and so on, all shared was their opposition to art-as-property and art-as-a-cultural-alibi-for-existing-society. We know the extremes to which they went: the sacrifices they were prepared to make as creators; and we see that their resistance was as ineffective as Cézanne’s.
In the last decade the tactics of resistance have changed. Less frontal confrontation. Instead, infiltration. Irony and philosophic scepticism. The consequences in Tachism, Pop Art, Minimal Art, Neo-Dada, and so on. But such tactics have been no more successful than earlier ones. Art is still transformed into the property of the property-owning class. In the case of the visual arts the property involved is physical; in the case of the other arts it is moral property.
Art historians with a social or Marxist formation have interpreted the art of the past in terms of class ideology. They have shown that a class, or groups in a class, tended to support and patronise art which to some degree reflected or furthered their own class values and views. It now appears that in the later stages of capitalism this has ceased to be generally true. Art is treated as a commodity whose meaning lies only in its rarity value and in its functional value as a stimulant of sensation. It ceases to have implications beyond itself. Works of art become objects whose essential character is like that of diamonds or sun-tan lamps. The determining factor of this development – internationalism of monopoly, powers of mass-media communication, level of alienation in consumer societies – need not concern us here. But the consequence does. Art can no longer oppose what is. The faculty of proposing an alternative reality has been reduced to the faculty of designing – more or less well – an object.
Hence the imaginative doubt in all artists worthy of their category. Hence the fact that the militant young begin to use ‘art’ as a cover for more direct action.
One might argue that artists should continue, regardless of society’s immediate treatment of their work: that they should address themselves to the future, as all imaginative artists after 1848 have had to do. But this is to ignore the world-historical moment at which we have arrived. Imperialism, European hegemony, the moralities of capitalist-Christianity and state-communism, the Cartesian dualism of white reasoning, the practice of constructing ‘humanist’ cultures on a basis of monstrous exploitation – this entire interlocking system is now being challenged: a world struggle is being mounted against it. Those who envisage a different future are obliged to define their position towards this struggle, obliged to choose. Such a choice tends to lead them either to impotent despair or to the conclusion that world liberation is the precondition for any new valid cultural achievement. (I simplify and somewhat exaggerate the positions for the sake of brevity.) Either way their doubts about the value of art are increased. An artist who now addresses the future does not necessarily have his faith in his vision confirmed.
In this present crisis, is it any longer possible to speak of the revolutionary meaning of art? This is the fundamental question. It is the question that Max Raphael begins to answer in The Demands of Art.
The book is based on some lectures that Raphael gave in the early 1930s to a modest adult education class in Switzerland under the title ‘How Should One Approach a Work of Art?’. He chose five works and devoted a chapter of extremely thorough and varied analysis to each. The works are: Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire of 1904–06 (the one in the Philadelphia Museum), Degas’s etching of Madame X Leaving Her Bath, Giotto’s Dead Christ (Padua) compared with his later Death of Saint Francis (Florence), a drawing by Rembrandt of Joseph Interpreting Pharaoh’s Dreams, and Picasso’s Guernica. (The chapter on Guernica was of course written later.) These are followed by a general chapter on ‘The Struggle to Understand Art’, and by an appendix of an unfinished but extremely important essay entitled ‘Towards an Empirical Theory of Art’, written in 1941. The editing, production and translating of the present volume – under the direction of two of Raphael’s friends – are a model of an efficient labour of love.
I shall not discuss Raphael’s analysis of the five individual works. They are brilliant, long, highly particularised and dense. The most I can do is to attempt a crude outline of his general theory.
A question which Marx posed but could not answer: If art in the last analysis is a superstructure of the economic base, why does its power to move us endure long after the base has been transformed? Why, asked Marx, do we still look towards Greek art as an ideal? He began to answer by speaking about the ‘charm’ of ‘young children’ (the young Greek civilisation), and then broke off the manuscript and was far too occupied ever to return to the question.
‘A transitional epoch’, writes Raphael,
always implies uncertainty: Marx’s struggle to understand his own epoch testifies to this. In such a period two attitudes are possible. One is to take advantage of the emergent forces of the new order with a view to undermining it to affirm it in order to drive it beyond itself: this is the active, militant, revolutionary attitude. The other clings to the past, is retrospective and romantic, bewails or acknowledges the decline, asserts that the will to live is gone – in short, it is the passive attitude. Where economic, social, and political questions were at stake Marx took the first attitude; in questions of art he took neither.
He merely reflected his epoch.
Just as Marx’s taste in art – the classical ideal excluding the extraordinary achievements of palaeolithic, Mexican, African art – reflected the ignorance and prejudice of art appreciation in his period, so his failure to create (though he saw the need to do so) a theory of art larger than that of the superstructure theory was the consequence of the continual, overwhelming primacy of economic power in the society around him.
In view of this lacuna in Marxist theory, Raphael sets out to ‘develop a theory of art that I call empirical because it is based on a study of works of art from all periods and nations. I am convinced that mathematics, which has travelled a long way since Euclid, will someday provide us with the means of formulating the results of such a study in mathematical terms.’ And he reminds the sceptical reader that before infinitesimal calculus was discovered even nature could not be studied mathematically.
‘Art is an interplay, an equation of three factors – the artist, the world and the means of figuration.’ Raphael’s understanding of the third factor, the means or process of figuration, is crucial. For it is this process which permits him to consider the finished work of art as possessing a specific reality of its own.
Even though there is no such thing as a single, uniquely beautiful proportion of the human body or a single scientifically correct method of representing space, or one method only of artistic figuration, whatever form art may assume in the course of history, it is always a synthesis between nature (or history) and the mind, and as such it acquires a certain autonomy vis-à-vis both these elements. This independence seems to be created by man and hence to possess a psychic reality; but in point of fact the process of creation can become an existent only because it is embodied in some concrete material.
The artist chooses his material – stone, glass, pigment, or a mixture of several. He then chooses a way of working it – smoothly, roughly, in order to preserve its own character, in order to destroy or transcend it. These choices are to a large measure historically conditioned. By working his material so that it represents ideas or an object, or both, the artist transforms raw material into ‘artistic’ material. What is represented is materialised in the worked, raw material; whereas the worked raw material acquires an immaterial character through its representations and the unnatural unity which connects and binds these representations together. ‘Artistic’ material, so defined, a substance half physical and half spiritual, is an ingredient of the material of figuration.
A further ingredient derives from the means of representation. These are colour, line and light-and-shade. Perceived in nature, these qualities are merely the stuff of sensation – undifferentiated from one another and arbitrarily
