A guest post on art criticism, this time the work of Rabindranath Tagore, a man much heralded for his writing and poetry but less so for his painting.
About his writing it is often said that Tagore is a modernist who pretended to be a sickly Romantic and pretended well enough to fool all his critics and most of his followers. This is certainly a good description of his paintings. When I think of the possible destinies of the surprise in Modernist aesthetics, sometimes I think of these paintings. The Bengal School of painting has too often condemned itself as arty. For instance, this painting by Abanindaranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s nephew:
Departure of Prince Siddhartha, 1914
It is hard not to feel that art has been smeared all over the canvas. There is no escape here from the regime of art. This is unfair as a representation of Abanindranath’s work as a whole; he could be exquisitely meditative, and something other than just art could emerge from inside that quietness. But although Abanindranath was a professional and Rabindranath only started painting after he was eighty, and although the nephew’s draftsmanship was much better than his uncle’s, it is Rabindranath’s pictures that usually astonish me.
They look supremely arty. For instance, they look whimsical, like this:
Lithograph, ca. 1935
Super-solemn, with a tired cult of Woman:
Untitled, ca. 1930-40
Literary, wilful:
Lithograph, ca. 1930-1940
I am not sure it is possible to see on a computer screen. Yet truly there is no interior decoration here, but you will notice it at first only by looking at a single mark. A single mark, which has that internal propulsion called intelligence. ‘Intelligence’ is the name of that quality which explicitly and on its surface represents the tension of opposites or the integration of disparate sources and performs such tension or integration with a local, tactical consciousness of its own bravura. It is the production of effects of that skill which is not technique; it is close to what was once called the making of felicities. William Carlos Williams, in his ‘Introduction’ to The Wedge, said:
A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words
The paintings of Rabindranath Tagore look like they are a collection of an indefinite number of attempts towards such a machine which adds up to the provision of an opportunity for the eye to rove over a complex, variegated and enjoyable picture-plane. They are constructed, in their large-scale formal properties, from Indian, Japanese, Chinese, European, African and Polynesian cultural materials and it is part of the pleasure to see the joins and the places between the joins.
That is what they look like. They also have an effect of internal illumination, from behind. That is an effect, of the pigments. It is also what holds them together. William Carlos Williams also said
The making of poetry is no more an evidence of frustration than is the work of Henry Kaiser or Timoshenko. It’s the war, the driving forward of desire to a complex end.
Machine and the war. The war, the Second World War, was fought with machines, but it is not itself a machine, it had no design. It was not a chaos either, it had historical patterns and was an effect in part of human intentions. Perhaps what Williams is saying is that poetry, by which he means art in general, since he was a Modernist, is a war machine, a machine for producing war, a machine whose internal processes are themselves war. That is something like a machine with no purpose, a cancellation of the utilitarian, which is what some people have thought art is; but really it’s the reverse, a machine for everything, a subsumption of the purposeful, a mockery of it, its apotheosis. In the gentlest possible way that is what Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings are.
Truly, they have no intelligence. You need to accept their background illumination to see that absence of consciousness underneath consciousness. That background is the imaginary core out from which, in imagination, a drive, a propulsion, a war of forms spirals. There is in each painting a disturbance of the silting of forms in Tagore’s mind, their spikes and twists and eccentric curves shatter the underlying material, which is familiar. They are thus incomplete and serial. Yet their illumination, which is the energy which fictively propels this endless outward motion, is also the force which gives each painting its apparently placid rotundity, which makes of it a single emblem. Into these emblems of an unknown religion, maybe Tagore’s own semi-Deistic bhakti-humanist Hinduism, any war of directions, layers, colours, angles amongst the marks on the paper can subside. And then rise again.
Modernism was, among other things, the belief in the permanent surprise of art. And it is easy to be unsurprised by everything, and to be unsurprised even by that. As I said, if I think of the destinations of surprise, I sometimes think of Tagore’s paintings. For here is the dichotomy we have inherited: an art which, by its disjunctions, refers ultimately back to the unified mind which can overcome the disjunctions and of which they are the projection; an art whose false objecthood is inadequate to the disjunctions we experience. Alternatively: an art that is a machine for mental form; an art that is form. The only permanent surprise would be in some art that could at all moments be both, by constantly overcoming the other term, an endless depth, an endless alternation between consciousness and its opposite which was also interpretable as the endless deepening of consciousness, its immanent coming to terms with itself, so finally no question of depth, of layers, could be decided or even asked. This is what Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings are.