3 The Second Step: Art
If it is true that philosophy, the first step in the line of despair, touched only a few people, art, the second step, influenced very many more.
As in philosophy, so in art there is a doorway into the line, and this is provided by the impressionists. When they began they did not see themselves as rebelling against classic concepts. They were interested in a study of light, as was the Englishman Turner who had preceded them. But later their work changed and expressed the new mentality.
VAN GOGH AND GAUGUIN
There are three men who stand out above all. They are Van Gogh (a Dutchman), Gauguin and Cézanne (Frenchmen). Each was a genius; they were very real human men, and each produced pictures which show their genius as artists. However, as we enjoy these pictures as art, appreciating their composition, their use of color and all the other things to admire, we must also see their place in the second step in the “line of despair.” They are the three pillars of modern art. In each case they tried to find a universal in their art as Leonardo da Vinci had tried many centuries before them. What the philosopher was trying to do within the scope of the whole universe, they now tried to do on a limited scale on their canvases. As they crossed the threshold of the line of despair, they began a desperate search to find a universal that would give them back reality, something more than just particulars. They were seeking to express a form and a freedom which would be valid in the scope of their discipline, art.
Van Gogh (1853-1890) can be thought of first. Very often people say he committed suicide because he was mentally ill or because Gauguin stole a woman he was interested in. These may have been contributing factors, but the suicide was due to a much more basic problem. There may have been psychological problems, but the final explosion came as a result of disillusionment on a much more fundamental issue. Van Gogh thought to make a new religion in which the sensitive people, the artists, would blaze the trail. For this purpose, he dreamt of starting an artistic community in Arles where he was living. He was joined by Gauguin, but after a few months they began to quarrel violently. Van Gogh’s hope of his new religion was gone and soon after, he committed suicide. The death of hope in man had taken place in Van Gogh. He died in despair.
Gauguin (1846-1903) did the same thing. He too was seeking for a universal. He went to Tahiti and there he, following the concepts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), championed the idea of the noble savage. The savage was to be the return to the primitive, the child of the race, and it was here, going back in time, that he hoped to find the universal. So Gauguin began to paint the beauty of the women he found there. For a time he felt that he had successfully removed himself from the loss of innocence in civilization, and that this was enough. But his last great painting tells the conclusion he came to eventually.
This painting is called What? Whence? Whither? and it now hangs in the Boston Museum of Art. The title is painted on a yellow corner on the upper left of the picture, thus making quite sure that anyone who looks at the work will understand its meaning. Elsewhere in discussing the painting, he tells us that we are to look at it the opposite way to normal—namely, from the right to the left. So at the right, where we look first, we see the same kind of beauty as in his other paintings. There is the same exotic symbolism, the same appeal to the sensuous in the concept of the noble savage. But by the time our eye has moved across the canvas to the far left, we see a very different end to the story. He began the painting in 1897 and finished it in 1898. This is what he says about it: “I have finished a philosophical work on this theme, comparable to the gospel. A figure lifts up its arms into the air and, astonished, looks at these two personages who dare to think of their destination.” A little farther on he continues:
“Whither? Close to the death of an old woman, a strange, stupid bird concludes: What? The eternal problem that punishes our pride. O Sorrow, thou art my master. Fate, how cruel thou art, and always vanquished, I revolt.” When you look at the left-hand side of the picture you see three figures. The first is a young Tahitian woman in all her beauty. Beside her is a poor old woman dying, watched only by a monstrous bird, which has no counterpart in nature. When Gauguin finished this painting, he too tried to commit suicide, though in fact he did not succeed.
Both of these men were attempting to find a humanistic universal. They failed dismally and remained below the line of despair.
CÉZANNE AND PICASSO
It was in the basic geometrical form that Cézanne (1839-1906) attempted to discover his universal. Many of his landscape paintings look like taut diaphragms, diaphragms pulled over geometric forms. Later he painted people as geometric forms—for example, The Bathers, now hung in the National Gallery in London. As far as we know, tragedy never caught up with him. He died, as far as I have been able to discover, without ever coming to the conclusion of despair.
But someone else carried on from where he left off. This was Picasso (1881-1973). Again we must stress, as we have concerning the others before him, that he was a genius of the first rank, he was overwhelmingly productive, an amazing man as a man, and all of us will find parts of his body of work which will move us, and perhaps will move us deeply.
Picasso saw the work of Cézanne at the large exhibitions of his work in Paris in 1905 and 1907, and discussed the problems involved in Paris in Gertrude Stein’s home where many painters used to gather.
Picasso brought together the noble savage of Gauguin, the geometric form of Cézanne and also incorporated something from the African masks that had just become known in Paris, developing between 1906 and 1911 what was to be called Cubism. The great picture of 1906-1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York), shows this development. The women on the left are much like those he painted before, but already showing Cézanne’s influence in an exaggerated form. In Picasso’s private collection which was broken up at his death, there was a small copy of Cézanne’s The Bathers, made just before Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. When one turns to the women on the right, one finds that instead of their being women, they have become demonic beings and symbols as in the African masks. Their humanity has been lost.
Picasso then pushed further. Unlike, say, Renoir, who painted his wife in such a way that she could be recognized (that is, the subject was a particular), Picasso was seeking for a universal. As he abstracted further, one cannot tell whether his women are blondes or brunettes. This is a move towards the universal and away from the particular. But if you go far enough, your abstracted women can become “all women” or even everything. But the difficulty is that when you get to that point the viewer has no clue what he is looking at. You have succeeded in making your own world on your canvas, and in this sense you have become god. But at the same time you have lost contact with the person who views your painting. We have come to the position where we cannot communicate. The problem of modern man’s loss of communication and his alienation did not have to wait for the computers and cybernetics. Picasso, the modern man, exhibited this far earlier in his art.
Picasso “solved” his problem with a romantic leap. One day he fell in love, and because he felt the force of love he wrote on the canvases, “J’aime Eva” (I love Eva). The painting could have been of anything, a chair or something else abstracted. But suddenly, with the words sprawled across the picture, he was in touch again with the man who looked on. But the communication has no logical relationship to the subject of his canvas. Picasso has failed; his abstraction carried to its logical conclusion has left him with no communication. What remains to him is that which, in his worldview, is a leap.
It is interesting that with the two women he married, Olga and Jacqueline, he painted them at times in the style closer to his earlier pink and blue periods, when as a younger man he was showing his great dexterity in the use of the classical style. But in the ongoing flow of his work, Picasso was the modern man with the brokenness which is involved in it.
This is modern man. This is the concept of truth by which we are surrounded. This is the spirit of the world to which we must say no, no matter what face it puts on, including a theological one. This is what makes the chasm between the last generation and our generation, a break of more than 400 years, a greater break than that between the Renaissance and the generation before ours. The tragedy is not only that these talented men have reached the point of despair, but that so many who look on and admire really do not understand. They are influenced by the concepts, and yet they have never analyzed what it all means.
MONDRIAN
Mondrian (1872-1944) picked up Picasso’s position in art and developed Picasso’s style to an extreme conclusion. Mondrian’s horizontals and verticals are lovely and magnificent. In architecture they have been used as a practical model. However, for him they were not just horizontals and verticals, for he too was fighting for a universal.
One day I went to the museum in Zurich. They have a big collection of modern paintings there. I went into one of the rooms, and I was aghast. There was a Mondrian with a frame on it. Mondrian did not put frames on his pictures. So I went to the office and asked the man in charge if the Mondrian had a frame on it when he received it. He replied, “No, we put it on.” So I said, “Don’t you understand? If Mondrian came in here, he would just smash the picture against the wall.” As far as I could tell, this was a new idea to him. Really, this man did not seem to understand the picture in his museum, because Mondrian’s whole concept was the building of a universal.
Mondrian painted his pictures and hung them on the wall. They were frameless so that they would not look like holes in the wall. As the pictures conflicted with the room, he had to make a new room. So Mondrian had furniture made for him, particularly by Rietveld, a member of the De Stijl group, and Van der Leck. There was an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in July-September 1951, called “De Stijl,” where this could be seen. As you looked, you were led to admire the balance between room and furniture, in just the same way as there is such a good balance in his individual pictures. But if a man came into that room, there would be no place for him. It is a room for abstract balance, but not for man. This is the conclusion modern man has reached, below the line of despair. He has tried to build a system out from himself, but this system has come to the place where there is not room in the universe for man.
Mondrian himself seemed to have come to understand that what he had tried had come to a dead end. He made a big shift in his painting, as shown by the painting Broadway Boogie Woogie, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Gallery of Art in New York.
DADA, MARCEL DUCHAMP, THE HAPPENINGS AND THE ENVIRONMENTS
I have a poem that appeared on page one of the last issue of the magazine called De Stijl, which was published by the De Stijl school of painting with which Mondrian was connected. It is written by Hans Arp (1887-1966), one of the members of the original Dada group. This is a translation from the German:
the head downward
the legs upward
he tumbles into the bottomless
from whence he came.
he has no more honour in his body
he bites no more bite of any short meal
he answers no greeting
and is not proud when being adored
the head downward
the legs upward
he tumbles into the bottomless
from whence he came
like a dish covered with hair
like a four-legged sucking chair
like a deaf echotrunk
half full half empty
the head downward
the legs upward
he tumbles into the bottomless
from whence he came.
On the basis of modern man’s methodology, whether expressed in philosophy, art, literature or theology, there can be no other ending than this—man tumbling into the bottomless.
Dada is a chance concept. The very word was chosen by chance. One day some people flipped through a French dictionary in Zurich in the Café Voltaire. They put a finger down at random and found it rested on the word dada. It means “a rocking horse.” And so it was by blind chance that they conceived the name for their school of art.
In the same way they composed their poems. They cut printed words out of the newspaper, threw them in a hat, and picked them out by chance. But these men were deadly serious; it really was no game they were playing.
One such man was Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), whom every Christian ought to know about. He could be called the high priest of destruction. He is best known by many for his picture Nude Descending a Stairway, which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was brilliant and destructive—and he meant to destroy. He sought to destroy you from within yourself. The best collection of his work in the world is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There is a picture in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Le passage de la vierge a la mariee (the words are written on the canvas and mean, “The passage of the virgin to the married state”). Naturally every man or woman who goes to look at the picture tries to find in the picture something which relates to its title. But no matter how long one looks, one finds no picture of a virgin, nor of a virgin becoming a married woman. Thus he causes the viewer to make himself dirty.
His last work, which no one knew existed, came to light at his death. It is now in the Duchamp collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. One must look through a small peephole in an old Spanish door to see it. And it is indeed both pornographic and totally absurd. Why is this placed in the staid Philadelphia Museum of Art by the staid directors? Because it is “Art,” and so the message is passed on to the population!
He was the man who, about 1950, gave birth to the happenings, and then beyond this the environments. The happenings began in New York. We might say that though America was behind at the time of the Armory Show in New York in 1913, today, in modern art and in many other areas under the line of despair, she leads the world.
In the happenings you are put as it were within the picture. You look at people acting; and, as the observer, you are forced to participate. There is always a nonsense element, and there is usually a dirty action as well. Always the observer is involved and is deliberately destroyed.
What are they saying? Everything is chance. Chance, the nothingness, is not just shut up in a framed picture, but it is the entire structure of life. You are in the chance, in the nothingness. You are the destroyed ones.
A good example of the environments was some of the rooms in the art show Art Zero, Art Nul, held in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in the summer of 1965. It was the most important show held on the Continent at the time. One entered the rooms in the gallery and looked at objects. But there was something more than mere looking at individual objects; rather you felt permeated by a total context which was almost subliminal. Almost against your wish you got drawn into the mood of the room. I watched young couples going through these rooms in Amsterdam. I knew that most of them did not understand what they saw. But I was certain that by the time they came out, the atmosphere would have had its effect and their moral defenses would have been weakened. They were touched at a deeper level than only the mind, and though the girl could not perhaps analyze what she saw, yet surely she would be more ready to say yes by the time she came out.
In this connection it is important to note that the leaders of the Provos, an anarchist movement in Amsterdam which had been much in the international news through 1966 and 1967, and which has an influence in the Netherlands into the 1980s, said that this movement was the logical result of the exposition program at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam through the previous fifteen years. It is also interesting to note that the Provos called their public demonstrations “Happenings.”
These paintings, these poems, and these demonstrations which we have been talking about are the expression of men who are struggling with their appalling lostness. Dare we laugh at such things? Dare we feel superior when we view their tortured expressions in their art? Christians should stop laughing and take such men seriously. Then we shall have the right to speak again to our generation. These men are dying while they live; yet where is our compassion for them? There is nothing more ugly than a Christian orthodoxy without understanding or without compassion.