What is Painting? by Julian Bell

Author:Julian Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2017-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Bodies

All these progressive initiatives – the freeing of colour from form, the freeing of painting from imagery, the freeing of art from the frame – proceeded more or less organically out of what we might call the deep-mind scenario, the prospect opened up by Romanticism. They pitted art against the unwelcome outcomes of the shallow-mind scenario – the dead, inorganic accretions of ‘soul-less’, exploitative science and industry, the ‘long reign of materialism’ that Kandinsky deplored. In the 20th century, a new art – one that might be able to make its peace with science, an art based on proven laws of colour – would transform all that.

But there is another way of looking at the deep mind. The above scenario insists that mind extends beyond self; that it wells up from somewhere beyond the area in which I am me. But the springs feeding that well of mind need not be divine: they can be related to nature in another way, as part of its material organization. The mind is an organ of the body.

To arrive at such a description of the mind has been, and continues to be, one of the main aims of science. In the 19th century, it was the distant prospect opened up by Darwin’s work; while Helmholtz in his Physiological Optics aimed to account for vision as a part of the functioning of the body. Freud, working from the 1890s, dug further – behind the eye, and behind consciousness. Labelling the zone hidden beyond the scanning reach of the spirit the ‘unconscious’ or the ‘id’, he related this area to the biological functioning of the human animal.

From the 1920s onward, Surrealist painters leant on scientific psychology for a rationale as they claimed to construct pictorial bridges to the unconscious, and hence to the physical roots of the person. Self-possession was, in a sense, under attack: Salvador Dalí’s trompe l’oeil renderings of deliquescent flesh were meant to undermine it, even while asserting the painter’s own mastery. Other Surrealists, notably Joan Miró, explored techniques of rubbing, scratching, smearing, dribbling and blotting that brought the painting closer to being a record of the painter’s physical presence. Encountering such work, you rubbed up against excitations, irritations and discharges.

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