The following is the second of four parts of a condensed proto-draft of a future lecture on expression in contemporary art. The first part appears as my previous blog post:
Previously we considered some basic features of philosophical accounts of the concept of art and of the roles that expression does or might play in them. Although there is little plausibility to the idea that an artifact’s possessing or embodying expression or expressiveness is either a necessary or sufficient condition for the artifact’s being a work of art, the thought that expression in some sense often contributes to some of the kinds of meaning and significance characteristic of works of art seems more promising. As we saw, the philosopher Richard Wollheim considered ‘expressive seeing’, the capacity to see a bit of nature as embodying or expressing some emotion, as one of the three great perceptual capacities, along with representational seeing and visual pleasure, that artists recruit from and elaborate upon in building up artistic meaning. Now in the modern period of the arts, from roughly the year 1800 through the 1950s, the appeal to a particular kind of expressiveness is overwhelming dominant in characterizing both the distinctive powers of the arts and their most valuable instances. On the classic account given by the literary scholar M. H. Abrams, there emerges in 1800 in the poet William Wordsworth’s Preface to his volume Lyric Ballads the ‘expressive theory’, which is first stated as a definition of poetry: Wordsworth writes that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” that is, of the feelings of the poet, which are then expressed in the poem. By 1833 the philosopher John Stuart Mill has developed this into a philosophical conception of poetry: (a) lyric poetry is “more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other”; (b) the best kind of poetry is ‘natural poetry’ wherein human feeling enters more intensely than in other kinds of poetry; (c) the aim of the best kind of poetry is not the depiction of the world, but rather of the poet’s state of mind in contemplating the world; and (d) the best poetry is fundamentally a soliloquy, where the primary audience of the poem is the poet herself; other readers besides the poet may be entranced by the poem and pay homage to the poet, but their responses, whether positive or negative, play no role in determining the value of the poem. (Abrams, pp. 21-26) Perhaps the clearest statement of the expressive theory, and one that was most influential in the first half of the twentieth-century, was that given by Leo Tolstoy in his late work What is Art? Tolstoy defines art (Section V) as “that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” And similarly to the way Mill connected the definition of art with an account of artistic value, Tolstoy continues (Section XV): “The stronger the infection the better the art is as art, regardless of its content—that is, independently of the worth of the feelings it conveys. Art becomes more or less infectious owing to three conditions: (1) the greater or lesser particularity of the feeling conveyed; (2) the greater or lesser clarity with which the feeling is conveyed; and (3) the artist’s sincerity, that is, the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself experiences the feelings he conveys.” For Tolstoy the third condition is the most important, as the particularity and clarity of the feelings expressed in a work flow from the artist’s sincerity in initially feeling.
This basic conception of the expressive theory is prima facie afflicted by two overlapping implausibilities, as was frequently noticed. First, the basic conception perhaps requires, and certainly implies, that the artist must be in the grips of the emotion expressed in her art work during the conception and creation of the work. But the testimony of history counts against this, as when a happy poet produces a melancholy poem (the crudeness of the example, as evidenced in the use of the terms ‘happy’ and ‘melancholy’, is not atypical in the discussions of the theory). Secondly, the basic conception of the expressive theory seems to require that the feeling expressed in the finished work was experienced by the artist with the same identity, and the same degree of determinacy and detail, prior to the artist’s making the work. This seems to disallow the intuition that artist’s frequently discover what the work expresses in the very process of making the work. More developed versions of the expressive theory will then take into account these objections, and allow that the artist need only be familiar with the feeling or emotion to be expressed, and not necessarily in the grips of it; and that the feeling or emotion expressed in the work may be an elaboration and developed version of what the artist was initially familiar with. But whether in its basic or developed conception, the expressive theory can plausibly thought to underlie and legitimate much prominent visual art of the first half of the twentieth-century. The art critic Roger Fry, for example, testifies in 1920 to the importance of Tolstoy’s statement of it in sweeping away the concern for beauty in the visual arts, and replacing it with a focal concern upon the artist’s sensibility, her feelings, emotions, and moods, and how these might be expressed in the creative process and in a finished work of art.
In 1948 the art historian Meyer Schapiro delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Value of Modern Art’, ostensibly in response to a series of public attacks on modern art by the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the president of the United States. These worthies denigrated modern art as respectively “meaningless and pornographic” and “unhealthy.” In response Schapiro offered a defense of modern art in the form of a stylistic analysis, first characterizing the typical subjects and manners of treating those subjects, then uncovering aims and assumptions of the art. (Schapiro, pp. 134-141) The typical themes of modern art are (i) “things that belong to the direct experience of the eye . . . that part of our everyday world that we experience simply by looking at it,” such as landscapes, domestic interiors, and beautiful human beings; (ii) “the world of the artist,” especially the artist’s studio and its contents; (iii) “the consciousness of art itself,” paradigmatically in abstract paintings such elements as colors, lines, spots, and patches; and (iv) “the world of the self,” including the artist’s feelings, dreams, and free associations. The typical manners of rendering these themes are likewise four: (a) the work exhibits “a most vivid sense of its making,” as with the visible and isolated touch or stroke; (b) the work foregrounds “the concreteness of the surface,” so that the work manifests itself not as it were something to be looked through, but rather to be looked at, so as to register “a new frankness and directness of expression;” (c) the work is pervaded with a new sense of ‘randomness’, so that the composition “looks undesigned, independent of any a priori scheme;” and (d) the work foregrounds the activity of ‘transformation’ so “that we are aware, simultaneously, of a raw material that has provided certain themes or elements of form and the final processed result, in such a manner that both are somehow preserved in the work.” There’s a great deal further that could be said about this analysis, which strikes me illuminating, indeed profoundly penetrating; but for our purposes I can only turn to Schapiro’s further consideration of what assumptions are made in the very practice of modern art, if something like this stylistic account is accurate. Schapiro follows the analysis with a consideration of the change in taste represented by modern art. He notes that along with the rise of modern art itself “more of the art of the world is accessible to modern art than was available in the past.” (p. 146) What made this change of taste possible was the prior acceptance of two aesthetic principles basic to modern art: “first, that any mark made by a human being, any operation of the hand, is characterized by tendencies toward form, toward coherence . . . [and] Secondly, every such product of the human hand or the human personality has what we call physiognomic qualities. It is felt by us instantly as a piece of the soul or the self that produced it.” This widespread acceptance of something like this second principle must underlie the plausibility of the expressive theory; as already in the early formulations of Mill and others, the work and the sensibility (or ‘soul’ or ‘self’) of the artist are of the same substance, and so one can reliably infer back from a perceived, expressive work to artist’s sensibility and the expressive, meaning-bearing aspects of the creative process.
If something like Schapiro’s account is accurate for the period immediately after World War II, then it has something of the character of the flight of the owl of Minerva, the bird of wisdom that flies at dusk; for this deeply entrenched practical ideology of modern art that consists of adherence to the two basic aesthetic principles, and which is manifest in the seemingly common-sense character of the expressive theory, collapses in the following decade or two. In the next part of the lecture, and so in the next blog post, we’ll consider the direct assault on the expressive theory in the work of Andy Warhol from 1962-64, then the more nuanced rejection represented by the early theater and installation work of Nam June Paik and, perhaps most illuminatingly, in the trajectory of the career of the painter Frank Bowling.
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References:
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953)
Roger Fry, Vision and Design (1920)
Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Value of Modern Art’ (1948) in Worldview in Painting—Art and Society (1999)
Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (1897)