The Last Aesthete
Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts.
by Bernard Berenson.
Pan Theon. 260 pp. $4.00.
Sketch for a Self-Portrait.
by Ber Nard Berenson.
Pantheon. 185 pp. $3.00.
Mr. Berenson, who is a great connoisseur of Italian art, has said that there are two kinds of experts in painting, the contractionists and the expansionists. The first are very strict in accepting a work as by the hand of a master; it must not only be shown to have issued from his workshop, but it must exhibit his personal touch in the smallest details. The expansionists are more generous and easy-going; since the style and conceptions of a master are transmitted to his students and assistants, any work that shows clear enough traces of his art may be judged to be his own, even if not executed entirely by his hand.
In the days when Berenson was justly famous for his uncanny skill in spotting the authors of pictures, he was a stubborn contractionist; how many museums and private owners of masterpieces were humbled by his keen attributions which forced them to change their labels from Titian to Palma and from Palma to Amico di Nessuno! In recent years, when there have been fewer great works to authenticate, Berenson has become more lenient. Around 1930, he declared himself for expansionism.
In Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts, which is a theoretical grounding of aesthetics and history ueberhaupt, he attempts to justify his newly-found expansionism rationally. What a surprise then for the reader to discover here that the inhumane contractionism which Berenson had expelled from his study of Italian painting has re-entered his thought in a more vulnerable and important spot, the general theory of art and the judgment of the great historic styles!
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Berenson feels very strongly that modern man has been enjoying too many different kinds of art; whereas in the 1880’s, cultivated people discovered true masterpieces only in Greek and Renaissance art, and a few more daring ones admitted the Gothic, today we are swamped by an utterly unprincipled aesthetic expansionism. Everything is admired: the art of troglodytes and African savages, archaic Greek works, early Christian, Byzantine, barbarian, Scythian, Chinese, and Mayan art, and worst of all, contemporary art. This tendency is rotting our civilization. It is one of the sources of Nazism and the general moral and intellectual confusion in which we now find ourselves.
We have heard like warnings and lamentations from other writers, but unlike them Berenson has both a logical theory and a remedy. As a self-declared humanist and rationalist, he is able to deduce the cause, the symptoms, and the cure from self-evident first principles. Art is by nature life-enhancing and humanizing. It is life-enhancing through the ideated sensations which we experience through the work of art.
For example, a beautiful modeled nude figure, Greek or Florentine, stimulates our tactile sense and gives us a heightened, but ideated sensation of the body’s weight, articulation, and movement. “Whatever is regarded as art in all ages has tactile values.” Now it is a fact that nothing is so capable of stimulating our tactile sense as the image of the nude human body, and the frontal standing body most of all. Hence the greatest art is that which is occupied with just this kind of figure. It is not surprising then to find that when artists lose the ability to represent the nude figure, art declines disastrously. This is what happened in the early Christian period and again during the last fifty years. Like the early Christian artists, the modem artists do not know how to draw; or they have been misled by dealers and perverse collectors to sacrifice their knowledge to impure, unartistic ends.
There is a second and no less important line of reasoning. Art is not only “decoration” (Berenson’s word for the artistic complex of tactile values, space composition, and the movement of lines), it is also “illustration,” by which he means imagery or represented subject-matter. Illustration, too, has its axioms and rigorous laws. To be life-enhancing, illustration must show beautiful and noble beings; it must influence life for the better by projecting ideal human figures and situations which will inspire the beholder to model himself upon them. Thus in the 1880’s, the young women tried to look like the figures in paintings by Bume-Jones, in the 1890’s Botticelli provided the models. What can a young woman safely venture to resemble in contemporary art? Given the principle of “identification” (the artist has “to oblige the spectator to feel as if he were the object represented and to imagine its functional processes”), we can see why Berenson must feel uneasy even with Cézanne and Degas, in spite of their tactile values (those dreadful laundresses and washerwomen!), and why he must condemn modem art; identification with it on his ideal terms would be exceedingly distressing: he would have to feel like a cube or a tangle of lines, and undergo in ideated sensation the organic distortions of some very strange objects indeed. The situation is desperate.
Amidst the general decline of our age, three powerful, mthless men, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, have repudiated modern art and its unhealthy exoticism and have restored the perennial tactile values through heroic, frontal, erect, nude figures. There they stand, in the Parks of Culture and Rest, in the great stadia and palaces of glass, those magnificent, sturdy, naked figures which teach the Russian, German, and Italian people how to stand and how to carry themselves as perfect Communists, Nazis, and Fascists. What a terrible thing to recall to Mr. Berenson, who was born in Vilna and who regards art as the “surest escape from the tedium of threatening totalitarianism”!
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Happily, his ideas about art are not altogether so forbiddingly classicistic and reactionary as would appear from the passages maliciously excerpted from these two books by a reader prejudiced in favor of degenerate art. Take, for example, Berenson’s favorite notion about tactile values. This is an advanced theory of the 1890’s, when German aestheticians taught that the aesthetic was a physiological experience of empathy, that we lie down with a horizontal line, stand up with a vertical and squirm or shake with spirals and sine curves. It is what some philosophers call a “subjectivistic” theory and has been condemned by austere rationalists like Julien Benda as a typical Belphegorian perversity, foreign to the great tradition for which beauty is an impersonal, intellectual thing, a matter of proportions calmly contemplated, and not a capricious cohabitation with an image by the sensation-hungry spectator. Benda would surely reject as a modem heresy Berenson’s aesthetic in which proportion is allowed only one small paragraph and the concept of structure is strangely absent. And severe classicists, fighting a rearguard action against subjectivism and the cult of the individual, would also have to reproach him for devoting the larger part of his life as a critic to problems of attribution, that is, to the discernment of the individual in the paintings of a given time and place, a preoccupation that has a heavy responsibility for the individualistic madness in modem art. They would observe also that when Mr. Berenson in his old years wishes to write about himself, he chooses the indefinite form of a “sketch for a self-portrait,” preferring, like a true son of modem decadence, to contemplate himself at random and to suggest his formless reveries rather than to compose an objective, old-fashioned autobiography in which the life-happenings fall into a definite order and build a clear image of character, action, and circumstance.
And he is right in doing so. We owe to this choice a beautiful picture of old age, some of the finest pages of Berenson’s prose. When he talks about others, we feel a lack of warmth, and when he tells us that “the dominant tendency of his mind” is “indignation against injustice” and that “every [avoidable] evil drives me wild,” we are somehow not convinced. But we cannot help being stirred by the deeply felt avowal of joy in living. “All ambition spent,” he looks upon the world as intrinsically good; every sensation and perception is a piece of life and therefore precious. The aesthetic here becomes a touching morality and vitalizing of old age, a time when the individual, released from struggle and desire, lives well in simple enjoyment of nature and art, delighting also in the spectacle of humanity, which had once been distasteful, and affirming his faith in man.
In this pure aesthetic hedonism of his old age, Berenson rejoins his earliest impressions and the ruling impulses of his childhood and youth. Then, too, his will to happiness was founded on the magic of the visual. He recalls the original keenness of his senses, the ecstasy of first encounters with nature and art, the joy of living in color, sound, and touch, which determined his dedication to the arts. An extraordinary receptiveness to artistic impressions governed his youth. Walter Pater was his god. He dreamed of a higher role, as a philosopher as well as critic of the arts; but he gradually slipped into the groove of connoisseurship and became an expert in Italian Renaissance painting. This he deeply regrets because it diverted him from his original aim, although he admits, too, that the work and authority were always a source of pleasure and gave him, besides, the material independence that he values and without which he could hardly have lived as he wished.
Reading the volume on aesthetics and history, which summarizes his life’s thought, one cannot share his doubts about the choice; his thinking is not that of a philosopher or of a critic deeply concerned with principles and consistency, but of a man of taste, whose intelligence is at the service of his impressions. He is no systematic mind, as he himself forewarns the reader, and his ideas present too many loose ends, too many contradictions and improvised judgments to satisfy a philosophical or scientific mind. But what he has to say about his experience of quality and his insight into the accomplishment of an artist is very often striking and just, and reveals in the fulsomeness and force of the statement a strong personality, sovereign in its field.
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Perhaps the spiritual shallowness of the culture-conscious social milieu in which he thrived, a milieu searching for a lost paradise of beauty and nobility and increasingly detached from the problems of modern life, was responsible for the stagnation of Berenson’s virtuoso thought. His capricious judgments of what springs from an outlook other than his own betray the limitations of his idea of the life-enhancing and humanizing. He wants art and man to be beautiful and to overcome the irrational, animal nature; but he is unaware, or insufficiently aware, of the depths of the human struggle towards self-mastery, freedom, and creativeness, its innumerable secret ties with institutions, events, and everyday life, and of the presence of the human, in its good sense, in vulgar experience and in the life and arts of the less civilized peoples. He has made of his own life a work of art inspired by a Victorian aesthetic conception, a true flower of Pater’s ideal. But we sense in it a finickiness and snobbery, a moral blindness to large regions of life (perhaps inseparable from so predominantly aesthetic an ideal), which have cut off this great student of art from important sources of insight.
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