SARAH ROSE. 'STILLNESS AND MOVEMENT IN WORKS OF ART'

Sarah Rose.  ‘Stillness and movement in works of art’. 

This is a brief summary of the essay by Sarah Rose: ‘Stillness and movement in works of art’. 

The essay was published in connection with the establishment of The Sarah Rose Collection at Borough Road Gallery, at the London South Bank University in 2012.

The artists in the collection are David Bomberg, Dennis Creffield, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead, Miles Richmond and Thomas Holden.

Sarah Rose: ‘Stillness and movement in works of art’.

Sarah Rose describes how she came to gather the works in the collection.  Sarah Rose is the daughter of a Ukrainian mother and a Latvian father: she grew up in the world of art galleries and art publications. Sarah Rose and her husband met the artist Cliff Holden when they came to England in the early 1950s.  Cliff Holden founded the Borough Group of artists who had studied with David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic – later London South Bank University.  Sarah Rose’s collection began in the early 1950s.  In his lifetime Bomberg was neglected as an artist. 

In the 1920s there was a sudden break with established conventions in painting in which ‘unselfconscious depiction of the world’ gave way to ‘art turning in on itself’, and in which there was a rapid emergence of new and individualistic styles.  In contrast, Bomberg valued continuation of tradition.  The artists in the collection are those who worked together in the traditional way to achieve ‘a new idiom’.   The collection is intended to focus on Bomberg.

Bomberg valued the artists of the Florentine Renaissance, as well as Rembrandt, Goya, El Greco, Velasquez, Van Gogh, Turner, Delacroix and Cezanne.

Unlike the media of human sport and performance, in which the event does not exist after the period of its enactment, painting maintains the involvement of the spectator over a protracted period of time.  Despite the static nature of a painting, it is ‘movement’ that characterises greatness in paintings.  Sarah Rose asks how may we ‘use the ability to move one’s visual focus when viewing works of art, what kinds of works reward such viewing, and what are the consequences?’

Movement in nature affects us all the time.  The nervous system of an adult responds positively to movement in specific kinds of activity that are more rewarding in this respect than everyday movement in life.  These specific activities include: ‘watching a sporting event and engaging with the moving arts’. 

A similar effect arises from seeing a painting because ‘every stroke is a record of a movement’.  Thus, our eyes move with the movements of the making of the painting and this gives us relaxation, rest and pleasure.  Our bodily response will confirm to us if a painting displays the quality of movement that satisfies natural law.  A good painting is one to which the words of Plato may be ascribed: ‘To nothing which is irrational can I give the name of art’.

Thus the viewer feels a work of art as well as seeing it.

Sarah Rose asserts that the difference between Bomberg and the Expressionists may be described by reference to the argument that she has set out.  Bomberg’s paintings are not made in response to ‘an urgent need to communicate’: his works are instead ‘ineloquent, mute, static, reminding one more of the tradition that produced him, of Cezanne, Goya or Pierro della Francesca, than of Munch, Ensor, Nolde or Soutine’.   The stillness of the image in one of Bomberg’s works ‘compliments the bodily stillness that results from the satisfying vitality in the virtual movement of the structure’.