ART AND MEN

Evening Star, Issue 20959, 25 November 1931, Page 4

ART AND MEN

WORLD OF THE ARTIST u To ray mind,” says Sir William Hothenstein, president of the British Society of Arts, in his bogk, ‘ Men and Memories,’ “ artists alone understand the intrinsic beauties of line and design and of colour; to try to educate ‘ the people ’ to a sense of beauty merely by showing them beautiful things is, I hold, fruitless. At Oxford I had seen how little the dons had learned from, the buildings and works of art among which they lived, "Whenever a portrait was to be added to a college nail they invariably chose the painter in vogue; Holl or Herkomer, Herkomer or Holl, was the verdict every time a distinguished Oxonian was to be painted. I don’t remember seeing in au Oxford college hall a portrait either by Watts or by Whistler. The theory, so dear to educationalists, that living among beautiful things gives to .men an enlightened understanding of living beauty has again and again proved false.” “ I was possessed,” he says later. m a kind of confession of faith, “ with the faith that if I concerned myself wholly with appearance, something of the mystery of life might creep into ray work. At rare moments, while painting, I have felt myself* caught, as it were, in a kind of cosmic rhythm; but such experiences are usually all too brief. I was no philosopher like Fi’y; but nothing seemed profounder to me than appearance. “ Through devotion to appearance we may even interpret a reality which is beyond our conscious understanding; in this, to my mind, lies the supreme importance of the painter s art. No good artist copies merely to imitate; but because form is the discipline imposed ou the universe by the hidden God. ‘ Thy will, not mine, is good aesthetic, as it is good moral law. “ The statement, ‘ God made man in His own imago,’ is pregnant. Copy the image of man and you approach the face of God. Perhaps external beauty is not, after all, a merely superficial tiling, but a significant answer to man s questioning of the why and wherefore of life. ... . “ For what is technique but a net laid to catch all the truth it will hold? and if the net be too apparent, truth that is shy and elusive is not to bo caught. .... “'I have retained my faith in the significance of appearance, and the hope that at rare moments some of that ecstasv embodies itself in my work.

Not that I think raw nature is good; but Nature remains the greatest of all designers, resolving her infinite detail into the austere lines of the hills, op the bewildering maze of branches into the simple contours of a tree. “ Man’s own sense of design is derived of necessity from hers. It is nonsense to talk of ‘ mere realism.’ Appearance is dynamic, not static; the clouds move across the heavens, trees bow before the wind, human features alter with every movement; the waves of the seas, the birds in their flight, the flowers bending in the field, change their forms from one moment to the next; each change makes a new rhythm, and without rhythm an- essential part of reality, the work of man’s hands ia lifeless, and comes to naught.”