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from Roger Fry, “The French Group” (1912)When the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition was held in these Galleries two
years ago the English public became for the first time fully aware of the existence of a new movement in art, a movement which was the more disconcerting in that it was no mere variation upon accepted themes but implied a reconsideration of the very purpose and aim as well as the methods of pictorial and plastic art. It was not surprising therefore that a public which had come to admire above everything in a picture the skill with which the artist produced illusion should have resented an art in which such skill was completely subordinated to the direct expression of feeling. Accusations of clumsiness and incapacity were freely made, even against so singularly accomplished an artist as Cézanne. Such darts, however, fall wide of the mark, since it is not the object of these artists to exhibit their skill or proclaim their knowledge, but only to attempt to express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences; and in conveying these, ostentation of skill is likely to be even more fatal than downright incapacity.
[on Henri Rousseau, who was among the exhibitors] Here then is one case where want of skill and knowledge do not completely obscure, though they may mar expression. An this is true of all perfectly naïve and primitive art. But most of the art here seen is neither naïve nor primitive. It is the work of highly civilised and modern men trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook.
from Roger Fry, “The French Group” (1912)
They [post-Impressionist artists] do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality.
The logical extreme of such a method would undoubtedly be the attempt to give up all resemblance to natural form, and to create a purely abstract language of form –a visual music; and the later works of Picasso show this clearly enough. […]
from Roger Fry, “The French Group” (1912)
All art depends upon cutting off the practical responses to sensations of ordinary life, thereby setting free a pure and as it were disembodied functioning of the spirit, but in so far as the artist relies on the associated ideas of the objects which he represents, his work is not completely free and pure, since romantic associations imply at least an imagined practical activity. […] Classic art, on the other hand, records a positive and disinterestedly passionate state of mind. It communicates a new and otherwise unattainable experience. Its effect, therefore, is likely to increase with familiarity. Such a classic spirit is common to the best French work of all periods from thetwelfth century onwards. […] It is natural enough that the intensity and singleness of aim with which these artists yield themselves to certain experiences in the face of nature may make their work appear odd to those who have not the habit of contemplative vision, but it would be rash for us, who as a nation are in the habit oftreating our emotions, especially our aesthetic emotions with a certain levity, to accuse them of caprice or insincerity. It is because of this classic concentration of feeling […] that the French merit our serious attention. It is this that makes their art so difficult on a first approach but gives it its lasting hold on the imagination.
from: Blast (1914): “Long Live the Vortex!”
Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!We stand for the Reality of the Present – not for the sentimental Future,
or the sacripant Past.We want to leave Nature and Men alone. […]The only way Humanity can help artists is to remain independent and
work unconsciously.WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY – their
stupidity, animalism and dreams.We believe in no perfectibility except our own.Intrinsic beauty is in the Interpreter and Seer, not in the object or
content.We do not want to change the appearance of the world, because we
are not Naturalists, Impressionists or Futurists (the latest form of Impressionism), and do not depend on the appearance of the world for our art.
WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel it’s crude energy flowing through us.[…]
from: Blast (1914): “Long Live the Vortex!”
[…] Blast will be popular, essentially. It will not appeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL. The moment a man feels or realizes himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time. Blast is created for this timeless, fundamental Artist that exists in everybody.
The Ma in the Street and the Gentleman are equally ignored.Popular art does not mean the art of the poor people, as it is usually
supposed to. It means the art of the individuals. […]AUTOMOBILISM (Marinettism) bores us. We don’t want to go about
making a hullo-bulloo about motor cars, anymore than about knives and forks, elephants or gas-pipes. […]
The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870.
from: Blast (1914): “Long Live the Vortex!”
We hear from America and the Continent all sorts of disagreeablethings about England: ‘the unmusical, anti-artistic, unphilosophiccountry’.
We quite agree. […]The Art-instinct is permanently primitive.In a chaos of imperfection, discord, etc., it finds the same stimulus as in
Nature.The artist of the modern movement is a savage (in no sense an
‘advanced’, perfected, democratic, Futurist individual or Mr. Marinetti’s limited imagination): this enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did more technically primitive man.
As the steppes and the rigours of the Russian winter, when the peasant has to lie for weeks in his hut, produces that extraordinary acuity of feeling and intelligence we associate with the Slav; so England is just now the most favourable country for the appearance of a great art.
from: Blast (1914): “Long Live the Vortex!”
The Modern World is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius, - its appearance and its spirit.
Machinery, trains, steam-ships, all that distinguishes externally our time, came far more from here than anywhere else.
In dress, manners, mechanical inventions, LIFE, that is, ENGLAND, has influenced Europe in the same way that France has in Art. But busy with this LIFE-EFFORT; she has been the last to become conscious of the Art that is an organism of this new Order and Will of Man.
Machinery is the greatest Earth-medium: incidentally it sweeps away the doctrines of a narrow and pedantic Realism at one stroke.
By mechanical inventiveness, too, just as Englishmen have spreadthemselves all over the Earth, they have brought all the hemispheres about them in their original island.
It cannot be said that the complication of the Jungle, dramatic tropic growths, the vastness of American trees, is not for us.
For, in the forms of machinery, Factories, new and vaster buildings, bridges and works, we have all that, naturally, around us.
from André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
We are still living under the reign of logic […]. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. […] It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer – and, in my opinion by far the most important part –has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. […] The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. […]
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. […]
Those who might dispute our right to employ the term surrealism in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all:
surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concerns.
from André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
Language has been given to man so that he may make Surrealist use of it. To the extent that he is required to make himself understood, he manages more or less to express himself, and by so doing to fulfill certain functions culled from among the most vulgar. Speaking, reading a letter, present no real problem for him, provided that, in so doing, he does not set himself a goal above the mean, that is, provided he confines himself to carrying on a conversation (for the pleasure of conversing) with someone. He is not worried about the words that are going to come, nor about the sentence which will follow after the sentence he is just completing. To a very simple question, he will be capable of making a lightning-like reply. […]
Not only does this unrestricted language, which I am trying to render forever valid, which seems to me to adapt itself to all of life’s circumstances, not only does this language not deprive me of any of my means, on the contrary it lends me and extraordinary lucidity, and it does so in an area where I least expected it. I shall even go so far as to maintin that it instruct me and, indeed, I have had occasion to use surreally words whose meanings I have forgotten. I was subsequently able to verify that the way in which I had used them corresponded perfectly with their definition. This would lead one to believe that we do not ‘learn’, that all we ever do is ‘relearn’.
from André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
Poetic Surrealism, which is the subject of this study, has focused its efforts up to this point on re-establishing dialogue in its absolute truth, by freeing both interlocutors from any obligations of politeness. Each of them simply pursues his soliloquy without trying to derive any special dialectical pleasure from it and without trying to impose anything whatsoever upon his neighbor. The remarks exchanged are not, as is generally the case, meant to develop some thesis, however unimportant it may be; they are as disaffected as possible. As for the reply that they elicit, it is, in principle, totally indifferent to the personal pride of the person speaking. The words, the images are only so many springboards for the mind of the listener. […]
The mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood.
Modernist Humanism?• Bell, 13: “In the later twentieth century it has become
common to speak disparagingly of humanism as an unacknowledged ideology naturalizing the given social order, and then to see Modernism in turn as tainted with this. But the opposite is closer to the truth: the relative status of the human was a central recognition of Modernism itself.”
• e.g. Lawrence, in a Letter about The Rainbow and Women in Love: he only cares “about what the woman is– what she IS – inhumanly, physiologically, materially –… what she is as a phenomenon (ar as representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception.”
from Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999):
a catalogue of Modernist features1. A commitment to finding new forms to explore how we see the world
rather than what we see in it (e.g. the break with realist modes of narrative in favour of a stream of consciousness; in visual art, the emergence of Cubism, which represents objects as a series of discontinuous, fractured planes, all equidistant from the viewer, rather than using light and perspective to suggest pictorial depth containing solid, three-dimensional objects; in music, the abandonment of harmony in favour of tone).
2. A new faith in quasi-scientific modes of conceptualisation and organisation, for instance using basic geometric shapes like cubes and cylinders in the tower blocks of modernist architec-ture, as the expression of a rationalist, progressive society.
3. An ideologically inspired use of fragmented forms, like collage structures in art, and deliberately discontinuous narratives in literature to suggest the fragmentation and break-up of formerly accepted systems of thought and belief.
from Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999):
a catalogue of Modernist features4. Aesthetic self-reflexivity, in which artefacts
explore their own constitution, construction and shape (e.g. novels in which nar-rators comment on narrative forms, or paintings in which an image is left unfinished, with `roughed-in' or blank sections on the canvas).
5.A clear demarcation between popular and elite forms of culture (e.g. intellectual distinctions made between atonal electronic music like Karlheinz Stockhausen's and modern jazz, or between modern jazz and rock, or between rock and `pop', etc.).
6.A gradual growth of interest in non-western forms of culture,
T.S. Eliot
1888-1965
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)• born St. Louis, Missouri• studied at Harvard, Paris, Marburg, Oxford• 1915 married Vivienne Haigh-Wood• 1957 marriage with Esmé Valerie Fletcher• treated for mental disorder• 1915: teacher; 1917-1925: accountant at Lloyd’s Bank, London• 1927: becomes British citizen and converts to Anglicanism• “Classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in
religion” 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature• 1954 Hansa Goethe-Prize Hamburg• 1914 meets his future supporter Ezra Pound• 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations• 1919 Poems• 1922 The Waste Land• other works, e.g. The Hollow Men (1925); “The Journey of the Magi”
(1927); Ash Wednesday (1930); Four Quartets (since 1936; 1943); Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939)
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)• critical writings: Criterion (journal; 1922-
1939); “Tradition and the Individual Talent”(1920)
“To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad.”
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land1922
for Ezra Poundil miglior fabbro
I. The Burial of the DeadII. A Game of ChessIII. The Fire SermonIV. Death By WaterV. What the Thunder SaidNotes
I. The Burial of the DeadApril is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10 And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 20 You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 30
Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zuMein Irisch Kind,Wo weilest du?
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; "They called me the hyacinth girl." – Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 40 Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. 50 Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City, 60 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Stetson! “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! 70 "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? "Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! "You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!"
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1910/11; 1915)
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosseA persona che mai tornasse al mondoQuesta fiamma staria sensa piu scosse.Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondoNon torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il veroSensa tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—[They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’] My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—[They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’] Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—Arms that are braceleted and white and bare [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!] Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .
I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it toward some overwhelming question, To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.’
And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floorAnd this, and so much more?—It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: ‘That is not it at all, That is not what I meant at all.’
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the
beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
