Paper delivered by John Gordon, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art, St Norberts College,
for a panel titled Leonardo's Legacy at the 2013 FATE Conference in Savannah, Georgia
The issue before us is the marginalization of perceptual drawing and painting in studio art pedagogy. I will address the broader context of that issue: the state of the field of art itself and its self-migration to the margins of culture. I will attempt to show that the movement responsible for the marginalizing: Modern Art in its current postmodern form, is historically and aesthetically unsustainable. Its problem is ontological: It exists only in the art critical imagination. In this paper, I will take issue with the central, defining figment of that imagination: the claim that Paul Cezanne was the “father of Modern art.” And I will begin with Cezanne’s own reaction to that claim. “If they try to create a new school in my name” he said, “ tell them they have never understood, never loved what I have done.” While this century-old fabrication may seem irrelevant to the issues we are discussing here at FATE, I will show that the whole modern/postmodern project owes its very existence to that fabrication – and thus shares in its insubstantiality. Could this be why the art of our day is so difficult to define and why we move so quickly from the old new thing to the new new thing? You may regard this challenge to the aesthetic existence of modern and postmodern art as a thought experiment if you wish, but I am not presenting it as such. Any enterprise that wishes to be considered real – relevant and substantial and productive -- must engage physical reality in its own terms.
Paul Cezanne rejected Modern Art’s theory of imaginative invention because he had his own theory -- based exclusively on the direct-perception of nature. And he made his position on modernist inventive abstraction clear: “I would rather crush my canvas” he said “ than invent or imagine a single detail. I want to know -- to know so I can see better, to see so I can know better.” This was the first theory of perceptual discovery in the history of art – and it is the only conceivable basis for the future for our field. This is the case because visible reality is the only unexplored territory we have left. We do not know what the world really looks like. We see stereotypically, in the terms of our own culturally and digitally induced pictorial expectations.
On the practice of “appropriation”
To say that Paul Cezanne was not the father of Modern Art is not to deny his influence on modern painting. It is to say that the movement that claimed him, rejected his theories and his methods (which he repeatedly urged them to accept.) Cezanne influenced Modern Art only in one very narrow and to my mind, morally and aesthetically questionable sense. The modernists took only one thing from Cezanne: his personal painting style. In other words, they did to Cezanne what Degas accused the traditionalists of doing to the Impressionists: they went through his pockets. As a result, Modern Art became the first school of art in history without a method or style of its own. Appropriating and reconfiguring the styles and ideas of other artists has been its primary mode of operation ever since. And for the past 75 years or so, art students throughout the world have been routinely encouraged to do the same. This is exhibit number one in the case of modernism versus reality.
Cezanne’s new art vs. Modern Art
Making a case for Cezanne’s theory is a difficult prospect, not because the theory itself is so difficult, but because it is new theory – and thus runs almost directly counter to the aesthetic assumptions of just about everyone to whom this argument is addressed. The defining motifs of modernism are: subjectivity, emotion, expression, imagination, revolution, freedom, abstraction and, mannerism. Cezanne opposed the modernists on each of those points. He regarded truth as objective rather than subjective (originating in God, not the self, and manifesting itself in nature and sense experience, not in the human imagination); he advocated a sober and attentive, rather than emotional, conceptual or reflective state of mind while painting; he emphasized the receptive aspect of painting over the expressive (expression in his system is an unexpected consequence, not the intended result, of painting); he sought to advance traditional art rather than overturn it; he rejected freedom in favor of willful submission to the authority of nature; he advocated abstraction as a way of seeing, not as a method of painting; and he strongly advocated the development of a strictly personal painting style rather than relying on the “influence” or “inspiration” of other artists. "Technique” he said “grows in contact with nature. It develops through circumstances. It consists in seeking to express what one feels, in organizing sensations into personal aesthetics." In Cezanne’s system, then, the artist sees nature uniquely and creatively through the personalized lens of temperament but with the aspects of cognition and self-consciousness removed. “…if I think while painting, if I intervene, why then everything is lost.” The following statement encapsulates his theory and bears many re-readings:
“In order to record (nature) on the canvas, to externalize it, (the painter’s) craft will have to be appealed to, but a respectful craft which also must be ready only to obey, to translate unconsciously -- so well does it know its language -- the text it is deciphering, the two parallel texts, nature as seen, nature as felt, the one that is there... (he pointed to the green and blue plain), the one that is here... (he tapped his forehead), both of which must merge in order to endure, to live a life half human, half divine, the life of art, listen to me, the life of God.”
The religious aspect of Cezanne’s theory is significant because it took him deeper into his subject – and it was the element of depth that set him apart from the Impressionists. The Impressionists were interested in nature’s surfaces, but nature to Cezanne “exists more in depth than on the surface.” With the exception of Impressionism and postmodernism, art has always been concerned with the depths of reality. The ancients and traditionalists were concerned with its spiritual depths, the modernists with its emotional depths. Cezanne was not the first artist to reach the finer states of reality through perceptual painting (Leonardo achieved it, Titian achieved it, Rembrandt and Vermeer achieved it.) But Cezanne was the first to know what he had done and how he had done it. And there is enough information in his letters and recalled conversations to reconstruct his pedagogy of perceptual depth. and build a future on it.
“What I am trying to translate to you”, he said, “is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.” His mode of entry to that source was truth. “One can modify, decorate and dress up the surface but one cannot attain depth without attaining truth.” The point of entry to truth in his system is color. “Color is the expression of this truth on the surface. It rises up from the roots of the world.” As to whether Cezanne actually found God in those depths, we must decide for ourselves. But there is enough anecdotal evidence to at least suggest that he did -- in the almost devotional testimonies of atheists and believers alike from the late 19th century to our own day. (He is still the most influential artist among working painters today.) Art critic, Paul Gsell commented on the phenomenon in 1907: “Some say that when he represents three red apples on a blue plate, it’s enough to cause you to kneel down in front of it.”
The Postimpressionist period
Two major events relating to our subject occurred during the Postimpressionist period. Modern Art criticism buried Cezanne’s theory of direct-perception by claiming him as a precursor of their movement. And Roger Fry designated the Postimpressionist period as the birthplace of Modern Art – even though there were more perceptually inclined artists working in Europe and America at the time than distinctly modern ones -- Fantin-Latour, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, etc. So it is just as reasonable to conclude that the Postimpressionist period was the cultivation site of the direct-perception movement as it was the birthplace of modern art. Accordingly, let the record be amended to show that there were three theories competing for the future of art during the Postimpressionist period, not two: the first was to maintain the dominance of traditional realism, the second was to replace traditional realism with inventive abstraction, and the third was Paul Cezanne’s proposal to advance the traditional ideals of beauty and truth, but through personal perceptual discovery rather than realism -- a proposal that, a century later, still awaits its historical moment. Cezanne foresaw the delay before he died. “I may have come too soon.” he said.
He did not come too soon. History does not move directly from culture to culture; it moves from culture to counter-culture to culture (not always neatly and chronologically, but inevitably.) Historical transitions are almost always revolutionary. Revolutionary cultures enter the historical process during stages of social decline. They do not cause the decline, they facilitate it. By the time Modern Art entered the scene, traditional art had already completed its two major historical tasks: the mastery of naturalism and its use in the illustration of culturally significant concepts and events (I will let Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa stand for both.) Upon the completion of these epochal tasks, the 500-year-old connection between the concept and the percept in art was severed, perceptual art’s role as an advisor to realism ended and traditional Western art had nothing historically important left to do in the direction it had taken. For the first time in history, the eye and hand were free to communicate directly with one another. The new direct-perception movement used that opportunity to master the surfaces of nature and begin the exploration of its depths -- but it could go no further. The power structures of the old order were still firmly established and had to be removed.
Modern Art as deconstruction
This is where modern art stepped in to clear the way for traditional art’s successor -- all the while believing itself to be that successor. But that’s not the way history works. Deconstructive cultures do not succeed real cultures; they take them apart – and when their job is done they disappear. Real cultures are grounded in the physical world and aspire to the spiritual world from there. This is the way it has always been and no puny century-old materialistic experiment is going to change it. As art historian Kenneth Clark observed "All great movements in art history began with a return to nature." The last three returns occurred in the 15th century, the 17th century and the 19th century. If Clark’s pattern holds, the next great perceptual return is already upon us – and there is evidence to suggest that it is, most notably in the reappearance of 19th century-style Academies and ateliers in America and Europe -- about 90 of them now (in 1980 there were about 8.)
Modern Art carried out its deconstructive task with the instrument of the “art movement.” Each movement targeted a specific aspect of traditional Western art – not the art itself, but its aesthetic and conceptual core: the ideal of the masterpiece – as it had evolved from Giotto to Bougereau. Early modernists took the major features of that ideal and replaced them with their opposites – perceived imagery with imagined imagery; realism with abstraction; spatial illusion with flatness; complexity with simplicity; harmony with discord, etc. And later modern artists did the same with the components of those features, then with the aspects of the components -- and so it went until nothing was left to deconstruct. So the art-movements of the 20th century are best regarded, not as a proliferation of many new and exciting things, but as reconfigured fragments of a single, previously existing old thing: the art of the Western tradition.
Which brings us to the art of the present moment. Modernism ended when its deconstructive task was finished. But there was one task still to be performed: the deconstruction of the deconstructive apparatus itself. Because negational cultures cannot govern the institutions they negate, and because they can’t stop negating (given what they are) they eventually turn on themselves. We are the targets of postmodern negation. The intellectual instrument of that negation is critical theory. The aesthetic instrument is imaginative invention -- which Aristotle regarded as impossible. "The imagination cannot create; It is composed of memories.” Cezanne confirmed his point: “Today our sight is overworked, abused by the memory of 1000 images. And the museums, the paintings in the museums! And the exhibitions! We no longer see nature; we just remember paintings.” (He said this in 1904!) I will add two correlates to Aristotle’s idea. 1. That man-made imagery is more attractive to the imagination than natural imagery. And 2. that our own imagery is more attractive than the imagery of others.
Thus, the most significant internal obstacles encountered by artists when they engage in the practice of inventive expression are their own acquired aesthetic sensibilities -- the very things that moved them toward art in the first place. The problem with modern painting and postmodern digital-image-making and ready-made-object-finding, as I see it, is this. The more attached we are to our memories of art -- even and especially our own -- the less able we are to distance ourselves from those memories aesthetically -- and the less power we have to prevent the socially modified version of ourselves from dominating, and in extreme cases eliminating, the original temperamental version. The self-undermining effects of inventive abstraction went largely unnoticed - and continue to go unnoticed -- because the preconceptions that support the practice, and upon which modernity and postmodernity depend, are internalized well before artists come to regard themselves as artists. The most potent of those preconceptions are that creativity is an introspective process and that everything within us, even if it entered us from the outside through the senses, is us or an aspect of us.
We tend to embrace such assumptions because the feelings our pictorial memories evoke in us when we recall them mentally or on paper are often mistaken for our feelings and the thoughts they evoke for our thoughts - simply because we are the one’s having them. So the more we operate under the assumption that our imaginations are in fact ours, the less likely we are to realize that we are increasingly thinking like other people, feeling like other people and painting like other people. If this is the case - and we can turn to Picasso and Braque’s almost identical Cubist pictures for verification - the inescapable conclusion of modernism’s self-expressive project was self-erasure -- a fate that few inventive artists have been able to escape. I am not saying that good art is not being produced today. I am saying, with Jacques Barzun and a growing number of others, that it is not nearly good enough to save the field.
We turn now to Cezanne’s safer, more creative and more self-expressive alternative.
There are two centers of creativity in direct-perception painting: the formation of the percept and the hand’s spontaneous response to visual experience. The percept is formed in an area of the brain associated with memory and understanding. It contains both objective and subjective information. So to draw and paint what we see is also to express (“unconsciously”) who we are. Conversely, to depart from nature, to turn within, is to express neither.
I noticed a pattern in the imagination-based sessions. The instructors were not fond of their students’ aesthetic tastes at the start of the semester and their lesson plans were designed to undo those tastes and replace them with their own. What the students really want; what they really need is to be taught how to draw and paint what they see -- as they see it, with their own eyes and their own hands.
They want the right things. Lets’ give them what they want.
