Robertson Davies on the task of the modern artist

It's too bad that the Shvarts affair happened during my break. I suppose it's too bad that it happened at all, but I wish I had sorted through it in writing as it happened. (If you don't remember Aliza Shvarts's infamous senior project, read Roger Kimball's entirely justified moral condemnation and almost certainly justified aesthetic disapproval.)

Too many conservatives, however, have quickly moved from a judgment against the excesses (often silly, sometimes repugnant) of much modern art to what seems to be a condemnation of all twentieth-century art and its apparent rejection of transcendence. Let me turn to Robertson Davies for a more sympathetic account of the Sisyphean task of the modern artist. The speaker is Saraceni, the talented expert in art restoration from “What's Bred in the Bone”; the interjection comes from Francis, the protagonist:

“[Modern art] is the logical outcome of the art of the Renaissance. During those three centuries, to measure roughly, that we call the Renaissance, the mind of civilized man underwent a radical change. A psychologist would say that it changed from extraversion to introversion. The exploration of the outer world was partnered by a new exploration of the inner world, the subjective world. And it was an exploration that could not depend on the old map of religion. It was the exploration that brought forth Hamlet instead of Gorboduc. Man began to look inside himself for all that was great and also—if he was honest, which most people aren't—for all that was ignoble, base, evil. If the artist was a man of scope and genius, he found God and all his works within himself, and painted them for the world to recognize and admire.”

“But the moderns don't paint God and all his works. Sometimes I can't make out what they are painting.”

“They are painting the inner vision, and working very hard at it when they are honest, which by no means all of them are. But they depend only on themselves, unaided by religion or myth, and of course what most of them find within themselves is revelation only to themselves. And these lonely searches can quickly slide into fakery. Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision, Mr. Cornish. Look at those ruined frescoes we were examining this morning; all the people who painted those—Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones—all had the inner vision linked with legend, and they chose to wrap it up in Grail pictures and sloe-eyed, sexy beauties who were half the Mother of God and half Rossetti's overblown mistresses. But the moderns, having been hit on the head by a horrible world war, and having understood whatever they can of Sigmund Freud, are hell-bent for honesty. They are sick of what they suppose to be God, and they find something in the inner vision that is so personal that to most people it looks like chaos. But it isn't simply chaos. It's raw gobbets of the psyche displayed on canvas. Not very pretty and not very communicative, but they have to find their way through that to something that is communicative—though I wonder if it will be pretty.”

-from What's Bred in the Bone, by Robertson Davies (1985)

Yes, there are charlatans, ideologues, and confused undergraduates who win great acclaim though they deserve nothing but scorn. Yes, one may suspect that the unaided inner journey will terminate in something like hell. But these are two different things, and we should not confuse them. A true artist, working in the modern idiom, can still reveal to us aspects of the human condition, even though he may not be able to point beyond it.