Byzantine IX-XIIIth Century, Florentine XIVth and XVth Century, and the
Contemporary Movement.
To say that the artists of the movement insist on design is not to deny
that some of them are exceptionally fine colourists. Cezanne is one of
the greatest colourists that ever lived; Henri-Matisse is a great
colourist. Yet all, or nearly all, use colour as a mode of form. They
design in colour, that is in coloured shapes. Very few fall into the
error of regarding colour as an end in itself, and of trying to think of
it as something different from form. Colour in itself has little or no
significance. The mere juxtaposition of tones moves us hardly at all. As
colourists themselves are fond of saying, "It is the quantities that
count." It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his
colours, and the combinations of those shapes, that we recognise the
colourist. Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form. It is
a virtue in contemporary artists that they have set their faces against
the practice of juxtaposing pretty patches of colour without much
considering their formal relations, and that they attempt so to organise
tones as to raise form to its highest significance. But it is not
surprising that a generation of exceptionally sweet and attractive but
rather formless colourists should be shocked by the obtrusion of those
black lines that seem to do violence to their darling. They are
irritated by pictures in which there is to be no accidental charm of
soft lapses and lucky chiaroscuro. They do not admire the austere
determination of these young men to make their work independent and
self-supporting and unbeholden to adventitious dainties. They cannot
understand this passion for works that are admirable as wholes, this
fierce insistence on design, this willingness to leave bare the
construction if by so doing the spectator may be helped to a conception
of the plan. Critics of the Impressionist age are vexed by the naked
bones and muscles of Post-Impressionist pictures. But, for my own part,
even though these young artists insisted on a bareness and baldness
exceeding anything we have yet seen, I should be far from blaming a
band of ascetics who in an age of unorganised prettiness insisted on the
paramount importance of design.
III
THE PATHETIC FALLACY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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