Art's the thing to make men angry

 By Dr. EMERY BARCS

THE timeless war between conservative and progressive artists flared up again violently a few days ago, when 70-years-old Sir Alfred Munnings, president of the Royal Academy and a specialist in painting horses, mocked the holiest names in modern art, such as Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Rouault, and Chagall.
Sir Alfred's rude remarks about his fellow artists may have shocked the uninitiated. But members of the artistic trades and their hangers-on —the more or less (mostly less) expert aestheticians and critics, the snobbish connoisseurs, and the holders of stern artistic opinions— have dived with gusto into this renewed battle between old and new.
THE heat of a debate between, let's say, Messrs. Bevin and Vishinsky at a United Nations meeting is mild compared with the white-hot hatred of arguing artists.
If the verbal venom which artists of different schools splash over one another were arsenic, there would probably be enough to poison the entire population of a big metropolis. You will remember the "Dobell case" fought in the Sydney Equity Court in October and November, 1944.
In 1944 the trustees of the National Gallery awarded the Archibald Prize of £500 to William Dobell's portrait of Joshua Smith. The decision shocked Australian conservatives. Two "old school" artists. Miss Mary Edwards and Joseph Wolinski, went to court to restrain the trustees from paying the award to Dobell.
Some hard words were bandied. Mr. Wolinski said after the judgment: "From the very outset of this case we had no other purpose, motive, or interest than to assist the cause of art and help to rescue it from debasement by the moronic imported vogues which are now undermining the basis of artistic criticism in this country."
The term, "academic art" comes from the French Royal Academy, which Cardinal Mazarin founded in 1648. In 1665 Colbert, one of the greatest statesmen in French history, decided that the Academicians should hold periodical exhibitions. The first of these was held in 1667.
At first these exhibitions were held in the galleries of the Royal Palace in Paris, but in 1699 they transferred to the Salon carre du Louvre. The name of the Paris Salon, the main centre of painters' exhibitions, is an abbreviation of that name.
One of the Academicians, Le Brun, compiled a manual for the guidance of painters, based upon the achievements of ancient Greek and Renaissance Italian masters. This manual standardised picture making. Every deviation from the set norms was anathema to the conservative artists and their public.
The Royal Academy of Arts in London, founded in 1768, followed the spirit of the French Academy. It was also diehard conservative, and artists who tried to break through the wall of conservatism found themselves up against well-organised forces.
In 1819. for instance, a gifted French painter, Gericault, exhibited a picture called The Raft of the Medusa. Critics and fellow-artists attacked this now recognised masterpiece so violently that Gericault swore he would never paint again. Fortunately he changed his mind and painted many more pictures which are now treasured in galleries throughout the world.
Baron Gros, another Frenchman, got such an acid reception at the 1835 Salon with his painting Hercules and Diomede that he committed suicide.
Corot (1796-1875), one of the greatest geniuses of art and one of the founders of Impressionism (a school that aims to give a spontaneous impression of a scene as it was on the very day or hour the artist saw it), couldn't sell a picture until he was 50. Critics denied that he had even the smallest trace of talent.
To one who remarked that he painted a tree where there was no tree and asked for the reason, Corot said: "Shh — it's a secret. Don't give it away. I put it there to please the birds."
When at last Corot sold his first picture he seemed inconsolable, and said: "Until now I have had a complete collection of Corots. Now, alas, it is broken!"
By the eighteen sixties a whole army of painters had produced pictures which were far from the Academic standards. Yet the jury of the Salon still refused to admit them.
Emperor Napoleon III was more liberal and had more commonsense than the French conservative artists. He suggested that those whom the Salon jury had refused should exhibit their works in a separate room — the Salon des Refuses (Salon of Rejects).
In 1863 Manet exhibited here his wonderful Breakfast on the Grass, showing two artists and two nudes. Critics and fellow-artists worked up so much public resentment against this picture "suggesting that at artists' picnics women might doff their clothes" that Manet had to escape through a side door to avoid a beating.
Two years later it was necessary to provide a guard to protect Manet's Olympia from destruction by furious Citizens and to keep them beyond spitting distance. To-day both paintings are considered masterpieces and classics.
In 1877 Ruskin— that pedantic and once so overrated English critic — wrote of an exhibition by James McNeill Whistler in the Grosvenor Gallery:
"The Gallery should not have admitted works in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approaches the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen and heard much of Cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."
Whistler did not take this lying down. He sued Ruskin for libel— and won.
By 1886 Whistler was recognised as a "fair" artist and the Royal Society of British Artists elected him its president. But the following year, when he was certain of not being re-elected. Whistler remarked: "The artists had come out and the British had remained."
Of the first great Impressionist exhibition in Paris, in 1876, which included pictures by Cezanne, Pissaro, Renoir, Degas, and Manet, the critic of Figaro wrote:
"An exhibition said to be of paintings has opened. The innocent visitor enters and a cruel spectacle startles him. Here five or six lunatics have elected to show their pictures, There are visitors who burst into laughter when they see these objects, but for my part, I am saddened by them."
Of the same exhibition the Chronique des Arts wrote: "They display the profoundest ignorance of drawing, of composition, of color. When children amuse themselves with a color-box and paper they do better."
When Cezanne opened his first one-man exhibition the critic of the same magazine wrote that it was "a nightmare of atrocities in oils, going beyond legally authorised outrages."
TODAY we can hardly understand how the contemporaries of a Van Gogh could so ignore him that when he died at the age of 37 he had sold only one picture or how people could ridicule Gauguin and auction his masterpieces to satisfy an unpaid fine after his death in Tahiti. Gauguin's last painting brought the equivalent of about seven shillings. Today it is worth thousands.
Art has not stopped with the Cezannes, Manets, Van Goghs, and Gauguins. Since their time we have had many schools and movements, such as futurism, dadaism, cubism, surrealism . . . Picasso, whom Sir Alfred Munnings would like to kick, is one of the greatest representatives of the contemporary vogue called "abstract art," an arbitrary arrangement of color reflecting the artist's reactions to more or less (mostly less) clearly defined objects.
Are these artists faring better than their revolutionary ancestors of the last century?
In many ways they are. But I can't help thinking that the real reason why a Picasso; a Dali, or an Epstein (to mention only a few) can thrive financially as well as artistically is not so much that critics appreciate art better but that they fear to repeat past mistakes.
Few critics today would like to run the risk of going down in the history of art as in competent morons and unappreciative boors.
One thing, however, is certain. There is no absolute authority on art. What is good and bad must be left to the artist himself. He may commit errors, he may fail. But only through his errors, failures, and successes can creative art develop and reach new heights.
And this is why totalitarian suppression or restriction of freedom for artist, writer, or musician is so dangerous for the future of human culture.
The Nazis or Communists who tell the artist what to do and how to do it and persecute him if he doesn't comply with their standards are not only barbarian oppressors of freedom, but the worst enemies of human development.
The real artist "either makes music as he wants to or he makes no music." Let him battle, let him be passionate, irate, and self-righteous, and let him solve his own problems.
But don't kick him. Because by kicking him you may kick yourself into hopeless stagnation and decline.

Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW : 1931 - 1954), Saturday 7 May 1949, page 14