V. Inspiration
Malevich’s essay Suprematism, published in Germany in 1927, reveals the changes which he experienced in consciousness…in movement from a “normal” sense of reality that led him to make this painting [Black Square].
But this dessert is filled with the spirit of non-objective sensation which pervades everything. Even I was gripped by a kind of timidity bordering on fear when it came to leaving “the world of will and idea”, in which I had lived and worked and in the reality of which I had believed. But a blissful sense of liberating non-objectivity drew me forth into the “dessert”, where nothing is real except feeling…and so feeling became the substance of my life. This was no empty square which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of non-objectivity.”
Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World, (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Co., 1959)
Malevich’s Black Square has affinities with reliquary statues, in that it is filled with the “feeling of non-objectivity” that he talks about – but, as in reliquary statues, where the activating ingredient (such as a breath) is hidden inside, only “initiates” of art history would know this.
It is important to realize that possession by a changed state of consciousness may lie behind such an apparently simple and totally abstract geometric painting. All too often it is assumed that only romantic figurative images, organic rather than geometric, owe their origin to a take-over of this kind. Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), another artist of this [last] century whose later work was totally abstract and geometric, writes in a similar vein:
Art shows that …intuition becomes more and more conscious and instinct more and more purified…Intuition enlightens and so links up with pure thought. They together become an intelligence which is not simply of the brain, which does not calculate, but which feels and thinks. Which is creative both in art and life.
(Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art & Pure Plastic Art, in Documents of Modern Art (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1945)
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….we must stress that such meaningful illuminations of consciousness, producing an expanded spectrum of awareness, underlies all highly creative acts…
These creative periods may be called moments of vision – using the word “vision” not to denote the psychological act of perceiving concrete objects, but rather the psychological experience of feeling or apprehending a new level of ones being.
Get some Guston quotes to illustrate this.
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States of heightened consciousness, for example, vary in their quality and intensity. As we regard a man’s [/woman’s] artistic production, accomplished over a two- or three-year period, we realize, like Delacroix, that the works differ in quality. We judge some to be much better than others; and if we were to demand as high a standard as Delacroix, we might consider only a dozen paintings or sculptures from a lifetimes output to be truly inspired. Consequently, it is realistic to recognize that a scale of creative levels exists within the general imaginative condition of heightened consciousness. And while we should continue to acknowledge that all true art springs from this special state of awareness, we should distinguish the higher levels of eloquence achieved by the more outstanding images. Therefore, let us reserve the word “inspiration” for those occasions when the image reveals that the man [or woman] was moved by an intense level of vision.
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….when many persons respond to the same image and there is a collective realization of its significance – even though this may not happen within the lifetime of the artist – then we know that the artist has touched on some universal quality or truth. Talking about the secret of creativeness, Carl Jung distinguishes the great (or inspired) performances in terms of their universal appeal:
The essence of a work of art is not to be found in the personal idiosyncrasies that creep into it – indeed, the more there are of them, the less It is a work of art – but in its rising above the personal and speaking from the mind and heart of the artist to the heart and mind of mankind. The personal aspect of art is a limitation and even a vice. Art that is only personal, or predominantly so, truly deserves to be treated as a neurosis.
(C. G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966, Bollingen Foundation. P. 101)
Inspiration moves the artist away from a sense of normal reality – “the contours of the objective world fade more and more”, as Malevich says – into what Mondrian describes as a state of pure feeling – thinking intelligence. This achieved, the creative personality is free to surpass the personal and speak of things that lie hidden in our common humanness. Once again we face an apparent paradox. For we have been constantly stressing the distinctly individual nature of the creative consciousness, only to arrive at a point where we say that the inspired artist rises above the personal.
You will remember Naum Gabo saying that an artists feelings and responses are in a more agitated state than those of the average man and that he more personally concerned with them. But he did not say that it was only through such highly subjective experience that the painter, sculptor, or poet transcends ego and becomes impersonal and objective in the highest degree. In so doing the artist uncovers deep layers of his own being which are also central to our common humanism.
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Inspiration, therefore, may be seen as the result of strong intuitive or unconscious mental processes which take over the rational consciousness and allow the artist to “think” and “feel” in terms of plastic forms without need of logical cause-and-effect reasoning.
The causes of the necessity to move forward and upward…are obscure. The path often seems blocked or destroyed. But someone comes to the rescue – someone like ourselves in everything, but with a secretly implanted power of “vision”.
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, London: Faber and Faber, 1948
In this statement Kandinsky puts the issue in a nutshell. He describes inspiration as a “secretly implanted power” and informs us that its purpose is to give men (by means of the images of art) a glimpse of higher and transcendent experiences.
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It is often such a visual confrontation when out in the world that triggers the imagination (J. Cornell).
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In developing these forms into a more complete image, the growing configuration itself acts as a catalyst and triggers further thought and feeling states in the artist; these new awareness’s will in turn cause the image to be modified as they are embodied in the growing design.
Of these two possibilities, the confrontation with form in nature appears to be the more common way of engaging vision. When this happens, it is difficult to know whether the artist is already partly conscious of an advanced range of thought and feeling moving within him and is therefore actively searching for the equivalent form, or if it is the sudden perception of the objects significant form which awakens an unconscious sensibility. But it seems that the latter event is the more usual experience.
He [John Constable (1776-1837) was particularly attracted to trees and the shape of clouds seen under changing conditions of light. He suggests that although on normal occasions a tree may be just a tree, there are times when a particular tree will capture his imagination so completely that he is moved by a surge of feeling for life which transcends all other realities. Other artists have described similar experiences occasioned by the emergence of a particular form.
Even though the man may have passed the same tree, or rock, or cow a dozen times during the previous week without giving it more than casual attention, on this special occasion it takes over the whole of his consciousness and the rest of the world fades away.
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