PROSPECT OF A CHANGE

It was a vertical canvas that the artist Brendan Martin had brought to show me, and I must confess, when I saw it, to being puzzled by its content. I had never seen anything remotely resembling it before, and could scarcely contain my astonishment.

"Well, what does it signify?" I asked him, as he stood back from the canvas in question to permit me an unimpeded view of a spectacle which, at first sight, resembled a tower, but was, in fact, three portraits - one above the other.

"You doubtless recognize the portraits, Mr Deasy," he crisply remarked.

"Of course," I answered, nodding affirmatively. "But why are they arranged in a vertical order?"

"Ah, that's the whole crux of the matter!" Brendan Martin replied. "They're arranged in what I consider to be a hierarchical fashion."

"Oh really?" I responded, somewhat baffled. "You mean in order of artistic importance?"

"Yes, one could put it like that," he admitted, smiling briefly. "Picasso at the bottom, Dali in the middle, and Mondrian at the top."

I drew a deep breath and knitted my brows. For the life of me, I still couldn't figure it out. Yet I had to admit, as I scrutinized the individual portraits in greater detail, that they were remarkable images of the actual men, done with virtually photographic exactitude. "But why do you conceive of them in that order?" I at length asked. "Why with Picasso, whom many people regard as the greatest artist of the twentieth century, at the bottom?"

Brendan Martin smiled anew and advanced a pace towards the canvas. "You perceive this background variation to each of the portraits?" he responded, pointing out the black background to the Picasso portrait, the grey background to the Dali one, and, finally, the white background to the portrait of Mondrian. As I made no objection, he continued: "Well, this serves to explain and justify the existing hierarchy. The black stands for the subconscious and hence, by implication, paganism; the grey stands for the ego, or conscious mind, and hence, by implication, Christianity; and the white stands for the superconscious and hence, by implication, transcendentalism. Each artist is equated with a specific religious tendency and arranged accordingly. Consequently, Picasso is regarded as the least of the trio and Mondrian as the greatest, while Dali comes in-between."

"Extraordinary!" I exclaimed, scarcely able to believe my ears. "You mean Picasso, for all his inventiveness, must rank lower than the others because his art often reflects a pagan or subconscious bias?"

"Absolutely, Mr Deasy," the artist confirmed. "Of course, none of them was wholly one thing or another. But they certainly reflected, in their different ways, a predominating psychological bias one way or another, which justifies me, I believe, in generalizing them into these respective categories."

I knitted my brows more deeply with the reception of this rather esoteric information and requested him to expand on it, to go into the subject in more detail. As it happened, I had no pressing engagement that afternoon and was accordingly in the mood to be instructed.

"You see," he complied, "Picasso was very much an artist of the Mediterranean, very much a Mediterranean type. He was born into a land of sunshine and, not surprisingly, he reflects its influence in so much of his work. Now as the sun is the ultimate sensuality, it generally follows that people born in hot countries will have a stronger sensual bias than those who, like ourselves, were born into the comparatively cool, wet climate of northern Europe. Picasso certainly had such a bias, as his paintings usually confirm."

"And not only his paintings," I impulsively volunteered, mindful of his romantic proclivities.

"Quite," Brendan Martin agreed, smiling wryly. "He was also pretty famous as a lover. However, to confine ourselves to his work, we may conclude that sensual influences played a significant role in it. He was by no means averse to depicting sensual women but, on the contrary, ranks as one of the most prolific nude-portrait painters of the century. Admittedly, he didn't paint women in the most literal or realistic of terms, since he was, after all, a modernist in regard to technique. But he rarely scorned an opportunity to emphasize their sexuality when the body was at stake. He was virtually a pornographer.

"However, women constituted only one aspect of his art, if a by-no-means insignificant aspect," Brendan went on, following a brief pause. "The sun also played an important role in it, as did the bullfight and ancient Greek mythology, thereby confirming a pagan bias. Furthermore, he was drawn to African and primitive art, which may likewise be equated with the pre-egocentric. Granted that his technique was, in its general sketchiness and penchant for expressionist distortion, decidedly modern, or post-egocentric, his themes and subject-matter were mostly pre-egocentric in nature, giving to his work an unmistakably pagan slant. Sex, sun, food, animals, landscape, wine, blood, bodies, primitivism - these are the constantly-recurring Camusian motifs, one could say, of his art, betraying his subconscious, and hence sensual, leanings."

"Yeah," I conceded, nodding once, "I think I'll have to agree with you there. He was, as you say, a true Mediterranean type.... Yet what of Dali, who was also a Spaniard but, according to your assessment, a different psychological proposition than Picasso?"

"Well, Mr Deasy," the artist responded, showing obvious signs of impatience to explain, "Dali was essentially a less sensual and consequently more spiritual painter whose work qualifies, on the whole, for the egocentric rather than the pre-egocentric category. His work often suggests a compromise between the subconscious and the superconscious, which is why I consider it fundamentally Christian, and hence dualistic. He considered himself to be artistically Picasso's superior, and so, I believe, he was, although his technique, being classically-orientated and profoundly articulate, is, as I say, egocentric rather than post-egocentric, and therefore somewhat anachronistic by truly contemporary standards. Nevertheless his subject-matter, especially when surreal, is distinctly post-egocentric, so he can't be dissociated from the moderns and equated with bourgeois tradition. His work is essentially avant-garde, but of the second rather than the first type - a looking down on the subconscious from the vantage-point of the superconscious, instead of an endorsement of the subconscious for its own sake and, as far as possible, on its own terms. Picasso's work, particularly when Expressionist, also falls partly into this second category, but by no means to the same extent or with the application of a truly egocentric technique. He is generally a proponent of the first type of avant-garde art."

"I see," seemed to be the appropriate response here, though, in truth, I was finding it difficult to assimilate the logic of Brendan Martin's contentions at the speed he was talking. A little slower, and it might have sounded clearer to me. However, since he was fully wound-up and eager to enlighten me, I bid him go ahead with an explication of Mondrian's painterly status.

"Piet Mondrian," he happily obliged, "was a true child of the North, with a puritan temperament. He scorned the sensual to an extent unprecedented in the entire history of painting, by concentrating on a spiritualized art relevant, as he saw it, to a metropolitan age. Instead of betraying an egocentric compromise in the manner of Salvador Dali, who even when dealing with transcendental themes - as in various of his late-period works - applies an egocentric technique, Mondrian approaches art from the vantage-point of the superconscious, in which a post-egocentric ultra-simplistic technique is put to the service of a truly transcendent art and, objectively considered, the greatest and most spiritually-advanced works of twentieth-century painting are produced - works appertaining to the third category of the avant-garde. With Mondrian, one is in the post-egocentric realm in both technique and subject-matter, which is why his paintings must rate above those of his two great contemporaries, who remain accountable to the subconscious. Consequently he is the greater artist, the one who deserves to be at the top."

"So that's it!" I exclaimed, casting an appreciative eye on the tall painting before me and, in particular, the Mondrian segment, with its white background symbolic of the superconscious. He was evidently the man whose art stood closest to the Holy Spirit. For I could now recall something Brendan had once said to me about the greatest art being that which most approximates, in concept, to the pure spirituality of the millennial Beyond, thereby encouraging us to focus on our essential destiny rather than on our apparent, or mundane, one. Appearance and essence were diametrically antithetical entities, he had told me - the former appertaining, as phenomenon, to the temporal, the latter, as noumenon, to the eternal. Now that I remembered this conversation, it seemed appropriate to draw on it in relation to Mondrian, whose art was evidently essential rather than apparent, and thus inherently religious.

"Indeed, Mr Deasy," the artist confirmed, a twinkle of spiritual satisfaction momentarily illuminating his dark-blue eyes. "Transcendental art pertains to the essential, or spiritual, and is consequently diametrically antithetical to Socialist Realism, or that which pertains to the apparent in contemporary urban, industrial, proletarian terms. There's no official transcendental art in socialist countries traditionally, because such countries are upholders of a materialistic one-sidedness in loyalty to an ideology which pertains to the temporal rather than the eternal. Only in the West has this kind of art been regularly produced."

"As I well know," I admitted, briefly nodding in apparent sympathy. "Western artists are often given to the ideal these days, which, in a society which doesn't profess any official allegiance to dialectical materialism, is only to be expected. However, where artists like Dali and Picasso are concerned, surely it's truer to say that they're more given to distorting the real than to actually pursuing an idealistic path?"

"To be sure," Brendan Martin conceded, smiling. "Particularly Picasso, whose early Cubist and later semi-Cubist portraiture provides a conclusive illustration of the fact. Dali, on the other hand, is less prone to distortion in his later, or mystical, works, though his idealistic aspirations are always depicted in realist or semi-realist terms, and are accordingly restricted in scope. Unlike Mondrian, he doesn't apply an abstract or truly idealistic technique to them, which is why I described him as fundamentally an egocentric dualist. His best work is undoubtedly great, but it stands lower in the evolutionary hierarchy than Mondrian's. Men aren't equal, after all, but decidedly heterogeneous in their various psychological or intellectual constitutions. The gap between Picasso at one extreme and Mondrian at the other ... is really quite immense in regard to lifestyle and artistic production. One can hardly believe they lived in the same century, as artistic contemporaries. Picasso's most sensual works and Mondrian's most spiritual ones are so different, so unrelated, as to suggest that their creators lived virtually centuries apart - the one in pagan times, the other in a transcendental age. The difference is really quite astounding!"

"Yes, I suppose it is," came my half-hearted agreement. "Mondrian probably wouldn't have deigned to shake Picasso's hand, had they met."

"Well, I'm not too sure about that, Mr Deasy," rejoined Brendan Martin in doubtful vein. "But he certainly wouldn't have approved of the latter's art, what with its uninhibited sensuality."

"No, I guess not," I chuckled, amused by the thought of how Mondrian would probably have reacted to the garish spectacle of Picasso's most unabashedly sensuous paintings! "Yet what of Dali?" I asked. "How would he have reacted to Mondrian's work? You've already told me, in so many words, that he didn't have a particularly high opinion of Picasso."

"Quite so," Brendan Martin confirmed, as he took a step nearer to his own canvas in order to peer more closely at the Dali segment. "If, in Dali's estimation, Picasso didn't produce a single masterpiece ... owing to the sketchy and distorted nature of his work, then Mondrian's art struck the egocentric Dalian imagination as too sparse, too barren, too simplistic, too ... nothing, to use a word he coined himself as a pun on Mondrian's Christian name, Piet, which became Niet, thereby suggesting nothing, the void. Nyet of course means 'no' in Russian."

"Yes," I responded, and suddenly burst out laughing at the unintentional clash of opposites my response had engendered! Brendan found this slightly amusing too, and then, returning to sanity, suggested that there was no need to speculate on the likeliest response Dali's art would have evoked in Mondrian's mind, since it was virtually a foregone conclusion that lack of appreciation would have been mutual.

"But what d'you think of my art?" he asked, having said as much as he wanted to say about theirs.

I hesitated a moment before committing myself to an answer, screwing-up my brows in an effort to bring greater concentration to bear on the subject. "Hmm, I quite like it, on the whole, though I'm still slightly bemused by its originality. In fact, I'm surprised that you've actually painted such a work, for you usually specialize in either Modern Realism or Socialist Realism these days, don't you?"

"To be sure, Mr Deasy," the artist answered, blushing faintly. "Although I occasionally venture further afield into other forms of artistic production, in accordance with my status as a Western artist, or someone who is under no binding obligation to toe a party line. Hard-line Marxists would probably regard it as a weakness, but I'm not in the best of positions to be a hard-line Marxist myself."

"No, I guess not," I wearily conceded. "In a sense, you know too much to be a hard-line anything.... Or is it because you don't happen to live in the right country?"

"That must undoubtedly have something to do with it," he candidly admitted. "One isn't given much incentive to be a hard-line Marxist here. People prefer one to be avant-garde."

"Some people do," I averred. "Though, as you know, I'm not one of them. Yet I take your point. It's probably true to say that a large proportion of Western avant-garde artists would be Social Realists under other circumstances, and not necessarily unwilling ones, either! You compromise a little with Modern Realism, yet even that would be considered bourgeois in some countries."

"Indeed it would," Brendan Martin agreed, a slightly-pained expression momentarily marring the purity of his handsome face. "Anything short of socialist propaganda would be considered bourgeois, including my triple portrait of three of the West's greatest artists."

"Which, incidentally, I'd like to buy," I declared, having finally made up my mind about it.

"You would, Mr Deasy?" he ejaculated, obviously delighted. "Well, that's something of a relief to me, since I feared that you'd reject it on the grounds of its unusual nature, and accordingly oblige me to find another dealer."

I laughed and said: "Have no fear, Brendan! I know your work too well by now to have any doubts about its artistic quality. A purchaser will soon be found for it, I can assure you." And, smiling ironically, I cast him a knowing wink, which quickly appeased him. This canvas, I reflected, would be one of the few works from him which could be sold over the counter rather than under it for once, thereby saving me some professional inconvenience. I relished the prospect of a change!