Ontology of Paintings

by Etienne Gilson

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Giorgio Vasari seems to have been one of the first artists to attempt a definition of painting. This definition itself presupposes another one, that of design. By the word "drawing" (disegno) Vasari means the art of outlining figures by means of appropriate curves. There is a certain amount of design in every painting, but to paint is something more than merely to make an outline. "A painting is a plane surface—be it a wood panel, a piece of canvas, or a wall—covered with spots of colors disposed around an outline which, because its curves have been well designed, circumscribes the figure."¹

A similar definition occurs in Hippolyte Taine's classic Philosophy of Art,² and again, more recently, in a famous article by Maurice Denis. The formula is well known, but it is so often misquoted or misunderstood that it will not be amiss to quote it once more: "Remember that before being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling any story whatever, a painting essentially consists of a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."³ Maurice Denis did not know the passage of Taine at the time he himself had written his own definition,⁴ but even if he had, the fact would be of little importance. There is no common measure between a casual statement made by a philosopher and the same statement, or a similar one, made by an artist fully aware of the exigencies of his own art.

Although it may seem too obvious to be worth quoting, this was, and it still remains, a highly controversial definition. We sometimes find it quoted under this abridged form: "A painting is a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." But the gist of Denis' definition was that, before being the representation of any subject whatever, a painting is made up of colors assembled on a plane surface according to a certain pattern. To say what a thing essentially is does not amount to giving an exhaustive description of it.⁵ As to Taine, the fact that his definition appears only at the end of his work suggests that it is of secondary importance in his aesthetics.⁶ At any rate, it seems difficult to deny that the two notions of color (or of light values)⁷ and of order sufficiently determine the nature of painting considered as distinct from pure drawing (37). Of these two notions, that of order is of especial importance for the ontology of painted works of art, but its definition presupposes a certain understanding of the notion of form, to which we now must turn our attention.

1. Form and Becoming

At this moment of our inquiry, it may prove profitable to ascertain the technical meaning of some terms whose use is unavoidable in the present discussion. These terms are borrowed from the philosophy of Aristotle, and their practical necessity appears from the fact that no aesthetician wholly succeeds in doing away with them. Modern phenomenologists, and even existentialists, openly or tacitly return to Aristotle's terminology every time they attempt to describe the relationship between artists and the works created by their art. And no wonder, since the philosophy of Aristotle, in its very essence, is a reflection on the operations in consequence of which things come to be. Now, art is distinct from nature, but, like nature, it is a cause in consequence of which a certain class of beings come to be. It seems therefore advisable to consider a few general notions applicable to becoming under all its forms—that is to say, in the order of nature as well as in the order of art.

Let us come back to the notions defined by Aristotle in connection with the problem of knowing how things come to be. His first remark about it is that, for any conceivable thing, to become is "to come to be from another thing" (Physics, I, 7, 189b, 33). The other thing from which it comes to be is called its matter. This notion can point out different objects. Matter can be something very modest in both being and commercial value, such as paper, plaster, or clay. It can also be something exceedingly precious and expensive, such as the gold a goldsmith uses as a matter in making a gold ring. Moreover, a matter can be a very complicated structure, itself the result of long natural preparation or of an elaborate industrial or artistic processing. In order to make things clearer, let us say that matter is both a certain way of being and a certain way of causing something else to be. Apart from absolute prime matter, which has no being of its own, any concrete substance can serve as a matter for the becoming of another being.

Because of the generality of its notion, Aristotle often calls matter a "substratum," that is, the underlying element "from which proceeds that which comes to be" (Physics I, 7, 190b, 1-4). Among the five examples quoted by him of the different ways in which things come to be from a certain matter, three are relevant to art: by change of shape, as a statue; by taking away, as the Hermes from the stone; by putting together, as a house. A fourth example of becoming—by addition—is borrowed by Aristotle from living things (things that grow), but he could as well have borrowed it from the art of the painter. In all these cases, a thing comes into existence, starting from something else (its matter) that becomes the thing in question. That from which becoming originates, in which it takes place, and which constitutes the very body of the being at stake is its matter. Such are marble, stone, or bronze in a statue; such also are the colored pigments in a painting.

One of the points stressed by Aristotle in connection with matter is that its notion is not merely negative. Matter is not a simple absence of being, On the contrary, in any process of becoming, that which becomes is often a highly complex entity, as are the germs and seeds in the generation of living beings. The matter from which becoming proceeds is sometimes called its subject, in order to stress the positive nature of its entity. At the same time, every generation, or becoming, presupposes the nonbeing of something—that is, the nonbeing of that which is going to be at the term of the process. This notion is really a very simple one: that which already is cannot possibly come to be; in other words, all becoming is the coming to be of something that, at the beginning of the process, is not.

This point led Aristotle to a curious notion, whose meaning appears in full when artistic production is at stake. It is the notion of privation.

Let us suppose a matter, or substratum, that will become the subject of some process of becoming. The very nature of this process will consist in turning the subject at stake into its very contrary. What Aristotle means thereby is this: if we want to obtain a colored surface, the starting point of this process should be a noncolored surface, or, in plain language, a white surface, just as, if we want to turn a man into a musician, he must first be innocent of musical skill at the beginning of the process. Privation then can be conceived as the absence, in a subject matter, of what it is going to possess at the end of the process of becoming. Thus, matter always is a certain thing that is becoming, and because it is always the matter-of-a-substance, it itself nearly is substance; on the contrary, as Aristotle himself expressly says it: "the privation in no sense is" (Physics, I, 9, 192a, 3-6).

This negative notion assumes a positive meaning as soon as we ask ourselves: of what is it the privation? For, indeed, this question immediately introduces the notion of a third principle of becoming, which is form. At the origin of any process of becoming, there is the privation—that is, the nonbeing—of a certain form that is coming to be. In other words, to be the cause of a certain becoming is to produce something, not indeed from absolute nothingness, but at least from the nothingness of the very form that is to be produced.

The aesthetic inspiration of Aristotle's philosophy of nature is clearly felt in his remarks on this curious notion of privation. Taken in itself, it first gives an impression of mere verbalism. What can be more commonplace than such a statement: it is contradictory to suppose that something already is that which it is about to become? But this Aristotelian notion is best understood in connection with the remark often made by the Philosopher, that negative as it is, the notion of privation points out the nonbeing of something that ought to be or, in other words, the absence of something that should be there. In this sense, the becoming of every work of art consists in substituting the presence of a certain form for the privation of that form in a certain matter.

The reason becoming takes place is precisely that, taken in itself, a given matter is neither pure nonbeing nor pure being. Placed, so to speak, betwixt and between, it always is both a substance determined in itself, such as a piece of canvas or masonite, and a possible subject for further determinations, such as the support of a possible painting. Expressed in terms of common experience, this means that in perceiving things, we often perceive, at least as much as what they are, what could be done with them or, in other words, what would become of them if they were used as so much material for the production of new beings.

The awareness of this fact is the probable source of Aristotle's remarkable doctrine concerning the origin of becoming in material substances. Having at his disposal three elements to account for this phenomenon—matter, form, and privation—Aristotle observes that he cannot find its explanation in form, because, being wholly defined in itself, form has nothing to desire; nor can he find its explanation in privation, for the simple reason that, having no entity of its own, privation cannot be the seat of any yearning; there then remains matter as the sole possible source of such desire, and this is what Aristotle finally affirms in a formula justly famous for a brutality verging upon crudity: "The truth is that what desires the form is matter, as the female desires the male and the ugly the beautiful" (Physics, I, 9, 192a, 20-25).

It is easy to misunderstand this doctrine and even to make it look ludicrous. There seems to be a naive anthropomorphism in a position that attributes to matter desire and yearning as if matter were endowed with a soul capable of such emotions. But Aristotle's doctrine is not that simple. It describes a complex experience in which the formal vocation of a certain matter is perceived by such a human mind as that of an artist. More deeply still, it describes a complex reality in which nature itself is unconsciously working after the manner of an artist and obscurely groping its way toward always higher ends. Is it really absurd to conceive of the universe of material things as animated from within by a sort of desire for perfection? Assuredly, this is not a scientific notion, but it has at least the merit of accounting for a fact that contemporary science leaves unexplained, namely, the progressive and quasi-creative character of evolution in general. At any rate, and without entering controversies we can avoid, let us say that, even if Aristotle had been mistaken in conceiving nature as a sort of unconscious human agent, his philosophy of nature would, for this very reason, provide a fitting interpretation of the genesis of works of art.

Reduced to its essentials, Aristotle's teaching on this point is that there is in matter a craving for any form that can turn its privation into some positive mode of being. Obviously, the fulfillment of this craving cannot be the work of privation, which is nothingness, or of matter, which is the seat of privation; it must therefore be the work of form, whose notion it remains for us to describe.

The word "form" now belongs to everyday language. In its common acceptation, it simply means the visual appearance of a thing or, in other terms, its figure and its shape. These meanings are correct, but they express less what Aristotle used to call form than its external manifestations. In the sense we shall give it, the word "form" designates the essential nature of a thing or, still more precisely, that nature itself considered as determining the thing in its species and, by the same token, in its figure and in its shape.

We know form much less in itself than by its effects. Every time certain effects are present, we can safely infer that a form is there, as their cause. Among these effects, let us first note a literally universal one: form is that through which each and every being has existence. For instance, wood is a thing of nature; it is a bed only potentially; to turn it into an actual bed, some artisan has to give it the shape of a bed, but as soon as it has been given this shape, the wood in question becomes a bedstead; in short, it is a bed. So the bed exists only through its form (Physics, II, 2193a, 30-35).

Aristotle expressed the same notion in different words when he said that, for any substance, or thing, that which "is only potentially a this" (for instance, a bed) "only potentially is" (On Coming to Be and Passing Away, I, 3, 317b, 26). Consequently, in giving actual form to a shapeless matter, we cause it to be actually this, we give it actual being.

Our next question then should be: how does form give actual being? It does so by isolating, within matter, a whole that, because it is endowed with determinate size, shape, and position in space, is capable of separate existence. We are here reaching a point where all the notions related to being are given at once as included in every one of them. Let it suffice to list the principal among these notions and to characterize their meaning in a summary way.

Form is that on account of which a certain thing is the very thing that it is. In this sense, as has already been said, form is, for each and every thing, the cause of its being.

By positing a thing as a definite being, form separates it from all that which it is not. This separative power of the form is easily observed, especially in the art of drawing, in which a few lines suffice to isolate a portion of space from the surrounding ones, and, thereby, to delineate a distinct being: angel, man, or beast. Under the hand of Albrecht Durer (38, 39), minor worlds, all complete in themselves, seem miraculously to separate themselves from nothingness and to acquire actual being. On a more abstract level, it can be said that, from the fact that something is that which it is, it becomes distinct from all the rest.

This separative power of the form manifests itself by delineation, if the operation takes place in space; or by definition, if the operation takes place in the order of abstract intellectual knowledge. The very word "definition" reveals the relationship between the two operations of defining and separating. To define is "to mark the limits or boundaries of." The definition of a notion therefore marks the limits, or boundaries, that separate it from other notions. This twofold operation, or, rather, this twofold effect of one and the same operation, is what classical philosophy used to express in saying that form is the ratio, or "reason," of the thing. Inasmuch as it is "reason," form is that in any reality which makes it intelligible (Webster's, p. 828). This "reason" (ratio, logos) can be experienced by sense, as when sight perceives the unity of an arabesque in space, or when hearing perceives the unity of a melodic line in time. In any case, the definition, reason, or intelligible formula of a thing results from its form, whose function it is to gather together a multiplicity of elements and to include them in the unity of a distinct being.

From this point of view, the Greek notion of form entails, as its highest characteristics, totality, wholeness, completion, and perfection. When the privation that was in matter has been replaced with a being fully determined by its form, the process of becoming is completed. For the same reason, this process is said to have reached its "end." Here again, language has its own logic. In the light of its Latin etymology, that is "perfect" which "has all the properties naturally belonging to it." In other words, it is that which has been "perfected." In the light of the Greek etymology of the word, that is perfect which has attained its end. In a remarkable passage of his Physics (III, 6, 207a, 12-14), in which he strives to establish that to be unfinished is also to be imperfect, Aristotle remarks: "Whole and complete are either quite identical or closely akin. Nothing is complete [teleion] which has no end [telos] ; and the end is a limit."

It now remains for us to realize the fact that all this analysis is dominated by the notion of form. For, indeed, the sole function of matter is to be the receiver of some form, to be informed by it, and thus to pave the way for determinations of a still higher type. From the beginning of this process to its end, form is the active energy that, in its effort to fulfill the obscure yearning of matter, quickens it from within and gives rise to fully constituted beings.

To this analysis the ready objection is: what is it about? Is this a description of the generation of natural beings, or is it a description of the production of works of art? It is both. One of the most important lessons we can learn from Aristotle is that, distinct as they are, natural causality and artistic causality are far from being unrelated. Nature works as a determined and unconscious artist, while artists work as free and more or less clearly conscious natures. This philosophy of being is, at one and the same time, a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of art.

To be sure, the philosophers who undertake to deduce from their ontology or their phenomenology some systematic interpretation of the fine arts, or of the various classes of works of art, are usually led to conclusions widely different from those of Aristotle. On the contrary, it is worth noticing that when they undertake to draw a philosophical interpretation of art from the direct observation and analysis of art itself, modern aestheticians, even though they have little use for Aristotle, spontaneously rediscover the fundamental notions of Aristotelian philosophy. If Aristotelian forms were not endowed with a dynamic spontaneity closely similar to life, nothing would happen in the order of nature any more than in that of art. Every time we start talking about matters, forms, and the "life of forms," our mind is simply recapturing ancient intuitions that are as valid today as they ever were. At any rate, there is no reason for deciding a priori that these intuitions are not worth testing in an introduction to the ontology of painting.

2. Nothingness and Creation

The notion of form is familiar to painters, but it presupposes other notions whose presence in their mind is certain, even though it is not always perceived with complete clarity. The obscurity of these notions is due to their high degree of abstraction, itself inseparable from the mystery of being. Yet the most elementary aesthetic experience attests the reality of their objects.

Let us consider music. Its very existence presupposes that of silence. We recognize as nonmusically gifted the well-known class of persons whom music inspires at once with an irresistible urge to talk. The reason for this is that talking is making noise and that to make noise is to make music impossible. Hence, on a larger scale, the many precautions taken by the conductors of orchestras to ensure complete silence at the beginning of any concert or any operatic performance. The existence of musical sounds presupposes the absolute nothingness of all other sounds. In this sense, music can be said to be created ex nihilo musicae, just about as the world is said to have been created by God from a nothingness of world, or as being was first created from a nothingness of being. There is nothing paradoxical in such statements. On the contrary, they could rather be reproached with stating what is too obvious to stand in need of restatement—namely, that the nonmusic that is silence is a prerequisite for the creation of music.

Let us now consider the poet. Confronted as he is with his sheet of white paper, he sees it as the place of infinite poetic possibilities, any one of which can materialize precisely because none of them is already there. The same remark applies to the canvas, wood panel, or wall selected by the painter as the support of his future painting. Whatever its nature, the first care of the painter will be to prime it—that is, to lay on it a coating or preparation that will ensure its perfect uniformity and neutrality with respect to any possible pattern of lines and colors it may have later on to receive. This initial nothingness of figures corresponds to the nothingness of sounds that is the silence created by conductors at the beginning of a musical performance. Like music, painting can be said to be, in a certain sense, created from nothing.⁸

After priming his canvas, the first thing usually done by a painter is to sketch an outline of his future work. This, of course, is an extremely complex operation in which intelligence, imagination, and draftsmanship are equally involved, but we can arbitrarily simplify it to facilitate analysis. More precisely, we can consider in it the sole initial motion of the hand whereby a painter (or a child) delineates the first outline on a sheet of white paper. Even reduced to these simple terms, the question evokes at once such a variety of answers that it remains necessary to make a further choice or, at least, to adopt a certain order.

Expressed in the simplest possible terms, the result of this initial operation is to make "some thing” appear where, heretofore there was"nothing" This is what is meant by the term "creation" when it is applied to works of art. In this, art is unique, and the fact is especially evident in the case of the plastic arts such as design, drawing, engraving, or painting.

In a loose sense, all the productions of the human mind can be called its creations. Science is something added to nature by the minds of scientists, but it is not another thing added by scientists to the world of already existing things. Science is not an artifact. It is not even a mental image of reality that we could conceive as duplicating and enriching it in the mind of the scientist. As a construction of the mind, science remains contained within the very reality it strives to describe. And what is true of science is also true of philosophy, particularly of metaphysics. The aim and scope of philosophy is to know the ultimate nature of reality. At a different level, and by methods different from those of science, metaphysics, too, is essentially speculative; its ultimate aim and purpose is not to produce a new being, or thing, but, rather, to know given reality exactly as it is. To the extent that it is art, painting is an activity specifically different from both scientific and metaphysical cognition.⁹

This does not mean that there is no art in science and that a philosopher cannot be, at the same time, an artist.¹⁰ The unity of the human mind is such that, just as there is intellectual knowledge in all that man does, or makes, there seldom is complete absence of art in what man knows. Elegance is a quality highly prized in mathematical demonstrations. The same elegance is perceptible in the dialogues of Plato, so much so that some of them—for instance, his Symposium—constitute in themselves exceptionally perfect specimens of literary art. But this is not our question. Even if it is truly aesthetic in nature, mathematical elegance is entirely at the service of cognition: it aims to achieve an expression of truth highly satisfactory to the mind. As to such works of art as Plato's Symposium, what of philosophy they contain could be stated in a much simpler, shorter, and less artistic way without losing any of its truth value, although it would lose all its beauty and much of its persuasive force. But this reduction of art to any kind of cognitive process is particularly impossible in the case of painting. The work of the painter is there, materially present in space, for everyone to see. While a scientist is explaining his science, he himself and his science occupy the same place in the lecture room; when a painter presents his works to the public, he himself and his paintings do not occupy the same space in the exhibition room. This is what we mean in saying that the art of painting is not a particular species included in the genus "cognition."

This point is of decisive importance, and the answers to so many other problems depend upon it that we should not let important difficulties pass unnoticed. One of the best known follows from the popular definition of art commonly attributed to the novelist Emile Zola: art is a fragment of nature seen through a temperament. If this were true, nothing would be more common than artistic creativity, for, indeed, each and every man has a temperament through which he cannot help seeing nature, but very few men are endowed by nature with the gifts that it takes to create works of art worthy of the name. This elementary confusion lies at the origin of many pseudo-artistic vocations. The most exquisite sensitiveness to natural beauty requires neither science, nor philosophy, nor even any kind of intellectual culture in general; between the charm of nature and ourselves, there is nothing, but between our sensibility and any painting that we may attempt to do, there is art. In the case of painting, art is not nature seen through a temperament; rather, it is the ability to create a new being that nobody would ever see, either in nature or otherwise, unless the art of the painter caused it to exist.

A similar formula, attributed to Francis Bacon, defines art as "man added to nature" (homo additus naturae), and it raises similar difficulties. Like so many other brilliant definitions, this one does not bear the acid test of critical examination. Since man is part and parcel of nature, he cannot be added to it. Rather than as man added to nature, art should be conceived as man adding to nature, or, better still, as nature enriching itself by all the additions that it receives at the hands of man. As has been said, the painter is neither a philosopher nor a scientist in whose mind nature mirrors itself ; but he is not, at the same time, one of those engineers whose cleverness harnesses the forces of nature and puts them at our disposal; he is one of the creative forces of nature, in this sense at least, that he gives existence to certain beings that, in nature, nothing else than himself could possibly have produced. And not only nothing else, but no one else. It is not evident that, at the present stage of scientific progress, the premature death of a great scientist renders impossible the scientific discoveries that a longer life would have enabled him to make. On the contrary, the death of an artist certainly brings to a close the production of the kind of painting that bears the imprint of his hand. Many men can now know the paintings and enjoy them, but no other man than himself could cause them to exist. The lineage of these beings, which resemble one another as the children of the same father, is now extinct, and neither the admiration nor the zeal and cleverness of his most faithful pupils will ever increase it by a single unit. The creative artist is for us the only empirically observable example of a force analogous to the still more mysterious one in virtue of which the works of nature come into being. No painting,_ drawing, or etching done by anyone else will ever replace those which a still longer life would have enabled Matisse himself to create. The death of a great painter is an irretrievable loss of substance for the world.¹¹

In the light of what precedes, it may well be asked if paintings should simply be classified among the artifacts. And, indeed, they are artifacts, at least in the sense that they are products of human workmanship; but even granting that all paintings are artifacts, it cannot be granted that all artifacts are works of art. Considered as a genus, artifacts include, besides works of art properly so called, the densely populated class of the many and manifold tools, instruments, and machines due to the inventiveness and skill of homo faber. Now, whatever their differences, all these tools, instruments, and machines have this in common, that their final cause lies outside themselves. Not one of them is made for its own sake. One does not look at a timepiece (taken precisely qua timepiece) except to know what time it is. An ornamented shotgun may well be considered a work of art, but then it is no longer seen as a shotgun, whose intrinsic qualities, taken precisely qua shotgun, are foreign to the notions of ornamentation and decoration. Not so in the case of paintings. We call "tool" anything that serves as a means to an end, but, precisely, a painting cannot be used as a means to any end extrinsic to itself. A painting is not there to permit any kind of operation to be performed such as carrying goods or persons, talking from a distance, or shooting game. There is nothing that one can do with a painting. True enough, there is something that one can do about it, but, precisely, there is only one such thing, and it is to look at it. If he considers a painting as a means to any other end than its contemplation, a man does not see it as a work of art. He may look at it as an art dealer looks at the particular brand of merchandise he tries to sell, or as an investor looks at a more or less promising kind of stock. He may even consider it something to be talked about, if he is a lecturer; or something to be written about, if he is an art historian or an art critic.¹² In every one of these cases, the end of the work of art lies outside it, as in money, in a lecture to give, in an article or in a book to write; consequently, in every one of these cases, the work of art will be used as a means to another end; it will cease to act as a work of art.

We can now return to our question and give it an answer. The question was: in what sense is it true to say that the term "creation" fittingly designates the initial operation of artists, and quite especially of painters? The answer is: because the immediate and direct effect of such an operation is to cause something to be or, in simpler terms, because the effect of such an operation is the actual existence of a new "being." Here again a comparison with theology can help, not at all because we should attempt in any way to deduce aesthetics from theology, but rather, on the contrary, because in certain matters theology has based its inferences upon the experience of artists as well as upon the nature of art. Such is particularly the case with the notion of creation. In his Timaeus, under the form of a mythical narrative, Plato has presented the world as the work of a divine artist whom he called the Demiurge. We shall have later on to ask ourselves what light this dialogue throws on the nature of artistic production; for our present problem, it will prove more important to consider the notion of creation such as, on the strength of Biblical data, the Christian theologians have understood it.

If we leave aside the history of this religious notion and consider it merely as it became at the very time it reached its point of perfection, this notion points out the act by which a certain being causes other beings to be. Strictly speaking, only one being can thus be the cause of existence for other beings—namely, God, who, because he himself is the pure act of being, is eminently able to impart actual existence. Obviously, no artist can create his works, as God does, from an absolute nothingness of existence. Some material must be at his disposal before he begins his work; even the forms he creates are the forms of something, and he has seen them in nature, or in the art of his predecessors, before he himself began to create.¹³ Moreover, the kind of existence an artist imparts to his works always presupposes his own existence, which, unlike that of God, is a received one. Incidentally, this is the reason why aesthetics need not carry its investigations beyond the philosophical level of ontology to the properly theological level of the divine act of existing. The actual existence of the matter to be informed by the art of the painter, as well as that of the painter himself, are two necessary prerequisites for the very possibility of art. The problems that belong to aesthetics presuppose the fact that there are works of art, and although aesthetics can investigate the mode of being proper to this specific class of artifacts, its inquiry stops at the level of substantial being specified and determined by its form. Actual existence is presupposed as already given, for all its ingredients, from the very beginning of the operation.

This does not mean that actual existence is not at stake in the making of a painting. The actual existence of the painting to be done is the final result that the artist intends to achieve. Since God alone is the pure act of being, no secondary cause, be it even the art of a creative artist, can conjure up a new being from total nonbeing. But the artist himself, his art, the matter and the forms he puts to use, all are enjoying an actual existence they have received from the Prime Cause. Artists can impart or communicate to their works the actual existence that is their own. Some pen drawings by Corot (40) are enough to give existence to charming landscapes that seem to be made from nothing, and almost with nothing. An etching done from a pen drawing by Pieter Brueghel succeeds in educing the most complex landscape from the blank surface of a plate. The mere interplay of the lines, ordered as they are by a supremely lucid imagination, even permits him to pretend that the very Journey to Emmaus (41) is included in this creation of his hand. In this sense, the production of plastic works of art truly extends to their very existence. Himself an existent, the painter is an efficient cause of actual existence for other existents.¹⁴

These notions will have to be reconsidered at a different level in discussing the proper kind of causality a painter exercises with respect to his works. For the present, let it suffice to observe that thus to relate art to metaphysics, and even to theology, is by no means to attempt a deduction of art from these lofty sciences. On the contrary, when theologians started from the visible world in order to conceive, as best they could, the invisible nature of God, they first borrowed from art the pattern of the most perfect kind of causality given in human experience, and then transcended it in order to make it attributable to God. In their effort to do so, the theologians have unveiled to us the very Idea of what an absolute artistic creation -would be: an act in which, because the intellect, the power, the will, and the art of the artist are identically one with his own act of being, the total cause of the total effect is included. Artistic creation is not such an act, but it remains for us the least imperfect image there is of what the theologians call creation. And no wonder, since it is found at the origin of the notion that the theologians have formed of it. Supposing, therefore, that painters can communicate existence to their own works, we must now ascertain the sense in which it is true to say that, because they also produce forms, painters truly produce beings.

3. Form and Being

Let us now consider the initial moment an artist's pencil, chalk, or brush begins to delineate a figure. This figure does not necessarily represent a thing. Whether it does so is irrelevant to the present problem. What matters is the fact that the figure itself is a thing. Even though it may consist of only one single straight line, it has a shape and a structure of its own. We distinguish at once a straight line from a circle, we give it a name, and we can always recognize it for the specified reality that it is—namely, a figure consisting of one single line lying evenly throughout its extent or, in other terms, having an invariable direction.

The characteristic property of such figures is that each of them is a particular way of occupying space. Our starting point is a nothingness of forms and figures. At the very beginning of our analysis, we find the painter face to face with the practically empty space represented by the uniform priming of his canvas.¹⁵ As soon as he draws the first line or the first figure, which can be a single straight line or a single curve, the painter begins to fill up the initial vacuum at his disposal. In other words, he begins to substitute beings, or things, for nothingness. Since he is working on a plane surface—that is, in a two-dimensional space—the painter must content himself with drawing lines. In the beginning of his operations, even his figures are generally mere outlines—that is, lines suggesting the visible boundaries of the place that, were they real objects, their volumes would occupy in space. To denote it by its most general name, let us say that, whatever his pencil or his brush may design, the painter begins by creating a shape or form. We thus find ourselves confronted with one of the most baffling notions that philosophers have to handle. There would be no point in trying to avoid it under pretense that its complexity may defy analysis. For, indeed, it does, but while it is disturbingly complex, the metaphysical notion of form is constantly present in practical life and in everyday language. No man aware of what he does and says can refuse to consider it.

The reason for these difficulties is, once more, that the notion of being is involved in the discussion. Generally speaking, "Form is the aspect under which a thing appears, especially as distinguished from substance or color" (Webster's). For us to see a form, then, practically amounts to seeing a thing, or the figure of a thing. Consequently, it amounts to seeing a being, or the figure of a being. There is no doubt about the equivalence of these notions in common language. We recognize objects by their forms, and each typical form is signified by a distinct name. In human experience, the two notions of being and of form cannot possibly be separated.

The preceding analysis chiefly bears upon cases in which a drawn or painted form is the symbol of a natural object, such as a tree or an animal, or else of any artifact known to us and designated by a common name, such as a "table" or a "house." But the same conclusion applies even to simple lines or figures that signify nothing else besides themselves. Contemporary artists and critics are agreed in distinguishing between representational art, whose forms imitate the visual appearance of things, and abstract art (i.e., nonrepresentational art), whose forms represent nothing other than themselves. From the point of view of our problem, there is no difference whatever between these two cases. For, indeed, even considered in themselves and apart from any possible signification, straight lines, angles, diagonals, triangles, rectangles, curves, circles, spirals—in short, all possible geometrical figures—are in themselves forms and, consequently, are definite objects (42). Abstract painters and representational painters (43a, 43b) are likewise creating forms and, by the same token, beings.¹⁶

There is something mysterious in this divisive function exercised by forms. One should perhaps rather say that to be a form essentially consists in occupying a certain portion of space by means of an outline that separates it from all the rest. Moving pictures and television have not been slow in exploiting the feeling of passionate interest we all experience in watching the tip of a painting brush or a pencil while it actually delineates objects, or men and women, that seem to spring from nothingness before our very eyes. And yet, the hand of the unseen artist does nothing more than to isolate, within the uniform indetermination of empty space, a certain number of zones circumscribed by their respective outlines or determined by their plastic properties. In this sense, to define a being, to set it apart, to abstract it, and to produce it are one and the same operation.

This truth can be verified by any onlooker watching a painter at work. Still more simply, it can be personally experienced by anybody attempting to perform the same operation. And it can be described at the various levels of theology, philosophy, or plain artistic experience.

In describing the creative activity of God, theologians usually distinguish two effects of the divine power. The first one is creation properly so called, whose effect it is to confer existence upon creatures. The second one consists in distinguishing among creatures, and it necessarily attends the act of creation since, without it, even God could not create a plurality of creatures. The only way to have two beings is to produce two separate beings. Hence, in his Summa theologise (I, 47), the words used by Thomas Aquinas: "After considering the production of creatures, we must turn to the consideration of the distinction among them." This is in no way a deductive inference. Thomas Aquinas simply takes it for granted that to cause a plurality of beings is to distinguish each one of them from the rest. More remarkably still, to make sure that the distinction and plurification of things is included in the creative act of God, our theologian quotes a text borrowed from Holy Writ, which is, in this case, from Genesis. And, indeed, the sacred book uses the same expression twice in order to say that the multiplication of created beings was an effect of their mutual separation by God.¹⁷ In the beginning "the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep"; then God made light, that is, he "divided" the light from the darkness (Gen. 1 : 4). The rest of the text is known: God "divided" the waters that were under the firmament from those above the firmament (Gen. 1 : 6-7) (46, 47). Even the creation of Eve (48) is an act of separation. But this divisive action itself follows from a still more primitive one that we can attempt to describe, this time with the help of philosophers.

As has been said, things, numerically differ from one another, because, within a certain species, each of them has its own matter by which it is individuated; but before this individual distinction within a certain species, there is a specific distinction between species and species within a certain genus. Now, what is the cause of this specific distinction? Once more, it is what philosophers call form. This time, it means "the essential nature of a thing as distinguished from the matter in which it is embodied." Plato calls it an Idea—that is, the ideal pattern of a material thing. In a more Aristotelian way, form can be defined as "that in a thing which determines it in its kind or species" (Webster's). In short, form is what makes a thing the specified being it is and, by the same token, distinguishes it from all individuals belonging in a different species. To make a thing what it is is the same as to distinguish or separate it from all the rest.

In order not to interrupt this analysis, we beg to push it slightly further than is strictly necessary for our present purpose. Among the many meanings of form, there is one that, perfectly classical in Latin (formosus, beautiful), is now archaic in English and yet, unless we are mistaken, still remains understandable. In this ancient sense, it used to mean "pleasing external appearance; beauty" (Webster's). We shall have later on to ask why the cause of being is, at the same time, the cause of beauty. For the present, let it suffice to note that every one of these notions naturally leads to the others. Yet the central one is that of the relationship between the two notions of creation and distinction.

Among the properties of form, the most striking one is its aptitude to confer being upon the matter that receives it. In the structure of being, the primitive element is the act in virtue of which a certain thing is, or exists; but existence itself is that of some actually existing thing, and since a thing is what it is owing to its form, it is through its form that it receives existence. Hence the classical position according to which existence comes to things through form.¹⁸ If this is true, we were right in saying that artists, and particularly painters, exercise an activity that closely resembles an act of creation, not only because they communicate actual existence, but also because they fashion and mold the very being they cause to exist. By imparting form to a given material, they turn it into a subject capable of actual existence —that is to say, into a substance. Ancient as it is, this doctrine is still valid in our own day; contemporary exponents of existentialism have reinterpreted it with penetration;¹⁹ and even among painters themselves, some perfectly sober minds do not hesitate to speak of their works as of so many creations ex nihilo.²⁰ And, indeed, insofar as its artistic mode of existence alone is at stake, nothing of it is given to the painter in natural reality.

The same problem can be discussed at the level of art itself and wholly apart from any theological or metaphysical implications. It then becomes a question of knowing if paintings are a particular form of language, whose function it is to impart knowledge, or if, on the contrary, it is of the essence of a painting to be a self-signifying substance and an addition to the sum total of already existing reality.

Delacroix is sometimes quoted as having said: "A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator."²¹ Even if it were complete, this formula should not be mistaken for an attempt, on the part of Delacroix, to define paintings. Painters themselves know very well what paintings are. They are not likely to mistake them for bridges, especially not for the particularly unsubstantial bridges that span the chasms between souls. When he wrote these lines, the point that Delacroix was enforcing was that, in paintings, "cold accuracy is not art." He then was criticizing the so-called conscientiousness of "the great majority of painters," which, to him, was "nothing but perfection in the art of boring. If it were possible, these fellows would labour with equal care over the backs of their pictures." As Delacroix saw it, the reason for their error is simple. It is that most painters conceive pictures as means of conveying knowledge; so they never tire of explaining, whereas, on the contrary, the privilege of pictures is to enable mind to speak to mind, "and not knowledge to knowledge." In short, a picture is a bridge precisely because it does not teach; it does not explain; it does not talk; it just is one more thing among other things.²²

The true meaning of this alleged definition of painting is therefore different from what it seems to be. The veritable intention of Delacroix was to contrast painting with literature, but, in so doing, he found himself led to observe that, while writers content themselves with explaining their thought by means of symbols, painters confront onlookers with concrete objects, real things, or beings, which they themselves have made and before which we all find ourselves in the same situation as before the things of nature. For, indeed, nature does not explain; nature does not impart knowledge; nature simply is there for us to see. In like manner, instead of giving us words to understand, painting places under our eyes realities on which to meditate. Whence, according to Delacroix, the superiority of painting (and, incidentally, of music) to literature. With deep insight, Delacroix observes that the words that a writer has to use always lose something of the thought that they strive to convey, whereas, when he meditates in the presence of a picture, the onlooker has the thing itself before him, including that in it which is not expressible by means of words.²³

The consecution of ideas, here, is clear. Since the painter creates a form, by means of which he gives existence to a new being, all his obligations are to the very form that he creates and to the new being to which his art aims to impart existence, not to any external object, being, or landscape that he might try to imitate.²⁴ This fact, as Delacroix aptly remarks, compels even the most realistically minded painters to "use certain conventions of composition or of execution."²⁵ These conventions simply express the exigencies proper to the form that the painter aims to embody in a certain matter. Their common justification is to keep out of the art of painting a cause of corruption that Delacroix has consistently opposed under the name of "realism." By this word, Delacroix understood the attitude of those who see the ideal of the art of painting in a faithful rendering of things and beings as they are in external reality. If it is a question of duplicating reality, no sculpture done by an artist will ever equal a plaster cast done from nature. Nor will any painting ever equal the accuracy and completeness of a good photograph. But a true painter does not borrow his subject from reality; he does not even content himself with arranging the material provided by reality so as to make it acceptable to the eye. His starting point is fantasy, imagination, fiction, and all the elements of reality that do not agree with the creature imagined by the painter have to be ruthlessly eliminated. In this sense, "Realism should be described as the antipodes of art." (44) At the very least, it is one of the most dangerous temptations that beset the artist in his work. It is imperative that he should reject from his models, however real and even pleasant they may be in reality, all the elements that are not at least compatible with the plastic form of the work of art to be made. Hence the remark often made by Delacroix: "The first of all principles is the need to make sacrifices."²⁶ This principle is but another name for the primacy of creation over imitation in works of art (45).

In adopting this attitude, Delacroix was announcing and even initiating a movement whose consequences are still felt in contemporary painting, but he also was positing a principle whose consequences were, or should have been, far reaching in the history of the philosophy of art, in art criticism, and, generally speaking, in all the disciplines that are in any way concerned with the interpretation of painting.

The first corollary of what Delacroix said is that the final cause of all the operations performed by the painter is to cause the existence of a self-subsisting and autonomous being—namely, the particular painting freely conceived by his imagination. From this first corollary, important consequences follow concerning what can be called the ultimate foundation for aesthetic judgments. This foundation must be sought in the very essence of the works of art under discussion, and in nothing else. This does not mean that works of art are not subject to other tribunals judging them on the strength of other rules, such as those of religion or of morality; but it does mean that, if it is a question of judging a painting precisely qua work of art, the principles to be followed in judging it should be borrowed from the notion of art understood as the creative activity that has just been defined. In the case of painting, these principles should be borrowed from the very essence of the class of beings that we call paintings.

Hence, what the painter is attempting, consciously or not, is to bring to completion the new being to which his art is imparting existence. For him to succeed is to create such a being, just as not to succeed is to fail to create it. There is no other criterion of success or failure in the art of painting than this golden rule: a painting is good when it actually exists as the fully constituted being that art can make it; inversely, a painting is bad when it fails to achieve actual existence as a fully constituted being. As has rightly been said, the true work of art is "the one which is." In other words, if it is a question of judging them as works of art, paintings are not to be justified, or condemned, by norms of morality, or by norms of any kind of knowledge, historic, scientific, philosophic, or otherwise, but "by ontological norms only." ²⁷ One could not better express the fundamental truth that all problems related to paintings must ultimately be answered in terms of being.

Art criticism is directly interested in the recognition of this truth. There is a positive art criticism. Whether what it praises in a painting is its composition, its coloring, or its execution, positive criticism always is about some actually existing reality, which can be perceived by the critic, pointed out by him, and then seen by all. On the contrary, there is nothing harder, nor perhaps more vain, than to indulge in negative criticism and to attempt to justify it.²⁸ If a bad painting is something that, as a work of art, has failed to achieve actual existence, negative criticism can do little more than either to overlook the presence of a reality that escapes the eye of the critic or else futilely to point out the empty place where something that ought to be there is not to be found. Now, there is no way to prove that something does not exist: between what one does not see and what is really not there, the distinction is not easy to make. If an artistic misfit is, on the whole, a nonentity, the best attitude toward it is silence. As the saying goes: "It does not exist."

These general rules are of little help when it comes to judging particular works of art from the point of view of their own structure. The starting point of this inquiry was the fact that paintings are physical beings—more precisely, solid bodies—endowed with an individuality of their own. It now begins to appear that, still more than it is an individual, each painting that meets the requirements of a true work of art is a completely self-sufficient system of internal relations regulated by its own laws. In this sense, paintings are mutually irreducible beings, each of which needs to be understood and judged from the point of view of its own structure. Painters have often made this remark, and although art critics and art historians have seldom subscribed to it (for it seems to make art too easy for artists and criticism too hard for critics), it can be said that, in this case, the truth about art is again to be found on the side of the artists.

A remarkable expression of this truth is to be found in a saying attributed by Leslie to Constable. As the family physician, Dr. Gooch, had just said in Constable's presence that he found "every individual case of disease a new study," the painter "applied this to painting, and said 'In like manner every truly original picture is a separate study, and governed by laws of its own; so that what is right in one, would be often entirely wrong if transferred to another.'"²⁹ To the extent that it succeeds in achieving its own mode of artistic existence, a painting is justified in being exactly what it actually is.

These conclusions hang on the mysterious power that forms have to create organic ontological units, that is, beings. Like all the concepts that are inseparable from the primary notion of being, the concept of form cannot be reduced to any other one by which to elucidate its meaning. The only other way to approach it than through straight metaphysical speculation is to ask painters themselves what it means to them when they envisage it from the concrete point of view of their own art.

Endnotes

1. Vasari, painter and architect, born at Arezzo in 1511, died in Florence in 1574. His famous book, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, is found in an English translation by A. B. Hinds. This edition does not include the Maniera of Vasari, often prefixed to the Lives as introduction. It exists in a separate translation by Louisa Maclehose, Vasari on Technique, ed. G. B. Brown. — Since the definition of painting found in the Maniera has been generally overlooked, we beg to quote it in the Italian original: "Ora, avendo di cio [i.e., design] ragionato abbastanza, seguita che not veggiamo che cosa sia la pittura. Ell' e dunque un piano coperto di campi di colori in superficie o di tavola o di muro o di tela, intorno a' lineamenti detti di sopra, i quali per virtu di un buon disegno di linee girate circondano la figura." "Introduzione alle tre arti," ch. XV, in Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari, vol. I, p. 38.

2. "By themselves and apart from their aptitude to imitate, colors as well as lines have a meaning. Our impression varies according to the way they are assembled. A painting is a colored surface on which the various tones and the various degrees of light are distributed with a certain choice; this is its intimate being; the fact that these tones and these degrees of light make up figures, draperies, or architectures is with them an ulterior property that does not prevent their primitive property from having all its importance and all its rights. The value proper to color is therefore enormous, and the decision made about it by painters determines the rest of their work" (II, 334-35). Taine wrote these words at the end of the second volume of his work, when it was too late for him to do anything with it. In fact, the whole trend of Taine's aesthetic is against it. One cannot help wondering if, when Taine was about to write the last sixteen pages of his Philosophy of Art, some charitable painter did not remind him that colors play an important part in painting.

3. Denis, "Definition du neo-traditionnisme," in Theories, p. 1. This same definition is restated, with an important addition, p. 27: "Before being a representation of any thing whatever, a painting is a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order, and for the pleasure of the eye." This raises the problem of the final cause of the paintings. It will be considered separately in another section of this book.

4. Denis, Charmes et lecons de I'ltalie, p. 177, n. 1.

5. Denis himself has sometimes abridged his formula: "The fruitful notion of the plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order . . ." ("The Influence of Paul Gauguin," Theories, pp. 166-71). But some historians have deliberately reduced it to this sole element: "Remember that a picture . . . is a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order" (Bernard Dorival, Les Etapes de la peinture francaise contemporaine, I, 110). In this "axiom," the ellipsis stands for all that has been suppressed. Going further still, some critics reproach Denis with having eliminated from the notion of "painting" all that is not color: Charles Lalo, "Classification structurale des beaux-arts," in Formes de l'art, p. 20, n. 2. Lalo reduces Denis' definition to the following formula: "Visual perception of two-dimensional forms on a continuous surface." The notion of order has thus been replaced with that of forms. This substitution agrees with Lalo's description of painting as "a technical interpretation of the laws of theoretic optics" (p. 20) ; but men have painted masterpieces for millenniums without even suspecting the existence of optics and its laws. Denis' definition simply aimed at recovering a clear awareness of the essence of painting conceived precisely as one of the fine arts.

6. "I am now coming to the last element, a capital one, namely, color" (La Philosophie de l'art, II, 355). Despite his theories about climate, race, and so on, Taine did not completely overlook the fact that, at the origin of painting, there is an aptitude to feel pleasure at the sight of certain colors.

7. Some painters have practiced a voluntary asceticism with respect to color (see Denis, "Le Renoncement de Carriere," Theories, pp. 213-14), but nothing forbids us to call "painting" a preparation in black and white, such as, for instance, those of Seurat. — Black and white can be held to be, in a certain sense, colors. See Webster's: "All colors are divisible into two classes: chromatic colors, as reds, greens, purples, browns and pinks; achromatic colors, including black, white, and the series of grays intermediate between black and white, which differ from each other only in the degree of resemblance to white or difference from black." The notion of achromatic (i.e., colorless) colors appears paradoxical, not to say self-contradictory. But these problems of terminology should not prevent us from acknowledging the fact that light values suffice to constitute a painting.

8. It is remarkable that modern artists have sometimes spontaneously resorted to the language of Holy Scripture in expressing their own experience on this point. For instance, speaking of his glass pictures, which he began by drawing with a needle on a blackened piece of glass, Paul Klee found it natural to say: "I begin logically with chaos, that is only natural" (Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 115). Speaking of Piet Mondrian: "To create emptiness is the principal act. And this is true creation, because this emptiness is positive; it contains the germ of the absolutely new." (Michel Seuphor, L'Art abstrait, p. 120.)

9. See E. Gilson, "Art et metaphysique," Revue de metaphysique et de morale, XXIII, No. 1 "8 (Jan., 1916), 244 46.

10. Thomas Aquinas has noted that "even in speculative matters there is something by way of work"; we make speeches, reasonings, demonstrations, expositions, etc. The arts related to the operations of the mind, and in which the body does not share, are called, for this very reason, liberal arts: Summa theologiae, Ia, IIae, 57, 3, reply to obj. 3. — On the many different answers given to the question "What is art?" see the excellent ch. III, "The Meanings of Art," in Thomas Munro, The Arts and Their Interrelations, pp. 49-109.

11. See the epigraph (borrowed from Gabriele d'Annunzio's I1 Fuoco) to our essay of 1915 on "Art et metaphysique": "Ah, Stelio, t'aspettavo! Riccardo Wagner e morto. —I1 mondo parve diminuito di valore." ("Ah, Stelio, I was waiting for you! Richard Wagner is dead. — The world seemed to have lost some of its value.") — This page was written on the very day the Toronto radio announced the death of Henri Matisse (November 5, 1954).

12. Critics themselves do not like discussing the question of their own attitude toward works of art. It seems hardly possible to consider their position as identical with that of common art lovers. Critics are at their best when they deal with works of art with which they used to be familiar before they began to speak, or to write, as critics. At any rate, to look at a painting in view of writing about it must somewhat interfere with the aesthetic apprehension of the work in question.

13. This point is forcefully developed by Delacroix in his Journal, p. 386 (March 1, 1859), particularly: "But not only did these great men create nothing in the proper sense of the word, which means making something out of nothing, but in order to form their talent, or prevent it from getting rusty, they had to imitate their predecessors and, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate them almost unceasingly." Delacroix himself always had Rubens in mind; Manet could not forget Velazquez during his "Spanish period," and Picasso, perhaps the most inexhaustible source of new forms in our own times, cannot help remembering somebody or something else's style the very moment he is inventing a style of his own.

14. "To act is nothing else than to communicate that by which the acting being is in act" (Thomas Aquinas, De potentia, qu. 2, art. 1, answer) . Thomas presently adds to this: "to the extent that it is possible." Now, God, who is the Prime Cause, is the pure act of Being. Consequently, "all the created causes communicate in one single effect, which is actual existence [esse], although each one of them has its own effects, by which they differ from one another. For instance, heat makes something to be hot, and an architect causes a house to be [aedificator facit domum esse]. Created causes thus agree in this, that they cause being [conveniunt ergo in hoc quod causant essel, but they differ in this, that while fire causes fires, an architect causes a house" (qu. 7, art. 2 answer).

15. The notion of space should be understood as that of a painter's space. There are mathematical and physical notions of space; there even are biological ones. The pictorial notion of space is distinct from them all. It can be defined as a pure possibility of visual forms; or else, as that whose whole nature it is to be occupiable by visual forms. In occupying space, visual forms determine it, define it, enclose it, or cover it. — The notion of space must not be confused with that of "spatial element," which seems to be proper to the terminology of Paul Klee. In his "Creative Credo," Klee distinguishes four formal elements in painting: dot, line, plane, and space (Grohmann, p. 97) ; but space is here understood as something already determined by the painter; it is a painted space—that is, in Klee's own terms, "a cloud-like, hazy spot made with a loaded brush and including several shades." Yet these two notions fundamentally agree, for, indeed, the spatial element defined by Klee is essentially formless—that is, without definable formal determinations. In fact, some modern pictures are five tenths unpainted canvas, cardboard, masonite, or even wrongside-foremost plywood; there is no essential difference between pure paintable space and what Klee calls a spatial element. Despite the confusion of his terminology, Piet Mondrian does not seem to think differently: "At this point, I became conscious that reality is form and space. Nature reveals forms in space. Actually all is space, form as well as what we see as empty space. To create unity, art has to follow not nature's aspect, but what nature really is. Appearing in oppositions, nature is unity; form is limited space concrete only through its determination. Art has to determine space as well as form and to create the equivalence of these two factors." (Mondrian, "Toward the True Vision of Reality," in Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, p. 13. Cf. p. 19: "The predominance . . .")

16. That abstraction is creation is the common root of many notions that have become fundamental in modern painting. Most of them are found, gathered together, in the contribution of Paul Klee to Schopferische Konfession ("Creative Credo"). First, "Art does not render the visible; rather, it makes visible." Secondly, since to design is to define, to separate, or to set a part of space apart from the rest of space, "a tendency towards the abstract belongs to the essence of linear expression" (to abstract, from the Latin abstrahere: to separate by an operation of the mind). With deep insight, Klee has perceived at once the ultimate implication of this property of lines: "The purer the artist's work (i.e., the more he stresses the formal elements on which linear expression is based), the less well equipped he is for the realistic rendering of visible things" (Grohmann, p. 97). These remarks of Paul Klee, if meditated and understood, clearly show that far from representing a belated and decadent form of the art of painting, non-imitational art is the development of one of the most essential tendencies of design.

17. Cf. Gen. 1:14: "Let there be lights . . . to divide the day and the night"; 1:18: "to divide the light and the darkness." These expressions are the source of the intimate relationship established by the Scholastics between the work of creation and that of distinction. The same Scriptural texts have been quoted, in full awareness of their significance for aesthetics, by Jeanne Hersch, L'Etre et la forme, pp. 103-10. For instance: "In the beginning God created heaven, and earth." First separation: as soon as God creates, he separates—but the earth was not yet separated within itself. "The earth was formless. . . ." Ever since the first distinction, surfaces come to be: "and darkness was upon the face of the deep. . . ." When God creates light, it looks as though he first ascertained its goodness, but it is its separation from darkness that definitively gives it existence: "And God saw the light that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness." "And God said: Let there be a firmament made amidst the waters; and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made a firmament, and divided the waters that were under the firmament from those that were above the firmament, and it was so." Thus the work of creation implies a work of distinction, before which there was nothing, except the Creator. Only owing to separation can there be reunion, repartition, order, form.

18. Boethius, De Trinitate, 2: "Omne namque esse ex forma est"—i.e., "For every being is in virtue of form" (tr. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, Loeb Classical Library, pp. 8-9). Among many other texts: Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, 9, 2; I, 14, 4; Contra gentiles, I, 68, 3. The notion that existence comes to things through form is not hard to understand if one relates it to this almost identical one, that to be always is to be a certain kind of being determined or specified by a form. It is strictly impossible for us to conceive a being otherwise than as a specified being. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, 17, 3. For a commentary, E. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, pp. 164-66.

19. This essentially creative nature of the art of painting is the central theme of the already quoted book of Jeanne Hersch, L'Etre et la forme. For instance (p. 205) : "He [the Poet] is, at the scale of man, the most integral creator; without creating from nothing, he makes something exist that did not exist. He creates by imparting form to something given—that is, by conferring upon it existential coherency."

20. We are simply copying Constable, who was neither an abstract painter nor a metaphysician: "It is the business of a painter not to contend with nature, and put such a scene, a valley filled with imagery fifty miles long, on a canvas of a few inches; but to make something out of nothing, in attempting which, he must almost of necessity become poetical" (Leslie, p. 124). And rightly so. In his Treatise on Landscape Painting (p. 11), Andre Lhote has this perfect definition: "The representational element, that is, the part that does not contribute to the structure of the picture." In other words, whatever is not representational in a painting presupposes a creative act of the painter. On the other hand, an element is not representational because it represents, but because, doing nothing else, it performs no plastic function in the painting.

21. Quoted by Thomas Bodkin, The Approach to Painting, p. 56. This author does not make the mistake of quoting this sentence as a definition of painting. His interpretation of it is that, once we recognize the purpose and the stability of a picture, "we ought to pass over it with all possible speed; and we can then look back at leisure to enjoy the grace of its proportions, the quality of its material and the skill that was spent upon its building." Who could affirm that Delacroix had nothing like this in mind? But it is at least certain that he also had in mind something else—namely, that a picture is not a word, a symbol, a sign, but a thing.

22. 'In painting, and especially in portraiture,' says Mme Cave in her treatise, 'mind speaks to mind, and not knowledge to knowledge.' This observation, which may be more profound than she knows herself, is an indictment of pedantry in execution. I have said to myself over and over again that painting, i.e. the material process which we call painting, is no more than the pretext, the bridge between the mind of the artist and that of the beholder." (Journal, p. 127 [July 18, 1850].) Cf. "To sum up, the painter says nothing, he keeps silent, and I still prefer it that way" (Lettres de van Gogh a son frere Theo, p. 469 [not dated, but later than September 17, 18881)

23. "When I have painted a fine picture, I have not given expression to a thought! That is what they say. What fools people are! They would strip painting of all its advantages. A writer has to say almost everything in order to make himself understood, but in painting it is as if some mysterious bridge were set up between the spirit of the persons in the picture and the beholder. The beholder sees figures, the external appearance of nature, but inwardly he meditates; the true thinking that is common to all men. Some give substance to it in writing, but in so doing they lose the subtle essence. Hence, grosser minds are more easily moved by writers than by painters or musicians. The art of the painter is all the nearer to man's heart because it seems to be more material. In painting, as in external nature, proper justice is done to what is finite and to what is infinite, in other words, to what the soul finds inwardly moving in objects that are known through the senses alone." (Journal, pp. 7-8 [October 8, 1822].) "In Mme de Stael I find exactly the same method that I use to develop my own ideas about painting. This art, like music, is higher than thought; hence it has the advantage over literature, through its vagueness." (Journal, p. 24 [January 26, 1824].) — On this notion: "Vagueness. In one of my little blue note-books there is a quotation from Obermann on vagueness. The church of Saint-Jacques at Dieppe in the evening. Painting is vaguer than poetry in spite of the definite appearance it presents to the eyes. One of its greatest charms." (Journal, p. 332 [January 13, 18571.) Cf. Journal, p. 201 (October 20, 1853). — An important passage of Delacroix, too long to be quoted here, will be found in the Appendix II, pp. 312-13.

24. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme. For instance (p. 8) : "Let the picture imitate nothing and let it present its raison d'être in its nudity." Yet (p. 17), the same authors grant that "the memory of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished, at least now." — Cf. Leonce Rosenberg, Cubisme et tradition. These sixteen pages are a reprint of the preface written by Rosenberg for the catalogue of an exhibition of French paintings at Geneva, February, 1920. A quotation of Philebus, 51, is found in pp. 6-8 of the reprint: "I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or pictures . . . but . . . understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them . . . " etc. (The Dialogues of Plato, tr. B. Jowett, IV, 625).

25. The fundamental convention that all painters have to observe is the necessity arbitrarily to construct a self-contained whole endowed with a unity of its own. This, Delacroix says, is one of the essential differences between painting and photography. "In a photograph of a view you see no more than a portion cut from a panorama; the edges are as interesting as the centre of the picture and you have to guess at the scene of which you are shown merely a fragment, apparently chosen at random. In such a fragment, the details have as much importance as the principal object and, more often than not, obstruct the view because they occur in the foreground. . . . The most striking photographs are those in which certain gaps are left, owing to the failure of the process itself to give a complete rendering. Such gaps bring relief to the eyes which are thereby concentrated on only a limited number of objects. . . . And what shall we say of the disturbing effects produced by actual perspective, especially where human figures are concerned? . . . The confirmed realist corrects this inflexible perspective which, because of its very accuracy, falsifies our view of objects. Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture . ." etc. (Journal, pp. 387-88 [September 1, 1859].)

26. Journal, pp. 396-97 (February 22, 1860). This passage is a criticism of the notion of "realism" in art, especially in sculpture and painting. By "realism" Delacroix means the servile imitation of reality. Against this attitude, Delacroix maintains: (1) that the starting point of art is imagination, invention; (2) that this invention, or imagination, or "personal feeling," is the only thing that can give unity to a work of art (nature itself has no such unity) ; (3) that in order to create this unity, the painter must eliminate from his work all that is irrelevant to it: "Personal feeling alone can give unity, and the one way of achieving this is to show only what deserves to be seen" (p. 397) ; (4) this systematic elimination of what, because it is irrelevant to the painting in question, does not deserve to be seen is what Delacroix calls "sacrifice"; in this sense, the need to make sacrifices exactly measures the distance between art and the reproduction of physical reality.

27. "This is where the power of making to be, at the human level, appears in the purest and most absolute manner. For it seems evident to me that, in art, the form is not to be justified by norms of moral goodness, nor by norms of true knowledge, but by ontological norms only. This simply signifies that the true work of art is the one that is—that is to say, the work of art whose form truly is a capture of being, under the formal conditions imposed by the human mode of existence. So also, in art, the misfit is not malice, nor is it ugliness understood in the sense of disobedience to a set of aesthetic rules, nor is it ignorance or deficiency in knowledge, but, rather, it is inexistence, non-being, lack of a coherency whose ontological efficacy would be due to the force of one single law." (Hersch, pp. 17-18.) These lines so perfectly express what we are striving to establish that we would not hesitate to assume the responsibility for what they say. Only one line ("under the formal conditions imposed by the human mode of existence") recalls to us that, writing under the spell of idealism, the author has perhaps not yet found the true ontology of her phenomenology.

28. Even Baudelaire, who had a good command of words, sounds somewhat naïve in his negative criticisms. For instance, concerning Horace Vernet's Prise de la Smalah d'Abd-el-Kader: "It is truly painful to see an intelligent man floundering about in such a mess of horror. Good Heavens, has M. Horace Vernet never seen the works of Rubens, Veronese, Tintoretto, Jouvenet?" (The Mirror of Art, p. 9.) We all have seen them, and still we cannot paint as Veronese did. Again (p. 16) : "Boulanger's Sainte Famille is detestable. His Bergers de Virgile, mediocre. His Baigneuses, a little better than Duval-Lecamuses or Maurins; but his Portrait d'homme is a good piece of painting." Again (p. 17) : "Schnetz. Alas! what is to be done with these vast Italian pictures? We are in 1845, but we are very afraid that Schnetz will be giving us the same kind of thing ten years from now." The truth of these appreciations is not at stake; we only wish to suggest their utter vacuity. When negativism in judgments extends even to paintings that have not yet been done, it seems to overstep its own limits.

29. Leslie, p. 281. — Cf. the fragment of a letter of William Collins to Leslie (pp. 278-79) : "I mentioned to you his [Constable's] admirable remark upon the composition of a picture, namely, that its parts were all so necessary to it as a whole, that it resembled a sum in arithmetic; take away or add the smallest item, and it must be wrong." "The world is wide; no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other" (p. 273).

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