Art as music, music as poetry, poetry as art: understanding the interart appeal, from Whistler to Stravinsky

The painter Whistler, in the last decades of the 20th century, enjoyed teasing the British critical establishment by presenting his paintings as if they were works of music, rather than representations of anything. He would give them titles such as 'Symphony in White'; he would maintain that his aim, in painting, was to create a harmony, analogous to 'pure' music (i.e. instrumental music). But he also described music as 'the poetry of sound', and painting as 'the poetry of sight'.
In presenting his paintings as both music and poetry, Whistler was in tune with an aesthetic strategy that lies behind the work of creators in all media in France in the seventy years before the second world war. (It is true that Whistler was originally American, just as Stravinsky was originally Russian; but like Stravinsky, Whistler saw in Paris the spiritual home of his ideas on art.) That strategy was conceived as a means to defend art against the objective, positive, scientific, rationalist discourses of the time, which increasingly claimed access to the value of the work of art. Saying that a painting is a song (as Braque so often did), or a symphony, or a poem, was their way of taking their art out of the reach of critics. A critic could write about the colours, lines, textures, and subjects of paintings, which were all objective properties of the painting. It was far more difficult for him to say anything apparently objective about the painting considered as a song, since the song was not objectively there. And if the painter could demand that the painting be considered simultaneously both as a song, and as a poem, then the poor objective critic was lost.
Poets and composers used the same strategies, and took them further. Apollinaire's poems became pictures; Stravinsky's music became the subject of a 'poetics'. The result of this general circulation between the arts, this proliferating interart appeal, was to create a tacit consensus, which lasted roughly from the First World War to the Second in France, concerning the nature of art: the value of each work of art was always something to which no one could have access merely by analysing what was actually, objectively and rationally, there - present - in the medium of the work of art itself.
The first aim of this project is to understand this aesthetic from the point of view of the time. This will inevitably involve a culture clash: since the interart appeal is designed to frustrate criticism, my own critical discourse will have to engage in a great deal of self-criticism to do justice to it. The second aim of the project is to suggest that, all but invisible to critics, the aesthetic of the interart appeal has never ceased to dominate our response to what we still think of as 'great art'. How else can one explain the continuing dominance, in our view of the great creators of the 20th century, of those who shared that aesthetic? How else can one explain the persistent echoes of the interart appeal itself in those non-academic discourses (from concert programmes to publishers' blurbs) that aim to connect the public to art? My contention is that by remaining blind to the implications of the interart appeal, academic criticism has become more divorced than it needs to be from the way that people today respond to art, in exhibitions and concert halls as well as when they read books. My hope is that this book will provide a means to re-connect academic discourse with that public response.