The Shape of a Pocket

art dealers and promoters have used this battle of styles to make brand-names for the market. Many collectors – and museums – buy names rather than works.
    Maybe it’s time to ask a naive question: what does all painting from the Palaeolithic period until our century have in common? Every painted image announces:
I have seen this
, or, when the making of the image was incorporated into a tribal ritual:
We have seen this.
The
this
refers to the sight represented. Non-figurative art is no exception. A late canvas by Rothko represents an illumination or a coloured glow which derived from the painter’s experience of the visible. When he was working, he judged his canvas according to something else that he
saw.
    Painting is, first, an affirmation of the visible which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears. Without the disappearing, there would perhaps be no impulse to paint, for then the visible itself would possess the surety (the permanence) which painting strives to find. More directly than any other art, painting is an affirmation of the existent, of the physical world into which mankind has been thrown.
    Animals were the first subject in painting. And right from the beginning and then continuing through Sumerian, Assyrian, Egyptian and early Greek art, the depiction of these animals was extraordinarily true. Many millennia had to pass before an equivalent ‘life-likeness’ was achieved in the depiction of the human body. At the beginning, the existent was what confronted man.
    The first painters were hunters whose lives, like everybody else’s in the tribe, depended upon their close knowledge of animals. Yet the act of painting was not the same as the act of hunting: the relation between the two was magical.
    In a number of early cave paintings there are stencil representations of the human hand beside the animals. We do not know what precise ritual this served. We do know that painting was used to confirm a magical ‘companionship’ between prey and hunter, or, to put it more abstractly, between the existent and human ingenuity. Painting was the means of making this companionship explicit and therefore (hopefully) permanent.
    This may still be worth thinking about, long after painting has lost its herds of animals and its ritual function. I believe it tells us something about the nature of the act.
    The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model – even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles. Mont St Victoire as seen from Aix (seen from elsewhere it has a very different shape) was Cezanne’s companion.
    When a painting is lifeless it is the result of the painter not having the nerve to get close enough for a collaboration to start. He stays at a
copying
distance. Or, as in mannerist periods like today, he stays at an art-historical distance, playing stylistic tricks which the model knows nothing about.
    To go in close means forgetting convention, reputation, reasoning, hierarchies and self. It also means risking incoherence, even madness. For it can happen that one gets too close and then the collaboration breaks down and the painter dissolves into the model. Or the animal devours or tramples the painter into the ground.
    Every authentic painting demonstrates a collaboration. Look at Petrus Christus’ portrait of a young girl in the Staadiche Museum of Berlin, or the stormy seascape in the Louvre by Courbet, or the mouse with an aubergine painted by Tchou-Ta in the seventeenth century, and it is impossible to deny the participation of the model. Indeed, the paintings are
not
first and foremost about a young woman, a rough sea or a mouse with a vegetable; they are about this participation. ‘The brush,’ wrote Shitao, the great seventeenth-century Chinese landscape painter, ‘is for saving things from chaos.’
    It is a strange area into which we are wandering and I’m using words strangely. A rough sea on the northern coast of France, one autumn day in 1870,
participating in being seen
by a man with a beard who, the following year, will be put in prison! Yet there is no other way of getting close to the actual practice of this silent art, which stops everything moving.
    The
raison d’être
of the visible is the eye; the eye evolved and developed where there was enough light for the visible forms of life to become more and more complex and