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Tuesday 2 December 2008

And Another Thing

The cartoonist who could make even God the Father laugh

People who are infuriated by the huge sums paid for stuffed animals in tanks and the adulation heaped on Francis Bacon’s squiggly horrors should grasp that there is no reason or logic in aesthetics. Andy Warhol, no mean exponent of effrontery, if not of skill, summed up the game for all time: ‘Art is what you can get away with.’ This is certainly true of modern fashion art. Was it always true? In studying the history of the subject, I am often struck by the bizarre careers of artists. For instance, that obscure figure Grünewald was better known in his day as a hydraulic engineer than as the painter of the Isenheim Altarpiece. The monks saw him as more useful in getting water from the nearby mineral springs to their hospital than in directing thoughts heavenwards by his images. The leprosy and other skin diseases which figure so strikingly on his panels required treatment as well as prayers.

One has to admit that luck or accident is a prominent player in the game. The hair of Christ which covers up the right side of his face in Velázquez’s ‘Crucifixion’ was his way of dealing with a mess left when his hand slipped. Turner likewise claimed that the miracles of beauty Ruskin read into a square inch of a certain landscape of his were nonsense — it was just a mistake. An even more striking instance was the entire career as a comic draughtsman of James Thurber.

No one doubts that Thurber was a genius of a kind. He left to posterity four masterpieces of prose: ‘The Night the Bed Fell’, ‘The Day the Dam Broke’, ‘The Night the Ghost Got In’, and ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’. They are just as funny, for reasons which go right to the dark heart of the soul, as when they were written three quarters of a century ago. Thurber worked like an inspired maniac on such pieces, writing them over countless times. He sweated over every word, and words were jewels to him. His approach to art was quite different. When aged six, in 1901, his left eye was destroyed by a toy arrow shot by his brother. His mother, a Christian scientist, refused to let his condition be properly treated, and as a result ‘sympathetic ophthalmia’ developed in his right eye, and eventually led to virtual sightlessness. By the time I met him, in 1958 I think, he was effectively blind.

More articles from: Paul Johnson | this section

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