Finally, the red horse provides a further variation. The very
words put us in another atmosphere. The impossibility of a red
horse demands an unreal world. It is possible that this
combination of colour and form will appeal as a freak--a purely
superficial and non-artistic appeal--or as a hint of a fairy
story [Footnote: An incomplete fairy story works on the mind as
does a cinematograph film.]--once more a non-artistic appeal. To
set this red horse in a careful naturalistic landscape would
create such a discord as to produce no appeal and no coherence.
The need for coherence is the essential of harmony--whether
founded on conventional discord or concord. The new harmony
demands that the inner value of a picture should remain unified
whatever the variations or contrasts of outward form or colour.
The elements of the new art are to be found, therefore, in the
inner and not the outer qualities of nature.
The spectator is too ready to look for a meaning in a picture--i.e.,
some outward connection between its various parts. Our materialistic age
has produced a type of spectator or "connoisseur," who is not content to
put himself opposite a picture and let it say its own message. Instead
of allowing the inner value of the picture to work, he worries himself
in looking for "closeness to nature," or "temperament," or "handling,"
or "tonality," or "perspective," or what not. His eye does not probe the
outer expression to arrive at the inner meaning. In a conversation with
an interesting person, we endeavour to get at his fundamental ideas and
feelings. We do not bother about the words he uses, nor the spelling of
those words, nor the breath necessary for speaking them, nor the
movements of his tongue and lips, nor the psychological working on our
brain, nor the physical sound in our ear, nor the physiological effect
on our nerves. We realize that these things, though interesting and
important, are not the main things of the moment, but that the meaning
and idea is what concerns us. We should have the same feeling when
confronted with a work of art. When this becomes general the artist will
be able to dispense with natural form and colour and speak in purely
artistic language.
To return to the combination of colour and form, there is another
possibility which should be noted. Non-naturalistic objects in a
picture may have a "literary" appeal, and the whole picture may
have the working of a fable. The spectator is put in an
atmosphere which does not disturb him because he accepts it as
fabulous, and in which he tries to trace the story and undergoes
more or less the various appeals of colour. But the pure inner
working of colour is impossible; the outward idea has the mastery
still. For the spectator has only exchanged a blind reality for a
blind dreamland, where the truth of inner feeling cannot be felt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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