Do We Need Commentary on Art?

Yesterday I attended a special exhibit at our local art museum, an assemblage of paintings by the modern French artist, Henri Matisse.

I went with a friend and had arranged to hook up with two other friends who were going. One of the latter told me, after I'd left, that he read all of the commentary. I had not done so; I read only part of the vast amount of elucidative material provided by the museum's curators.

I am not extensively trained in art but I am trained in literary scholarship. I feel that I can make some comparisons between a piece of art and a literary work.

Specifically I want to examine the question of whether we need the commentary. I feel that, to a degree, a work, be it a work of art or a literary work, should stand on its own. It communicates (if it works at all), and does so in its own language, a language that cannot be paraphrased. If a musical composition or painting could be paraphrased in words, then the message should have been presented in words and not with musical notes or paint on canvas.

Still, that does not rule out a role for scholarship or criticism. These are aids that extend or deepen our appreciation, perhaps by calling our attention to details we hadn't noticed. Sometimes a literary work needs footnotes to explain, for example, obsolete language. (The poet T.S. Eliot supplied one of his poems with his own footnotes. That makes me think that the poem, rather than standing on its own, was made too recondite by its author.)

However, I do not want any commentary by the work's own author or painter or composer. Why? Again, the artist should have achieved his or her message in the work itself. Also, and more importantly, with writers it's notoriously true that you can't believe what they say. They may say they are doing one thing in their work and yet, if you look at their achievement, what the artist realized is in fact something else. Just as one example, Edgar Allan Poe states his belief that a poem should be no more than 100 lines long. Yet many of his poems are longer than that.

I don't want to say that writers (etc.) are deliberately deceptive in what they say about their own craft. I think it's more likely that they just don't consciously know what they are doing. The novelist William Faulkner, when he was Writer in Residence at the University of Virginia, would be asked what symbolism he intended by this or that element in one of his books—and he would say something like, Well, that's just something I dug up out of the lumberyard in the back of my mind.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein