Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

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      Problems arise when we try to enlist painters under one of these headings. No artist wholly belongs under any one. The pictures of Giotto, Poussin, David, Ingres and Cézanne have a carefully constructed calmness we may call Classical with a capital C. Giotto lived before that word was used of the visual arts, but the last four consciously strove to be Classical. But David – “he of the blood-stained brush,” as Walter Scott called him – was a political revolutionary. There is a turbulence in the compositions of Michelangelo, El Greco, Goya and Van Gogh, and this fits with the often tormented private lives of the first and last two, yet El Greco was an Orthodox Catholic whose work was as much commissioned by the Spanish priesthood as Giotto’s by the Italian. How can such words be attached to the works of Leonardo, Breughel, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Velasquez? All the big labels art historians, journalists and polemicists find so useful – Realist, Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Cubist and Surrealist – are too vague to suggest the quality of one fine work of art.

      Art criticism is most helpful when it is most empirical, thus we know what is meant when a picture is called a crucifixion, nativity, portrait, nude, landscape and still life. When governments still bought huge paintings for their palaces and museums in the 18th and 19th centuries what were called History Paintings were thought greatest because they often used elements of all the foregoing kinds of picture. In the introduction I said I would describe the main artistic categories: there are only two: good and bad. All other categories are built upon individual preferences and biases among work that is generally agreed to be good. Therefore when I describe (with examples) the epic category of painting, and even construct a theory of the pictorial epic, understand that I am consciously working inside the limits of an individual psychology. Certain paintings have given me more acute delight than others, therefore I believe their painters had a more intense apprehension of eternity than others, therefore I think their scope sufficiently wide to be called “epic.”

       THE EPIC CATEGORY

      Grunewald’s polyptych at Colmar, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Mantegna’s Crucifixion, Tintoretto’s Last Supper and Gauguin’s What are we? Where do we come from? Whither do we go? are epic paintings. In each of them I feel that the artist looked intensely in and intensely out. He looked into the universe he contained and at the universe containing him, and he realised and explained in his picture a very important thing about the nature of them both. The discovery contained in these paintings is too vast to be merely tragic. They all deal with men in an open space – and that space is the universe. In Rembrandt’s painting the psychological depth of the portrait faces is as great and implies as much as the depth of space on the city wall on which they stand. The organization of the crowd is superb. This is not a rabble or a mob. It is not a disciplined troupe. It is moving, but not concertedly. There are drums, weapons, banners being carried and held, but casually. The gestures of the men are also casual, but important. But most significant of all is the unrelatedness of the individuals, the psychological gulfs between each of them. Obviously they are one group, but none of them seem to recognise that the others exist – or they recognise it only casually, almost somnambulistically. They are held together by the gulfs of light and shadow between them.

      In Grunewald’s crucifixion there is greater awareness between the members of the group around the cross, but the awareness is an agony. Grunewald was terribly conscious of what the flesh was capable of sustaining. The terrible unremitting abyss of the universe. It is really against this that Christ is crucified. On the left side his mother sways back, supported by St John, with Mary Magdalene on her knees at their feet. Both women are working their hands together, in a way which is partly prayer, partly a way to distract their attention from the agony of Christ by making a physical sensual pressure against themselves. On the other side of the cross stands St Peter, feet slightly straddled, pointing to the agony on the cross with his forefinger in a gesture which is so undramatic and pedagogical that the horror of the situation is weighted more heavily.

      Each of these paintings, in their own way, describes the condition of mind in the universe in pictorial images. Each is intensely aware of the unknown, the ordinary, the remote, the horrible: the ordinary in The Night Watch, the remote in Gauguin’s painting, the horrible in Grunewald’s; the inhuman precision of Mantegra’s conception exaggerates the everyday nature of the crime of the crucifixion, planted as the cross is in the geological stratas supporting a city; while Tintoretto behind a room whose marble floor is littered with kitchen utensils, shows dim divine presences lurking behind a busy crowd of eating men who seem unaware of their radiant halos.

      Each of these paintings (with the possible exception of the Gauguin) is too vast and too stark for comfortable acceptance. Each is too full of the facts of our condition to be accepted with anything less than delight. These pictures are not tragic. Tragedy depends on the feeling that death has perhaps the last word. It is a literary conception. In these paintings life and vacuity, pain and struggle and man’s phenomenal persistence are shown as fundamental, eternal, and limitlessly generative. That is why I think them epic paintings.