“Ivan Eyre” by George Woodcock

This book, the first full-length treatment of Ivan Eyre, does several things. It relates much of Eyre’s biography, gives an account of Eyre’s own recorded views on his art, summarizes other critics’ treatment of him and, finally, presents Woodcock’s own views (all accompanied by lavish illustrations). So much valuable information assembled in one place will make this work an important reference tool in any study of Eyre’s oeuvre. The multiplicity of functions, however, does result in a certain amount of confusion, which ultimately weakens it as a work of criticism.

The most important source of this confusion is Eyre’s own presence in the book, which is considerable. Not only does Woodcock quote extensively from Eyre’s own words throughout, but we are told that the illustrations were chosen, not by Woodcock, but by Eyre. At the risk of sounding obvious, it ought to be pointed out that when a painter stands in front of a painting with a brush, he is an artist; the moment he starts to write or speak about his work, or the moment he begins to select works for some purpose, he is a critic, and while what he says is of special interest, it nevertheless must be regarded as just one piece of criticism among others. Woodcock is, to some extent, aware of Eyre’s separate function as a critic—he warns against accepting the selection of works as forming a canon—but he does not work out the implications of Eyre’s double role far enough. There is no clear assessment of Eyre as his own critic, and indeed, it is often not sufficiently clear when Woodcock is talking for himself, or when he is acting as a voice for Eyre.

Perhaps this merging of the two intentions is not as muddling as it might be, since presumably Woodcock generally agrees with Eyre. Yet there are moments of unease. For instance, Eyre makes large claims for himself. He wants his pictures to “talk” with painters of the future, “just as Cranach, della Francesca, Vermeer, Degas and so on ‘talked’ with me.” His life task, as a painter, is to form questions “in as beautiful and intriguing a way as possible” about subjects no less vast than “life, death, love, fate.” All right, that is what Eyre says, but what, the reader is curious to know, is Woodcock’s own reaction to such statements? We do not find out. He reports them, then executes a neat sidestep.

And then, perhaps it is Woodcock’s concern to follow Eyre that leads him into some egregious critical pronouncements. How does one deal with his facile dismissal of entire schools of art, like Action Painting, Tachisme, or Geometric Abstraction? We have come to expect and forgive myopia in artists, many of whom seem to need to reject anything outside their particular mode, but it is disturbing to find a serious critic, especially one who writes so sensitively on other matters, unable to see that the work of, say, Albers or Stella belongs in an art “that aims to place man in a spiritual as well as physical relationship with his world,” to quote Woodcock’s own prescription. (How can any serious artistic endeavour be outside this mandate?)

The reader’s unease is compounded by Woodcock’s easy habit of invoking great names. In literature there are, among others, Pascal, Baudelaire, St. Theresa, Orwell, Camus, Wordsworth; Proust is a particular favourite. Artists include Pissaro, Blake, El Greco, Turner, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and, above all, Breughel, Beckmann, and della Francesca. These names are used because they help define Woodcock’s aesthetics, or because they are a reference point for elements in Eyre’s work, and Woodcock nowhere claims that he is their equal. But their constant presence, on almost every page, sets up a sort of association by proximity, so that the reader is left with a strong suggestion that Eyre belongs in such company, a situation that is strengthened by Eyre’s own apparent large claims.

That I have taken so much trouble to point out what seems to me to be the weaknesses of Woodcock’s approach, should be taken as a measure of my respect for him, for this is certainly a book to be taken seriously. Many of his insights are truly illuminating, and in his insistence on the poetic, or symbolic, quality of Eyre’s work, he has focussed on an essential element. Although his “parallel experience” approach, derived mainly from Baudelaire, is not particularly popular on this continent, it seems unlikely that we could enter the spirit of Eyre’s work any other way. Woodcock’s discussion of Eyre is provocative in the full sense of the word: he stimulates thinking, and he provokes into responding. Constantly, a phrase will ignite in the mind, and one is sent off on one’s own tour of discovery. The broad and humane aesthetic framework that Woodcock has constructed, despite a certain amount of inflation already hinted at, can have an inspiring effect. Even if one is not convinced that Eyre has earned a place as one of the great artificers in Woodcock’s Byzantium, one still is braced by the boldness of the vision. This kind of attempt, we realize, must be made, and this kind of test must be applied.

While the quality of Woodcock’s writing makes this book more than mere decoration, the handsomeness of its design and the sumptuousness of its illustrations qualify it as a luxury book quite apart from its text. There is a rather serious paucity of drawings (which can be superb and just as satisfying as the paintings) but apart from this, the illustrations are plentiful enough, and good enough, to allow the reader to make his own response to Eyre.

These responses are bound to vary considerably, given the enigmatic quality of Eyre’s work, but there is one aspect in particular that needs to be addressed—the sheer unattractiveness of Eyre’s vision which, combined with its obvious power, produces pictures that are deeply troubling.

I suspect that of the people who really look at Eyre’s paintings, far more admire than like them. To begin with, the pictures are curiously reclusive. Woodcock points out how Eyre’s human figures never engage the viewer directly, but he might have noted that this obliquity operates just as strongly in the landscapes where there are no figures. A clue to this effect is found in the strange texture of the paintings; there is no way through the tight fuzz of paint that forms the surface of the canvasses. It is as if the artist refuses to engage the viewer at any direct level, or allow him any breathing space. In those pictures in which Eyre himself appears, one is not surprised to find that the artist is depicted either with his back to the viewer, or else asleep (as, for instance, in Long Grass and Morning Snow). I can think of no other paintings that so resolutely exclude the viewer.

There is another reason why Eyre’s paintings do not ingratiate themselves easily. In most of them, there is a powerful brooding presence, a funereal feeling. At one point, Woodcock quotes an illuminating passage from Eyre’s description of his stay in England: “I wondered, as Dante did, climbing over the hills and valleys of the Devil, whether at the end of it I should see the sky…” Metaphorically speaking, Eyre never does find the sky, but remains in the hills and valleys. It is significant that in almost every landscape illustrated in the book, the sky is sombre, sitting like a lid on the land; the brightest part of the painting is typically a stretch of pasture, or of snow, unexpectedly lit from no obvious source. Eyre himself firmly rejects any label applied to him. Yet labels can be useful as mnemonics, and I will risk resurrecting the term ‘gothic,’ used before in connection with Eyre. If gothic means the awareness of death in life (and, more palely, life in death) then it seems to apply particularly well to an important aspect of Eyre’s work.

The paintings do not allow one to rest. Because they are so elusive, one tries to penetrate them by turning to some other form of expression that uses suggestion, and so one can see why Woodcock, his professional predilections apart, would turn to literary analogues in his discussion of Eyre. It is contagious. When I look at Eyre’s paintings, two quotations come irrepressibly to mind. Both are concerned with colour, for as texture offers a clue to the quality of Eyre’s vision, so does his colour. (Eyre is not at home with bright colour, and he is far more powerful when he uses dark tones such as his velvety greens, metallic blues, black, and purple. When he does use brighter colours, they are not joyous but often unpleasantly acrid, even crass.) The first of the two quotations is from the New Zealand artist, Frances Hodgkins, a fine lyrical watercolourist who died in the forties. She was explaining to her friend Douglas Glass how her colour sense originated. It was the time of the death of Queen Victoria, she said, when “the whole country went into mourning…And everything was black; everybody in the street was black, the clothes for sale in the shops were black. Until you get right down to black, and everything’s black, you can’t reach colour.” When Douglas Glass objected that Frances Hodgkins did not use a great deal of black in her paintings, she replied “No, but I’ve been down to black” (The Listener, March 1970). The second quotation is one of the enigmatic utterances of the 18-century poet, Christopher Smart: “For black blossoms and it is Purple.”

Possibly here is a clue as to why part of one’s psyche rejects Eyre’s paintings, formidable and beautiful as they are. They are too close to mourning. Unlike Frances Hodgkins, who went on to produce celebratory paintings of radiant colour, Eyre stays in black, a black that blossoms only into purple. ■

Peter Millard is Arts Manitoba’s contributing editor from Saskatoon.