Purity and Propaganda in Art

PURITY AND PROPAGANDA IN ART A. F. B. CLARK T HE Demon of the Absolute presides sardonically , over our age. The eternal tendency of the human spirit towards polarity (in ' popular language "to go to extremes") has been extended from the ordinary affairs of life to the higher spheres of politics and philosophy. One must be either a hundred per cent. , Nationalist or an Internationalist, a Capitalist or a Communist , a belated Victorian or an anticipatory Utopian, a N eo-I-Iumanist or a Naturalist, a believer in "pure science" or "applied science." Every phase of human activity is regarded as having a positive or a negative pole, around one of which all self-respecting particles feel it their duty to collect. In the intellectual sphere the tendency takes the form of assigning narrow and exclusive fields to certain kinds of mental activity, of fencing them off from human activity in general. The white radiance of life is being broken and scattered in fragments by the Absolute's dome of many-coloured glass. In questions of art opinion is tending to crystallize around the poles of ((pure art" and "propaganda." "Pure art" has its degrees of "purity," 'as I shall show presently, but in its "purest" form it is represented in painting by the "abstractions" of Picasso, in sculpture by the works of Brancusi, in music by the "pseudo-classic" compositions of Stravinsky, and in literature by the later: works of Gertrude Stein. These, being the extremest expressions of "purity," serve best to define the concept. In such works it is useless to look for an imitation of life or nature, for an expounding of ideas or even an expression of feeling; they appeal solely to what the believers in pure art call "the aesthetic sense." This 567 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLYsense (whose existence some aestheticians would deny) is a sense of pure form, of design.or rhythm; and this "pure form" differs from mere ornament (like designs in wallpaper or on carpets) in being "significant" (hence "significant form"). If you ask for an interpretation of a sample of 'tpure art," the answer is that it is of the essence of "pure art" that its meaning can be conveyed only in its own ·mediulTI; if it could be expressed in language , in logical terms, it would cease to be "pure art" and would become philosophy or religion or story-telling. How did this theory of "pure art" arise? I t is simply one aspect of the characteristic modern tendency to pre- -cipitate the salt from the liquid that holds it in solution. Before the middle of the eighteenth century there was no systematic study of the concepts "art" and "beauty." The Renaissance understood the ancients to have maintained that the arts, particularly poetry, existed faT moral ends, and .this was the generally accepted view down to the nineteenth century, Many treatises were -produced on the art of poetry and of the dranla, and some also on the technique of the plastic arts; but before the eighteenth century no attempt was made to discover what function poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, _ music, etc., have in common that justifies us in speaking of them all inclusively as "art" and that separates them out from all other activities of the human spirit. As a result of the speculations of Vico, l(ant, Schiller, and the Schlegels, the early nineteenth century had come to recognize in man an aesthetic faculty, quite distinct from the cogni tive facul ty on the one hand and the moral faculty on the other. Thus "art" became an autonomous activity, and this idea was pushed to its logical conclusion by the ((Art for Art's sake school." Radical as this school seemed to the Victorians with its divorce of art 568 PURITY AND PROPAGANDA IN ART [rOln morality, it was nevertheless relatively conservative in its adherence to the traditional view that art is imi tation . The last stage in the development of "pure art" came with the post-impressionists in painting and the symbolists in poetry, who asserted their right to distort the appearances of the natural world and the processes of logical thought, in order, as they...