Art (for Art's Sake)

There was a thump when the post arrived this morning. Gary Schwartz's Rembrandt book arrived only three days after I placed the order. At £3.33 with free delivery it's quite a bargain since it looks like it cost World of Books £3.45 to send. All credit to them. I only hope they stay in business.

With Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio and Vasari's Lives also on their way, it's going to be a painterly summer. Caravaggio, admittedly, is of interest at least as much for the lurid life as the paintings but I think I admire things in inverse proportion to how well I can do, and properly appreciate, them.

Let's pretend, for argument's sake, that I can write a passable poem and know something about poetry after 45 years of thinking it was my thing. I am re-impressed by Michael Donaghy and I can't see me ever abandoning my dozen or twenty most valued poets but I've lost a lot of faith in the overall enterprise. Perhaps, for my purposes today, we could also reduce the creative arts to writing, music and painting with all due respect to dancers, sculptors and whatever it is Damien does when he puts dead animals in tanks of formaldehyde.

We all have language and, up to a point, can produce a poem. To make music one has to learn an instrument and have the talent to make it work. Not all of us can draw although I understand it can be taught but I doubt if 'being an artist' can be taught. Thus, while what the likes of Donaghy can do is admirable, poetry is an easy access activity that most can have a go at and, it seems, most that do consider their efforts worthy. Musicians need to practice regularly, apply discipline and are less satisfied with their performances. There are several local instrumentalists that I've been writing about here that are stunning in their technique but aren't well-known beyond adjoining parishes. And then I wonder at the folds in the frocks of Vermeer's ladies, the time-ravaged face in Rembrandt's self-portraits and don't think words can make that happen either.

Laura Cumming is very sympathetic to Van Gogh in her book on self portraits but I can't see it in the way he uses a brush. On the other hand, whereas I think I know what I'm looking at in a poem and much of what I'm listening to in music, I very much need paintings explained to me. It won't be entirely satisfactory until I can see a bit more of it for myself.

But I wonder who are the maddest - the poets, musicians or painters - because Laura gives space to the 'Romantic' idea that genius and madness are somehow linked. None of that, however, should be allowed to suggest that the likes of Gary Lineker, Stephen Hendry and Philip Larkin weren't great just as Paul Gascoigne, Alex Higgins and Sylvia Plath were.

Musicians, I'd say, are probably the sanest. Yes, there's Wagner, Erik Satie, John Ogdon but they are up against some stiff opposition. We can't count those who affected zaniness for commercial pop purposes.

Some similar doubt applies to poets who, especially those 'confessional' among them, made themselves exhibits in their own art, sometimes suspiciously appearing to think that extreme mental states could stand in for talent. I don't mean Sylvia, who was a brilliant poet, but I might be wondering about John Berryman, for example. I'd say Ezra Pound was not a fraud, maybe not Rimbaud or John Clare either.

But writing is anchored by words that bring definitions with them, however shifting they might be, and it is harder to 'fly by those nets' to make something that goes beyond them which - without wanting to make any sort of manifesto out of such things - is where the art is. Words aren't so easy to be convincingly mad with because they contain sense, that sense needs to be subverted and that subversion is going to have to be deliberately done.

No, it's the painters that are maddest. Not Vermeer. He exudes sanity like Bach does, trying to show us that it's possible. No, Rothko, Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Munch - genuine articles whether one likes their work or not. Probably not Jackson Pollock, Warhol, the utterly gorgeous Maggi Hambling or the highly confessional Tracey Emin. That latter group tried too hard at it; that first quartet lived and died devoted to their painting. Whether it was mad to do so or if it put their lives on a more fulfilling level than the likes of ours could ever have achieved, well, you pays your money and you makes your choice. 

But painters slip the surly bonds of words, like musicians do, and because I understand even less about how they do it than I understand what it is musicians do, I'm potentially even more in awe of it.