This is Personal: Blake and Mental Fight

by Christopher Bucklow

I come to this essay with competing projects. Blake's resurrection from obscurity into an object of Christ-like devotion is of great interest, and in beginning to write, part of me wishes to try to account for his rising status as a cult figure and to explore his function for contemporary users. Going against this wish however, another part of me wants to set down on paper some thoughts on the fundamentals underpinning his belief system. This would require us to assume that we are here to talk about a real historical figure, rather than the fantasy Blake that we use today for our own various purposes. Following from this, quite another part wants to experiment with his way of thinking - to try to assimilate his intellectual technique - and to apply it to certain aspects of our own society: in the case I have in mind - the psychology of the contemporary art-world. [1] Finally, and not really in competition with these desires, another wish would be just to cut open the smooth surface of this text and to show the operation of the usually unconscious processes which would attempt to knit these competing projects into a seamless fabric - showing how they would employ the rhetorical suppressions and ellipses that are used habitually and unthinkingly - with the great ease of constant practice - in the production of any persuasively believable text. This last desire is really about trying to be open about what - so to speak - is 'in it for me'. It is therefore a desire to examine Blake's use, not for contemporaries in general, but for this contemporary - the present user as a practicing artist. Those who are curious to discover another surface below the smooth weave of this essay's textual fabric will find such an examination within the notes; a commentary in which I try to discern my own motives for writing the essay in the way that I have done.

The situation of being confronted with competing projects is without doubt that faced by any writer at the beginning of a text. And yet I rarely see that fact openly declared. On the contrary, in the interests of seeming to be made of an undivided, unitary and coherent fabric - in other words in the interest of being perceived as single-minded - such dilemmas are usually given the appearance of having been settled before the writing begins. What greatly interests me about Blake however, is that, on the contrary, much of his subject matter actually deals with the recovery of his incoherence.

One of his main interests - even talents - was that of looking behind appearances - of 'opening up' the texts of others - unpicking the stitches of his own texts - indeed of himself. And one might understand what he enthusiastically called his 'Seeing' as the upsurge of delirium produced by this experience of himself as a hive of competing psychological energies - and his perception of those same energies unleashed in the world and shaping the events of eighteenth-century European and American history. It is tempting to call this 'Seeing' a kind of reasoned analysis; for while there is much Blakeian protest about reason being a divisive approach to the world, in view of the strength of his aversion, one might be justified in suspecting that it is actually quite close to his usual ways of processing information and that his attacks upon it are impassioned by the force of fear - fear, that is, of a dictatorial rationalist within him, and, most tellingly, an entirely understandable fear of fragmentation experienced by a mind that has discovered the tenuous reality of its own cohesive and scattering forces. [2]

Blake's own comments on the nature of his thought process are generally couched in terms of a stripping-away of surfaces. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for instance, he seems to identify with a mighty devil, hovering “on the abyss of the the five senses, where a flat steep frowns over the present world” - a devil writing with “corroding fires”. And later in the same book, when he says his intellectual technique is of “the infernal method” he describes it as working “by corrosives, [...] melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid”. Of course, he is also describing his unique etching method for the production of text and image; but clearly he uses it as a metaphor for his ability to see beyond the smooth surface of things presented to his understanding - the propaganda of government, and of church, and monarchy and, I contend, the rhetoric of Urizen - the internal aspect of himself that he identified as the tyrannical rationalist.

This ability to see through rhetoric must come in part from his Dissenting family background - for that religious tendency commonly pulls down the 'smooth' appearances of orthodox texts or even rival sects.[3] But they usually do so only in order to erect another faultless surface of their own making - another set of certainties; more suited to the needs and desires of the psyches that produced them - though conscious knowledge of that fact is always suppressed - even within the mind of the creator of the new sacred texts themselves. In this sense it is not unlike the psychological situation one senses across a wide span of time - for it was perhaps the same in early pre-orthodox Christian Egypt around two to three hundred years after Christ's death, when sects proliferated and creation myths seem to have been produced by various writers to suit their own agendas. [4] Closer to home both geographically, and in time, a similar situation arose during the English Revolution when orthodoxy was relaxed. But where Blake differs crucially from all of this is in his awareness of the nature of the very process of belief within himself. He appears to have been curious about the motives or anxieties that produce all the phenomena of surety - and what we might call the doctrinairness in the use of doctrine. In other words Blake applies the corrosive to himself.

And what he found was a galaxy of forces that he personified as sub-characters. These become the actors in his epic-length narrative poems that are known collectively as the 'Prophesies'. The nature of these prophetic works has been much perplexing. Even Blake acolytes such as W. B. Yeats - the most sympathetic of his readers - confesses: “The surface is perpetually giving way before one, and revealing another surface below it, and that again dissolves when we try to study it... It is all like a great cloud full of stars and shapes through which the eye seeks a boundary in vain.” [5] I sense that this surface or boundary to a text actually stands for the writer as a cohering psyche and that the part of the reader which is doing the reading is placed in a dangerous, even vertiginous position in relation to the chasm of unconscious space that Blake opens up. When Blake pours corrosive upon himself, naturally the self image inhering within the textual fabric dissolves, as if in acid.

Essentially, what Blake was writing about when he writes of these characters or forces was the agency of motive at play between them. And crucially, the experience of writing must have been just like Yeats' experience of reading Blake. A poem is drafted, the actions and motives are accounted for in the narrative, the poem is put aside for the night, the following day it is reread in order to continue with the narrative and the act of reading suggests a deeper layer of understanding, these insights are then added in, and so it goes. The experience would be exciting and felt as revelatory - all the while truth seeming to become deeper and yet remaining elusive as different psychological forces enter to block off the perception of true motive. This process of gradual revelation may have come on rereading a text written only the night previously - but often it was text written some years before. His epic poem called The Four Zoas is certainly the best example of the kind of labyrinth that such rewritings and the insertion of changes of mind produces. Abandoned at Felpham in 1804, the poem died in a hail of competing projects. Shot through with massive revisions and riddled with the 1803 corrections to his philosophy of 1797 - the year he had begun to write it, the whole thing became a maze; and one that he could not make to cohere. [6] And yet at this point there seems to have occurred a kind of quantum leap in his understanding of the reality of the psyche, for in the years following he produced his two longest and greatest works - 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem' - and in both of these he appears comfortable with - and perhaps to exult in - the strange shocks of sequence and layered disjunctions that his method produced.

Blake's detection and acceptance - even wonder, at this fissioned self is, for me, one of the main things about him that still has relevance today. [7] For he set about exploring the universe of his psyche with at least as great an energy as Freud was to bring to the exploration of the subject a hundred or so years later. But I fear that the relevance and vitality of Blake's discoveries are today in grave danger of being neutralised. For one major use of Blake at present - the reason his flavour is invoked in many situations outside of specialised academic study of him is that he is appealed to as a kind of general spiritual guardian. [8] He is created into a spiritual ideal: Blake as pure spirit, as all spirit - antidote to our materialism - someone to carry the torch of those who are bruised by our overly rationalistic culture. The problem is that Blake is used as if he were all antidote, antidote pure and simple, as if he is the opposite of rational - an Irrationalist genius through and through - never once touched by Rationalism and Materialism.

But this is to forget the psychology of motives: Blake's motivation, the force that stiffened his resolve, that kept him going in the face of all his difficulties must surely have been that he was - or rather, a significant fragment of him was, both Rationalist and Materialist. (How could he not be? The doctrines of the Enlightenment were so pervasive - even entering the established church as Deism - that he would have imbibed them without noticing as he grew into consciousness as a teenage boy). I suggest that only personal - highly personal involvement - could supply the massive energy-flow that was needed to produce all that he wrote and painted, and therefore that the line from the preface to his Milton: “I will not cease from Mental Fight” - has, from a psychological point of view, a wonderful ambiguity. Is it his internal mental fight that will build the New Jerusalem, or is it his battle with external foes? Even if it is meant as the latter, these external mental enemies are always likely to be close family relatives of internal adversaries. Yes, indeed, Blake is fighting the 'Antichrist' of the Materialist/Rationalist philosophy - and yes, they were real forces in the world, and real forces in the mental world (a most un-Blakeian distinction), but the energy to engage in all-out warfare is a species of tilting at windmills - for in many ways we create externally the giants we fight with in direct lineage with their giant internal parents.[9] I feel the reality of the situation is more likely to be that the inner spiritual Blake was fighting to the death with the inner rationalist Blake and the inner materialist Blake, and all their progeny. In fact the vigorous reality of the despotic internal rationalist can be inferred by the strength of the force that is mustered to combat it. These are indeed powerful forces within him - and through the natural tendency to anthropomorphise energy he personifies them. Once personified, then the fight is even more personal - for these forces have their 'own' energies, their 'own' motives, vendettas and histories. For Blake - somehow - for whatever reason, the reason that makes him great - none of this could just be ignored. It is interesting to note that he sometimes identifies the tyrant with God the Father, the lawmaking god of the Old testament. To this he opposes Jesus, who embodies the immense but gentle strength of love. And of course they are to be understood as internal as well as external agencies. It is also interesting to see that if, from an eighteenth-century perspective this whole issue was couched in terms of a rationalist/anti-rationalist polarization,
today, from our own vantage point, the problem might appear to be that Blake was simply reacting against oppressive authority - scriptural or temporal; external or internal. In Blake's case he seems to have been especially sensitive to the voice of authority that is internalised as we pass through childhood - the area of the psychical apparatus the Freudians call the super-ego.

But there is another problem: this striping away of surface has often been mistaken for something like Idealism - like a general Platonic sense of form beyond the apparent reality of individual material phenomena. This does occur in Blake as a minor theme - but it is often taken as the whole story. The effect is to externalise and depersonalise the corrosive effect he desired. This is a mistake that could only be made in our own time when physics is the central paradigm of reality. Reality, for this age, is always that of extension in space - the material realness of substance. But Blake's seeing is not through the surface of material to the real nature of a 'spiritual' reality - like, that seen for example, to name but a popular modern instance, in Fritjoff Capra's Tao of Physics. [10] Nor is his vision that of seeing into the creation of the physical world by the observer - a world out there that is not us, but that we somehow create from the Bohm world of the Implicate Order by particle-wave collapse. Instead it is seeing that everything is us: so that the famous grain of sand or wild flower, and in fact all the phenomena of the world, are perceived in the imagination and that this is our universe - the only one we can ever know.[11] And so the grain of sand is human. Moreover, this kind of universe is intrinsically a world of values and motives - psychological forces that are as real as anything else. Rather than a stripping away the surface of an outer world - he is stripping away the illusory containing under-surface of the inner world - and for Blake this inner world has no limits - certainly not the roof of his skull. There is no outer universe that he can have objective knowledge of, he is everything in the sense that his imagination is implicated in all he can know. This is not to deny the existence of other worlds - you or I - other universes - for we all exist within a larger mind - he calls it the mind of God - but with his views on the transcendent we must not confuse this with an external being - perhaps the mind of god is the “human form divine” as he says - extant within the mass of vehicles that make up a human population - and thus he is jubilant in the mystery of the individual's relationship to the whole.

This system is a view of the world that is close to a psychological process now called projection. Projection is the reading of the intentions and nature of others through one's own nature - however contingent, complex and provisional that may be. In his dictionary of psychoanalytical terms, Charles Rycroft defines projection as literally “throwing in front of oneself” - that is: “ 'viewing a mental image as objective reality' “. Rycroft's sub definition is: “the process by which specific impulses, wishes, aspects of the self or internal objects are imagined to be located in some object external to oneself”. Put like that - without the qualification that projection is a general mental phenomenon, it tends to sound pathological - something that other, unwell, people do - and nothing at all to do with readers numbered amongst the psychologically healthy.[12] But from Blake's perspective projection has to be the fundamental way that we apprehend the world, for the perceiving 'organ', the individual imagination, models the world in its own terms and mind might be seen therefore less as mirror than as lamp. [13]

Perhaps it is fitting that the history of Blake criticism gives excellent examples of phenomena that are good candidates for projection at work. The Blake neophyte - the student new to the critical literature must be confused by the number of Blake's on offer. In listing the phases that Blake criticism has passed through, Northrop Frye tells us for instance, “Blake's early critics found him especially eloquent on the sense of the infinity of experience, which they found more fully expressed in Whitman”. And he continues: “Symbolisme filtered in from France, and Blake's lyrics became poems that presented more than they said. When Nietzsche was better understood, Blake's doctrine that reality is what man creates and not what he studies was better understood too... Revolutionary doctrines began to trouble the West and the character of Orc in the prophesies seemed charged with an immediate significance.” [14] Yet here even Frye, the most Blakeian of all critics, prefers to have the phenomenon float as an intellectual abstraction rather than pinning it firmly within the minds of the individual writers. Tact may account for this - many of them were then alive and numbered amongst his friends and colleagues and therefore it perhaps prevented him spelling it out - but it seems fair to suspect that Blake the proto-marxist revolutionary of so many books is in fact the creation of the socialist writers of those books, while Blake the Esoteric Gnostic Cabalist is the projection of writers with similar sympathies - as is Blake the Neoplatonist and Blake the Feminist. [15] Conspiracy theorists, If they ever enter the fray, will no doubt cast him as the Michael Moore of the eighteenth century.

So Blake has qualities that allow projection just as do the classic sacred books: his is a vast text, and the poetic strategy of indirect symbolism which he adopts permits of many readings - so much so that it is useful for the act of vindication - and he is used just as the Jehovah's Witness on the doorstep uses his bible - to justify his opinions and values. [16] As such the bible is made into a self-symbol and I see no reason to doubt that this is the sleight of hand that is visible in the changing trajectory of the academic versions of Blake set out above. Of course as Frye generously points out, it is the peculiar quality of the definitive poets that they always seem to have a special relevance to one's own age. But this is as if to say only that there is something about them, like the greatest and most charismatic Gurus, which attracts projection.[17]

The unifying idea that underlies all these versions of Blake is that of 'use' -all these writers have objectives, all these 'Blakes' are useful to the writer of each version. I suggest that ultimately there can be no energy available to the human individual that is not in the end personal. This means that criticism and the practice of writing history has less to do with the past than one might think and that it is a form of energy expenditure related directly to current personal psychological needs in the writer. I contend that this does not, of course, exclude the present essay or this present exhibition. We the writers and curators and artists all have our own agendas, and I am sure that Blake as object of study and exhibition as object communication obey the basic rule of being offered as a symbol of the self. Perhaps one of the greatest wonders of human mental evolution is that we are experts at failing to notice these agendas and symbolisms. It seems, in fact, to be a general law of human nature that such motives should remain inaccessible to consciousness for their success to be effective. [18] Therefore as I seek to persuade you of Blake's psychologism I will be - by my very nature - no exception, and yet I will believe as I write that I am uncovering truth. On this point, while I cannot know, I nevertheless strongly suspect, that I am not alone in this, and that what we have here is something fundamental to the psychological equipment we all carry.

One of my original wishes in writing on Blake was to experiment and to use some of these ideas as seeds to think out from. I have already suggested that the Blake of this essay is in all likelihood a self-symbol. And I have expressed it slightly mischievously (in the context of Blake's supposed anti-materialism) in terms of energy: that the kilo joules of energy - almost of calories - mental though they must be, which are needed to sustain an argument are never abstract or impersonal. But let us take it further - if true, then this must mean that the critics and curators of contemporary art are engines in the same mental economy.[19] Thus the artists chosen for support, promotion or other kinds of endorsement must also be seen as self-symbols. But they are self-symbols in the ecology of a very interesting pan-social psychological battle. For it seems to me that what we have going on is the playing out of contested versions of the self. Chosen artists or artworks are symbols for an actual or ideal self, and cannot be wholly unrelated to a version of the self the chooser fully approves of. [20] Thus the exhibiting of an artist by a chooser is a move in the contest between those individual intellectuals that society promotes into positions to have power to choose. The curatorial ethos, within the national museums at least, is still that of non-interference. Despite the importation into art theory of more than forty years of philosophical and psychological thought that denies the possibility of such a position, it has been conserved over time - and it must therefore be a useful trait. Perhaps the persistence of such a fantasy is a function of it being a necessary cover for the activity of partialness - the activity of the promotion of the various selves that are currently contested within our culture. I do not set this up as a bad thing - something to be corrected. It just seems to me that it is the reality of what is going on and it is interesting to recognise it as such. One reason we do it - outside of the obvious fact that diplomacy produces the best results in obtaining one's wishes - is, I suggest, that it may be related to a need to confirm our individual unstable internal reality by seeing it as if it were outside us. We do after all contain a mental system in which instinct has been largely omitted and is therefore not on a hard-wired foundation - and we are reliant on learnt behavioural systems of morals to supply codes of conduct . [21] If this were the case then it would give an interesting context to Blake's statement “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's”. It may actually be that a non- system would be more radical response to that problem - but evidently Blake felt the need of a system - he had after all spent twenty years demolishing the internal system of values he was 'born' with, and it made him too anxious to be without. My postulation of the mental battles I imagine taking place across the inner-city spaces of the art establishment may sound something like Blake's war of ideologies brought down from the ether hovering across Europe and America of the Revolution, but let us not forget that Blake also set s it within the compass of a single mind where it works as a symbol of individual division and is only then expanded out again to embrace mankind as a single mental phenomenon - one of warring fractions within a total self.

Blake's working intellectual technique, is a good source of perspective on the contemporary mental orientation of art-makers and the professional consumers of art. I think Blake's dependence in his visual work upon his own text - one that is discursive, extended, expository and narrative shows him to be pre-Romantic rather than Romantic. [22] Romantic work relies on suggestion and dense monolithic symbol. Importantly, the perspective Blake offers shows that in this supposedly post-Romantic age, all the theorising of Postmodernity has not affected in any way the Romantic mode of production - and so-called post-Romantic, Postmodern art is still more suggestive rather than expository. [23] To use a courtly metaphor we are in the age of the Fool rather than the Magus. The Fool puts his critique of the ruler at court in pithy, short , amusing, suggestive, ego-puncturing bursts. This is the dominant genre-mode of the art of Young British Art as it has recently existed. And indeed 'pithy', 'short ' and 'amusing' sounds like the form that advertising currently takes - and so it is natural that it suits the taste of the greatest contemporary art collector of our time. I do not imply that the council of the Fool artist is any less serious than that of the Magus; Andy Warhol - all Fool - is every bit as serious or wise in implication even though his preferred mode is suggestive and ironic.

If Blake is as influential today as it is often said, then it is a Blake seen through our eyes - from our mode, and this mode is that of the Fool. Within the visual arts his extended, epic, explicatory nature is so alien that it appears to be invisible - with one important exception that proves the rule - that of Matthew Barney. But when Barney invented the vast mythic system he built in the late eighties at the age of twenty-one, he can hardly have heard of Blake. Perhaps it is in the cinema, or the novel that further examples of the truly similar can be found.

2005

'Another Surface': Notes and Observations

Readers will find conventional references to sources and also suggestions for further reading on certain points in these notes, but they also contain observations on my motivation to cast the essay in the way that it has been. In one version of the essay many of these observations were present in the main body of the text. I fear that by dropping them down into these notes I have only produced another smooth surface. But the gain is a more readable main text - and perhaps the contrast between that text and these comments below it's surface is all the greater and perhaps, therefore, more powerful. Before I begin the notes proper, I should draw the readers attention to the phenomenon of wishful thinking - and all the suppressions of evidence to the contrary that maintaining the wished-for qualities entails. The pressure to convince that one is single-minded is gentle and commonplace enough to be almost unperceivable. But the presence of wishful thinking is even harder to detect. Mostly it goes unnoticed within one's own system - self-interrogation for its presence being a strange exercise indeed - for the tool one uses to detect wishful thinking is itself a wish. For further discussion on this point, see transcript of my conversation with Adam Phillips in, Christopher Bucklow, If This Be Not I, British Museum and Wordsworth Trust, 2004, pp. 39-101.

1. Clearly there is a certain circularity in this - for it is I who detect what I take to be Blake's “way of thinking”. Read the sentence again with this insert - “... to experiment with what I take to be his way of thinking...”.

2. To be true to my aim to unpick my own stitches, I must here draw to the reader's attention that while one can indeed make out a good case for Blake being able to open up texts, allowing myself to strategically state that case at that point - and therefore having the form of the text mirror the content - is really a subtle appeal to authority and precedent - seeking Blake's blessing to my approach - thus calming my anxieties about the novelty of this whole way of thinking - and writing. I hope to show here that motive is a complex matter - but this exercise may simply be an excuse to demonstrate that I can see through surfaces myself - whether that be for the sheer pleasure of it, or to elicit your admiration, I cannot say. Who can ever really tell? Motives may appear between the lines - and perhaps I can pull some of them up to the surface as I write and revise this text over the next few hours. In addition to the phenomena mentioned above, creases in the surface of continuity have also been ironed out - revealing as they would be to your analysis as producing undesirable paradoxes that highlight rather than conceal the spin I want to put on this essay. I thank Rene Zechlin for reading this text and offering insightful and helpful comments on these matters.

3. The background of Protestant dissent is discussed very well in E.P. Thompson, Witness Against The Beast - William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge University Press, 1993

4. See James M Robinson (Ed.) The Nag Hammadi Library in English, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1996 and Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, Random House, New York, 1979

5. Quoted in Kathleen Raine's introduction to William Blake - Poems and Prophecies, London, Everyman edn., 1975 p.vi.

6. Is it merely an odd coincidence that The Four Zoas is about a character - Blake himself, no doubt - who has fallen into division and like myself, is laying bare the motives of the actions of the competing voices he finds?

7. And here I must declare a vested interest - for this is the nature of my own enquiry in my paintings and drawings.

8. And this is unique - for all the other Romantic poets and artists - excepting Wordsworth - are dead in this sense - dead and buried physically and spiritually - never invoked in general conversation.

9. That this argument is very personal to me must be taken as read. I no longer look at academic exercises as somehow just something the academic author just happens to find interesting in a relatively random, impersonal way. My best guess is that the chosen studies of academics are fused to their own psychic history and are chosen so as to do work in their own emotional and intellectual development. The questions posed of the subject look to me like questions that the writer somehow needs to answer in his or her own life. How odd then that we should choose to locate so much of our psychic life outside of us. Traditionally that has always been the use of constructs such as gods - and the pantheon of famous artists are now used in a similar manner.

10. This mistake probably accounts for Blake being treated almost as a patron saint at all the conferences on Science and Art that have proliferated since the 1970s.

11. Imagination was a large and inclusive term in Blake's day. It would include areas we now call the unconscious as well as conscious areas.

12. How is it that I feel that to see this one has to have seen one's own major projections (and thus to be able to see the reality of other people more clearly than one may have done previously) and yet one still feels that projection is all there is. Does it now have a less strong field - less opaque, more transparent?

13. For a full discussion of these two terms and their use as metaphors of creation in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature se M.H. Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp. Oxford University Press, 1971

14. Northrop Frye, Introduction, in Blake - a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Frye, Prentice Hall, 1966, p.6

15. The kind of texts I am thinking of are ones with interpretative arguments - the kind that I generally write myself. The qualities of more historical research type texts are ignored for the purposes of this argument - 'purposes' being the operative word. Is this then setting something up in order to knock it down? Such a process involves charicature always. An interesting example from recent art history is the anxious charicature of Romanticism - which is set up as the opposite of what contemporary theorists want themselves to be. An example is the way Romanticism is held to hold that there is a fixed essential self - whereas most romantic writers give the impression that the self is a flux permeated by external forces.

16. The very bible edited by certain bishops in AD 367 to exclude all the Books included in the Nag Hammadi Library (see note 4, above). But I suppose to a sect member, their excisions were guided by the mind of Jehovah. Psychologism is defined by the Collins English dictionary as “the belief that psychology is the basis for all other natural and social sciences”.

17. For an excellent,highly readable account of the psychology of gurus and their acolytes see Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay, Harper Collins, London, 1997.

18. See my dialogue with Adam Phillips in Bucklow, 2004 op cit. p.51 For an extremely interesting account of self-deception as an evolutionary strategy see Robert L.Trivers, Sociobiology and Politics. In Sociobiology and Human Politics, E. White (Ed.), Lexington, Mass., 1981

19. In an important sense we are all curators - as we all have favoured artists who stand for ourselves in any discussion about what is good or bad in contemporary art - that is: good and bad in the contested ideal human self that such discussions actually hide.

20. Of course there are curators who are facilitators and who put on shows that seem to be important and are therefore exhibitions that local audiences ought to be given the chance to see. However these curators are simply passing on the self-symbol that they recieve from those power makers who brought the artist to prominence in the first place.

21. See Bucklow, Op cit., p.45-8.

22. For further reading see Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting, W.W. Norton, New York, 1967.

23. Actually Modernism is a subset of Romanticism - so, strictly the term should be 'post-Romanticmodern'.