This
paper, which began life as a graduate seminar presentation at the Courtauld
Institute of Art, was delivered in the version published here at City
University of New York Graduate Center
in 1995. Later it was published in edited form under the same title
in Charleston Magazine,
(Spring/Summer 1998), the journal devoted to studies of the
Bloomsbury Group.
As a member of the Bloomsbury
Group, which played a special role in the genesis of British psychoanalysis,
Roger Fry looked at psychoanalysis for what it could tell him about
aesthetic experience, but seems largely to have resisted its implications
for his subject. This need not surprise us. Formalism - of which Roger
Fry is a crucial early exponent - eschews anthropological or social
considerations as well as issues arising from the artist's biography.
It aspires to exclusive examination of plastic qualities in a work,
and often actively denigrates content. When it turns its attention to
historical developments it does so in terms of other works within the
same medium. Examination of response is equally protected from the murky
intrusions of psyche or culture, assuming the viewer to be passive and
disinterested. And yet by the end of his career Fry began to admit the
potential appliction of psychoanalysis to art criticism.
Fry was the first in a line
of British art critics to do so. In fact, there is a lively strand,
which includes such figures as Herbert Read, Adrian Stokes, and later
in the century, Peter Fuller, for whom psychoanalysis of one school
or another is a key factor in their aesthetics. One could add the philosopher
Richard Wollheim to this list. Fry's interrogation of psychoanalysis
laid the agenda for his successors. But Read, Stokes, and Fuller are
critics with an uneasy relationship towards formalism. They are unwilling
to jettison the primacy of direct experience of the art object established
by Fry, but are equally drawn to describe, and ultimately theorize,
the motivating force behind art's creation and appreciation. They wish
to keep the baby of significant form while throwing out the bathwater
of reductivism that gave rise to such a notion.
In using the word "resistance"
in relation to Fry's uneasy examination of psychoanalysis I imply a
significance that goes beyond a tantalizing failure to connect - tantalizing
from the point of view of the intellectual historian noticing the Bloomsbury-Freud
nexus and the subsequent developments in British art criticism. Of course,
the word "resistance" is all the more loaded because of its
psychoanalytic application.
Fry's formalism
- Freud and Bloomsbury
While Fry's formalist critical
theory was very close to that of his friend Clive Bell, who was responsible
for the catchphrase "significant form", Fry arrived at a formalist
position more reluctantly. As late as 1909, in his "Essay in Aesthetics",
Fry admits that the "emotional element of design", while first
apprehended at the level of sensation and perception, is enormouly enhanced
when merged into the subject represented: nature, or the human body.
Certainly, in the same essay, Fry goes to great lengths to dissociate
art from morality, striking at the bedrock of Ruskin's aesthetics, which
still held currency. Fry sharply contrasts the realm of imagination
to which art belongs as a contemplative, disinterested object from that
of action, predicated on instincts and implicated in morality. Fry's
initially connoisseurial interests - from 1905-1910 he was connected
with this city's Metropolitan Museum, as curator and then advisor -
influenced his formative theoretical reading: Bernard Berenson, Heinrich
Wölfllin (whose work he helped introduce into England); and Giovanni
Morelli, the guru of connoisseurial attribution. Freud himself remarked
upon his affinity with Morelli whose system relied on unconscious betrayal
and little clues.
For Bell, the "thrill"
of recognising significant form was the end in itself - and, incidentally,
was an inherited faculty, not one which could be cultivated. Fry's pursuit
of "plastic values", by contrast to the epicureanism of Bell,
had an ethical dimension, comparable to the scientist's search for truth,
and in his review of Bell's Art (1914) (in The Nation March 7, 1914)
he insisted that the ultimate nature of aesthetic experience still eludes
us, "as indeed it may well do for some centuries to come".
He posits a something extra, "an x in the equation", which
makes art special. "Is it not just the fusion of this something
with form that makes the difference between the finest pattern making
and real design? For the most ingenious and perfect pattern - a pattern
which we judge to be absolutely impeccable - has not significance, while
some quite faulty and stumbling efforts possessing this other thing
in them move us profoundly."
Fry was propelled towards
more formalist definitions by the fierce antagonism that received his
seminal exhibitions, "Manet and the Post-Impressionists",
1910, and its sequel two years later, both at the Grafton Galleries.
With these exhibitions, which introduced Cézanne, Gauguin, Signac
and Van Gogh to London, and such contemporaries as Picasso, Matisse,
and Derain, Fry jepordised his well-earned position as an expert on
the old masters, secured with his pioneer studies in Renaissance painting
(such as Giovanni Bellini in 1899). There was, nonetheless, a reciprocal
relationship between his advocacy of contemporary painting and his work
on the old masters, and his personal tastes were consistently with the
"Classic", as he called it. Art is classical if it "depends
on its formal organisation in order to arouse emotion" according
to Fry.
If passion for Cézanne
was rooted in his love for Italian Primitives and for Poussin, Claude,
and Chardin, David Carrier has suggested in his book, Artwriting that
Fry's formalist reading of these old masters was in part related to
his efforts to champion Cézanne. In a strictly architectonic
analysis of Poussin's "Achilles discovered among the daughters
of Lycomedon" Fry claims the "boring" story is designed
to force a fuller concentration on the "brilliant" composition.
To Blunt's comment that this would have left Poussin "speechless
with indignation", Carrier insists that an iconographical account
"would have made Poussin seem very different from the Cézanne
Fry admired." Today, because Cézanne is an admired master,
and much is said about the content of his pictures, such formalist analysis
would be unhelpful. "The very success of Fry's rhetoric has helped
to make his account seem dated."
The scientific frame of argument
is persistent in Fry's artwriting, and must relate in part to his early
interests in science. He grew up in a Quaker household that had little
time for the visual arts, but as a boy he shared with his father, the
judge and international lawyer Sir Edward Fry, a passion for science,
which he took as the first two parts of his unfinished tripos at Cambridge.
(He was always proud of the fact that his great-grandfather Luke Howard
wrote a treatise on clouds and corresponded on that subject with Goethe.)
Fry tended to use pseudo-scientific phrases like "inevitable relations"
and "plastic purity", and believed one could ensure a "fresh"
and disinterested frame of mind before a picture. This scientific attitude
attracted him to a range of psychological research, but would also prove
a stumbling block specifically in relation to psychoanalysis. Fry's
open mindedness towards new ideas was fully in accord with the Bloomsbury
spirit, and we can note his friendship with William James in America
and his sympathy with Behaviourist psychology. Indeed, it has been suggested
that the idea expressed in his "Essay in Aethetics" that the
perceptual senses make dual, conflicting demands for order and variety
possibly derived from readings in Behaviourism. Positive predictions
of the future contribution of psychology to aesthetics are scattered
in his writings.
Despite the conceptual bias
suggested by his taste for Cézanne and Poussin, Fry placed greatest
importance on spontaneity and intuition. His preference for classic
art as he conceived it was fully commensurate with his appreciation
of children's art and primitive art (he was a pioneer in the promotion
of both) and with his idealisation of races and individuals living life
more fully than modern western man. In correspondence about his honeymoon
in North Africa quoted by Virginia Woolf in her Fry biography, Fry observes
the ecstatic dances and feats of self-injury of the Isa Weir sect, the
only explanation for which can be "some sort of auto-suggestion...
Their religion prevents them from bothering about a future life so they
actually live and enjoy instead of preparing to enjoy as we do."
A crucial element of Fry's
formalism was the idea of aesthetic emotion, that is to say a frame
of mind, a response, particular to the aesthetic experience, one that
is positive and pleasurable; in contrast is the violently negative,
painful reaction in the realm of dramatic association. In the "Retrospect"
to Vision and Design, he comments on his own earlier description of
Giotto's Pietà, the sort of picture in which he is worried that
"we are liable to have our aesthetic reaction interfered with by
our reaction to the dramatic overtones and implications". He questions
whether such emotions form a "chemically pure" compound -
the scientific simile is his - or are "merely mixtures due to our
confused recognition of what goes on in the complex of our emotions".
"[A]t present I should be inclined to say that this fusion of two
sets of emotion was only apparent and was due to my imperfect analysis
of my own mental state. Probably at this point we must hand over the
question to the experimental psychologist." Revealingly, he wrote
in The Athenaeum's 1919 debate on art and science: "The emotion
which accompanies the clear recognition of unity in a complex seems
to be so similar in art and in science that they are psychologically
the same." The most promising reference to psychoanalysis per se,
as opposed to its rival psychological systems, had to wait until the
Last Lectures, the Slade lectures at Cambridge in 1933-34, which were
published posthumously.
Introspection and frankness
in matters of sexuality were hallmarks of the Bloomsbury Group, of which
Roger Fry was a forceful member, so it should come as no surprise that
"the new psychology", as psychoanalysis was called, found
fertile ground among this milieu. Several peripheral members of the
group played an important role in the foundation of the British Psychoanalytical
Society: Adrian Stephens, for instance, younger brother of Vanessa Bell
and Virginia Woolf, threw in his studies in medieval law to become one
of the society's first analysts, together with his wife Karin Costelloe
Stephens. Lytton Strachey's younger brother, James, and his wife, Alix,
became the principal translators of Freud into English; James became
editor in chief of the Standard Edition in 1924 after Freud's break
with Otto Rank, who had planned English publications from Vienna. James
Strachey and Ernest Jones approached the Woolfs, who eagerly undertook
the project. The only policy of their Hogarth Press was "to refuse
to publish anything unless we thought it worth publishing", according
to Leonard, who would also declare in his memoirs: "I am, I think
not unreasonably, rather proud of having in 1914 recognised and understood
the greatness of Freud and the importance of what he was doing at a
time when this was by no means common." Reviewing The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life in 1914 he came to the verdict that "...there
is a substantial amount of truth in the main thesis of Freud's book
and that truth is of great value." When in 1933 Virginia Woolf
answered the inquiries of a German scholar interested in the influence
of Freud on novelists that she was aquainted with Freud "only in
the ordinary way of conversation", her answer was misleading, in
view of the level of conversation she could have with her husband, brother,
and sister-in-law.
In explaining Bloomsbury's
receptivity towards psycho-analysis, it has been claimed that "Freud
begins where G.E.Moore leaves off in the famous last chapter of Principia
Ethica" (Philip Rieff). Moore's radical philosophy appealed to
Bloomsbury for its rationalism, and its elevation of the aesthetic life,
positing as it did that "the most valuable states of mind are those
we associate with the contemplation of beauty, love and truth",
as Quentin Bell has put it. It should be stated, however, that Fry's
time at Cambridge predated Moore, whose great influence was on the generation
of Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey. Indeed,
he had already published his "Essay in Aesthetics" before
he came into contact with the Bloomsbury Group, via Bell in 1910. But
rationalism, an optimistic view of human nature, a willingness to question
received notions, and the idea of emotions appropriate to specific objects
are common to Moore and Fry.
On one level, Moore's philosophy
may have prepared Bloomsbury for Freud but it was also a source of Bloomsbury's
ambivalence towards psychoanalysis. As Maynard Keynes later observed,
the view of his set towards the unconscious, sexuality, and neurosis
was "intellectually pre-Freudian"; they breathed "a purer,
sweeter air by far than Freud cum Marx", for they were "water-spiders,
gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of
the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath."
This characterization of the Bloomsbury mind rings true with Fry's view
of the unconscious. In her reconstruction of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's
response to Freud, Jan Ellen Goldstein (1983) points out that, despite
Leonard's claim to have become a Freudian in 1914, it did not occur
to him to turn to psychoanalysis during Virginia's nervous breakdown
at that time. Indeed, until her suicide in 1940, Virginia continued
to follow the "rest cures" - ie weight gaining - prescribed
by conventional psychiatrists. Her own attitude to Freud is particularly
fraught and contradictory; I have already mentioned her reticence to
admit any interest in Freud. She in fact put off reading Freud until
her penultimate year, and references in earlier reviews tend to be disparaging.
She could not identify with Geoffrey Faber's psychoanalytically informed
1934 biography of Cardinal Newman which attributed his nervous breakdowns
to repressed inner conflict between ambition and masochism, her diaries
reveal. The conflicts she identifies in her own life are external, conscious
ones, say between "the effort to live in two spheres - the novel
and life", or between critical and creative thought. As Goldstein
puts it, "The idea of repressed conflict - the idea in essence
of not knowing her own mind - is flatly denied and apparently very distasteful
to her".
"The
Artist and Psychoanalysis"
In his 1924 lecture to the
British Psychological Society, "The Artist and Psycho-analysis",
(published that year as a Hogarth Essay by the Woolfs) Fry pursued to
its utmost the rationalist aspect of his formalism, couching his arguments
in metaphors and examples for a scientific audience, the majority of
whom would would still have been suspicious of psychoanalysis.
Just as "one would give
the enquirer a strange idea of the functional importance of the brain
in the economy of the body if one only stated that it was originally
part of the skin," so Freud's perfectly plausible theory of the
origin of language in the sexual grunts primeval men exchanged for fun
while engaged on menial labours hardly explains its current function,
"to serve ... precisely those activities which are most completely
removed from the instinctive life." So too "the purely animal
and instinctive" origins of art are remote from its current reality.
And appealing to the sound scientific principle that the subject under
investigation must be a pure example, otherwise an extraneous element
might be taken for a general feature, Fry whittles down most of what
would be taken for the visual arts til arriving at its "pure"
essence: advertising, however well executed; fashion, however formal
the concerns of its makers; and most of the products to be found at
the Royal Academy go. Most art appeals to the emotions through association.
"On the other hand, in each generation there are likely to be a
certain number of people who have a sensitiveness to purely formal relations",
and these are the only works that tend to outlive their times, which
is how most of the received canon of old-masters, he implies, are sources
of significant form. The two kinds of artist, pure and impure, are so
diametrically opposed that if they are to be subjected to psychological
tests, the findings, he begs his audience, must be kept in seperate
pigeon holes.
It is obvious how, from this
position, the ruminations of Freud and his followers were in for trouble.
To start with Freud himself, Fry quotes in full the famous passage about
artists in the twenty-third of Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(the most widely read of his books, available in English before Strachey
set to work) in which art is described as a rare path that leads from
fantasy back to reality. Artists, Freud says, generally have introverted
dispositions, and are not far from neurosis. They are endowed with a
strong capacity for sublimation and laxity in the repressions which
in others would cause conflict. He might also have "instinctive
needs which are too clamorous", longing for worldly and libinal
pleasures. When these are denied to him, therefore, he turns to art
and creates in fantasy what he wants in reality. As the artist can fashion
an actual work from his fantasies, these appeal to others who have only
their day-dreams; they buy his work, and so "he has won - through
his fantasy - what before he could only win in fantasy: honour, power,
and the love of women." This, for Fry, is almost the very definition
of an impure artist, the Bohemian of popular imagination, whereas "almost
all the artists who have done anything approaching first-rate work have
been thoroughly bourgeois people - leading quiet, unostentatious lives,
indifferent to the world's praise or blame."
Fry gives C.G.Jung particularly
short shrift for his treatment of artists in Psychological Types of
1921 (it was translated in 1923, the year before this lecture, demonstrating
how quickly Fry digested psychoanalytical texts). The description of
Oriental artists all being introvert and Western artists extrovert is
especially risable to Fry, who was passionate about Chinese art and
not racially determinist in outlook. By contrast, Herbert Read's "Psychoanalysis
and the Critic", in The Criterion the following year, is especially
enthusiastic about Jung's typological theories, the mainstay of Read's
application of psychoanalysis to criticism before the war.
Oskar Pfister, the Swiss
pastor and early disciple of Freud who belonged to an enduring tradition
of encouring patients to draw as part of their therapy receives equal
opprobrium. From an item such as "The Bridge of Death" by
one of his patients which illustrates an elaborate dream scenario Pfister
is able to generalise that "artistic or poetic inspiriation is
to be regarded as the manifestation of repressed desires". "Everything
was present" writes Fry about this drawing: "poetic creation,
substitution, dramatization. The most intensive use was made of symbolism."
Everything, Fry adds, "except the faintest glimmer of any artistic
feeling". For "precisely in proportion as they were valuable
as indications of the patient's dream life, they were worthless as indications
of the nature of real art." And now he comes to the crux of his
argument with psychoanalytic explorations in art: that symbolism, with
which psychoanalysis in its search to cure neuroses is so concerned,
is inimical to the work of real artists. He quotes Mallarmé "...the
spirit of Gautier, the pure poet, now watches over the garden of poetry
from which he banishes the dream, the enemy of his charge." Unlike
Bell, who confined his theory of significant form to the visual arts,
Fry was adamant in the applications of formalism to literature, ideas
which inspired Virginia Woolf. He says here that in a world full of
symbolism, there are two classes of men working against it: artists
and scientists, "since they alone are seeking to make constructions
which are completely self-consistent, self-supporting and self-contained,
... which ...appear to have ultimate value and in that sense to be real."
Aesthetic
Emotion
Just as Fry was drawing attention
to the limitations of psychoanalysis, so formalism itself was under
attack. Whereas the opposition to his Post Impressionist exhibitions
came from the reactionary camp, his new critics came from a vanguard
position. I.A.Richards, in his seminal Principles of Literary Criticism
(1924) set out to exorcise the "phantom aesthetic state",
insisting that "psychology has no place for such an entity."
He traces the formalist's notion of disinterested, universal, aesthetic
pleasure unrelated to ordinary emotions back to the Kantian division
in which aesthetics belongs to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure,
divorced from the faculties of knowledge or desire. Philosophically,
such ideas are discredited, argues Richards, but they still permeate
artistic criticism. Ominously, Richards insists that, "when so
many other divisions in psychology are being questioned and reorganised,
this also may be re-examined", hinting at an incompatability between
formalism and psychoanalysis.
Clive Bell's riposte to this
assault was in character: "What induces the mood in which the first
shock [of recognising significant form] is received? As I am an aesthete
and not a psychologist it is no part of my duty to answer." As
for Fry's response, as Kenneth Clark put it: "far from abandoning
his pure aesthetic state in face of attack, he has made it purer still
[into an] [u]ltimately ...mystical, we might even say a Pythagorean
aesthetic." His 1926 volume, Transformations, from which the almost
provocatively formalist reading of Poussin cited by David Carrier earlier
is taken, contains an essay, "Some Questions in Esthetics",
which answers Richards. In seeking to show the differences between pure
and impure works of art - "a distinction which Mr Richards has
the good fortune to be able to ignore" - as well as the correspondence
of psychological and plastic aspects, Transformations looks at caricature,
religiosity, sentiment and so on, in Daumier, El Greco, Picasso, Courbet,
Rembrandt, coming to the conclusion that "A great deal of very
precise and detailed representation may yet envisage purely plastic
and spatial expression". In other words, in the face of opposition,
Fry intensified his commitment to formalism.
From his protégé
the French literary critic Charles Mauron Fry borrowed the idea of "psychological
volumes" as part of his campaign of expansion for formalism. In
The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature, Mauron had suggested that
if the element in painting which most excites aesthetic emotion is that
of spatial volume, "any kind of spatial construction which may
further contain other volumes seen in plastic relief" to quote
Fry, then in literature the equivalent would be all forms of the inner
life, "spiritual or psychological realities". "In other
words", to quote Linda Hutcheon, author of a study of Mauron, "volume
in the plastic arts provokes reaction in the same way that content -
that is, the sense of words and the psychological reality they define
- does in literature". Fry considers this an "ingenious analogy",
but his cautious adoption of the phrase "psychological volumes"
(which neither he nor Mauron would pursue further in their writings)
fails to conceal that Mauron was signalling a point of departure from
his mentor, and was soon to discard aesthetic emotion in his gradual
path to psychoanalysis. Fry had introduced the young Frenchman to Bloomsbury,
translating his first two books into English, The Nature of Beauty already
cited and Aesthetics and Psychology (1935). This latter uses Fry himself
as an example of the self-critical amateur whose "ordered exposition"
of his tastes and their development provides evidence for the psychologist.
Mauron in return was the French translator of Virginia Woolf, D.H.Lawrence
and E.M.Forster, and collaborated with Fry in his translations of Mallarmé.
Having earlier been inspired
by the formalist ideas of Fry, Mauron went on eventually to construct
his method of "psychocritique", combining Freudian notions
with semiotics in an attempt at what he claimed to be scientific criticism.
This was well before the ascent of Lacan in France, and his approach
did not cut much ice. That someone at first sympathetic to Fry should
then move on to Freud, taking with him some of the idealism of his earlier
allegiance, is interesting. Naturally, it would be tempting to draw
some comparison between his development and that of Read and Stokes,
the "inclusivist" critics mentioned earlier. But there are
more recent, American critics whose case is more strikingly comporable.
I am thinking of Michael Fried, and to a lesser extent Rosalind Krauss,
both of whom began their careers as formalists in thrall of Clement
Greenberg only later to develop more complex, deconstructive critical
methods that absorb psychoanalysis. It makes Fry's resistance to psychoanalysis
all the more tantalizing to consider the appeal of psychoanalysis to
critics formed on formalism. Might this be because psychoanalysis does
to content what formalism does to form? That psychoanalysis and formalism
are both inherently deconstructive?
Kenneth Clark's characterization
of Fry's intensifying notion of pure plasticity in the face of criticism
could be bolstered by biographical considerations. Indeed, there have
been attempts to characterise Fry's thought, his daring championing
of new forms but within a preference for the classical, in terms not
only of personal character, but events in his life. Thus, following
the confinement of his wife, Helen, to a mental institution in 1910,
while he was in the very thick of his work on the first Postimpressionist
exhibition, his biographer Frances Spalding comments that "from
then on a horror of madness made all the more compelling Fry's search
for meaning, purpose, and reality in art. It is not surprising that,
having witnessed mental disintegration, the bias of his artistic taste
was towards the classical and well ordered, towards an art built upon
'significant form'." In the year of "The Artist and Psychoanalysis",
1924, Fry experienced a repeat in miniature of his tragedy with Helen.
At the clinic of the psychologist Dr Coué, in Nancy, which he
visited in an attempt to cure psychosomatic stomach pains, he met Josette
Coatmellec, a consumptive of unstable mind. After a fraught relationship
with Fry, Josette committed suicide. Her nervous disposition and their
failure to connect is typified by her extreme fright on being shown
an African mask by Fry which he had just acquired.
Cézanne
Cézanne: A Study of
His Development can almost be read as the case study of Fry's formalism
in resistance to psychoanalysis. As if to signal its proximity to Freudianism,
its opening line declares, "Those artists among us whose formation
took place before the war recognize Cézanne as their tribal deity,
and their totem." Fry's copy (in the Courtauld Galleries) of the
Cézanne self-portrait in the National Gallery is a talisman of
this "projective identification". Cézanne was the oft-stated
hero, alter-ego even, of Fry, who purchased a Provençal "mas"
in St Remy, from the parents of Marie Mauron, and painted there. The
first version of Cézanne consisted of notes in L'amour de l'art
on the Pellerin Collection and was written in French, which accounts,
according to Denis Sutton, for the fluidity and elegance of the writing.
In many ways it was a pioneer study of Cézanne, wresting him
from Impressionism, and perceiving the integration of plane and colour
for the first time.
While Fry was anticipated
by Cubist readings in his approach to the still-lifes, his incentive
for elevating these subjects was different. The apprenticeship to Morelli
tells in Fry's elucidation of Cézanne's "handwriting".
"It is generally in small works thrown off by the way that an artist
reveals the underlying trend of his nature, precisely because such works
are less moulded by deliberate and conscious purpose. In them the profounder
and more unconscious needs have full play." But Fry does not offer
a psychopathology of everyday apples precisely because of the very purity
of those "unconscious needs": the achievement of pure plasticity.
The elevation of still-life represents a conscious inversion of the
academic hierarchy in which subjects redolent with drama, sentiment,
and ideas are placed at the top. The very lack of such distractions
gave Cézanne the full opportunity to find the "reality hidden
beneath the veil of appearances". Unstructured compositions of
landscape are equally a vehicle for "the intellectual part of his
sensual reactions".
Cézanne is propelled
on this heroic course of self-discovery by the failures of his early,
romantic-baroque endeavours to give shape to his sexual and violent
obsessions. He lacks the illustrator skills of a Rubens or a Delacroix
required to achieve such inner visions. Had he been successful with
his orgies and pastorals, Fry wonders at "the extravagence of an
imagery, Hugoesque in its exuberance, and Baudelarian in its cruelty!"
that we would have had. It is our immense good luck, however, that he
was an artworld failure, and that he had a private income to work in
isolation.
As the Cézanne he
presents is one who overcame the obsessions of his youth, who realised
- albeit with reluctance and relapses - his inability to convey emotion
through an a priori design - Fry is forced to marginalise as a recurrence
of romantic subject matter a major aspect of Céanne's œuvre,
the Bathers. "Those of us who love Cézanne to the point
of infatuation find, no doubt, our profit even in these efforts of the
aged artist; but good sense must prevent us from trying to impose them
on the world at large." And work like "The Toilet", (now
in the d'Orsay), despite its rococo lyricism and poise, must also be
isolated from the main thrust of Cézanne's achievement. "...these
exquisite improvisations, much as we should miss their absence, do not
form an important part of Cézanne's contribution to our spiritual
inheritance. Other and minor masters have been more felicitious in the
expression of such erotico-lyrical moods. But the persistence of such
emotions throughout his life, their increasing attraction towards its
close, throw an interesting light on the character of his genius. Cézanne
counts preeminently as a great classic master. We may almost sum him
up as the leader of the modern return to Mediterranean conceptions of
art - his saying that he wished to 'do Poussin again after nature' is
no empty boast. Cézanne, then, was a classic artist, but perhaps
all great classics are made by the repression of a romantic".
This is where Fry seems at
greatest proximity to the Freudian notion of sublimation, but a closer
thinking through of Fry's interpretation of Cézanne reveals the
intrinsic incompatablity of his conception of the unconscious, and Freud's.
Let me repeat, that because of his benign and idealistic outlook - certainly
as compared with Freud's pessimism - the atavism connoted by the primitive,
the classical, and the spontaneous was not, for Fry, regressive. The
lost pastoral idyll in which man is in closer harmony with what he makes
and uses is regained through these agents - the primitive, the classical,
the spontaneous - but only where the maker and viewer are fully attuned
to values of pure plasticity.
Despite Cezanne's stated
intention to re-do Poussin, Fry characterizes his reconnections with
the past as semiconscious. "Poussin pushed his intense feeling
for balance so far that he habitually divided his compositions by a
marked central line or gap - as it were a caesura in the line. And here
we find Cézanne, probably quite unconsciously, doing the same
thing." Elsewhere, Fry credits Cezanne with the "recover[y]
for modern art of a whole lost language of form and colour" - terminology
which places his formalism in tantalizing proximity to psychoanalysis.
Indeed, we may recall Harold Bloom's observation (after Freud) that
tradition is "equivalent to repressed material in the mental life
of the individual".
But for Fry, the unconscious,
if he were to speculate on its character and contents, would not be
the "seething cauldron" of repressions, both personal and
collective, envisaged by Freud; the primitive frame of mind is not one
in which the artist becomes a savage nearer to primal drives and instincts.
These are bypassed as the artist or viewer gains access to a supraconsciousness.
Joachim Gasquet's reported statement of Cézanne's, that "I
will be the subjective consciousness of the landscape, just as my canvas
will be its objective consciousness" was taken very seriously by
Fry, as it would be for different reasons by Merleau-Ponty. The Cézanne
of Fry, of course, differs greatly from the Cézanne that recent
scholars have begun to excavate from the neo-classical encrustations
around him. In 1910 Fry had translated Maurice Denis's essay on Cezanne
for The Burlington Magazine.
With this idea of the classic
artist made by the repression of a romantic, Cézanne comes to
be compared with Flaubert, for their relentless pursuit of truth and
indifference to opposition. "They are both protagonists in that
thrilling epic of individual prowess against the herd which marks the
history of French art in the nineteenth century", says Fry. If
such a conclusion is not altogether anticipated by the formal study
that precedes it, it is fully commensurate with the classical-primitive
idea binding Fry's politics and his aesthetics. In a letter quoted by
Woolf in her biography, Fry writes: "It seems to me that nearly
the whole Anglo-Saxon race, especially of course in America have lost
the power to be individuals. They have become social insects like bees
and ants. They are lost to humanity, and the great question for the
future is whether that will spread or will be repulsed by the people
who still exist, mostly the people round the Mediterranean." Cézanne,
we are never allowed to forget,is a Mediterranean man, while Fry's personal
gravitation in that direction has been noted. The concept of the herd
instinct cited by Fry in this finale was devised by Wilfrid Trotter
whose Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916) was read approvingly
by Bloomsbury. Fry, indeed, was reminded of it when in 1922 he read
Strachey's translation of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
by Freud, who also draws on Trotter's observations. But this does not
cloud the difference between the "well-adjusted ego" of Freud
and its equivalent in the artist-hero of Fry. Even if, somewhat fancifully,
the process of sublimation through an analysis of perception were compared
with the psychoanalytical experience, Fry's "real man" is
one in intuitive dialogue with a classic-primitive continuum of life
altogether rosier than the "normal unhappiness" that constitutes
the Freudian cure.
Last Lectures
An undergraduate at Fry's
first Slade lecture, "Art history as an academic study", would
have been impressed by the emphasis given to the unconscious. It "becomes
more and more clear to modern enquirers", Fry said, "that
what the artist brings to the particular exeperience is much more than
his immediate consciousness of it. His reaction is coloured by all sorts
of subconscious associations and feelings, of which he is naturally
unaware, but which affect profoundly the form taken by the work of art
and which have the power to stir up corresponding subconscious feelings
in the spectator. It is this fact that the work of art acts as a transmitting
medium between the artist's subconscious nature and our own that gives
it its peculiar, and as we say 'magic' power over us." But to a
reader keenly aware of Fry's uneasy commerce with psychoanalysis, his
prediction that aesthetic enquirers will have increasingly to deal with
the psychoanalysts - who "have given us a very strange and disquieting
picture of the contents of this long-unnoticed companion of our conscious
life" - is tellingly qualified. "...they are mainly concerned
with mapping out the most primitive and fundamental part of this entity,
with those emotional patterns which are laid down in the first years
of infancy. These may possibly one day be shown to have a bearing upon
the nature of artistic creation, but we are more particularly concerned
with another aspect, with those parts of the subconscious being which
have filtered down through our conscious life and consist of the abiding
residue of innumberable sensations, feelings, predilections, aspirations,
desires, judgements, in fact all those things that constitute our spiritual
life." Fry manages to foresee with remarkable alacrity the direction
of psychoanalytic interest in aesthetics, it so happens, but what interests
me here is the manner in which, appearing intellectually open, Fry sidesteps
the real intervention of psychoanalysis to insist on an innocent, pre-Freudian
view of the unconscious; to protect pure plasticity, as it were, from
the messiness of primal instincts or complexes.
According to Virginia Woolf,
"the seances at Nancy [the treatment of Dr Coué] had their
share in developing his growing interest in the art of uncivilized races.
'The development of the unconscious in art', he was to write in his
last Slade lectures, 'may bring about a purer and more expressive visual
art and one that is complementary to the intellectual and spiritual
art of the West'. And with Coué in mind he went to the Colonial
Exhibition at Marseilles and exclaimed, on seeing the negroes, 'What
we have lost by forgetting how to be animals!'"
But Woolf trivialises Fry's
primitivism by seeing it in terms of his personal experience of psychotherapy.
We can read past the racist style of Fry's exclamation to see it as
fully commensurate with his idealisation of the primitive state which
we have already discussed, his notion of modernity and individualism.
Fry in fact had a longstanding fascination for non-western art; an essay
on the art of Bushmen appeared in 1910. The reason he looked with renewed
interest at such material at this late stage, and sought to accommodate
unconscious motivation more forcefully within his theory, is that the
Slade lectures represented his first systematic survey of world art,
a project he intended to bring right up to the present day. (He died
after a fall in September 1934, and so the lectures end with the Romans.)
Concerning himself with sculpture
by unnamed makers rather than his own personal selection of paintings
meant that the base of his theory had to expand, most particularly to
take in the formal aspect which he tended to neglect in his concerns
with vision and design, namely surface texture, the maker's touch, the
material. As the formal concern with the realisation of three-dimensional
space in two-dimensions, the problem of "design", had no bearings
on sculpture, attention shifted to the relationship between design and
execution. Fry, who has a predeliction for dualities, manages to map
the division between conscious and unconscious onto his old distinction
of order and variety, the competing psychological desires to which successful
art must appeal. "Design, planning, coordination of the parts on
the whole corresponds more of less with our desire to find order in
things, our sense of immutable law and causation. Sensibility, on the
other hand, corresponds to our desire for variety, multiplicity, chance,
the unforseeable. We may say that the conscious mind tends to a mechanistic
view of things, a view amenable to mathematical statement: the unconscious
brings in the vital element which eludes mathematical statement."
I have no evidence that Fry was sympathetic towards Bergson, but some
connections with his topography do seem to suggest themselves. If the
artwork is an activity located in "real time", then the interaction
between conscious and unconscious, between design and sensibility from
the maker's perspective, order and variety from the viewer's, is effectively
an intuition, somewhere between instinct and intellect. Fry does talk
about "the logic of the senses" here, which corresponds to
the intuition he describes in the case of Cézanne. Bergson or
not, Fry's conception of the unconscious and how it operates in art
is a long way from Freud's.
Conclusion
So far, while charting modifications
in Fry's formalism within an historical evolution, I have tended somewhat
to treat psychoanalysis as a static given. In fact, though, Freud's
theory underwent major revisions in the 1920s, of which Fry shows limited
awareness. Richard Wollheim has pointed out that most of Freud's writings
on art predate his metapyschology, that is to say the charting of a
topography of ego, id and superego, in "The Ego and The Id"
(1923) and the positing of the death instinct as corollary to the life
instinct in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920). These
texts appeared in English in 1927 and 1922 respectively, but Fry seems
to have been unmoved by them. (Read, by contrast, shows himself very
uptodate in the literature in his 1920s writings on psychoanalysis.)
What is even more curious is that Fry did not actually respond to Freud's
essays on Leonardo or Michelangelo, translated in 1922 and 1925.
After his death in 1934,
Fry's own theories have come under the scrutiny of psychoanalysts in
their speculations on aesthetics and the arts. For instance, Ernest
Jones, against the advice of Ernst Kris and Ernst Freud (the father
of Lucian), added a chapter on art to his 1950s biography of Freud.
He accepts Fry's objection that the type of artist devoted to "honour,
power, and the love of women", ("Freud's unhappy phrase"
as Jones puts it) is by definition likely to be a second-rate artist,
adding the gloss of Hanns Sachs observation that by the time of maturity
the conception of an audience is internalized within the artist's superego.
But the insistence that formal values constitute not only an essential
element in art, but the only essential element, is viewed as dogmatic.
Fry's belief that associative emotions, connected with content, are
only added as bait for the layman, unatuned to significant form, is
contrasted with Freud's contrary reckoning that perceptual pleasures
are an "incitement premium", constituting the forepleasure
in art, the climax being the satisfaction of fantasy-longings. (Another
instance, could we not argue, of psychoanalysis and formalism mirroring
one another?)
Hanna Segal, the leading
follower of Melanie Klein, takes Bell's and Fry's ideas very seriously
in her various writings on aesthetics, such as Dream, Phantasy, and
Art (1991) admitting that the notion of significant form is congenial
to her, and that "some of their statements are illuminating and
consistent with the psychoanalytic view" she describes. But Fry's
criticisms of Freud are shown to be reductive, especially after the
metapsychological revisions are taken into account. For instance, his
view of symbolism, which only considers conscious symbols. "He
has no understanding of true, dynamic, unconscious symbolism",
the subject of her book. She contrasts his Mallarmé quote about
banishing dream with Elstir's advice, in Proust, that the cure of a
little dreaming is a lot more dreaming. "If by a dream you mean
a wish-fulfilling phantasy based on the denial of internal and external
realities, then surely Mallarmé is right. But if by dream you
mean imagination - getting in touch as deeply and truthfully as you
can with the contents of your own mind - then Elstir is right."
Segal's Kleinean conception of art as an object belonging to the "depressive
position" in which the baby (and in repeated pattern the adult)
seeks to repair the aggression projected onto the formely split-off
"bad" mother while retaining from the paranoid-schizoid position
that merging of the self with the idealised mother, ultimately reconciles
the formalists' insistence that art is not fantasy, but a reality on
its own terms, with a rescripted version of Freud's view of art as a
path from fantasy back to reality. "Neither dream, day dream, nor
play involve the work, both unconscious and conscious, that art demands.
The artist needs a very special capacity to face, and find expression
for, the deepest conflicts, to translate dream into reality. He also
achieves a lasting reparation in reality as well as in phantasy."
I think Fry anticipates such
a rapprochement in his concluding remarks to "The Artist and Psycho-analysis".
Having arrived at a state of mind in which the most intense pleasure
derives from inevitable relations - the more complex the greater the
pleasure - Fry still wants to understand this emotion; one could say,
to discover the significance of significant form. "...from our
definition of this pure beauty, the emotional tone is not due to any
recognisable reminiscences or suggestion of the emotional experience
of life; but I sometimes wonder if it nevertheless does not get its
force from arousing some very deep, very vague, and immensely generalized
reminiscences." Why else, he wonders, "are we moved deeply
by certain dispositions of space in architecture which refer so far
as we can tell to no other experience". Almost as if taking up
the challenge directly from Fry, Adrian Stokes, in such works as Smooth
and Rough (1951), sets out to explain precisely this aesthetic experience
of architecture psychoanalytically, to "intensify" the saying
that "architecture... is the mother of the arts" "The
building which provokes by its beauty a positive response, rescusitates
an early hunger or greed", says Stokes, who guides his reader through
a history of architecture which reads like a Kleinean case study: "In
a more magniloquent, more uncertain age, though the Baroque searches
for plasticity and movement by means of a broken and omnipotent line,
the agitation still exists within the wall, a violence of lively stones
whose apertures often suggest clamorous or excited or twisted lips:
whereas Alberti's Sant' Andrea at Mantua most clearly embodies a matron-ideal,
capacious, sober, firm; yet no less magnificent."
Cohen on the critics:
John Ruskin: A New York Ruskiniad
Herbert Read and Peter Fuller: Seeing Moore,
the Case of Two Critics
Clement Greenberg: Ornithology for Birds, Greenberg's
"Homemade Esthetics"
David Sylvester: The Golden Lion of English
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