Ricciotto Canudo
Never has an age been so favourable to artistic debates. Five or six times a year the Athenian republic of modern times becomes fascinated and passionate, it judges and condemns – at exhibitions, concerts and performances.
The echo of our modern artistic life, sustained over the whole gamut of the Absurd, cross the defences of the city that is the Face of the World, pass the banks of the suburbs, and disappear beyond the borders to spark off identical debates in Germany, Russia and England. The Absurd of the Real not yet born, or not yet understood. Phalanxes of artists all over the world live sumptuously on the Parisian Absurd.
The nineteenth century was, in all spiritual matters, the real century of the French renaissance. But for several decades France has been so imperiously at the head of modern artistic evolution that even the most hostile nations give into its dominance.
This dominance is, it has been said, absolutely cerebral. Over at least the last thirty years art has progressively, intensely, become cerebralized. Baudelaire was the pioneer of this subtly cerebral aesthetic, which found its best expression in the two precursors of today’s and tomorrow’s lyricism: Rimbaud and Mallarmé. These men stood on the tomb of the last romantics and dug a wide pit in front of the Parnassians and the Symbolists, whose cerebral art was impure, weakened by all the sentimental and cerebral visions of the past they cherished. Rimbaud and Mallarmé were the first to use prosody to elicit a new emotion; one capable of making the brain tremble, rather than the heart. The haughty intellectualism of Gabriele d’Annunzio or Oscar Wilde has also pushed lyricism towards today’s ‘cerebrist’ channels – inseparably intellectual and sensual. The internal psychology of Gabriele Tarde’s crowds gave rise to he most thoughtful literature, that of the collective soul.
Modern music, in liberating itself from the soft and viscous chains of sentimental melodies, in the Italian style, and from Wagner’s grand sentimental symbolism, has become ‘intellectualized’ in the works of Debussy, Paul Dukas and Erik Satie. The young composers’ aesthetic is dominated by lyrical preoccupations that are purely cerebral, and by a Symbolism or Impressionism that is perfectly intellectual, in which sensuality is cerebralized, in which cerebrality becomes entirely sensual. And if, several decades ago, the harmony was somehow raised above the counterpoint through all the harmonious research of the ‘Debussyists’ and their immediate expression of feelings chosen by the brain, the counterpoint re-enters the fray with Igor Stravinsky, enriched with a new component, sensually and cerebrally modern.
The fine arts have followed the same evolutionary path. When Whistler and Fantin-Latour timidly admitted that in order to give painting new life ‘the line must be distorted’ they accepted a principle of caricature, that of ‘looking for character through distortion’, and they opened the golden doors through which Cèzanne, Guaguin and Van Gogh all passed.
Cèzanne insisted that there is a ‘photographic eye’ and an ‘aesthetic eye’, and that he had the right to disregard the exact measurement of a model’s shoulders in relation to his head because it was the head that he wanted to emphasize, by way of diminishing the size of the shoulders as he liked. ‘The eye only sees what the spirit draws its attention to,’ said Rodin, another great ‘distorter’. He also sacrificed the slavish reproduction of shape in favour of a completely free and cerebral idea that he made of a subject, as he conceived it.
The aesthetic eye, the pure and simple reasoning of that voluntary harmonizer of nature that is the artist, determined the expressive innovation of the Impressionists’ colour. And it pushed following generations progressively to ‘distort’ form, to break it, to recompose it, away from linear surfaces, to find the depth of volume; to lead, with a view to who knows what new synthesis, to Fauvism and, more courageously, to Cubism.
An emotion too oft repeated loses its charm and its value, and in the end stops being an emotion. This is true in the realm of sentiment as well as that of art. What artists ask of the evolution of art are new emotions, through the discovery of new modes of expressing the artistic emotionalism of a time. Each era has, therefore, rejected the preceding one. In the succession of styles there is as much will and arbitrariness between the well-defined and detailed styled of Donatello or Botticelli and the violent and pompous style of a great distorter, Michelangelo, as there is between Ingres’ paste and the further devotions of the Impressionists. The bias towards plumpness (the soul of the style) inherited from the Venetians, which inflated the inspiration of the eighteenth century, and towards the pictorial representation of dresses and feminine gestures, equals Titian’s bias towards opulence, or the bias of some modern artists towards skeletal thinness.
In art, as on the battlefield, ‘to stop advancing is to retreat’. Every artistic innovation must revolt the eye and ear, because both the eye and the ear require time to get used to the new harmonizations of colours, forms, words and sounds. The drift of contemporary innovation is in the transposition of artistic emotion from the sentimental to the cerebral domain. We want no more painting that merely ‘represents’ whatever it may be, in the manner of documentary illustration. We want no more paintings that are only words in the form of images. We are looking for new varieties of form and colour, we want the pleasure of painting for its own sake and not for the literary or sentimental idea that it has to illustrate. This is how the Arabs designed their architecture.
Formerly – up until our time – great mythical and religious sentiments dominated all the arts. Artists kept ready-made feelings to hand, which every one could understand. Myths and religions ruled. In our age of excessive individualism, every artist has to create his interior world and exterior representation. He has an obligation to give concrete representation to his particular vision of life and the right to express it. Thirty years ago modern art was born from this obligation; liberated, determined and rebelling against all dogmatism of the school: free verse and general post Mallarméan art in poetry; Impressionist, Fauvist, Cubist, Futurist, Synchromist, and Simultaneist, in the plastic arts; Debussyist or post-Debussyist in music; metachoric in dance.
This modern art marks the funerary limit of all sentimental art: banal, facile; in other words intolerable because it is insufficient. We know more and more that the melodrama at which Margot wept [a reference to a work by Musset] is without doubt a stupid melodrama which evokes the same emotion – superficial, hollow, diminishing – as an inconsequential news headline. There is no exaltation for the individual, no elevation of the spirit. In contrast, against all sentimentalism in art and in life, we want an art that is nobler and more pure, which does not touch the heart but which moves the brain, which does not charm, but makes us think.
The new generation of artists, indifferent to Margot’s tears, strives for heroism. They continue to reform the different arts through their research, which is dominated by the brain. This is why modern art is tremendously cerebral.
This is why we are Cerebrists.
Ricciotto Canudo (1914)
