Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray
in any one without impairing the delight we feel in it. Apart from this it is clear that there are as many different sorts of artist as there are different sorts of men. Any likeness between the artists of a particular age is imposed by social pressure. The Byronic anarchic bandit painters of the past 100 years have been produced by a society which has not come to terms with its image makers, just as the priest painters of ancient Egypt were produced by a society which came too thoroughly to terms with them. To discover a way through the diversity of subject matter and attitude we will begin by resorting to the old over-simplifications. Here comes some jargon.
Visual artists are Classic, Romantic, Realist.
Classical artists subdue their passions through cool reasoning, test their subconscious intuitions against social analysis. Such artists ride on their emotions like rowing boats on calm water, their social consciousness adjusting and steering. Their politics are conservative. When they fail it is by turning their best ideas into repetitive academic forms. They often die rich and respected.
Romantic artists make their powers of reasoning and social analysis serve their passions and instinctive feelings. They are moved like yachts by the wind of their passions, the conscious intellect working to stop them overturning, which sometimes happens. Their politics are radical, sometimes revolutionary. They sometimes die through poverty and neglect, while delighting posterity.
Classical artists convey delight through the equilibrium of broad, general views. Romantic artists convey delight through the impetus of deep, intense views. Realists differ from both by their subject being modern life, using fewer examples from the past.
Problems arise when we try to enlist painters under one of these headings. No artist wholly belongs under any one. The pictures of Giotto, Poussin, David, Ingres and Cézanne have a carefully constructed calmness we may call Classical with a capital C. Giotto lived before that word was used of the visual arts, but the last four consciously strove to be Classical. But David – “he of the blood-stained brush,” as Walter Scott called him – was a political revolutionary. There is a turbulence in the compositions of Michelangelo, El Greco, Goya and Van Gogh, and this fits with the often tormented private lives of the first and last two, yet El Greco was an Orthodox Catholic whose work was as much commissioned by the Spanish priesthood as Giotto’s by the Italian. How can such words be attached to the works of Leonardo, Breughel, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Velasquez? All the big labels art historians, journalists and polemicists find so useful – Realist, Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Cubist and Surrealist – are too vague to suggest the quality of one fine work of art.
Art criticism is most helpful when it is most empirical, thus we know what is meant when a picture is called a crucifixion, nativity, portrait, nude, landscape and still life. When governments still bought huge paintings for their palaces and museums in the 18th and 19th centuries what were called History Paintings were thought greatest because they often used elements of all the foregoing kinds of picture. In the introduction I said I would describe the main artistic categories: there are only two: good and bad. All other categories are built upon individual preferences and biases among work that is generally agreed to be good. Therefore when I describe (with examples) the epic category of painting, and even construct a theory of the pictorial epic, understand that I am consciously working inside the limits of an individual psychology. Certain paintings have given me more acute delight than others, therefore I believe their painters had a more intense apprehension of eternity than others, therefore I think their scope sufficiently wide to be called “epic.”
THE EPIC CATEGORY
Grunewald’s polyptych at Colmar, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Mantegna’s Crucifixion, Tintoretto’s Last Supper and Gauguin’s What are we? Where do we come from? Whither do we go? are epic paintings. In each of them I feel that the artist looked intensely in and intensely out. He looked into the universe he contained and at the universe containing him, and he realised and explained in his picture a very important thing about the nature of them both. The discovery contained in these paintings is too vast to be merely tragic. They all deal with men in an open space – and that space is the universe. In Rembrandt’s painting the psychological depth of the portrait faces is as great and implies as much as the depth of space on the city wall on which they stand. The organization of the crowd is superb. This is not a rabble or a mob. It is not a disciplined troupe. It is moving, but not concertedly. There are drums, weapons, banners being carried and held, but casually. The gestures of the men are also casual, but important. But most significant of all is the unrelatedness of the individuals, the psychological gulfs between each of them. Obviously they are one group, but none of them seem to recognise that the others exist – or they recognise it only casually, almost somnambulistically. They are held together by the gulfs of light and shadow between them.
In Grunewald’s crucifixion there is greater awareness between the members of the group around the cross, but the awareness is an agony. Grunewald was terribly conscious of what the flesh was capable of sustaining. The terrible unremitting abyss of the universe. It is really against this that Christ is crucified. On the left side his mother sways back, supported by St John, with Mary Magdalene on her knees at their feet. Both women are working their hands together, in a way which is partly prayer, partly a way to distract their attention from the agony of Christ by making a physical sensual pressure against themselves. On the other side of the cross stands St Peter, feet slightly straddled, pointing to the agony on the cross with his forefinger in a gesture which is so undramatic and pedagogical that the horror of the situation is weighted more heavily.
Each of these paintings, in their own way, describes the condition of mind in the universe in pictorial images. Each is intensely aware of the unknown, the ordinary, the remote, the horrible: the ordinary in The Night Watch, the remote in Gauguin’s painting, the horrible in Grunewald’s; the inhuman precision of Mantegra’s conception exaggerates the everyday nature of the crime of the crucifixion, planted as the cross is in the geological stratas supporting a city; while Tintoretto behind a room whose marble floor is littered with kitchen utensils, shows dim divine presences lurking behind a busy crowd of eating men who seem unaware of their radiant halos.
Each of these paintings (with the possible exception of the Gauguin) is too vast and too stark for comfortable acceptance. Each is too full of the facts of our condition to be accepted with anything less than delight. These pictures are not tragic. Tragedy depends on the feeling that death has perhaps the last word. It is a literary conception. In these paintings life and vacuity, pain and struggle and man’s phenomenal persistence are shown as fundamental, eternal, and limitlessly generative. That is why I think them epic paintings.
A Report to the Trustees
The original of this is also a sheaf of lined fullscap pages folded together, covered with my manuscript in ink. It was written in 1959 over a year after my return from an unhappy trip to Spain. I took many months to turn the events into a careful account of facts without overemphasis. The result was a piece of prose so professional that the trustees thought it was fiction. 25 years later, having run out of ideas for short stories, I used it to fill my space in a book of stories I was sharing with my friends, Agnes Owens and Jim Kelman. This anthology was first suggested to me by a Quartet Books editor, but published by Bloomsbury in 1985 with the overall title Lean Tales, which is now long out of print.
IAPOLOGIZE TO THE TRUSTEES OF THE BELLAHOUSTON TRAVELLING SCHOLARSHIP AND TO MR BLISS, the director of Glasgow Art School, for the long time I have taken to write this report. Had the tour gone as planned they would have received, when I returned, an illustrated diary describing things done and places visited. But I visited very few places and the things I did were muddled and absurd. To show that, even so, the tour was worth while, I must report what I learned from it. I have had to examine my memory of the events deductively, like an archaeologist investigating a prehistoric midden. It has taken a year to understand what happened to me and the money between October 1957 and March 1958.
On learning I was awarded the scholarship