WHAT GUÉNON SAW IN GLEIZES
I do not know exactly how Coomaraswamy was introduced to La Forme et l'histoire but it is easy to see why he would have been at least intrigued by it. The second and third chapters of the book are concerned with right and wrong approaches to understanding the art produced by religious cultures. The wrong approach is typified by Emil Mâle, the great French historian of Romanesque art. Gleizes accuses him of treating this art as if it had the same ambitions as Renaissance art but was less successful in achieving them. Mâle, Gleizes believed, had failed to enter into and to understand the state of mind of the society that had produced these works. The right approach, by contrast, was typified by the English orientalist E.B.Havell, in his Ideals of Indian Art: 'We do not have in France a work which, from far or from near, even touches on the question of form which E.B.Havell clearly reveals (tranche) in the essence of its principles.' [9] It happens that Coomaraswamy's career as a writer on art could almost be said to have started around 1907-8 as part of a movement whose leading spokesman at the time was Havell, defending the integrity and artistic value of Indian art. [10]
[9] Gleizes 1932, p.24
[10] Lipsey 1977, p.60 et seq
Guénon too, though he several times disclaims any great personal feeling for art, thought highly of Gleizes and saw him as an ally. Favourable reviews of Vie et mort de l'occident chrétien and Homocentrisme appeared in Études traditionnelles under the pen of Guénon's collaborator (on the Roman Catholic side of the venture) Pierre Pulby. [11] Guénon himself wrote short accounts in his 'comptes rendus' of Gleizes's Signification humaine du Cubisme (Feb 1939) and Tradition et modernisme (April 1937) as well as of Pouyaud's Du "Cubisme" à la peinture traditionnelle (July-August 1949) and the first issue of L'Atelier de la rose (Oct-Nov 1950). [12]
[11] Pulby 1936 (for review of Vie et mort) and 1938 (Homocentrisme).
[12] These comptes rendus have been reprinted in Guénon 1973
In so doing he was taking seriously Gleizes's view that Cubism was capable of evolving into a renewal of traditional art. This is such an extraordinary development in the thinking of the great despiser of all things modern that it may be worth quoting his review of Signification humaine at length:
'This pamphlet is the reproduction of a talk in which the author sets out to show that Cubism - known first and foremost as an aesthetic manifestation - has in reality exercised an influence in a much wider, more truly 'human' field, first because it was "a work faithful to the true nature of the painter, a manual craftsman" (un travail de peintre véridique, de manuel), and then because it led the painter, in order to resolve certain difficulties, to reflect "not on images of the outside world, but on himself, on his natural tendencies, on what he wanted to do, on his active faculties." It was, then, at least for certain of them, a starting point for researches that were bound to lead them further, "reintroducing (through the multiplicity of points of view) time, in a human mode of expression, in an art which, so people thought, couldn't take account of it" and leading them to understand that "the geometrical figure was a means and not an end." We shan't dwell on the more specifically "technical" considerations, nor on the theory of the "rainbow", which the author has already developed elsewhere, but we will notice as particularly interesting the idea that "Cubism has forced us to question the one sided idea of the importance of sensation (la notion unilaterale sensible) which we got from the Renaissance" and thus to come closer to the artistic notions of the middle ages, which could bring about "the rebirth of a religious expression."' (Guénon 1973, pp.30-31)
If Guénon does not deal here with the 'more specifically "technical" considerations' his 1949 review of Pouyaud's Du "Cubisme" à la peinture traditionnelle indicates his approval. Pouyaud's account of the technique developed out of Cubism is largely based on Gleizes's La Peinture et ses lois, and Guénon has this to say about it: 'he [Pouyaud] has been able to summarise in a few pages, with a clarity that cannot be too highly praised, a certain number of essential ideas concerning painting envisaged from the traditional point of view: laws relative to the plane and to its movements (the moderns have forgotten too easily that a painting is a flat surface) ...' (ibid, p.108)
Page from Robert Pouyaud: Du "Cubisme" à la peinture traditionnelle, Clamecy 1948, illustrating his (and Gleizes's) argument that Christian art had developed from a non- or a minimal - representational base
In a compte rendu written for the 1940 edition of Études traditionnelles (which in the event did not appear, though the article was published in 1945) Guénon severely criticised Pouyaud for saying that the collapse of the religious tradition of the west could be seen in the transition from the Romanesque round arch to the Gothic pointed arch (ibid, p.45). Was he aware that this was a central argument of Gleizes? In any case he discussed the transition from Romanesque to Gothic in correspondence with Gleizes in 1947 and in the 1949 review of L'Atelier de la rose he quotes Pouyaud on the transition from round arch to pointed arch without adverse comment (p.230). Guénon has a reputation for rigidity and dogmatism but in this case he showed himself to be quite flexible and willing to consider ideas that challenged even quite fundamental parts of his own argument (he had situated the collapse of the religious tradition of the West in the fourteenth century).