Artists Without Art
ROSENBERC, HAROLD
Our feeling of the sanctity of human life is really not a very logical one—and in fact very logical jurists have demolished it by cogent argument repeatedly—but it is a very vital and inexpugnable...
...Nevertheless, it does seem that Camus's particular senius is that of a reflective writer, and therefore most completely realized in the kind of novelistic monologue...
...Dope and madness can also be shown, and the extraordinary ways of seeing and believing they induce, but not the necessities of art which result in esthetic "distortion" All phenomena of creation must therefore be translated into phenomena of pathology...
...One of the heroes of an age of boredom, he is the hero of a period whose passion for creation is the complement of its ennui...
...But while the artist as a starred semi-underworld tramp can be pictured without difficulty, to tell the story of the hero of the creative is all but impossible...
...Though his days are held to consist of drinking, fornication and ducking the landlord, with occasional frenzied flourishes on a canvas inspired by Mlle...
...Langouste undressed, and end in his breaking his neck by falling downstairs or hanging himself, the artist is not glamorous only for the way he spends his time...
...For a generation eager to see something new and original come out of itself, this secret and its bearers are objects of veneration, envy and uneasy curiosity...
...Is it not a fact that he alone of all the characters in popular iore persistently reappears as the protagonist of serious literature...
...Our feeling of the sanctity of human life is really not a very logical one—and in fact very logical jurists have demolished it by cogent argument repeatedly—but it is a very vital and inexpugnable feeling ( at least in some of us) that no logic can extirpate...
...I should like, particularly, to see a good performance put on here of The Just Assassins, which strikes me as dramatically the best of these plays, before I could be sure just how exciting this fine, lucid, classical playwriting can be on the stage...
...Savonarola, Al Capone...
...Nor does the fact that he is the scorned outsider who triumphs, when after his death a canvas dragged from behind the dresser is sold for $150.000 in a gilded auction room filled with high society, make his tale a mere version of Cinderella...
...Camus is always in complete control of his subject matter: in every play he does exactly what he wants to do, and the loose ends of anything inexpressible are never left hanging...
...7.50...
...116 pp...
...4rt critic...
...All of these plays are very good, and yet I came away somewhat disappointed by this book...
...Perhaps, however, that is the trouble: Camus is so in control of what he has to say that nothing seems to break loose and blaze up on the stage...
...Leader...
...Sharing in all these attractions, the figure of the doomed great artist possesses an appeal lacking in other beachcombers...
...Yet the image of the artist at work actually communicates little about the artist himself...
...If a man cannot witness a hanging without a physical reaction, it would seem a little bit schizoid for him to espouse a rational theory of punishment in which hanging is a perfectly perfunctory and appropriate action by society...
...contributor, "Art News,'' Orion...
...the r?cit, which he has brought to perfection in The Stranger and The F nil Artists Without Art liani: Man and Myth.Modig] Reviewed by Harold Rosenberg inneBy Jeo Modigliani...
...Drinking can be shown and drunkenness, which are speoial states of consciousness, but not the excitation that produce a masterpiece...
...Ionesco, or the marvelous indictment of capital punishment by Brendan Behan, The Quare Fellow, these plays of Camus seem to be muffled and pallid in tone...
...In the relation between the artist's condition and his product we detect the presence of a genuine secret, and one of the first importance...
...Part of this impression may be due to the deliberate classicism that Camus has espoused as his ideal for the theater...
...partly, it may be a case that the plays need to be performed in order to take fire...
...It renders only the visible part of his act, most of which is unseen...
...In comparison with the plays of Beckett...
...Not even his being a kind of innocent, a big baby distracted by the problems of his toy—how to draw a foot or thicken his paint with sunlight—fully explains his fascination : under the current psychopathological dispensation everybody, including motormen and executive vice-presidents, is a big baby if you hold the camera at the right angle...
...The argument against hanging is not really an argument at all, but a simple question : Can you yourself watch a man being hanged...
...Partisan Reviezv,'' "Commentary" THE ROMANCE of the disordered, and disorderly, artist enjoys a rising popularity — Gaugin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh are now rivals of Nero...
...Every state of the artist, and especially his least controlled ones, touches upon the deepest of impulses, different from those aroused by the safecracker...
...The only way to behold the artist is to watch him at work—the most interesting films about artists are educational shorts, like those of Matisse and Leger, which show how thev draw and paint...
...Hence even CONTINUED ON PACE 22 The Neu...
...For his prestige as a hero of disreputability the artist is indebted, of course, to that general yearning to break loose from routine that has endeared pickpockets and call girls to what is so happily designated as "the family audience...
...With a painter this is less so than with a poet or composer...
...Being a member of an exotic trade is ,not, however, all there is to it...
...but painting, too, is an action of the psyche of which the physical movements represent only the completing gestures...
Vol. 41 • December 1956 • No. 45
