Book by Book (13 page)

Artists have long recognized this need for ambitious work to eschew the cozy and soothing, the expected approach, the conventionally beautiful. This isn't simply a twentieth-century philosophy of shocking the bourgeoisie. “There is no excellent beauty that hath
not some strangeness in the proportion,” said Francis Bacon in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, just as critic Harold Bloom asserted, in the time of Elizabeth II, that “when you read a canonical work for a first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations.” Writing halfway between both, Goethe observed much the same: “All great excellences in life or art, at its first recognition, brings with it a certain pain arising from the strongly felt inferiority of the spectator; only at a later period, when we take it into our own culture, and appropriate as much of it as our own capacities allow, do we learn to love and esteem it. Mediocrity, on the other hand, may often give us unqualified pleasure; it does not disturb one's self-satisfaction, but rather encourages us with the thought that we are as good as another.”

The innovative, then, needs time to be explored and understood. “Great masterpieces,” said Proust, “do not disappoint us by giving us their best first.” And so when you attend a concert or visit a gallery and are confronted by what seems to you ugly or upsetting or incomprehensible, be hesitant about giving it an instant thumbs-down. Yes, the painting may look as if your third grader did it in Day-Glo crayon, the concert sound nothing like Mozart or the Beatles, and yet, just maybe, you are missing the point.
The Rite of Spring
provoked a riot; Jackson Pollock's abstractions were dismissed as jokes. Which of us would have immediately recognized their originality and grandeur? Wait awhile. Only critics on deadline must rush to judgment. I like the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's modest advice: “We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages—stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.”

In 1878 the influential critic, prose stylist, and social visionary John Ruskin attacked James McNeill Whistler for trying to foist off slapdash daubs as works of art and so hoodwink the ignorant public. The painter sued for libel, and the case went to court.

In the most famous exchange during the trial a lawyer snidely asked Whistler, “How long do you take to knock off one of your pictures?” The artist answered that it had taken him one or two days “to knock off” his
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
, a blurry night-scene of the Thames, painted in shades of black, with a few flashes of color from fireworks. Then came the crucial question. Lawyer: “The labor of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?” Whistler: “No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.”

Though Ruskin was required to pay a derisory sum in damages, nothing was truly resolved by the trial. The far-reaching debate about the value of art goes on to this day. Does art have a social or moral function? Or is it autonomous? Does it need to be pleasing? (In his last Slade lectures Ruskin wildly overpraised the saccharine children's illustrations of Kate Greenaway.) Or should it shake us as profoundly as possible, like the “Black” paintings of Goya (e.g.,
Cronos Devouring His Children)
or the sadomasochistic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe? Who can properly judge a contemporary work— only another artist? a critic? the public? the marketplace? Is criticism simply a branch of rhetorical persuasiveness? (“The true work of a critic,” said Ruskin, “is not to make his
hearer believe him, but agree with him.”) In sum, how does one determine value, whether monetary or aesthetic? (At first no one would buy
The Falling Rocket;
years later Whistler sold it for eight hundred guineas; today it is a treasure of the Detroit Institute of Arts.)

Whistler's viewpoint—that art possesses its own inherent form and beauty outside any anecdotal qualities, social concerns, or traditional expectations—harmonizes with received doctrines of high modernism. But why bother with art if it has little or no relationship to life? Because it does, and must. In more recent years an artwork's often unexpressed ideologies, whether political, social, or sexual, have again obsessed academic critics. The pendulum swings, the questions continue.

Once an acolyte came up to Ruskin to tell him how much he enjoyed his writings. “I don't care whether you enjoyed them,” shot back the social prophet and moralist, “did they do you any good?” When a similarly enthusiastic admirer compared Whistler to the great Spanish portraitist Velázquez, the creator of
The White Girl
(in the National Gallery) and
The Peacock Room
(at the Freer) replied with his own typical modesty, “Why drag in Velázquez?”

You pay your money and you take your choice. Ultimately, of course, what matters most isn't simply plumping for one view over the other, but thinking and arguing about the issues raised. By so doing, each of us comes to understand more fully the place of art in our own lives. So look hard, listen closely, and strive, as Henry James urged, to “be one on whom nothing is lost.”

The writer Jeanette Winterson once asked a friend who had a good cellar how she could learn about wine. “Drink it,” he said. This advice is true of all the arts: To learn about music, listen to it, to learn about art, look at it.

Art books, especially those sumptuous
grandes horizontales
of the coffee table, are no substitute for actual paintings, prints, and drawings. After all, only the work of art itself is art; everything else is a copy, merely a pictorial
aide-mémoire.
By its very nature, then, a
Paintings in the Hermitage
, for example, can be only a very big collection of postcards, albeit quite large ones, reminding us of the glories in store for the visitor to Russia. It is usually far better to spend an hour at the nearest museum than an evening looking at color reproductions. But once we've found ourselves drawn to the work of Bronzino or Brancusi, or discovered a passion for seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, we can turn to monographs or albums. Art first, then art books.

Still, anyone who is interested in the visual arts will gather about him or her a small library of critical and scholarly texts. Obviously, there are standard
catalogues raisonnés
for every major painter and movement, and the person who reveres, say, Watteau will want the specialized studies of Donald Posner and Michael Levey, as well as the fat exhibition volume of the Watteau extravaganza mounted by the National Gallery of Art. But there are more general histories and nontechnical works directed toward
the novice art lover and occasional visitor to the concert hall and theater. Setting aside music, which is covered in the next section, here's a very basic starter kit. Nearly all these books can be enjoyed for their prose and the strong personalities of their authors as well as for their insights on their respective subjects:

James Agee,
On Film

Kenneth Clark,
Civilisation; Looking at Pictures

Edwin Denby,
Looking at the Dance; Dance Writings

Ernst Gombrich,
Art and Illusion

Robert Hughes,
Nothing If Not Critical

William Ivins, Jr.,
How Prints Look

H. W. Janson,
History of Art

Pauline Kael,
I Lost It at the Movies; Deeper into Movies

Michael Levey,
Early Renaissance; High Renaissance

André Malraux,
The Voices of Silence

Bernard Shaw,
Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Kenneth Tynan,
Curtains; Tynan Right and Left; Show People

Giorgio Vasari,
Lives of the Most Excellent Sculptors, Painters and Architects

All the arts, famously proclaimed Walter Pater, “constantly aspire to the condition of music.” For not only is music the purest of the arts, this daughter of Mnemosyne is also the most powerful: With his lyre Orpheus could persuade trees to walk and the king of the
Underworld to release the dead. Before Copernicus wrecked everything, people even knew that the sun, stars, and planets were pushed about by angels and that their progress through the sky created the celestial harmony of the spheres.

Today, most concertgoers turn to music for emotion, to feel a rush of exaltation or a pang of melancholy; what Santayana called “a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.” Wallace Stevens says this more beautifully (in the poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier”): “Just as my fingers on these keys/ Make music, so the selfsame sounds / On my spirit make a music too. / So music is feeling then, not sound.”

But to progress beyond mere passive listening, one can at least start by reading some of the more accessible writing about classical music. Classical music? Let me point out that, like many people, I love jazz and popular song and some rock, but in a wholly sentimental fashion, while I believe the work of Bach, Mozart, and Wagner delivers a deeper and more enduring satisfaction. Still, it's “strange how potent cheap music is,” as Noel Coward rather dismissively remarked, and I can come close to tears over oldies and country-and-western heartbreakers. I also know that Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis created enduring and serious masterpieces, and that there are times when a person needs to listen to Art Tatum, Antonio Carlos Jobim, or Billie Holiday. They are amazing artists. In the end, though, no matter what you turn to on the radio or CD player, Nietzsche certainly seems to have gotten it right: “Without music life would be a mistake.”

It's hard, even impossible, to convey the experience of sound through words, especially to a general reader without much
knowledge of composition and theory. So most of us turn to introductory guides, biographies, and collections of reviews.

Luckily, many of our best musical commentators have been lively prose stylists. Pianist Glenn Gould offered radio shows in which he displayed both his convictions and his wit: “One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind.” The famously eccentric Canadian once imagined a fictional musicologist and avant-garde composer Karlheinz Klop-weisser, whose interests included “the resonance of silence,” specifically “German silence, which is of course organic, as opposed to French silence, which is ornamental.”

The conductor and polymath Robert Craft worked as Igor Stravinsky's assistant, adviser, and confidant for many years. His encounters with the Russian master—recorded in the diarylike
Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship
and a half dozen volumes of conversations—can be as lively as Boswell's life of Johnson. After all, Stravinsky knew, and sometimes worked closely with, such varied artistic giants as Rodin, Debussy, Diaghilev, Picasso, Mann, Valery, Cocteau, Auden, and Disney Even Joyce and Proust once attended the same soiree in Stravinsky's honor. (Of course, this sort of thing is hardly unusual for a great musician: On a single stroll down a Paris boulevard in 1840, the composer Liszt ran into Heine, Balzac, Chopin, and Berlioz.)

Nicolas Slonimsky's
Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians
is a mammoth reference book suffused with its compiler's wry personality. Consider Slonimsky's entry on himself, which blithely opens, “A legendary Russian-born American musicologist of manifold endeavors” and goes on: “Possessed by inordinate ambition,
aggravated by the endemic intellectuality of his family on both maternal and paternal branches (novelists, revolutionary poets, literary critics, university professors, translators, chessmasters, economists, mathematicians, inventors of useless artificial languages, Hebrew scholars, speculative philosophers), he became determined to excel beyond common decency in all these doctrines.”

Slonimsky, like Robert Craft in his own critical work, is a ravenous intellectual magpie whose several books on music spill over with odd, believe-it-or-not facts. A poet named Schubart, we learn, was “the author of the words of
Die Forelle
by Schubert.” The eccentric composer Kaikhosru Sorabji lives in a castle in Dorset with this sign on his gatepost: “Visitors Unwelcome. Roman Catholic Nuns in Full Habit May Enter without an Appointment.” In his
Lexicon of Musical Invective
Slonimsky notes that an early reviewer of Stravinsky dubbed his most famous work “Le Massacre du Printemps.” Another called Debussy's masterpiece “La Mai de Mer.” Nearly always subtly playful, Slonimsky does know when to pull out all the stops. J. S. Bach's entry in
Baker's
begins with this resounding organ roll: “Supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music, a master comparable in greatness of stature with Aristotle in philosophy and Leonardo da Vinci in art.”

The three volumes of George Bernard Shaw's collected musical criticism can be enjoyed for the sharpness of its author's convictions (Shaw was a “perfect Wagnerite” and couldn't grasp Schumann, Brahms, or Dvo
ák) and for the pleasure of his pungent expression—GBS once remarked that he could make tired stockbrokers read his reviews. And they did. “A readable unfavorable notice is a better advertisement than an unreadable or at any
rate unmemorable puff.” He was best in humorous attack: The “fiddlers rambled from bar to bar with a sweet indecision that had a charm of its own, but was not exactly what Purcell and Handel meant.”