Physical Existence
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This is a book about the kind of reality proper to paintings and their relation to the natural order. Deriving his information from the writings of the great painters, from Leonardo da Vinci through Reynolds and Constable up to Mondrian and Klee, Professor Gilson concludes that painting is foreign to the order of language and knowledge. Painting, he argues aims to add new beings to the beings of nature, not to represent them; and for this reason it must be distinguished from another art, that of picturing, which aims at producing images of actual or possible beings, not new beings. Though pictures play an important part in human life, they do not belong in the art of painting. Through this distinction, Professor Gilson shows that the evolution of modern painting makes positive sense, and he defines the present situation of this branch of art.
PHYSICAL EXISTENCE
The first question a philosopher should ask about paintings is related to their mode of existence. About what does not exist, there is nothing to say. About what does actually exist, the first point to be considered is the nature, or modality, of its existence.
Strictly speaking, the word being should be used only in connection with that which enjoys the fullness of being, without any restriction or qualification. Philosophers usually agree that, if there is a God, his nature precisely consists in enjoying the permanent possession of absolute being or, better still, in being it. Thus understood, the notion of being excludes those of change, of beginning and of end. Being is, and that is about all there is to say about it.
Even though we may have reasons to affirm its reality, no such being is given in human experience. All the things we see and touch are particular and qualified beings. They are so many entities that endure in time between the moment each of them comes to be and the moment each of them finally passes away. The type of reality that characterizes such entities is less that of being, properly so called, than that of becoming. This time-honored distinction goes back at least as far as Plato, but it still is familiar to our own contemporaries. Most of us would agree that the kind of entity proper to things given in human experience is "existence" rather than "being." To exist is to have the kind of being proper to things enduring in time between their coming to be and their passing away. No deduction is required to establish the fact that paintings belong in the category of those things which have existence. Each of them has come to be at a certain date, and, as will be seen later on, each of them is fated to cease to be in a more or less distant future. While they are enduring in time, pictures, or paintings, are so many "existents." For this reason, we shall feel justified in speaking of the existence of paintings, in asking about their mode, or modes, of existence; in short, we shall everywhere consider existence as the type of being that it is fitting to attribute to this particular class of works of art.
I. Physical Existence
The ontological nature of this approach to the study of painted works of art entails limitations to which philosophers and art critics rarely consent to submit. They are fond of talking about art in general, itself considered as an expression of what they call "poetry," that is, in the universal sense of this word, the primary process that is "the secret of each and of all arts."1 From this lofty point of view, there is no reason not to consider reflections about plastic arts as directly relevant to "poetry" understood in the universal sense that has just been defined.2 Not so in our own inquiry. Starting as we do from the fact that paintings are, or exist, we have no right to assume that their mode of existence has anything in common with that of other works of art. We do not even know a priori if there is such a thing as a universal "poetry" whose study would lead to conclusions equally valid for painting, for music, and for literature. Granting that there is an a priori probability in favor of this supposition, it should remain for us a supposition so long as separate inquiries have not confirmed it for each one of the various arts under consideration. In fact, if we consider the various kinds of works of art from the point of view of their specific natures as well as of the specific type of existence they enjoy, it becomes at once apparent that no common conclusion can apply to them all.
In order to simplify the problem, let us first examine separately what can be called the physical mode of existence of a work of art. By its "physical mode of existence" we intend to point out the mode of existence that belongs to it inasmuch as it is a physical object characterized by the same properties as any other object belonging in the same natural class. In the case of paintings, for instance, their physical mode of existence is practically identical with that of the very stuff of which they are made. In this sense, the mode of existence of a decorated wall is practically the same as that of any wall covered with a plain coat of paint, and this is true whether the painter be Botticelli, Michelangelo, or a modest house painter. In other words, the physical mode of existence of a painted wall, of a painted canvas, or of a painted wood panel is the same as that of the plaster, of the canvas, and of the wood on whose surfaces a certain coat of paint has been applied and continues to exist.
This is no place to analyze the mode of physical existence that belongs to works of art other than pictures. We must, however, give summary indications concerning some of them, be it only to invite further investigation and to make clearer what we have to say about the kind of existence that belongs to paintings. Let us consider, for instance, the kind of existence proper to poetry. In what sense can it be said of the Ode on a Grecian Urn that it is, or exists? In other words, in what sense can any poem be said to be an actually existing being?
To answer this seemingly simple question is, in fact, an exceedingly difficult task. Anybody who attempts to unravel this modest mystery soon understands for what reasons so few people have dared to approach it. In the beginning, everything is simple: a poem exists while somebody reads it or hears it being read. Its physical existence then is that of its reader, or that of the people who make up the audience to which it is being read. But while it is not being actually read, or heard, in what sense can it still be said to exist? What then remains of it is exactly what is left of Hamlet between any two of its private readings or of its public performances—that is to say, a certain number of letters printed in a certain order on some sheets of paper. The analysis of this ghostlike mode of existence would never end. It requires the existence of a poet inventing a poem in a certain language; the existence of a system of conventional signs standing for the various sounds and words constituting that language; the existence of a reader who, because he knows the language and can read, is able to reproduce, within his own mind, the same poem that first existed within the mind of the poet. Now, there is no necessary relationship between the conventionally adopted letters and the sounds for which they stand. Nor is there any necessary relationship between these articulate sounds, or words, and the things, or notions, they signify. Let us suppose a poem written in a language that scholars have not yet been able to decipher: the engraved stone or the parchment does indeed exist, and so does the would-be reader, but in what sense does the poem itself exist? There is no contradiction in imagining faraway times when stray copies of Shakespeare's plays will have survived all their possible readers; in what sense will Shakespeare's poetry then still exist? To this question the answer is: in the same sense as it does now exist for men who cannot read English. In short, it will not exist at all.
This is tantamount to saying that poetry has perhaps no physical existence of its own. But what about music? This time we are dealing with works of art whose physical existence is certain, but only within strangely narrow limits. The physical being of a musical piece, that which we could call its body, consists of sounds, that is, of vibrations in the gaseous mixture that envelops the earth, namely, air. The mode of existence of these vibrations is a physical one; yet it is very different from that of a solid body. Here again we cannot undertake the complete analysis of the mode of physical existence proper to music, but it will not be amiss to consider at least its first moments, to provide a point of comparison between music and painting.
In what sense can it be said of a musical piece that it is, or exists? In a first sense music exists, in the same way as poetry, under the form of conventionally acceptable signs, written or printed on sheets of paper and signifying, for those who know how to read them, certain sounds or combinations of sounds. These signs or musical symbols, printed in black on white paper, enjoy a physical existence, but they are not music.3 Music has no other actual existence than that of the actually existing sounds, and because sounds exist only while they are being actually produced, music exists only, precisely qua music, while it is being actually performed.
This entails the immediate consequence that musical pieces have a discontinuous mode of existence. A sonata, a symphony, or an opera endures as long as the time of its performance. As soon as an orchestral mass and the choirs it supports have sounded the last chord of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the whole structure vanishes into nothingness. Nothing of it is left except grateful memories and the hope to hear the same masterpiece again, or, rather, another rendering of it. But one never knows with absolute certitude that there ever will be another one. Countless ancient musical scores have been destroyed during the past centuries; the reading of those which have survived is full of problems whose answers are uncertain; many musical instruments once in use have now ceased to exist, or, at any rate, we no longer know how to play them. Apart from all such accidental difficulties, it is a fact that, between any two of its performances, a musical piece has no physical existence of its own, and the interval between two performances can be a very long one. Bach's Passion According to St. Matthew completely ceased to exist qua music during the time between Bach's death and its revival, largely owing to Mendelssohn's efforts, in 1829. Monteverdi's Orfeo had to wait a still longer time. In short, the mode of physical existence proper to music is discontinuous because it consists of sounds that have no subsistence of their own except while they are actually being produced.4
This character of music entails another one. Precisely because sounds lack the kind of substantiality proper to solid bodies, a musical piece has no simultaneous existence. It never enjoys the kind of total presence that naturally belongs to paintings. The remark is an old one. St. Augustine made it, many centuries ago, in the famous passage of his Confessions that deals with the paradoxical nature of time.5 His analysis of the mode of existence that belongs to a poem is directly applicable to a song, to a sonata, to a symphony. The fragmentary character of their existence is obvious. What do we actually hear of a sonata? Not the sonata as a whole. Not even one of its movements, its themes, or its bars; all that we actually hear of it at a time is one of its chords. While this one is actually sounding, the next one has not yet come and the preceding one has already ceased to be. Taken as a whole, a musical piece has no actual existence except in the mind, owing to our memory of the past and to our expectation of the future. Were we to express this ontological condition in the language of traditional philosophy, we would not refuse existence to music; on the contrary, we would describe music as the very type of that which, because it never is but ceaselessly becomes, is much less a being than an existent striving to be without ever quite doing it.
Whatever else it may be called, then, a musical piece cannot be said to be, in the full sense of the term, a thing. A painting, on the contrary, is typically a thing. In dealing with such primary notions as "being" and "thing," one cannot help feeling tempted to define them; but their definition is impossible precisely because these are the very first notions that occur to our intellect. Whatever we may say about them, they themselves are inevitably included in their attempted description. But actually existing things have at least certain well-known properties that make it possible for us to ascertain their presence.
The most striking one among these properties is well expressed by the German word that points out actual existence: Dasein.6 A thing is recognizable by the fact that it is there. The two notions of thing and of place are inseparable in our minds because, indeed, an actually existing thing is always somewhere. To the question, where is the "Kreutzer" Sonata? there is no answer. Its score is to be found in many places, because it is a thing; the sonata itself does not exist anywhere else than, ideally, in the minds of the music lovers who hear it or remember it after hearing it. Strictly speaking, it is nowhere. On the contrary, we can say with precision where a painting is to be found, and its location is the only place where it can really be seen. Because it is a thing, the Death of Procris(49), by Piero di Cosimo, occupies a certain place, and only one. If we want to see it, we must go to the National Gallery in London, for this is where it is and it can be seen nowhere else. But where is Parsifal? To the extent that music can ever be said to be, Parsifal exists nowhere in particular, unless we prefer to say that it exists everywhere it is being actually performed. Only, if we say so, we must remember that the only reason there can be two or three Parsifals existing at one and the same time in various parts of the world is that there is no such thing as a Parsifal subsisting somewhere, itself in itself, after the manner of a physical substance. On the contrary, each and every picture has its own Dasein, which cannot be duplicated. To the question, where is Veronese's Marriage Feast at Cana? the precise answer is, it is, at least for the present, in the Louvre, Paris, France. Similar answers could be given to all similar questions. When an art historian cannot answer one of them, he simply says that the picture in question is "lost." We shall have to come back later on to the consideration of this curious notion. Just now, let it suffice to say that even a "lost" picture is supposed to be somewhere, in an unknown place where it is peacefully continuing to exist.7
Let us consider more closely the implications of this doctrine. The more immediate and the more fundamental of these implications is that, strictly speaking, the mode of existence proper to pictures is practically the same as that of all material objects. This is so true that, in many cities whose artistic collections are still young, the same building can indifferently shelter a few paintings, some pieces of furniture, and even geological specimens or stuffed animals. All these are material objects, subsisting in definite places where each of them enjoys a continuous existence so long as no accident happens to destroy it. The perfectly obvious nature of this evidence should not render it trivial in our sight. On the contrary, to keep in mind such fundamental certitudes is the best way to protect ourselves against many confusions in art criticism and even in art history. All comparisons between painting and music should first take into account the radical difference there is between their respective modes of physical existence.8 They are not in the same way.
This is the reason many questions can be asked about paintings that cannot be asked about music. For instance, we shall have to discuss the kind of relationship that obtains between an original painting and its copies. And indeed such a question makes sense, for all painted copies can be compared with some actually existing original. Not so with music. True enough, there can be an indefinite number of performances of the Ninth Symphony, but there is no original prototype of that symphony with which each one of these performances can be compared and, by comparison with it, be judged. All that Beethoven has left us is a musical score; he has not left us a symphony in the same sense in which Michelangelo has left us the Moses of San Pietro in Vincoli, or, to confine ourselves to paintings, in the same sense in which Veronese has left us the Marriage Feast at Cana. Still another way to point out the same difference would be to say that it is possible to own a painting, be it even a Rembrandt or a Vermeer, but it is not possible to own a Beethoven sonata, or a symphony, except, of course, under the form of musical. scores that are neither sonatas nor symphonies. To own the original manuscript score of one of Haydn's quartets is in no way to own an original quartet, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Even the first performance of such a quartet, in Haydn's own lifetime and under his personal supervision, was but the first one of an indefinite series of possible performances, each of which was an original, and none of which could be considered the quartet at stake. The modern technique of recording performances and of multiplying such records does not modify the data of our problem. We can listen to one of the recordings of one of the possible interpretations of any musical score, but since the original of its ideally perfect interpretation does not exist in nature, we cannot point out the features whereby any such performance either keeps faith with this ideal original or betrays it.9 On the contrary, any painter can set side by side an original and one of its copies and show in what they differ, in what they are alike. All these facts (and many others that we shall have to discuss later on) necessarily follow from the physical mode of existence that belongs to paintings. To sum up, a painting is a solid, material thing, enduring in a certain place and enjoying a continuous mode of existence so long as it lasts. The whole ontology of painting rests upon this fundamental fact, which also accounts for the specific nature of our relations with painted works of art. These relations are not the same as those we have with the products of the other arts, precisely because, not having the same kind of being, poems, musical compositions, and paintings do not exist in the same way.
2. Aesthetic Existence
In what precedes, the words "physical existence" signify the existence of paintings conceived as simple material objects. To simplify the problem, we can consider each painting as constituting a single physical unit made up of a support (plaster, wood, plywood, canvas, cardboard, paper, etc.), its underpainting, and a coat of colors. But it can be objected that thus to consider a painting as any other material object is not to consider it as a painting at all. And, indeed, each and every material object that we can see and handle is likewise a solid, located in space and enjoying a continuous existence in time. From this point of view, there does not seem to be any difference between a painting and the brush of the painter or his easel. Hence the conclusion that, although the physical mode of existence of paintings may well differ from that of music, their artistic and their aesthetic modes of existence can nevertheless be the same. Like a poem or a musical piece, a painting has actual existence only during those moments that it is being actually experienced as a work of art.
This position has recently been maintained with great force by excellent aestheticians. In order to understand it, one must first remember the modern distinction introduced by philosophers between ontology and phenomenology. Ontology deals with being, or beings, such as they are in themselves, irrespective of the fact that they are apprehended or not as well as of the particular way in which they may happen to be apprehended. From this point of view, it is true to say that, like every other solid body, a painting continues to be that which it is, irrespective of the fact that it is being seen or not. Even artistic existence belongs to paintings irrespective of the fact that they are being experienced or not. The modern preponderance attributed to the point of view of the onlooker has finally led the aestheticians to reason as though to experience a painting as a work of art was to cause its existence as a work of art.10 In fact, just as a work of nature is such because it owes its existence to the efficacy of natural forces, so also a work of art is such because it is the work of a certain artist who has caused it to be by means of his own art. Up to what point our awareness of their artistic existence is implied in our aesthetic experience of paintings is a point to be discussed later. For the present, the point at stake is that the consideration of the artistic mode of existence of a painting, since it hangs on that of its efficient cause, belongs in ontology.
Phenomenology rests upon the assumption that, as it has been established by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we cannot speculate about what things are in themselves, since this would entail an attempt to know things such as they are while they are not being known. To avoid this contradiction, phenomenology substitutes, for the knowledge of things in themselves, the knowledge of things such as they are in human experience. In other words, what philosophers call a "phenomenon" is "being" as an object of experience. In the light of this distinction, it is commonly said that the only being of a painting in which we should take an interest is not its so-called physical being, but rather the phenomenological being that it has as an actually experienced work of art.
This is a good occasion to remember the great saying of Leibniz, that systems are true in what they affirm and false in what they deny. For, indeed, phenomenology is a very important discovery and it is here to stay. Even if its arrival should not prevent the survival of ontology, the fecund investigation of the manifold modes of phenomenological existence deserves to be carried on, as it has been ever since the time of Hegel, with increased care, but the aesthetic implications of this new philosophical attitude are not so simple as they seem to be in the eyes of some contemporary aestheticians.
Let us first observe that, from a strictly phenomenological point of view, the distinction should not simply be between a painting taken as a physical being and the same painting taken as an object of aesthetic experience. Philosophers are mainly concerned with knowing. Consequently, the type of phenomenological existence in which they are interested is the one that belongs to things inasmuch as they are being known. Now, the distressing fecundity of the notion of phenomenon is such that the analysis of no phenomenological being ever comes to an end. Because any object can enter human experience in a practically infinite number of different ways, the investigation of its various modes of existence—that is, its "phenomenology" —can be indefinitely pursued without ever exhausting the object in question.
This, which is both the greatness and the misery of phenomenology, can be verified in the case of paintings. Apart from having its physical existence, a painting has the being of that which is known and seen; but it can also exist as an object of aesthetic experience, which is a mode of being distinct from the two preceding ones. To the painter himself, a painting is first something to be done, but it also is something to be sold, and very great painters, such as van Gogh, have known the distance from a completed picture to a sold picture.11 Nor is this all, for the mode of existence of the painting we intend to buy is not the same as that of the same painting the art dealer is trying to make us buy. Still more modest modes of existence should be listed, even in the case of the greatest masterpieces. Paintings are things to be stored, or to be exhibited, or to be packed and carted or shipped; they are things to be dusted, repaired, restored, or more simply protected by guardians. As a mere suggestion, let us try to imagine what a world-famous masterpiece really would mean to us if we were in charge of seeing to it, eight hours a day, that no one should touch it, scratch it, or steal it.12 From the point of view of phenomenological existence, all these are so many different modes of being. Considering these various modalities of their existence, it is at least doubtful that all works of art can be said to exist in the same way. Many problems arise, in connection with paintings, that do not arise, at least under the same form, in connection with poetry or music. To mention only one of them, the problem of selling art is not at all the same for the art dealer as it is for the bookseller to sell art books. Our present problem is to ascertain the common origin of these differences, and our tentative answer is that we should look for it in the fundamental mode of physical existence that is proper to each specifically distinct type of work of art.13
Let us call aesthetic existence the mode of existence that belongs to paintings inasmuch as they are being actually perceived as works of art and as objects of aesthetic experience. It then becomes obvious that, like music or poetry, paintings enjoy only a discontinuous mode of existence, which lasts as long as aesthetic experience itself and varies together with it. Everyone will grant that there is such a mode of existence, but some philosophers maintain that works of art, taken precisely as such, have no other one. Their reason for upholding this thesis is both subtle and simple; it is that, so long as it is not being perceived as a work of art, an object is not a work of art. In other words, what is not a work of art for somebody is not a work of art at all.
There is something to be said in favor of this philosophical position. In Europe at least, small forests of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century furniture have been used to keep stoves burning; to those who were using it that way, such furniture was just fuel. Quite recently (July, 1954), a Milan newspaper announced that a large-sized Tintoretto had just been discovered in the basement of the Cathedral. Up to that day it had been used to cover a pile of junk. The question then is, To those who had been using it that way what was it? Was it a Tintoretto or was it a covering? But the problem can be generalized. What is a cathedral, while nobody is looking at it, if not a heap of stones? In the same way, while nobody is looking at them and enjoying them precisely as paintings, these are nothing more than colored pieces of canvas, cardboard, or wood. It seems therefore that, like musical pieces, paintings exist only while they actually are being perceived.14
These remarks are justified to the extent that aesthetic existence is at stake, but they do not apply to the artistic existence of the experienced works of art. Taken in itself, aesthetic experience involves time. It is only one among many psychological events that all have a beginning and an end and whose nature is such that they can be more or less exactly repeated. From this point of view—that is, considered as an object of actual aesthetic experience—the existence of a painting, and even that of a statue or of a monument, is just as fleeting and discontinuous as that of music. We all know this from bitter experience. Being abroad and in one of the rooms of some art gallery to which his chances of ever returning are remote, does not an art lover experience a feeling of distress at the thought that, after crossing the next door, he will never again find himself face to face with one of the world's masterpieces? Especially if he is advanced in years, an art pilgrim cannot leave even certain art cities without thinking that this time is perhaps the last time. At any rate, there is no doubt that for each of us, whatever his age, the mode of existence that belongs to objects of aesthetic experience is discontinuous and fragmentary.
Let us go further still. There are, on the part of paintings themselves, subjective causes for this discontinuity. One of these causes, at least, is familiar to all, namely, the presence or the absence of light. However long they try to stay open, a moment comes every day when art galleries have to close their doors. Darkness then sets in, and, from the point of view of possible aesthetic experience, all the paintings cease provisorily to exist. Is not this another feeling familiar to most of us? At the time the guardians of art first begin surreptitiously to look at their wrist watches, and then, politely but firmly, escort us from room to room until they finally march us out of some art gallery, do we not sometimes wonder what kind of existence those masterpieces are still enjoying during the long hours that their colors are blacked out and can no longer be seen? Nor is this all. For, indeed, works of art can disappear for years, sometimes even for centuries, with the result that, as did happen in the case of cave paintings, some of them ceased to be actually experienced for some fifteen thousand years. Moreover, even after being thus rediscovered, they were not recognized at once as works of art, much less as the kind of works of art that they are.
The radical contingency of aesthetic existence is strikingly symbolized by the story of the discovery of the rock paintings of Altamira. In 1879, the Spanish archaeologist, Marcelino de Sautuola, was exploring a cave near Santander, in Spain. While he was at work, his little daughter, who was playing around him, suddenly told him that she saw a beast on the rock. De Sautuola looked at it and saw several animal forms painted on the walls of the gallery he was in as well as of the following ones. Thus and in this way did works of art buried in darkness for many thousands of years relive for the first time in the eyes of a child wholly unaware of having made a momentous archaeological discovery. At the time, however, nobody paid attention to it. It was going to take a few more years before, being at last recognized for what it was, the prehistoric cave art of Altamira achieved the fullness of its aesthetic existence.15 The more recent, but equally accidental, discovery of the Lascaux murals (Front) bears witness to the same truth. Far from being identical, ontological existence and phenomenological existence are not always compatible. Unseen, the Lascaux murals have victoriously stood the strain of many millenniums. Exposed to the natural vandalism of crowds, the crucifixion of Avignon (1) is now ending an agony of five hundred years.
The same conclusion can be directly obtained by considering the problem from the point of view of aesthetic experience itself. In the case of painting as well as of music, there are an experiencing subject and an experienced object. In both cases, the experiencing subject is a human consciousness that endures in time and whose fluidity communicates itself to the very being of aesthetic experience. A certain painting may not have perceptibly changed during fifty or sixty years, but the man who sees it at the age of sixty is very different from the young boy of ten or from the man of thirty who had seen it before. Let us leave aside the tricky problem of artistic tastes and of the way they have of changing with age; the same painting, even if it is as much admired as it ever was, is not seen in the same way by the child, by the same child now become a mature man, and by the same man now entering a ripe old age. It is the same painting; it is the same human being; it is by no means the same being of aesthetic experience in one and the same person.
Nor is this all. Let us consider ourselves while we are looking at a certain painting in some art gallery. It takes time for us to see it. However long or short this time is, our inspection of the painting has a beginning, a middle, and an end.16We see it better and better; at any rate, we see it otherwise, so that its aesthetic mode of existence never ceases to change even while we are looking at it. The same remark applies to the various modes of existence of one and the same painting in the consciousness of five or six different persons looking at it at one and the same time. They do not all see it under the same angle or in the same light. Even if they did, they still would not be the same person, so that there still would be five or six different modes of aesthetic existence, each of them continually changing, for one and the same painting.
It is therefore true to say that, because all human experience is subjective and takes place in time, the aesthetic mode of existence of painting is somewhat similar to that of music. And yet, when all is said and done, even this is not wholly true, because the difference between their respective modes of physical existence is confusedly perceived in aesthetic experience, and this is enough to render the aesthetic existence of a painting specifically different from that of a musical piece. In the case of music, we have a fleeting apprehension of a fleeting and always incompletely existing thing; in the case of painting, we have a changing, fleeting, and always incomplete experience of a stable, complete, and enduring entity. This is enough to account for the fact that we do not expect the same kind of emotion from paintings and from music. Some of us are tone-deaf to music, others are color-blind, and while many men are fortunate in being able to enjoy both painting and music, very few, if any, are equally sensitive to both. At any rate, personal experience, to which one often appeals in the last resort, seems to confirm the fact that the physical difference there is between their respective relations to space and time remains perceptible in our different ways of apprehending the existence of music and the existence of painting.
The easiest way to realize this difference is perhaps to compare the two kinds of places where music and painting are to be found. Musical scores exist in libraries where they can be consulted; only, as has already been said, musical scores are not in themselves music. In order to hear music, we have to go to appointed places, such as theaters and concert halls, and it is necessary for us to be there at certain appointed times that are the only ones during which some music will exist in those places. During the interval between two performances or two rehearsals, an opera house or a concert hall is totally empty of music. There is nothing there. On the contrary, museums and art galleries are permanently inhabited by a multitude of man-made things whose unseen presence is perceptible to us even when, having something else to do, we must content ourselves with passing by. Every time we can enter one of these buildings, and especially one of the rooms in which some world-famous painting is exhibited, our impression of being admitted to an awesome presence becomes irresistible. One enters the room of the Brera, in Milan, where the sole painting exhibited is Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin, as he would enter the hall in which some sovereign is sitting in state, waiting for the homage of his visitors.
This solid physical presence is part and parcel of the aesthetic existence of paintings, and it renders their aesthetic experience specifically different from that of music, which, far from being focused upon a whole completely given at once in an intuition of the present, consists of a succession of instants each of which is full of memories of the past as well as of expectations of the future. To experience music is to communicate with the kind of order, and therefore of unity, of which becoming is capable. Sonorous structures have their own forms, without which they would not exist as works of art, but here again we can apply to music what St. Augustine once said about poetry;17 all the rhythms, numbers, proportions, and, generally speaking, all the rules to which poets or musicians resort in order to turn the words of common language into poetry, or the sounds of human voices and of instruments into music, have no other effect than to impart to a fleeting multiplicity the only kind of unity, order, and stability of which it is capable. It is no mediocre achievement, for a musician, to fill up the emptiness of silence with sounds whose intelligible structure is perceived by man's ears as endowed with a unity of its own and, consequently, with a certain degree of entity. But painters have no such problems to solve. The difficulty for them is not to impart to becoming enough unity to turn it into some sort of being. Precisely because they are material solids, paintings enjoy the same kind of concrete existence, the same sort of actually complete being, that belongs to things of nature. The painter's own problem rather is to obtain from the solid and immobile objects produced by his art an expression of movement, of becoming, and, in short, of life.
All painters are aware of the problem, but some of them give in to the desire of obtaining from their art results that it is not in its nature to yield. In the case of great artists, the result is always interesting, yet it never wholly fulfills the ambitions of the painter. In such pictures as the Bonaparte Crossing the St. Bernard, (2) by David, the eternally rearing horse whose forelegs never touch the ground offers a rather disturbing contrast between the immobility of the painting and the frantic intensity of the action it attempts to represent. In his famous Epsom Derby, (3) Gericault has cleverly avoided attributing to his galloping horses any one of the many positions in which a snapshot would catch them in reality. His intention has certainly been to suggest motion rather than to represent it. Yet, when all is said and done, there remains a puzzling ambiguity in the sight of these horses that always fly and never move. Many pictures of battles, fighting animals, and hunting scenes call for similar remarks. In them, whirls of apparently frantic motions stay frozen solid in an everlasting immobility.
There are ways of palliating the difficulty. One of them consists in representing a scene implying motion at the very moment that the forces at play are reaching a point of equilibrium. This is what Manet has done in his Tumblers (Les Saltimbanques). (4a) We all know the moment of suspense during which, having at last achieved a precarious poise, an acrobat keeps us breathless; this is also the moment for a painter to get us interested in a combination of lines that represents an interval of rest between two motions. In his Horses Fighting, (4b) Delacroix has achieved a similar result by means of another triangular composition whose summit, irresistibly attracting the eye, is the head of the tall dark horse. As will presently be seen, the static equilibrium of the figure interests the painter much more than his apparent intention of representing movements. Another, and a hardly less perfect, answer to the same problem is exemplified by Seurat's Circus. (5) An important part of it is in motion, but our eyes cannot possibly follow its lines without going full circle and, by the same token, without achieving some sort of immobility.
Not so, however, in the many cases in which painters obviously lose sight of the problem. When they are not mere feats of skill to be enjoyed as such, their unconvincing renderings of motion by means of cleverly combined immobilities achieve no other result than to mislead us as to the true pictorial meaning of the works in question. Seen as a snapshot, The Sabine Women(6a) of David is hardly bearable. After a first glance at it, which immediately reveals the accomplished mastery of the classical traditions typical of David's art, most of us consider that we are done with this gigantic canvas. But it may happen that a painter knowing his craft invites us to spend a few more moments in the contemplation of this cumbersome structure and points out for us the true result that David intended to achieve. Our painter friend first warns us to forget any idea of motion and even any desire, on the part of the artist, to convey to us any impression of mobility. Only one thing interests him, as it should interest us, namely, the visual pattern formed by the intricate lines indicating the supposed motions of the painted figures. As soon as we look at it, not as suggesting motion in time but as a visual pattern in space, the work of David becomes highly interesting. Without attempting one of those endless analyses which mean little to anybody except their own authors, let us briefly observe the striking horizontal line that divides the picture from the extremity of the spear leveled by the warrior on the right up to the crest on the helmet of the opposite warrior on the left. Let us also observe the dominating rectangle determined by these two opposite figures between which, in point of fact, the whole subject is depicted: a Sabine woman attempting to separate a Roman warrior from a Sabine warrior. But, above all, let us note the triangular structure of the middle group formed at its base by the central figure of the Sabine woman with extended arms and descending to the apex formed by the playing children. On the right, it follows the line that goes from the hand of the standing figure to the head of the older woman, then of the younger woman; the line continues following the arm of the younger woman to her own right hand, but at the very point where it reaches the tip of her fingers this descending line begins to reascend through the raised hand of the child on the left, then through the drapery of the gown, then through the left leg of the standing woman who shows a child to the warriors, until it reaches again the fingers of the other extended arm of the central figure. Other similar patterns will easily be detected by any careful observer of this complex composition. Its true pictural meaning then clearly appears. We would achieve nothing by giving these frozen figures a mental push in order to set them in motion. They cannot move without wrecking the composition. But we shall be amply rewarded if, forgetting everything about motion, we concentrate upon the structured interplay and the arabesque of the lines.
The static nature of paintings is therefore included in our aesthetic experience of them. This conclusion can be verified by comparing the effect produced by The Sabine Women of David with our immediate impression of any other similar composition in which, because no suggestion of motion is intended, the geometrical pattern is immediately discernible. David's Distribution of the Eagles18 cleverly picks up the moment that, for a split second, all the movements are supposed to stop; there is perfect harmony between the static nature of the art of painting and the equally static nature of the subject. But the contrast is still more fully perceptible if we compare The Sabine Women with Velazquez's Surrender of Breda(6b). In this masterpiece, there is hardly a trace of motion left. Time seems to have come to a standstill. Human beings themselves, however well painted they may be, are only second in importance to the pattern of the lines and to the balance of the masses. Nor is it without reason that this world-renowned picture is often called The Lances. Most of those who admire it do not know with perfect precision where Breda is, nor by whom it was taken, nor at what date; but they all perceive at once the impressive hedge of verticals that, while dividing its surface according to the "golden section," establishes communication between the verticals of the lower part and the horizontals of the higher part of the painting. For, indeed, the powerful effect produced by these vertical lances is largely owing to the fact that the horizontal landscape in the background still remains visible behind them.19
This, of course, does not mean that a painter is wrong when he tries to represent action. Few pictures are completely free from action, and some very great painters have often taken pleasure in representing it. The reason for this is not hard to find: the more action there is in a subject, the more opportunity it affords to achieve complex patterns of lines and combinations of forms in whose apprehension, as will be seen, the cause of our pleasure chiefly resides. If the artist is a master in his art, the effect of the represented action is precisely to lead our eyes along lines whose pattern we might otherwise fail to discern. As has been seen, such was the case in The Sabine Women of David; but such had already been the case with The Rape of the Sabine Women(7a) by Nicolas Poussin, in which, provided only it follows the lines of the represented action, the eye spontaneously perceives the general distribution of the masses and the main lines of the composition. The point we are enforcing is that, whether or not it harbors the secret ambition to represent action, a painting first is a static pattern of colors, forms, and, in the last analysis, lines. Moreover, a painting is experienced as being such a static pattern, and this fact accounts for the feeling of incongruity that, after a short moment of full satisfaction, most people experience at the sight of the static representation of some intensely dynamic action. If we compare the two versions of Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women(7b) with either his Baptism of Christ(8a) or his Funeral of Phocion(8b), the two latter works, in which the maximum of composition combines with the minimum of action, convey an impression of solid and harmonious stability more in keeping with the physical mode of existence that belongs to paintings.20
As it is not easy to dissociate the two notions of suggested motion and of represented motion, a simple experience can help in realizing the distinction. It consists, while looking at the painting of some animated scene, in trying to imagine what would happen to the composition if the figures depicted in it really began to move. Most of the time the composition would be wrecked without being .replaced by a new one. Pictorial composition requires immobility. In the words of Baudelaire: "Je hais le mouvement qui deplace les lignes."21 While looking at The Forge(9), by Goya, some visitors to the Frick Collection express misgivings about what would happen to the skull of the person who holds the iron on the anvil in case the blacksinith wielding the hammer really should strike. One prefers not to think of it. But, precisely, this has nothing to do with the quality of the painting. A certain pyramidal structure, and the trace left in space by a possible movement, not actual movement, is what the painter was interested in. To sum up, the aesthetic mode of existence of a painting includes an awareness of the static mode of existence of its object just as, on the contrary, the aesthetic mode of existence of music includes the awareness of the discontinuous and fleeting existence of its object. And no wonder. It is as difficult for painting to move as it is for music to stand still.
This specificity of the physical mode of existence proper to paintings accounts for the growing importance attributed to still life in the history of art. On the one hand, most of the aestheticians and painters who insist that there is a hierarchy of genres of painting seem to agree that still life is the humblest of these genres. There is nothing particularly noble about representing fruit, loaves of bread, forks, knives, cups, and other such objects whose sight evokes nothing more than the most modest aspects of, everyday life.22 On the other hand, one cannot look at one of the best Chardins, or, for that matter, at any good still life of any school and any period, without feeling that this is indeed a genre in which painting reveals its very essence and reaches one of its points of perfection. A still life does not inspire us with the same kind of admiration as the frescoes of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, but we derive from it a different and, in a sense, a fuller feeling of contentment. However great the artist, he cannot convince us that his immobile puppets are really running, talking, and acting. Not so in a still life, which, by definition, is a picture consisting of inanimate objects. It may comprise animals, provided these animals be dead. In a still life nothing acts, nothing gesticulates, nothing does anything else than to be. Now, precisely, this is what painting is best equipped to depict. The kind of plenary satisfaction we experience while looking at a still life is due to the perfect adequacy that obtains, in this case, between the substance of the work of art and the reality that it represents. Such pictures are solid and inanimate objects enjoying a continuous mode of physical existence; the cups, the forks, or the books they represent are beings of the same sort, and they enjoy the kind of continuous existence that belongs to inanimate solids situated in space. In this case, the artist is not attempting to make his art say more than it can say. The specific pleasure given by the best still lifes clearly reveals the radical difference there is between the aesthetic mode of existence of paintings and that of music.
The notion of "still life" does not apply only to the pictures representing dead animals or inanimate household objects. It is surely not by chance that the seventeenth-century Dutch painters, who were the first to handle still life as a distinct genre and brought it to its point of perfection, were also the first to find fitting subjects in many other man-made objects, or things, whose only common quality precisely is their stillness. The old belief, expressed by Reynolds, that a still-life painter simply aims to imitate the visual appearance of the lowest kinds of objects befits a large number of still lifes whose authors never imagined that another conception of their art was possible. But when the still-life style extended itself from household objects to houses themselves; then to churches, which are the houses of God; then to cities, which are made up of houses and of churches, it became obvious that the aim and scope of a still life was something far beyond the mere imitation of inanimate objects.22a
There is magic in the art of the great Dutch painters. The same intense feeling of reality and of enduring stability suggested by their fruit bowls and their loaves of bread remains perceptible in the interiors painted by Pieter de Hooch(10) before, yielding to a temptation fatal to so many painters of still lifes, he began to turn out mere genre pictures. Generally speaking, the best Dutch interiors invite the spectator to partake of a life that is not his own, but with which he communicates without disturbing it in the least. Their quiet housewives do not mind us; they are not even aware of our presence; as to themselves, even if they pretend to be doing something, all that they really have to do is to be. Many Dutch pictures of church interiors proceed from the same spirit. The small personages that people the churches painted by H. van der Vliet(11a) do not prevent them from remaining so many still lifes. This is still truer of the churches painted with a unique blending of finish and sensibility by Pieter Saenredam(11b). But there is a short distance, if any, from an interior by Jan Vermeer to his justly celebrated Street in Delft(12), whose life is no less still than that of his own interior scenes. Even his equally famous View of Delft(13a) shares in the same qualities of quiet presence and actionless existentiality that characterize his little street. A similar extension is observable in the works of Saenredam when he passes from the inside of his churches to their external appearance. There is something of the stillness of Vermeer's View of Delft(13b) in the portrait of a Utrecht public place by Saenredam. One might feel tempted to include some landscapes in the same class, but even when they are peaceful, Dutch landscapes and seascapes are not still. An intense life quickens their skies as well as their seas. The spirit of still life is no longer there. But we find it again every time we turn our attention to one of the masterpieces anterior to the time, when, even in Holland, still life deteriorated into plain imagery. And since the corruption of the best brings about the worst, we should not feel surprised to find in the most mediocre of modern genre pictures the posterity of such perfect masterpieces.
There is a sort of metaphysical equity in the fact that this humblest genre is also the most revealing of all concerning the essence of the art of painting. If, by the word "subject" we mean the description of some scene or some action, then it can rightly be said that a still life has no subject. Whether its origin be Dutch or French(14a, b), the things that a still life represents exercise only one single act, but it is the simplest and most primitive of all acts, namely, to be. Without this deep-seated, quiet, and immobile energy from which spontaneously follow all the operations and all the movements performed by each and every being, nothing in the world would move, nothing would operate, nothing would exist. Always present to that which is, this act of being usually lies hidden, and unrevealed, behind what the thing signifies, says, does, or makes. Only two men reach an awareness of its mysterious presence: the philosopher, if, raising, his speculation up to the metaphysical notion of being, he finally arrives at this most secret and most fecund of all acts; and the. creator of plastic. forms, if, purifying the work of his hands from all that is not the immediate self-revelation of the act of being, he provides us with a visible image of it that corresponds, in the order of sensible appearances, to what its intuition is in the mind of the metaphysician.
3. Existence and Operation
Paintings are experienced as solid bodies enjoying the mode of duration proper to all such beings, and the awareness of this fact specifies their aesthetic existence as distinct from that of either poetry or music. But the same remark applies to the artistic mode of existence of paintings. Produced as it is by the art of some painter, a painting is usually experienced as a man-made thing. The art of the artist is perceived in his work in the same way as the efficient cause is perceived in any one of its effects. The fact is easily confirmed by personal experience. Just as a real landscape is spontaneously seen as a work of nature, so also is a painted landscape, or a musical composition, seen or heard with the full awareness of the fact that its origin lies in the creative power of an artist. Rembrandt, Veronese, and Delacroix are really present in our art galleries through the presence of their art embodied in their works. So also are Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven present in every concert hall in which one of their masterpieces happens to be performed. In short, both the author and his art are included in our aesthetic experience of any work of art. Yet, because the relationship between painters and their works is different from the relationship between a musician and his compositions, our experience of paintings is deeply different from our aesthetic experience of music. Here again, phenomenology has a great deal to gain from an attentive study of its ontological conditions.
Paintings are not only man-made, as all works of art are; they also are handmade. It is the hand of the painter that embodies in actually existing physical objects the conceptions of his mind. This fact entails important consequences concerning the very art of the painters even before affecting our aesthetic experience of their works. The first of these consequences is that painters are craftsmen, doing handwork in more or less comfortable workshops, whose artistic activity consists in making things. If we visit his studio, a painter will be able to exhibit his works exactly as a watchmaker can show his watches stored in drawers or hanging on walls. As often as not, a painter has to don working clothes in the same way as a mechanic or any other artisan. He does not resent dirtying his hands with paint, just as wall painters have almost unavoidably to do in their own work. Among those who specialize in painting portraits of socialites, some artists seem to resent this servitude. They do their utmost to make their studios look like drawing rooms, but when all is said and done, painters (and sculptors) are related to manual laborers by a deep-seated affinity that nothing can eliminate. Poets, playwrights, and novelists all belong in the category of those who hold white-collar jobs. Even a music composer is a writer using ink, paper, and pen to draw symbols signifying a work of art that, unlike a picture or a statue, has no actual existence of its own outside the mind of the artist.
The fact that painting is manual work has visibly influenced the course of its history. Ever since the Renaissance, painters have struggled to ensure the recognition of their art as one of the "liberal arts" and its distinction from merely "servile" work.23 This accounts for the insistence of some painters, in their writings, on stressing the all-importance of the part played by the mind, by the intellect, and even by what they call science in the composition and execution of paintings. This same preoccupation is likewise apparent in their criticism of purely imitational painting. We are not here alluding to the modern opposition between imitational and nonimitational art. Within imitational art itself, representatives of the purest tradition of academic art have insisted that painting must not be considered a "mechanical art," because the object of the painter's art is not simply to copy nature, but to interpret it in some original way, which is an act of the mind. All this is true, but intellectual speculation alone is unable to make anything. It cannot move matter. It is in the nature of things that the maker of a solid physical body has to use his hands in order to make it. However much he may have to use his brains, a painter's work is also manual work, and this is a point that, obvious as it is, seems to have been overlooked by some of those who have philosophized about art.
The contrary illusion arises from the ancient social distinction between masters and slaves, in consequence of which all manual labor was considered slave work. It even presupposes a state of society in which the authority of masters over slaves was an unchallenged despotism. An echo of this state of mind can still be perceived in the passage of his Summa theologiae (I—II, 57, 3) where Thomas Aquinas distinguishes the "liberal arts," which are ordained to purely speculative works, from "those arts that are ordained to works done by the body; for these arts are, in a fashion, servile, inasmuch as the body is in servile subjection to the soul, and man, as regards his soul, is free." No painter would describe the relationship between his hand and his mind as one of servile subjection. A painter's hand is a progressively educated hand, which it takes infinite patience to turn into a reliable collaborator and whose co-operation will never be an entirely passive one. Man does not think with his hands, but the intellect of a painter certainly thinks in his hands, so much so that, in moments of manual inspiration, an artist can sometimes let the hand do its job without bothering too much about what it does. At any rate, unless we call servile all manual work—and what can a man do, or make, without using his hands?—it cannot be doubted that the art of a painter resides in his hands, in his fingers, and probably still more in his wrist, at the same time that it resides in his intellect. The art of the painter is an art of the whole man.
Aristotle himself never said anything to the contrary. His own definition of art is "a reasoned state of capacity to make," or else "a state of capacity to make involving a true course of reasoning."24 As it stands, the definition of Aristotle is both correct and complete. Art is not concerned with things that come to be in virtue of the laws of nature: such things fall under the competency of science. Art is exclusively concerned with things that come to be because there is, in their maker, an acquired capacity to make them. Philosophers would never have thought differently if, instead of contenting themselves with thinking, they had attempted to make something that they could consider the work of their own hands.
It is a curious fact that, so many centuries after his death, Aristotle should have been made responsible for the "mentalism" that has placed art entirely on the side of the mind. One of the most frequent objections directed by Aristotle against the Ideas of Plato is that, even though they did exist, the Ideas would be wholly useless as principles of explanation because, of themselves, Ideas are unable to act upon matter and to produce physical effects. Plato himself knew this so well that, in his Timaeus, he did not represent the formation of the cosmos as the work of any Ideas, but, rather, as that of a god working after the pattern of the Ideas. Before anything else, the Demiurge of Plato has to take the three elements in order to shape up the world: the Demiurge is an artist. Being a self-thinking thought, the god of Aristotle has no hands; the result is that he does not create. On the contrary, Yahweh is most eminently a creator, and this is why, using a metaphor borrowed from the observation of human nature, Scripture says that "the heavens skew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands" (Ps. 18 : 2). If it is a question of making things by means of art, where there are no hands, there is no art. The art is in the operation of the hand as the soul is in the body.
This is the truth that some artists intend to stress in identifying the two notions of art and of skill.25 To do so is to follow a traditional usage of the word "skill." The root of this word signified "distinction," "discernment." Today, it first signifies a "reason or ground for doing or saying" something; then, by extension, "the ability to use one's knowledge effectively; technical proficiency" (Webster's 25a). However we understand its notion, skill expressly includes the knowledge that is needed for the performing of a certain operation. Skill always is a "know-how." If the notion at stake were that of art in general, or that of certain arts, like the art of writing, in which nothing more is required from the hand than the ability to use a pen or a typewriter, it could be maintained, with some probability, that the acquired ability called "skill" entirely resides in the mind. Not so in the case of painting. If skill includes the ability to use acquired knowledge, then art itself is found in the hand as well as in the mind.
Nor would it suffice to object that, even in the case of painting, all the skill in the hand has first to be, under the form of art, in the mind. On the contrary, one of the main reasons painters find it so hard to make themselves understood when they speak of their art is that their hearers listen with their minds only, not with their hands. If it is a question of painting, the artist himself can form no clear notion of his own art without including in it manual skill. True enough, there are cases in which an artist knows beforehand all he is going to do or to make. This particularly applies to artisans making such simple artifacts as chests or chairs. Everywhere there is a blueprint, the very detail of a certain operation can be foreseen. The same remark applies to the skill of real painters, and sometimes of truly great ones, every time they undertake to do a replica of one of their own works. Facility is not creative. On the contrary, "limited means [of execution] beget new forms, they invite creation, they make style."25b As will be seen in connection with another problem, there even is for painters a constant danger of falling victims to the perfection of their acquired technique: a painter knows beforehand all he is about to do, when no element of novelty is included in his work. If, on the contrary, creative work is at stake, many other factors than intellectual knowledge become involved in the process. The hand is one of them, and the hand of a painter is for him full of surprises. Even when his hand does exactly what he wanted it to do, the knowledge that an artist has of his own art is not an abstract notion of lines, surfaces, and colors to be seen on a piece of canvas; it is the concrete cognition of the very acts and motions whereby a certain pattern of lines, surfaces, and colors can actually be produced. In painting, it is impossible to distinguish between art itself and execution, as if art were wholly in the mind and execution wholly in the hand. Art here is in execution, and if it is true to say that the intellect of the painter is engaged in all the motions of the hand, it is equally true to say that a painter could entertain no thought about his own art if his hand were not there to give to the word "art" a concrete meaning. If, what is very doubtful, the Aristotelian definition of art really implies that the art of the painter, taken precisely qua art, entirely stands on the side of the mind, it seems to call for correction.26
Such an error would not be too surprising. One of the shortcomings of philosophers is that, because they think rather than make, they have few opportunities to realize how clever the body of an intelligent being actually is. As he was visiting Matisse, a painter friend found him in his studio surrounded with a litter of drawings. Wondering how Matisse could make a choice among them, he asked him: "How do you know the really good ones?" To this question, a philosopher, or a theologian, would have answered with considerations about beauty, order, splendor of the true, and suchlike, applied to the drawings under discussion. But Matisse's answer was a different one. "How one knows the really good ones?" Matisse answered. "Well, one feels that in the hand." The knowledge by the intellect of the proper way of making something here jointly resides in the intellect that knows and in the hand that makes. Only in God, a perfect knowledge of the things to be made precedes, so to speak, their actual making.
Even the most resolute supporters of a purely "mental" conception of art betray some embarrassment when it comes to defining, or describing, the relationship between the knowledge of the work to be made and the power of execution without which nothing would ever come out of the mind. Some of them seem to consider skill a certain faculty, "made" by art and from which the operation of the artist proceeds.27 Even Thomas Aquinas, when he lets himself go for a moment, speaks of art as of an acquired disposition that enables man to know how to operate, and even to operate, so as to produce a work of art. And indeed, what kind of art would be an acquired disposition with respect to things to be made, if it implied no practical ability to make them? The question is not to know if an act of abstract cognition permits us to conceive art apart from any operation conducive to the actual production of works of art. There is nothing that man cannot conceive apart. He can conceive a nose apart from any face; he even can conceive snubness apart from any nose. Yet, when all is said and done, there is no such thing in the world as a nose in itself, or snubness in itself. Nor is there any such thing as an art of painting conceivable apart from its operation. Thomas Aquinas himself seems to suggest a similar notion of art when he says of it that art perfects man as to both knowledge and power in operating.28
Such abstract discussions would be pointless were it not for the fact that some artists feel inclined to take what philosophers say about art more seriously than philosophers deserve to be taken in matters of which they have little or no personal experience. As it exists in the minds of metaphysicians, art is eminently conceivable apart from its operation, for the simple reason that abstractions do not operate. Only man operates, through his art.29 In the case of painting, whose proper effect it is to make material objects that occupy definite places in space, art cannot possibly be conceived apart from its operation.
4. Existence and Execution
This first consequence of the material nature of paintings entails a second one, namely, that the painter is to himself his own executant. Eugene Delacroix, who was acquainted with several musicians of the stature of Liszt and Chopin, was well aware of the fact that, in such cases, the musician happened to be, at one and the same time, both a composer and a performer; but he also knew that it was not necessarily so. A musician can write music for an instrument that he cannot play, or that he plays only badly. If what he writes is the score of a duet, a quartet, a symphony, or an opera, he cannot possibly be the performer of his own work; nor is it always enough to put an orchestra at the disposal of a musician, since as often as not the music composer turns out to be an indifferent conductor of his own music, sometimes even a decidedly poor one. Johannes Brahms is a case in point. The famous German conductor, Hans von Biilow, is said to have broken relations with Brahms, at least for a time, not at all because he did not like his music, but, on the contrary, because he could not endure the way Brahms, as a conductor, was ruining his own symphonies. These facts, and similar ones that everyone will no doubt remember, are enough to explain the meaning of the remark made by Delacroix: "The craft of the painter is the most difficult of all and it takes longest to learn. Like composing, painting requires erudition, but it also requires execution, like playing the violin."30
Since a painter is to himself his own virtuoso, there is no hope for anyone to become an artist worthy of the name before he has mastered the technique of his art. A painter does not deserve the name until he has reached both intellectual maturity and the full mastery of his craft. In an age such as our own, when children's drawings and children's paintings receive a degree of attention amounting to a superstitious cult, it should be remembered that, undeniable as they sometimes are, the natural gifts of these young painters are not even an inchoation of what is perhaps later on going to be their art; for, indeed, art, or craftsmanship, is essentially technique, and technique requires time before being assimilated. In John Constable's terse words: "There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual." 31
This fact accounts for the feeling, common among painters, that their relationship to their own works is a peculiar one. They are conscious of being the causes of their works much more completely and absolutely than musicians can pretend to be. The very being and existence of pictures is directly caused by painters. To the extent that it fulfills the ambition of the artist, a painting not only owes him its existence, it is also indebted to him, and to him alone, for being what it is. In other words, a painter is the sole and total cause of his work. Hence his feeling of superiority in comparison with the restricted role played by artists in some other branches of art—for instance, poetry and music. To limit ourselves to the particularly clear case of music, it cannot be said that a composer, let us say Wagner writing Parsifal, is the sole cause of its actual existence, nor that he causes it to be exactly such as he wants it to be. Many executants will be required before any opera succeeds in achieving actual existence as the sonorous structure that it is; and not only many executants working through many rehearsals, but also conductors, no two of whom will cause Parsifal to exist in identically the same way. Taken precisely as composer, the musician is powerless to impart to his own work the actual existence that any painter imparts to his paintings. And this again is a point that Delacroix has expressed in a particularly felicitous way.32 The relationship of the painter to his work is specifically other than that of the poet to his poems or of the musician to his music.
For the very same reason, our own relationship to painting is different from the one that obtains between us and the works of the poets or of the musicians. Delacroix has subtly analyzed the difference between the physical realities that painters place under our own. eyes and the books in which writers speak to us, explain things to us, and try to convince us. Not so with painters. Having done his work, the artist simply puts it before our eyes, after which he disappears without explanations or commentaries. In Delacroix's own words, painting is one of those "silent arts" for which, like Poussin, he professed a preference. The author of a book, Delacroix says, "seems to wrestle against criticism. He argues, and one can argue with him in return. The works of painters and sculptors, on the other hand, are all of one piece, like the works of nature. The author does not appear in them, is not, in touch with us like the writer or orator. He offers, as it were, a tangible reality, yet one that is full of mystery."33 Let us keep in mind these remarks concerning the naturalness of the physical bodies made by the particular class of artists whom we call painters. What Delacroix was trying to say is, perhaps, still more tangible in the case of sculpture. The works of Arp, made of "stone formed by human hand,"34 seem to be the perfect fulfillment of this high ambition of the plastic arts.
The same remarks apply to our experience of music. As has already been noted, it takes a sort of conjurer to give music actual existence. We are not more in contact with Beethoven himself, while listening to one of his quartets, than we are in contact with Rembrandt while looking at one of his paintings. Yet, in listening to music, we are always in personal contact with an artist whose presence between the musician and ourselves cannot possibly be ignored. As often as not, there first is a conductor. His functions are, besides directing his orchestra, to perform a sort of pantomime, or interpretative dance, whose purpose it is to keep his musicians interested in what they are playing and to make his public see what, without this visual help, they would perhaps fail to hear. Moreover, the conductor of an orchestra is responsible for his own interpretation of the works performed under his direction. This is so important, especially in our own day, that it does not sound ridiculous to speak of the Ninth Symphony of such and such a conductor, as if its author were anybody else than Ludwig van Beethoven. The virtuosos are no less necessary intermediaries between written music and our ears, and it is today permitted to include certain great orchestras in the class of the virtuosos. In short, hosts of intermediaries are required to ensure the performance of musical compositions whose physical existence would be impossible without these interpreters, performers, or executants.
The importance of these mediators cannot be denied. Unless it is actually performed, music simply does not exist. It is therefore natural that our immediate gratitude should go to those men to whom we feel indebted for the very existence of the music we love. Without overlooking the ludicrous side of this sometimes misdirected veneration,35one must recognize that, up to a point, it is founded in the nature of things. Nay, the very freedom enjoyed by conductors and virtuosos of every denomination is likewise founded in the nature of things. Since musical compositions have no physical existence of their own, it is for conductors, virtuosos, singers, and, generally speaking, all executants an absolute necessity to decide upon one of the countless possible interpretations of an original whose idea has died with the composer himself. Like a Platonic idea, the ideal original of a musical composition is nothing more than .a notion of the mind. Strictly speaking, it does not exist.36
This ontological difference between painting and music entails many more consequences whose detailed study would be endless. One of them at least should be added to the preceding ones because of its impact on practical life. It may happen that music is enjoyed by a solitary music lover playing to himself the kind of music he prefers. Most of the time, however, musical performances are collective undertakings that require the co-operation of many executants, plus the no less necessary co-operation of a more or less large public. Let us forget all the material side of musical life, not, however, without remembering that it takes money, and a very great deal of it, to "revive," as they aptly say, such works as the great oratorios of Bach or certain operas that, despite their artistic value, or perhaps even because of it, cannot be expected to be financial successes. The least that can be said on this point is that, in many cases, the production of music and its enjoyment are a social and collective business. Without pretending that the experience of paintings is necessarily a solitary one, it seems at least true to say that it is not a normally collective one. There is a sort of satisfaction in the sight of a well-filled concert hall in which one thousand listeners or more can hear together the same symphony. On the contrary, it seems doubtful that the best day to visit an art gallery is the one on which the place is so full of visitors that there are always several persons between ourselves and the paintings we desperately try to see. From time to time, small groups of friends go from painting to painting, exchanging a few remarks and communing admiringly; but we never see the fifty visitors of some room in an art gallery stop before the same picture and, after ten minutes of silent contemplation, suddenly burst into applause.37 An audience attending the performance of a musical piece witnesses the' quasi miracle of its recreation by its performers. We then see the very men to whom we are indebted for the actual existence of the masterpiece, and they themselves are there to receive in person the expression of our gratitude. But there are no painters in art galleries, or, if some of them happen to be there, their presence adds nothing to the cause of our gratitude. Art galleries contain only paintings. Paintings, that is to say, things. One does not speak to things.
A still deeper consequence of the same fact affects the very structure of the works of art themselves. The powerful shock, sometimes amounting to a blow, inflicted by certain paintings upon our sensibilities is due to the fact that, being solid bodies, they are totally given at once. Because total presence is impossible for music, musicians have resorted to various artifices to help memory keep the fleeting musical chords and phrases more or less simultaneously present in the mind. The most fundamental of these expedients is repetition. To be sure, there is a measure of repetition in painting, too, be it only under the form of rhythm.38 Many painters resort to rhythm, but they do not all understand it in the same way. Rhythm can arise from the calculated repetition of certain forms, certain patterns, or certain colors. It can also arise from a distribution of the light values whose regularity divides space as musical rhythm divides time. Seurat would provide striking illustrations of pictorial rhythm—for instance, his Parade(15). Yet, in the last analysis, even a picture without much rhythm can be apprehended as a whole by the eyes of any onlooker. On the contrary, repetition is of the very essence of symphonic music, and this probably is the reason some painters have objected to what appeared to them as an excess of it on the part of even very great composers.39 The use of subjects and countersubjects in fugues; the constantly recurring method of musical development by mode of "theme and variation"; the extension of this method from symphonic music to dramatic music by Richard Wagner when he completely transformed the notion of theme; in fine, the extension of this dramatic notion of theme to symphonic music again, when Cesar Franck and his school decided to achieve "cyclical" composition40—all these facts are so many consequences of a first one, namely, the fleeting mode of existence proper to music on the one hand and the permanent solidity of pictures on the other hand. These two kinds of works of art are not in the same way.
When painters resort to the essentially musical notion of rhythm in order to define what they consider one of the necessary elements of their own art, it is a sure sign that this art itself is trying to overstep its natural limits. Nor are painters themselves unaware of the fact. The arts of space, from architecture to sculpture and painting, have always included among their fundamental notions that of composition. To compose is to arrange the parts of a picture in such a way that the proportions between their respective sizes, shapes, colors, and degrees of luminosity are pleasing to perceive. The reason modern painters, especially since the time of Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris, have added the notion of rhythm to that of composition is not mysterious. For, indeed, rhythm implies composition, but it adds to it a regularly recurring pattern in the duration of sounds. This is to say that, as soon as pictorial composition in space assumes the form of patterns of lines and colors successively perceived in time, composition becomes for us a rhythm.
Classical painters were quite familiar with this notion, especially such colorists as Rubens and Delacroix, whose paintings often repeat hues and light values so as to lead the eye from place to place, following a perceptible pattern. Lines, of course, always can answer to one another, as they have regularly done in classical compositions, including those of purely academic style. But the need for such line and color patterns was more and more forcibly felt as, caring less and less for the imitation of natural appearances, painters had finally to rely upon pure formal elements. These patterns and their composition provide in modern paintings the equivalent of the intelligible content that used to be provided by imitation in most of the works produced between the Renaissance and our own times. Precisely because of their nonimitational nature, such rythmical motives act upon our sight in a way similar to that in which musical sounds act upon our ears.41 Again, it seems that nonrepresentational paintings require from us a more protracted effort of attention, be it only because to "understand" such paintings can no longer consist in recognizing the subject—figure, face, or story—which traditional pictures represent. Even in such works as those of Juan Gris(16), in which the imitational element remains immediately perceptible, the structure of the composition so engages the attention that it is sometimes practically impossible to stop the eye in its investigation of the rhythmical interplay of lines.42 Painting then feels tempted to describe itself in terms of music... If the phenomenology of aesthetic existence were more advanced than it is, the interaction of our experience of paintings in time and of their substantial stability in space could be analyzed with more precision than can now be done. Higher literary and art criticism has long held it lawful artistically to look for musical analogies in poetry, for poetic analogies in painting, and for pictorial analogies in both poetry and music. Artists and art critics do not need philosophers to realize that such lofty speculations are possible; it is, however, to be hoped that philosophy will someday discover the reasons why, in their own order, these speculations are not only legitimate, but sources of the highest among the joys accessible to understanding.
Endnotes
1. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, p. 3. According to Maritain, poetry is "another name for what Plato called mousike." Poetry therefore exceeds, or transcends, the more limited notion of art, which is the only one we intend to deal with in this book. This limitation of our own subject implies no judgment, explicit or implicit, on the notions that lie beyond its boundaries. The distinction between poetry and art in Mari-taM's book is best understood from pp. 167-71. See especially the remarks about the "free creativity of the spirit, essential to poetry," but not essential to either science or art, in which "the creativity of the spirit is subordinate to an object" (p. 169). Cf. "Poetry, as distinct from art, has no object" (p. 169). In this book, on the contrary, everything will revolve around the notion of a certain art; if anything is said in it concerning poetry, the remarks in question will only apply to the kind of poetry that is, if not subordinate to the object of art, at least intentionally related to it. [For full bibliographical references, see the Bibliography.]
2. Ibid., p. 4, art. 2.
3. See the next note.
4. On musical existence in general, see Etienne Souriau, "L'Insertion temporelle de loeuvre d'art," in Charles Lalo et al., Formes de l'art, Formes de l'esprit, pp. 42-45. These excellent pages convey a just impression of the complexity of the problem. The phenomenology of musical existence is still more complex than that of pictorial existence, at least if the physical mode of existence alone, irrespective of the aesthetic mode of existence, is taken into account. — A slightly different approach to the problem is to be found in Harold Osborne, Theory of Beauty: An Introduction to Aesthetics, pp. 101-10. This book favors a phenomenological interpretation of art. On painting, see pp. 110-12.
5. St. Augustine, Confessions, bk. XI, ch. 27, art. 34, up to ch. 28, art. 38 (ed. M. Skutella, pp. 288-92) . English translations of the Confessions are easy to find, even the classic one of E. B. Pusey. Augustine carries his analysis up to the mode of existence that belongs to a syllable. Long or short, a syllable endures in time; it does not exist whole in any single instant of its duration.
6. Endless commentaries have been written concerning the allegedly untranslatable meaning of the German Dasein. In a way, it is a mysterious term, in this sense at least, that it points out a mystery—namely, that it is impossible to define actual being. But its own meaning is not at all mysterious. It simply stresses the fact that "to be somewhere" is the simplest and most manifest of all marks of actual existence. The English there is has the same meaning. Other indirect formulas (German, es gibt; French, il y a, etc.) serve the same purpose. Such expressions do not attempt to say what being is; they simply point out so many signs of actual existence. Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, ch. 111, "Essence and Existence."
7. We call "lost" a picture whose place is unknown to us. Art historians consider a picture "lost" when they themselves do not know where it is. For instance, if an art lover owns a picture and cherishes it so much that he does not even want other people to know that he owns it, the picture in question is "lost" for the history of art and therefore for its historians.
8. On certain objections against this position, see below, sec. 2, "Aesthetic Existence," p. 12.
9. This does not prevent conductors, virtuosos, and even "connoisseurs" from entertaining pretty definite ideas concerning the proper interpretations that alone permit one to hear the "true" Don Giovanni, etc. The arbitrariness of such convictions is as complete as their dogmatism.
10. The contrary position is perfectly expressed in John Dewey, Art as Experience. "A work of art, no matter how old and classic, is actually, not just potentially, a work of art only when it lives in some individualized experience. As a piece of parchment, of marble, of canvas, it remains (subject to the ravages of time) self-identical throughout the ages. But as a work of art it is re-created every time it is esthetically experienced" (Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey's Philosophy, ed. J. Ratner, p. 983). The example of the Parthenon, quoted by Dewey himself, clearly shows where the error lies. The Parthenon is in no way re-created by art every time it is actually experienced as a work of art. It is a work of art because it has been produced by the art of an artist. It always subsists as a permanent possibility of aesthetic experience, as long as it lasts (Souriau, "L'Insertion temporelle de l'oeuvre d'art," in Lalo et al.., p. 41), but unless we identify artistic existence (existence of that which has been produced by art) with aesthetic existence (existence of that which is actually experienced as a work of art) works of art remain such in themselves whether they are being experienced as such or not. — Against our own position, see Osborne, pp. 95-96. Starting from a distinction introduced by H. S. Goodhart-Rendel (in Fine Art) between the material of any work of art and its vehicle, Osborne defines the vehicle of a work of art as "that which, persisting unchanged through time and outside perception or apprehension, enables (more or less) the same organization of material to enter the experience of different persons at different times." Whence his conclusion (p. 96) : "The vehicle of a work of plastic art is what is commonly called the picture, an arrangement of pigments upon canvas, wood, plaster or what not." Again: "If a beautiful picture is painted, all that is further needed for its actualization as a work of art is that a competent observer should look at it." We simply prefer to say that if a beautiful picture is painted nothing is further needed for its actualization as a work of art. The work of an artist's art is, by definition, a work of art.
11. The only painting ever sold by van Gogh was The Red Vineyard. Cf. Charles Terrasse, "Vie de Vincent van Gogh," in Lettres . . . a son frere Theo, p. 16.
12. Ingres once sent for a messenger to take the portrait of Cherubini from his studio. The story continues as follows. The man calmly takes the painting down from the easel, wraps it up, ties it carefully, and carries it away without further ado. "The imbecile," remarked Ingres; "he did not say a word." Quoted from Jules Laurens, La Legende des ateliers, by Amaury-Duval, L'Atelier d'Ingres, p. 203. Obviously, the phenomenological being of the portrait was not the same for the "imbecile" and for the painter.
13. On the various modes of phenomenological existence attributable to works of art, see Souriau, La Correspondance des arts, pp. 70-71. — On the allegedly "univocal" nature of aesthetic existence, "whatever its specification according to the different genres of art," see Souriau, "L'Insertion temporelle de l'oeuvre d'art," in Lalo et al., p. 41. The word "existence" would apply to all works of art univocally if the nature of aesthetic experience was not diversified by the physical nature of its objects.
14. The fact that there are many correspondences among the various fine arts cannot be denied. What is less certain is that the fine arts can be organized into anything like a "system of the fine arts." The interrelations among the various arts should neither be denied nor stressed to the point of obliterating the specific characters proper to each one of the fine arts considered in itself. On this problem, see Souriau, La Correspondence des arts; and Thomas Munro, The Arts and Their Interrelations, for philosophical classifications of the arts, pp. 157-208 (on Souriau's doctrine, pp. 202-6).
15. A. Laming and J. Emperaire, L'Art prehistorique: peintures, gravures et sculptures rupestres, introduction.
16. This discontinuity has invited several aestheticians, including painters, to question the received distinction between arts of time (poetry, music) and arts of space (sculpture, painting, and, generally speaking, the "arts of design"). See, for instance, the remarks of Paul Klee in his "Creative Credo" (Schöpferische Konfession) : "Movement is the source of all growth. In Lessing's Laokoon, the subject of so much mental exercise in our younger years, there is much ado about the difference between time and space in art. Once we examine it more closely, this is really just a bit of erudite hair-splitting; for space, too, implies the concept of time." (In Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 98.) Klee then observes that it takes time for a dot to become a line, for a line to form a surface, for a surface to form a solid, for an artist to construct his work, and for the beholder to see it. To *Inch he adds: "It was Feuerbach, I think, who said that a picture cannot be appreciated without a chair. Why the chair? So that your tired legs won't distract your mind. Legs get fatigued from standing for so long. What is needed is leisure-time once more." All this is true, but it is true of the genesis of the work of art and of its apprehension by a beholder only. On the contrary, from the point of view of the work of art itself, the distinction between space and time seems to remain valid. On the one hand, music is always performed and heard somewhere; so music, too, is in space; but the very substance of a musical piece is quite different from that of a sculpture or a painting. On the other hand, a painting endures in time, but it does so as a complete whole whose parts are simultaneously given in space, which is not the case with music.
17. Because order is the only kind of unity that multiplicity is able to receive. On this doctrine: E. Gilson, Introduction a l'etude de saint Augustin, pp. 159-60.
18. A drawing (1808), in the Louvre.
19. See the commentary written on Las Lanzas by Thomas Bodkin, The Approach to Painting, ch. XX, pp. 131-34. Compare, op. cit., pl. XVI, the lopsided composition of Jose Leonardo's treatment of the same subject.
20. Bodkin, p. 128, attributes to Nicolas Poussin the following principle: "Without action, neither drawing nor colour in a picture influences the mind." (No reference is given.) In the same book, opposite p. 128, p1. XV reproduces Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women as a perfect illustration of this theory. Let us observe, however, that action is not identical with movement. It resides in the subject rather than in the painting itself. A subject calling for the representation of some action helps in imparting to a picture a quality that Delacroix regretted not finding in the compositions of Titian: "Have I always felt a lack of enthusiasm for Titian because he almost invariably ignores the . . . charm of line?" (The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, p. 71 [March 7, 1847].) What Delacroix means to say is that, because they lack action, the works of Titian are often deprived of the charm that goes with ingenious arabesques. Naturally, this is a criticism of a kind that is quite frequent among creators. Delacroix resented the relative inactivity of Titian's figures because he himself was fond of the complex patterns of lines that normally go with action.
21. "I hate movement which disarranges lines" (Beauty).
22. In the passage where he refuses to reduce painting to imitation, Reynolds says: "In the same rank [as Watteau or Claude] and perhaps of not so great merit is the cold painter of portraits. But his correct and just imitation of his object has its merit. Even the painter of still life, whose highest ambition is to give a minute representation of every part of those low objects which he sets before him, deserves praise in proportion to his attainment; because no part of this excellent Art, so much the ornament of polished life, is destitute of value and use." (The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. John Burnet, p. 50.) Better inspired, Eugene Fromentin has rightly observed that "just as there are in the most practical of lives motives and influences that ennoble the behaviour, so in this art, held to be so positive, among these painters, held for the most part to be mere copiers of detail we feel a loftiness and a goodness of heart, an affection for the true, a love for the real, that give their works a value the things do not seem to possess" (The Masters of Past Time: Dutch and Flemish Painting from Van Eyck to Rembrandt, p. 101).
22a. "Also avoid motion in a pose. Each of your figures ought to be in a static position" (Paul Gauguin, Intimate Journals, p. 32).
23. Art was so clearly understood to be manual work that it has long been considered a servile avocation. "The boy [Michelangelo] devoted all the time he could to drawing secretly, for which his father and seniors scolded and sometimes beat him, thinking that such things were base and unworthy of their noble house" (Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, IV, 109). — "You have set painting among the mechanical arts! Truly were painters as ready equipped as you are to praise their own works in writing, I doubt whether it would endure the reproach of so vile a name . . ." (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, tr. and ed. E. MacCurdy, II, 228). — "The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it. As this principle is observed or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art, or a mechanical trade." (The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, p. 52.)
24. Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 4, 1140a, 7-10 (tr. W. D. Ross). It has been suggested that "state of possession" would be a better rendering of habitus (Greek: exis) than "state of capacity" used by Ross (Maritain, p. 49, n. 3). Ross' choice seems to be justified in the light of the context, for, indeed, even in art, habitus remains a possession, or a "state," but it then is the possession of a capacity to make—that is, a "state of capacity to make." The text of Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 4, 1140a, 3-5) cannot be translated differently; a "state of possession to make" would still signify, in more awkward terms, an acquired capacity to make.
25. "By the word Art I understand simply skill" (Eric Gill, Work and Property, p. 39). This definition agrees with the English usage, and although it differs from that of Thomas Aquinas, there is no real contradiction between them. Conceived as an "acquired facility in doing something," skill implies the knowledge of the proper way to make something that Thomas Aquinas attributes to the practical intellect and that he calls art. There is little or no difference between the Thomistic notion of "art" and the usual notion of skill if skill includes the knowledge of its own rule and if art includes skillfulness in its own operation. Cf. Gill, Beauty Looks After Herself, p. 11. Note, p. 12, "Skill in making and skill in doing are both loosely called art," and pp. 180-83, "Art is skill"; "Art is deliberate skill"; "Nevertheless, the word art means, first of all, skill. Skill in making (poiesis)." There is something pathetic about the plight of a competent craftsman, so keenly aware of the true nature of his own art, worrying because philosophers assure him that "Art abides always on the side of the mind," p. 11. Cf. Gill, Art-Nonsense, p. 289; refers to Maritain, The Philosophy of Art, p. 17 of the English translation. This formula is not Thomas Aquinas', but John of St.. Thomas'.
25a. All of the Webster's citations are to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 5th edn. (1936).
25b. Georges Braque, Le Jour et la nuit, p. 16.
26. It is legitimate to seek in St. Thomas for the principles of a philosophy of art. He himself, however, does not seem to have been interested in the problem. There is no doctrine of art in his own writings. Most of the texts borrowed from his works on this question are concerned, not with art as art, but, rather, with art as distinct from ethics. The antithesis recta ratio factibilium—recta ratio agibilium is no definition of art; it simply aims at distinguishing between the two orders of making and doing. Moreover, as will presently be seen, it is far from certain that the oft-quoted formula, recta ratio factibilium, justifies the conclusion with which Gill seems to have found it so hard to reconcile his own creative experience. A good antidote for the mentalism endemic in philosophical minds can be found in the assiduous reading of the writings left us by painters. For instance, Fromentin on Rubens' Miraculous Draught of Fishes at Malines (Belgium) : "It is a beautiful canvas, smooth, clean, and exact, worked by a hand of magnificent skill, adroitness, sensitiveness, and balance. The hastiness one reads into it is rather a manner of feeling than a disorder in the manner of painting. The brush is as calm as the mind is heated, and the genius ready to burst forth . . ." (The Masters of Past Time, p. 34). Cf. the rules prescribed by Delacroix for the painting of leaves: "The fist alone moving the brush, not the fingers, as for flourishes in handwriting. The hand serves only to hold the thing that draws or that paints; it remains stiff, pliantly yielding to the motions of the fist; it remains immobile in all the displacements to which the fist has to submit it in order to follow the contours of the leaves and of the stems" (Louis de Planet, Souvenirs de travaux de peinture avec M. Delacroix, p. 53). These precepts are not art; rather, they are the knowledge of the reality that art is in the hand of the painter. — Similar remarks about Japanese art in Henri Focillon, Hokousai, p. 13. In Hokusai's own art "it is not the fist that is moving; it is the forearm, or the shoulder, while the fingers, clenched on the brush, which sometimes is solidly clutched with the hand, do nothing more than hold it."
27. The Thomistic notion of art seems to include two notions, both distinct and inseparable: (1) art properly so called, which is the knowledge of what an artist wants to make and of the correct way to make it ("recta ratio factibilium"—Thomas Aquinas, commentary on Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, nn. 8, 282, 1496) ; and (2) practiced ability—that is to say, the habit, acquired by the training of natural dispositions, of performing the visual and manual operations required for the making of a work of art. So "art" is a knowledge entirely related to the making of certain material objects: it directs the operation ("ars est factiva generationis, quia est recta ratio factibilium . . . non est autem factiva operationis, sed potentiae alicujus ex qua procedit operatio," n. 1496). The Aristotelian definition of art, taken up by St. Thomas, "habitus operativus" (Summa theologiae, I—II, q. 57, art. 3, answer), includes art, its operation, and even the product of this operation. Cf. "idem est ars quod habitus factivus cum vera ratione" (bk. VI, ch. 4, lecture 3, nn. 1153 and 1159). These two definitions mean the same thing in the mind of Thomas Aquinas (compare n. 8 with n. 1153). Thus understood ("ars est habitus cum ratione factivus," n. 1166) , the notion of art cannot be separated from that of its proper operation. It then includes: (1) a speculation as to the best way to do the work; (2) a set of considerations concerning the choice and the preparation of the matter of the work; and (3) the skill required for the making of the work under the guidance of practical reason (n. 1154). Let us not forget that, like all forms, art is there in view of its operation, and, in the case of painting, the skill by which alone art can operate is in the hand. This is the reason we are saying that, concretely speaking, the "aptitude to operate" includes manual skill. Nobody knows the proper way to make a thing unless he himself can make it. The proof of the art is in the making.
28. Thomas Aquinas, De virtutibus in communi, art. 7, answer to the question. Here again, Thomas Aquinas is not interested in the notion of art qua art; he only wants to establish that there are virtues in the practical intellect; and what he says is that the effect of art is not to inspire man with the desire to operate well according to art, but, simply. to give him the knowledge of how to operate and the aptitude thus to operate.
29. "Art is simply the well making of what needs making" (Gill, Art-Nonsense, p. v). This artist has clearly seen why his own interpretation of such elementary notions could hardly please purely speculative minds. It is that "few who are trained in philosophy and few who have the cure of souls seem to have any understanding of the job of the artist or a just appreciation of his work."
30. Journal, p. 81 (September 18, 1847). Cf. pp. 162-63 (Tuesday, October 12, 1852).
31. C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, p. 276. — Cf. the remarkable page in which Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler explains why "There is every reason severely to exclude from art children's drawing, from which the formative factor is absent" (Juan Gris, p. 170). See the English translation of this work by Douglas Cooper, p. 85 (we have brought the translation nearer the French original). — The main reason alleged by Kahnweiler (who quotes Matisse in support of his position) is that the kind of drawing practiced by children, and sometimes abusively called "child art," is a kind of handwriting, ideographic rather than pictorial, and therefore foreign to art. Children do not draw forms; they describe concepts. Incidentally, Kahnweiler rightly warns his readers against the mistake made by certain critics when they reproached Paul Klee with returning to child drawing. Nothing is more calculated than the drawings in which Klee has extracted from the ideographic handwriting of children the truly pictorial elements it contains.
32. "What I have been saying about the power of painting now becomes clear. If it has to record but a single moment it is capable of concentrating the effect of that moment. The painter is far more master of what he wants to express than the poet or musician who are in the hands of interpreters; even though his memory may have a smaller range to work on, he produces an effect that is a perfect unity and one which is capable of giving complete satisfaction." (Journal, p. 201 [Thursday, October 20, 1853].)
33. Journal, p. 259 (September 23, 1854). The title of this entry is: "On silence and the silent arts."
34. Hans Arp, On My Way, p. 6.
35. It is not rare to hear music critics compare the "Eroica" of Weingartner with the "Eroica" of Bruno Walter, Furtwangler, or Toscanini. They seem to forget the name of its true author. But they are excusable because, indeed, conductors are efficient causes of the actual existence of musical works. As an example among many of the dithyrambic praises bestowed by journalists upon conductors, we beg to borrow the following ones from the first 1954 program of a well-known American symphonic society: "Mr. X, for whose art we have exhausted every possible praise," "one of the greatest musicians of our time," etc. It would be difficult to say more in praise of the greatest music composers of the past as well as of the present, since this musical hero is simply called "A PHENOMENON OF ALL TIME" and "A VERITABLE PROMETHEUS." Let us note that the conductor in question is undoubtedly one of the best. His merit is not here in question. We are simply wondering if, after these glorious epithets, there are any left for Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Wagner.
36. The virtuoso or the conductor is freer than the copyist who strives to duplicate a given picture. For, indeed, in the case of the painter, the model exists, and it is easy to compare the copy with it, whereas one cannot prove to a musician that his interpretation betrays the original. On the other hand, the musician cannot help comparing his own interpretation with a mental ideal that, precisely because it has no substance of its own, it is impossible to duplicate. As the pianist Artur Schnabel is reported to have said to one of his pupils, music, especially that of Beethoven, is "always better than it could be played." This is why, with deep insight, the same pianist would not call himself an "interpreter" of Beethoven. Still, it would have been interesting to hear Schnabel's comments on the performance by Beethoven of one of the famous sonatas on which his interpreter spent so much more time than the musician himself ever did. He might well have felt sorely disappointed at Beethoven's own interpretation. — On the trouble caused by the intervention of executants in the plastic arts, see Redon, A soi-même, pp. 123-24.
37. Applause is a complex collective reaction whose analysis would include physiological, psychological, sociological, and aesthetic elements. Its study should perhaps take into account the fact that, at the end of an exceptional performance, the audience is saying farewell to something infinitely precious, which will never again exist under identically the same form or with identically the same kind of perfection. "That strain again! it had a dying fall." All music has it.
38. Remarkable observations on the musical rhythm of colors in Delacroix and Cimahue, as well as on "the musical part that, henceforward, color is going to perform in modern paintings," in Lewes de Gauguin, pp. 287-88. On the attempts of "dynamic futurism" (Boccioni) to represent movement in pictures, see Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism, p. 21. On the suggestions made by Picasso to the same effect, p. 22. Those among the painters who have emphasized the notion of rhythm have been naturally led to stress the similarities between painting and music. On this point, see Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 40, how a painter "seeks to apply the means of music to his own art"; p. 76, how to distinguish between melodic and symphonic composition in painting, and how melodic composition ("which is regulated according to an obvious and simple form") gives rise to what Cezanne called "rhythmic" composition. "Complex rhythmical composition, with a strong symphonic cast, is to be seen in many paintings, woodcuts, miniatures, and so on, of the past" (p. 76). This timeless rhythm, which is proper to plastic arts, only deserves this title owing to the fact that, after its first instantaneous apprehension, a picture requires time to be seen in its structure and properly understood. Painting becomes an art of time to the extent that aesthetic experience is concerned.
39. Delacroix was so thoroughly a painter that, even while listening to music, he sometimes felt impatient with its essential lack of simultaneity. After admiring the "divine `Pastoral' Symphony," Delacroix observes: "I ventured to say that Beethoven's pieces are usually too long, in spite of the astonishing variety with which he reintroduces the same themes. I do not remember noticing this defect when I heard the symphony before, but however that may be, it is clear to me that an artist spoils his effect when he claims one's attention for too long at a time. Painting, among other advantages, is more discreet than music; the most gigantic picture can be seen in an instant. If its qualities, or certain portions of it, hold one's attention that is all to the good; one can enjoy it even longer than a piece of music. But if the painting seems mediocre, one has only to turn one's head away to escape boredom." (Journal, pp. 91-92 [Sunday, March 11, 1849].)
40. Without entering into the problems of musical composition, we beg leave to observe that the significance of the Wagnerian leitmotiv precisely consists in its aptitude to be reproduced whole, and practically self-identical, without ceasing to provide matter for an infinity of variations. The Wagnerian theme imparts to music an amount of simultaneous presence that it is not in its nature to have. The Wagnerian reform was the more genial as it was brought to bear upon theatrical music, in which the presence of action made it less necessary to impart to the work the kind of unity so important in symphonic compositions. The nearest approach to total presence in an opera is represented by such works as Tristan and Parsifal, whose end is in their beginning.
41. See the developments of Kahnweiler on these analogies between painting and music, in his Juan Gris, pp. 119-24. The following pages extend the comparison to poetry.
42. See the pencil drawing of Juan Gris, Girl Seated (1922); pl. 48 in Kahnweiler's text (Juan Gris, p. 121). Even in his lithograph illustration for Salacrou's Le Casseur d'assiettes (pl. 49, p. 124), dated 1924, we find it difficult to keep our eyes on any one of the three main volumes: the head, the top of the table, or the capholding hand. But, of course, there is no standard way of perceiving a work of art.
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