ART AND SOCIETY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 306, 24 November 1945, Page 8

ART AND SOCIETY

LUNCH CLUB ADDRESS

The position of the artist in society and the results and effects of that position were dealt with in an address to the Citizens’ Lunch Club yesterday by Mr E. C. Simpson, of Wellington. The speaker explained that, in medieval times, the artist was regarded purely as a workman, like a carpenter, who was commissioned to’ do his work in a certain manner and who provided the public as a whole with something they needed. With the advent of the merchant princes in the loth century a rich aristocratic class began to be built up. At this stage the artist, seeing that his work had value and distinction, began to work for this rich class, performing under its patronage. Now art and the artist were lifted to a higher aesthetic position and at this period the execution of art reached perhaps its highest peak; but, through this submission to his patron’s wishes, the artist began to lose touch with society as a whole and worked purely to the tastes of his narrow, but wealthy, higher circles. This state of conditions persisted until about the time of the French Revolution, when the aristocracy throughout Europe began to crumble. Suddenly the artist found himself deprived both of his public and his patron. He had lost touch completely with the larger part of society, and had no tradition on which to assess its tastes. As he hurriedly attempted to regain his position, but still out of sympathy with his public; he found himself placed on a pedestal as something incomprehensible, hut to be revered. Finding this convenient, the artist lived up to the popular conception, and began to turn out the eccentric and fantastic works of the | late Impressionist period. Artists painted for and -were understood by each other; but the gap between them and other people broadened. Unless an artist had private means or was willing to'starve, he could not continue his work. Some of the greatest painters of our time could paint only because they evaded this restriction. Cezanne, for example, had private means, while everyone was familiar with the story of Gaugin, who went to Tahiti to paint so that he could live cheaply. Since the form of art did not change, it became essential that the public do so, and pictures began to be sold to the aesthetic class, those who had taken the trouble to educate themselves to an appreciative standard; however, even now the artist was out of touch with most of the public, and at this stage began to feel that he was a social outcast. Towards the beginning of the present century there came a spate of pictures of other social outcasts, such as clowns, theatrical actors, and tramps, painted by the artist in a sort of fellow feeling. A feeling of exclusion in the artist prompted these works. The next progression was that the artist, retreating more and more into himself, went back to the studio and began to paint bric-a-brac as it appeared to him, through a sense of association and touch rather than through a sense of sight. The final stage before the Second World War, the last step in introversion, was perhaps logical and to be expected. It was a retreat into the mind itself, a surrealist form based on the psychology of Sigmund Freud. Since the war, however, the speaker concluded, it had been realised by the British Government, at least, that the artist deserved a better place, and some of the former surrealists had been commissioned to paint for the public benefit. So,, it might seem, the artist’s position might return to what it was in medieval • times, that of a servant of the whole of the public.