Author: Amory Crane

(note: at the end of this article is a list of the letters that make up the debate, categorised chronologically.)

Back when I still lived in London as a penniless student, hopeful that I might one day live and work among the bohemians and their garrets as my heroes did in yesteryear, it was a full time occupation to preserve such delicately arranged illusions from reality. Yet no matter where I went or what I saw there, whether staying in my flat alone or spending day after day in the library without a word passing my lips, I carried with me those hopeful dreams like a Fabergé egg which only by stratagems ingenious, and actions both graceful and contorted, could I keep from ever hitting the floor. Alas, my fellow students rarely stuck around after seminars, and would disperse into the capital from our building’s exit to their own lives, no doubt captured by their own dreams. Needless to say, going for a pint with them was a rarity. The result was that on those days when I had no seminars to go to, no lectures to attend, I would often ponder what to do with my time before resolving, on the basis of free-entry and cultural significance, to make my way over to the National Gallery. As it was still the early days of contactless payment on the tube, I could tap my card at the gate even though my account was empty, and they would — perhaps because the system was too slow to realise back then — miraculously open. The charge was another day’s concern. I would then spend whole weekday mornings visiting the National Gallery when it opened, and have the whole place essentially to myself. I could sit and view Holbein’s Ambassadors as if it were hung in my own front room; the Rokeby Venus so close that it was as if she were lying in bed with me; and Rubens’ Samson and Delilah as if I were a voyeur stepping upon the very scene itself. I had no formal training or education in art, yet if I agree with Chekhov, that beside my wife (whenever I may find her) Literature shall always be my mistress, then the plastic arts will, I suspect, remain forever a further bit on the side.

With this came all the freedom and excitement of a fervid adultery. For in those days when my stomach groaned I fed myself every morning, like a savage, and with no direction beyond those of my own appetites, on the peaks of human exertion as are laid out almost dreamlike on the walls of that gallery. Each room a harem of beauty, an education in how to see, would exhaust me before offering up another, and another, and another. Like a prince of the Orient, or Louis XV from his Parc-aux-Cerfs, exhausted and spent, I would return at night to my official mistress, and read diligently from my Shakespeare, my Stendhal, and my Eliot. Still though I would awake every morning eager to return to Van Dyke and Velasquez, Da Vinci and Cezanne, Turner, Gainsborough, and Titian; and though I had only my eyes and my soul to offer, like all great affairs they paid back handsomely with what I could ill-afford. In the end, I had no one really to discuss this aspect of my life, so I cherished it like a child’s imaginary friend or secret world. Art then, alongside books and music, came to be my only companions, and have remained so to me for a long time.

All this is to say that for many years I have searched for some like-minded set of men who could and did take art, literature, music, and their production seriously; men whose lives are so intimately entwined with the desire to carry forward the flame lit inside them by previous experience, probably not so far removed from my own, that a divorce would prove nothing short of murder. Heartening then it has been to see an exchange hotly and seriously argued about art. That it was my pleasure to preside over these letters I suppose proves what a queer place this world is for its inhabitants. For how many long hours have I spent wishing merely to be at the fringes of such a bataille?

Let it not be said then, that there remain no men ready to congregate and muse upon serious things. That the symposium, that venerable institution, has lost some of its lustre in recent years — bereft as it has become of musicians, wine-maidens, and the embroidered chez-lounge — should not, for the moment at least, disturb us. Far more concerning is the unfortunate development that such men rarely find themselves together under one roof. The result is those who are this way inclined make do as best they can, often with the very tools that have proved so deleterious upon the matter of general intercourse. Yet one is nevertheless always aware of a certain detraction, an incompleteness in the resulting exchange in human affairs. By some nefarious slight of hand we doubtless find, pleasant as they may seem, that such interactions prove in the fullness of time little more than pale shades, etiolated memories of what we once knew. There are, certainly, some benefits. Had Diderot been able to suggest a Zoom call to Catherine the Great he may well have averted those long journeys to and from Russia which contributed so much to the ill-health of his later years, though he would have missed out on slapping the Empress’s thighs.

To suggest then, that the exchange which has taken place in the pages of this little magazine over the course of the past fortnight would have had its own benefits and charms in another (which is to say, audio-visual) medium is undoubtable. To hear in real time the passionate arguments from the horses’ mouths has that benefit of immediacy which appears now to be so cherished in our time. Yet it is worth noting our propensity to formal debate has, undoubtedly, withered in us. Without an idiom of rigour, conversations very quickly become riddled with shorthand, with appeals to etc. and ‘you know what mean?’ Here, when each proponent has had the opportunity to sit and ruminate upon his cause, and appeal to illustrations of his argument, he has nowhere to hide from the reader. This means two things: that his blunders are without mitigation, and that his victories are fully and irrefutably his own. This is not to denigrate streaming, but only to suggest an over-reliance on that means by which we pursue endlessly that aim of being informed — that chatter of the ether, by which we attempt to contain all experience — would risk admonishment by the poet’s words, that ‘the empty vessel makes the greatest sound.’

My aim had been in suggesting this series of letters to provide if not an actual house, then at least something like a return to what once existed between men who, for reasons of geography, found the question of breaking bread together impossible. I shan’t here relitigate or pronounce on the validity of one or another’s argument; I have no wish, like Paris, to pass a final verdict on matters of Beauty. But let us not mistake what has been argued. For if, as Wild suggests, that ‘Art Deco presents an example of a synthesis and integration of the arts that can suit a technological post-industrial society,’ we are aware he is pointing out a time when man at least aimed at completeness. That this debate started with a criticism of ‘the unit’ — that quantity by which society’s resources are allocated according to one’s ‘basic functions and to them alone’ — is fitting. For this is a false completeness. It curtails that human need for beauty by stopping short at pure novelty, eschews eros for the basest sex instinct, and betrays man in his variety and extent for man as the easily quantified. For the complete man is, and always has been, the enemy of Mammon. He has reconciled what is essential in himself and the world, and has no need for fripperies or fads. By long and strenuous exertion he has risen high above his baser needs, knowing they are only the first step of a ladder, and longs only for further replenishment of what he has come to know by those hard efforts as the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

If then arguments have here or there become ardent it should, perhaps, be forgiven. It takes a lot of heat and pressure to turn carbon into diamonds. For reading these letter back now my overwhelming impression is, despite deviation of artistic genealogies or terms, that these three — and many others in this sphere — are men whose propensity towards Beauty is undoubtable. That Rhoads begins his second letter by saying of himself and his opposite numbers, that ‘our reaction is boredom or disgust to the inhuman International and Brutalist architectural styles and the ridiculous and revolting things which sometimes continue to be called painting or sculpture,’ is the obverse sign of this observation. For a disposition towards the beautiful is to live affronted by ugliness. That such men can find little to praise in the productions of our times — men who affix their gaze upon the world to rend from it such beauty as we are blind to — well, there is no greater criticism.

Dividing these two sets of argument then is not a diagnosis, but a remedy — a palliative for contemporary woes. Yet if this debate has shown us anything, it is that there is a lot more at stake here than simply the question of Art Deco. Reading these letters by Messrs. Wild, de Villiers, and Rhoads, the reader will no doubt discern beneath both sets of arguments, and often even between them, nothing short of the expression of some felt need for a new covenant between man and modernity. This covenant, much as we might wish it, shall not be made by the exchanging of letters or the back-and-forth of X debates, but by spent sweat in well-worn hours, by the hard clack of the chisel’s edge meeting marble, of the deft and purposeful wielding of brush and palette knife, and by the steady draughtsman’s hand. Some no doubt, embodying the spirit of our age, will question the appropriateness of art to broker such a renegotiation between ourselves and our times. Yet why shouldn’t it? Should the artist, who arranges the world so as to make us at home in the presence of higher things, be left out — as he has for over a century — from such a task? Should we leave it to lawyers? City-planners? Doctors? Let us dispense with such idiocy. For what unites these men — Rhoads, Wild, de Villiers, and many others in our sphere — is that they dedicate themselves to making. Between them and the moment when the spark was first lit by that ochre-tipped finger daubing cattle on a wall of the Iberian caves, stretches a line far richer and more varied than can be claimed by any administrator. With each one, embodying that primordial yearning as Homo Faber, we are aware of that special eloquence which is our privilege to behold: to make us see. If then I, a mere arranger of words, can add anything at all to this debate it must surely be that tired advice given by all men who wish to support those of promise: that if you are a painter, a sculptor, a novelist, poet, or composer, then take heed of their example. Go forth and multiply. Fill the world with beautiful things.

The Letters:

1. The Necessity of an Art Deco Revival (original article)
2. On Art Deco: A Letter to the Editor
3. Letter to Editor: Fen De Villiers Responds
4. Letter to Editor: Paul Rhoads II
5. Letter to Editor: Sam Wild Responds
6. Letter to Editor: Paul Rhoads III

Amory Crane is Editor-in-Chief at Decadent Serpent. He covers such topics as Art, Literature, and the more broadly Cultural, reporting straight from the chamber of what Shelley once called the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. You can follow him @LaughingCav1 on X or on Substack. He also writes fiction.