Fired by
creative inspiration, the artist evokes a noble and innocent self-image.
But the imagination is susceptible to self-deception, dishonesty
and illusion.
KAREN LAUB-NOVAK
Every intellectual work begins by a moment of ecstasy; only in
the second place does the talent of arrangement, the technique
of transitions, connections of idea, construction, come into play.
Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life
THERE ARE
SIMILAR stages of insight, preparation, discipline, dark night
of the soul, and unity in both the spiritual quest and artistic
activity. The artist is rooted in imagination, while the mystic
seeks to transcend imagination. For the artists this rootedness
affords special temptations. First, the imagination is especially
embattled between the divine and the demonic. This warfare can
be either fruitful or destructive to the artist and her creative
work. But, second, there are many myths about creativity that
the artist must sort through. One myth, that creativity is always
spontaneous, inspired, prophetic, divine, and rebellious against
tradition, applied both to the artist and the saint.
This essay will attempt, from an artist's point of view, to sift
through several types of self-deception in the imagination and
in the creative process.
I
Wassily
Kandinsky (1866-1944) was widely regarded as a free spirit who
worked in a fever of spontaneity. His wife fed this myth - as
he often had - in her introduction to his book Concerning the
Spiritual in Art. Were they self-deceived?
In 1913, the Armory Show introduced European avant-garde art to
bewildered audiences in New York, Chicago, and Boston. The show
was angrily denounced by critics and artists alike, but in the
end a generation of painters and their followers drew inspiration
from these works.
Some critics consider Kandinsky to be the originator of abstract
art and point to his Improvisations as the first abstract painting.
The Armory Show included his Improvisation 27, filled with vibrant
colors, almost waterlike washes, a few sketchy lines, no discernible
images. He spoke of this work as "spontaneous," reflecting
moods, tension, sounds, the spiritual in art. However, recent
studies reveal that in Kandinsky's fury of brush strokes and color
are encoded horses, riders, snakes, boats, cannons, cities, warriors,
and lovers: clear ideas, although veiled images.1
From 1886 to 1896, Kandinsky had been a lawyer and an economist.
At the age of thirty-one he decided to concentrate on painting,
and at forty-three he became interested in theosophy. Theosophy's
blending of Eastern and Western mysticism led him to a style that
was considered purely abstract. Yet in 1953 Gabriele Munter, Kandinsky's
companion from 1902 to 1916, gave the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus
in Munich over one hundred of Kandinsky's painting and drawing
from that period, many of which had been preliminary drawings
from the Improvisation. These sketches reveal a variety of images
later disguised in the paintings. Furthermore, these preliminary
sketches and watercolors were often simply enlarged and transposed
to the final paintings. Recent studies show that much of Kandinsky's
imagery was biblical; his favorite passages come from Genesis
and Revelation. Furthermore, technical studies using infrared,
ultraviolet, and macrophotography now reveal layers of pencil
sketching underneath the paint.2 Kandinsky's work is not, as we
previously thought, purely abstract and spontaneous.
Classical Christian mysticism encourages beginners to use the
visual, literal imagination in the early stages of prayer; but
later to reject these levels of the imagination as impediments
to spiritual growth. Kandinsky, of course, did not abandon imagination
but he did reject the literal imagination. By encoding his imagery,
he forces the viewer to enter into the process of the work, to
pay attention to medium of the work, and to look below the surface.
This seems to be the rationale behind Kandinsky's expression "the
paint is sound." It is also an excellent reason to call these
paintings "Improvisations" rather than "Genesis"
or "Revelation." The former pleased the avant-garde
as the latter could not have.
Arthur Koestler
said that the artist is on a tightrope between the practical world
and the world of imagination; in that tension comes the creative
impulse. Kandinsky, too, had a foot in each world. A curious contradiction
are Kandinsky's demands of the Apocalypse, who march forth in
joyful cadence. Kandinsky's color is vibrant; alizarin crimson,
turquoise, ultramarine blue, gold, yellow. The paintings are full
of life and excitement, a lyrical dance. However, the dominant
mood of the Apocalypse is that of impending doom, death, violence,
destruction. Despair comes in the fifth destruction, as the locusts
sting but do not kill, and man seeks death but cannot find it.
People cower, stars fall, cities crumble, the woman flees to the
desert on eagle wings, the harlot's body is a cage of wild things,
and the beast lies in wait to devour the child. The inner pulse
of the passages is not that of a lyrical dance; it pounds with
beating wings, and fiery armies march from the four corners of
the worlds. These are the images Kandinsky chooses to veil. With
his lyrical brush strokes, he evokes the New Jerusalem while covering
the horsemen, floods, sea battles, and falling cities with layers
of paint. His colors are visual analogies of joyful songs lightly
covering wails of despair and darkness.
A small black spot in Improvisation 31, intended, according to
Kandinsky, to represent the dark side of spiritual life, is not
adequate to the darkness of the apocalyptic motif. Somehow Kandinsky's
personal version of mysticism eliminated the dark side of the
soul, perhaps weakened his interpretive skills, and led to a spirituality
of too few notes.
Do these revelations diminish Kandinsky's reputation? Does it
disappoint the viewer that the spontaneities of his imagination
were harnessed by analytical intelligence? Because his work is
not purely abstract, is it any less inventive and exciting? Kandinsky
sought to challenge the viewer's imagination. His work still succeeds,
but not perhaps according to his original intent. Abstract art
no longer shocks the eye. The new shock lies in our detection
of his imagery. Kandinsky's work forces us to exercise imagination
and to bring a critical eye, both technical and interpretative,
to what he has done on canvas. It forces us to believe not what
he said but what he did.
II
Speaking for myself, the questions, which interest me most when
reading a poem are two. The first is technical: Here is a verbal
contraption. How does it work? The second is, in the broadest
sense, moral: What kind of guy inhabits this poem? What is his
notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil
One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal
even from himself?
W. H. Auden
Koestler's
artist walks a tightrope and lives in tension, conflict, and risk.
Mircea Eliade, writing of early religious beliefs, chose a similar
metaphor to describe the spiritual quest: in the last part of
the journey of the soul the soul must go over a bridge. This bridge
is "as thin as a thread and sharp as a sword." The goal
ahead is divide presence. Below this bridge are the demons of
the underworld.
This image can be used in another way: The artist often feels
suspended between what she wants to renewal and what she wants
to conceal in her paintings. Furthermore, the subjective struggles
and technical problems of the work, which seem to be above and
below this inner bridge, constantly change as the artist crosses.
In the beginning the thin line seems stretched between clichés
on the one side and obscure subjectivity on the other. As the
artist develops her balancing act the scenery changes. Now she
seems suspended between the choices of realistic rendering and
abstract symbolism. Later on, the challenge becomes more complex.
The artist may become more concerned with the exercise of either
classic technique or experimental novelty. Again, themes and ideas
may seem to dominate on one side sheer images on the other.
All too often
these decisions, temptations, and tensions become clear only in
retrospect. As the artist does a balancing act other factors enter.
Little furies buzz, poking and enticing. Their names are ambition,
laziness, lack of direction, false imitation, dark humor, slick
cleverness, pride, simplicity, writer's and artist's block, compulsive
action, withdrawn passivity, overconfidence, loss of spirit. These
furies are at least a nuisance and often the cause of melancholy.
Yeats called them his frustrations, always interfering with his
poetry. More deceptions.
III
The man without imagination … is cut off from the deeper
reality of life and from his own soul.
Mircea Eliade
Imagination
is the power of the inventor, scientist, artist, poet, philosopher,
and saint. With imaginal power, we can live in other places, place
ourselves in situations we've never experienced. Moreover, imagination
contains several faculties.
Coleridge describes imagination as having two parts. The primary
but finite imagination participates in the "eternal act of
creation in the infinite I Am." The secondary imagination
"dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create."
It struggles to "idealize and to unity." By contrast,
fantasy is "no more than a mode of memory emancipated from
the order of time and space."
"For most writers and philosophers, fantasy seems to be a
poor cousin of the imagination. Fantasy seems more accidental,
without that ability to unify and order which we attribute to
the imagination. It refers more to dreams, delusions, and playful
perceptions. Jung wrote of fantasy as the "play of the imagination,"
and he considered it essential for creative work.
Thomas Aquinas
divided the imagination into the reproductive and the creative.
The reproductive imagination enables us to recall an event, to
live it again, to bring back to the "screen of our consciousness
pictures of things once but no longer present to our senses."
He would also say that memory and imagination walk hand in hand,
and that an original experience makes an impression on the "wax"
of our memory. If the wax is too soft the impression is lost.
If the wax is too hard the impression does not take.
Creative
imagination has powers beyond the reproductive. It can invent
images of things never perceived by the senses. The creative imagination
has the ability to recall perceptions and then to recombine them.
The creative imagination gathers all types of impressions and
sees the similarities even between dissimilar things. It is the
creative imagination that plays with veiling and unveiling, creates
illusions, shocks the eye. Creative imagination simplifies, eliminations
details or adds them, gives emphasis or distorts. In Kandinsky's
case, it encoded the horses of the Apocalypse and shrouded the
biblical images, so that the painting seems totally unattached
to any imagery, past or present.
Imagination is fundamental to spiritual and aesthetic growth.
It is the center of intuition, invention, and ration order. It
is through the imagination that we appreciate beauty and experience
awe. Why, then, does the mystic seek to transcend imagination?
Why does the mystic see imagination as only one, and a very early,
step on the mystical ladder - a ladder that artist and mystic
climb again and again? Each new stage of understanding brings
a repetition of the process of insight, critical reflection, and
action. So, too, the artist will repeat with each new development
in her work similar stages of understanding and action. What is
present in these rooms of imagination that the mystic warns against?
The artist is inspired by the idea that the imagination is ecstatic,
awesome, divine, almost holy and prophetic, yet the mystic warns
of its dangers.
In Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Jacques Maritain writes,
"Art resides in the soul and is a certain perfection of the
soul. It is … an inner quality … that raises the human
subject … to a higher degree of vital formation and energy."
In modern art he sees three steps. The first step transforms nature
in order to disclose a reality closer to our dreams, anger, anguish,
melancholy. The second step liberates us from conventional natural
language. The third step is a rejection of reason and logic, an
obscuring of plain meanings. Maritain sees in these three steps
both advantages and a "diligent effort towards self-deception,
narcissism, and surrealism." Lional Abel published an autobiographical
account of his friendship with the surrealists Breton, Matta,
and Gorky. He noted the problems that arose from their philosophical
espousal of sadism and the eventual havoc wreaked upon their personal
lives. 3 In creation and destruction we call upon the same energies,
the same inner demons. E.M. Cioran says, "to destroy is to
act, to create backwards."
Without habits of hand and discipline of mind and memory, the
imagination easily becomes self-pitying, sarcastic, helpless,
passive; prefers fantasy; likes to wrap itself in its illusions.
At other times, it is content to fill up work after work with
images and ideas created by others. The imagination can be sloppy,
careless, imprecise. It willfully rearranges thoughts and images.
Imagination likes to fling its clothes to the floor assuming that
reason and discipline will come along later and pick up the pieces.
Imagination is a willful child, and at times a dangerous trickster.
We often hear praise for the delightful side of imagination. We
think of the imagination as angelic, holistic, and divine. We
avoid the other side that is obscure and vulnerable to self-deception.
IV
Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
Plato
The awful
thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and
the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart
of man.
Dostoevski
There is struggle within the imagination. The temptations of illusion
affect the artist and the work. The artist has two struggles with
deception, one in herself and another with the surfaces of the
work. Whatever the intentions of the artist, the construction
of the work tells the final story, for the work is judged on its
merits and not on the complicated personality of the artist.
The artist may see her won work as creating enigmas, not as revealing
them. The artist may want not to be literal and univocal, but
to create several levels of meaning, both to reveal and to hide.
By hiding the literal meaning, the artist wants to reveal another
level of our unconscious and conscious enigmas.
This whole business of veiling may fail. A tromp I'oeil may reveal
deeper truths. On the other hand, despite all the pretensions
- or even profound intentions - of the artist, the painting may
still be a cliché. Depth of feeling is no guarantee of
a fine product. A good technician may lack passion. A passionate
person may lack technique. Both may lack originality, judgment,
or proportion. There are infinite ways to fail.
The artist is enchanted by illusion, magic, visual deception,
satire, wit, and humor. Viewers are often entranced by the deceptions
the artist creates, enticed, for example, into many paintings
by the device of perspective Imaginary lines recede to a vanishing
point with buildings, people, and trees following those lines
and creating a three-dimensional effect.
In Geneva
there is a very small painting with a very large frame, The Tower
of Babel, by a sixteenth-century Flemish master. The canvas measures
approximately twelve by fourteen inches. This small painting of
a fantastic tower draws the viewer's eye into a small space and
creates an illusion of vast space. One feels as if one is standing
within the painting, becoming a part of this landscape with its
towering citadel and struggling people. Evan photographs of this
painting re-create this strange experience of immense space, since
those who see it assume that it represents a large painting rather
than a small one. Part of the illusion is the skill of the draftsman
and his control of perspective. Another part of the illusion is
the fine detail of rocks, stones, ladders, and bodies. Yet another
part is an uncanny use of color to suggest and emphasize the illusion
of space.
Color both reveals and conceals the literal image. Certain colors
seem to express moods: red for anger, violence, action; green
for hope, nature, comfort, quiet; blue for melancholy, withdrawal,
cold; black for despair and death. Cioran says that "the
amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its
profundity, as the despairing accent of employs chiaroscuro to
conceal and reveal, to reveal and conceal.
Rembrandt, for example, cast his figures in soft shadows, at some
points obscuring and at some points highlighting the painting.
The proofs of his etching of a crucifixion show how he began with
a clear rendering of the three crucified figures, the guards,
and the attendants. Then, with cross-hatching, soft ground, and
deep etching, he gradually made some figures merge into the dark
background, while the crucified figures are focused in light.
Each step from clarity to obscurity made the later print more
powerful than the earlier.
Maritain notes that the purity of the artist is not moral purity
… {but} a special purity of vision open to sophistication.
Technique can be used in many ways, by accident or by intention,
with insight and skill or without. The artist who is a master
technician is blessed, but also has to be wary of being captured
and deceived by her skill. There is more to being an artist then
being a master of the crafts of illusion.
When an artist creates illusions in her work, she my loose the
boundaries of her own experience of time, space, color, passion,
mind. The illusions of the work may create illusions in the mind.
Avoiding clear meaning, using veils, the artist may end up avoiding
self-knowledge, consciously or unconsciously. She may become entangled
in her won elaborate concoctions.
The inner rooms of illusion are a delight to the artist, but a
bane of the mystic. What the artist seeks to experience the mystic
seeks to transcend. For it is in these rooms that a person is
at once most creative and also most destructive. In one sense,
the person is freed from rational restraints but in another is
vulnerable to self-deception and the worship of false idols.
V
The
overarching metaphor for both the life of the spirit and the life
of art is "the quest." We speak of the journey of the
soul, the way, the pilgrimage. The power of this image is that
it aptly describes the life of the spirit as a process, not static,
but changing, developing. The spirit is energetic, not stagnant.
It explores, questions, and moves directory or indirectly, toward
a goal. In The Trial, Kafka used the image of long corridors,
with doors and rooms going nowhere, attended by persons who could
tell the accused nothing of his charges. Keats said, "I compare
human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which
I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon
me." The quest is not always happy.
The quest can also be taking as a metaphor for self-deception.
Three wise men have a vision. They set out upon a journey. A star
is to be their guide. Traveling through strange lands, they seek
the guidance of jealous King Herod. Unthinking, focused on their
goal, they asked foolish questions that have political and moral
consequences. An enraged and threatened king orders the "slaughter
of innocents" and kills all male children under the age of
tow. The quest has consequences unforeseen.
The quest may also be intoxicating. One may love the process more
than the goal. One may center more on the questioning self than
on transcending the self. It is easy for an artist to become enamored
with the act of painting, the pursuit of fleeting images, the
feeling and emotions that surround the moments of inspiration
- and fail to complete the work. The quest becomes the goal.
A second dangerous metaphor that bewitches the artist is that
of being prophetic. We have endowed the artist with the gift of
prophecy, saying she sees the future with a clear eye. Every street
corner has its resident prophet, Cioran writes. And Paul Valery
in his introduction to The Method of Leonardo da Vinci says, "The
folly of mistaking a paradox for a proof, a torrent of verbiage
for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is
born in us." The central problem is to complete the work.
Such prophetic roles take care of themselves, if they are genuine.
They seldom are.
VI
Lying, the wellspring of all tears! Such is the imposture of genius
and the secret of art. Trifles swollen to the heavens: the improbable,
generator of a universe! In every genius coexists a braggart and
a god.
E.E. Cioran
Psychologists
and philosophers often try to describe the attributes of an artist.
Studying a range of individuals in various fields they usually
come up with a list of traits that these individuals seem to share.
In his book Creativity, Silvano Arieti lists "aloneness,
inactivity, daydreaming, free thinking, state of readiness to
catch similarities, gullibility, remembrances and inner replay
of past traumatic experiences, conflict, alertness, and discipline."
All f these become isolation. Free thinking can lead to anarchy.
Inactivity can tend to a withdrawn and passive state. Remembrance
can lead to psychic disorder. Conflict to violence. Discipline
to tyranny. Each attribute opens a side door to self-deception.
Self-deception is more than being perplexed, different from inner
conflict, tension or turmoil. It is not the same as being indecisive.
It is an inability (or unwillingness) to see through our own fakeries.
It is a form of lying to the self. Yet not all lying is self-deception.
An intentional lie is quite clear to the individual who tells
it. Even such a lie may conceal other self-deceptions. All the
attributes of the creative person are vulnerable to self-deception.
Two common ones are worth note: daydreaming and creative innocence.
Daydreaming
is fundamental to creative work. But it is filled with dangers.
Free floating fantasy is more pleasant than pulling oneself off
the couch to make the painting or write the novel. Fantasy is
more pleasant and immediate than taking up the pen, struggling
with the words, and ordering the ideas. Inactive daydreaming is
more pleasant than receiving the rejections slip from the publisher.
Marcel Proust took to his bed with his asthma, neurosis, and memories
of his doting mother. But he did manage to take his pen and paper
to bed with him.
C.S. Lewis spent hours daydreaming as a child. But he warned later
that had he not combined his daydreaming with invention and writing,
the daydreaming alone would have led to a passive delight in fantasy.
He also saw that without daydreams his adult work would have lacked
a sense of awe.
Creative innocence is another trait attributed to both the artist
and the saint. We need to be born again as a child to enter into
the Kingdom of God. The danger of this metaphor is to equate purity
with naivete. Many take this path, hoping for spiritual union
or artistic inspiration. "Unfortunately, this rare purity
of the mind is rare: when it does exist it is often allied with
empty headedness," said Sertillanges.
Maritain notes, in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, that
the purity of the artists is not moral purity. It is a special
purity of vision open to sophistication. At the age of nine, Dante
sees Beatrice and falls in love with her. This ideal, which envelopes
Dante for the rest of his life, could have become maudlin. Neither
naïve nor blind, Dante was able to penetrate difference and
make distinctions in human qualities, actions, and virtues. And
with this ability he created The Devine Comedy to honor his ideal.
Willa Cather has written, "Artistic growth is, more than
it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist,
the great artist, knows how difficult it is."
Those artists who have created the best work have been able to
overcome for a short time many of their self-deceptions. They
have developed the ability to make distinctions. Some are able
to make these distinctions not only between their good work and
their bad work (independently from what others say), not only
between illusions leading to truth and illusions leading to deception,
but also between their own honest voices and their many poses,
their own self and its many disguises.
The journeys of the artists and the saint have similarities and
differences. Artists and saints speak with quite individual voices
about the struggles with their angels and their demons. For both,
imagination is a source of inspiration and deception. Those who
find the spiritual quest difficult and think that the artistic
quest will be easier are mistaken.
Those who work with money, thinks, mundane affairs may be, however
crafty, simple and direct. Those who work with the imagination,
however noble in self-image, may be corrupted and dishonest, them
most self-deceived. Their material is themselves, vague, obscure,
and full of illusions. By itself, not reliable stuff.
To paraphrase Maritain: It is hard to be an artist. It is even
harder to be a developed moral person (a saint). To be both is
not twice as hard, but twice squared.
Notes
1 Rose-Carol Washton Long and E.A. Carmean in a unpublished manuscript
referred to in the brochure Kandinsky: The Improvisations, published
for the Kandinsky exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C.. April 26 to August 2, 1981. See also Washton Long's Kandinsky:
The Development of an Abstract Style (New York: Oxford, 1980),
an expanded and revised version of her influential 1968 thesis.
This work presents an extensive discussion of Kandinsky's abstraction
and use of religious motifs in the Improvisations and other works.
2 E.A. Carmean
and Hoenigswald in unpublished research done in connection with
Kandinsky exhibit at the National Gallery mentioned in the previous
note.
3 Lionel Abel. "The Surrealists in New York." Commentary
72. no. 4 (October 1981). Pp. 44-54.
Karen Laub-Novak
is a painter, printmaker, sculptor and commercial illustrator.
Her works have been exhibited in the United States and in Europe.
She has taught at several colleges and is a popular guest lecturer
in art and mysticism at colleges and universities. This essay
appears in Art, Creativity and the Sacred: An Anthology in Religion
and Art, ed., Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (Crossroad).
