Three
Types of Decadence
HENRY: I have often
heard the word 'decadent' used in connection with the arts and, in particular,
the art of painting, but I am still not absolutely sure what it signifies. After all, there are various interpretations
of the decadent, including that which pertains to a turgid, obscure style of
painting.
FRANK: Yes, though the
most significant interpretation of it is undoubtedly that which suggests a
falling-away from something higher, a decline in standards. That is what I usually think of when I hear
the word 'decadent'.
HENRY: And what type of
art would you classify in this manner?
FRANK: Basically
non-Christian art which has little relation with its time.
HENRY: I'm afraid that
I don't quite follow you.
FRANK: Well, let's
divide the history of Western art into three phases, viz. an aristocratic, a
bourgeois, and a proletarian. The first
phase came to a head with the gothic, and resulted in the early-Christian art
of the Middle Ages. One thinks of
Martini, Giotto, Van der Weyden, Van Eyck, Memling, Bosch, et al., as representative of the flowering
of Christian art in the aristocratic phase of Western civilization, which
stretched from approximately the 11th-15th centuries. However, with the Renaissance we arrive at
the first manifestation of Western decadence, and are accordingly confronted by
a rediscovery of and return to ancient classical art. The intrusion of paganism into the Christian
culture marks the aristocratic decadence, which was to last into the sixteenth
century and take the form not only of a partial resurrection of ancient Graeco-Roman paganism but ... a fresh interest in Old
Testament themes as well. One might cite
Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael, Correggio, and Giorgione as
leading practitioners of this first decadence, even though their work was by no
means exclusively decadent.
HENRY: Yes, I
agree! The return to pre-Christian
subjects or themes can only be interpreted in terms of a falling-away from the
high achievements of early-Christian art, which you characterized as gothic. But, presumably, we next enter a phase of
bourgeois art?
FRANK: Indeed we
do! Now this phase, beginning with the
Reformation and stretching into the eighteenth century, may be characterized as
baroque and be regarded as a predominantly, though far from exclusively,
Protestant phenomenon. For there were
indeed many Catholics of the Counter Reformation at work in this second phase
of religious production, not the least of whom were Titian, Tintoretto,
Poussin, and El Greco. Yet even Catholicism undergoes modifications
under the influence of Protestant criteria, so that it increasingly
approximates to a Protestant humanism, and gives rise to a correspondingly
optimistic art, eschewing the earlier emphasis on sin and death in favour of
life and salvation. However, it is
primarily to the northern countries like Holland and Belgium that we must turn
for the most outstanding examples of bourgeois Christian art, as manifested in
many of the traditionally-inspired pictorial works of Rembrandt and Rubens, as
well as in the uniquely puritan art of masters like de Witte and Saenredam, whose best works, focusing on church interiors,
shine with the light of Protestant purism.
In
HENRY: And what would you generally consider the pre-Raphaelites,
whose works appeared later in the century, to have been?
FRANK: Essentially
bourgeois decadents, because so often returning to the Middle Ages in their
rebellion against contemporary industrial civilization. In a sense, they were misguided progressives
rather than strictly decadent, since they wished to escape from bourgeois
materialism and champion spiritual values.
But instead of progressing towards the higher, non-representational spirituality
in art which an industrial society makes possible, they regressed to an
attempted resurrection of medieval spirituality, albeit purged of gothic
pessimism and elevated to the Protestant neo-gothic optimism of Victorian
society, in which the pleasant side of medieval life, as envisaged through
nineteenth-century eyes, tends to predominate.
But while their volte-face is preferable to a wholesale immersion in Graeco-Roman or Old Testament antiquity, it is certainly
less good than the strictly contemporary spirituality being developed by,
amongst others, Turner and the Impressionists, who were aligned not so much
with bourgeois decadence as with the new proletarian phase of religious
evolution in art. With the development
of abstraction under Turner and the nebulous disintegration of the material
world which Impressionism presupposes, we are in the third and highest phase of
aesthetic production, in which the religious tends to prevail over the
secular. The battle in
HENRY: And presumably in England, Alma-Tadema,
Lord Leighton, Poynter, and other such painters of
pagan antiquity were the Academicians' decadent counterparts?
FRANK: Indeed they
were! So you can see that bourgeois
decadence is really quite different from what it is generally considered to be
in countries, for example, where Soviet Communism has officially prevailed. It is something that pre-eminently pertains
to the nineteenth century, and then only to those artists who specialized in
pagan themes, not to those who, like Turner, Constable, Monet, and Van Gogh,
pioneered proletarian transcendentalism.
HENRY: A
transcendentalism, I take it, which has subsequently become the mainstream
movement of twentieth-century art?
FRANK: Yes, at any rate
in the Western world. In the (former)
Soviet East, however, it is the secular, utilitarian art of Socialist Realism
which has traditionally prevailed, as relative to the materialist side of
proletarian revolution. Because a
political revolution occurred in
HENRY: So an unofficial
spiritual revolution exists within the West which is tolerated and even
encouraged by the bourgeoisie because it doesn't directly threaten them, as
would a political revolution?
FRANK: Yes,
precisely! This is why we have the
paradoxical situation of avant-garde art being produced in the West and, on
that account, mistakenly regarded in the East, traditionally, as a
manifestation of bourgeois decadence.
Yet the fact that this art exists in the West is by no means a guarantee
that it's bourgeois. On the contrary, it
testifies to a proletarian transcendentalism which co-exists with bourgeois civilization,
but always in the role of an outsider.
Strictly speaking, there isn't any modern bourgeois art. For with the decadence of a given class-stage
of aesthetic evolution, one arrives at the end of the particular contribution
of that class to the arts. After the
sterile academicism of fin-de-siècle decadence had run its dreary course, the
evolution of art continued, with the twentieth century, in increasingly
proletarian terms.
HENRY: Even as regards
Modern Realism, which eschews the abstract in favour of contemporary
representation?
FRANK: Yes, even
then! For the secular is no less
legitimate than the religious, and consequently entitled to a place in the
development of modern art. Provided the
artist concentrates on subjects or themes pertinent to contemporary industrial
society, his art is relevant to the age and takes its place on the secular side
of proletarian art as a kind of Western equivalent to Socialist Realism. A lesser type of aesthetic production to
transcendental art the result may be!
For, in any objective scale-of-values, the religious should take moral
precedence over the secular. But it is
by no means irrelevant to the age, just because it takes a representational
form. If non-representational painting
preponderates in the West, it is because we live in an unofficially religious
age, one that was initiated, during the last century, by the spiritual
revolution introduced into art by painters like Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, and Pissarro. The
political revolution introduced into Russia by Lenin, Trotsky, and the lesser
Bolsheviks, early in the twentieth century, subsequently gave rise to an
official secular age in which Russia existed until the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and which caused the representational to preponderate. In the East it was official means that
prevailed. In the
West, by contrast, unofficial ends.
Consequently the one tended to contradict and castigate the other, each
of them thinking poorly of the opposite type of art. Just as representational
artists in the East tended to be critical of avant-garde artists, so
avant-garde artists in the West tended to have a poor opinion of
representational artists. Yet
they were but two sides of the same coin - the coin of proletarian art in both
its spiritual and materialist manifestations.
HENRY: So the modern
age isn't decadent after all, at least as far as art is concerned, but
intensely youthful and progressive?
FRANK: Not as youthful
as 60-70 years ago, when abstract art was relatively new, but certainly
maturing into a higher spirituality, as confirmed by the most recent
experiments in light art - that quintessentially transcendental genre. Indeed, with the acceleration of evolution
which modern life has engendered, we have already witnessed the appearance of
proletarian decadence in one or two exceptional cases.
HENRY: Such as?
FRANK: Oh, the
neo-Christian works painted by
HENRY: And yet, when
Western artists call themselves Communists but continue to produce avant-garde
art, as did Picasso and a number of Surrealists, surely there is a
contradiction involved?
FRANK: Of course there
is! For Communism pertains to a
materialist society founded on the canons of Marxism-Leninism, and Communists
should therefore eschew all contact with spiritual or avant-garde trends. Being a Communist is, in effect, to be a
modern barbarian, outside the pale of civilization. But being a Transcendentalist isn't to be a
bourgeois, as some orthodox Communists seem to think, but a proletarian
revolutionary within
the
Western context. For the only revolution
to have occurred in the West, outside the domain of technology, is the
spiritual one initiated by the leading painters of the late-nineteenth century,
which has resulted in the development of an unofficial art in the avant-garde
context. Naturally, Socialist Realism
would also be unofficial in the West.
But for most proletarian artists it is both safer and financially more
expedient to remain in the avant-garde camp, without undue risk of bourgeois
repression. Also one could argue that,
from the historical standpoint, it is more natural to do so, insofar as the
development of Transcendentalism in the West is the obverse of Socialist
Realism in the East, and follows as a logical consequence from the absence of a
political revolution. A Western social
realist, like Lurçat or Fougeron,
is by definition as much an outsider in relation to the tradition of
revolutionary spiritual art in the West ... as an Eastern avant-garde artist,
like Stepanov or Bitt, in
relation to the tradition of revolutionary materialist art in the East. Consequently it is expedient for a majority
of artists to remain within the confines of their respective proletarian
traditions, rather than to go against the grain of their particular
society. The fact that a number of
avant-garde artists in the West have considered themselves Communists is just
another of those ironical paradoxes of the twentieth century. Obviously they weren't Communists in any
strictly Marxist-Leninist sense, for their art betrays the fact. They were simply Transcendentalists with
communist sympathies, which isn't an uncommon situation among the Western revolutionary
proletariat! Considering that Picasso
was at work in an avant-garde context long before the October Revolution (1917)
and subsequent endorsement, by Stalin, of Socialist Realism as the only
acceptable art in a communist state, one cannot be surprised if, having already
gained a reputation in the West for his particular contribution to art, he
continued to produce work of an avant-garde nature, in preference to Socialist
Realism, during the latter part of his career.
One might say that habit and conditioning were against his doing
anything else, as must also have been the case for most of his
contemporaries. Besides, when he did
make a somewhat belated attempt at producing Socialist Realism in the rather benign
form of a portrait of Stalin, the Soviet authorities judged the result
technically inadequate and rejected it.
A man who had spent so much time distorting faces in his semi-cubist
portraits could hardly be expected to produce one that matched-up to the
eulogistic requirements of Socialist Realism!
So, despite his political sympathies, he remained a Transcendentalist.
HENRY: And what about his art in relation to proletarian decadence
- I mean, did he produce any decadent works as well?
FRANK: Yes, but
scarcely of a neo-Christian order! Being
in many respects a typically Mediterranean type, he
preferred to relapse into neo-pagan themes from time to time, as confirmed by
his drawings of nymphs, satyrs, and Graeco-Roman
heroes. Not that he treated this return
to pagan antiquity in a bourgeois manner.
On the contrary, he always employed a modern technique - as, for
example, in the series of drawings depicting pagan orgies and heroes, which are
very minimalist. Thus he remains, in
these works, an exponent of proletarian decadence, even if a rather untypical
and, as far as subject-matter is concerned, slightly bourgeois-oriented
one. However, the majority of his
pictorial works aren't decadent but distinctly modern, especially the
semi-cubist Expressionist portraits of his late period. There is nothing decadent about distortions
of the natural, irrespective of what reactionary philistines of an overly
objective or autocratic nature may like to think. Rather, such distortions correspond to a
perfectly legitimate function of that branch of modern art which, whether in
the context of Expressionism or Surrealism, would seem to be encouraging a
break with the natural-world-order and consequently facilitating man's progress
towards the transcendent. Now this
particular branch of modern art may not be the highest, but it is certainly far
from being superfluous or irrelevant!
Time will, no doubt, vindicate its evolutionary status, in the
development of proletarian art, as both an integral and progressive manifestation
of post-dualistic criteria.
HENRY: That I can well
believe! Though, to be honest, I still
find it difficult to reconcile myself to the view that modern art is
essentially proletarian, perhaps because I regard artists coming from a
middle-class background, like Dali and Picasso, as effectively bourgeois.
FRANK: It isn't the
social background of an artist that matters, but the kind of art he
produces. If it is post-dualistic or
transcendental, then it is proletarian art, and he should be regarded as a
proletarian artist. The age of bourgeois
art, properly so-considered, has long since passed and can never be
resurrected. The present and the future
belong to proletarian art, and in the ultimate civilization this art will be
official, not, as is currently the case in the West, unofficial and therefore
outside the pale of institutionalized proletarian religion. Essential art will take its rightful place
above apparent art, as the religious art of the future proletariat. But contemporary artists won't be cheated out
of their aesthetic contribution towards the formation of this transcendental
civilization! They shouldn't be mistaken
for decadent bourgeois artists in their concentration on avant-garde art. They should be seen in their true light - as
Western revolutionaries. And even proletarian
decadence, to the limited extent it now exists, shouldn't be confounded with
its bourgeois precursor. For, in truth,
there is a significant difference between the neo-Christian works of
HENRY: Not to mention
between Picasso's neo-pagan works and those of the fin-de-siècle
academicians you mention.
FRANK: Oh, absolutely!