5. Romanticism and its Aftermath. By and large,
Renaissance and post-Renaissance artists regarded the
business of art as an intellectual discipline. The intel-
lectual responsibilities artists took upon themselves had
a noticeable influence upon forming their minds and
personalities. With Michelangelo, they believed that
“a man paints with his brain,” and with Leonardo they
agreed that “painting has to do with natural philoso-
phy,” that it is “truly a science,” and that a painter
had “first to study science and follow with practice
based on science.” Not until the second half of the
eighteenth century does a shift away from intellectual-
ism toward an intuitive approach begin to predomi-
nate. The revolt came into its own when an artist such
as William Blake vented his scorn against the reign of
Reason with these lines:
All Pictures that's Painted with Sense and
with Thought
Are Painted by Madmen as sure as a Groat
(Keynes, p. 660).
Romanticism with its “egomania” brought about a most
serious change in the personality of artists. A romantic
pedigree is recognizable in the untrammeled individ-
ualism of many twentieth-century artists and in their
personality and social problems, though it must be
admitted that the freedom they arrogate to themselves
is in the last analysis derived from the revolution of
the Italian Renaissance, the period in history on which
they heap the fullness of their scorn.
When the psychologists entered the arena, artists,
backed by an “authoritative” analysis of the psyche
and armed with an up-to-date vocabulary, could state
with confidence the case for self-expression unencum-
bered by book-learning. Artists of the Freudian and
post-Freudian era claim a degree of subjective and
moral freedom that would bewilder even their roman-
tic precursors. When Pablo Picasso says that “the artist
is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter
where,” or Marc Chagall comments on his pictures “I
do not understand them at all.... They are only
pictorial arrangements that obsess me,” or Mark
Rothko strives to eliminate all obstacles “among others,
memory, history, or geometry” (Wittkower, Born
Under Saturn, 1963), or Jackson Pollock maintains
“When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what
I am doing” (Read, 1967)—they may emphasize and
cultivate the emotional element in their creations, but
theirs is a very conscious surrender to the unconscious.
Contrary, however, to the artists' own belief, “auto-
matism” in art does lead to a loss of artistic individ-
uality. Nevertheless, even though a doodle by Picasso
or Klee may lack a distinct personal quality, one cannot
argue that the public is deceiving itself by paying high
prices for such works. For, obviously, the public places
the artist above the work: it is the name that works
the magic. Behind the name looms the man, the great
artist, in whose integrity we believe and of whose
genius we are convinced.
