Keys to Art
John Canaday, 1964*
Forward
The simple but ambitious aim of this book is to fill the interval, lengthy or brief according to the individual, that separates the act of seeing and the act of looking. It is through the sight in childhood that we receive the basis of a direct knowledge of the world, a knowledge that education and learning only makes more aware, more thorough and more lucid without effacing the first, fundamental impression.
There is no intention, however, of offering the public another and quite unnecessary history of art, with its welter of erudition and lists of names and dates, and still less a new aesthetic with a novel terminology; it is rather to help the common reader rediscover that hidden power of wonder, which is characteristic of childhood and which awakened in our most distant ancestors a taste for adorning themselves, their homes and places of worship, the pleasure of using a well made tool and the feeling of joy and freedom from looking at a beautiful landscape. In fact, no method can achieve this and it is the aim of this book to revive this profound instinct for beauty without the farrago of learned words, false or even true ideas, and without classifying by schools and giving examples.
If art is in itself a magic way of seeing, it is because the artist has already looked for us. A silent language of forms and objects, its value is so universal that all interpretation obscures it, all words deceive and mislead us. Rilke expressed this perfectly in discussing the mystery of nature: “If a woman paints this, it is because she cannot put it into words.”
A return to understanding by simply looking, by the direct path of contemplation, that is the true source of every renewal, of every awakening and every miracle. A woman looks and the world is reborn.
Introduction
The reader should notice that this book is called “Keys to Art,” not “The Key to Art.” If there is anything that can be called the key to art, it is the intuition held intimately at the core of personality, and hence differing, at least slightly, from one person to another. But since this key itself frequently gets locked in, the purpose of this book is to offer a few keys that may be of service in releasing it for use.
The first key, certainly, is to learn to see more than casually. Fixed in our habits, we see little enough of what passes before our eyes every day. We see even less of what a painting, a sculpture, a building, offers us. The routines of daily life condition us to see the practical essentials of things—which is fair enough in a life where coping with practical essentials has to take up most of our time. But paintings and sculptures are not practical essentials. Most buildings are, but the great buildings of all times, even of our own hardheaded time, are also works of art. This means that, like painting and sculpture, they are expressions of the human spirit no matter what practical essentials they also serve, and are subject, like all art, to our habitual blindness.
When habits of seeing the world are used as a way of seeing art, a painting becomes an imitation of something, when it should be instead a revelation. A sculpture is only a more or less pleasing object in stone, bronze or wood, usually a figure of something, when it could be a transfiguration. And buildings, which of all things around us can be more interesting as summaries of a civilization, are reduced to structures occupying certain sites and designed to serve certain purposes, perhaps with certain proportions and embellishments that make them pleasing to the eye.
“Pleasing to the eye” is a dreadful phrase under any circumstances, but is most dreadful of all when applied to a work of art. It implies that art is a soothing optical lotion, and that the way to see art is to let it wash across a surface that has been wearied by more demanding activities. “Stimulating to the eye” would be a little better, indicating that art can jolt us out of habitual ways of seeing, if we will let it. “Challenging to the eye ” would be better still, since some effort on our part is necessary if, as a beginning to deeper understanding, we are ready to see fully.
Compare the way we see with the way we hear. Of all our sense, hearing may be the most subtly attuned. Having learned from experience that a sound once produced is gone immediately, we listen more intently than we look, and may perceive more completely a sound that we hear unexpectedly in a fraction of a moment than we perceive a building we pass every day or a picture that hangs on our wall for years. Nor are we trained to recognize visual devices as we recognize verbal ones. Everyone says, “It wasn’t what she said, it was the way she said it,” but how many say, “It wasn’t what the picture showed, it was the way the artist showed it.”
Thus we realize that our enjoyment of a comedian’s wit is increased because we can recognize the skill with which she calculates the pause just before the punch line. But few of us are aware of the ways a painter leads us to the climactic point of his picture and emphasizes it by comparable devices. We may admire the rolling cadences of an orator’s speech, and miss the sculptor’s comparable building up of forms into a unified whole. Consciously we admire the timbre of a great voice, yet we take for granted the texture of a great building. Of course we are talking here about techniques and materials, which are only the means of art, not its end. The comedian’s timing is technique ; so is the painter’s way of putting a picture together. The orator’s rhythms are produced by technique, so are the rhythms of sculptural form ; the timbre of a great voice is only raw material that may be used or misused by its owner, and so are the materials in which the architect designs.
If the first key to art is a matter of learning to see such things (and their recognition alone may give much pleasure), it is only the first key of many. For you may say that the effectiveness of a work of art lies not in what the artist says, but in the way she says it, but you cannot say that its greatness lies there. Of course it is what is said that is important or unimportant, true or false, noble or base. The way it is said is simply the effort to reveal as fully as possible the character of the thought. The most obvious truth about art, yet the one least considered by most people, is that if an artist has nothing to say, it makes little difference how great her mastery over the means of saying it, and that no matter how much she may have to say, and no matter how great a woman she may be within herself, she is of no consequence as an artist except to the degree that she has mastered the most appropriate way of communicating with the rest of us.
From this point on, the “appreciation of art”—another deadly phrase, but an irreplaceable one—is a process so complex that it would be discouraging if its rewards did not equal its complexities. Once the first door is opened, any key on the ring will open another. Art is the summary of our history, sometimes in the factual sense as a record of heroes, wars, governments, and the gradual transformation of our planet from a self-contained wilderness to a cosmological speck. But more importantly, art is our history of self discovery. There is nothing anyone can know that does not find its reflection, or better yet its clarification, in art. From superstition to religion, from religion to science, from the way women look to the way they think, it is all there. What we have hoped for, what we have accomplished, where we have failed, what we have believed or doubted, what we have revealed as true or exposed as false, everything that we have found good, true and beautiful or stale, flat and unprofitable, has been expressed in art. Anything we know about anything adds to our understanding of art, and anything we learn from art increase our knowledge of ourselves.
Works of art of any consequence are immortal, but they are not static. They grow even after the civilizations that produced them have died. Nothing is more certain than that a work of art changes from generation to generation and from age to age as the women change who look at it. From the distance of a generation, a century, a millenium, we surely lose something of what the art of the past meant to the women who produced it. But we gain incomparably more than we lose. Because the past produced us stage by stage, and continues to nourish us, we in turn discover within it new meanings extending from, growing upon, the old. Since this is true, some of the ideas propounded in this book might come as surprises to the artists who did the paintings, sculptures and buildings. But if the artists are not here to argue such points, their works are, to offer corroboration or rebuttal. The reader should listen to them.
A book on art should be a three sided conversation: the author proffers her responses to art, the artist makes them meaningful or invalidates them by the evidence of her work, and the reader takes the two of them on, not as antagonists but as fallible specialists. In disagreements where the decision is close, the benefit of the doubt should go to the artist. She is, after all, the one who counts most. Art cannot be created solely by any set of rules ; hence a work of art can be analyzed only up to a point, although the point may be a vantage one for sensing what lies beyond it—the inexplicable something that accounts for the greatness of a great work of art.
