Shaw on Art

SHAW ON ART THE ART CRITICISM OF BERNARD SHAW is his first sustained publication. It gives some indication of his eclectic taste in art and his ability to cope with a specialized subject. In this criticism certain interests which he was to develop are also evident. That Shaw had the innate gift of expression is undoubted. Yet this talent had to be reinforced throughout his work by inquiry, diligence and application. The roots of his critical ability developed in his childhood. Neglected, one who had to create his own world, Shaw absorbed the arts by practicing them as well as he could. Though his attempts to be as great a painter as Michelangelo were frustrated by his obvious incompetence in the medium, he explored the National Gallery in Dublin thoroughly. Thus he learned art the only way one can, as he said, by looking at pictures. His dramatic improvisations and the musical abnosphere of his home, provided by his mother and her teacher, also laid the base for his later work in these fields. When supplemented by incessant writing practice, studies in economics, extensive debate and speech-making, the critic turned into the dramatistphilosopher . Seemingly by chance but actually by character, Shaw seems throughout his critical writings to be between movements in the arts. He always championed the new developments. At first in art and music, he accepted whatever appealed to him of the old method. In his drama reviews, however, he refused to accept the theater he subjected to his attacks. In this case, he had to scuttle an old drama to make way for his own. This was not required in the earlier areas of art or music in which Shaw had no intention of working permanently. The art world of the late 1880's included the last remnants of academic studio painting from the early part of the century, fading to its long deserved rest. The dominant forces were the final flowering of the once triumphant pre-Raphaelite movement which was waning before the ever growing tide of Impressionism. The chief English figures in this struggle as Shaw sees it were Edward Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt of the pre-Raphaelites, and James McNeill Whistler of the avantgarde . Shaw dispenses little praise to the academicians. Occasionally he commends a praiseworthy attempt, or takes time to indulge in a close description of the latest grandiose Meissonier or some other effort, but this is the extent of his indulgence. For pre-Raphaelitism Shaw had great respect, as practiced by its leading painters. His ideal in art147 148 MODERN DRAMA September was best served by painters of this school. They devoted- great skill and effort to portray in ultimate detail, stories or figures which upset no susceptibilities and conveyed a message of inspiration, if not directly, at least indirectly by the strength of their purposeful dedication to the discipline of their craft. If Shaw had a hero in this series on art it would be Edward BurneJones . Shaw accepted the pre-Raphaelite criteria in art of a return to the colorful, craftsmanlike simplicity of the 13-15th centuries, before Raphael. He applauded their attempt to reproduce in modern times the accomplishments of the early Italian masters. In Burne-Jones Shaw saw talent placed at the service of a lofty ideal, not one based on the crassness and fraud of the romantic ideals later attacked by Ibsen and himself. It was a true ideal of skilled craftsmanship and application resulting in the critic's eyes in a triumphant vindication of the modern potential to emulate the past and surpass it. Shaw followed Burne-Jones' work in the theater in his later criticism, and was aware of how the sincerity and merit of his sets and costumes tended to dominate the sterile pageantries and displays of the repertoire of Henry Irving. The high seriousness of the artist, instead of just setting the stage, swept aside the shabby romanticism of the actor and displayed the hollowness of an art in which background and costume had conquered the essence of the drama, the words. Thus Burne-Jones and his associates were following the Shavian standard of art as didactic in their sublimation of technique...