'Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954' (MoMA)

When my friend Diana asked me at Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954, the art exhibit we saw at the Museum of Modern Art on 26 February 2016, what it is that I like about Pollock’s paintings, the best I could come up with was two vague statements.  The first is simple to say but impossible to define in any concrete terms as it’s purely aesthetic: I simply find his work, especially his later canvases up through the famous “drip paintings,” beautiful.  What does that even mean, though?  I can’t say, except to suggest that they please my eye in a certain way that moves me.  That’s the best I can do.  How do you define or explain beauty—after all, it really is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?  What’s beautiful to me may not be to you or anyone else.  How do you explain that?  I can’t; can you?  So Pollock’s painting are beautiful to me: they make me happy; I smile when I look at them. 

Susanne Langer, a philosopher of art and aesthetics, defined “beauty” as “expressive form,” which she maintained “do[es] something to us.”  “Beauty is not identical with the normal,” Langer admonished us, “and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”  She continued, “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous.”  Furthermore, Langer asserted that our responses to art are “intuitive,” and therefore can’t necessarily be explained, a condition we’ll see afflicted me in my reaction to Pollock’s paintings.  (I blogged on Langer on 4 and 8 January 2010.)

My other response was even harder to describe, much less to define.  I said that Pollock’s work excites me.  It’s dynamic, energetic, explosive.  His paintings make me feel infinitely animated—I don’t really know a word for it: in motion, active.  But it’s not physical—I don’t go running around the galleries like a Tasmanian devil or something.  It’s visceral.  I actually feel as if my insides are roiling, but not like I’m sick—like I’m exhilarated.  Could that be an adrenaline rush?  Can art get your adrenaline pumping?  I suppose it can, since art triggers emotions and emotional responses can trigger adrenaline, can’t it.  Maybe that’s it then. 

I’m not altogether certain you’re supposed to explain, at least not fully, a response to art.  Music is almost entirely an emotional experience, so why shouldn’t painting and sculpture be emotional—or psychological in their effects?  Pollock himself wrote: “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.”  Diana, who turned out not to care much for Pollock’s art (I asked why she agreed to go with me to MoMA; she was curious and thought I might help her “understand” Pollock some), later when we made a short stop at the permanent collection on the fifth floor (Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat, Rousseau, and so on), explained her appreciation of several of the pictures based on the artists’ use of various painting techniques—line and focus, and color and balance.  She’s a longtime student of the Art Students League (ironically, where Pollock also studied) and an amateur painter.  I, on the other hand, have no training in art—or even “art appreciation”—and whatever I know of art theory has been picked up haphazardly over the years of just looking at painting, sculpture, and drawings—and occasional reading.  (“The entire qualification one must have for understanding art is responsiveness,” wrote Langer, and “the real [artistic training] is not the ‘conditioning’ effected by social approval and disapproval, but the tacit, personal, illuminating contact with symbols of feeling.”)  I’m the quintessential “I don’t know anything about art; I just know what I like” guy. 

This wasn’t the first, nor the last, time Diana asked me to explain what was essentially a visceral response to some work of art, both visual (she did the same thing after the Alexander Calder exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art about which I wrote on 21 August 2017) and theatrical (after the Suzan-Lori Parks plays The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Venus; see the reports posted on 1 December 2016 and 7 June 2017).  I’ve never made a satisfactory reply to her query.  In any case, I didn’t help her at all.  What I see as dynamism—Pollock himself described his painting as “motion made visible memories arrested in space”—Diana sees as randomness and chance, which she dismisses as “not art,” which she insists requires control and selectivity.  Leaving aside that I don’t necessarily see that art can’t be random, at least in part at any rate, I disagree that Pollock’s work wasn’t controlled and selected.  An element of chance did enter into his work, but it didn’t operate exclusively or even dominantly.  Indeed, the artist himself declared: “I can control the flow of the paint.  There is no accident.”

We may not recognize as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its expressiveness,” Langer also admonished us.  Our response to a piece of art may be instinctive, but the philosopher explained that it can be prejudiced, because “the free exercise of artistic intuition often depends on clearing the mind of intellectual prejudices and false conceptions that inhibit people’s natural responsiveness.”  After all, “the function of art,” she declared, “is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.”  Additionally, Richard Kostelanetz, an artist himself as well as a critic of the avant-garde, submitted that since “audiences and critics would sooner acknowledge the familiar than explore works of art they cannot immediately comprehend . . . a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful.”  One friend of Vincent van Gogh’s, for instance, admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.”  Langer instructed that “if academic training has caused us to think of pictures primarily as examples of schools, periods, or . . . classes . . ., we are prone to think about the picture, gathering quickly all available data for intellectual judgments, and so close and clutter the paths of intuitive response.”  I think this may have been what prevents Diana (and many others who share her opinion of Pollock) from appreciating Pollock’s work—as well as that of theater artists like Parks or Adrienne Kennedy—anywhere near the way I do.

Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 at MoMA (22 November 2015-1 May 2016) was entirely composed of works from the museum’s collection and included over 50 pieces, among them engravings, drawings, lithographs, and silkscreen prints along with the paintings.  Collection Survey covered essentially the whole of Pollock’s short career (he died in August 1956 in an alcohol-related single-car crash at the age of 44), from 1930 (a painted wooden cigar box) to 1954.  (The artist painted two canvases in 1955, Scent and Search, and none in 1956.)  From one perspective, it traced the artist’s development from figurative work, visibly influenced by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, to deliberately non-representative paintings (and experiments in other media), ultimately to his drip paintings, the culmination of his distinctive style and the art form which distinguished Pollock from his contemporaries and set American Abstract Expressionism apart from European art.  In 1943, at an exhibit at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century (1942-47) of young American artists, the famous de Stijl modernist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) remarked of Pollock’s paintings, “I think this is the most interesting work I've seen so far in America. . . .  You must watch this man.” 

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on 28 January 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five boys.  He grew up in Arizona and California, where his family lived a peripatetic life, moving from ranch to ranch, town to town, and in 1928 Pollock began to study painting at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.  Plagued by disciplinary problems, Pollock was already drinking heavily by the time he turned 15.  In September 1930, 18-year-old Pollock followed his older brothers Charles (1902-1988) and Frank (1907-1994) to New York, and registered at the Art Students League, where Charles was already studying, to study under his brother’s teacher, the Regionalist painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), who encouraged him throughout the decade.  In 1937, Pollock began therapy for his drinking under the care of a Jungian psychoanalyst; he would go through several therapists in his lifetime.  Though most didn’t do him much real benefit, he was affected by Jung’s theories of the subconscious and the significance of signs and symbols and this knowledge became evident in his art. 

By the early ’30s Pollock knew and admired the murals of Mexican painters David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), and Diego Rivera (1886-1957).  He traveled throughout the U.S. during the ’30s, but spent most of his time in New York and he settled there permanently in 1933, sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with the now-married Charles.  (Brother Sande, 1909-1963, moved to New York City in October 1934 and he and Jackson shared an apartment.  Sande eventually changed his last name to McCoy—his father’s birth name before the older man was adopted as a child—to get around the Works Progress Administration’s ban on one household collecting multiple  WPA paychecks.)  Jackson Pollock worked on the WPA Federal Art Project (1935-42) and in Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in New York (1936).  (In 1931, Pollock watched Rivera paint his controversial mural at Rockefeller Center.  I posted an article on Diego Rivera on 12 and 15 April 2015.)  The painter also first met artist Lee Krasner (1908-84), a founder of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, who would eventually become his wife, in 1936, but they did not meet again for six years.

Pollock exhibited Birth (ca. 1941) in American and French Paintings at McMillen Inc. in January-February 1942.  Also exhibiting in the show was Lee Krasner and, impressed with his work, she sought out Pollock; Krasner began to support and promote Pollock’s work and introduced him to influential figures in the New York art scene.  (More outgoing than the introverted Pollock, Krasner, a native New Yorker, was one of those people who just seemed to know everyone worth knowing.  Among these was Hans Hofmann, an Abstract Expressionist with whom Krasner was studying.  He, in turn, introduced Pollock and Krasner to playwright Tennessee Williams, who, in 1969, wrote In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel which features an artist character who resembles Pollock.  There’s even a scene in which the artist discusses color theory in terms reminiscent of Hofmann.)  In August, after Pollock’s brother Sande and his wife moved to Connecticut, Krasner moved into Pollock’s East 8th Street apartment.  At the end of that year, Pollock took a job at a printmaker where he learned the technique of silk-screening; the job lasted only a short time, but Pollock would use the skill in 1943 and ’44 when he branched out from painting to experiment with other expressive forms.

The artist participated in his first show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artists for Victory, in December 1942-January 1943; on 20 May 1950, Pollock would sign an open letter (published in the New York Times) in which 28 artists (18 painters and 10 supporting sculptors) accused the MMA of “contempt for modern painting” and refusing to participate in the upcoming juried MMA show, American Painting Today – 1950.  (On 23 May 1950, the New York Herald Tribune published an editorial response entitled “The Irascible Eighteen” defending MMA, giving a name to the group of protesting artist.  In its 15 January 1952 issue, Life published a photo of 15 of the original signatories, including Pollock, under the headline, “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show,” establishing the name “The Irascibles” for the painters.)  

In 1943, Pollock briefly worked as a custodian at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (since 1947 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).  In May and June that year, the artist’s work was included in the Art of This Century’s Spring Salon for Young Artists, an exhibition of young American artists that attracted considerable attention.  In July, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) gave Pollock a contract that was extended until 1947 that paid him $150 a month as an advance against sales, permitting the young artist to devote all his time to painting.  This was followed in November with Pollock’s first solo show, at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century; Guggenheim would eventually house four solo Pollock exhibits at the gallery.  In May 1944, MoMA bought The She-Wolf (1943), Pollock’s first piece in a museum collection.  That summer, Pollock and Krasner spent the season in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Hofmann ran a summer art school.  (Tennessee Williams was also spending summers in Provincetown, surrounded by several artists, models—many of them dancers—from Hofmann’s school, and sundry others from the art and theater world.) 

Before 1947, Pollock’s art manifested the influence of  Picasso, Miró, and Surrealism, and in the early ’40s, he contributed paintings to exhibitions of Surrealist and Abstract art.  By the mid-’40s, though, Pollock was painting in an entirely abstract manner, liberating himself from the vertical constraints of an easel by affixing unstretched raw canvas to the floor.  “On the floor I am more at ease,” he would explain later.  “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”  In 1947, his “drip style,” marked by the use of sticks, stiffened brushes, or palette knives to drip and spatter paint, as well as pouring paint directly from the can (or simply punching holes in the can and letting the paint dribble out), emerged.  Pollock’s drip technique, also called “action painting,” was derived from the Surrealist focus on the subconscious and the notion of automatic drawing (“automatism”).

Abstract Expressionism, also known as the New York School, for those who don’t already know, is an art movement—but not a unified style—that began in the United States around 1940 with artists of European origin like Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and Arshile Gorky (1904-48).  It emphasizes the act of painting, as expressed in the textures and colors of the media used, and the connection between the artists, who found universal themes within themselves, and the media.  By the late 1940s, a second phase of the movement began, the principal expression of which was “gesturism” or “action painting,” which stressed the texture of the medium and the physicality of the act of painting.  (The first strain was color field painting, emphasizing unified color and shape.  Some of these artists are Sam Gilliam, b. 1933; Kenneth Noland, 1924-2010;  Morris Louis, 1912-62; and Helen Frankenthaler, 1928-2011).  Pollock, the best-known exemplar of this form of art, vigorously splashed, dripped, and splattered paint on the canvas.  (Time magazine dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper” in 1956 because of his technique.)  Other artists from this school included Mark Rothko (1903-70), Willem de Kooning (1904-97), Franz Kline (1910-1962), and Larry Rivers (1923-2002).

In March 1945, Pollock had a solo exhibition of 17 canvases at the Arts Club of Chicago; some of the pieces from the show went on to the San Francisco Museum of Art, giving the artist national exposure outside New York City.  On 25 October 1945, Krasner and Pollock were married and moved to a farmhouse in The Springs, East Hampton, on New York’s Long Island.  Eventually, he turned the property’s barn into his studio, which figured in many photos and films of the artist at work with his canvases spread out on the floor.  From December ’45 to January ’46, Pollock exhibited for the first time (of five) in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art—known as the Whitney Annual (precursor to the current Whitney Biennial, launched in 1973).  In April and May of 1947, Pollock’s Mural (1943) was included in MoMA’s Large Scale Modern Paintings.  In October ’47, the most influential art critic in the country, Clement Greenberg (1909-94), declared in the British magazine Horizon (October 1947): “The most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is . . . Jackson Pollock.”  The 11 October 1945 issue of Life magazine included “A Life Round Table on Modern Art” which put Pollock among such modern masters as Picasso, Miró, Georges Rouault (1871-1958), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and de Kooning.  The following 8 August, Life published “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” by Dorothy Seiberling (b. 1922) that included photographs by Martha Holmes of Pollock at work.  In November and December 1949, Pollock exhibited an untitled painting in The Intrasubjectives at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York, a seminal show in the evolution of what would eventually be called Abstract Expressionism.

Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock international exposure when six of his works are included in a display of her collection at the Venice Biennale in May-September 1948; with four additional pieces, the collection traveled to Florence in February 1949 and to Rome the following June.  In July through August 1950, Hans Namuth (1915-90) took his now-famous series of some 200 photos and extensive film footage of the artist at work in his Long Island studio.  One of the canvases the painter completed while Namuth was shooting was the iconic One: Number 31, 1950, arguably Pollock’s most famous and recognizable drip painting.  Some of the photos were published in ARTnews in May 1951 and in the 1951 issue of Portfolio.  In November ’50, Namuth filmed Pollock painting on glass—so the photographer could film some of the work from below.  The film, shot outdoors and in color, was shown at MoMA in June ’51. 

Guggenheim organized Pollock’s first European solo exhibition at the Museo Correr of Venice in July and August 1950 with a show of her own collection of over 20 pieces.  Venetian art critic Bruno Alfieri (1927-2008) described Pollock’s work in L’Arte Moderna as “chaos”; “absolute lack of harmony”; “complete lack of structural organization”; “total absence of technique, however rudimentary”; “once again, chaos.”  This sounds a lot like Diana’s criticism of the artist’s work, but it was what Alfieri confessed was only “superficial impressions, first impressions,” and continued: “Pollock has broken all barriers between his picture and himself: his picture is the most immediate and spontaneous painting.  Each one of his pictures is a part of himself. . . .  The exact conclusion is that Jackson Pollock is the modern painter who sits at the extreme apex of the most advanced and unprejudiced avant-garde of modern art. . . .  Compared to Pollock, Picasso . . . becomes a quiet conformist, a painter of the past.”  (Time published the negative excerpts from Alfieri’s review, entitled “Chaos, Damn It!,” in its 20 November issue and Pollock responded in a letter to the editor, published on 11 December, declaring: “No chaos damn it.”) 

In March 1952, Pollock’s first solo show in Paris opened at the Studio Paul Facchetti and in November, art critic Clement Greenberg arranged the artist’s first retrospective at Bennington College in Vermont.  In April and May 1953, four paintings by Pollock were included in 12 Peintres et Sculpteurs Américains Contemporains, an exhibition organized and circulated by MoMA’s International Program.  The show opened at Paris’s Musée National d’Art Moderne and traveled to Zürich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo.  Despite his increased popularity and renown in Europe, Pollock didn’t obtain a passport until July 1955, and he never traveled outside the U.S.  By the spring of 1956, he hadn’t painted anything new in a year-and-a-half.  After several years of abstinence, he’d been drinking heavily since the fall of 1950 and his depression had deepened; his and Krasner’s marriage was deteriorating badly, and when she took off for a vacation in Europe in July ’56, he stayed home in The Springs.  While Krasner was away, Ruth Krigman (1930-2010), a young, aspiring artist with whom Pollock had begun an affair, moved into the farmhouse.  On 11 August, he was killed in a one-car, drunk-driving automobile accident in East Hampton; Krigman was with him in the car but survived, though a friend of hers who was visiting was also killed.  Krasner returned from Europe for her husband’s funeral. 

You could say that Pollock led a tumultuous, if short, life.  And maybe that’s what made his art so turbulent.  One reviewer called his work “a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.”  But if, like me, you just let it move you, the pure emotionality of the action painting, the intricacy of the lacy lines, the astonishing endlessness, boundlessness of the paintings—I’m speaking of his late work, though the early- and mid-career pieces like 1934-38’s The Flame or The She-Wolf of 1943 tend in this same direction—the lack for formality won’t amount to much.  Perhaps because he was one of the first American artists of any stature who never went to Europe to study or work, Pollock’s art showed few signs of the European refinement of Picasso, Miró, and the other continental Expressionists and Surrealists who were the vanguard of contemporary art.  He acknowledged an impact of his upbringing in the American west which can be seen and felt in the roughness and rawness of his earliest paintings in contrast with his European models—some of which was born of his familiarity with the Mexican muralists and the teaching of Thomas Hart Benton whose style was a sort of brawny social Realism.  When Pollock finally found his own style, namely the drip painting, that American vitality took the form of the dynamism and energy that make his canvases so stirring.  At least to me—for not everyone agrees even today, 60 years after his death.  Art critic Robert Coates (1897-1973), who coined the term “Abstract Expressionism,” once dismissed Pollock’s work (also sounding like my friend Diana) as “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless” in 1948 in the New Yorker.

Eric Bentley – An Appreciation

by Kirk Woodward

[Last September, Kirk Woodward contributed a profile of George Bernard Shaw (published on ROT on 5 September).  One of the greatest fans of the Anglo-Irish playwright in this country is Eric Bentley, arguably one of our most prominent public intellectuals and theater authorities.  Kirk acknowledges that Bentley is one of his strongest influences, going back to his teen years, and in “Eric Bentley – An Appreciation,” Kirk presents a view of the American writer and critic that's tinged not a little with his personal attraction. 

[Kirk mentions in passing that he had a brief encounter with Bentley in a Manhattan theater bookstore sometime back before 2000.  I had my own brief meeting with Bentley at another theater bookstore in Manhattan.  Somehow I’d been invited to a 70th birthday party for Bentley hosted by Applause Books on the Upper West Side in 1986.  I’m ashamed to report that I have no recollection of what we said to one another on that occasion; obviously it wasn’t especially significant.  Of course, it was a social occasion, so maybe that’s an excuse.]

 
As I write this piece, Eric Bentley is living in New York City at the age of ninety-six. This means that at this moment, at least, we still have among us possibly the greatest writer about theater who has ever lived, and I include Aristotle in that estimate, particularly since we’re not certain that what we have of Aristotle’s comments on theater – and on drama, a distinction I will return to – isn’t some student’s lecture notes.

Being – let’s say it again for argument’s sake – the greatest theater critic in the world doesn’t necessarily make one well-known. I met Bentley once, in the Drama Book Shop at its former location on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. I had seen a notice that said he would be signing books at the “DBS” one evening, so I went, bought a book, and took it over to him so he could autograph it.

He was standing by himself on one side of the room, gamely waiting for someone to come along. I remember him as looking rather small, and quite dapper. I told him about his influence on me (a story I will recount below), and he listened politely, said thank you, and signed my book. That was that. My major emotion was mortification that he wasn’t surrounded by a crowd of eager listeners, but then New York can be a blasé town.

My experience with Bentley begins with my parents’ purchase, through the old Literary Book Club, of a book by Bentley called In Search Of Theatre that, perhaps wrongfully, I assume my parents never read. But I did. I devoured the book, which is made up of about seven years’ worth of essays written about theater all over the world, between 1947 and 1953. When I read the book I must have been in my early teens. My ideas about theater were heavily influenced by the book, and I still return to it often.

A few biographical details: Eric Bentley was born in Great Britain in 1916, studied at Oxford (under C. S. Lewis, professor of literature, popular theologian, and author of the Tales of Narnia stories) and then, moving to the United States, at Yale. He taught at Columbia University and reviewed drama for the New Republic for four years. He has forged a number of careers for himself in addition to teaching, criticism, and reviewing; he has also been a director, a translator, a playwright, an editor of a number of important collections of plays, and a noted musical artist, performing and recording the songs of Bertolt Brecht, whose works he more or less introduced to the United States.

His doctoral thesis for Yale was published as A Century Of Hero Worship (1944), a book I have never warmed to. The book that followed, The Playwright As Thinker, has been credited with helping make the study of playwriting a respectable academic field in the United States. The next year he published Bernard Shaw, which he said was the first book written about Shaw by someone who hadn’t met him. In Search Of Theatre followed in 1953; then The Dramatic Event and What Is Theatre?, his collections of New Republic reviews, in 1954 and 1956; his Brecht Commentaries in 1981; and Thinking About The Playwright in 1987.

Bentley’s best known book, however, is The Life Of The Drama (1964). Bentley has complained about the book’s notoriety, saying that it’s drawn attention away from the rest of his work. It is certainly his most teachable book, because it contains a systematic approach to drama, while much of his criticism is contained in collections of short pieces. With this exception, his books do not appear to be staples of the academic world. How then can I claim his superiority as a critic of theater? Much of the answer has to do with the natures of theater, of drama, and, of course, of academia.

As I’m using the word, theater is an immediate, present-moment activity, and each moment of a theatrical performance is unique. One might object that plays are rehearsed with the object of making them the same every time. However, that goal, if it is a goal (not all directors feel it is), of making every live performance the same, simply cannot be achieved, because for the experience to be exactly the same at each performance is impossible, whether for audience member or for actor. Moods, knowledge, relationships, all undergo modification each day, even each minute. As T. S. Eliot writes in The Four Quartets:

Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.

(The Dry Salvages)

As a result, almost any actor will testify that, like snowflakes, no two nights’ performances in theater are ever exactly alike. (Even in film, directors demand numerous takes of scenes because each take, for whatever reason, is different.) We may ignore this fact because typically we may see only one performance of a play, making it seem that the one performance is the performance. Also, performances can be filmed, taped, or digitally recorded, freezing them in time. Live performances of the play itself, however, are not frozen; they move forward in time, picking up subtle or not-so-subtle alterations as they go.

On the other hand, as opposed to theater, drama, as I’m using the word, means, in practice, the reading and understanding of scripts and the theory that can be derived from them, and drama can be taught in schools. Theater, however, is never a fixed point. So in general Bentley, to the extent that he writes about theater rather than drama, is not and cannot be a systematic writer, a fact that makes it difficult for the academic world to take full advantage of his work, despite the years he spent as a teacher. It is much easier to gain academic recognition for subjects that aren’t moving targets.

However, I believe that without imposing an arbitrary structure on Bentley’s writing on theater, we can find teachable principles there, and as for drama, the success of The Life Of The Drama in the academic world is clear. I want to lay out an approach to Bentley’s writing on theater using primarily In Search Of Theatre, the book that introduced me to Bentley in the first place, and then look at the theory of drama presented in The Life Of The Drama. (Since the words “theater” and “drama” are often used interchangeably, I am grateful to Bentley that he titled his books in the way I’m using the words!)

The title In Search Of Theater illustrates in itself the difficulty of teaching theater: if you want to see it, you have to go out and look for it. In Search Of Theater is written, much of it, on the road, between 1947 and 1953. It begins with a series of reports on theater in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Dublin . . . the geographic range of the book is dazzling. Nor is that all. It also contains detailed looks at, among others, Strindberg, Ibsen, Pirandello, Yeats (his plays), O’Neill, and at a number of the greatest performers of the time, including, among others, Jean-Louis Barrault, Martha Graham, and Charlie Chaplin.

If only because of how much it describes, the book would be a treasure, but the quality of the description is just as important. When I first read the book I knew almost nothing about any of the people Bentley writes about, but subsequent experience has validated his observations time after time. But what I learned from the book, even more than a remarkable amount of reporting, was a first principle that I would cite in making a case for Bentley’s importance: the distinction, which I will put in the italics he loves, between the spurious and the genuine.

An example occurs in the essay “Trying To Like O’Neill” where Bentley describes his experience directing a production (in Switzerland) of The Iceman Cometh:

There seemed to [Bentley and his co-director] to be in The Iceman Cometh a genuine and a non-genuine element, the former, which we regarded as the core, being realistic, the latter, which we took as inessential excrescence, being expressionistic. . . . To get to the core of reality in The Iceman – which is also its artistic, its dramatic core – you have to cut away the rotten fruit of unreality around it. More plainly stated: you have to cut.

There are, Bentley suggests, genuine and spurious elements in the play, and the task – in this case, the director’s task – is to separate the one from the other.

One might make a case that there is no distinction between “genuine” and “spurious” in theater – that all theater is artifice. That might be so if theater were not, as Bentley continually insists, a part of life, not to mention a reflection of it.

Bentley is at base a moral writer. Like Shaw, he believes that theater matters, and that what it shows as it “holds the mirror up to nature” makes a difference. So there is truth and falsity, he insists, in theater. How can we tell which is which?

It is not enough, Bentley says, to be on “the right side” of issues about life. That too can be spurious, even if the impulse is itself moral. “The road to good theater,” Bentley writes, “is not paved with good intentions.” Looking at Broadway plays of the time, he writes:

A “serious play” is one with a message or at least with modern – preferably liberal – ideas in it. You can easily change any non-serious play into a serious play by changing the color of the heroine and inserting a speech or two against race hatred. The formula for serious drama is: non-serious drama plus a small dose of “modern ideas.”

Nor must we think that the spurious is necessarily harmless. A report from 1949 finds Bentley in Italy, only five years after the end of World War II and the apparent demise of the Fascist regime:

They have removed the statue of Mussolini from the Teatro delle Arti in Rome. Behind the statue, however, there were Fascist inscriptions inlaid in the wall. These, I am told, have not been removed; they are simply hidden, for the time being, by a curtain. . . . You don’t see anything as candid as a piece of Fascist propaganda in the Italian theater. The statue of the Duce is gone and the inscriptions are curtained off. It is the special aestheticism of the Fascist era that persists.

In some ways the distinction between the genuine and the spurious is almost the same as between the generalized and the specific. There is a general idea, for example, he says, that Pirandello’s subject matter is “illusion and reality.” That’s too general, Bentley says, and he goes on to demonstrate how Pirandello’s plays are rooted in the real suffering that people endure. “Real” – another possible opposition of words in Bentley’s work is realism and – what? Vagueness? Generality? Non-specificity?

I haven’t found a useful antonym in Bentley’s writing, but realism is central to his writing, not in the sense of a kind of theater that uses store-bought kitchen sinks and actual running water, but in the sense of a theater that is in touch with the truths of life. In his introduction Bentley quotes Shaw: “When an art becomes effete, it is realism that comes to the rescue.” Art, Bentley suggests, is always becoming effete; realism is always needed.

I would not have to search for an antonym to “real” if I were writing about Shaw; a word would be at hand, the ideal. Bentley, I have already mentioned, wrote a book about Shaw, and although hardly uncritical of Shaw (particularly Shaw’s later turn toward dictators and the use of force to bring about change), is significantly influenced by him.

Shaw’s antonym for “realism” is idealism. In “ideals” – I am putting this concept in my own terms – Shaw sees generalities that take the place of understanding the real – that word again – the real nature of the world. What sort of ideals? Love . . . patriotism . . . nationalism . . . fatherhood . . . motherhood . . . any high-sounding, well-meaning generality can conceal an ideal that takes the place of serious analysis and comprehension.

Bentley’s reviews abound in illustrations of this phenomenon. Here, for example, is his comment on the works of Jean Cocteau, the French playwright, filmmaker, and poet:

There is brilliant writing in Les Parents. There are lovely visual images in the more romantic films. What is disturbing is the awful vacuity of all these pieces, a deliberate but in no way justified meaninglessness. Or are we supposed to find significance in some of the nice things that are said to us? The film of The Eagle ends, if I recall, with a narrator’s voice assuring us that love is more powerful than politics. Tell it to Molotov [who was at that time the foreign minister of Stalin’s Soviet Union].

I could cite numerous passages in Bentley’s writing that make this same point. Just as interesting is what he sees as the remedy: no magic formula, no “silver bullet,” but the firm intention to get down to the real core of the theatrical moment, using what he describes as a “humble, yet deliberate and determined approach,” as in this passage on staging the plays of Shakespeare:

As for realism, I am not offering it as a panacea, but only a timely banner – modern, without quotation marks – under which Shakespeare might be more seriously interpreted. It appropriately suggests that one should start with the simplest, solidest rudiments . . . . [T]oday is a time to go back to the beginnings and realize that, in taking another look, we are seeing things for the first time. We must be content to rediscover the Shakespearean A B C. Let the director ask himself the naïvest questions of each scene. … And to the degree that he answers them in action, forthrightly, clearly, he will find himself a path-breaker.

And what will that director find as he breaks that new path? To discover Bentley’s answer, or part of it, we turn to the much more systematic The Life Of The Drama. Before we do, however, in fairness to Bentley I must acknowledge again that he is not happy that this book is all that many people know about him, and he’s right to feel that way.

For example, his work as a translator is well known, and so is his commentary on what the work of a translator is and how it is done (see in particular “How Translate A Play?” [sic] in Thinking About The Playwright). One comes away from his essays on the subject awed by the difficulty of the translator’s task, and energized by the examples.

Bentley’s career as a playwright, which he began fairly late in his life, is also substantial. Interestingly, the play for which he is best known, Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been, is literally realistic, being based on the transcripts of hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s. I have no experience with his singing and recording career, but it has been widely acknowledged.

Still, The Life Of The Drama is an exceptional book, a landmark, and it deserves the attention it has received. The book is divided into two sections. The first looks at plays in terms of plot, character, dialogue, thought, and “enactment.” The second looks at genres of drama: melodrama, farce, tragedy, comedy, and what Bentley, at a loss for a better word (I don’t have one either), calls “tragi-comedy,” a category that includes plays by writers as different as Chekhov and Beckett, Goethe and Brecht.

One might suppose from an outline of the book that it presents reasoned descriptions and comments on the areas and genres listed. In a way this is true, but what the book really does is more surprising: it looks at the emotional, rather than just the intellectual, foundations on which drama is built. Bentley’s comment on the book, in an interview with the Voice of America, is significant:

My friends had said it would be an elaboration of Brecht’s ideas. I myself thought it might be Aristotle’s Poetics as rephrased by a Freudian – I was being “analyzed” in those years. What surprised me was that the philosophy of theatre in the book wasn’t either Brecht (my father) or Freud (my guru at the time) but Pirandello, one of a number of Europeans I had translated. He saw life as role playing.

Bentley’s friends, one may assume, thought he would write a restatement of Brecht’s ideas because Bentley is so closely identified with Brecht, whom he knew and with whom he directed, and whose plays and poems he translated. But Bentley is clear that Brecht has his faults and limitations, telling the Voice of America that what interested him was Brecht’s “savvy, his talent, his genius, anything but his theories.” Bentley is forthright about the elements in Brecht that he finds genuine, and those that he finds spurious.

With the reference to Freud, we come closer to the heart of the book, because in its pages Bentley looks at the “subterranean” life of the drama, the emotions and impulses and instincts that emerge, masked by the veneer of civilization, in the way we behave in our everyday activities. We put on a civilized face in our day to day life, but beneath that face – that role playing – boils an emotional brew that begins to be created in our first moments as infants, that develops particularly in our formative years, and that never goes away, and that in moments of greatest conflict emerges in behavior worthy to be captured in a play, sometimes as comedy or tragedy, and often, perhaps more appropriately, as melodrama or farce.

I don’t mean to suggest that Bentley reduces drama to psychology. For one thing, “psychology” is too timid a word for the forces that surge and roar in the subconscious. As the Bible says, our minds (“the wicked,” the verse says) are “like the sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no rest…” (Isaiah 57:20-21 edited). We see these forces at work in our dreams, and in a sense drama is a projection of those dreams onto the stage.

A good actor will look at a character role on several levels. There is the level of meaning, of interpretation and significance. There is the level of behavior, of our attempts to remain civilized in the face of all the obstacles that threaten to drag us down. And there is the subterranean level, the dream level, the level where great forces struggle for mastery within us.

Macbeth, for example, gives us the interpretive level of questions of fate and inevitability, of individual responsibility and of helplessness in the face of circumstances, including those of our own nature. It also gives us the behavioral level, as Macbeth and his wife move within their social circles in an ever-accelerating cycle of violence. And it gives us the subterranean level that surfaces in the presence of the Weird Sisters, and that provides the forces that make a man capable of murdering father figures, children, people who might conceivably oppose him . . . powerful forces indeed.

Bentley refuses to consider these emotional tsunamis as any less important to the drama than the civilized behavior that both embodies them and covers them up. This refusal makes it possible for him to see with remarkable clarity the importance of elements of drama that might at first glance seem random or trivial, as in this discussion of a “bit” in a Charlie Chaplin movie:

Suppose you saw one man force the head of another through the glass of a street lamp so that the latter will be gassed by the fumes. It sounds like some Nazi atrocity, and Plato would no doubt be indignant at the notion of re-enacting the incident in a work of art. Nevertheless it was re-enacted in Charlie Chaplin’s film Easy Street, and in all the years no one has protested. . . . The villain is a giant whose strength passes the limits of nature. He can bend lamp posts with his bare hands. Since the “little man’s” revenges have to be more than proportionate to the provocation . . . he can drop a cast-iron stove on the villain’s head and ram that head inside a street lamp with the gas turned on.

This vivid set of images – including the giant, a figure out of a dream world – shocks by its violence, and yet it only represents moments in a funny and popular film. But all three of the levels of living that we have described here – the interpretive, the social, and what I’m calling the subterranean – are at work in those moments. The strength of Bentley’s book is that he is able to make us understand that the more fearsome aspects of ourselves are not factors to be ignored, but to be embraced and understood, in any discussion of drama.

As a result, the book, in my experience at any rate, takes on extraordinary interest. No matter how many times I read it, I find passage after passage that is startling and nourishing. Not least of the great things in it is its continual common sense. For example, my recollection is that in his book Tragedy And Comedy, Walter Kerr disparages the popular idea that the difference between the two is that tragedy ends sadly and comedy ends happily. Bentley, on the contrary, writes:

The popular definition of a word, like the popular understanding of a subject, always irritates the expert, but is always of great interest in itself, and usually provides an ideal starting point for study. The popular understanding of tragedy and comedy is simply that one has an unhappy, the other a happy, ending: that one ends in death, the other in marriage, which will lead to birth: that, by consequence, the one is represented by a mourning and weeping mask, the other by a rejoicing and laughing mask. All these propositions are full of sap and substance.

Kerr accused Bentley of an over-intellectual approach to drama, but who is the intellectual here? It is Bentley who sees truth in the popular understanding of tragedy and comedy. He can do so because he understands that we all share the psychological makeup that turns some of us into neurotics, some into playwrights…

I could continue to write at length about Bentley’s work, but I hope what I have said gives a glimpse of how interesting a writer he is. He is startlingly intelligent and well-read; he irritates, provokes, stimulates. He can be belligerent or eccentric – the price, perhaps, that one pays for caring about art in a sometimes unfriendly climate. He is like some marvelous conversationalist, rattling on about one’s favorite subject, raising the status of a chatterbox to high art, providing startling insights on nearly every page.

Criticism, Bentley writes in Thinking About The Playwright, “is good talk committed to the printed page. Even a critic is a person. No: especially a critic is a person, and the voice of a person must be heard in all his work. Conversely, all criticism in which a human voice is not heard is bad criticism.” Words to live by!

I am so grateful for all that his writing has done for me, and for the theater, and for our understanding of the mystery and complexity of our lives, and of how they are reflected in art.

[I said above that I’d met Bentley briefly at a reception for his 70th birthday.  I don’t know for certain why my name was on the invitation list, but I had been in contact with Bentley earlier that year—we’d never met; it was correspondence only—and that might have accounted for my invitation.  In the mid-’80s, I edited two theatrical newsletters, one for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now  “. . . of the Americas”) and the other for the now-defunct American Directors Institute.  ADI organized panel discussions and conferences to promote a better understanding, both among the public and among theater professionals, of what stage directors and artistic directors actually do. (You might be surprised how little most people understand that.)  In November 1986, ADI held its second conference, Symposium II: The Director’s Vision, and had invited Eric Bentley to give the keynote address.  Bentley turned us down and in two letters to ADI’s artistic director, Geoffrey Shlaes, explained his attitude toward the profession of stage director.  In the Winter 1986 issue of Directors Notes, I ran excerpts from those letters, dated 20 June and 12 July, to share some of Bentley’s provocative thoughts with ADI’s members.  Among his statements, Bentley wrote: “I don’t believe in a Director’s Theatre. . . .  No director is needed: the function is properly performed by either the playwright (Molière, Brecht) or the leading actor (Booth, Irving)” and “A constant irritant is the Nutty Production.  You set a story in another time and another place—the more inappropriate, the better.  That is how to make your name as a brilliant young director.”  He also declared that “while in technology there is progress, in the arts there is not; otherwise Arthur Miller would be a better playwright than Aeschylus.”  (By the way, amidst his disparagement of directors, Bentley also called dramaturgs “Ph.D. gofers” and warned that he’d “remove [dramaturgs] one day before removing [directors].”)]

Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater - Part 2

[Here’s Part 2 of my short discussion of some of the theories of Susanne Langer. Occasional readers of ROT will find the first part, which covers art in general, posted on 30 December 2009. I make no apologies for the superficiality of this review, but I do recommend that frustrated readers turn to Langer’s own books to flesh out this introduction, especially Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form.]

If, as Langer insists, art is defined by its capacity to express emotions, where, then, does beauty enter the equation? Well, in a way, it doesn’t. It kind of depends on what you mean by ‘beauty’ as applied to a work of art. “Beauty,” according to Langer, “is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.” ‘Prettiness’ isn’t the criteria Langer applies to art when she considers beauty. It may be present in the work, but it’s irrelevant. In fact, she wrote:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so. Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . . Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them. The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

“Beauty is expressive form” by Langer’s definition. In other words, beauty is a function of the artwork’s main purpose: if the work successfully expresses feeling, that is, “may truly be said to ‘do something to us,’” it is by definition ‘beautiful’--whether or not it’s also pretty. (I quoted Langer--and some others as well--in a brief consideration of this topic in “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Part 4,” ROT, 14 November.)

The upshot of this alternative definition of what’s beautiful and what isn’t, at least from my perspective, is that we consumers of art, whether we’re professionals who get paid to sound off on our opinions or private viewers, readers, and listeners, is that we need to allow for the possibility that something that strikes us at first as disturbing or even ugly may have artistic value if we delve beneath the surface appeal and get to the core of feeling inherent in the work. I fall back on the remark of a friend of Vincent van Gogh’s who admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.” I, at least, have always found van Gogh’s painting not just beautiful, but gorgeous--so full of fury and intensity. When I first saw Fernando Botero’s paintings 50 years ago, I thought they were strange and grotesque; I still do, but now I see them also as sublime and expressive. When I saw Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real for the first time, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t like it. Now I see it as one of the playwright’s most fascinating works and a classic of mid-century American Absurdism. We need to learn not to dismiss art that isn’t pretty, that doesn’t immediately appeal to our senses, and see if there isn’t something in it that stirs us if we let it in. Beauty, I think Langer was saying, affects us profoundly; prettiness just pleases us.

Langer’s criteria for beauty were very inclusive; she mostly told us how not to leave out creations we at first deem challenging. She didn’t provide us with a definition of what qualifies--primarily because there aren’t any . . . and there don’t need to be. We’re all equipped to discern effective art. “The entire qualification one must have for understanding art is responsiveness,” wrote Langer. This ability to appreciate art is natural, she said, though it can be enhanced or inhibited by various influences, including experience and upbringing. “Since it is intuitive,” Langer explained, “it cannot be taught; but the free exercise of artistic intuition often depends on clearing the mind of intellectual prejudices and false conceptions that inhibit people’s natural responsiveness.” I take this to mean that Langer thought we have to be open-minded to experience art in all its varieties. (That obviously doesn’t mean we have to like it all, but we shouldn’t be ready to dismiss any of it before we’ve contemplated it without preconceptions.)

We may not be able to teach artistic understanding, which Langer said is like creativity--though she stressed they are not the same thing--but we can direct or misdirect the ability to appreciate art by schooling--or the lack of it. If all we’ve learned about painting, for example, are the schools, genres, and styles of academic taxonomy, “we are prone to think about the picture, gathering quickly all available data for intellectual judgments, and so close and clutter the paths of intuitive response.” As we’ve already seen, Langer felt that our scientifically-oriented society has led us away from appreciating the creative aspect of human endeavor:

Our scientific convention of abstracting mathematical forms, which do not involve quality, and fitting them to experience, always makes qualitative factors ‘content’; and as scientific conventions rule our academic thinking, it has usually been taken for granted that in understanding art, too, one should think of form as opposed to qualitative ‘content.’

This carries over into our education as well:

People who are so concerned for their children’s scientific enlightenment that they keep Grimm out of the library and Santa Claus out of the chimney, allow the cheapest art, the worst of bad singing, the most revolting sentimental fiction to impinge on the children’s minds all day and every day, from infancy. If the rank and file of youth grows up in emotional cowardice and confusion, sociologists look to economic conditions or family relations for the cause of this deplorable ‘human weakness,’ but not to the ubiquitous influence of corrupt art, which steeps the average mind in a shallow sentimentalism that ruins what germs of true feeling might have developed in it. Only an occasional devotee of the arts sees the havoc . . . .

Art education, as I’ve argued myself (see “Missoula Children’s Theatre,” ROT, 25 August, and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children's Theater in America,” 25 November), is “the education of feeling,” Langer declared, “as our usual schooling in factual subjects, and logical skills such as mathematical ‘figuring’ or simple argumentation . . . is the education of thought.” She was adamant about the importance of this training and observed that the only way to get it is to be exposed to creativity and experience it in our lives. So kids' theater, and art museums, and concerts, and so on are necessary--and basically all that is necessary--for teaching people to enjoy and appreciate cultural and artistic endeavors:

Few people realize that the real education of emotion is not the ‘conditioning’ effected by social approval and disapproval, but the tacit, personal, illuminating contact with symbols of feeling. Art education, therefore, is neglected, left to chance, or regarded as a cultural veneer.

Up to now, I’ve been concentrating on Langer’s discussions of art and beauty in a general sense. Her theories, however, did separate the arts and she wrote about the characteristics of each genre. Each art form generates a “virtual” sphere of its own. The visual arts, for example, create “virtual space”; music, “virtual time”; and literature and drama (by which Langer meant the written texts, not the performing art), “virtual history.” (Langer devoted three chapters to drama in Feeling and Form.) Each art’s symbolic vocabulary is used by the artists to express their impressions of life and the world; it is the task of the perceivers to interpret these same symbols in order to absorb those impressions in their own ways.

(Langer, who wrote before computers became common and therefore before the term ‘virtual reality’ took on the meaning with which we’re familiar today, used the non-tech sense of these phrases: “Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.” Having recently posted on “Theater and Computers” [ROT, 5 December], I don’t want to commit an unintentional act of equivocation here. In Langer’s own use, a virtual phenomenon is a “semblance,” which she equates with the Aristotelian “imitation.” So, a theatrical act “imitates” a real act, or “resembles” one.)

Literature, Langer asserted, “projects . . . virtual memory,” a vision of life “completed, lived. . . events that compose a Past.” Drama, by contrast,

presents the poetic illusion in a different light: not finished realities, or ‘events,’ but immediate, visible responses of human beings, make its semblance of life. Its basic abstraction is the act, which springs from the past, but is directed toward the future, and is always great with things to come.

While literature “moves toward the present,” drama moves “toward something beyond; it deals essentially with commitments and consequences.” Drama, “though it implies past actions,” Langer indicated, is “directed toward the future”:

This future, which is made before our eyes, gives importance to the very beginnings of dramatic acts, i.e. to the motives from which the acts arise, and the situations in which they develop; the making of it is the principle that unifies and organizes the continuum of stage action. It has been said repeatedly that the theater creates a perpetual present moment; but it is only a present filled with its own future that is really dramatic. A sheer immediacy, an imperishable direct experience without the ominous forward movement of consequential action, would not be so. As literature creates a virtual past, drama creates a virtual future. The literary mode is the mode of Memory; the dramatic is the mode of Destiny.

“In the theater,” Langer believed, “most people--and especially the most competent spectators--feel that the vision of destiny is the essence of the work, the thing that unfolds before their eyes.” After all, a fundamental element of theater is action, which Langer saw as “oriented toward the future.” As she explained this:

In actual life the impending future is very vaguely felt. Each separate act is forward-looking--we put on a kettle expecting it to boil, hand someone a bill and expect to be given change, board a bus with casual confidence that we shall leave it again at an intended point, or board an airplane with somewhat more conscious interest in our prospective exit from its inside. But we do not usually have any idea of the future as a total experience which is coming because of our past and present acts; such a sense of destiny arises only in unusual moments under peculiar emotional stress.

In drama, however, this sense of destiny is paramount. It is what makes the present action seem like an integral part of the future, howbeit that future has not unfolded yet. The reason is that on the stage, every thought expressed in conversation, every feeling betrayed by voice or look, is determined by the total action of which it is a part--perhaps an embryonic part, the first hint of the motive that will soon gather force. Even before one has any idea of what the conflict is to be (i.e. before the ‘exposition’ has been given), one feels the tension developing. This tension between past and future, the theatrical ‘present moment,’ is what gives to acts, situations, and even such constituent elements as gestures and attitudes and tones, the peculiar intensity known as ‘dramatic quality.’

The characters in drama are also “makers of the future”:

We know . . . so little about the personalities before us at the opening of a play that their every move and word, even their dress and walk, are distinct items for our perception. Because we are not involved with them as with real people, we can view each smallest act in its context, as a symptom of character and condition. We do not have to find what is significant; the selection has been made--whatever is there is significant, and it is not too much to be surveyed in toto. A character stands before us as a coherent whole. It is with characters as with their situations: both become visible on the stage, transparent and complete, as their analogues in the world are not.

The notion of destiny and “futurality” (my word, not Langer’s) in theater was only a small portion of Langer’s discussion of drama as a form of art. (She also entered the debate about whether drama even is an art. She affirmed that it is.) Nonetheless, I’m focusing on that segment of Langer’s theories (and encourage curious readers to go back to her original books to learn more) because it’s one of the more uncommon aspects of her perspective on drama and theater. As she explained the concept, in contrast to reality:

In actual life we usually recognize a distinct situation only when it has reached, or nearly reached, a crisis; but in the theater we see the whole setup of human relationships and conflicting interests long before any abnormal event has occurred that would, in actual life, have brought it into focus. Where in the real world we would witness some extraordinary act and gradually understand the circumstances that lie behind it, in the theater we perceive an ominous situation and see that some far-reaching action must grow out of it. This creates the peculiar tension between the given present and its yet unrealized consequent, “form in suspense,” the essential dramatic illusion. . . . The future appears as already an entity, embryonic in the present. That is Destiny.

In reference to the Aristotelian dichotomy I mentioned earlier, Langer specified, “Destiny is, of course, always a virtual phenomenon--there is no such thing in cold fact.” But, she concluded, it is still “an aspect of real experience” and part of what separates humans from other animals because it enables us to sense “past and future as parts of one continuum, and therefore of life as a single reality.” Drama, therefore (if I may extrapolate a little), is a fundamental aspect of human intellectuality because it facilitates one of the basic distinctions of human existence. I think the evidence of this axiom can seen in plays like Eimuntas Nekrosius’s The Square, a Lithuanian play from around 1991 that depicts the difficulties of learning how to live in a free society after years of Soviet repression. Even more recently, the Iraqi National Theater is planning to reopen (after an abortive attempt a year ago) as if the drive to perform were too strong for Baghdadis to suppress for too long. In words that are the prosaic echo of Susanne Langer’s philosophical analysis, one actress said: “It’s as if the spectators want to send a message . . . they are not afraid, and life goes on.” Destiny, indeed.

Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater - Part 1

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) was an art philosopher whose best known books are Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and Feeling and Form (1953), the latter of which I want to discuss a little with respect to art, beauty, and theater. Her magnum opus, ranging across many academic disciplines, is Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, a massive study of the human mind that attempted to incorporate feeling into a grand scheme of human thought, published in three volumes in 1967, 1973, and 1982. A trained musician, Langer played the piano and the cello and music was an enduring pleasure of her life. She was a poet in her early life, composing poems before she knew how to write them down and her first published book was The Cruise of the Little Dipper and Other Fairy Tales (1923), a collection of children’s stories. She even wrote a play called Walpurgisnacht, performed by family members in a grove of woods near Lake George, New York, where her family vacationed. (Langer and her cousins also presented a Hamlet whose text they rewrote themselves.)

To summarize the work of any philosopher is to court distortion and oversimplification. Langer’s subject was vast and her ideas were complex and difficult to unpack, though her writing was straightforward and, given the complexity of her ideas, clear. But I’m pulling her words on one or two particular topics out of the entirety of her generally unified theories, which runs the further risk of misrepresentation. Nevertheless, I expect I’ll be quoting her directly a lot here because not only do I feel Langer’s own words are the focus, but I couldn’t articulate her thoughts better than she herself did. Furthermore, I guess that because privately I find enlightening what Susanne Langer has to say about art--she makes about the best intellectual argument for the significance of art in society, in human existence, that I’ve ever encountered‑‑I also think it’s something everyone should find worth contemplating, so I’m promoting her writing, not my own. (There’s no book-length biography of Langer--a subject I’d imagine would be interesting to research--so the best published source of details about her life is a lengthy interview article written when Langer was at the height of her career: Winthrop Sargeant, “Profiles: Philosopher in a New Key,” New Yorker 3 Dec. 1960: 67-100. Another, shorter article of note is James Lord, “A Lady Seeking Answers,” New York Times Book Review 26 May 1968: 4-5; 34.)

Langer, one of the most-read philosophers of the 20th century, was among the first to work in the field of aesthetics and write about how we perceive beauty and art. Until she began to write about aesthetics, it was all but ignored by philosophers. Langer, however, saw art as a fundamental human activity, equal in significance to the acquisition and use of language. In Philosophy in a New Key, she wrote:

I do believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolistic schema other than discursive language.

Of course, she’s talking about art, which she defines in Feeling and Form as “the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” Art, Langer felt, is what humans use to express things they feet that resist reduction to ordinary “discursive” language--everyday speech and writing. We need art, in other words, as much as we need language because without it, we can’t express much of what we sense, perceive, or feel. Indeed, for Langer, the drive to find meaning through symbols and art is a coequal endeavor for humans with the scientific impulse to find facts, both being at the apex of human intellectual refinement. She viewed art, among other disciplines, as a form of language:

[T]he term ‘language’ encompasses not only the written and spoken forms that most people use in everyday life, but also the less common symbolic forms of the mathematician, the physical scientist and others. These forms have been developed just because of the limitations of ‘ordinary’ language and permit their users far greater precision in expressing thoughts.

The symbolic language of art, however, “has no vocabulary, no dictionary definitions,” Langer explained. It is . . . an expression of non-discursive thought.” Discursive language--that is, the language of discourse--comprises only one portion of human expression, covering a limited aspect of human experience. Humans are symbol-makers--dreams and myth, Langer demonstrated, are other forms of non-discursive, symbolic expression; we perceive the world around us in symbols of all kinds and even think in symbols. “Freud . . . observed that in dreams speech has the same function as visual image,” Langer noted, for instance. Discursive language, she found, is inapt for communicating many of the activities of the human mind, aesthetic experience among them. “The making of this expressive form,” proclaimed Langer, “is the creative process that enlists a man’s utmost technical skill in the service of his utmost conceptual power, imagination.”

Ordinary discursive language also has an inadequacy in that is it linear. When we view a painting, a movie scene, a live performance, or even a landscape, we experience many things at once; the images hit us simultaneously. But try to describe that painting in words, either orally or in writing, and we are reduced to explaining the images serially--first the size and dimensions, then the colors and textures, the figures and shapes (or some version of that scheme). The same is true of performance description (which I’ve made something of a practice so I can attest to this predicament). Only the non-discursive, symbolic language of art can accomplish this simultaneity. Without it, we can’t communicate with one another a significant aspect of our lives.

While many philosophers before Langer began her writing saw art as mystical and non-rational, beyond coherent thought in the mysterious realm of emotion and intuition, Langer saw art as another form of human rationality, the form that deals with ideas that can only be expressed in symbols. Langer placed considerable value in art which has been informed by human thought. After all, she proclaimed, “‘feeling’”--the basis of art--“is not something opposed to reason.”

The foundation of Langer’s philosophy was the work of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a German-Jewish philosopher who fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in the U.S. in 1941. (Langer’s own family left Germany in the mid-19th century during another round of revolutions and violence in Europe. She grew up speaking only German in her home--her mother never learned to speak English--and, though born in New York City, always spoke with a pronounced German accent.) Cassirer understood that disciplines which seemed to be in conflict with one another like art, religion, and science were really different forms of symbolic thought. By isolating artistic expression as some unknowable construct, Langer’s predecessors couldn’t contemplate the whole of human intellectual activity, as she saw it. And by accepting this dichotomy, relegating the arts to a lesser plane of human endeavor and stressing a world of science and logic only, we have developed a society devoid of symbolic expression, a poorer place for all of us to live in. “A life that does not incorporate some degree of ritual, of gesture and attitude, has no mental anchorage . . . . Technical progress is putting man’s freedom of mind in jeopardy,” said Langer. “Indifference to art,” she declared, “is the most serious sign of decay in any institution.”

“[T]he function of art,” Langer wrote, “is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.” Langer observed that

there are two opposite perspectives from which any work of art may be viewed: that of its author and that of its spectators (or hearers, or readers, as the case may be). One perspective presents it as an expression, the other as an impression. From the former standpoint one naturally asks: ‘What moves an artist to compose his work, what goes into it, what (if anything) does he mean by it?’ From the latter, on the other hand, the immediate question is: ‘What do works of art do, or mean, to us?’ This question is the more usual, even in serious theoretical thought, because more people are beholders of art than makers of it, and this counts for philosophers as well as for any unselected public.

If, I think Langer believed, the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then omitting the part of life expressed by art--not just by those who make it but by the rest of us who perceive it--leaves a huge portion of our lives unexamined. “[I]t is the whole life of feeling--call it ‘felt life,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘direct experience,’ or what you will--which finds its articulate expression in art,” she insisted, “and . . . only in art.” As a crucial aspect of human existence, “art penetrates into personal life because in giving form to the world, it articulates human nature: sensibility, energy, passion, and mortality. More than anything else in experience, the arts mold our actual life of feeling.”

On the significance of artistic expression, Langer specified that “it clarifies and organizes intuition itself” by “formulat[ing] our conceptions of feeling and our conceptions of visual, factual, and audible reality together.” It puts everything together, she posited, and functions as an important societal asset “because the formulation of ‘felt life’ is the heart of any culture, and molds the objective world for the people. It is their school of feeling, and their defense against outer and inner chaos.” Langer concluded:

Art does not affect the vitality of life so much as its quality; that, however, it affects profoundly. In this way it is akin to religion, which also, at least in its pristine, vigorous, spontaneous phase, defines and develops human feelings.

But in Langer’s epistemology, “human feelings” isn’t a restrictive phrase. To be clear on this point, she specified that “by ‘feeling’ I mean everything that can be felt. This includes all mental acts and perceptions.”

Art, in Langer’s conception, “is envisagement of feeling, which involves its formulation and expression in . . . a symbol . . . .” But not all symbolic creations are equal. The “envisagement” can be distorted by interfering experiences which the artist hasn’t sorted out. “Candor is the standard,” wrote Langer. The feelings art “envisages” must be honest feeling: bad art is corrupted by false emotions.

In contrast, however, art which is merely imperfectly crafted by an insufficiently masterful creator is “poor art, which is not corrupt, but fails to express what [the artist] knew in too brief an intuition.” The product is “sincere enough,” said Langer, “but confused and frustrated” by “recalcitrant” media and lack of technical skill in the artist. While truly bad art must be “repudiated and destroyed,” insisted Langer, “as a lie may be exposed and retracted,” poor art is simply dismissed. (Langer also discusses non-art or false art, a creation which doesn’t fail to express an emotion because there’s no attempt to express anything. We’ve all encountered this: tourist art, airport art, junk art, artistic pabulum. It takes the form of an artistic object but not the content. Whether this is the creation of a charlatan or just an untalented producer is irrelevant from the perspective of aesthetics.)

I spoke just now of form versus content, which is misleading. In Langer’s artistic epistemology, while art may appear to be “formed content,” in actuality, the form and content are inseparable. She explained that

a work of art is a structure whose interrelated elements are often qualities, or properties of qualities such as their degrees of intensity; that qualities enter into the form and in this way are as much one with it as the relations which they, and they only, have; and that to speak of them as ‘content,’ from which the form could be abstracted logically, is nonsense. The form is built up out of relations peculiar to them; they are formal elements in the structure, not contents.

Furthermore, creativity doesn’t depend, in Langer’s theory, on either the form or the content being new, original, innovative, or novel. “A Greek vase was almost always a creation,” Langer observed by way of illustration, “although its form was traditional and its decoration deviated but little from that of its numberless forerunners. The creative principle, nonetheless, was probably active in it from the first throw of the clay.” The work need only be “symbolic of feeling,” even if “a thousand people may have used every device and convention of it before.” (Works of art, even great art, have come out of some of the most hide-bound traditional forms: canonical painting, Socialist Realism, Kabuki theater. Junk, in contrast, has come from some of the freest.)

Though art can be assessed as good or bad, however, doesn’t mean works should (or even can) be judged against one another.

Works of art are not usually comparable. Only prize-juries have to evaluate them with reference to some standard, which is inevitably arbitrary and in many cases inapplicable. A competent jury does not even define a standard. If it consists of people who have developed their powers of perception by long conversance with the order of art . . . in which their judgments are to be made, intuition will guide the verdict. There will be disagreements--not because good and bad works cannot be distinguished, but because among successful ones there is no sure principle of selection. Personal or social factors usually tip the balances; “ratings” are trivial.

(I’ve inveighed against turning art into a competition--the Tonys, Oscars, Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Carnegies, Pritzkers, and so on--on several recent occasions. I find it distasteful, but Langer makes an argument that it is also essentially impossible as well as meaningless--and I wholeheartedly agree.)

[This is only the first part of my brief discussion of some of Susanne Langer’s ideas. Please return in a few days for Part 2, which will cover Langer’s conception of beauty and one aspect of her analysis of drama and theater.]