The Soul of Art: Analysis and Creation

The Soul of Art

Number Twenty

CAROLYN AND ERNEST FAY SERIES IN ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Michael Escamilla, General Editor

The Carolyn and Ernest Fay book series, based on the Fay Lecture Series in Analytical Psychology, was established to further the ideas of C. G. Jung among students, faculty, therapists, and other citizens and to enhance scholarly activities related to analytical psychology. The lecture and book series address topics of importance to the individual and to society. Both series were generously endowed by Carolyn Grant Fay, the founding president of the C. G. Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas. The series are in part a memorial to her husband, Ernest Bel Fay. Carolyn Fay has planted a Jungian tree carrying both her name and that of her husband, which will bear fruitful ideas and stimulate creative works from this time forward. The Jung Center, Houston, and all those who come in contact with the growing Fay Jungian tree are extremely grateful to Carolyn Grant Fay for what she has done. The Frank N. McMillan Jr. Scholar at the Jung Center, Houston, functions as the general editor of the Fay Book Series.

The Soul of Art

ANALYSIS AND CREATION

Christian Gaillard

Translation by Anita Conrade

Foreword by David H. Rosen

Texas A&M University Press

College Station

Copyright © 2017 by Christian Gaillard

All rights reserved

First edition

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Binding materials have been chosen for durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Gaillard, Christian, 1942– author. | Conrade, Anita, translator. | Rosen, David H., 1945– writer of foreword.

Title: The soul of art: analysis and creation / Christian Gaillard ; translation by Anita Conrade; foreword by David H. Rosen.

Other titles: Carolyn and Ernest Fay series in analytical psychology; no. 20.

Description: First edition. | College Station: Texas A&M University Press, [2017] | Series: Carolyn and Ernest Fay series in analytical psychology; number twenty | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016046611 | ISBN 9781623495251 (book/cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781623495268 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Art—Psychology. | Emotions in art. | Psychoanalysis and art. | Art therapy. | Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875–1961—Knowledge—Art.

Classification: LCC N72.P74 G3313 2017 | DDC 700/.453—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046611

A list of titles in this series is available at the end of the book.

Contents

Foreword, by David H. Rosen

Introduction: Onward and Upward?

Chapter 1: From the Analyst’s Consulting Room to Prehistoric Caves

Chapter 2: An Encounter in Herculaneum

Chapter 3: Whatever Happened to Paradise?

Chapter 4: From Dürer to Cranach: Melancholy in Black and Red

Chapter 5: Narcissus Crouching: From Ovid to Caravaggio

Chapter 6: Who the Heck Is Bluebeard? The Nineteenth Century Grapples with an Ogre

Chapter 7: A Contemporary Bluebeard Story

Chapter 8: Jackson Pollock on the Brink of the Well: The Challenge of Figuration

Conclusion: Vessels Are Broken and a Book Opens

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

The Soul of Art is deep. It goes back to our beginnings. It is aboriginal and archetypal. Cave people were artists, and as so eloquently described in this text, we honor their creative capacities and ours. Cave paintings also are seen in Africa, Texas, and in other locations around the world. When I lived in Texas, I remember visiting Panther Cave, near Del Rio, and standing in awe of the beautiful, magnificent panther depicted on the wall. This book cites the French cave paintings at Lascaux, with which the author is keenly familiar. I was astonished by the way Gaillard explores this and was filled with wonder. Some speculate that these cave paintings were made in an altered state of consciousness. This same theory has been advanced by Harry J. Shafer in Ancient Texans.¹ Nevertheless, they appear childlike, and we encourage our analysands to drop the ego and produce similar kinds of creative artwork.

All of this follows Jung, who embodied the soul and spirit of art. Throughout his life, Jung maintained that he was not an artist, but it is clear that he was able to paint from the depth of the collective unconscious. When I was in Texas, I wanted to know more about these paintings, and now we can all learn from this magnificent book about those same stick figures, shamanic priests, and designs—specifically the ever-present mandala. What was striking to me then and in this book is how humans are characterized as stick figures, the animals appear more lifelike, and the shamans seem larger than life.

Through revelatory analysis, Gaillard explores the meaning of these ancient paintings and their modern descendants. He doesn’t limit his exploration of art to paintings, but includes literature and religion—Ulysses and Moses, for example. Since Jung’s technique of active imagination brings forth these aboriginal symbols, Gaillard starts out his work in the analyst’s consulting room. There is an early encounter in Herculaneum in the first century BC, and then we move forward to the time of the Roman Empire, specifically to the wonderful center of art at Pompeii. Those images can be seen today as they were painted at that time. This is followed by Whatever Happened to Paradise? Gaillard covers art from Dürer to Cranach, focusing on melancholy in black and red. Then we are on an excursion with Picasso, Caravaggio, and Ovid. Next is an exciting adventure with Bluebeard, and then on to Jackson Pollock and Kiefer.

The fact that the prehistoric cave paintings resemble the art of children and active imagination is a truism. As we know, these are creative products that analysts and our analysands produce that link us with our archetypal past, as well as with our divine child archetype. In a real way, we are like the first artists, and we should never lose touch with our inner divine child archetype. Let us remember that the soul of art can be expressed in many ways: painting, sculpting, dancing, and the joy of life itself, which is the most important form of art.

Christian Gaillard helps us to appreciate and value the art that springs forth from the collective unconscious. I commend him for writing this treatise. Art makes us human and preserves the wellspring of creativity in all of us.

David H. Rosen

Eugene, Oregon

Introduction

ONWARD AND UPWARD?

The psychoanalyst with a taste for all the arts has an advantage over the art historian. He is under no obligation to become a scholarly specialist, an expert in a certain artistic period or place. He travels freely through time and space, stopping where he pleases. Rather, he finds himself stopped inadvertently when he encounters a certain work of art.

It may be one that he has only glimpsed and knows little about, or, on the contrary, one that everyone knows too well. This work of art may either impose itself, or it may allow itself to be skimmed over and forgotten. But it will return and insist on facing him, outwardly and inwardly, until he finally yields to it, observes it, gets to know it more intimately, wondering about what is happening when he contemplates it: something that is unexpected and yet expected and unforeseen, but intuited.

It is likely that one of the functions of art is to make us experience and recognize something we usually overlook: something that, unbeknownst to us, dwells inside and haunts us, or carries us forward to some other becoming—if we are finally willing to lend it the attention it awaits and demands.

The works that form the subject of this book often confronted me in this way. Often I initially put off any dalliance with them, being busy with the tasks of the moment for years or even decades. Finally, I returned to these pieces—or, in actuality, finally they were so insistent and imposing that I was forced to deal with them. I had to find out what they were presenting and representing to me with such insistence and consistency that it would have been indecent to avoid them, to forget them, or to dismiss them by telling myself that enough was already known about them.

Rather oddly, these works commanded my attention helter-skelter, causing me to spend several months, even years, grappling with the Middle Ages, on the brink of leaping into the discoveries and upheavals of the Renaissance, or embarking on a perilous and possibly mortal adventure with a piece from the twentieth century or perhaps ancient Rome. I even faced some mute enigmas of prehistory. I accepted this charge with amazement. These encounters made me very happy, and so did the discoveries I made as I wandered and wondered into museums and libraries, while also teaching at the French National Academy of Fine Arts in Paris.

As I was publishing in journals and essay collections, or in books I wrote, or for lectures I was asked to give at various universities or congresses, for a long time, I lacked the motivation to sit down with all of these pieces of writing and build something that could be called a coherent, intelligent whole.

Gradually, I wondered and wandered, experimenting with these essays, attempts to express what I had noticed and what had struck my eye. Little by little, I realized that something was emerging from this jumble of impressions and discoveries, something inchoate, groping, and uncertain at first—something new that I had to dig out to grasp it better and share it with others.

David Rosen’s friendly invitation to teach at his university’s Fay Lectures series came just at the right time. It helped me put the puzzle together into a sort of archipelago. A map was emerging in the vast ocean, a way to sail through the journey without drowning in it.

Therefore, the book is not the result of a plan. It is an assemblage of essays, a reflection under way that is still forming and wants to be heard—by me and by others who might be attuned to this type of journey.

What can I say about this reflection and research to introduce this book? I’ll offer just a few clues to open some perspectives and guide you from one chapter to another, or one part to the next, of this book.

It’s worth noting that if the imaginary galleries and rooms we will visit are arranged in chronological order, that order was not preconceived. Nor is it a mere artifice shaped by the needs of this publication.

The history to which these works belong, our collective history, from the origins of time until today, is the long-hidden path that finally emerged, the red thread that connected the subjects of my research and reflection.

Amazingly, humans gradually discovered who they were—an altogether unique phenomenon of the living world, different from the animals and nature surrounding them. At the dawn of humanity, there is astonishment. What an awakening! The traces of it remain: the earliest artworks in caves. They are powerful and impressive even today, and they are largely puzzling to us. We know nothing of the rituals and myths of our origins, aside from the drawn, painted, or carved representations, and a few objects spared by the ravages of time.

Today, some scholars assert that if we assume that there was a primal religion, such as shamanism, we will be enlightened. Should we believe them?

More generally, what should an analyst make of belief? The question of belief looms over our approach to each of the pieces studied herein, from the dawn of history up to Anselm Kiefer, one of our most creative contemporary artists. Likewise, the question is constantly raised by our psychoanalytical practice and the theoretical reflection to which it gives birth. Is individuation compatible with belief? Isn’t the reliance on psychoanalysis, our psychoanalysis in particular, a form of belief?

The question deepens and engages us. It is more than disturbing. Jung spent years grappling with it, using colors, pencils, and brushes, largely at his expense, unsure of what he could think of it and what he was becoming, not to mention whether he was fated to meet a power that would be his doom.

Individuation is an adventure—a long-haul journey involving individual and collective risks. Do we always go forward? Do we sometimes regress? It is evident, perhaps today more than ever, that we experience crisis moments. At this turning point, one does not know if the road will lead to some relief—another perspective that will enable us to breathe freer.

On the scale of the history of a culture as well as that of an individual, these moments are indeed critical, in both senses of the word. They challenge all that we have taken for granted, even our most dearly cherished, established certainties. They are so critical and painful that it is hard for us to say if they are leading us to our collapse, or to another, brighter future, a becoming.

For the relationship to the unconscious is at stake. It does not always lead to awakening, emergence, and progress. It is an experience consisting of events that very often prove to be terrible ordeals, which endanger us to the core.

The point is that the emergences and transformations that delight us have an opposite, a movement that is just as strong in the other direction. Perhaps it’s a nosedive, a fall toward a reality that, for all practical purposes, has never changed. It’s enduring and active, with its own rhythms and powers.

Down there, drowning is a threat. One may get lost. At one end, at the dawn of time, we are awed by Lascaux. At the other, we find Pollock, who died smashed into a tree.

Might we see two sides to this coin? A form of bipolarity? No, because the whole point of the endeavor, from the beginning, has been the art and manner of shaping, and representing—and thereby confronting—sights that make us flinch, insights we would rather ignore. But they demand to be heard and often at the most inconvenient times. Art channels them.

Art is not the matter of artists alone. We are all involved in the adventure, the outcome of which sometimes appears to be, or really is, totally uncertain. As analysts and analysands, we are even more committed than others.

In fact, you will have noticed that the term unconscious surfaced briefly, in the lines I have just written. The unconscious, as a vivid, largely innate, and uncontrollable reality, is really at the heart of our work as clinicians.

In this book, I will use as little jargon as possible, as academic language contains many obvious traps. I want to create a particular way of thinking. I hope to show that that was one of the issues with Jung’s commitment to his Red Book. Now it is my turn to press forward, to make my own attempt in the field of the arts to give shape to a thought.

It is an analyst’s thought, and as such, it accompanies the works. Interrogative, exploratory, and, therefore open to the unexpected, to the unplanned event or chance meeting, to the provocation of what is unfolding and it’s attentive to what is ineluctably fading. I hope it attests to my taste for following the ongoing matters we conduct in our personal lives, and also those of our collective history, of which we are all the subjects.

For now, I will say no more. We will see how the ideas I have just mentioned, in the form of hypotheses, are fleshed out, in the journey from one artwork to another. We will see how they are challenged and affirmed, or infirmed, unless they will be renewed.

So let’s go forward together and see.

1

From the Analyst’s Consulting Room to Prehistoric Caves

Rien n’est jamais acquis à l’homme

Man can take nothing for granted.

LOUIS ARAGON

I love my life and my work as an analyst, the protected and protective space of my consulting room.

And yet, I occasionally dream of another life or lives for myself: that of the paleoanthropologist, particularly. This desire was sharpened when I discovered more about the work and research of Denis and Agueda Vialou at Paris’ National Museum of Anthropology.¹ My interest for prehistory became even keener when I visited the dig they are in charge of as archeologists and paleoanthropologists in Brazil, at La Cidade de Petra (The Stone City), near Manaus, in Amazonia.²

My interest in prehistoric man was also inspired by an encounter with the work of another paleoanthropologist, Professor David Lewis-Williams, who teaches at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Lewis-Williams is a distinguished researcher of San art and the Upper Paleolithic. He developed a thesis on the shamanic rituals that, according to him, would have been performed in the caves before language was written.³

In the summer of 2007, I met him, when I invited him to present his research as part of a panel I set up at an International Association for Analytical Psychology international congress in Cape Town, South Africa. His ideas were discussed by analysts from various schools: two were Freudians; I was one of two Jungian analysts.⁴

Methodological discipline

In making a methodological remark, I should note that, at first, I wondered if it was wise to apply the same approach to European Upper Paleolithic sites and relatively more recent South African ones. They are quite distant from each other in time and space. I finally overcame my reluctance to adopt what initially appeared to be a somewhat unorthodox approach, thanks to prior work of paleoanthropologists who also proceed in this way.⁵

As an analyst, I meticulously check all of my statements and ideas with scholars specializing in the field where I have ventured, regarding the facts and methods on which they are recognized experts. They tell me what has been established in the past and what they have learned in their own research. I defer to their authority, a practice I learned from my earlier work experience with Roger Bastide, professor at the Sorbonne and director of research at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EPHE/EHESS) in Paris. As you will see as I progress from one chapter to the next of this book, I also apply this methodological rule when analyzing more recent paintings or sculptures, which are evidently and primarily the subject of art-history studies.

An oblique approach

However, this methodological prudence has its limits. At a certain point, my questions and analytical perspective take over. My discoveries and hypotheses are then discussed by fellow analysts, whether Freudian or Jungian, or from traditions other than psychoanalysis.

I explore this somewhat unfamiliar terrain from a viewpoint that is not the product of my best-honed skills. I am well aware of the temptation to aim at some universal theory. Instead, I can only hope to shed an oblique, and therefore partial light on the questions raised and the enigmas encountered.⁶ At best, I will only sidle up to these issues from an angle, rather than confronting them head-on, in my effort to contribute to the discussions.

Surprise and amazement

I have just mentioned questions and enigmas. This is because, as an analyst, amazement and surprise are truly the leavening grace of my daily attention.

In my consulting room and in my life, what I am dealing with often is that which usually escapes our attention even as it drives our actions without our knowledge; haunts and even obsesses us; structures us; contains and possesses us, while we remain oblivious to it, especially if we are careful to avoid discovering what it is.

I am speaking of the unconscious. Surprise is a good indicator that we are dealing with the unconscious. That is, we have encountered an entity with a life of its own, its own ebb and flow, an entire enterprise with a specific means of expression—which is usually rather enigmatic. In any case, it can be disconcerting.

What then do I find so striking, so riveting, when I discover a prehistoric rock shelter or cave? What arouses my curiosity, almost physically captivating me?

To bring this feeling to life, let’s walk into the cave at Lascaux, caves that are perceived as rather familiar. I am amazed, spellbound, and arrested by the incredible beauty of these surroundings. The vision is at once close to me and almost familiar, and yet it causes my eyes to widen in astonishment and wonder. I ask myself what is being presented and represented: something that I know yet do not truly recognize.

I am at home here, as an analyst, but I am also surprised and even slightly anxious. Although I am a true Jungian, Freud’s term, das Unheimliche (the uncanny), is a good description of how I feel.⁷ I sense a strangeness that is a bit disturbing, and yet familiar to me at the same time. Why?

The animals so frequently seen in rock shelters or caves are admirable. They are admirably realistic, and yet simultaneously literally extraordinary. For example, this beast with two horns, visible at Lascaux, and usually, for some mysterious reason, called a unicorn, does not exist in reality.

Entrance to the cave at Mas d’Azil, in France

Entrance to Candle Cave in South Africa. Photo by J. Parkington

I am well aware that the horn or horns in question might well be a line that escaped from a different drawing, overlapping with or covering the first quadruped, as is often the case with these cave paintings. Nevertheless, to my amazement, what I actually see on the wall is indeed a fabulous beast. And doubtless, at other times, other people’s eyes have perceived the same creature as I do—created either deliberately or by accident.

What reality are we dealing with? Lewis-Williams’s theory or theories might very well provide an appropriate, stimulating answer to the question.

Hall of Bulls, Lascaux. Photo by D. Vialou

The unicorn, Lascaux

The theory’s strength

The theory derives great strength from its methodology. Because it is a combination of three approaches, it is interdisciplinary in method. Thus, each of these approaches contributes to the discussion with its own assumptions, methods, and conclusions, which delight the researcher, happy to find such parallels and convergences.⁸

It is primarily an ethnographic approach, based on current observations of rock art produced by hunter-gatherer societies in southern Africa in various epochs, and the study of accounts from earlier centuries regarding the natural and social context of this art and the meaning then attributed to it.

A so-called neuropsychological approach is paired with it, to account for the common visual or entoptic effects of altered states of consciousness. These states have been described in a wide range of times and places, and due to neurophysiological similarities, they are shared by all mankind.

Thirdly, the paleoanthropological approach brings many facts to bear on the question: for example, Upper Paleolithic paintings are often located in hard-to-reach spaces, underground; the viewer’s visual perception of what he is seeing may be enhanced or accentuated by the natural shapes in the rock walls, to the point where the effect may be virtually hallucinatory. Lastly, mysterious geometric signs, either by themselves or associated with recurring representations of figures, have also been found.

These three approaches, woven into Lewis-Williams’s theory, give it strength and power. Lewis-Williams then calls upon a more generally anthropological explanatory theory, according to which shamanic practices, institutionalized and theorized to varying degrees, observable in many hunter-gatherer societies as well, including those of the Upper Paleolithic, create altered states of consciousness. They are gateways to a different reality.

These assertions caused a great stir among paleoanthropologists, and more generally, in every community of scholars interested in shamanism, anthropology, and prehistory. The discussion immediately spread widely. It also elicited criticism, which, although sometimes subtle concerning methodology, was also frequently sharp, and sometimes even violent, from certain specialists in the field.⁹

Lewis-Williams further reinforced his hypothesis by confronting this criticism, not only by immediately accepting our invitation to Cape Town, but by adding a long afterword to the latest edition of the book he wrote with his distinguished colleague, the French paleoanthropologist Jean Clottes. This afterword contains an accurate survey and detailed critical discussion of the objections his work has raised.¹⁰

Is the Lewis-Williams thesis or hypothesis really necessary?

Perhaps. Or, it may be one of the best possible approaches to interpreting the curious geometric figures, such as dots, lines, circles, embellishing so many otherwise figurative cave paintings. It is important to note that according to other experts in the field, this type of sign may indicate the identity of a human community or a place.¹¹ These scholars argue that the markings refer to a well-encoded, systematic means of collective identification, instead of to the trance experience.

I will return to my first impression, which remains central to my quest: the feeling of awed surprise, mixed with disturbing strangeness, aroused by the experience of seeing prehistoric cave paintings.

This unsettling and unsettled amazement is accentuated by the fact that, curiously enough, the exquisitely drawn and painted animals so frequently encountered in prehistoric art are almost never accompanied by representations of the landscape. Neither the media the painters used, nor the esthetic of the animal images provides any explanation for this absence. For some unknown reason, the natural surroundings are omitted.

Rocks, mountains, trees, and forests are ignored. These animals are represented outside the context that is natural to them. They live a life of their own, on the wall of the cave. What life is that?

Our first steps

We can only be impressed by this life, reaching us from so far back in the past. They are still powerful enough to enliven us, sparking our curiosity about what was happening to us, in the earliest years of our history. These events may also have