morbidly profound Crime and Punishment and The Brothers
Karamazov already conceived, his true greatness as a
56
V. Surikov. Boyarina Morozooa. A detail
democratic writer, a passionate opponent of the humiliation and oppression of man.Valentin Serov revealed remarkable skill as a portraitist in his very first portrait paintings, Girl with Peaches and Sunlit Girl. His Portrait of the Singer Tamagno is one of his mature works. It is painted in an emotional key, in broad, sweeping strokes, and captures perfectly the artistic appearance of the famous dramatic tenor, his characteristic powerful figure. But in the socio-political sense, the painting affirms not only the artistry and refined intellect but the boldness and directness of a generous, honest nature, an active appeal to the world and rejection of closed, isolated life.
Tamagno is not a hero of social struggle, but the artist
illuminates such facets of his image which, without distorting
him, give him an extremely important accent, enabling him to
represent, to a far greater extent than was usual in the
portraiture not only of Manet, but even of Courbet and Ingres, a
positive civic aesthetic ideal. This is a significant and very
precious feature of Russian realist portrait painting of the latter
57
V. Serov. Portrait of M. N. Yermolova
half of the 19th century in general. To some extent it makes it akin to the art of the Renaissance, and even more links it with the art of socialist realism, the rightful heir and continuator of all that was best in world art and culture.We have spoken of a work by Serov in which the subject did not give the artist an opportunity to embody fully a progressive civic ideal. But it is quite a different matter when we come to his portraits of Maxim Gorky and the famous Russian actress Maria Yermolova. Although very different from each other in composition, these two works arc remarkably similar in one respect: both figures are strongly suggestive of personal service to society. Both the great writer and the great tragedienne are portrayed as active opponents of social evil, free of any kind of self-admiration---composed, modest, and tireless in the performance of their civic duty. Serov, who was so fond of using a sharp, expressive silhouette, a resilient line, a bright patch of colour, revealed his skill to the full in these two portraits. But at the same time he is restrained. There is the necessary element of simplicity well suited for people who, although used to being ``in the public eye'', do not ``act a part'' but feel deeply, and are our models in the great profession of being a Man.
The outward expressiveness in these two paintings does not mask the complexity of the person's inner world, which includes his or her positive features in both the personal and the social plane. This, as a rule, is what West European portraits came to lack more and more.
Cezanne's famous Self-Portrait at Twenty-Three is very expressive. It is built up of broad, laconic colour strokes with an abundance of contrasts of light and shade. It conveys the young artist's nature, energetic, stubborn and firm. At the same time, before us is a passionate, almost raving, fanatic. The intense, sullen stare is distraught, almost maniacal.
The man we see in two powerful, brutally frank self-portraits
by Van Gogh of 1889 is clearly pathologically abnormal. He is
in the grip of terrible visions and expects nothing good from
life. The artist's eyes are those of a tracked animal. But he
does not take a morbid pleasure in this ``inferiority complex'',
he wishes to free himself from it through his art, he rises above
his sickness through his creative effort: hence the terrible
feeling of truth that emanates from his canvases. This is the
confession of an artist, whose heart has been crushed by the
ruthless wheel of history. Here the artistic image serves for
self-analysis and self-assertion but does not present a moral, or,
especially, civic example, and does not contain a ``spiritual
charge'' of inspiring ideas and emotions encouraging
58
V. Surikov. Yermafe'.s Conquest of Siberia
self-improvement. Naturally, every honest confession of a great artist, even where it merely cautions against something, spiritually enriches the viewer, reader or listener, as the case may be. But this cannot compare with the image-example, which uplifts people and encourages them to rise to the heights of endeavour, heroism and self-sacrifice like David's Marat, Delacroix's Liberte, Repin's Kanin or the lyrical hero of Beethoven's Third Symphony.The question arose: was not the great principle of artistic creation, its fertilising spiritual power being lost by the wayside, perhaps for ever, in the historical zig-zags of artistic development? Many artists and thinkers at the turn of the century were dismayed at the impact of decadent aestheticism, the cult of form as an end in itself. Especially as the question gave rise to another one: was this principle really great and important and did people need its torch?
In 1849 the French artist Courbet painted his Les Casseurs de pierre. In 1874 the Russian painter Savitsky painted his Railway Repair Works. In 1875 the German artist Menzel completed his Das Eisenmalzrverk. In the early eighties the remarkable works of the Belgian sculptor Meunier began to appear---Ouorier puddleur, Le Marteleur, and others.
In short, a new hero was coming to occupy a place in art, the worker.
59This process had begun even earlier in literature, which presented a vivid picture of the factory system, with its unbearable burden of monotonous backbreaking toil, transforming the workers' blood, sweat and tears into money. Suffice it to recall Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times. This was more than an extension of the factual material providing the subject matter of literature and art. Life was advancing an exceptionally complex social and aesthetic problem, and the existing methods of artistic reflection of life were no longer equal to the new task, not even the method which was the most progressive in the 19th century---critical realism.
In Meunier's Ouvrier puddleur the figure is seated snatching a short rest. The muscles of his torso have relaxed and his chest is sunken. A hand with knotty fingers hangs limply between his parted knees. The head is slightly raised and the face is contorted in a grimace of suffering, with sunken eyes and parted lips, as though in a silent vain prayer. This is a realist figure, and it is undoubtedly warmed by the sympathy of the artist for his hero. But there is nothing new or novel in the artist's conception or his approach to the new subject. Le Debardeur is in much the same vein, although rather more optimistic.
Contradictions characterise not only Meunier's art. They are a feature of critical realism as a whole, straining towards poetry and beauty yet finding in life mainly cruelty, stupidity and abject poverty. This was the truth, but not the whole truth about the bourgeois world. And as time went on, this incomplete truth gradually became historical untruth. The tendencies of life and art were running in different directions. Life brought forth active opponents of social injustice, whereas art, as a rule, ignored them, or continued to see them only as victims.
At the beginning of 1888 Engels read Margaret Harkness's A City Girl. Here was a courageous, honest writer, not afraid to speak out against the injustices of the society she lived in. The banal story of the poor girl seduced by a middle-class man was told in a new, fresh way, with severe simplicity. Not long afterwards, Engels, who admitted to having read the book with great enjoyment, conveyed his impressions of it to the author. His ideas on the subject clearly express the demands the classics of Marxism made on the works of contemporary artists and writers.
Engels spoke of the need to go beyond the historical
limitations of critical realism to achieve a higher level of truthfulness.
``If I have anything to criticise,'' Engels wrote to Margaret
Harkness, ``it would be that perhaps after all the tale is not
C. Meunier. Ouvrier puddleur
60V. Perov. Portrait of F. M. Dostoyevsky
quite realistic enough. Realism, to my mind, implies, besides
truth of detail, the truth in reproduction of typical characters
under typical circumstances. Now your characters are typical
enough, as far as they go; but the circumstances which
surround them and make them act, are not perhaps equally =
so."^^1^^
What exactly does Engels mean when he says that Margaret
Harkness had failed to show typical circumstances? Above all,
he means the active power of social environment in which the
_-_-_
~^^1^^ Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1975, p. 379.
61
P. Cezanne. L'homme a la pipe
heroine of the novel acts, the working class. ``In the City Girl the working class figures as a passive mass, unable to help itself and not even showing any attempt at striving to help itself.''^^1^^ And Engels concludes: ``The rebellious reaction of the working class against the oppressive medium which surrounds them, their attempts---convulsive, half conscious or conscious--- at recovering their status as human beings, belong to history and must therefore lay claim to a place in the domain of realism.''^^2^^This was an imperative of the time. But only artists who had noticed the great historic process of the awakening of selfawareness in the working class had realised it. Elements of a new, revolutionary art are to be seen in certain poems by Heine and Weerth, and they are present in Pettier and Degeyter's immortal work, the Internationale. In Meunier's La mine (1892) and Kasatkin's Coal Cutters. Change of Shift (1895) essentially new features are evident in the depiction of the working man. His dignity, strength and resolution are stressed. Yet these were still only elements, and had yet to be shaped into an organised, integrated aesthetic system.
Maxim Gorky was the founder of the innovatory artistic method that opened up broad prospects for the aesthetic development of mankind. Like no other great artist before him, Gorky subjected the life of the proletariat to close, all-round and profound scrutiny, capturing the fundamental changes in society associated with the struggle of the working class for its rights. He deliberately adopted the philosophical, political and moral principles of the revolutionary proletariat and committed his art to their cause. This deepened his realism, and fecundated his excellent first-hand knowledge of the life and characters of different classes and social strata in Russia, which he had acquired from his wanderings across the length and breadth of the country. The great source of Gorky's strength, according to Lenin, was that he had ``bound himself . . . closely to the workers' movement in Russia and throughout the world~.~.~.".^^3^^
Gorky's innovatory contribution as the founder and first brilliant exponent of socialist realism consists above all in bringing to the fore the new hero of the age. Pavel Vlasov, and Nakhodka and Nilovna in the novel Mother and Grekov in the play Enemies are conscious fighters for the proletarian cause who firmly believe in the ultimate triumph of their great struggle. They stand upright, their souls cleansed of the grime of slavery and the selfish bourgeois ethics.
The contradictions of exploiter society, which became more acute than ever in conditions of imperialism, the highest stage _-_-_
~^^1^^ Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 379.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 380
~^^3^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works. Vol. 16, p. 106.
62
V. Van Gogh. Promenade a Aries
of capitalism, greatly restricted the expression of the humanistic substance of art. The social crisis was reflected in the aesthetic sphere. The presentiment, if not the actual awareness that a great upheaval was in the offing weighed heavily on the artist's heart. Feverish efforts were made to escape from the stifling, circumscribed world of bourgeois ``virtues''. Moods of revolt, refracted through petty-bourgeois anarchy and individualism, which had often been features of the artistic world even earlier, now took the form of aesthetic ``reclusion'' and ``shocking'' public taste, and nihilistic rejection of tradition. Not infrequently they perverted the very substance of art. 63Yet even in these unfavourable social conditions, which did considerable damage to artistic creation, art could not develop at all fruitfully outside the sphere of humanistic concepts, interests and impulses.
This is where we should seek the objective roots of the significant fact that the works of a number of gifted and honest artists who were subjectively indifferent to the democratic social movement and realistic art, and even opposed to them, nevertheless contained certain valuable elements.
The age pregnant with proletarian revolution was bound to produce, in the aesthetic sphere, phenomena which defy simple, straightforward assessment, and must be collated with the tremendously complex and important process of the emergence of the fundamentally new art of socialist realism. Such links may be extremely marginal and oblique, but in so far as they are discernible it would be an historical mistake to reject them and fail to take them into consideration.
Let us recall, for example, the remarkable attention a number of artists of the period devoted to icon painting and folk arts, to the epic and folk tales. Was this purely a romantic evasion of the contradictions of real life? One must also see the other side of it---enrichment of the aesthetic power of art. This was particularly patent in the works of a number of Russian artists of the time like Vasnetsov, Serov, Rerikh, Kuznetsov and Vrubel.
Interest in folk art had arisen periodically prior to this, without, however, leading to any significant practical results. This is a particular manifestation of the complex social contradictions of capitalism. Capitalist production struck the arts and crafts a cruel blow. The aesthetic principle began to depart from everyday life of the masses.
The interest in folk arts and crafts was frequently accompanied by rejection of the bourgeois world. There is no reason to assume that this automatically led to the adoption of a practical revolutionary approach. The life of the artist in the past frequently presents a curious picture of good sense combined with fantastic illusions, decisive, resolute steps and unnecessary retreats. Quite often interest in folk art masked social passivity and was a form of withdrawal from sharp social problems. This was certainly the case with the Jack of Diamonds = group^^1^^ in Russia, who took a fervid interest in ``primitive'' folk art. But when this interest was evinced by a genuinely gifted, discerning artist, it could not fail to produce valuable, albeit limited results. This was part of the wider process of searching for a way to overcome the aestheticising of ignorance and triviality, spiritual flabbiness, and served to protect art against the poison of decaying bourgeois culture.
_-_-_~^^1^^ A group of Moscow artists organised in 1910. Rejecting both academic art and 19th century realism alike, yet equally opposed to the currents of mysticism and symbolism in Russian art during the first decade of the present century, they were inspired by the art of Cezanne, Fauvism and Cubism, and also employed devices from Russian lubok (mass produced lithographs) and folk toys. ---Ed.
64G. Courbet. Les Casseurs de pierre
A merciless critic and fighter, the revolutionary worker was at the same time concerned with preserving and protecting what was of genuine value, with creating. He held in his hands the life-giving fire of the future. And this gradually removed the gloomy, dismal attire from his artistic image and enveloped him in a cheerful, life-asserting emotional atmosphere. He now became a strong, vigorous, passionate and determined hero. He did not turn his back on the joys of life. He was certainly no ascetic. He was not averse to a smile, a racy song, a funny joke or a colourful tale. And folk art contained all these valuable artistic elements in abundance.
A most interesting parallel phenomenon was an unprecedented interest in national artistic forms of other continents. The aesthetic va