Review
What's so great about genius?
Martin Smith: John Coltrane: jazz, racism and resistance.
Mike Gonzalez: Diego Rivera: the man who painted walls.
John Molyneux: Rembrandt and revolution.
Paul McGarr: Mozart: overture to revolution.
All published by Redwords, London, 2001, priced at £4.99 individually or £12 for the set.
Reviewed by Andrew Kennedy
What attitude should Marxists take to the work of "great" artists, with their attendant cults of genius? Is the idea of a body of artistic work that "stands the test of time" elitist and unhistorical? Such questions are raised both explicitly and implicitly by the first four volumes of the series "Revolutionary Portraits", newly published by Redwords, an imprint of the Socialist Workers Party.
These CD-sized booklets are each devoted to a major artist, namely Rembrandt, John Coltrane, Diego Rivera and Mozart.
One obvious justification for the series’ overall title is that the creativity of each artist is related to their engagement at some level with revolution, rebellion or resistance; another, that the artist concerned introduced a new or "revolutionary" kind of representation.
The underlying thesis here seems to be that the most inspiring and innovative works of art are related in some way to historical progress and that this connection is achieved through the creative activity of heroic individual figures.
All the texts are opposed, however, to the crude idea that art and in particular individual creativity is a straightforward reflection of politics or economics. They equally contest the notion that artistic geniuses arise as if by magic, independently of historical circumstances.
All four works are based at least notionally upon a dialectical materialist model of (to quote the series blurb) "the relationship between individuals and larger historical forces", in which "each influences and shapes the other".
Yet there are interesting differences of emphasis among the texts. In the Rembrandt and Coltrane volumes, the individual artist seems to be accorded more autonomy and the tone is more celebratory. The authors appear to be fans and to want to stimulate our appreciation of the works concerned.
On the other hand, the Mozart and Rivera studies, which were originally published as theoretical articles in International Socialism, take a more dispassionate approach, in which there is greater emphasis upon the shaping power of "the larger historical forces".
Mozart, in particular, tends to figure in Paul McGarr’s study ultimately as a product or expression of the tensions within European society which resulted in the French Revolution and other social upheavals.
This approach (Mozart as herald of progress) is usually fairly nuanced, but when applied to the opera The Magic Flute it becomes over-schematic: thus McGarr ignores the sexist portrayal of the Queen of the Night (surely unjustified even if she does symbolise reaction!) and the racist caricature that is Monostatos, a black servant.
The historical context also plays a key role in the volume on Rembrandt, but the question of individuality comes more to the fore. To start with, John Molyneux makes it clear that the crucial things we appreciate about Rembrandt’s paintings and prints now are not simply present-day "constructs", formulated with hindsight, but are related to the real, material gains for humanity brought about by the Dutch revolution and war of independence against Spain (1566-1648).
Interestingly, he argues that the Dutch capitalist revolution brought a greater sense of the human individual, reflected in Rembrandt’s self-portraits, for instance, and a greater acceptance of diversity, which would presumably (although this is not spelt out) provide a context within which Rembrandt could create his sympathetic 1 images of Jews and black people.
Here, as elsewhere in Rembrandt’s work, Molyneux argues, the bourgeois celebration of the individual, pushed to an extreme, takes on an anti-bourgeois logic: for example, Rembrandt’s "positive" depictions of black people would sit ill with the racist ideology which legitimised the republic’s policy of colonial slavery.
More problematically, Molyneux asserts that Rembrandt’s images of the women with whom he had relationships can be extraordinarily non-sexist, because they were painted out of love, and not out of a desire to objectify. 2 How does he know?
Furthermore, Molyneux does not examine the precise forms that patriarchal power took in the bourgeois republic, nor whether these forms allowed a space for the expression of fulfilling heterosexual love, at least. Without such a historical foundation, his argument here tends not to advance beyond the level of humanist, empathetic insight.
Like his mentor John Berger, therefore, he has to resort to the notion that Rembrandt was an exceptionally sensitive individual for his time, rather than being a "typical" product of it. 3
This raises the following question: how much of a role should Marxists accord to individual agency and individual exceptionalism? Obviously, under certain conditions, quite a lot – we would probably say, for example, that without Lenin’s intervention the October Revolution would not have been accomplished.
Arguably, an important role is given to human agency in Marx’s famous statement that "Men [sic] make history, but they do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past". 4
There may, of course, be problems in applying this formula to individuals rather than to collective groupings, and to the cultural rather than the political sphere.
For Molyneux, however, Marx’s principle seems to work as follows: Rembrandt is at once a product of the Dutch revolution and Dutch society (something that he did not choose) and yet as a historical agent he chooses (though not with full consciousness of what is he doing) to express the highest tendencies of that revolution through his individual psyche.
One could argue, notwithstanding, that the format of the series panders to a very traditional kind of bourgeois individualism. Doesn’t the focus on the single artist, despite all the contextualising, inevitably lead to a capitulation to the myth of male genius?
It is noteworthy that the figures covered by the series so far are all men. Over the past thirty years, feminists in particular have argued against genius as an elitist concept that by definition excludes women and other oppressed groups and leads to the elevation to sacrosanct status of a relatively small group of works by white European males. 5
This argument should strike close to home: it is safe to say that most people in and around Marxist organisations are familiar with the phenomenon of "the man with the big brain", who authoritatively holds forth and is heard with a kind of reverence.
The SWP’s theoretical weaknesses in relation to special oppression are particularly evident here: not one of the volumes engages with feminist critiques of genius.
Some will point to the inclusion of the black jazz musician John Coltrane or the Mexican artist Diego Rivera as demonstrating that the chosen format is at least not inherently Eurocentric.
Nevertheless, most of the texts take an approach to artistic achievement which is summed up by Martin Smith: "John Coltrane was not a ‘natural born genius’ somehow sprung fully formed, divinely inspired and beyond logical explanation. Genius he definitely was, but the nature of his genius was spelled out by his environment."
He goes on to state: "At a certain point in history Coltrane was able to express his musical ideas with greater clarity than those around him". 6
This begs the question of why it was Coltrane, rather than another jazz musician, who was able to express these ideas, which means that we are still left with the notion of exceptional individual attributes. In other words, we have a modified and not very satisfactory version of the bourgeois genius thesis, which might be expressed as: "such-and-such an artist is great, but their greatness has a material explanation, sort of".
One volume bucks the trend. Mike Gonzalez argues that Diego Rivera depicts peasants and workers as passive inhabitants of a timeless, mythic Mexican nation, rather than as active agents, that he is impervious to social contradiction and is therefore actually "the least revolutionary" of the Mexican mural painters. 7
The incidental effect of his account is to show how completely inappropriate the representation of the individual artist as hero can be. Such a cautionary note is welcome: the desire to portray an artist both as revolutionary and as creative genius, the notion that great art and political action can originate from the same figure – all this creates a huge pressure to mythologise and heroicise.
No doubt Redwords will cover some female cultural practitioners in future volumes - the German socialist artist Kathe Kollwitz occurs to me as a prime candidate. But it is questionable whether the "heroic" format would be suited, for example, to Claude Cahun, a lesbian artist of the 20s, 30 and 40s whose work subversively interrogated notions of gender and identity. 8
Her unsettling images were produced for herself or for her friends: they were not interventions into the public domain; their relation to class politics is not obvious or straightforward; they don’t wear the egotistical trappings of the self-consciously "great" artist.
Might this lead some Marxists to relegate Cahun once again to the historical margins?
It was Trotsky – himself often portrayed as a genius – who predicted that under communism, "The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise". 9
This promises a future levelling-up of human capacities only to tease us with the prospect of new geniuses arising who will reach an even higher level. Even in an egalitarian society, then, human beings will never possess absolutely equal talents and attributes. Is Trotsky right about this, and if so, is it a problem?
Clearly, we are still in the early stages of developing a dialectical materialist model of the creative human subject and its relationship to social structures and processes. It is worth remembering, however, that these volumes have been produced primarily not as interventions into theoretical debates, but as accessible and enjoyable Marxist introductions to their respective subjects. From that point of view, they work very well.
Andrew Kennedy lectures in art history for various institutions.
1. Molyneux prefers to talk instead of "solidarity" and "identification"
2. See Molyneux, pp 18-21
3. See Molyneux pp 82-3 and Berger’s Ways of Seeing
4. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
5. see e.g. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius, Women’s Press, 1989
6. Both quotes from Smith, p 65. See also Molyneux pp 23-4 and McGarr, p 78
7. Gonzalez, p 62
8. Gen Doy discusses Cahun from a Marxist feminist point of view in her book Materialising Art History, 1988
9. These are the last two sentences of Literature and Revolution.