Preface - Painting and Reality

by Etienne Gilson

The literature about painting has become so abundant that one feels somewhat guilty for adding one more volume to its already impressive bulk. Whether there was any justification for doing so is a question whose answer will ultimately hang on the free judgment of every reader. My only intention in writing this introduction is to dispel one of the misunderstandings that this book is likely to create in many minds.

There is only one justifiable approach to painting, and it is neither archaeology, nor history, nor science, nor art criticism, nor philosophy; it is paintings. Far from being a precautionary statement, this is one of the main conclusions that I hope to establish. Painters are fully qualified to say what their own art is, and a philosopher would simply make himself ridiculous if he undertook to tell them how to paint.

I hope to avoid this mistake. In my intention, at least, this is not a philosophical approach to painting, but, rather, a pictorial approach to philosophy. My own problem exactly is: what has a philosopher to learn from painting? This book, therefore, is the work of a philosopher asking himself philosophical questions on what he happens to know about a certain art. Just as we can philosophize about science, about history, or about religion, so also we can philosophize about art. The first chapter of this book will make clear, I hope, the reason it has seemed advisable to confine this inquiry to what philosophy can learn only from the art of painting.

Such preliminary remarks are not likely to create an atmosphere of good will and of mutual understanding between artists and philosophers. If a philosopher says anything about their art, painters find it hard to believe that he is talking about philosophy, not about painting. This is an evil to which I know no remedy. At any rate, painters will perhaps notice how careful I have been to listen to what they themselves had to say concerning the nature of their own work, its essence and its end.

Assuredly, when they write about painting, painters themselves become philosophers, and their own statements suffer from the difficulty of applying words to any one of the silent arts. Yet, when all is said and done, a fundamental difference remains between artists and philosophers, even when works of art are the common object of their reflections. Philosophers start from art in the hope that its study will open new vistas on philosophical problems to them, whereas artists, when they philosophize, do so in the hope of clearing up for themselves difficulties inherent in their art. In consulting artists about the nature of painting, I did not expect philosophical conclusions from them that art cannot possibly provide, but I wanted to make at least reasonably sure that my own conclusions were not wholly irrelevant to what painters themselves call the art of painting. In his first lecture at the Royal Institution, May 26, 1836, John Constable declared himself "anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information on painting." I hope that, from this point of view at least, this book would have given John Constable some measure of satisfaction.

Such as they are, my conclusions will be found to arise at the meeting point of two entirely different disciplines: metaphysics and the concrete reality of the painted works of art. My first publication concerning the philosophy of art was written in November—December, 1915, and published the next year, in the Revue de metaphysique et de morale, under the title "Art et metaphysique." That was forty years ago, and during this long space of time, many things have happened to art as well as to my own metaphysics.

In art, we have witnessed the boldest creative experiment ever attempted during the whole evolution of the art of painting. With admirable and penetrating lucidity, the artists themselves have done their utmost to explain to their public the meaning of initiatives by which, not feeling their inner necessity, even the onlookers of good will could not help being puzzled. In metaphysics, a purely personal evolution led the author of the 1915 article to the rediscovery of the solid, down-to-earth realism of the classical metaphysics of being as interpreted by St. Thomas Aquinas.

This book would not have been written without the invitation extended to me by the Trustees of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. I wish to avail myself of this opportunity to express to them my heartfelt gratitude for inviting me to reconsider, in a new light, a problem that had never ceased to haunt my mind for forty years. In accepting the invitation, I was committing myself to the task of interpreting the evolution of the art of painting, especially that of its most recent phase, in the light of the classical metaphysics of being.

On this point, however, it will not be amiss to dispel a widespread illusion. Because they know the first principles in whose light all the rest becomes intelligible, metaphysicians sometimes imagine that the knowledge of the principles enables them to deduce from these principles the knowledge of all the rest. No attempt will be found in this book to achieve any such deduction. The only persons who know anything about painting as a creative art are the painters themselves; metaphysicians as such know nothing about it. Only, since modern painters have begun to worry about the nature of their art as well as about its relationship to the world of visible realities, they themselves have raised "metapictorial" problems to which the art of painting itself can give no answer. In such cases, the metaphysician must learn from the painters the data of the problems, after which he can feel justified in trying to see whether the light of the first principles does not facilitate their solution. Metaphysics essentially is a wisdom. Its proper function is not to do away with art, but, rather, to develop from art, in order to reveal it to art itself, the fullness of its own intelligibility.

In his Introduction to Aesthetics and History, Bernard Berenson has rightly observed that "no little of the sterility of art theory, and the un-satisfactoriness of art history, from late antiquity to our own day, is due to the failure to state at the outset whether one is thinking from the point of view of the producer of the work of art, or of the consumer." This is a very sensible challenge indeed. My own answer to it is that, in so far as I am aware of its place, the center of perspective in this book will be found to be neither the producer nor the consumer, but, rather, the work of art taken in itself as well as in its relationship to the world of natural reality.

For reasons that will be given in the book itself, the plates do not pretend to place real paintings under the eyes of the readers. Their strictly functional role is to substantiate, or, at least, to exemplify statements made in our text about certain paintings. The real paintings are not here, not even under the form of "reproductions." Real works of art can be found only in the seclusion of private homes, on the walls of certain public buildings, or in those galleries of art wherein, when these are allowed to fulfill their essential function, art lovers find a place of felicity, of light, and of peace.

ETIENNE GILSON
Toronto, December 5, 1955

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to the following persons who greatly helped me when, in the spring of 1955, I gave at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the six A. W. Mellon Lectures out of which this book has grown: Huntington Cairns, without whom this book would not have been written; Macgill James, assistant director of the National Gallery of Art, who assembled the slides and always was of excellent advice; Richard S. Zeisler, New York, who found for me the writings of several modern painters; and Lionel Trilling, professor of English at Columbia University, who helped me out of a semantic difficulty.

Acknowledgments are due to Professor Lane Cooper, Ithaca, for giving permission to use the pages we have quoted from his translation of Plato's Republic; to D.H. Kahnweiler for a hard-to-find photograph of a painting by Juan Gris and for permission to quote from his book on Juan Gris published by Curt Valentin; to the painter Alfred Reth, Paris, for photographs of two of his works; to Mr. and Mrs. A. S. J. Zacks, Toronto, for a photograph of a painting by Derain in their collection; to Martin Baldwin, Director of the Art Gallery of Toronto, for a photograph of the Gleizes painting; to Hayward Cirker, president of Dover Publications, for his gracious permission to quote material from Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art; and also to the following publishing firms for permission to quote from the works indicated: Art News, for James Johnson Sweeney's essay on Miro; Jonathan Cape, for Eric Gill's Letters and Edward MacCurdy's Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci; Cassel and Co., for Gill's Art-Nonsense and Other Essays; Phaidon Press, for Delacroix's Journal, Eugene Fromentin's The Masters of Past Time, and the Mayne edition of Leslie's Memoirs; Wittenborn, Schultz, for Hans Arp's On My Way; and Harold Holtzman, for Mondrian's Plastic Art etc. Various other institutions and individuals who co-operated in making photographs available are detailed in the List of Plates, and to all of these my thanks.

E. G.

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