Working out what one envies in an earlier artist.
109. Francis Bacon. Study for a Port rait of Van Cogb V. 1957
If wc could stick with envy long enough, if we could probe it rather than deny it or let it throw us into despair, we would learn to pull from its sulphurous depths a range of vital clues as to how we might become who we are.
Aside from envying badly, we are also at risk of admiring others in a way that prevents us from emulating them. Our respect can be so powerful that we are at risk of failing to see our heroes as people we might - in the best sense - steal from. A healthy relationship to one's idols involves a sense that one might one day, after suitable respectful study, outgrow them, rather than merely pay lifelong, uncreative homage to them. Although admiration and envy are universal experiences, they are played out in the careers of artists in ways that allow us to inspect their inner workings with particular clarity. In the biographies of artists we have a chance to observe that success has an uncommon amount to do with a capacity to use admiration and envy constructively.
J.M.W. Turner began his career with overwhelming respect, and not a small amount of envy, for the distinguished landscape painter Philip James de Loutherbourg (107-108). Turner appreciated Loutherbourg s way of painting mountains, fields, waterfalls and trees. At first Turner copied this range of enthusiasms faithfully, in a sterile and unimaginative way. With time, he learnt to examine his admiration with a critical eye. He learned to ask himself with greater vigour what it was he really responded to in Loutherbourg's work, and discovered, when he examined matters closely, that his respect was more selective than he had at first imagined. The true target of his admiration was the way that Loutherbourg painted the effect of sunlight on clouds and rain, and it was this he decided to highlight in his most characteristic later works. Turner had the wisdom to study what it might be about an admired predecessor that really excited him and the courage to devote himself to building upon it singlemindedly. His example suggests that one way of dealing with one's heroes is to focus on something that they have done, single it out from the multiplicity of their achievements and throw a new emphasis upon it. What we call novelty may just be a case of judiciously highlighting what was once a mere sub-theme in a predecessors work. Turner might have taken his admiration in a vaguer direction. He might simply have continued along the same general lines set by Loutherbourg and remained a follower rather than a creator. He might have ignored the particularly loud signals of interest and excitement that he would have felt when looking at Loutherbourg's skies in his early twenties. If he had, the world would never have known the mesmerizing, intense beauty of his great final phase.
110. Francis Bacon. Three Studies for Figures at tire Base of a Crucifixion (detail righti, <'.1944
A quart of Van Gogh, a little Eisenstein. a measure of Titian, a dash of medical plates.
Another technique artists have used to discover their own identities through an engagement with admired predecessors is that of combination: taking a number of different and well-known influences and combining them in ways that have never yet been tried. The style of Francis Bacon now appears obvious and complete, but the path to this achievement was based on a gradual blending of a range of disparate artistic interests. When he began painting. Bacon was deeply impressed by Vincent van Gogh, as his studies for a portrait of him attest (109).
The process of becoming the artist we know meant throwing together a range of different themes into the crucible of his feelings for van Gogh. Over many years, from the 1930s to the 1950s, Bacon slowly assembled a diversity of sympathies and enthusiasms. In 1935, for instance, he came across a book on diseases of the mouth in a second-hand bookshop in Paris; the coloured plates, which would have struck most people as unbearably repulsive, fascinated him. In the same year he saw Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, with its striking scene of a nurse screaming, which he joined up with his own asthmatic struggles for breath and with memories of his bullying father's face distorted in rage (110). Half a decade later, he would discover Titian, and be struck by the atmosphere of dignity and solemnity in his canvases, achieved by simplifying the visual plane and relying on backgrounds of deep ochre tints. All of these elements might have had an independent life, but Bacon was able to digest and organize them in a way that brought out new, mutual sympathies never before suspected, and which together contributed to the genius of his mature style.
It is sometimes observed that everyone has a novel, or perhaps a painting, inside them. This seems right; almost all of us have passing intuitions about what our creations and careers might look like. The issue is whether we can also develop the tenacity and perseverance to turn an insight into a product. Here too artists are of help. Like many of us, Le Corbusier started off with a sketch of what he wanted his life to be like (111). His early notebooks, when he was a student and then an apprentice, are filled with swift pen-and-ink renderings of buildings that have an atmosphere we recognize from his later built projects. The sketches are moving because they are show us how young Le Corbusier was when he knew where he wanted his career to go - and yet how many decades he had to wait for it to do so and how much effort he had to make to ensure it would. They remind us of the cost of going from the dream to the creation.
What can this teach those of us who don't want to be architects or artists? Principally, that difficulty is normal, that we have much to learn from others and ourselves and that we should be patient. The capacity to work in complex jobs requires many strands of one's personality to be developed. To put up buildings, to run a school, to manage a bottle- manufacturing business, to invest successfully in the stock market, to plan an election campaign: these require overcoming a range of our native defects. These could include a tendency to wishful thinking, a reluctance to look danger in the face or to absorb the painful lessons of failure or a disinclination to listen to advice when it comes from unwelcome sources. Furthermore, success requires the nurturing of many positive qualities, including a capacity to explain one's ideas to people who do not yet share them: the strength to disappoint people and still like oneself; the capacity to let go of a lesser good for the sake of the whole. Such disparate sources of maturity need to be gradually bound together and deployed. The development of the artist provides a profound model of the process of maturation.
The patience ii would take until the armchair and the room could he real.
III. l.c Corbusicr, sketch from I n Maison da Ham ma, 1942
One aspect of a good relationship with anything is an appropriate set of expectations. For example, a good marriage will almost certainly have a lot of conflict and anguish, but if one takes this as an expected level of pain, the allure of leaving and finding something better is diminished. The same constructive lowering of expectations can be applied to work. A task for art, here, is to dignify our sorrows: humiliation, self- doubt and anxiety over money are parts of life that we struggle with, but not because we arc idiotic or inept. We should learn a lesson from religious history and make a private and public habit of honouring images of suffering with repeated attention. Christian art made a point