I’m reading at the moment the volume of essays entitled Italian Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Emily Braun. It is enormously instructive in an area that interests me, but about which I don’t know a great deal. Looking at one of the pieces about art after the Second World War I was prompted to ask a question. Why have artists in the past made such a thing about issuing manifestos? In Italy I guess the Futurists started it all, but there was a rash of these things after the war, with protagonists of various stripes of Realism, “Informalism”, advocates of abstraction and so on, all blowing their own trumpets. It all strikes me as entirely inappropriate. This is particularly the case in that both during the inter-war period and afterwards, in several states in Europe, artists had to contend with attempts by governments to impose dogmatic views about what art was supposed to do, and how it was to go about doing it.
Why should artists want to be so dogmatic about their approach to what they do? Surely one of the rewarding things about the arts is the way in which they constantly re-invent themselves, so that the cultural landscape at any time is richly pluralist. I have to confess that I have a degree of sympathy with the authors of the manifesto of the Corrente group, which after the war insisted that “We don’t what painting about painting!” I’ll drink to that! But if “painting about painting” is your cup of tea then just get on without bothering me.
Manifestos seem to be out of fashion these days, but my impression is that groups of artists can be just as exclusivist and dogmatic about what we are supposed to be doing, and, more particularly, what criteria are to be used in evaluating the results of what others have done.
We all know just how difficult it is to be an artist. Why can’t we all be generous in recognising the application, originality and courage of others who happen to see their task in different terms? I reserve my right to be unfashionable.