THE
EYE IS A PART OF THE MIND
195
Renaissance painting, on the contrary, was valid because in it every
element corresponded with its prototype in nature.
And Malraux? What does
he
mean when he pits the "simply
painting"
of Manet against the styles of other ages? Why, precisely
the same thing. Representational art for him is weighted with ex–
traneous content and transcribed appeal, with reference to things
and situations that exist outside the picture frame in general exper–
ience. Manet pries art loose from the world. "Modern art," says
Malraux, "has liberated painting which is now triumphantly a law
unto itself." No longer must a painting borrow its validity from
natural analogues. Its meaning-if self-significance can be called
meaning-lies wholly within itself. Wherever
art
is seen with modern
eyes-seen, that is to say, as "a certain compelling balance in colors
and lines"-there, says Malraux, "a magic casement opens on
another world ... a world incompatible with the world of reality."
It was for this incompatibility that Vasari spurned medieval art; it
is
on this very account that Malraux glorifies contemporary painting.
Thus juxtaposed our authors confess that what is here involved
is
not a difference in aesthetic judgment, nor even in the definition
of
art.
We are dealing rather with two distinct valuations set upon
reality,
and the overt gap between the Renaissance and the modern
aesthetician is evidence of a rift far more deeply grounded.
We will ask later whether either Malraux or Vasari was justified
in
seeing "merely painting" anywhere. For the moment we may say
that Malraux speaks the mind of his generation when he declares
that the representation of external nature has nothing to do with art.
"Creating a work of
art
is so tremendous a business," says Clive
Bell,
"that it leaves no leisure for catching likenesses."
As
long ago
as 1911, Laurence Binyon wrote with satisfaction: "The theory that
art
is,
above all things, imitative and representative, no longer holds
the field with thinking minds." Albert C. Barnes reminds us that
only painters "unable to master the means of plastic expression, seek
to awaken emotion by portraying objects or situations which have
an appeal in themselves. . . . This attraction, though it is alI-im–
portant in determining popular preference, is plastically and aesthet–
ically irrelevant." And, as Sheldon Cheney insists: "It can hardly be
too
often repeated that the modernist repudiates the Aristotelian
principle
'Art
is Imitation.'''
