Landscapes. John Berger
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exactly
And their thoughts.
How else save with a knowledge of men
Can you wage the fight of your class?
I see all the finest among you
Impatient for knowledge, making
Observation more keen
Thus adding again to itself.
Already the best of you learn
Those laws which govern
The living together of men,
Already your class makes ready
To overcome all that hindering you
Stands in the way of mankind.
Here is where you
Acting and working,
Learning and teaching,
Can intervene from your stage
In the struggles of our time.
You with the intentness of your studies
And the elation of your knowledge
Can make the experience of struggle
The property of all
And transform justice
Into a passion.
Revolutionary Undoing: On MaxRaphael’s The Demands of Art
SOME FIGHT BECAUSE they hate what confronts them; others because they have taken the measure of their lives and wish to give meaning to their existence. The latter are likely to struggle more persistently. Max Raphael was a very pure example of the second type.
He was born near the Polish–German border in 1889. He studied philosophy, political economy and the history of art in Berlin and Munich. His first work was published in 1913. He died in New York in 1952. In the intervening forty years he thought and wrote incessantly. Only a fraction of his work has been published, and most of that is out of print and unobtainable. He left thousands of pages of manuscript which his widow and friends are ordering and hoping to publish. Their subject-matter ranges from palaeontology to classical architecture, from Gothic sculpture to Flaubert, from modern city planning to epistemology.
For five years I tried to interest European publishers in his work. In vain. A fact which I mention only because in a few decades it will be hard to remember how unknown and unrecognised Max Raphael still was in 1969.
His life was austere. He held no official academic post. He was forced several times to emigrate. He earned very little money. He wrote and noted without cease. As he travelled, small groups of friends and unofficial students collected around him. By the cultural hierarchies he was dismissed as an unintelligible but dangerous Marxist: by the party communists as a Trotskyist. Unlike Spinoza he had no artisanal trade.
To appreciate the possible role of the book under review,1 we must be clear about the present situation of the arts. (Nobody who is not prepared to grapple with fundamentals should approach the book.) It is a situation of extreme crisis. The validity of art itself is in question. There is not a significant artist in the world who is not asking himself whether his art is justified – not on account of the quality of his talent, but on account of the relevance of art to the demands of the time in which he is living.
Raphael quotes a remark of Cézanne’s in the context of a quite different analysis:
I paint my still lifes, these natures mortes, for my coachman who does not want them, I paint them so that children on the knees of their grandfathers may look at them while they eat their soup and chatter. I do not paint them for the pride of the Emperor of Germany or the vanity of the oil merchants of Chicago. I may get ten thousand francs for one of these dirty things, but I’d rather have the wall of a church, a hospital, or a municipal building.
Since 1848 every artist unready to be a mere paid entertainer has tried to resist the bourgeoisation of his finished work, the transformation of the spiritual value of his work into property value. This regardless of his political opinions as such. Cézanne’s attempt, like that of all his contemporaries, was in vain. The resistance of later artists became more active and more violent – in that the resistance was built into their works. What Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and so on, all shared was their opposition to art-as-property and art-as-a-cultural-alibi-for-existing-society. We know the extremes to which they went: the sacrifices they were prepared to make as creators; and we see that their resistance was as ineffective as Cézanne’s.
In the last decade the tactics of resistance have changed. Less frontal confrontation. Instead, infiltration. Irony and philosophic scepticism. The consequences in Tachism, Pop Art, Minimal Art, Neo-Dada, and so on. But such tactics have been no more successful than earlier ones. Art is still transformed into the property of the property-owning class. In the case of the visual arts the property involved is physical; in the case of the other arts it is moral property.
Art historians with a social or Marxist formation have interpreted the art of the past in terms of class ideology. They have shown that a class, or groups in a class, tended to support and patronise art which to some degree reflected or furthered their own class values and views. It now appears that in the later stages of capitalism this has ceased to be generally true. Art is treated as a commodity whose meaning lies only in its rarity value and in its functional value as a stimulant of sensation. It ceases to have implications beyond itself. Works of art become objects whose essential character is like that of diamonds or sun-tan lamps. The determining factor of this development – internationalism of monopoly, powers of mass-media communication, level of alienation in consumer societies – need not concern us here. But the consequence does. Art can no longer oppose what is. The faculty of proposing an alternative reality has been reduced to the faculty of designing – more or less well – an object.
Hence the imaginative doubt in all artists worthy of their category. Hence the fact that the militant young begin to use ‘art’ as a cover for more direct action.
One might argue that artists should continue, regardless of society’s immediate treatment of their work: that they should address themselves to the future, as all imaginative artists after 1848 have had to do. But this is to ignore the world-historical moment at which we have arrived. Imperialism, European hegemony, the moralities of capitalist-Christianity and state-communism, the Cartesian dualism of white reasoning, the practice of constructing ‘humanist’ cultures on a basis of monstrous exploitation – this entire interlocking system is now being challenged: a world struggle is being mounted against it. Those who envisage a different future are obliged to define their position towards this struggle, obliged to choose. Such a choice tends to lead them either to impotent despair or to the conclusion that world liberation is the precondition for any new valid cultural achievement. (I simplify and somewhat exaggerate the positions for the sake of brevity.) Either way their doubts about the value of art are increased. An artist who now addresses the future does not necessarily have his faith in his vision confirmed.
In this present crisis, is it any longer possible to speak of the revolutionary meaning of art? This is the fundamental question. It is the question that Max Raphael begins to answer in The Demands of Art.
The book is based on some lectures that Raphael gave in the early 1930s to a modest adult education class in Switzerland under the title ‘How Should One Approach a Work of Art?’. He chose five works and devoted a chapter of extremely thorough and varied analysis to each. The works are: Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire of 1904–06 (the one in the Philadelphia Museum), Degas’s etching of Madame X Leaving Her Bath, Giotto’s Dead Christ (Padua) compared with his later Death of Saint Francis (Florence), a drawing by Rembrandt of Joseph Interpreting Pharaoh’s Dreams, and Picasso’s Guernica. (The chapter