The Abolition Of Catalogues

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Title:     The Abolition Of Catalogues
Author: Israel Zangwill [More Titles by Zangwill]

The average Englishman takes his religion on Sundays and his Art in the spring. Influences that should permeate life are collected in chunks at particular seasons. This is sufficient to prove how little they are really felt or understood. The Academy headache is the due penalty of hypocrisy. It is the catalogue that is the greatest coadjutor of cant. If pictures, besides being hung, were treated like convicts in becoming merely numbers, without names either of painters or subjects, what a delightful confusion of critical tongues would ensue! But conceding that a picture should have the painter's name, for the sake of the artist (or his enemies), I would propose that everything else be abolished. It is not unfair to subject pictures to this severe test, because, of all forms of art, painting is the one whose appeal is instantaneous, simple and self-complete. If a picture cannot speak for itself, no amount of advocacy will save it. If it tells a story (which no good picture should), let it at least do so without invoking the aid of the rival art of literature. Literature does not ask the assistance of pictures to make its meaning clear. Nor, too, is anything gained by calling colours harmonies or symphonies. Let such pictures strike their own chords and blow their own trumpets. Catalogues of all kinds are but props to artistic inefficiency. If dumb-show plays did not rely on "books of the words," pantomime would have to become a finer art. If ballets had no thread of narrative attached to them, their constructors would be driven to achieve greater intelligibility, or to give up trying for it--which were the more gratifying alternative. So with the descriptions of symphonies we find in our programmes. Why should good music be translated into bad literature? Surely each art should be self-sufficient; developing its effects according to its own laws! A melody does not need to be painted, nor a picture to be set to music. The graceful evolutions of the dance are their own justification. The only case in which I would allow a title to a picture is when it is a portrait. That is an obvious necessity. Portrait-painting is a branch of art which demands recognition.

[The end]
Israel Zangwill's essay: Abolition Of Catalogues

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