[From Time Stood Still by Paul Cohen-Portheim]

XIII PAINTING

THERE were few lucky enough to be able to continue working at their usual profession after they had been interned. The majority were without any occupation at all or had to try to find some work which would keep them occupied. That could be found, but what was more difficult to achieve was the conviction that this new-found work had any sense at all, because, as a matter of fact, it really had none in most cases. If a middle-aged business man did assiduously follow lectures on the policy of Bismarck or a young medical student took piano lessons they could not but feel after a time that they had strayed from their road in life and taken paths that led nowhere in particular. They were just wasting their time and could find no satisfaction in their work ; it would not increase the one's business or business capabilities, it would not help the other to pass his exams. That is why I considered myself very fortunate in being an artist, for if there was a very great deal of work I could not go on with in camp, yet there remained a number of possibilities. I had to adapt myself to circumstances, but I need not and did nor feel that I was utterly wasting my time. I could continue to work and therefore to make progress in an art, which was - as I then believed-my chief interest in life.

I have already described how I managed to force myself to work under very trying circumstances in Knockaloe. [139]After that all should have been plain sailing, but as a matter of fact it was not. For a long time I found it impossible to do any work in Wakefield ; I had to get used to the idea of being definitely a prisoner, of knowing no other life or surroundings for a period that stretched away into a dim, incalculable distance. All energy and willpower seemed to have left me there ; I hated my condition and my camp, I gave myself up to despair, I had not even the wish to start work again. Moreover, mine was not work of a mechanical nature ; even if I had wanted to I could not just have sat down and started on it. My favourite work was entirely imaginative in inspiration. Something set me off it might be a tune, the line of a poem, the movement of a body, or no more than some bits of colour, and it had to be given expression. The actual subject of such-and­such a coloured drawing or miniature was unimportant to me ; often I could not have defined it all. What I felt had to take on some sort of shape, human, architectural, or ornamental, and then began the second part of the work, the technical, sketches for the design and composition, essays of colour-schemes, and finally the very slow and laborious execution. It was curious work, and in its meaning often quite as incomprehensible to myself as to others. I had exhibited samples of it sometimes and it had found very few admirers, but these very enthusiastic, while the majority thought the dubious result did not justify the very great labour it had necessitated. Looking back on it now it seems to me the work of a stranger I barely remember having known, and of curiously mixed character. As far as its technique goes, it has little originality, it is derived from Persian, to a lesser degree from Far Eastern art, and it has, in fact, sometimes been taken for such. But as far as the emotions expressed by means of that technique go, they are of a purely personal nature, confused dreams, sometimes nightmares, often so vague that painting is too intellectual a form of expression for them and music would have served better, often circumscribed in purely decorative pattern-work.[140]They are a manifestation of a troubled and uneasy state of mind that seeks an outlet, and when I look at them now they no longer seem to me, as they did at the time, purely personal, but very characteristic and typical of the anxious unrest, the sense of unknown menace overhanging the years immediately preceding the war, of that atmosphere overcharged with electricity like that before the break of a thunder­storm, which oppressed and unsettled the more sensitive and impressionable, the 'artists' of all countries, though none of them could have explained the exact nature of their presentiments.

As a rule, pre-war times are contrasted with those of the war and after-war as a period not only of peace and plenty but of settled quietude, but that division is wrong. Unrest began long before 1914. ; social and moral conventions, scientific and artistic creeds were in full dissolution and the change of the 'old order of things' in full progress, only the masses were not yet aware of it, and only a minority had been affected. All that is considered characteristic of the after-war time, and looked on as consequence of war, was already in being. The war interrupted a process of dissolution, evolution was arrested by it and in many ways it temporarily modified, but the after-war at once took up the pre-war legacy, which had gathered speed. The break-up of the old order begun before the war became clear to all after it. In science, philosophy or art, in music or architecture, all that in 1930 still passes for new, modern, revolutionary was in existence before 1914, no new movement of basic importance has appeared after the war, and the same applies to the more superficial and obvious phenomena: motoring, flying and speed-mania, the cinema and exotic music, the craving for the sensational and for eternal change.[141] All these new movements and new inventions and new sensations signified and brought about the end of an epoch of civilization, or, if one prefers to look to the future, the beginning of a new order. But between one order and the next there is a reign of disorder, that reign began some time in the years before the war, it affected me, as was but natural, and my works of art were but the expression of an inner and personal state of disorder and unrest corresponding to the general.

The war was like a stunning blow which brought every movement not directly connected with it to a standstill, but movements contain accumulated speed which makes them continue for some time after the original impulse is spent, and in that way I, too, had continued my artistic expression. The shock of realization of my condition experienced at Wakefield brought this to a stop, but not to a definite stop yet, for after some months I began anew.

A Paris publisher had decided to bring out a dozen drawings of mine as an accompaniment to Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal - for they were not illustrations. I had left those already finished with him in Paris (where they and he got lost) and decided to do the three or four still needed for the cycle (which were to get lost later), because it gave me a feeling of 'business as usual.' As there were no signs of a return to normality when they were finished I started a series of six biblical subjects, but not of a very saintly character. There was, of course, a Salomé, for she was a sort of presiding goddess of the period, after the works of Gustave Moreau, Oscar Wilde, and Richard Strauss ; there was a Judith, and one inspired by the Song of Solomon ; there were also a David and Jonathan, an Annunciation, and the sixth never got done ; and they were all very rich, very précieux and very oriental. [142]They certainly served as an escape from reality (to which the psychoanalysts would limit the function of all art), for during the good many hours a day they kept me busy, only noises, bumps, and vibrations recalling my surroundings to me.

After these there was a long pause, and then came a number of works connected more directly with what was occupying my thoughts at that time, and of which I shall have more to say later; but I was not idle during that pause. It was long, I believe, but I am not sure, for by that time I had lost count of weeks and of months, nor could I then see and comprehend the inner logic of my work, and it seemed to me quite fortuitous whether I did any work or what sort of work I did. Oil-painting was difficult on account of its cumbersome implements, so I began to try water-colour work and found that difficult medium very fascinating for landscape-painting. At first it seemed to me that there was really very little to paint ; the camp itself, though I did try one or two of its aspects, was really very hopeless, and it got more and more hopeless from a painter's point of view as its original aspect of a waste piece of land changed into one of suburban primness ; but then spring came along and I discovered that spring in an internment camp had great beauties. There is a saying 'one cannot see the wood for trees,' but the camp had so very few 'trees' that one discovered the 'wood.' I have never watched and lived the coming of spring so intensely as during the months following my first winter, which had meant a very hard time, at Wakefield. Everything took on a quite extraordinary value ; there were a few fruit trees in flower outside the wire in the commandant's garden, there was one little laburnum tree, a shabby little thing really, but it seemed a miracle. Then the chestnuts flanking the camp were full of little flowering pyramids, some nasturtiums appeared actually within the wires, and occasionally visitors brought flowers to one man or another. [143]And every tree, every single flower, almost every blade of grass seemed a discovery and something infinitely precious that first spring. So there was lots to paint, and it was work of a kind I had never done before. I remember one incident which at the time impressed me strongly. I was finishing a sketch of the chestnuts running alongside the camp and a man was looking at my work over my shoulder (needless to say, someone always was). And after a while he said 'You have forgotten the barbed wire,' meaning that I had omitted the ugly lines of wire cutting across the trees. So I had, and what is more, I had not even noticed them ! 'Yes,' I said, 'I have forgotten the barbed wire,' and the accent was on the 'forgotten.'

Spring and summer passed, they always seemed to pass in a few days ; it was winter again, but I had found another type of work to keep me busy. There was a drawing-class by that time, and some man or other sat as a model. I began to do pencil-portraits and then a series of caricatures. Of these I had done a great number in former years in Paris, and there was plenty of material for that sort of work where I was now,- though by no means all people were willing to be caricatured or liked the results. All this work of varying character was done during what I have called a pause in my imaginative work ; :and when I come to think of it, I believe that pause must have lasted well over a year, for I remember adding a new variety in the second year, before I returned to my original methods. Quite a number of men were doing inlay-work in different woods, and though the work was mostly an eyesore, the woods employed were very pretty. I often watched one of these men at work, and one day I discovered what to do with the thin plaques of wood left over and thrown away, and began collecting them. [144]No less a person than Leonardo da Vinci has advised painters to gaze at walls or stones, for faces and scenes will arise out of them if you know how to look. The same applies to bits of inlay-wood as I had discovered, though not, of course, to all of them. You put them up in front of you and after a time the lines of the grain will reveal their sense. They suggest the picture, and the real art is to add as little as possible, just enough to emphasize the hidden design, an art akin to the painting of China and Japan, where the ground, the silk or paper, is never covered by paint all over, but left to play a most important part in the work of art itself. Thus some small wooden plaque became a seashore or rocks beneath water, the desert with the suggestion of a few low, square houses on the horizon ; some were covered with strange plants, cuttings out of a primeval forest, and the biggest and most marvellous of all held the Tibetan Desert and fantastic ruined walls of a city on a hill. But if in spite of intense and prolonged gazing the wood would reveal no secret, I ceased to be Far Eastern and acting as a European barbarian just painted something on it which took no notice at all of its character. The last of these efforts was executed in winter and it was a winter scene. The lines were those of ploughed fields, covered lightly with snow by a little white water-colour paint ; the sky was left almost the colour of the wood, and there was a bare black tree near the horizon which was a cheating addition. It is a melancholy little thing, a real barbed­wire product. After this the charm no longer operated, and all pieces of wood again looked alike to me.

Thus did one exhaust one possibility after another, and when one had come to the end, deep depression followed and lasted until the next phase. Things did not repeat themselves : the flowers of the second spring only said 'How many more springs ? ' ''here was no new angle from which to look at the scenery. [145]All faces worth recording had been drawn, all caricatures accomplished. All wood was just wood. It was then that with a kind of desperation I once more took up my imaginative work, but I found its character had altered. It had taken on a new meaning and one I myself could not fathom at the time. It had, in fact, ceased to have any artistic signification, it had taken on a mystic character about which I shall have more to say in a later chapter.

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