The Significance of Modern Painting

by Etienne Gilson

[NOTE: We recommend keeping the list of plates open in a separate tab so you can switch tabs to consult the plates.]

By the "significance of modern painting" we mean all that the preceding considerations can suggest to a philosopher concerning the ultimate nature of reality. Such views of the mind are limited in a twofold way. First, they hang on the nature of the particular problem from which they are taken: only a limited number of determined questions can be asked about the world from the point of view of the art of painting. Next, such considerations are still more limited by the particular approach of the philosopher to this particular problem. The fact that the art of painting seems to have reached a critical point in its history can be said, in a sense, to dominate the discussion of the whole problem. An observer asking the same questions two centuries from now will find himself confronted with new forms of the same problem, even perhaps with new problems. Another observer living in our own times and asking the same questions would probably consider them in the light of different facts. But may we not hope that, in the last analysis, all these different approaches and all these differently formulated conclusions will ultimately point out a common truth?

The significance of modern painting is perhaps better seen when painting is compared with other arts, such as music, in which, because it consists of sounds only, imitation is practically impossible. Imitative music is immediately recognized for what it is. In the "Pastoral" Symphony, it occupies about the same place and fulfills the same function as that of certain "collages" in cubist paintings. In both cases the creative nature of art is emphasized by the insertion, in the musical piece or in the painting, of a fragment of reality. But even among what have often been called the "arts of design," there is at least one that has never been submitted to the servitude of imitation—namely, architecture. There is nothing in the material used by architects that is not likewise included in sculpture or painting. Solid materials, such as those used by sculptors, are assembled by architects in a certain order and according to certain proportions; architecture has lines, volumes, geometrical intelligibility immediately perceptible to sight, tone values due to the ceaselessly changing way in which light plays over the accidents of its surface; architecture can even make use of color if it chooses, and still architecture is not, has never been, and is not even now in danger of becoming an art of imitation.

Some painters, wholly unrelated to the nonimitational school, have clearly discerned this eminent dignity of architecture.¹ Their remarks give full meaning to the old tradition, mostly Greek in origin, that associated music with the birth of certain famous architectural masterpieces. And, indeed, in a sense architecture is a sort of solidified music. A building is like a stone symphony whose parts coexist in space instead of succeeding one another in time. In neither one of these two arts is there any direct imitation of nature. There are caves in nature, but there are no houses, still less temples, community centers, or commemorative buildings of any kind. True enough, architecture, too, has its own artistic limitations. Functional architecture, which comes under the heading of engineering rather than of the fine arts, is a perfectly legitimate and necessary type of architecture; there is hardly a building in which functional considerations do not play a determining part; only, to the extent that they do, architecture pursues another end than beauty—that is to say, that quality which enables an object to please the eyes.

Since they are man-made realities without any model in nature, buildings can be considered so many additions to the world of natural objects. This is so true that one of the latest additions to the body of scientific disciplines, human geography, has often incorporated the study of human habitations in the general description of the face of the earth, which is geography. In beginning to build houses, man was simply continuing the natural process by which nature evolves animal shells. The process is different, and shells are usually more beautiful than houses, but, in both cases, the result is an increase in the number of existing beings, not the duplicating of some of them by a set of images whose only end is to be their imitations. There is therefore a possible use of lines, surfaces, and colors other than the imitational use that is still so often considered coessential with painting.

Strangely enough, it seems that primitive arts exhibit the same lack of interest in the imitational reproduction of visual appearances. The reason usually given for this is that primitive artisans could not, and still cannot, achieve the perfect resemblance that is supposed to be the ideal of sculpture and painting. This is tantamount to saying that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written in verse because their authors could not have written them in prose. It does not take into consideration another possibility—that as soon as they undertake to create, men go straightway not to that which is more useful or more obvious, but to that which is noble, more beautiful, and therefore more important. It is more important to create a being whose justification is in itself than to turn out endless clever images of such beings. If it is a true painting, a simple still life creates a new pattern of plastic forms well calculated to please the eye. Images add nothing to existing reality;(81) artistic creations do increase the sum total of the objects whose reality is as certain as their intelligibility.

An obvious fact should suffice to convince us all of this truth. The development of art history and art criticism parallels the admirable development of modern science. Neither art criticism nor science would exist if art and nature did not first provide them with an objective reality to study. Being comes before knowledge; because it is art, painting stands on the side of being.

This applies to the history of painting from the early Middle Ages to our own times. The unanimous admiration for Giotto expressed by practically all painters who ever wrote probably can be attributed to a felicitous blending of incipient imitation with a large proportion of the artistic creativity of Byzantine art. Up to Giotto, paintings continue to be, like human dwellings, so many products of the human power to add artifacts to the number of natural beings. Such artifacts are beings produced by nature through the agency of man, himself a product of nature. Petrarch and Laura never lived in Pistoia,(83) but if an artist puts them there, they will eternally be passing before its cathedral. We beg to suggest that the art of painting always keeps faith with its own essence when, whatever its date, local origin, and style, it fulfills this creative function.²

But man has other functions to fulfill. Besides that of making, he also fulfills those of doing and knowing. This assertion, which probably sounds metaphysical to the ears of our contemporaries, would have been maintained as strictly biological by Aristotle, as indeed it is. Leaving aside the order of morality, which is that of doing, we can state as a bare fact that, if there were no men in the world of nature, reality would no more be aware of its own existence and of its own intelligibility than of its power to increase the sum total of beauty in the cosmos. It' is now customary, in certain circles, to poke fun at the simplicity with which the Greeks, then the Christians, expressed their admiration for that peerless natural being, man, but this admiration was much more justified than the present tendency to vilify human nature by reducing it to the common level of brute life. Even apart from any theological assumption, it remains a scientifically objective fact that, through man, and through him alone, nature finally achieved self-awareness. Science is the name for this outstanding achievement.

During the long episode that lasted from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of nonrepresentational art, painters, instead of remaining firmly established on the ground of nature, progressively or regressively shifted over to the ground of imitation, representation, and, in short, exchanged making for knowing. Imitation—that is, representation of reality as it appears to be—stands on the side of science or, to use a more modest word, knowledge. Reduced to its simplest expression, the function of modern art has been to restore painting to its primitive and true function, which is to continue through man the creative activity of nature. In so doing, modern painting has destroyed nothing and condemned nothing that belongs in any one of the legitimate activities of man; it has simply regained the clear awareness of its own nature and recovered its own place among the creative activities of man.³

The evolution of modern painting entails consequences that go beyond the boundaries of pure art. Because these consequences are philosophical in nature, no painter should be made responsible for them. As to philosophers, it is too easy to foresee that, even if they agreed to discuss these problems in the light of what precedes, each of them would draw a different set of conclusions from the same facts. We shall therefore content ourselves with pointing out the main lines of thought that, as far as we can see, would best agree with the suggestions made by painters themselves in those of their writings which we have read.

Starting from the last conclusion to which modern painters have led us, one seems to be well founded in saying that their common ambition is to bring art closer to nature than it seems to have been ever since, considering itself a sort of speculative approach to truth, it began to take sides with knowing against making. Many painters now tend to consider themselves natural forces sharing in the fecundity of nature and their works so many beings produced by nature through their own art. Everything invites them to adopt such an attitude—first of all, their recent rediscovery of the nonimitational character of painting qua painting, but also their increasing awareness of the biological affinities between the conception and birth of a painting and those of any living being. In Herbert Read's words: "Aesthetic activity is biological in its nature and functions."⁴ If we remember that the life of man is that of an animal endowed with intellectual knowledge, we shall not fail to use the term "biological" in the fullness of its meaning. To make works of art is proper to man, and it differentiates human evolution from common animal evolution precisely because the life of an intellectual animal is essentially different from that of any other known species of living beings.

The peril that threatens this recent orientation in the field of aesthetics is precisely to forget that, if the study of intellectual life belongs to biology, as could be gathered from the study of Aristotle's treatise On the Soul, biology itself has to broaden its field to make room for the disciplines that deal with the problems related to knowledge, action, and creation. In the present case, a deep difference separates the natural production of things and beings from the production of works of art by man. The fact that all artists designated it by the word "creation," which is borrowed from Christian theology, clearly shows that the biological process by virtue of which paintings come to be is somewhat different from the natural evolution of animals from their conception to their birth. The distinction of the two biological levels that has just been suggested finds here its necessary application.

In speaking of creation, no artist normally imagines himself a rival of the supreme being Paul Cezanne used to call Deus Pater Omnipotens. Some artists may have been tempted by pride, but few succumbed to the temptation. Yet the sole fact that such an illusion was at least possible proves that the making of works of art implies a feeling of power and of domination over matter analogous to those which religion attributed to God. We have noted several expressions of this creative exaltation written by various painters, but some of them have carried their observation deeper and attempted to say in what sense, although the formula could not be taken as literally true, they felt justified in describing their work as creation.

Seen from without, works of art are characterized by their amazing diversity. Civilizations, countries, schools, individual artists, all leave behind paintings recognizable by their styles and bearing the marks of their various origins. Seen from within—that is, from the point of view of their authors—these paintings are characterized by their imprevisibility. Naturally, history does not hesitate to explain how, and for what reasons, the art of painting has followed the evolution that it has taken. What has not yet been seen is a painter able to foretell the future evolution of his art or the probable development of his own career, or even, when he begins a new painting, what this particular work will look like after being completed. Unless we are mistaken, what the term "creation" expresses in the writings of artists is precisely that character of "novelty" which is so typical of artistic production. Far from proceeding with the mechanical previsibility of natural operations, whose effects are always more or less previsible and, as they say, determined, art is full of ignorances, uncertainties, and surprises for the artist himself, who sometimes sees his work docilely following his decisions, sometimes entering ways he had not foreseen.

These two characteristics of imprevisibility and liberty are the more remarkable in that, according to the unanimous consent of painters, nothing is more dangerous for them than to trust to luck. The kind of imprevisibility that characterizes the work of art is very different from that which attends chance. No true artist will leave anything to chance; only, when everything has been foreseen, prepared, and calculated, the creative painter still does not know what his work is going to be. What he has calculated is less his work than the way he is going to do it. An artist somewhat resembles a man who, before making a decision of vital importance, collects all the facts relevant to the case, weighs the various decisions that are possible, calculates their probable consequences, and still does not know how his will ultimately will decide. These are the classical moments of the philosophical description of a free act. Just as previsibility attends determination, imprevisibility attends liberty. The true meaning of the word "creation" in the writings of painters is practically the same as that of the word "liberty" when it is understood in this sense. As Eric Gill once said, the artist does not create de nihilo, but he does create de novo. This is so true that when we want to say of an artist that he has had his day, we simply say that he is unable to renew himself. A self-repeating artist has reached the end of his creative activity.⁵

Remarkably enough, the questions we ask about the probable future of a painter's career, or, for that matter, about the probable future of the art of painting in general, are similar to the questions an observer could have asked, many millenniums ago, concerning the probable development of life on the surface of the earth. Even now, confronted with the results of these millenniums of change, modern science does not find it too easy to explain how this change took place. The word "evolution" remains a symbol for a demonstrated explanation still to come. We simply do not know.⁶ But if it is true that man is part and parcel of nature, and that artists are men, then their personal experience of artistic creativity should be able to unveil to us some of the secrets of the inventiveness of nature. Unless we decide that man is unrelated to the cosmos in which he lives, what happens in him must bear some relationship to what is happening to the whole of which he is a part. What happens in painters suggests the presence, at the origin of universal becoming, of an inner force of invention and creativity that, everywhere at work in the world of matter, achieves self-awareness in the mind of artists.

This approach to the cosmic problems discussed by scientists and philosophers is neglected by almost all philosophers. The reason for this is that philosophy itself is knowledge, and since knowledge must be true to exist, philosophical problems are usually related to the truth of certain propositions. Now, truth is the conformity of intellection with its object. Consequently, where there is no object, there is no truth. This consequence entails another one. If there are forces or energies in the world whose operations cause effects that are new in both existence and nature, philosophers feel naturally inclined to disregard them as irrelevant to their own discipline. In this, science in no way differs from philosophy. Always ready to account for works of art, and even for artists, once artists have already produced their works, science is unable to say anything sensible about the very act by which works of art are being produced by artists. Some painters have been so acutely aware of the opposition between the respective attitudes of artists and scientists toward reality that they expressed their dislike of scientists in somewhat crude term⁷ But there is no opposition between art and science; there simply is a real distinction between their functions. The very possibility of science presupposes the existence of realities produced by art, or by a still higher power than that of artists and of art. By definition, science is not qualified to deal with what it presupposes. When science attempts to deal with what it itself naturally presupposes, it simply denies the existence of such problems or of such realities. The natural tendency of science and speculative philosophy is to consider their intellectual formulations of reality equivalent to reality itself. True enough, philosophers and scientists are well aware of the fact that they do not know everything; on the contrary, they often declare that what they know is little in comparison with what still remains to be known; but they also believe that what remains to be known will be found to be homogeneous in nature with what they already know.

If there are forces or energies in the world productive of novelty, the only discipline that can directly communicate with them is art, any art, provided only it keeps faith with its own essence, which is that of a creative activity in the order of formal being. When approached from the point of view of art, reality becomes very different from what it seems to be when seen from the point of view of speculation. It is being only to the extent that becoming is being. Art introduces us to a world of forms whose final completion is the outcome of a sort of biological growth.⁸ But even this is not quite true, for biological growth does not seem to have any choice, whereas artists are in quest of forms that only their own free choice is able to determine. Nor should we feel surprised to hear some of them describe their attitude as one of obedience to an "internal necessity," for, indeed, the long and ascetic preparation that precedes artistic creation has precisely for its object to eliminate the obstacles—perceptions, images, imitational urges, acquired habits, and even skill—that stand in the way of the new germinal form and impede its materialization. The internal necessity to which an artist must submit is not a necessity for his will. The internal necessity by which creative artists often feel bound is that of the very form to which their own free will chooses to give actual existence in a matter fittingly disposed to receive it. Other disciplines, such as, for instance, ethics, can introduce philosophers to the problems related to the freedom of doing; art is the only approach we have to the freedom of making.

This is to say that art invites philosophy to take into serious consideration problems for which philosophers exhibit little interest.⁹ In Plato's doctrine, all questions related to existence as well as to the causes and origins of things are kept out of the domain of science properly so called and reserved for probable opinion, which expresses itself under the form of narratives, or myths. Plato's Timaeus is the best example of such an approach to these problems. In the philosophy of Aristotle, on the contrary, there are no such things as myths, so all problems related to origins disappear at once. The world of Aristotle is eternal, indestructible, as well as uncreated, and all the fleeting beings that ceaselessly come to be and pass away are nothing more than temporary embodiments of their eternal and immutable species. Only the accidental is new in the world of Aristotle; it is no wonder, then, that when the time came for him to define art, he found nothing better to say about it than to reduce it to imitation. What else could he have done? Both philosophy and science are hostile to becoming, except, of course, to the becoming that brings nothing really new into the world and does not endanger previsibility.

Theology has often favored similar views, for the simple reason that, since they had to credit God with science, many theologians naturally conceived him by analogy with a perfect human scientist. But there were difficulties. The first one was that, since Aristotle had not had to solve any problem of origins, he had had no use for the notion of Ideas. It thus became imperative for theologians to supplement Aristotle with Plato. Now, this simply cannot be done. Philosophies just are not that way. One cannot possibly retain ninety-five per cent of Aristotle and add five per cent of Plato to it. If one does, the resulting mixture is plain incoherence. So theologians have had no other choice than to evolve their own notion of the creative power of God and of the way in which this power has been exercised. This has led them to two conclusions that, rather hard to reconcile from the point of view of man, must needs be actually reconciled, in fact, if there is a God. One of these conclusions is that, since the divine science must needs be perfect, the future of the universe must eternally remain an open book before the sight of God. The second one is that, since there are freedom and contingency in the universe, the perfect knowledge that God has of the future does not prevent contingency and freedom from playing their parts in the general history of the world. Various theological answers have been given to this essentially theological problem; the only point we are concerned with, as philosophers, is the fact that an exclusively speculative approach to the problem is bound to minimize the elements of novelty and natural imprevisibility which must be present in a world created by the free will of an all-powerful God. The reason for this assertion can be stated in a few words: if all effects resemble their causes, a freely created world must exhibit at least some traces of the free creative power of its Author.

This is the reason why, despite resemblances in terminologies, the created universe of Christian theologians has never been identical with the uncreated universe of Aristotle; but the same reason probably accounts for this other fact, that when modern artists undertook to investigate the nature of their own activity, they spontaneously resorted to the creationist terminology of Christian theologians. As often happens, while speculating in the light of its own principles, theology is here acting as a guiding star for philosophers considering the nature of the world as well as for artists considering the nature of art.

If there is such a thing as a divine art, it must be very different from our own. First of all, our own art never creates in the proper sense of the word. It does not create its matter; it does not even properly create its forms. Human art simply assembles the elements of composites that, once made, are possessed of their own forms for the sole reason that they are.¹⁰ Moreover, if one can speak of God as of the supreme Artist, his art is certainly innocent of any groping and of any becoming due to what would be for him the incomplete previsibility of his own works. Unlike the Ideas of Plato, those of Christian theology are one with the very being of the Creator; unlike the Prime Mover of Aristotle, the Christian Creator of the world has Ideas of all things known by him and creatable by his power. For this very reason, nothing that happens can possibly be new in the sight of God. Yet, when all is said and done, the God of the Jews and of the Christians did create the universe, and if this was nothing new in him, it certainly was the beginning of all newness in the created world itself. According to Christian theology, creative power belongs to God alone, and the world of creation owns no parcel of it. But it does not take a divine power to achieve novelty in the communication of existence and in the forming of man-made beings. This is what artists do. It is what modern painting has done in the highest degree, and, be it for this reason only, it deserves the careful consideration of philosophers, even perhaps of theologians.

Metaphysicians and theologians usually say that, since effects resemble their causes, created beings resemble their Creator. Because his very essence is to be the pure act of being, the world created by God is, or exists. Because this existence of the world is due to the efficacy of the divine power acting as a cause, we see all the beings included in God's creation causing, acting, and operating in their diverse ways and according to their different natures. Things, Thomas Aquinas liked to say, imitate God in that they are and in that they are causes. Such are the painters, whose works add to the beauty of the world. Painters are the makers of new visual forms whose proper function is to make intelligibility perceptible to human sight.

This is the most solid ground there is for speaking of a religious art. In a created universe whatever exists is religious because it imitates God in its operations as well as in its being. If what precedes is true, art, too, is religious in its very essence, because to be creative is to imitate, in a finite and analogical way, the divine prerogative, exclusively reserved for HE WHO IS, of making things to be. Now, as has already been seen, to make things be and to make them beautiful are one and the same thing.¹¹ Each artist, then, while exerting his often anguished effort to add new types of beings to those which make up the world of nature, should be conscious of the resemblance between his finite art and the infinitely perfect efficacy of the divine power. All truly creative art is religious in its own right.

By the same token, the meaning of the words "Christian art" becomes at once apparent. The problem does not arise in connection with picturing conceived as an art distinct from painting properly so called. Some religions exclude images; others do not hesitate to appeal to them as to visual aids in the teaching of religious truth. Christianity has always done so, the more willingly as, upholding the truth of the substantial unity of man, the Church has always associated, in both cult and prayer, the mind of man, his affectivity, and his activity. It seems therefore evident that picturing fulfills in Christian worship an important function, whose proper end is inscribed in its very nature and which cannot possibly reach this end without resorting to imitational art. The subject here is of primary importance, and nothing is more legitimate in it than to do what most creative artists would consider an abomination: to rely upon the subject more than upon the art as a source of emotion. In religious imagery, this is not only legitimate; it is necessarily required by its very end. He to whom a bare wooden cross does not suffice is perhaps not so wholly Christian as he should be; he who sees in a crucifix the thing of beauty it may well be, but nothing else, is not a Christian at all. The art of doing Christian pictures does not exclude the possibility of doing Christian paintings; (84, 85) by itself, however, it necessarily is representational art.¹²

This answer is but indirectly related to the problem of creative Christian art. On the contrary, the fact that all the main moments of human life have a religious significance lies at the very center of the question. Ever since the birth of Our Lord, the birth of every child is a nativity. There is, in a Christian universe made up of created beings, a direct invitation to artists to join in the praise of God by co-operating with his creative power(86a, b) and by increasing, to the extent that man can do so, the sum total of being and beauty in the world. This is the more instantly required when the works to be produced by human art are primarily destined to a specifically religious use. There then is an inner affinity between the intended end and the means to be employed to reach it. Religion can survive without art; it even survives in spite of the fact that its churches have largely become so many temples dedicated to the exhibition of industrialized ugliness and to the veneration of painted nonbeing. But when Christian artists are called upon to celebrate the glory of God by cooperating, in their modest human manner, with the work of creation, it becomes imperative that their own works be things of beauty. Otherwise, these works would not truly be, and the artists themselves would contribute nothing.

Philosophers, too, have something to learn from a careful examination of art under all its forms. In the case of painting, we find ourselves enriched with privileged information concerning the way physical beings come to be. It would be somewhat naïve to imagine nature acting as an artist—that is to say, as a man—but the fear of this kind of anthropomorphism should not make us fall into another error, which consists in believing that man is in himself a separate being, self-sufficient and wholly different from the universe that includes him. The physical energies that move the world of matter crop up, so to speak, in man's self-awareness of himself as well as of his operations.

It is difficult for us, who are not sharing in their creative power, to formulate inferences based upon what artists say. There would be no excuse for taking such liberties if they themselves were not so often found struggling for words in an effort to go beyond the limits of their own personal experience and to reach conclusions valid for all men. They do not all use the same formulas, but the diversity of their language points out a common truth for which perhaps there are no adequate words. The world in which creative painters live appears to them, not at all as an obstacle, but as something that must be transcended. Assuredly, for them as men, the world of nature (87) is the very same reality it is for us and that we share in common with them, but for them as painters, it is not in the world of nature that ultimate reality lies. They feel that there is still another reality hidden behind the appearances of nature and that it is their own function to discover it in order to express it, or, rather, to express it in order to discover it; for, indeed, this metareality has to be made to be before being made to be known. The constantly recurring opposition of painters of all schools(88a) to the literal imitation of nature finds its deepest justification in this feeling. Nor is this conviction peculiar to painters alone. The "poetic principle" invoked by Edgar Allan Poe, which he simply calls "a sense of the Beautiful," seems to obey only one law—namely, not to be a mere repetition of the forms, the sounds, the odors of nature as well as of the common feelings with which they inspire all men.¹³ When Poe says that "mere repetition is not poetry," he wholly agrees with the conviction expressed by so many painters that to initiate new realities, not to repeat already existing ones, is the proper end of the art of painting.

The universe in which painters live is therefore a still incomplete one. With a heart full of misgivings, the artist sees himself as one of those whom destiny has elected to enrich the world with new beings. Others before him have been honored with the same mission, and their works are there to witness their success in fulfilling it. But this is no reason he himself should evade his duty, for just as he could not have done the works of his predecessors, nobody else could possibly do the works he seems to be called upon to produce.

The force that will cause their existence is, first of all, an irresistible urge to paint probably akin to the fundamental forces that have given rise to the impressive procession of the vegetal and animal species since the first appearance of life upon earth. Despite its intensity, this force is neither a blind impulse nor a lucid progression toward a clearly seen goal. It could be more justly compared to the groping of primitive forms, if the forms of nature possessed an awareness of their own becoming. A sort of inner sense of direction, not always immune to error, seems to direct both nature and artists toward their respective goals, which are the perfecting of one more being of nature or one more work of art.¹⁴

The most remarkable feature about this universe of creative artists is the particular relationship it reveals between being and intelligibility. The mechanically conceived universe of Rene Descartes, and all those which followed it to the end of the last century, were very different from the world in whose existence creative artists invite us to believe. Given a certain quantity of extended matter and the elementary laws of motion, Descartes could make bold to reconstruct a priori just such a universe as the one we live in. No artist ever lived in such a world. Not that there is less intelligibility in the universe of a modern painter than there was in the world of Descartes, but instead of preceding being, as it naturally does in a world for knowledge, intelligibility attends it and finds in it its very foundation in the world of intelligible qualities familiar to creative artists.(88b) It is a universe that is always trying to say more than has already been said, or, at least, to say it otherwise; but it does not yet know the sense of what it is about to say; the sense will be clear as soon as the words are found to say it. Yet there is surely going to be a sense; otherwise there would be no words. So also with paintings. All significant works of art, however much they may at first surprise the eye, the ear, or the mind, ultimately reveal the inner intelligibility without which they would not be. But it is in giving being to their works that painters themselves realize their intelligibility.

However we may interpret them—and artists are not responsible for the reflections inspired by their art—the facts on which these remarks are founded should remain present in our mind, be it only as so many invitations to pursue the dialogue with the discoveries of modern art as eagerly as we do with the discoveries of modern science. It would be difficult to say which ones are the more important, not indeed in the order of practical life, where applied science reigns supreme, but in the disinterested order of philosophical speculation. A lifetime is not too long to understand the message of so many paintings waiting for us everywhere on the surface of the earth, but one cannot begin too soon to listen to what it says. Nor should one be afraid to embark on the somewhat strange adventures to which we are invited by some of these masterpieces. It is only too possible that some of them will always remain for us like those secret domains of which, in dreams, we vainly try to find the key. In such cases, we shall never know who was at fault, but the odds are on genius. He who sincerely exposes himself to creative art and agrees to share in its ventures will often be rewarded by the discovery, made in joy, that an endlessly increasing accumulation of beauty is, even now, in progress on this man-inhabited planet. As a still higher level, he will know the exhilarating feeling of finding himself in contact with the closest analogue there is, in human experience, to the creative power from which all the beauties of art as well as those of nature ultimately proceed. Its name is Being.

Endnotes

1. "On architecture. It is itself the ideal, for everything in architecture is idealized by men. Even the straight line is man's invention; it exists nowhere in nature. . . . Architecture, unlike sculpture and painting, takes nothing directly from nature, and here it resembles the art of music—unless it be claimed that just as music recalls the noises of the outside world, so architecture echoes the dens of animals, the caves and the forest. But this is never direct imitation as we understand the word when we speak of the two arts that copy the exact forms to be found in nature." (Journal of Eugene Delacroix, p. 160 [September 20, 1852].)

2. "Actually, plastic art is manifested in two principal tendencies, the 'realistic' and the `abstract.' The first is viewed as an expression of our aesthetic feelings evoked by the appearance of nature and life. The latter is an abstract expression of color, form and space by means of more abstract and often geometric forms or planes; it does not follow nature's aspect and its intention is to create a new reality." (Piet Mondrian, "Liberation from Oppression in Art and Life," Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, p. 43.) The new reality at stake is what Mondrian calls "universal beauty" (universal, as liberated from the particular limiting forms) ; here again, the notion of creation in art excludes that of imitation (p. 50).

3. "This is an age in which the glories are shared by the money makers & the literary men. It is an age of money & an age of print. This is inevitable (vide Game, Dec. 1922, article 'Idiocy or Ill-Will') & one of the results is that the literary critic of works of art always seeks for and belauds only 'literary content' in such works &, where he finds none, weeps or howls. The painting of Giotto is admirable and the more remarkable because it is great painting in spite of his preoccupation with illustration or story telling. The painting of Cimabue is upon a higher plane, a more exalted plane, a plane more removed from representation & one upon which the painter finds himself face to face with God. It may well be maintained that the great Byzantine school deserves even greater honour for here was not simply one individual bathing in the vision of God but, as it seems, a whole people, & for several centuries, filled with the Holy Ghost. Their works are indeed the evidence—to the Jews a stumbling block, to the Gentiles foolishness, & to Mr. Chesterton & Sir William Orpen ugliness and dullness." (Letters of Eric Gill, pp. 179-80.)

4. The Philosophy of Modern Art, p. 13. We apologize for borrowing this perfect formula without subscribing to all the consequences that it entails in the mind of its author. It is important, however, that two authors whose general philosophies are so different should meet on such an important point, and that they should do so on the strength of two distinct analyses of the meaning of modern art considered as a sort of collective experiment. We would willingly subscribe to the following sentence (pp. 13-14) : "There is no phase of art, from the palacolithic cave-paintings to the latest developments of constructivism, that does not seem to be an illustration of the biological and teleological significance of the aesthetic activity in man." This view has been more fully developed in the Conway Memorial Lecture for 1951, given by the same author under the title of Art and the Evolution of Man. — By "constructivism," Read seems to mean the position maintained by Naum Gabo in "A Retrospective View of Constructive Art," included in Three Lectures on Modern Art.

5. "Plato's theory is right enough but does not go all the way. The word 'type' suggests one thing which is typical of many things. No doubt this is an important department of 'art'—the discovery of the type, the weeding out of the accidental & extraneous so that, as in a Hindu sculpture of a tree, all trees are resumed. But this job is only one department & not I think the most important—it is one of the arts but not the highest or most specifically artistic art so to say. The art which is art specifically & at its highest is that of pure creation—de novo, ad hoc & ex nihilo. This is God's art & not man's. But man, in the second degree, by virtue of 'free will' can create (not out of nothing but, de novo & ad hoc, out of what God has made). Thus he makes not types but uniques—things that represent nothing but themselves & of which there is & cannot be another example in the whole Universe of created beings." (Letters of Eric Gill, p. 235; cf. pp. 275-76.)

6. Biological evolution is a fact; what still remains obscure are the limits of this fact as well as the reasons that make it different from mere change. There is, as biologists say, "orthogenesis"—that is, "the process by which a certain number of characteristics are modified in evolution in the same direction and according to a principle of increasing unity" (Jean-Paul Aron, "The Problem of Evolution," Diogenes, VII 1:19541, 94, n. 5). This is what remains to be accounted for—namely, the very fact, known to all those who ever considered the most elementary facts in embryogeny, and which Aristotle explained by the notion of final cause. — On the present scientific formulation of these problems, see L. Cuenot, L'Evolution biologique. His conclusions are summed up in Jean-Paul Aron, P. 96.

7. See the comic hostility of Delacroix toward scientists in general, Journal, pp. 155-56 (May 6, 1852) , quoted above, p. 138, n. 5.

8. Art imitates nature (Aristotle, Physics, II, 2, 194a, 21). This saying is usually understood in the sense that the works of art strive to imitate the visual appearance of the works of nature. This is not what it means in Aristotle; the art he has in mind is medicine, which works as nature does. As Thomas Aquinas understands it, this famous saying means that art is to its operations and its works in the same relationship as nature is to its own operations and its own works. The whole doctrine has been summarized as follows: "The origin of what is made by art is the human intellect, itself derived, as some sort of resemblance, from the divine intellect, which is the origin of natural things. Whence it necessarily follows that the operations of art imitate the operations of nature, and also that the products of art imitate the products of nature." Man looks at the way God does things in nature in order to learn, as a good pupil, how to do his own works; but the two domains remain distinct because the works of nature are no works of art. "If art had to make things of nature, it would operate as nature does. But, on the one hand, nature does not bring any work of art to completion; it simply prepares certain of their elements and places under the eyes of artists, so to speak, a model of the way to operate. On the other hand, art may well examine the products of nature; it even can make use of them in order to perform its own works, but it cannot produce the works of nature. Whence it appears that with respect to the things of nature, human reason does nothing more than to know; but with respect to works of art, human reason both knows and makes ["est et cognoscitiva et factiva"]. Thus, those among the human sciences which are about natural objects are speculative, whereas those which are about man made things are practical, and about operations carried in imitation of nature." (Thomas Aquinas, In libros politicorum Aristotelis expositio, Prooemium, 1-2 [ed. Spiazzi, p. 1].) — The doctrine is sometimes expressed in saying that art imitates nature in operation rather than in representation: "ars imitatur naturam in operando, non in repraesentando."

9. Our own views on this philosophical problem are to be found in Being and Some Philosophers.

10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, 45, 5, 1st obj. and answer.

11. The perfect formula is given by Eric Gill (Beauty Looks After Herself, p. 66) : "Beauty—the word is a stumbling block. Do not let us stumble over it. Beauty is the Splendour of Being. The primary constituent of visible Being is Order."

12. In his Theories, Denis strongly protested against the excesses of the "expression by the subject" in religious art. In 1896, he did not hesitate to write that, although a masterpiece, it was with Vinci's Last Supper that religious painting "entered the way to perdition." If he represents a subject endowed with an emotional value of its own, as was here the case, the painter does not act upon our emotions through his work, but through his subject. The way was then open to Munkacsy, Tissot, "and all that is worse in religious art." From then on, it was going to be the subject alone that, in religious painting, would invite to worship (pp. 41-42). This perhaps is the shortest definition of the art Philistine: "He does not look at the painting; he sees nothing but the subject."

13. The Complete Tales and Poems, p. 893.

14. See Eric Gill's letter to William Rothenstein, February 25, 1917 (in Letters, pp. 88-89) : "I am speaking only of the actual work—the paint or the stone—and not at all of its significance or meaning or value in the abstract, what it's 'worth to God,' but simply what it is. On the one side are e.g.: Giotto, etc.; Persian Rugs; Bricks & Iron Girders; Tools, Steam engines; Folk Song; Plain Song; Caligraphy [sic] ; Toys (not some few modern ones tho.) ; Animals; Men & Women physically regarded; Hair; Lines; String; Plaited Straw; Beer & so on. On the other are Velazquez, Rembrandt, etc. No, this second list is too difficult—what I wish to convey is that such things as I name in the 1st. list & such things as young children's drawings & the works of savages are themselves actually a part of nature, organically one with nature and in no sense outside her—while, on the other hand, the work of Rembrandt & most moderns (the modern contribution—the renaissance) is not a part of nature but is apart from nature—is in fact an appreciation & a criticism of nature—a reviewing of nature as of something to be loved or hated. Good criticism is an excellent thing—why not? Well, it's no good trying to write all this—I wish we could meet & thrash it out." We intentionally preserve these last lines, as a symbol of the discouragement artists experience when they try to talk about art. Cf. the letter to Walter Shewring, March 28, 1933 (pp. 275-76), and to The Friend, July 14, 1933 (p. 277), where Gill forcibly restates his distinction between interpretative art and creative art—that is, "between the works which 'hold a mirror up to nature' and those which are themselves part of nature. It is clear that the characteristic works of post-Renaissance painters and sculptors are of the interpretative kind, while the works of the European and Indian middle ages and those of China, Mexico, Egypt and all 'primitive' and 'savage' peoples are of the other kind. They are 'natural' objects in the sense that they are the natural product of the kind of being that man is—a creature that needs things for use, who delights in making what he needs and who can only with difficulty be prevented from making things in such a way as that they please him when made."— Cf. Braque, Le Jour et la nuit, p. 13: "The painter does not strive to reconstitute an anecdote, but to constitute a pictorial fact?"

This item 10871 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org