“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

(Originally posted January 1st, 2009)

This powerful and dark painting is the work of William A. Smith, showing part of the Weihsien prison camp in China, probably in the spring of 1945 (I may have missed the date). Smith was, at the time, one of the OSS officers who were inserted into Japanese prison camps in an effort to do what could be done to ameliorate the conditions of the prisoners, then extricate them. Smith did quite a number of sketches and paintings that are quite expressive.

I know these works from Leif Peng's wonderful blog, Today's Inspiration, which covers the illustrative art of the 1940's and 1950's. Peng's commentaries are always rich, insightful, and models of excellence in art criticism - they illuminate for the reader some of what there is to see in the work, and they help preserve memories that might otherwise be lost. There is often interesting material about the artists, material which is also a proper part of art criticism, for it evokes empathy, without which understanding of art is impossible.

The painting above is reproduced in a much larger scan in Peng's site, at Today's Inspiration William A. Smith Inside Weihsien Prison Camp; the narrative there is based mainly on material provided to Peng by Smith's daughter, Kim.

When I was twenty or so, I would have sneered at much of the work that Peng has collected and so graciously made available on the Web; it was, after all, "commercial" and "decorative ." Now, after more than four decades, I find those adjectives so silly that I am embarrassed ever to have used them. In fact, if one goes back to any period or culture before roughly the time of Beethoven, all art, music, and even literature is commercial in some sense - it was bought and paid for. The idea of an artist producing work purely for the sake of beauty was almost unthinkable, and, for the most part, remains so today.

There are obvious lessons in this. One is that if you want to see good art, just open almost any magazine - or even look at its cover, for cover art is a whole art form by itself. There was a time when I thought that "great art" (whatever that meant) had to have some "profound" or "deep" meaning, had to be extremely serious and mysterious. Perhaps there had to be clear evidence of blood, incest, and pain.

That, of course, is rubbish. Art exists to integrate our experiences by using abstractions to convoke our memories. I do not choose those words casually. By "integrate" I mean that art juxtaposes experiences - it puts them next to each other so that they can be compared, contrasted, so that one sheds light upon the other. In fact, it would be best to say that the integration of experience achieved by art is accomplished by making one memory into a predicate that is applied to another memory, the subject. That is why I say "convoke" - that is , call up together. It is this convocation of memories that is art's integration.

As for the abstract nature of art, we can leave that topic for another time, but it is obvious. All art is abstraction, even when it is called "realistic."

This view of art means that the appreciation of art is inherently subjective - you might look at a painting that I find deeply moving, yet you might think the painting meaningless because it does not convoke enough of your memories to produce "illumination" (the feeling of a surprising new conjunction of memories). It is the task of the art critic then not to be dogmatic , but to guide the reader so that he might, if he has the requisite memories, even at second hand, reach his own illumination. This ought to be a warm and humane task, not a  harsh duty.

In his beautiful commentaries on the art that he so plainly loves, Leif Peng has achieved a very high level of excellence in art criticism.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me