An equally powerful biological imperative is to promote ‘self’. In the sense of the ‘selfish gene’
scenario, any behavioural characteristic that gives one’s own genetic endowment an advantage in
passing to the next generation is subject to natural selection. From this aspect, art is also one of
many behavioural expressions that allow an individual to be distinguished from the crowd. Piet
Mondrian put it this way:
“Although art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same, nevertheless two main
human inclinations, diametrically opposed to each other, appear in its many and varied
expressions. One aims at the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the aesthetic
expression of oneself, in other words, of that which one thinks and experiences. The first aims
at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively”.
The advantages of contributing to group identity by reinforcing the contemporary norms of
representation (subscribing to locally agreed icons of beauty and meaning), and the cultivation of an
individual output are not opposing principles of artistic creativity. They represent primeval skills of
being able to help highlight group identity through mapping one’s social unit, and having the ability
to produce new ideas about the environment which improve one’s own survival.
Every work of art we meet with modifies, even if ever so little, our attitude towards what we have
seen in the past and what we hope to see in the future. In bringing our experience of pictures to bear
on this one picture, we sort out those paintings which seem the most relevant, and we try to work out
what the common factors and what the differences are. Thus, we instinctively feel that a Cubist still-
life by Braque, and a late abstraction by Mondrian in some way "belong" together-the painters
concerned pose similar problems, and that part of us which responds to them is the same in each
case.
Mondrian Composition with red, blue and yellow posters
The paintings and the painters in fact conduct a sort of dialogue with one another. Braque reminds
us that our experiences of colour, shape, and design, our response to pictorial rhythm, is something
that springs from our own daily lives. As we move about the streets, or in our houses, we impose
shapes, patterns, sequences on things this indeed is how we comprehend them. Mondrian, on the
other hand, reminds us that these shapes, patterns, and sequences can be abstracted from nature,
and presented as absolutes. The appeal, which he makes, is, however, to very much the same set of
reactions. When he thinks of the spectator, the guise in which he sees him is not so very different
from the form envisaged by Braque.
Braque: Still life with grapes and clarinet
For both these artists, the spectator is a man whose normal, day-to-day responses- the responses
which he uses to pilot himself through the daily round of living-must be extended and heightened.
They try to confirm us- Braque and Mondrian-in things, which we already know. They also want to tell
us that the operations of our senses and of our minds can be enjoyed for their own sake, quite free
of overtones, detached from personal emotion.
The situation is very different when we turn to a Surrealist painter like Magritte. Magritte and Braque,
though both figurative painters, are radically different from each other. Magritte uses the objects he
paints to make a kind of rebus. We "read" the picture, rather than experience it. For Magritte the
senses, and particularly the sense of sight, are simply the conveyors of a message to the brain.
Braque tries to show us the essentials, Magritte wants the recognizable surface. The more "illusion"
he can pack into a picture, the greater its success (in his terms) is likely to be. He persuades us by
disorienting our senses, rather than by trying to heighten our awareness of sensuality. By confusing
the signals, he tries to slide some idea about the nature of reality, about the nature of mankind itself,
into our consciousness.
Magritte
Braque
So far as the true nature of painting goes we cannot really hope to determine whether its main task
should be to extend awareness through the physical senses or through the psyche. The painters of
the past- Mantegna or Rembrandt, for example, entwine the two things so closely that the question
does not arise. On the other hand, one has only to make the experiment to see that it is difficult to
provide a true verbal equivalent to a Surrealist picture, because even the briefest and most cryptic
verbal description fails to catch the simultaneity which only a picture can give-and this is true despite
what I have just said about a surrealist picture having to be "read" rather than experienced plastically.
Jackson Pollock's aims are, in the end, closer to Magritte's than to Mondrian's. The increasing
tendency we have to find Pollock "pretty" and "decorative" is perhaps the best example to illustrate
the chaotic state of opinion about contemporary art, and the need for new categories and groupings.
Pollack
