Humble Fish : The Challenging Passivity of a Scaly Subject

A great artist can make even ennui interesting; Walter Richard Sickert did so in his painting of that title. But at least there is a “development,” as we say of a musical piece, in our becoming bored. We are bored; five minutes later we are more bored; after four hours we may be bored to death.

With passivity, there is no such development. We are passive; five minutes or four hours later we are not more so. Passivity can be made interesting only by the use of a foil--some bolt of action, a violent slash that disturbs or destroys the passivity. That is the challenge that faces the artist or decorative artist who chooses fish as his subject.

The human form divine; purple mountain ranges; cathedral interiors; apocalyptic sunsets--all these have inspired great artists. But fish ? Goggle-eyed and generally passive, they have seldom been seen to better advantage than in still-life paintings. In other words, the artists’ consensus seems to be: The only good fish is a dead fish.

The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (as translated by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter) has written:

“Fish cannot gesticulate their despair. This justifies the dull knife which jumps on their back and flays the sequins of the scales.”

Fish can be feisty, of course. Fish can give as good as they get, as Captain Hook learned. We know about “playing a salmon” and about Ernest Hemingway’s bully-boy tussles with marlin and barracuda in a sort of aquatic bullring. But still, in the popular mind a fish is almost an emblem of the passive, the unemotional: cold as a fish. Its passivity excites the desire for cruel action--to yank it out of the river on a hook, spear it with a harpoon, or, as Herbert writes, flay its “sequins” with a knife, a “dull knife.”

With that unshowy epithet, Herbert suggests two things: First, that the passivity of fish is so extreme that you don’t need a sharp knife to disrupt it; a dull one will do. Second, that bright as knives are, fish are often brighter. Rather as a coward may be tricked out in a glorious suit of armor, piscine apathy can be masked by surface dazzle or iridescence. (“Now winks the gold fin in the porphyry font,” wrote Alfred, Lord Tennyson.)

In the fish as objet d’art both the passivity and the surface interest are exploited. In the case of a vase--the bizarre conceit of a fish standing on its tail with its mouth gaping open to receive the stems of daffodils or roses--the passivity goes without saying. Even the token animation that fish have is stilled: fin ! Chinese potters of the 18th Century made pots that looked like upended fish. An example of one is illustrated in the famous Portland Vase in the frontispiece to the 18th- Century Duchess of Portland’s collection. Carl Faberge made a vase similar in shape but with the usual sheen finish of his wares--which had to be not only costly but manifestly seen to be costly.

It has to be admitted that many works of art or decorative art in which fish appear are aesthetic belly flops. The phrase “Hook, line and stinker” might cover them, or “One hesitates to carp, but. . . .” This category would certainly have to include Wedgwood urns balanced on three dolphins’ tails, and plastic earrings in the form of octopuses. But artists did find a way of giving vitality--Hitchcockian suspense, even--to works representing fish: Include a cat or two. Preferably a cat or two, looking menacingly into a goldfish bowl. A beautifully executed example of this genre is the 18th-Century illustration to Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat.”

Adolphe Steinlen, French poster artist and book illustrator, drew a sort of strip cartoon of a cat’s battle with a goldfish bowl ( “Horrible Fin d’un Poisson Rouge” ) in his book “Des Chats” (Paris, 1899.) And in the early years of this century, Japanese artist Hoson designed a delightful woodblock print on the same theme.

But any subject that can be sublimely rendered by good artists can be made ridiculous by bad ones. A specially nasty picture by Horatio Henry Couldery, with the arch title “The Little Anglers,” was sold by Sotheby’s, London, in 1979. It shows no fewer than four kittens pawing the bowl from which a hapless goldfish goggles. Looking at this painting, you don’t need reminding that cats are in the same family as tigers. And, in its turn, even kitsch can be turned to good account. An advertisement for “Entryphone” (a telephone that connects the front door of a building to an individual apartment) shows a fish in a glass bowl speaking into a telephone dangling in the water, while a predatory cat sits outside with an expression of malevolent frustration.