Creators (37 page)

Picasso’s influence was also immense, since he abolished all the parameters of representational art and largely replaced it by fashion art. He made it possible for Warhol to coin the telling phrase “Art is what you can get away with.” By the beginning of the twenty-first century artists, or rather operators in the art world, were getting away with anything. Since the influence of both Picasso and Disney was so vast, is any purpose served in trying to decide which was the greater and more enduring? Yes, and for two reasons. The first reason is that the essence of Picasso’s art was to move away from nature and into the interior of his mind. The essence of Disney’s art was to reinforce, transform, and reanimate nature, to surrealize it. Hence, in deciding which was more extensive and permanent we are pronouncing a verdict on the power, or weakness, of nature.

Second, both artists were involved, not always by their own choice, in the politics of the twentieth century. Disney was an
entrepreneur, and a highly successful one, the founder of a business which in his own day employed thousands of people and which, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, survives and flourishes and is measured in terms of billions of dollars. Disney was, in the highly charged ideological atmosphere of the 1930s, his most creative period, a strong supporter of what would now be called family values and traditionalism, who primly and obstinately (though silently) refused to allow his organization to promote collectivism or socialist values. As he employed a good many intellectuals, artists, and writers who at that period leaned overwhelmingly toward the left, this produced tension at Disney Studios and, in 1940, led to a strike aimed either at forcing Disney to make pro-Communist propaganda cartoons or at shutting the studio down. Disney defeated the strike, with some help from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and pursued his own individual way until his death. As a result, left-wing writers tried to demonize him, both during his lifetime and later.
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By contrast, the left deified Picasso, who identified his interests with those of communism from the mid-1930s. Before that he had vaguely supported “progressive causes,” as did most avant-garde artists. However the showing of
Guernica
as the centerpiece of the Spanish Republican government’s pavilion at the 1937 fair in Paris brought him a degree of world fame he had never before possessed, and was an important step in turning him into the art god of the left. That apart, however, he never lifted a finger to help the desperate Republic. Though happy to protest with his brush against the Nazis’ atrocities, he never, to the end of his days, acknowledged the torture and execution, by the Stalinists and the Spanish Communist Party, of thousands of Catalonian anarchists, including people he had known. He was a great signer of collective letters of protest—signing cost nothing—but appeals to him to help individual Spanish refugees, including old friends, fell on deaf ears. So did the anguished appeal of his old patron Max Jacob, whose help had been central to Picasso’s first successes. When Jacob was arrested by the Nazis and asked for succor, Picasso joked: “It’s not worth doing anything at all. Max is a little devil. He doesn’t need our help to escape from prison.” Jacob died of cold in his cell.
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World War II and its aftermath produced many cases of perfidy. Picasso’s is one of the worst. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Picasso (who had sheltered from the fighting in the Bordeaux country) was able to return there, despite the fact that he was a prominent left-wing figure whose works had featured in the Nazis exhibition “Degenerate Art.” He lived in Paris throughout the occupation, undisturbed and able to carry on painting and selling his works. Indeed he was probably the only artist who emerged from World War II (as from World War I) much richer than he had entered it. He was undoubtedly protected by prominent Nazis, one of them Hitler’s favorite sculptor, and by the coterie of Nazi homosexuals who gathered in Paris during the occupation. Picasso rewarded his Nazi friends with gifts of his own paintings, drawings, pottery, and other artifacts from his collection. Needless to say, he had nothing to do with the Resistance, for Picasso had a terror of violence (except when practicing it himself on women); but he had many friends among the communists who largely controlled the Resistance in 1944. Once the Nazis had gone, Picasso was hailed as a heroic figure by the French Communist Party, and he himself loudly denounced any compassion or clemency for Frenchmen judged to have collaborated. Indeed he held a meeting at his studio to demand the arrest of such people, some of whom were on his list of personal enemies. At the Salon d’Automne of 1944, largely controlled by the communists, Picasso was selected for the honor of a gallery entirely devoted to his work. On 5 October, on the eve of its opening, the Parisian press announced that Picasso had joined the Communist Party the day before.
⁴³
He believed, like many other people at that time, that the Communists would take over France. Moreover, the French Communist Party was then, and remained for many years, a strong power, controlling over 4,000 newspapers and magazines, including many arts journals. The party was thus able to relaunch Picasso’s career on a large scale and arrange for his European tours under its auspices. He figured prominently at international communist conferences, especially those designed by Stalin (and his successors) to persuade the west to disarm unilaterally; and he designed the dove of peace that was the logo of the communist empire’s propaganda
effort. Picasso also flatly refused to condemn the various suppressions of workers’ revolts by Soviet tanks, first in Berlin in 1953, then in Budapest in 1956, and the savage destruction of the “Prague spring” in 1968. In fact he never criticized communist policy or the policies of the Soviet Union in even the smallest particular, and he died a member of the party. He also took care that his various country houses and châteaus in France were always in areas where the party controlled the local government, just in case he fell afoul of the law (e.g., by seducing a minor). Thus the support of the left was of immeasurable help to Picasso in establishing him, even in his lifetime, as the “greatest painter of the twentieth century”; and even though the communist empire has disappeared, and communism is dead, Picasso remains an unassailable hero of the left.

However, in the long run, political factors fade away. The popularity of the creative arts, and the influence they exert, will depend ultimately on their quality and allure, on the delight and excitement they generate, and on demotic choices. Picasso set his faith against nature, and burrowed within himself. Disney worked with nature, stylizing it, anthropomorphizing it, and surrealizing it, but ultimately reinforcing it. That is why his ideas form so many powerful palimpsests in the visual vocabulary of the world in the early twenty-first century, and will continue to shine through, while the ideas of Picasso, powerful though they were for much of the twentieth century, will gradually fade and seem outmoded, as representational art returns to favor. In the end nature is the strongest force of all.

I
N THIS BOOK
I have dealt essentially with people of outstanding talent, or genius, who worked in the arts. But as I pointed out at the beginning, creativity can take innumerable forms. Why have I included nothing, for instance, about the sciences? I have no satisfactory answer to this question. It is true that some observers will not allow scientists to be called creative. Scientists are discoverers. You cannot create something that is already there. Making discoveries is a form of factual activity. There are two objections to this argument. First, throughout history, no real distinction was made between the exercise of skill or even genius in the arts and sciences. Imhotep was an example of a creator who operated in many spheres: architect, builder, engineer, doctor, surgeon, priest, politician. A typical seer of antiquity was Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC), the greatest mathematician of his age, perhaps of all time, but also an engineer, inventor, astronomer (like his father, Phidias), adviser of kings, and prolific writer. He was rather like Imhotep, in fact, and notable as the only prominent Greek writer who understood hieroglyphics (he had been to Egypt and hobnobbed with its priests). A stylist, he famously said of the lever, “Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.” Some of the machines he invented, such as the water screw, were exercises in creativity by any standards, and he was the kind of inventive, imaginative jack-of-all-trades who pops up from time to time in history to astonish us. Leonardo da Vinci, 1,600-odd years later, was another superlative example,
though Archimedes leaned rather more to the sciences and Leonardo to the arts.

Renaissance studios, especially in Florence, where metallurgy was so important, buzzed with artist-scientists. Verrocchio, who ran one of the largest and most successful of them, where Leonardo and Della Robbia (among others) were trained, could turn his hand to almost anything. Dürer, Bramante, Michelangelo, Cellini—these were artists who knew a lot about the physical world and how it worked. If you could handle a variety of materials, as they did, the likelihood is that you were well up in physics and chemistry too; and all those I have mentioned were versed in mathematics. In the seventeenth century, the tradition of multicultural creators continued. Thomas Hobbes, one of the most creative political philosophers (his
Leviathan
is uniquely powerful), was also a master of geometry, pursuing ingenious lines of inquiry. Christopher Wren, a many-sided scholar, was a leading astronomer before he took up architecture. The Royal Society, confirmed by Charles II in 1660, abounded with learned men who bridged the arts and sciences. The truth is that until the nineteenth century, there was a single culture of learning, and it could be embraced even by self-made men who came up from trade, like Benjamin Franklin, just as well as by those educated at Harvard or Oxford. It is comforting to read that, in the 1790s, Wordsworth and Coleridge, while creating romantic poetry in their
Lyrical Ballads
(1798), were also mixing with the young chemical pioneer Humphry Davy, in Bristol, writing and reading poetry together, and “attacking chemistry,” as Coleridge put it, “like sharks.” (They also experimented with drugs, including marijuana and “laughing gas.”)
¹

Davy was a creator in the strictest sense. In May 1812 a gigantic firedamp explosion at the Falling Pit near Sunderland, in England, cost the lives of ninety-two men and boys. The country, which then had by far the largest coal industry in the world, demanded a safety lamp for its miners. Various lamps were produced but proved unsatisfactory for different reasons, usually weight. In 1815 the mine owners appealed to Davy, by then director of the Royal Institute in Albemarle Street in London, and regarded as England’s leading scientist, for help. Davy visited
pits, talked to miners and managers, and designed a safety lamp. His brilliant assistant Michael Faraday, who later discovered electromagnetism, testified: “I was witness in our laboratory to the gradual and beautiful development of the train of thought and the experiments which produced the lamp.” On 9 November 1816, Davy gave a famous lecture at the Royal Society, “On the Fire-Damp of Coal-Mines and on Methods of Lighting the Mine,” announcing that he had solved the problem. In fact the great railway engineer George Stephenson, head of engineering at the Grand Allies coal pits, also produced a safety lamp, rather earlier than Davy’s, and marginally more safe. There is no record that the Stephenson lamp ever caused an explosion, whereas in 1825 a Davy lamp ignited gas and cost twenty-four lives. But Davy got the credit for the lamp. He went down in history as the “miner’s friend,” but was handsomely rewarded at the time, receiving £2,000 from Parliament, a massive set of silver plate from the mine owners, the Rumford Medal from the Royal Society, and a baronetcy. The most illuminating aspect of the episode, to me, is Faraday’s description of the train of thought leading to the creation of the lamp as “beautiful.” It is as if the emergence of a clever piece of scientific engineering in a laboratory is similar to the making of a piece of sculpture in a studio. The tragedy of the time, however, is that Davy’s trains of thought, albeit beautiful, had by the 1820s become incomprehensible to his old colleagues in discovery, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Davy met Wordsworth for the last time in 1827, at Lowther Castle in the Lake District. Wordsworth complained in a letter that it had no longer been a meeting of kindred spirits: “His scientific pursuits had hurried his mind into a course where I could not follow him, and had diverted it in proportion from objects with which I was best acquainted.”
²
We can thus date, fairly precisely, the bifurcation of the arts and sciences, which, a century later, the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow was to call “the two cultures.”

The bifurcation should not be exaggerated, however, as we can see from the careers of two outstandingly inventive spirits, the Scotsman Thomas Telford (1757–1834) and the American Thomas Edison (1847–1931). Telford began working life, at age ten, as a stonemason—his “mark” can still be seen in the bridge
and doorways of the New Town the duke of Buccleuch created at Langholm.
³
Telford went on to achieve a quantitative record in civil engineering—roads, bridges, canals, viaducts, ports, and docks—which has seldom been equaled in history, and never for quality. But he always loved to work with his hands, in iron as well as stone, and his singular virtue was to combine superb craftsmanship, by himself and others, with a passion for the latest technology and formidable powers of organization in the completion of immense projects. Telford transformed northern Scotland with his immense Caledonian Canal, from the Atlantic to the North Sea; his docks; his ports; and 1,117 bridges. He built the fast new road from London to Holyhead (and Ireland) with its amazing bridge over the Menai Strait, which reduced the time to get from the capital from forty-one to twenty-eight hours. He planned, and wished to build, a national system of fast roads, bypassing the ancient towns—a concept 150 years ahead of its time. He was a great reader and close to men of letters: he took with him, on a tour of his great works in Scotland, the poet laureate, Robert Southey, who wrote a fascinating book about it. Most of all, Telford ensured that all his constructions, from gigantic locks and dockyards to humble tollkeeper’s houses and milestones, were designed with classical simplicity and occasional decorative features of the highest elegance—doing it himself or employing architects of genius.

Equally, Thomas Edison, the greatest inventor the world has ever known, with over 1,000 patents, scores of them of major significance, often worked closely with creators in the arts.
⁴
One of his objects, in producing the first recording machine or phonograph (1877), was to hand down to posterity the voices of great singers and instrumentalists; and his improvements in electric lighting were of immense help to dramatists. He produced, with Tiffany, New York’s first electric theater, the Lyceum; and his spotlights made possible the career of the Chicago dancer Loie Fuller in the 1890s, who performed using son-et-lumière effects at the Paris Folies Bergères. Edison’s research laboratories, first in Newark, then on a bigger scale at Menlo Park, were temples of creativity, often with a bohemian streak more characteristic of a painter’s studio on Montmartre than a lab: Edison would sleep
on the floor in his clothes when in an inventive frenzy.

Scientific research can be not only “beautiful,” as Faraday said, but highly imaginative in almost the same way as literature. Einstein used to say, “A scientist tells himself a story and then finds out by experiment whether it is true or not.” A hypothesis is essentially an imaginative exercise, and without a hypothesis a scientist cannot move forward into new territory of knowledge. In scientific storytelling, in forming a hypothesis, there is much use of the literary device of metaphor, which has the primary purpose of conveying meaning more clearly and strikingly but the secondary aim of allowing thinkers (or writers) to loosen up their own mental processes in a variety of ways—broadening the topic under discussion, relating apparently disparate or distant ideas in a creative way, and jumping from the physical to the metaphysical and back again. The primary purpose was exploited brilliantly by Michael Faraday in his famous lectures at the Royal Institution (especially in his Christmas lectures to children, who love and need metaphors). He inaugurated a tradition, followed by Sir James Jeans, Lord Rutherford, Julian Huxley, and other leading communicators of scientific truth to the public. The second purpose can be illustrated by the work of many creative scientists, a notable example being Robert Burns Woodward (1917–1979), who has been called the greatest organic chemist of the twentieth century. In all advanced sciences where the matter under discussion is too minute to be seen, metaphor is essential; and all diagrams are metaphors. The three-dimensional “structures” (the word itself is a metaphor) used in organic chemistry are metaphorical lab apparatus and stimulate further metaphors in the worker. By introducing the word “bonding,” with a range of metaphorical images flowing from it, Woodward was able to formulate the patterns governing the way electrons shifted in chemistry. What are now known as the orbital symmetry rules were a double product of metaphor, first in Woodward’s mind, where bonding was a master metaphor, and then in his linked colored balls, which formed his chief metaphorical laboratory tools. But scientists also use metaphoric tools that have no apparent relationship with their subject. In childhood Einstein, for instance, developed the habit of building card houses, some
times as high as fourteen storys, and he continued to build them throughout his life, explaining that they helped to develop the persistence, independence, and self-reliance essential for formulating and reformulating “stories” or hypotheses. When a house of cards collapsed, indicating that the hypothesis was weak, the scientist instantly had to begin to build another house, or formulate a different hypothesis, until the hypothesis is rendered secure by experimentation. The fragility of the card house was itself a virtue, akin to the falsifiability principle which (as Karl Popper argued) was the great merit of a useful scientific hypothesis, and of which Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity were outstanding examples.

An example of the value of metaphors in both senses—explaining and thinking—is provided by the work of the great American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910), who occupies a central place in the development of American (as opposed to European) thought, especially in educational theory and practice. He and Henry James were brothers, and William shared Henry’s fastidious attitude toward language, used words with great care and precision, and (to tell the truth) wrote not only with elegance but with greater clarity than Henry. William James probably made more conscious use of metaphors than any other scientist because, as he said, they enabled him to think of deeply abstract matters in concrete terms. He believed that metaphors were particularly useful when used in teams or ensembles, where they became interactive. He drew a diagram, which he used in evolving his theory of mind in 1908, showing how four “families of metaphors”—stream, fringe, flight, and herdsman—by interacting, illuminated such concepts as change, selectivity, relations, continuity, and personal consciousness. His brilliant use of metaphor is illustrated by this passage from
The Principles of Psychology
(Vol. I, p. 243):

A modern research team took the trouble to examine the use of metaphor in psychological writing. Examining research papers from 1894 to 1975, they found that among psychologists of routine skills and limited creative imagination, the “metaphor score” was only three per article, whereas in William James’s famous “President’s Address: The Experience of Activity” (1905), there were twenty-nine metaphors.

That metaphors are useful to creative thinking becomes more certain and obvious the more you study specific instances. What is more difficult to ascertain is the part activities play. Einstein’s card houses were an example more of character training than an actual aid to creative thought. But most scientists and many writers have on their desks implements, gewgaws, games, and puzzles, presumably because they find such things useful to thought. I have no difficulty in concentrating, and I get down to actual writing as soon as I sit at my desk (or at my easel or drawing table), so I cannot easily follow the reasoning behind such gimmicks. But in cases without number, it is clear that spasmodic or periodic activity helps imaginative thought. Thus Dickens, who would spring up from his writing table to make dreadful faces in the big mirrors in his study, is by no means unusual among writers. Some writers build up such resistance against writing, or against continuing to write, that physical means have to be applied to force them to concentrate. When I was an editor, I had, on occasion, particularly with one or two contributors, to lock them in a bare room with a typewriter, in order to get them to write or complete an article, not allowing them to emerge until it was done. But many writers cannot work out their creative thoughts in a writing room. It is well known that
Wordsworth usually composed his verses while walking in the open air, either around the lake at Grasmere or Rydal Water, or ascending and descending the fells. He memorized the lines thus imagined, and only wrote them down when he returned to the house. Sometimes a gap of days, even weeks, intervened between writing the lines in his head and getting them on paper. It is not clear whether Wordsworth needed walking for his poetry because he saw things outside that he could then transform into verse, or because the sheer movement of walking jogged his thoughts. The latter, I surmise, for Wordsworth was in some ways an unobservant man. It was his sister, Dorothy, who saw the works of nature, in astonishing detail, and noted them down. When both were at Gowbarrow Bay, on Ullswater, when the daffodils were dancing in the wind, it was Dorothy who observed them and noted them in her journal, passing on her visual experience to her brother, who some weeks later wrote the famous poem. Without Dorothy it would not have come into existence.