Questions of Influence
The other day I overheard an art student. “The lecturers want me to research a whole lot of artists,” he said, “but I just want to do my own thing… I mean that’s what art’s about. Why can’t I just be myself?”
I understood his sentiment. Drawing, painting and sculpting are solitary activities, and when they go well the feeling of elation is personal. No wonder the student was annoyed at the suggestion that the works of others might matter. His simple enjoyment of a medium, unhindered by the question of art, was under threat.
But a good teacher would have ventured further with him and inquired into the influences already shaping his work. Perhaps the prints hanging on the walls of his kindergarten set him up with a stock of visual ideas about clowns and balloons. That’s an influence. Perhaps at school he won a prize for a picture that he smeared purple all over, an event that could explain the way he understands colour to this day. And even preceding cultural and social influences, what did he intuit from his parents about the world and his place in it? Surely, with some probing it would emerge that influences of many kind were at work in him even as he ‘did his own thing’ in the studio.
“Still” he might protest, “why worry about it? If influence is unavoidable let it occur. Why the need to take responsibility?” Here it would become more difficult to help, for it’s hard to make somebody go to the library or visit the Art Gallery when all they want is to enjoy the illusion that through art they are unique and unbounded by the constraints that beset them in everyday life.
But once a student or artist recognises that the voice they thought they were born with is actually the product of their worldly experiences, they turn a corner. There they come upon the strange possibility that the most adventurous exploration they could make of art would commence with a walk in another artist’s shoes. It may sound odd when so many forces in our culture have popularised (and cheapened) the idea that something special lies within us but many artists’ potential has been awoken by another’s vision; by the recognition that a predecessor’s insights sit well with them, or not. Why else would an artist of the stature of Arshile Gorky (one of many examples I could have used) have spent years working through the examples of Cezanne, then Picasso? The fact that Gorky eventually came upon a way of drawing and painting that was thoroughly different to both, and original, might say something about the benefits of submitting to influence; that to engage with influence is not to diminish one’s originality.
This idea was one of the premises behind a major exhibition staged earlier this year in the United States. ‘Cezanne and Beyond’ at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was an exposition of the influence ‘the Father of Modern Art’ has exerted over generations of artists, with fifty of his paintings placed alongside the work of eighteen modern and contemporary artists who’ve been affected by them. In some respects the show (of which I, unfortunately, have seen only the catalogue) looked like an exercise in confirming what we already knew about the art world. The curators selected only American and European artists, and although the inclusion of the photographer Jeff Wall was probably intended to show that Cezanne’s influence is not limited to painters and sculptors, it looked like a case of tokenism.
But to the extent that ‘Cezanne and Beyond’ raised the issue of influence and allowed the viewer some scope to wonder about it, it appears to have had a refreshing effect. Critics remarked upon some surprising juxtapositions between works, the placement of Marsden Hartley’s ‘Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine’ (1940-41) next to Cezanne’s famous ‘The Bather’ (c.1885) being singled out in more than one review. “It’s shocking to see Cézanne’s pasty bather, gingerly dipping a toe into the water, in the company of Hartley’s strapping, suntanned lumberjack” wrote Karen Rosenberg in the New York Times. “The Cézanne becomes a flesh-and-blood character, not a Modernist Ur-man.”
Amongst the points made by ‘Cezanne and Beyond’ the main one seemed to be that when one artist exerts influence over another, both are transformed. It’s not just that Cezanne gave licence to subsequent artists; they each tell us something about his work that we didn’t know before, something that he mightn’t have recognised and wouldn’t necessarily have condoned, but that nevertheless followed from the creative interpretation of his example.
Another book that was shown to me recently, that puts the question of influence in a slightly different light, is ‘Themes and Variations: Five Centuries of Interpretations and Re-creations’. Written by K.E. Maison and published in 1960, its 224 pages show one example after another of artists copying each other’s works. While the aura of ‘Cezanne and Beyond’ is canonical and exclusive, ‘Themes and Variations’ shows all kinds of artists - famous and forgotten – putting their own identities to one side momentarily and opening themselves to influence in a way that could be understood as humble or ambitious, depending on your point of view.
Amongst hundreds of examples in the book there are some bizarre and wonderful things. I didn’t know that Andre Derain painted, from 1945 to 1950, a very close copy of Breughel’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’. Or that Rembrandt had sat down in the 1650s with an Indian painting from the Moghul school and faithfully observed its four figures in a pen and ink drawing – albeit changing the landscape background.
But the most surprising and memorable pairing of images involved Cezanne yet again. It is a copy he made of a fashion print from around 1880 featuring two ladies holding parasols. He transformed the engraved image into a painting in his own way, interpreting its polite modelling as a tough play of shapes, but how surprising that he would find enough to engage him in such a source. The thought that kept occurring to me as I looked at ‘Themes and Variations’ was how much less precious the artists of past centuries were with regard to their styles. They would pick up an image from anywhere if it suited them and drop it just as quickly.
The introductory essay in ‘Themes and Variations’, by Michael Ayrton, makes a strong case for copying as the most intense and productive experience of influence. “Not the least of the dubious propositions we entertain today” he writes, “is that through the medium of mechanical methods of reproduction, art is available to all. Since we can now inspect a coloured postcard of Michaelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ it is available to us. A reproduction, notwithstanding the inevitable falsification of scale, surface, handling and everything else which we patiently overlook, is more acceptable to us than a copy.” Ayrton reminds us that although the act of copying has been tainted by forgery and is misunderstood as irrelevant or injurious to an artist’s individual personality, it is in fact an artist’s means to the “enlargement of his vocabulary of forms and ideas”.
It’s a point well made. Through copying, the activity of the painter or sculptor becomes similar to that of the musician interpreting a score; the thoughts of another are there on paper or canvas, awaiting interpretation. Although in recent decades artists have exercised power over the images of the past by a fashionable strategy known as appropriation, perhaps the humble old act of copying reaches a more profound truth. For looking at our period, an historian who wished to account for the persistence of traditional forms such as painting and sculpture might well see them as performative art-forms in which familiar and even hackneyed ideas have served the talented performer just as well as starting points as any others - newness being less important than the desire to lose, then find oneself in the act of making something.
As Ayrton puts it, “no work of art is utterly self-engendered and very few have really been engendered solely as a result of the artist’s direct experience of nature…since the adult eye is never entirely innocent, it refers to precedents in the memory”. The ramifications of this thought are enormous. It’s obvious enough that the act of making images is cultural, but the prospect that the way we use our perceptual faculties might be subject to the influence of art says something very profound about the individual human’s relationship to culture. We are used to the written word being afforded primary status as a describer of experience, but perhaps the picture has something else to tell us about the world, something that words can’t.
Nevertheless, the most comprehensive attempt to get to the bottom of what influence is and explain how it works has been a book about poetry, not visual art. ‘The Anxiety of Influence’ written by Harold Bloom and first published in 1973, puts it that “strong poets” – those who contribute to literature – endure an uncomfortable process of maturation through which they must overcome the very influences that have allowed them to proceed with their work. Bloom is systematic in his development of this theory, setting out six categories of action by which the poet’s crisis may be resolved.
The book is illuminating, and while Bloom’s prose can be confounding, it would be interesting to consider how well his ideas translate to the visual arts. In asking what influence is, we consider each individual’s relationship to the general condition of humanity. Influence can cause a person to lose the distinction between thoughts they’ve inherited and thoughts of their own; it renders the distinction irrelevant. A serious consideration of what influence is might lead us beyond the cult of originality to a better understanding of art.