Art to play with life

On page 98 of my edition of Art & Illusion (art and illusion), art historian Ernst Gombrich tells a small episode past in Henri Matisse’s studio. A lady who was visiting there, possibly a client, looking at one of the paintings, commented: « You will surely recognize that this woman’s arm is too long… ». The painter did not disturb himself minimally. «My lady must be wrong. This is not a woman, it is a painting. And, as a painting he was, the Creator could give himself the freedom to make his arm with the length he well understood.
Art-at least the figurative-has always moved in a kind of hidden game with life. Swiss romantic painter Johann Heinrich Füssli also played with this confusion between art and reality when he noticed that just looking at John Constable’s landscapes-who loved to paint England’s humid fields-had a huge desire to get the overcoat and the umbrella.
The case of Constable deserves special attention from Gombrich, as it is someone who has managed on his screens to take the feeling of illusion very far. This illusion, as the artist meditated, was not to deceive the viewer’s eye, but to put his memory to work. Art, adds Gombrich, must be ‘suggestive’, or ‘evocative’, awakening something we already bring within us.
« To read the artist’s painting is to mobilize our memories and our experience of the visible world and test this image through temporary projections, » writes the art historian. That is, we interpret a painting by comparing it with our impressions of the world outside.
Although Constable worked outdoors, drawing directly from nature, his landscapes, Gombrich note, are not a mere ‘transcript’ of what he saw. For them also contributed other paintings that the artist brought in his mental baggage. Constable was not limited to observing the fields, without ceremony used the discoveries made by his fellow painters. Which leads the historian to conclude, in a phrase that summarizes his thesis: « All paintings, as Wölfflin said, owe more to other paintings than they owe direct observation. »
After reaching the height of the likelihood in painting, the artists began to distrust the opinion and move away from ‘naturalism’. They no longer interested them imitating reality in a way, so to say photographic, but rather create a new reality with their own rules. Picasso is a good example: “When Picasso says ‘I do not seek, meeting’, I mean, I assume, who began to acquire that the creation itself is exploitation. He does not plan, he sees the strangest beings rise to his hands and assume a life of his own. A life regardless of the reality around us.
As we can see, Gombrich did not die of love for modern art, and also did not disguise. Considerations of this genre – « the weirdest beings » – did not please the enthusiasts of modern art. But that did not support him beyond. It had always been a free-to-peanker. In a young man, he had rebelled against the heavy German academic tradition dedicated himself to studying caricature and popular culture; At mature age, I resisted what I saw as a passing fashion. And it was not going to be the opinion of some to stop him from thinking about his own head.