Russian Visual Arts Project

TITLE: Complicated Questions: The Principles of Artistic Evaluation

AUTHOR: S. Diaghilev

Beauty in the field of human artistic creativity is the highest manifestation of the personality, irrespective of the form it takes. The artist is the all-embracing source of our innumerable artistic experiences. Why, then, should we look elsewhere for explanations of the fundamentals of art? Is it not a matter of indifference to us where the artist takes the motif for his work from, or in which external form his thought is expressed? If the artist is in harmony with nature then let him fearlessly enslave it and draw from it everything that will help him to express himself. After all, how can we fail to acknowledge the passion for nature? We sympathise fully with it, but what matters to us here is not nature, but the personality in its powerful fascination with nature. Our appreciation of the work of art depends on the extent to which we uncover that personality in its loving attitude to nature. And a person who worships nature must understand us above all, since, if the entire beauty of the world is a manifestation of the divine will, then surely it is concentrated most intensively in the nature of man, who is the highest emblem of the divine spirit.

Ought one to say the same about those who seek beauty far from the world and who regard beauty exclusively in this light? We cannot agree with such people. We do not concur that happiness consists in intoxication; that is happiness that can be 'bought in any chemist's shop and can be carried in your waistcoat pocket'.

One must seek the manifestation of beauty but not the conditions of its manifestation. Therefore, we cannot accept a formula for the search for beauty that consists in a deliberate distancing on principle from reality, in the same way that we cannot agree that a work of art is a slice of nature viewed through the temperament. Beauty in art is temperament expressed in images; moreover, it is a matter of complete indifference to us where those images are drawn from, since the work of art is not significant in itself, but only as the expression of the personality of the artist. The history of art is not the history of works of art, but of the manifestation of human genius in artistic images. It might be objected that the instances of the highest manifestation of human creativity were precisely those eras when the significance of the individual personality was maximally destroyed and which were the product of a diverse crowd, imperceptible to us. During the three eras of mankind's greatest artistic creativity - the arts of Egypt, Greece, and the Middle Ages - the individuality of man seemed to retreat into the depths and be hidden behind the inspired trembling of the crowd and the shadow of great creative works. But can we know whether it was by accident or design that stern time wiped from the annals the names of those artists who created the greatest of earth's treasures? Can we understand why it has not been given to us to know upon whom to bestow the laurel wreaths? And what if this oblivion is not accidental? What if, in the immeasurable ecstasy of their service to God, those simple stonemasons who hewed out Gothic cathedrals believed that it was a great sin to harbour the ambitious desire to glorify their own individuality, which was imbued solely with the greatness of the common task? Is it not the highest and unequalled manifestation of human existence when the human creator forgets himself in God the Creator?

Moreover, in eras which were so intensely gripped by a single world outlook and ultimate goal, in eras when both faith and the meaning of life seemed uncomplicatedly clear and welded the entire mass in the single service of a single God, there could not, of course, be that differentiation of the human personality at which we - with our agonizing eclecticism - are now arriving. In such eras division into discrete physical entities, each an identical reflection of the one common idea, is of no significance to us. The era itself appears to us as an integral being, without division into its constituent elements. For us, what is essential is the expression of the human spirit, whether it reveals itself in collective or individual personality. Finally, even in such eras some separate world outlooks, some strong individuals overcame the full weight of the age and have come down to us, giving us the opportunity to glorify Phidias, (1) to experience Sophocles, (2) and to smile with Horace. (3)

I see the forward movement of the entire history of the arts in the development of the artistic personality alone, independent of any objective conditions, and from this point of view all eras in the history of art are of equal significance and worth, and therefore I will never agree that the Age of the Renaissance was greater than, let us say, the eighteenth century as a form of expression of the personality. They both seem to me to be exactly equivalent in this regard, as do all forms and all eras. Here everything is commensurable only in the degree of manifestation of the human spirit, and so I can compare Giotto (4) with Watteau, (5) but not the Gothic era with that of rococo. One of the major merits of our time, our generation, is precisely the ability to sense the individual personality under any clothing and in any era. Not only have we acknowledged Wagner, (6) we have come to love him passionately, but this does not prevent us from the boundless admiration of Don Juan (7) or the adoration of Orpheus. (8) And how short-sighted it is to see in this the absence of logic and hence the signs of degeneration. Herein lie our happiness and the breadth of our understanding. Of course, we cannot follow the prescription set out in Nordau's (9) cheap little book, which cites Cavalleria Rusticana (10) as an example of wholesome music and Ohnet's (11) novel as an example of wholesome literature. We can only congratulate him on his decision and close the book without reading any further. The fact that we do not recognise works like this in no way narrows our horizons, for it represents not an inability to understand such pearls, but rather a conscious aversion to them, since - besides the insignificance of the personality revealed through them - we also encounter here an absence of what constitutes the second and final of our requirements in the assessment of works of art: an accord between us and the artist . Apart from the contemplation of the manifestation of personality, the complete enjoyment, the full appreciation of a work of art consists not in losing my own 'I' in the sphere of higher sensations, not in the transubstantiation of my being, but - on the contrary - in the finding of my personality within the personality of the artist in my solidarity with the creator. If we are gladdened by the unexpected and the unprecedentedly new that we find in a work of art, then we owe that feeling precisely to our capacity to unite with the new, which already lies within us but which reveals itself only thanks to the divine clairvoyance of the fortunate artist

'It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero', says Carlyle. (12) 'What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so!'

Of course, the accord between the viewer and the artist is a purely subjective condition, although between people who are fully at one with each other it can acquire a certain objectivity, since it must not be forgotten that ideas are for ever flying around in the air, and even though the extent to which views are held in common might change from generation to generation, nevertheless each generation thinks and evaluates in its own way, and in this sense is at one. The generation preceding ours was more fortunate than us because it was more united. For us, such unity is more difficult, since we lack ready maxims and formulae. Although questions about the extent of development of the artist's personality and the accord between the artist's personality and that of the viewer will constantly change, nevertheless it is to these two questions and to them alone that the entire essence of criticism can be reduced. The task of criticism seems to me far removed from the pedantic classification of things according to precise but wholly mutable criteria. It is, of course, extremely important to explain what influenced Rembrandt's (13) use of colour and what Racine (14) contributed to the history of French tragedy. From the scholarly point of view it is exceptionally interesting to observe under the microscope the evolution of the lyric poem from the spiritual homily, but is this really criticism's direct function? Must one really wear large, professorial spectacles and lock oneself away in a scholar's study in order to form a judgement about the subtle grace and harmonious beauty of art that is as transparent as a stream? Such art has on it a delicate dust, as on a butterfly's wings, that vanishes when it is subjected to all these methods and systems. Surely the essence of criticism was better understood when the greatest works of art were being created, at that blessed time of art's brilliant flowering, when criticism had not yet been separated off as a special concept, when Donatello's (15) statues and Leonardo's (16) pictures appeared? At that time, whoever was able to do so, whoever felt within himself sufficient power, whoever was imbued with the greatness of new creation wrote a sonnet in which he - the completely unknown poet - in a burst of rapturous emotion, praised the artist in poetic images corresponding to the latter's imagination. He brought his sonnet and laid it at the feet of the one whose praises it sang, and the artists rejoiced and were proud of the number and beauty of the sonnets praising them. 'The next day', writes Benvenuto Cellini (17) in his memoirs, 'I unveiled Perseus to the public's gaze. People crowded round the entrance to the loggia, which I had adorned with drapes, and in the few hours during which the statue was open for public viewing more than twenty sonnets of praise were stuck to it. When I once again closed the statue to the public, no more than a day went by before the learned professors of the Pisa schools and their students deposited many poems in Latin and Greek outside the loggia. I was truly proud to receive the praise of Jacopo da Pontormo (18) and of his famous pupil, Bronzino.' (19)

Is not the entire principle of criticism to be found here? Surely one cannot relate to a work of art in a better, more beautiful, more artistic way! I believe that art should be praised, that each new manifestation of talent should be met triumphantly, and hymns of praise can only be sung out of boundless joy and unexplained personal rapture. Whilst in no way denying the significance and utility of so-called scientific criticism, I must nevertheless remind the reader that the scientific attitude to art, the desire to turn criticism into a science, will never succeed in resolving the issue of the relative value of talent.

Just as the astronomer observing the movement of the planets sees no significance in the mysterious beauty of the stars, so the artist would never dream of evaluating his impressions by subjecting art to vivisection using methods stolen from the natural sciences. And if, in Taine's (20) words, criticism judges nothing, forgives nothing, and relates sympathetically to all forms of art, then what is its function, other than to arrange the volumes of works of art on the dusty shelves of eras, nationalities, and races? Brunetière (21) may show us with mathematical precision the entire development of the French novel, but will he thereby succeed in proving - even to the tiniest degree - that the novel is really a work of genuine art? 'If it is interesting', he says, 'to compare a platypus with a kangaroo, then exactly the same reasons, springing from the desire to know and therefore to compare, make it interesting - indeed, essential - to compare Shakespeare's plays with Racine's tragedies.' True, but where is the artistic evaluation in this?

We might trace in an entirely scientific fashion the entire evolution of pornographic literature from Les Liaisons dangereuses (22) to Louÿs's Aphrodite, (23) but in doing so we accord the subject no relative place in the history of art and we entirely miss its artistic significance. And this happens not because criticism has hitherto failed to establish more or less stable criteria, but because whatever criteria it might have established are transformed with the relentless passing of the years into dry, worn out formulae, and will be deprived even of that unfading charm of subjective evaluation in which, besides the artist's work, there can be discerned the critic's soul. Whereas subjective criticism diagnoses, objective criticism categorises the illness and records it in a book of scientific statistics, reacting with complete indifference to the facts that it has established.

Thus, for each person experiencing a work of art, its value and significance consists in a very clear manifestation of the personality of the artist and in a very close accord between the personality of the artist and his own. Clearly, it is often the case that only one of these elements is encountered in a work of art: the creative personality, while striking a chord with the person experiencing the work, may not be manifested to the full; conversely, the personality might be expressed in the most powerful way, yet not be in accord with the person experiencing the work. Both these types of art must be appreciated as the expression of at least one side of the manifestation of beauty. Only works of anti-art, such as those mentioned above, the novels of Ohnet and Cavalleria Rusticana, must be banished with a clear conscience from the realm of aesthetics.

This general position provides the explanation for our entire attitude to art. Directly from it, for example, flows our passion for 'modernisation', i.e. a completely identical attitude to modernity and to history. Whoever accuses us of harbouring a blind passion for innovation and of rejecting history does not understand us at all. I say it again: we were brought up on Giotto, on Shakespeare, on Bach. They were the first and greatest gods of our artistic mythology. But it is true that we were not afraid to rank alongside them Puvis de Chavannes, (24) Dostoevskii, (25) and Wagner, and this correlation is based entirely logically on our fundamental point of view. Rejecting all concepts of authority, we approached both groups of artists independently and with our own demands. We viewed history with a modern, personal outlook, and we bowed down only before what we found to be of value. We dived into the centuries, and we applied our measure of the development and correspondence of personality to Shakespeare exactly as we had applied it the day before to Wagner and Böcklin. (26) We respected art too much to accept anything on faith, out of fear that it would not pass our 'reckless' judgement. We loved it too much to approach it from the point of view either of authority or history. In our whole attitude to art we first of all required independence and freedom; and if we left ourselves the freedom to judge, we granted the artist complete creative freedom. We rejected any hint of the non-independence of art, and our point of departure was man himself, as a uniquely free creature. All possible surrounding frames had to be removed. Nature, imagination, truth, content, form, the picturesque, nationalism - all had to be viewed through the prism of personality.

Nationalism is still a sore issue in modern art, especially Russian art. Many people see in it our entire salvation, and they attempt to preserve it in us artificially. But what could be more destructive than the wish to become a national artist The only possible nationalism is unconscious nationalism that is in the blood. This is rare and most valuable treasure. The very nature of such an artist must be national; it must involuntarily (perhaps even against the artist's will) be a constant reflection of indigenous nationality. Such an artist must bear within him the characteristics of the nation; he must be, so to speak, its natural offspring, with its pure, ancient blood. In such cases nationalism has value, an immeasurable value. But nationalism that is held as a principle is a mask and a sign of lack of respect for the nation. All the crudity of our art in particular flows from this false search: as if, just by wishing it, you could capture the Russian spirit and convey its essence! So these seekers come along and seize what, in their superficial understanding, appears to be the most typical feature of our national character but which is actually the thing that most discredits it. This is a fatal error, and until we see in Russian art an elegant, grandiose harmony, a majestic simplicity and rare beauty of colour, we will have no real art. Take a look at our real pride: the icons of ancient Novgorod and Rostov - what could be nobler and more harmonious? Remember our great composers, Glinka (27) and Tchaikovsky (28): how subtly and elegantly and yet on what a gigantic scale do they express the whole of Russia, everything that is purely Russian. Of course, our art cannot avoid severity, a Tartar quality, and if it comes out in an artist because he is incapable of thinking any other way, because he is imbued with this spirit, as with Surikov (29) or Borodin (30) for example, then clearly all the charm of such an artist lies in his sincerity and simple candour. But as for the false Berendei, (31) the Stenka Razins (32) of our art, they are our scourge, they are the truly unRussian people.

At this point another question arises: should we maintain this Russian blood, and how are we to protect it? Many people say that we have no need of the West, that it is destroying our concealed tender side, that it is making too many inroads into our lives with its sweet, fragrant fruits. This is untrue, profoundly untrue. You can understand who you are only when you have seen what others are. It is essential to imbibe the whole of human culture if one comes to reject it later. The true Russian nature is too elastic to break under the influence of the west. Once again, take some examples: think of the art of Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoi, and Tchaikovsky and you will see that only with the aid of a detailed knowledge of and love for Europe were they able to convey our peasant huts, our national heroes - bogatyrs (33) - and the unfeigned melancholy of our songs. Restraining oneself or tuning one's inspiration to the rattling of nationalism is as sad a delusion as demanding certainty in, say, human nature or truth. We can demand wholehearted sincerity and truthfulness from the artist in respect of his attitude to his work, but that does not mean that we must look for sincerity and truth as a necessary condition of the work itself. The nature of the artist is such a complex and fragile mechanism that we dare not demand that it shine with a light that our crude and imperfect eye would deem to be true. Art and life are inseparable and the one is reflected in the other. If, according to our stern human verdict, an artist's sincerity consists in affectation, then let him express himself in his innate affected manner, and not be afraid of the taunts and impotent spite of the blind crowd. Throughout the history of the world the names that have lasted are of those who have struggled fearlessly against the received opinions of their age. The names of those who have quietly gone in step with their age have been wisely expunged from the pages of the chronicle as being unworthy of men's gratitude. May the powers on high protect the artist against seeking a preconceived version of truth that runs counter to his nature and life, that relative truth which he will not find, and the fiction of which will destroy his subtle gift. Of course, we are not proponents of the lie, but neither are we the slaves of truth:

An elevating lie is dearer to us
Than the darkness of ignoble truth. (34)

Above all, we are a generation that craves beauty. And we find it everywhere, in both good and evil. We have no formula bordering on blindness in terms of its clarity and on complete stasis in terms of activity. What are we to do when Ruskin, (35) the powerful aesthetician of our age, concludes his aesthetics with the words: 'the best part of any work is always inexplicable. It is good because it is good and elegant, developing like the grasses of the earth and dropping like dew from the sky.' We must not look for a general definition of beauty, one that could be appreciated by everyone, for that would be hypocrisy. We must each carry in us our own beauty and only later can we come together in a general hymn to its omnipotence. 'I now go alone, my disciples!', says Nietzsche (36) in the words of Zarathustra the superman, 'Ye also now go away, and alone! So will I have it. Verily, I advise you: depart from me, and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he hath deceived you. The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends. One requiteth a teacher badly if one remain merely a scholar. And why will ye not pluck at my wreath? Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should some day collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you! Ye say, ye believe in Zarathustra? But of what account is Zarathustra! Ye are my believers: but of what account are all believers! Ye had not yet sought yourselves: then did ye find me. So do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account. Now do I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when ye have all denied me, will I return unto you.'

We must be free as gods in order to make ourselves worthy to taste this fruit from the tree of life. We must seek in beauty the great justification of humanity and in personality its highest manifestation. And here, as at the beginning, I evoke the image of a great thinker in saying 'man has no more incessant and agonizing anxiety than, whilst being free, to try to find as soon as possible someone to bow down to and worship'. (37) But we want to be free because in this torment of freedom there is the crown of all-embracing art, although we know that there is nothing more burdensome than 'agreeing to bear freedom'.