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'How does David Bomberg’s notion of the “spirit in the mass” relate to the concerns of Cézanne?'

There should be little doubt that those who paint are involved in a creative act. By simple virtue of imperfectly attempting to control a plastic medium on a surface, the painter cannot be a copying machine or be regarded as a maker of pure design; an element of self will always be present. Moreover, those who paint from life are presented with a further uncertainty, as the world around them is as changeable as the material they use to capture it, and they are equipped with imprecise devices with which to measure it. Thus the painter of nature is presented with a set of variable circumstances: the reality of the world around him, his ability to perceive it, and the nature of the materials he uses in response to those factors. Artists presented with these circumstances in the history of Modern art have been inclined to seek a degree of solidity through such uncertainties, a common ground in representational response that may exist as some spiritual or otherwise intangible truth to be found in nature, something that an artist may be able to grasp and set down.
The observer, in this instance the artist, is integral to defining this truth; it is partly his imprecision that does so. It is this duality of nature and our response to it that shapes the act of artistic creation. It exists in the work of Paul Cézanne and David Bomberg not as something that is necessarily found but something that is worked towards; a search for a spirit of creation in form, a synthesis of ‘us’ and ‘it’: the “spirit in the mass”.
This elegant term reaches us from David Bomberg, by the 1940s a long-standing but little celebrated figure of the British art scene. The phrase appears to us in current literature as something of an aspiration, perhaps unsurprising as Bomberg was at the time involved less in his own painting career than in teaching others to embark on theirs. Thus though the phrase probably originated verbally some years before, in classes or lectures, the first recorded instance of it we have is in the catalogue of an exhibition by those students who began their adult careers under Bomberg’s wing.

“We have said that our search is towards the spirit in the mass. Many people have asked us for a further definition. Words cannot give it; the answer lies in the content of the painting. That is our purpose.”

This reluctance to elaborate on what is essentially a phrase underpinning a visual medium is rarely and esoterically breached by Bomberg himself , a coyness not present in the earliest part of his career. For he set out in the art world, having his first one-man show in July 1914, in a time of manifestos, movements, and a developing avant-garde. Indeed, his 1914 show boasted its own manifesto of sorts, a forcibly phrased description of his visual intentions at the time.

“I APPEAL to a Sense of Form… I am searching for an Intenser expression … where I use Naturalistic Form, I have stripped it of all irrelevant matter… My object is the construction of Pure Form. I reject everything in painting that is not Pure Form.”

This statement, though perhaps more a product of enforced haste in producing the exhibition catalogue, Bomberg later recalled , can be seen as a precursor to the more functional implications of the phrase “spirit in the mass”: form, after all, is responsible for volume and thus mass in painting; but his work at the time was some distance removed from the example he had by then developed to put before his students of the 1940s. From academic education and relatively traditional showings for precursor exhibitions, in the years leading up to 1914 Bomberg had launched himself straight into the centre of the London avant-garde, developing a distinctive style (fig. 1) based, as described, on “pure form” in response to his urban context. It had him associated in the press with the Vorticists, a group with stylistic concerns based on developing continental Cubist and Futurist ideas, and was himself labelled a ‘futurist’, though this was at the time in Britain a term used for any emerging movement that rejected Post-Impressionism .
Bomberg did not associate himself with any single group or ideology, and indeed refused approaches from several, though he participated as a guest exhibitor at the Vorticist show of June 1915, a self-imposed isolation that became something of a feature of his career. Coming home from the services in 1918, Bomberg found, like many of his contemporaries, an artistic landscape less receptive to the styles produced by the modern age. Bomberg himself implied later that, in his refusal of an offer of membership to the Dutch De Stijl group working out of Leyden, it was at this time that he found a truer path for his art: one that presupposed a search for mass.

“…I was not impressed with [the work of the Leyden Group]. There was evidence they were not sensing design as that which emanated from the sense of mass… I had found I could more surely develop on the lines of Cézanne’s rediscovery that the world was round…”

It's half and half really. Can't do it without a degree of visual analysis... but that's the stuff I'm worst on. I likes my theories and histories.

1500(ish) words to go!

In a relatively early letter recounting his time under Bomberg’s tutelage, Richard Michelmore, at the time one of the students at the Bartlett, places full emphasis on the physical characteristics implied by “spirit in the mass”.

“In Westminster Abbey he [Bomberg] described it as the Spirit of the Mass (weight x volume, not religious service) although he was probably aware of the pun and would not have excluded the religious aura from it…”

This is the only instance of its capitalisation as a term, though given Michelmore’s somewhat derivative account of the “spirit” we can probably safely equate this with the more traditional usage and find equivalence between a spirit of mass and a spirit in mass. As comparatively dry as this explanation of the term appears, it does form an addendum to his own impression of Bomberg outlining the relationship between viewer, object and image key in other expounded views of the “spirit in the mass”; there existing “an order peculiar to one’s own vision of a thing, an order which underlies the image.” The spirituality of this process is given greater credence by a later student, Dennis Creffield, who intimates the phrase as representing something of nature’s inner current.

“…it is that animating principle found in all nature – its living vibrant being – not simply the sheer brute physicality of the object.”

The implication here appears to be that the “spirit” is something present in nature to be retrieved by the artist, an element to be extracted from the scene. This seems analogous to some degree with Cézanne’s search for the essential elements composing nature, though Creffield qualifies the description as being his singular interpretation of the phrase and not directly derived from any more precise definition Bomberg may have given; in fact, Creffield asserts ignorance of any point of origin or more rigid definition. This, coupled with the earlier statement from the Borough Group exhibition, may lead to the conclusion that Bomberg left such things entirely to the work itself and his eventual successors, but there are several key surviving first-hand accounts that expound on both the key sense of mass and the “spirit in the mass” as a whole.
In the same passage, Creffield asserts Bomberg’s emphasis on achieving a sense of gravity in the act of drawing , perhaps a pseudo-scientific description of the always-present mass. Gravity is mentioned heavily in Bomberg’s description of Cézanne’s legacy, appearing much as Creffield later describes: an underlying force holding nature, and thus work produced from it, together. Cézanne’s discovery is that “the earth is round and has a gravitational pull” , intoning that the dual elements of truth in form and volume and underlining force are present in his work.
In partnership with this is the creative act. Bomberg remained externally silent on the relationship of this and the “spirit in the mass”; a logical stance given that these elements are supposed to represent verbally a union between artist and nature, only to be repeated in the act of creation itself and only to be recorded in the resulting work, a product of the moment. In unpublished notes, he gave an impression of how he felt on the value of writing about art, and in trying to elicit a sense of the unfathomable nature of the process he gave us a fleeting glimpse of the “spirit”.

“…something that in essence lives but is not life, beauty & truth which is near but is not God – something that is boundless & infinite – a magnitude beyond measure – something unidentifiable & yet has Form but which is not synonymous with nor can exist as form only.”

This description is sympathetic to a definition of drawing present in his ‘Syllabus’ of 1937, that drawing is “not the representation of appearances of Form, but more the representation of all our feeling about a form” . The process of drawing or painting thus is not something that can be written down or otherwise recorded, but a feeling that must be experienced.
Cézanne’s own writings are rather more explicit in their practicalities, as they generally come presented in the form of advice to the younger artist Emile Bernard among others. In description of mass and volume he is most explicit in one of his most famous pronouncements; that one must “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone”, and in doing so greet the viewer with the sense of depth which is evidently more prevalent in nature than surface. The emphasis is placed on nature as reality, not illusionistic as one might expect from the Impressionists. In a fortunate turn of phrase from the same letter, Cézanne describes the experience of nature as “the spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Aertene Deus spreads out before our eyes” : Father Omnipotent Eternal God, providing us with a convenient “spirit” to pair with nature.
Moreover, Cézanne is as adamant as Bomberg would be forty years later on the experience of nature being key to the creative act; nature must be experienced “in the right way” but in combination with the expression of oneself “forcibly and with distinction” . Above all, it is this combination of self and the model of nature that gives “concrete shape to sensations and perceptions”.
Above all the “sprit in the mass” comes across as a reflection of the sense of magic an artist may feel in the creative process, in eliciting from nature and from oneself the visual elements to represent not just mass and volume but something greater than the whole, something only experienced in the process of synthesis. Cézanne’s role here is clear; he makes explicit to generations succeeding him the search for this synthesis, and in David Bomberg found a successor capable of expounding the “gravity” and unifying form he found in the former artist’s work for a further generation. The “spirit in the mass” must relate to Cézanne because its origins clearly lie in Bomberg’s perception of his work. At its most complex an indefinable truth, and at its simplest, as Bomberg, speaking as if for both men in his final year described, “the problem of the magnitude contained in the Billions of tons of Living rock.”

Ok, I rushed the end...

i didn't read it (because i'm too lazy to read on the internets), but Hackney know's what she's talking about, methinks.

Yay, rhetoric mode! xd I don't think I've written an essay in several months... and I don't miss it. What class was this for, anyway?