The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  ART AND PROGRESS

  In the discussion which followed a lecture at an American university on the subject of this book, one of the 'resident painters' I remarked angrily:

  'I do not "bisociate". I sit down, look at the model, and paint it.' In a sense he was right. He had found his 'style', his visual vocabulary, some years earlier and was quite content to use it, with suitable variations, to express everything he had to say. The two planes of motif and medium had become firmly welded together at a fixed angle, and the original bisociative act had become stabilized into a skilled routine -- highly flexible, but governed by a fixed code. It would be very foolish to underestimate the achievements of which skilled routine is capable. By working tirelessly to improve his technique, the pupil or imitator may -- as the history of doubtful attributions and outright forgeries proves -- equal and sometimes surpass the master in technical perfection. But technical virtuosity is one thing, creative originality another.

  Cumulative Periods

  Original discoveries are as rare in art as in science. They consist in finding new ways of bisociating motif and medium. Art historians who lived in periods of rapid transition, considered 'progress' in terms of discoveries of new techniques: Pliny called each innovator a heuretes -- a 'finder' entitled to utter Archimedes' triumphant shout. The innovations which he and Quintilian listed as quasi-scientific discoveries were feats such as rendering difficult, contorted motions; making the first statue with an open mouth; showing the course of the veins; paying attention to light and shadow. They regarded each discovery as a landmark on the road towards the mastery of reality; and during the second great awakening, the Renaissance, Vasari, Leonardo, and Dürer took a similar attitude. Vasari described the triumphant advance of painting from Giotto to the sixteenth-century masters in terms almost comparable to a history of sea-farers, where each of the great captains puts a new continent on the map. Leonardo thought in all seriousness that it was 'a wretched pupil who did not surpass his master'; and if we recall that less than two centuries, or six generations, separate Giotto and Ducio on the one hand, from Raphael and Titian on the other, we can appreciate his point of view. Greek sculpture, from Polymedes of Argos to Praxiteles (also a span of about six generations), and Italian art from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, advanced indeed in a cumulative way -- each genius 'stood on the shoulders of giants' and could look a little further than his predecessors.

  But here a dangerous misunderstanding might arise. 'Cumulative progress' means in this context merely that each painter could make use of the discoveries of his predecessors without having to make them again. Foreshortening, perspective, anatomy, a whole series of steps in the rendering of light and colour, of textures, movements, expressions; these and many other innovations in the treatment of the medium and the perception of reality, once made, could be easily absorbed by pupils and imitators. When Leonardo spoke of the pupil's duty to 'surpass' his master, he meant only this -- that the pupil was free to incorporate at his ease the discoveries of his elders into his repertory and to look for new pastures. But neither he nor Vasari meant that those who came later were better painters in an absolute sense than those on whose shoulders they stood. Moreover, Leonardo knew that the pupil was free not only to accept, but also to reject the discoveries of his elders. The deliberate distortions and asymmetries in the face of Mona Lisa, and the equally deliberate ambiguities of contour in the corners of mouth and eyes, are deviations from the canon; but they were based on a knowing rejection of certain aspects of 'scientific realism' in painting -- not on naive ignorance. In this sense the achievements of art are indeed cumulative and irreversible, as those of science are. The artist can decide to go against them, but he cannot ignore them.

  'Florentine painting', wrote Eric Newton, [1] 'starts, like a sprint, with a pistol shot, In 1280 it hardly exists. By 1300 it is racing ahead.' Quite a number of modern art-historians share, with Pliny and Vasari, a belief in cumulative progress of art. Ruskin and Roger Fry thought the history of painting from ancient days was a progressive shedding of prejudices and the recovery of our lost 'innocence of the eye'. 'It has taken from Neolithic times till the nineteenth century to perfect this discovery,' wrote Fry, 'European art from the time of Giotto progressed more or less continuously in this direction, in which the discovery of linear perspective marks an important stage, whilst the full exploration of atmospheric colour and colour perspective had to await the work of the French impressionists.' [2] Eric Newton sees the development of European art 'as a great river system in which many tributaries are gradually drawn together'; [3] and his diagram of the outstanding artists and trends from 1300 to 1940 is a map of branches and confluences representing 'the cycle of realism that had begun with Giotto and ended with Cézanne'. Lastly Gombrich, though puzzled by the representational skill of the prehistoric cave-painters, agrees that 'all representations can be somehow arranged along a scale which extends from the schematic to the impressionist'.

  Stagnation and Cross-Fertilization

  On the other hand, it is easy to match, in the history of every culture or country, the relatively brief periods of rapid cumulative advances with much longer periods of stagnation, onesidedness, mannerism and estrangement from reality. The parallel between the dizzy zig-zag curves in the development of the sciences and arts is obvious; and so is the kinship between the defenders of scientific and of artistic orthodoxy -- the phalanxes of inertia. 'The more we become aware of the enormous pull in man to repeat what he has learned, the greater will be our admiration for these exceptional beings who could break this spell and make a significant advance on which others could build.' [4]

  Because visual discoveries are so difficult to verbalize, we have hardly any introspective records of the painter's 'moment of truth' which could be compared to the accounts left by scientists; we do not know how the games of the underground enter into the picture. But if we consider the history of art as a whole -- in its aspect of a collective enterprise, as Vasari saw it -- we shall find that the great innovators all stand at draughty corners of world-history, where air-currents from different culture-climates meet, mix, and integrate. The Greek awakening in the sixth century B.C. probably started under the impact of the seemingly incompatible Egyptian, Oriental, and Cretan art forms on the tribes of northern origin -- when they became sufficiently settled to take an interest in these matters. Later Alexander reversed the process: in the wake of his conquests, Hellenistic art invaded Egypt, the Middle East, and India; even the Buddha was made to put on a Greek smile. Gothic art originates in the particularly draughty climate of the migrations and incursions from the north, and led to the integration of pagan and Roman-Christian traditions. Another great synthesis, of the Byzantine and the Gothic, started the chain-reaction in Sienna and Florence; the rediscovery of Greek statuary gave it a further boost. Brunelleschi married the Gothic invention of vaults carried by pillars and ribs with the columns and pillasters of classic Roman architecture -- and created that wonderful hybrid, the Renaissance style. And so it goes on -- to Chinese Chippendale, the impact of Japanese colour-prints on Manet and Degas, and of primitive African sculpture on the moderns. Equally important were cross-influences from not directly related fields: the discovery of the laws of perspective, and the rediscovery of Apollonius' work on conic sections; the revival of anatomy (Leonardo himself dissected more than thirty corpses); the invention of oil-paint, of the woodcut, of lithography, and photography; the evolution of colour-theory in physics.

  To sum up: it seems to be undeniably true, as Pliny was the first to suggest, that art evolves, like science, in a cumulative manner -- but only for a while, and within limits, until all that can be done has been done along that particular line; at the great turning points, however, which initiate a new departure along a new line, we find bisociations in the grand style -- cross-fertilization between different periods, cultures, and provinces of knowledge.

  Statement and Implication

  I ha
ve compared ( p. 72 f.) the cartoonist's technique of reducing a face to its bare essentials, to the scientist's technique of representing a process by a diagram, schema, map, or model. In the third panel of our tryptich, the artist applies similar techniques. He too is engaged in making models of phenomena in his particular medium, using a particular set of formulae, and concentrating on those aspects of reality, to the detriment of others, which are significant to him, or to the fashions and conventions of his time. (Let me repeat, though, that the reality which he represents need not be a tangible object in three-dimensional space any more than the elusive 'objects' represented in the physicist's equations.) Thus unavoidably, artist, scientist, and caricaturist alike must use the techniques of selective emphasis, exaggeration, and simplification, to underline those aspects or features which seem relevant to them.

  They must also observe the rules of economy. As the laws of physics become more universal in character, the symbols which represent them become more elusive and implicit. In the history of art we can trace the effects of the 'law of infolding' in every period. On Egyptian tomb-paintings, each part of the body is still shown explicitly, in its most characteristic aspect; but the young girl picking flowers on a famous wall-painting in Stabiae impertinently turns her back on us. What we see of her face is only the merest hint of a profile, leaving it to us to extrapolate her lovely features. The deliberate return of Byzantine art to pre-Hellenistic rigidity and 'naivety', expressed a rejection of worldly realism in favour of a more implicit manner of conveying its message. Much the same could be said of the deliberate simplicity and discreet, almost apologetic, use of perspective by Fra Angelico; and of all the later, unceasing attempts by artists to escape saturation, evade the obvious, and appeal to the beholder's imagination. It was Leonardo who invented "sfumato" -- the smoke-screen of ambiguous shadows, the blurred contours at the corners of Mona Lisa's eyes, which kept people guessing through four centuries; and it was Titian who in his later years invented the technique of the bold and 'rough' brushstroke, those 'crudely daubed strokes and blobs' -- as Vasari admiringly described them -- which, looked at from close quarters, make no sense at all. A similar progression from the neat and meticulous to the loose and evocative brush can be seen in Rembrandt's rendering of textiles and embroideries: the law of infolding asserts itself both in the evolution of individual artists and in the historic development of any particular form of art. A striking example of the latter are the two views of the same Venetian motif (the Campo San Zanipolo) by Canaletto in 1740, and by Guardi in 1782 -- the first neat and explicit like a photograph, the second suggestive, impressionistic, and 'modern'.

  One can hardly accuse Reynolds of exaggerated modernism; some of his nice little girls hugging their nice little doggies have precisely that sweet-and-sticky quality which, by its over-explicit attack on the emotions, defeats its own purpose. But as he was an accomplished master of his craft, he was capable of seeing the reverse of the medal; and in his 'Discourse' commemorating the work of Gainsborough, there is a surprising passage: 'I have often imagined that this unfinished manner contributed even to that striking resemblance for which his portraits are so remarkable. Though this opinion may be considered as fanciful, yet I think a plausible reason may be given, why such a mode of painting should have such an effect. It is presupposed that in this undetermined manner there is the general effect; enough to remind the spectator of the original; the imagination supplies the rest, and perhaps more satisfactorily to himself, if not more exactly, than the artist, with all his care, could possibly have done.'

  From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, the trend towards the implicit, the oblique hint, the statement disguised as a riddle kept gathering speed and momentum -- so much so that it sometimes gave the impression of art not merely 'folding in' but folding up. In impressionist painting, Gombrich remarked, 'the direction of the brushstroke is no longer an aid to the reading of forms. It is without any support from structure that the beholder must mobilize his memory of the visible world and project it into the mosaic of strokes and dabs on the canvas before him. The image, it might be said, has no firm anchorage left on the canvas -- it is only 'conjured up in our minds.' [5] From here it was only a step to cutting the anchor and doing away with illusion as something altogether too obvious. Picasso's women shown part en face and part in profile, sometimes with a third eye or limbs shuffled around, rely on the beholder's knowledge of the female form and on his willingness to participate in the master's experiments with it; like Leonardo's experiments with his chimeras, they are a challenge and an invitation to explore the possible worlds implied in the visible world. At the opposite extreme of the scale we find the meticulous realism of a series of great portrait painters -- from Holbein to, say, Fantin Latour. From a purely optical point of view they seem to be completely explicit statements; and yet they contain a mystery in another dimension -- the mystery of character and personality summed up in a single expression, breathing through the pigment of the canvas. A photograph can convey the truth of a moment; a portrait can intimate the truth of a whole life.

  Thus there exist various dimensions of infolding -- various directions in which the beholder must exert his imagination and complete the hint. One is reflected in the development which started with the veiled sfumato and the loose, evocative brush -- with Eastlake's 'judicious unfinish of the consummate workman' -- and ends, for the time being, with the baffling challenges offered by contemporary art. Another is the avoidance of any too overt appeal to the emotions -- whether in a human face or in a Neopolitan sunset. The less there is left to divine, the quicker the process of saturation sets in, which rejects any further offer of the mixture as before as sentimental, melodramatic, pornographic, or just slushy kitsch. Rembrandt's famous warning to the spectator to keep his distance -- 'don't poke your nose into my pictures, the smell of paint will poison you' -- could be reversed: 'don't turn your canvas into flypaper to catch my emotions, I can' t bear the feel of it.' Even patterns of unity-in-diversity, for all their archetypal echoes, become boring if they are too obvious -- as rhythm becomes monotonous unless its pulsation is perceived beneath the surface only of a complex musical or metric pattern.

  The Japanese have a word for it: shibuyi. The colour-scheme of a kimono so discreet, subdued, and apparently dull that there seems to be no scheme at all, is shibuyi. A statue whose grace is hidden by a rough, unpolished, seemingly unfinished surface, is shibuyi. So is the delicious taste of raw fish, once the acrid tang which hides it is overcome. The Chinese, however, discovered the law of infolding much earlier on. A seventeenth-century manual of painting advocates the technique of 'leaving out', illustrated by drawings of the familiar kind where the simple outline of a face, minus features, serves as a surprisingly expressive formula: 'Figures, even though painted without eyes, must seem to look; without ears, must seem to listen. There are things which ten hundred brushstrokes cannot depict but which can be captured by a few simple strokes if they are right. That is truly giving expression to the invisible.' [6]

  But economy of means and avoidance of the obvious should not be misinterpreted as lack of spontaneity or a tendency towards moderation. Sesshu, perhaps the greatest of Japanese painters (a contemporary of Leonardo's), was a master of the leaving-out technique; yet he used not only his brush, but fisffuls of straw dipped in ink to impart to his landscapes their powerful and violent sense of motion. Goya's 'Disasters' combine a maximum of economy with a maximum of horror. On the other hand, Royal Academy portraits in the approved tradition display all the virtues of moderation, yet in their pedestrian explicitness 'deprive the mind', to quote Mallarmé once more, 'of that delirious joy of imagining that it creates'.

  The artist's aim, we saw at the beginning of this book, is to turn his audience into his accomplices. Complicity does not exclude violence -- but it must be based on a shared secret.

  XXIV

  CONFUSION AND STERILITY

  The Aesthetics of Snobbery [1]

 
In 1948, a German art restorer named Dietrich Fey, engaged in reconstruction work on Lübeck's ancient St. Marien Church, stated that his workmen had discovered traces of Gothic wall-paintings dating back to the thirteenth century, under a coating of chalk on the church walls. The restoration of the paintings was entrusted to Fey's assistant, Lothar Malskat, who finished the job two years later. In 1950 Chancellor Adenauer presided over the ceremonies marking the completion of the restoration work, in the presence of art experts from all parts of Europe. Their unanimous opinion, voiced by Chancellor Adenauer, was that the twenty-one thirteenth-century Gothic saints on the church walls were 'a valuable treasure and a fabulous discovery of lost masterpieces'.

  None of the experts on that or any later occasion expressed doubt as to the authenticity of the frescoes. It was Herr Malskat himself who, two years later, disclosed the fraud. He presented himself on his own initiative at Lübeck police headquarters, where he stated that the frescoes were entirely his own work undertaken by order of his boss, Herr Fey; and he asked to be tried for forgery. The leading German art experts, however, stuck to their opinion; the frescoes, they said, were without doubt genuine, and Herr Malskat was merely seeking cheap publicity. An official Board of Investigation was appointed, and came to the conclusion that the restoration of the wall-paintings was a hoax -- but only after Herr Malskat had confessed that he had also manufactured hundreds of Rembrandts, Watteaus, Toulouse-Lautrecs, Picassos, Henri Rousseaus, Corots, Chagalls, Vlamincks, and other masters, and sold them as originals -- some of which were actually found by the police in Herr Fey's house. Without this corpus delicti, it is doubtful whether the German experts would ever have admitted having been fooled.