Friday, April 6, 2012
Clive Bell on Impressionism's Paganism
The New Republic will from time to time reprint old essays on various subjects. Here is a 1923 piece by the formalist art critic Clive Bell, whose ideas about the nature of aesthetic experience have always seemed to me nearly universally wrong. That notwithstanding, I found his discussion in this piece of the connection between impressionism and paganism to be illuminating — one of the most concise explanations for why I have always disliked impressionism with such great intensity. A bit:
The cultivated rich seem at last to have discovered in the impressionists what the impressionists themselves rediscovered half by accident. They rediscovered paganism—real paganism I mean—something real enough to be the inspiration and content of supreme works of art. Paganism, I take it, is the acceptance of life as something good and satisfying in itself. To enjoy life the pagan need not make himself believe that it is a means to something else—to a better life in another world for instance, or a juster organization of society, or complete self-development: he does not regard it as a brief span or portion in which to do something for his own soul, or for his fellow creatures, or for the future. He takes the world as it is and enjoys to the utmost what he finds in it: also, he is no disconsolate archaeologist spending his own age thinking how much more happily he could have lived in another and what a pagan he would have been on the banks of the Ilissus. No, paganism does not consist in a proper respect for the pagan past, but in a passionate enjoyment of the present; and Poussin, though he painted bacchanals galore, would have been quite out of place in the world of Theocritus. Your true pagan neither regrets nor idealizes: and while Swinburne was yearning nostalgicly for “the breasts of the nymph in the brake,” Renoir was finding inspiration for a glorious work of art in the petticoats of the shop-girls at the Moulin de la Galette.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/04/clive-bell-on-impressionisms-paganism.html
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Marc,
I’m not an unabashed enthusiast of Impressionism as a movement or particularly fond of many Impressionist paintings, but I nonetheless have a hard time understanding how someone might, with “great intensity” no less, dislike its products. So I decided to carefully consider Bell’s argument and came away rather disappointed and therefore thoroughly unpersuaded. And while it is usually gratifying to have someone concisely articulate one’s visceral response to some idea, subject matter, object, event, what have you, I think Bell was a quite over-the-top in his assessment. I find it hard to criticize the Impressionists in toto for helping us better see or appreciate the light and color of our (or their) everyday world, for it seems they’re here being castigated for looking upon what God and man have created, and finding it “very good” (cf. Genesis 3:1). And while Bell proclaims “[y]our true pagan never regrets or idealizes,” he must not have been thinking of the pre-Islamic poets of the Bedouin tribes who did both in ample measure. The social and cultural impact of the Impressionists’ putative celebration of life did not run deep: witness the unprecedented brutality and carnage that made up the next century’s carnival of death, World War I. Apparently the elites of European civilization found it easier to revel in death than life. And I rather think that it is not the case that the human subject frequently found in Impressionist paintings, a pagan par excellence one would surmise, “took life as it is,” and was thus constitutionally unable to regard life “as a brief span or portion in which to do something for his own soul, or for his fellow creatures, or for the future:” look again at Morisot’s “The Cradle,” or the women and children in Cassatt’s works (indeed, the general subject matter itself), I’ve always been intrigued about the young woman in Manet’s “Pflaume:” What is she thinking? And why do we care about what’s on her mind? Or spend some time with “A Philosopher” and tell me again this signifies nothing but “passionate enjoyment of the present“ (and yet there is, I think, nothing intrinsically wrong with that, as our Buddhist friends who have assiduously cultivated practices of ‘attentiveness’ would remind us). I might proceed with more evidence for the defense, but I trust this can suffice to at least suggest that Bell may have been profoundly wrong on many counts here, albeit enabling us to better understand why the term “Puritan“ has become a purely pejorative epithet.