What Is Art? (3 & 4)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy.

Jules Breton, The Song of the Lark, 1884 (source)

Tolstoy’s What Is Art? is like two superimposed photographs. One of the photographs is a trenchant condemnation of the failures of contemporary art and its priorities, with noble exhortations as to what we ought to value instead. The other is a philisitine screed that assumes too great a moral dimension to art, condemns creative projects alien to the author’s, and finally makes him look like history’s most erudite bumpkin. Imagine being able to read your native Russian, French, German, English, Latin, Greek, and a smattering of several other languages, and nevertheless concluding that Monet was a fraud.

All the best that has been done in art by man remains strange to people who lack the capacity to be infected by art, and is replaced either by spurious counterfeits of art or by insignificant art, which they mistake for real art. People of our time and of our society are delighted with Baudelaires, Verlaines, Moréases, Ibsens, and Maeterlincks in poetry; with Monets, Manets, Puvis de Chavannes, Burne-Joneses, Stucks, and Böcklins in painting; with Wagners, Listzs, Richard Strausses, in music; and they are no longer capable of comprehending either the highest or the simplest art.

I skipped writing about this book last Friday in favor of starting a painting. It had become repetitive in its criticality. I admit to favoring certain conservative views and tending somewhat to negativity as a critic. Tolstoy was a reactionary’s reactionary and thought that painting had gone off the rails starting with Michelangelo. In his estimation, the art of the upper classes was irredeemable. He dismissed the criticism of his time as the “valuation of art… by erudite, that is, by perverted and at the same time self-confident individuals.” The art schools were wholly in the business of producing spiritual and actual counterfeits. Dealers should be driven out of the temple of art like Jesus drove out the moneylenders. (His simile, not mine.) There should be no professional artists. Beethoven was a purveyor of nonsense and the draw of his later music was attributable to mass hypnosis. Wagner’s vision of the Gesamkunstwerk was a joke.¹ Zola and Kipling were devoid of feeling. After a while, this sort of thing felt interminable.

Moreover, he overestimated Christianity and folk art. Christianity, practiced well, is excellent doctrine. It obviously does not, as he claims, achieve the kind of universality that would make it the default criteria by which all the art of Christendom might be evaluated. He’s correct that folk art is often preferable to learned art, but there’s plenty of bad folk art.

Yet the shotgun blasts of invective sometimes hit bullseyes. “Every false work extolled by the critics serves as a door through which the hypocrites of art at once crowd in.” This is magnificent in its comedy and veracity:

Some forty years ago a stupid but highly cultured—ayant beaucoup d’acquis—lady (since deceased) asked me to listen to a novel written by herself. It began with a heroine who, in a poetic white dress, and with poetically flowing hair, was reading poetry near some water in a poetic wood. The scene was in Russia, but suddenly from behind the bushes the hero appears, wearing a hat with a feather à la Guillaume Tell (the book specially mentioned this) and accompanied by two poetical white dogs. The authoress deemed all this highly poetical, and it might have passed muster if only it had not been necessary for the hero to speak. But as soon as the gentleman in the hat à la Guillaume Tell began to converse with the maiden in the white dress, it became obvious that the authoress had nothing to say, but had merely been moved by poetic memories of other works, and imagined that by ringing the changes on those memories she could produce an artistic impression. But an artistic impression, i.e. infection, is only received when an author has, in the manner peculiar to himself, experienced the feeling which he transmits, and not when he passes on another man’s feeling previously transmitted to him. Such poetry from poetry cannot infect people, it can only simulate a work of art, and even that only to people of perverted æsthetic taste.

So is this:

I know that most men—not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical or philosophic problems—can very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty—conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

And so is this:

The art of our time and of our circle has become a prostitute. And this comparison holds good even in minute details. Like her it is not limited to certain times, like her it is always adorned, like her it is always saleable, and like her it is enticing and ruinous.

I came to similar conclusions about What Is Art? as about Robert Adams’s Art Can Help. Adams is as progressive as Tolstoy was conservative, but they disdained the art of their respective moments for similar reasons. I think that Adams is correct about the vacuity of Koons and Hirst in a way that Tolstoy was wrong about Monet and Manet, but Adams is every bit as wrong about abstract painting. Both of their criticisms of the present are substantive, but the positive exhortations are rather beside the point unless you want to make photographs like Adams’s or novels like Tolstoy’s. And then Tolstoy’s curses upon the imitators may apply even to the aspirant trying to make true art. Tolstoy’s book has the advantage of being more quotable; Adams’s has the virtue of a length befitting its subject, which is to say, it’s shorter.

The final judgment of such efforts hinges on not whom the authors demean, but whom they praise. Adams’s taste for his fellow photographers is excellent. By way of painters, Tolstoy lauds this lot:

In modern painting, strange to say, works of this kind, directly transmitting the Christian feeling of love of God and of one’s neighbour, are hardly to be found, especially among the works of the celebrated painters. There are plenty of pictures treating of the Gospel stories; they, however, depict historical events with great wealth of detail, but do not, and cannot, transmit religious feeling not possessed by their painters. There are many pictures treating of the personal feelings of various people, but of pictures representing great deeds of self-sacrifice and of Christian love there are very few, and what there are are principally by artists who are not celebrated, and are, for the most part, not pictures but merely sketches. Such, for instance, is the drawing by Kramskoy (worth many of his finished pictures), showing a drawing-room with a balcony, past which troops are marching in triumph on their return from the war. On the balcony stands a wet-nurse holding a baby and a boy. They are admiring the procession of the troops, but the mother, covering her face with a handkerchief, has fallen back on the sofa, sobbing. Such also is the picture by Walter Langley, to which I have already referred, and such again is a picture by the French artist Morion, depicting a lifeboat hastening, in a heavy storm, to the relief of a steamer that is being wrecked. Approaching these in kind are pictures which represent the hard-working peasant with respect and love. Such are the pictures by Millet, and, particularly, his drawing, “The Man with the Hoe,” also pictures in this style by Jules Breton, L’Hermitte, Defregger, and others. As examples of pictures evoking indignation and horror at the violation of love to God and man, Gay’s picture, “Judgment,” may serve, and also Leizen-Mayer’s, “Signing the Death Warrant.” But there are also very few of this kind.

The Millet, absolutely. Jules Breton had his moments. But Walter Langley? Defregger? Kramskoi? What does Leizen-Mayer have on Böcklin? We forgot about some of these able painters for good reason.

The central message of What Is Art? is worth preserving: art is the transmission of feeling from the artist to the viewer. “If it doesn’t begin as feeling, it doesn’t end as art,” says Darby (paraphrasing Cézanne) in the Aphorisms. It’s all true, but how to have feelings worth transmitting remains as elusive as ever, and outside the scope of any book, even one written by as great a giant as Tolstoy.

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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.

1. Admittedly, it kind of was. But it also stimulated a lot of interesting work far beyond Der Ring des Nibelungen and was perhaps worth taking more seriously than did Tolstoy.