EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Why do artists fib?

The secrecy with which artists create is an enduring topos but not one that those interpreting art pay much heed to. The stories that are particularly intriguing are the ones in which artists seem about to explain their meaning only to end up misleading their audience, sometimes with an outright lie. Listen to Rodin on how subject matter is not the key to understanding art:

“[It’s not necessary] to attach too much importance to the themes that one interprets. Without doubt they..…contribute to charming the public; but the principal worry of the artist must be to give life to the musculature.”¹

I mean, that’s bull. He’s about to spill the beans but instead of explaining what is conceptually important, he switches to an issue of craft.  Yet if craft were the issue, Bougereau would be a great master.

It’s a familiar story, though. Jack Flam says that Matisse’s explanations are inconsistent, full of paradoxes and were intended to mislead.²Ian Warrell claims that Turner went “out of his way to be cryptic and to confound straightforward interpretations of his art.”³ And Francis Bacon, we are told, “combined obfuscation with apparent candour and revelation in order to set the terms in which his art was interpreted.”⁴

As for Picasso, the only great master whose life has been so minutely recorded, his behavior gives us an idea of what earlier masters (of either gender) must have been like. Dore Ashton said that Picasso would never write about his art, spoke seriously about it with very few friends and, when he did, it was invariably in quick flashes of insight and wit; his conversation was virtually impossible to reconstruct accurately; he hated to have his voice recorded and intimates knew that they were never to quote him directly. ‘You mustn’t believe what I say’, he told Roland Penrose.⁵

What does all this mean? Plato was faced with a similar problem in his day and came to the conclusion that poets were either no good at explaining poetry or were not inclined to.⁶ I tend to believe the latter. Poets are word-smiths and would have no trouble explaining their art if they wanted to. Great painters who are often highly intelligent and highly articulate too would have no trouble either. No, I think the bottom-line is obvious: they have something to hide.  

1. Manet-La-Jolie. Face à Face: Portraits d’Artistes dans les collections publiques d’Ile-de-France, exh. cat.  (Paris: Somogy) 1998, p. 79

2. Cited in John Klein, Matisse Portraits (Yale University Press) 2001, p. 19

3. Ian Warrell, “J.M.W. Turner and the Pursuit of Fame” in J.M.W. Turner (London: Tate) 2007

4. Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, “On the Margin of the Impossible” in Francis Bacon (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2009, p. 22

5. Dore Ashton (ed.), Picasso on Art (New York: Da Capo Press) 1972, pp.xvii-xxi