The Visual Arts

In reading about the visual arts, I find myself relating everything to poetry and the rules, for lack of a better term, which Eliot and Pound endorsed. I thought this was a bad thing until in my continued reading I found Macleod, Fry, and Goldman making the same connection. I lost count of how many times the Eliot’s objective correlative came up as well as the idea of fragmentation. For example Goldman states, “The Post-Impressionists ‘were not interesting in the discoveries of the Impressionists only so far as these…helped them to express emotions which the objects themselves evoked” (125). This emphasis on art and emotion, however that emotion may be represented, had, for me, not yet been blatantly linked to the emotion evoked by other arts. After these readings though, I feel as if I had failed to realize the most obvious relationship; arts, paintings and sculptures are the visual equivalent of literature.
The painting with its colors and lines connotes feelings and emotions much in the way a written work does—visual arts are the poetry of the eyes. While this may seem obvious to some, I needed the relationship between the poetry of first decades of the twentieth century and Post-Impressionist and Impressionist art to be made irrefutable, by using the language commonly associated with the criticism of the former to describe the latter. Macleod asserts that the visual arts had a great influence on poetry and it is easy to see this when realizing the emphasis on form, innovation, point of view, and emotion in either. Macleod continues to look at individual artists and finds of Picasso with regard to Analytical Cubism that his objects “became hardly recognizable” and saying of Braque and Picasso, “the two artists banned almost all color from their canvases” (200). We must recognize that cubism broke objects into small parts, literally Picasso and the other Post-Impressionalists fragmented images, a most obvious commonality between much of the poetic form indicative of modernism. Also, I read the second portion of this statement as the visual equivalent of the “DON’T’S” which Pound emphasizes in “A retrospect.” The lack of superfluous language and unnecessary words in many ways mimics the lack of color in Picasso’s work. With regard to form, we can see that much like important action in poetry often happening between lines or in the absence rather than presence of words, painting worked in a similar way. Fry describes this by discussing space on a canvas. He says of Cézanne, “Space indeed is his real subject, and his feeling for it is so intense that he could make a design of almost nothing else” (273). This reminds me of the starkness of some modernist poems, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” for example. In this two line poem, the meaning exists in the words which don’t.
It appears that whatever standards and expectations were expected of writers at this time, were also expected of visual artists. Clive Bell begins his “The Artistic Problem” for example, “We all agree now – by ‘we’ I mean intelligent people under sixty – that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art” (102). His statements seem to parallel the desire of critics like Eliot and Pound to create works that were new, but to realize that their greatness must be recognizable and therefore not entirely foreign.
What is perhaps most interesting with regard to the similarities between the visual arts and literature is the representation of emotion. While poetry is supposed to paradoxically embrace and renounce emotion, art exists to foster it. It is in its translation from artists to audience that leaves room for problems. Bell declares, “One man cannot pour an aesthetic experience straight into another” (106). This would appear to evoke Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative, but as Goldman finds of Post-Impressionist arts, “All the emotion and associations’ that the object ‘may be made to convey in poetry were omitted’” (125). Art then does not reside in a place of tension as much modernist poetry does. There is no conflict between the need for emotion and the difficulty in representing it. The art is concerned, according to Goldman, “with the arousal of emotion,” (131) making it, in my opinion, a more accurate medium and one better equipped to traffic in the world of human response.