Art as Recurrence

This essay was written in 1953.

Art is a not-leaving-alone. We are told by art that the oldest things have not been seen sufficiently; that there is nothing which cannot be seen again. We are told that the old is new, that the repeated is novel, the recurrent fresh; that the ageless is surprising, and the basic brilliant.

What recurs most often in art are forms: these have to recur. Whatever is looked at has something in common with anything else that is looked at. The Egyptian saw lines; the Assyrian saw lines; so did the Greek of Homer’s time and Pericles’ time. Venetians, Florentines, Parisians, Londoners saw lines. They could hardly do anything else. A world without lines would hardly be a world. A lineless world is a reality-less world, which is important nonsense. Lines recur, and art as recurrence takes lines today and says what lines are is still going on. The lines in an airplane and in a rose make them unmistakably akin. Propellers will be like petals.

And surfaces persist; planes are as fresh as ever. Planes recur. They permeate old Mediterranean lands and more recent Central American lands. Volumes of various kinds likewise happen without end. All paintings honor the recurrent things I have mentioned; they honor them by showing something new about them.

These lines, surfaces, volumes recur within the great constancy of space. Space is; spaces recur. Space is the great withinness and endurer. Church spires pierce space and meadows bring it down; and, doing so, serve as verticals and horizontals making space different.

The Greatest Recurrence

The greatest recurrence in reality is the greatest recurrence in art: rest-and-motion. These two or one will never be through. We can never be through feeling them or it. Art is a way of making this great recurrence ever novel. It is a way of bringing the ageless to a point.

Light and dark, allied to motion and rest, go on, recur—recur so much one doesn’t notice it. Bright and dull colors, warm and cool colors, allied to light and dark, motion and rest, recur; are present now.

Every painting, among other things, is a presence of the great recurrences, the insistent everlastingnesses. There are also the lesser recurrences. By this I mean that a line is a great recurrence; a slanted line is a lesser recurrence; a slanted, somewhat curved line is an even lesser recurrence; and a slanted, somewhat curved line, with a little twist, is a still lesser recurrence. Suppose we look at The Madonna and Child of Giovanni Bellini (The Ralph H. Booth Collection) as that which has recurrence and the recurrences. —There are first rest and motion. The Madonna is moving in rest; most noticeably in motion are the fingers of her left hand. The child is moving generally, though he is in one place.

There is a strong vertical line made by the end of her mantle, starting with the neck. How often vertical lines have recurred! What do they mean? Here the strong, vertical line completes, in difference, the gentleness of the Madonna’s cheek, and chin, and eyes. There are vertical lines in the upper part of her dress. The sky, which is the background, has horizontal lines. There is a horizontal, too, quite near the toes of the child’s left foot. So can one say that the presence of vertical and horizontal is not a startling presence? Vertical and horizontal are common, but startling anyway: for existence is startling, even while repetitive. The placing of the vertical line, as to the two horizontals, is different; but as Bellini was different he was showing us what an old thing is charged with.

There are various kinds of slanting, or diagonal, lines. The child’s feet make for some. There is the longest one, with some curve effects, down the mantle of the Madonna. There are diagonal lines in the background. Again the diagonal; again we are meeting the meaning of the diagonal.

Circular, triangular, and oblong shapes occur. There is a halo around the child’s head, and an angle at the child’s pointing heel. Circles, angles, ovals recur—and add to the meaning of circles, angles, and ovals. Every time we see a shape we are nearer to knowing what that shape means.

Upward and downward are recurrences. The Madonna looks down; the child looks up. In the Madonna is a gentle closedness, in the child a lively openness. Upward, downward, closedness, openness also represent art as recurrence. The nose of the Madonna, though gentle, is harder than the child’s merrily rotund body. Hardness and softness are recurrences, too. And all through the painting are the recurrences expansion and contraction.

We can see, then, I think, that some things in Bellini’s painting will recur, have to recur, in all paintings. We can take their familiarity as familiar, or see them as representing something specific, even while they’re common and inevitable. I think it is well to see art as the surprising history of the recurrences.

Nearest to Reality Itself

Colors are recurrences, too. They do not seem to be as deeply recurring as lines or forms. Color, seen as a happening in space, as a happening of light, seems more deeply recurring than when thought of just as color. Reality is the most recurring thing there is; and it follows that the things seen as most recurring, most deeply recurring, are nearest to reality itself. Reality can be presented on a surface by form alone; but where there is color, there must be form. The outlines of things seem to precede their mass, or volume effect.

However, colors are recurrences enough for any but the most unrestrained philosophic purposes. Color, as recurrence, brings together portrait and landscape; as, of course, forms do. When Holbein’s Margaret Wyatt, Lady Lee “wears a dress of brown damask tufted with gold tags” (Metropolitan Museum Catalogue of Paintings), we are meeting that brown and that gold often and much to be seen elsewhere. The black of Lady Lee’s bonnet obviously recurs, as does the gold of her gold filigree; and the reddishness of her “reddish hair” is hardly unparalleled either. Red is in Lady Lee’s “Tudor rose in red enamel,” and gold once more in her gold medallion.

These colors, then, of Holbein and a Tudor lady are the repetitions of reality, accompanied by newness of circumstance. That is basic in art: repetition of reality and newness of circumstance. We must see the old as new, or we are languid. We must see the new as old, or we have no foundation. Situations recur in painting. People face each other; people are alone; a group surrounds one person. The situations I have mentioned have to do with the meaning of two in reality, the meaning of one, the meaning of one and many. The technique of painting is a series of recurrences, called motifs, accompanied, of course, by the new. The fact that there are art terms at all points to recurrence.

Even Today

Even today it is the recurrences that present the greatest, most interesting problems. How a face shows a mind, and the whole world, too, recurs whenever a portrait is in question: and is a matter as fresh as it was in Titian’s day. How people are alone and together with others is as wonderful as ever. How someone moves while he still is, is just as insistently in painting today as it ever was.

The recurrent brings together old and new painting. Things will be abstract and concrete: how they are is as fresh as tomorrow’s idea. Light and dark will not be banished by future announcements of any kind. The relation of atmosphere and the definite should give rise to manifestoes: but the manifestoes will honor the relation.

Design makes for the recurrent within a painting. Indeed, the criticism of this century points to the recurrent as that which brings power to a painting. Thomas Munro is a representative critic of our time, and he is constantly stating that things are recurring in pictures. I give some examples. Munro, writing (Great Pictures of Europe, 1930) of Uccello’s The Rout of San Romano, says:

In line, the themes are long straight lances, round oranges and harness plates, and the wavy curves of prancing horses. All these shapes are echoed with variation in the long lines of the hills and pennants, and in the shorter ones of the men in armor.

The word I have italicized, echoed, points to recurrence. A recurrence in reality, line, is said by Munro to recur, in various ways, in Uccello’s painting. This is so, and should be expected—and looked for. Indeed, art can be seen as the recurrence in a painting of recurrence in reality.

Munro points out recurrence as technique in Turner’s Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus:

Objects recede in space, and they build up definite rhythms of three-dimensional shape: for example, the fan-like diverging of masts, oars and rays of light; the curving planes of the rocks and clouds, and of the prows and sails of the ships. These interrelations of shape are not carried far enough to organize the picture into a definite design.

The critic is saying that though there is some recurrence in difference in Turner’s painting, there is not enough. Munro wants more “interrelations of shape,” that is, recurrence of the same shape in different objects: if this occurs, interrelation will follow.

Helen Gardner, another representative art critic of our time, writes (Art through the Ages, 1936) of how Giorgione repeats a “long diagonal” in his Madonna with Saint Francis and Saint George:

The long diagonal of the banner, repeated in the right side of the triangle, in the Virgin’s robe, and in the shadows on the pavement, cuts sharply across one side of the triangle, and breaks the otherwise too precise symmetry.

The recurrence of the diagonal, Miss Gardner says, diversifies the painting, and also helps to “bring it together.” Diversity and oneness are quite clearly in the idea of recurrence. Recurrence is, after all, one of reality’s disguises, which art is gloriously trying to show.

In the Giorgione painting, along with the recurrence of diagonals, there is a recurrence of color, particularly green—a recurrence in identity and approximation. The pavement has green, Saint Francis has green, Saint George has green, a round decoration on the pedestal has green, a cloth just below the Virgin has it, as does the pedestal (a little), the dress of the Virgin, grass and bushes just beyond (though in different ways); and green seems to be even in water and sky. Well, green is a magnificent recurrence.

Newer and Older at Once

Art, then, is evidence of the fact that when a thing recurs, you not only see it as older, but as newer. There is a pleasing tension between new and old, which art honors, brings out. This recurrence and tension are in the much used contemporary phrase “formal relationships.”

What has occurred, art states, is never through. It wants to recur. The baby has smiled at nurse; now it wants to smile at sky; later it may smile at book and music. The baby’s smile is newer and older at once, as it recurs.

Art as recurrence tells us that we should never think there is no perceptive electricity in the familiar, the antique, the grey.