Page 42 - Studio International - March 1967

proves an alarming idea. We cannot see our way to brushstroke can never make experience concrete. The
dominate it, and shrink from persevering in the attempt. experience that produced the form on the canvas can
We therefore give it up, and turn our attention to some- never be registered. The image is its by-product, it is not
thing less intimidating.' That is the corruption of con- the experience itself. But then I cannot agree even with
sciousness. Therefore what a painter has to do is not to the use of the word experience in the sense that Forge
recognize either the object or the image but to recognize used it. It sounds too much like what Santayana meant
the kind of sensation that produced the image. when he spoke of objects that are imbued and reverberate
Bomberg himself talked constantly of the mood; he with the heat and the glow of past experience. I prefer the
always said, 'try to remember the mood'; it was only by word 'sensation', which has more to do with the act of
remembering the mood of the creative act that one could painting. The sensation only develops and defines itself
be certain of working well, and progressing from one vital during the activity in front of the object as the work goes
image to another. It had to be an almost ecstatic drunken forward. And it is by recognizing the truth or falsity of
state, in which we project ourselves into reality, into the sensation that the artist knows whether or not his
things, rather like an actor becoming identified with the image is valid. If an artist is not true to his sensation, if he
character he is playing. It was in a concern with mass that superimposes a concept or idea of feeling over the
we strove to find the unique character of mass and the sensation that in humility before God and nature he has
meaning in the reality. But the mood was merely a guide. felt, he becomes guilty of a corruption of consciousness.
It could not be projected on to the canvas. This, apart One of the difficulties is that there is no finality to any
from problems of structure, was the main difference form ultimately . . . everything we see, touch or know
between Bomberg and the Expressionists. Andrew Forge could always be something else. As Braque has said,
In the catalogue to the
Memorial Exhibition organized once said that each brushstroke of Bomberg's defines the `Everything changes according to circumstances.' In the
by the Arts Council in 1958 experience of the form as well as the form itself. But a Tate there is Bomberg's earliest drawing, the Sleeping