• Thinking Eyes
Paul Klee : The Thinking Eye. Edited by Jarg Spiller. (Lund Humphries, 17 17s. 6d.)
Barbara Hepworth, By J. P. Hodin. (Lund Humphries, £4 10s. 6d.)
The Work of Graham Sutherland. By Douglas Cooper. (Lund Humphries, £4 4s.) No doubt the war interfered with the proper spread of the reputation of Lyonel Feininger. Is he a name even to most people? I should doubt it; and should admit at once that 1 had no adequate idea qf his stature until I read the text of this picture book by the director of the York Art Gallery. I missed the Feininger ex- hibition in London last year, but I do not recall that it excited London and set us exclaiming that Feininger is one of the major masters of our century. But he is.
Like Whistler, he was an American who was made an artist by Europe. He left America at sixteen in 1887, only returning as a refugee after fifty years. First he was a comic draughtsman. Then he developed an art of luminous planes, melancholy and grand, a colourist, a humanist, a modernist, creating pictures as independent dynamic events. But reviewing an art book isn't reviewing the artist. So first I should say that this is a definitive book, as much as possible, next that it reproduces most of Feininger's mature work, and some of his most thrilling masterpieces in good colour, and third that the text, a synthesising account of Feininger's life, thoughts, objectives and development, is one of the most distinguished and subtle I have ever read about a modern artist.
Whereas an expressionist enlarges himself in the world, says Hans Hess, this great artist en- larged the world in himself, transformed natural colour into pictorial colour, natural form into pictorial form, creating glowing works—Fein- inger-works, not nature-works or window-works —on an immense scale, incidentally reshaping Turner, it might be said (Turner was a favourite artist of Feininger's), according to man and form. No one who reads this account of Fein- inger will have an excuse for misunderstanding any more the modern revolution in art; and I doubt if it can be read without feeling that one is in direct touch with a man of the highest degree and without being moved to tears by Feininger's steady, confident, entirely justified dedication of himself, and by his old age of advance.
; He was one of the 'masters' of the Bauhaus. , So was Klee. He worked by necessity. ('Need ! Produces the artist,' Feininger remarked, `luxury ; Produces the cesthete.) So did Klee. Both knew . what their inexplicable beings were up to. This Klee volume, more than 500 pages, with many drawings and pictures, consists of his Bauhaus lectures and teaching notes. The eye thinks, • astonishingly, coMpletely, wittily. The eye analyses the visible in its effects—form, rather, in its effects, dynamic, statie; accented, unac- cented; quality, quantity; chaos, disorder; and SO on. 'All pictorial form begins with the point that sets itself in motion.' This is a handbook on taking the handcuffs off creativity and letting il work. Anyone again who wants to be sure he understands modernism should read in this book Klee's 'Creative Credo' and his 'Ways of Nature Study,' and learn how `Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible,' though 'for the artist, dialogue with nature remains a conditio ' •sine qua non'—how the artist is 'more than an improved camera . . . more complex, richer, and wider . . . a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole, that is to say, a creature on a star among stars.' Also how in the arts 'Ethical gravity coexists with impish tittering at doctors and priests.'
I know writing about modern art is difficult, calling for precision in terms and unusual cer- tainty in claim and style. But Mr. Hess on Feininger, and Klee (though Klee is one of the remarkable men of all time), and others, show It can be done; which being so, I find it hard to understand why Miss Hepworth and Mr. Suther- land were not dismayed by the texts their authors provided for them, and why they did not forbid their appearance. It does not illuminate the not very abstruse virtues of Miss Hepworth's I sculpture to write like a classical hyperbolist ! at a speech day in 1910 celebrating Alma- ' Tadema. I admit the artist doesn't help her advocate by her own unguarded verba sacra such as 'I believe in the continuity of life,' or 1 :I...ife will always insist on begetting life.' But , n would need many more of these to explain so , Much vatic sillybillyism in an account which never pauses to clarify Miss Hepworth's virtues bY some attention to her obvious defects (which include a certain uneasy head-heaviness, as if each piece were subject to upset).
Mr. Douglas Cooper writes, I nearly said, more persuasively. He. doesn't do the vatic aet, be is more fluent, though an ugly writer, in this exposition of Graham Sutherland, of an English drab, chalk-swollen with cliches, and weak with Washing-machine or labour-saving words (especi- ally instinct and mystery). In a way, things go Well in this big book, dates and plates, and so forth, Mr. Cooper sensibly calls Sutherland an anthropomorphic (i.e., expressionist) nature Painter; he says that his purpose is 'to isolate and make visible the workings of that common Principle of growth and decay' which relates an and nature.
But he seems unable to praise with- out an occasional concurrence of sneer. He has to define Sutherland by a side-swipe at Moore; he has to define him as nature artist by a larger sneer at the 'typically-English' view nature—i.e., that nature is agreeable. Is it necessarily better, one has to ask, to select out °f the dialogue with nature, in a manic way, °Illy the ominous and the prickly, to relieve them (If their bravura, and to celebrate or elevate not I n fact the growth, but the death which they fand we) contain?
GEOFFREY GRIGSON
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