For some time now I’ve been attempting to learn Italian, by one means or another. The latest means by which I’m addressing this problem is by individual conversation tuition on line. It’s entirely a novelty, as previously all of my attempts have been undertaken in groups, and what is more groups which meet face-to-face. This one is managed through Google “Meet”, and it seems to work quite well. I can’t quite get used to the fact that the young woman who is teaching me is actually located somewhere near Bologna.
The advantage of this type of tuition is that it is directed at the level of competence and the interests of the student. Discovering that I am an artist, and that I have a particular admiration for the work of Renato Guttuso, the current group of meetings is focussed upon his painting.* The work has been challenging, but immensely interesting and satisfying. Last week the teacher emailed me extracts from a couple of scholarly articles about him which I have found particularly demanding. Reflecting on this, it struck me that writing about art almost invariably adopts an approach and a style which is (to put it politely) distinctive. Regular readers of this blog will recognise that I have dismissed this sort of thing on more than one occasion as “art bollocks”. Does it have to be quite so abstract, and in comparison with almost anything else I am required to read, written with such a peculiar vocabulary? In comparison with the way in which I believe that I engage with art (and think that this is generally true of others) critical writing about art strives to achieve a peculiar level of detachment. It is almost as if the work is being looked at through the wrong end of some kind of linguistic telescope.
I was pondering on this question this afternoon as I took on the thoroughly boring task of checking over my material to take down to Worcester for an exhibition next week. The task of the art critic is precisely to stand well back from the work, and try to tell us where it fits into the big picture of art history. This might well require reference to large movements in art history (in the case of Guttuso, for example, why he is different from those of his contemporaries who would be described as “expressionist”.) In the case of what is probably his most famous picture (his Crucifixion, of 1940-1) it is enormously helpful to know that his treatment of the subject challenged almost every convention of Catholic religious painting up until that time.
The critic is totally uninterested in whether you or I might be moved by a piece, and certainly ready to disregard whether or not we actually like it. That is not the point. It might be more helpful for the critic to be able to tell us what the painter thought that he/she was aiming for. So, it is helpful to know that Guttuso wants to distance himself from Expressionism, because he wants us to realise that his personal feelings in response to the subject are irrelevant. Viewed from any standpoint, personally or in history, however, the political and religious systems that can lead to the kind of abomination which he represents to us, in his Crucifixion, are to be condemned.
*Guttuso was an Italian modernist (1911-1987).