Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 38))

THE IRONICAL IN ART

AS irony is the supreme method of perception, so it would seem in art
that all æsthetic impulse must at last end in that comic calvary where-
in the painter, the poet and the musician play the crucified before
their own sly eyes.
This thought was evoked in me as I stood before the extraordinary
sculptures of Matisse lately exhibited in the Gallery of the Photo-Secession.
Matisse, Picasso, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Felicien Rops, Geiger:
what do they represent except Art doubling on itself, thought and feeling
achieving a sublime mockery of itself, Columbus cursing his new-found
America ?
To write “the book of revenge” (as James Huneker calls Flaubert’s
“Bouvard et Pecuchet” ) ,to paint the picture of revenge, to chant the psalm
of revenge—is not that the secret dream of all great artists? In the last
analysis, all revolutionary art, like all religion, is a kind of vengeance. The
dreams of artists are nympholeptic dreams of Perfection. Never being able
to reach perfection they revenge themselves by ridiculing it. Have not Matisse
and Picasso done this? Is it not that the secret of Futurism and Post-Im-
pressionism and all the other isms that now run riot and will continue to run
riot in a glorious and impenitent world in spite of the bleatings of the obscure
employe of the Wall Street Edition of a bright and spleeny evening sheet?
Irony in art is the expression of a lifelong vendetta of a penned-up, often
impotent Ego against the commonplace and the limited; the cry for perfection
à rebours. Richard Wagner was a demi-god, and he dreamed of heroic forni-
cations and Olympian sex-frenzies. Not being able to satisfy this madness
in the “Ring” and “Tristan und Isolde” ,he wrote “Parsifal, ”the apotheosis
of venom, spite and unassuaged lust. He spat on women and deified the
eunuch. Wagner should have lived in a harem of Junos; but being only
mortal with the voluptuous dreams of a thousand Joves packed into his
body, he flung at the world his opera of revenge, — Parsifal“, ”the epic of
spleen.
Every great painter dreams of doing a “Parsifal” in color.
The root of nihilism in art is spite. “Les Fleurs du Mal” is spite. “Thus
Spake Zarathustra” is spite, “The World as Will and Idea” is spite. All
Futurism, Post-Impressionism, is spite. Great men are known by their con-
tempts. There have been geniuses who have never given their spite to the
world; it was because they lacked the time, not the will.
All great movements begin with the gesture of hate, of irony, of revenge.
This is as true in art as in social history. Irony is the perpetual heaven of
escape. Nothing can follow the mind into that sanctuary. Against self-
disdain and self-mockery the world wars in vain. It redistributes and revalues
everything that comes to it for appraisal.
There is a revaluation going on in the art of the world to-day. There
is a healthy mockery, a healthy anarchic spirit abroad. Some men are spitting
on themselves and their work; and that is healthy, too.

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