A Riff on Art (and Life)

Garth Williams, Stuart Little at Gramacy Park. An illustration for Stuart Little, 1945, by E. B. White

When I was a kid, I loved pictures. I loved Garth Williams’s illustrations for Stuart Little, John R. O’Neill’s Oz drawings, and the paintings Arthur Rackham made for The Wind and the Willows. That’s just the top of the list. I loved the funny papers, the frontispieces to the Hardy Boys books, Thomas Hart Benton’s Persephone, and much, much more, including certain billboards. I also loved to make pictures. I was what the other kids called “a good drawer.”  So was my sister Mary Curtis, who became an artist and has a large and devoted following in the Bay Area. I did not become an artist and have never wondered why. I had the talent or signs of it, and my fascination with visual images was intense. Why, then, didn’t I become an artist? Prior to that personal mystery is a larger one. Why do we like pictures of things? Why do we need them? Whatever the need, it is persistent.

Paleolithic Europeans drew pictures of bison on cave walls. In ancient Athens, painters turned out scads of paintings, not one of which survives. Yet we can read about them in the contemporary commentary that did come down to us. On the assumption that a good picture reveals the essence of the thing pictured, the Elder Philostratus said that “Whoever does not revere painting does an injustice to true reality.”  So here is an answer to the question. We make pictures—or look at them—to get a glimpse of the Real with a capital “R.”   For millennia, writers and artists have been offering variants on this explanation. Art, said Picasso, “is the lie that tells the truth.”  This is a celebrated idea, shimmering under a patina of authority, but I don’t buy it.

Arthur Rackstraw, Mole and Rat in the Wild Wood. An illustration for The Wind in the Willows, 19808, by Kenneth Grahame

I didn’t pore over a picture of Rat and Mole trudging through the Wild Wood because I thought it would deliver the Truth. Nor did I think that the scene was in any way Real or even real with a small “r.”  And I never believed I could find truth or reality of any sort in a poured and spattered painting by Jackson Pollock (aside from the literal fact of pigment, which certain Minimalists made such a fuss about). I am not sure what matters to me in pictures, abstract or figurative. And I don’t know why I haven’t tried until now to figure out what it might be. It seems that I have spent decades upon decades looking at pictures in an unquestioning state of enchantment.

Doing my best to look with disenchanted eyes, I have come to see pictures—or the ones I like—as evidence that a crucial freedom has been exercised. This is the freedom to play around with the familiar look of world, a freedom a book illustrator enjoys in collaboration with an equally inventive writer. A picture maker says of the world, yes, it is what it is, but it can also be something more, and that something more might be generated by the subtlest, most elusive tinge of sensibility.

Fairfield Porter, Long Island Landscape with Red Building, c. 1962

Setting aside Aruthur Rackham’s talking animals and Jackson Pollock’s strange, still-unassimilated ways of restructuring space, think of Fairfield Porter’s realism. We could see his Long Island Landscape with Red Building, from the early 1960s, as a straightforward record of what met his eye one summer afternoon, and that would not be wrong. Yet it would be incomplete, for Porter is no literalist; he quietly transforms whatever he sees. You could say that he has supplied a dull scene with a subtle but strong charge of feeling. Or he has endowed brute fact with refinements of meaning. For decades, I have made remarks along those lines, and I have only recently realized that feeling and meaning can hide from us the picture-maker’s freedom to make of things whatever he or she wants to make of them. Pictures offer the chance to feel that freedom and this, I believe, gives them their deepest attractiveness.

Of course, some pictures are more attractive than others, yet the exhilaration built into the very idea of freedom permeates the very idea of making a picture. I remember feeling that exhilaration when I sat down to a blank sheet of paper in the art classes I attended when I was young. And I realize that it has persisted, largely unnoticed, throughout my career as an art critic. Having noticed it, I see no limits to its domain. Rackham remade the flora and fauna of the English countryside. Late in his career, J. M. W. Turner converted the solid world to luminous vapor. And in Utopia, 1516, Thomas More reshaped human society. Picture makers share their freedom with political visionaries. All right, an accountant or a corporate executive or a mechanical engineer might say, I don’t disagree. But what good is this freedom?

The question is dismissive but fair. Why, after all, must we take seriously a freedom that flourishes chiefly in works of the imagination that wield little or no worldly power? Right-wingers accuse Hollywood of colluding with liberal operatives to advance an un-American agenda, but that’s just conspiracy theorizing. Movies do not shape policy. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, 1979, gives a relentlessly awful series of twists to the idea that war is hell, but he did not cure the United States of its war-mongering ways. We love movies for their spectacular inventions, not for a socio-economical-political efficacy they have never possessed. Likewise, novels, poems, plays, paintings, and sculptures have no impact on ordinary life. They have their impact on us as individuals in those extended moments when the seductively unreal whisks us away from ordinary life. Having said that, I am going to contradict myself.

Writers in the mainstream press keep reporting evidence that “serious” novels enhance their readers’ capacity for empathy. And surely the increased visibility of minorities and gay people in movies, television shows, and ads has eroded at least somewhat the foundations of bigotry. We call pop culture escapist and so-called high culture offers escape routes of its own. Still, art and life are not absolutely separate realms. Here and there, the barriers between them are permeable. At the end of my “Art and Life” post I suggested that, seeing how a landscape by Domenichino is, “we see how the world might be. For his painting recommends in its tactful way that we envision universal equality; it suggests, further, that our vision might foster the feelings, attitudes, and actions that would make the world a better, more equitable place.” 

So, having wended my way through Stuart Little’s imaginary Manhattan, Rat and Mole’s Wildwood, Oz, and the medium-sized city of Bayport, home to the Hardy Boys, I am going to suggest that art can improve things. But only if we let it. The first step is to do something I have only in recent seasons begun to do: become conscious of the freedom exercised by picture makers and other artists. Call it consciousness-raising, an acknowledgment that the hope of experiencing this freedom is what draws us to works of the imagination in the first place. The next step is to set imaginative freedom to work in daily life. This is difficult, so difficult that powerful voices have been saying since the 1830s that it is impossible—that works of art are autonomous and self-enclosed, hence irrelevant to life. Or life is irrelevant to art. But that can’t be so. Art is not just part of life; it is a redemptive part. Anyway, that is what I want to believe and do believe at my most optimistic.