Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
    Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
    Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
    Ebook689 pages9 hours

    Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

    By Jacques Maritain

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The classic work on the sublime interplay between the arts and poetics

    This book explores the rich and complex relationship between art and poetry, shedding invaluable light on what makes each art form unique yet wholly interdependent. Jacques Maritain insists on the part played by the intellect as well as the imagination, showing how poetry has its source in the preconceptual activity of the rational mind. As Maritain argues, intellect is not merely logical and conceptual reason. Rather, it carries on an exceedingly more profound and obscure life, one that is revealed to us as we seek to penetrate the hidden recesses of poetic and artistic activity. Incisive and authoritative, this illuminating book is the product of a lifelong reflection on the meaning of artistic expression in all its varied forms.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateOct 17, 2023
    ISBN9780691251769
    Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
    Author

    Jacques Maritain

    Jacques Maritain, a highly regarded French philosopher, teacher and writer in the 20th century, was one of the principal exponents of Thomism and an influential interpreter of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas. He lived for many years in the United States, and taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. After WWII, he served as the French ambassador to the Vatican. He also helped draft the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

    Read more from Jacques Maritain

    Related to Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

    Titles in the series (46)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Art For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Raising The Tone

      Jun 4, 2021

      Raising The Tone
      2 min read

    • Article

      A Companion to Curation

      Nov 4, 2020

      If there was ever a book that should be top of the bibliographic list for students studying art institutions and curatorial practice(s) of the past, present and future, this is it – A Companion to Curation edited by well-known Australian artist acade

      6 min read

    • Article

      Rejecting the Standard

      Jun 1, 2022

      Rejecting the Standard
      6 min read

    • Article

      Who Runs The Art World: Money, Power And Ethics

      Feb 28, 2018

      BOOK REVIEW ANN FINEGAN IN THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, editors Brad Buckley and John Conomos have assembled an impressive set of authors, including Amelia Jones, John Welchman, Bruce Barber and Gregory Sholette. The front cover features a performance

      3 min read

    • Article

      From Einstein To Duchamp: The Physics Of Modern Art

      Apr 4, 2019

      “Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein,” an exhibit at Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum, explores interconnections between art and science.

      3 min read

    • Article

      One April Day

      Jun 4, 2018

      One April Day
      3 min read

    • Article

      Was Burne-Jones A Reluctant Radical?

      Jun 1, 2022

      THE title of this book is, at first glance, a curious one. What exactly was radical about the medievalist, mystical and Michelangelesque paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones? They show a very Victorian dream world, comprising Arthurian

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Reality of Surrealism

      Nov 1, 2024

      The Reality of Surrealism
      7 min read

    • Article

      After Life

      Mar 3, 2022

      After Life
      5 min read

    • Article

      Anything But Still

      May 1, 2024

      Anything But Still
      5 min read

    • Article

      Down To A Fine Art

      Dec 27, 2023

      Down To A Fine Art
      3 min read

    • Article

      Paint A Different Picture

      Apr 26, 2024

      Paint A Different Picture
      1 min read

    • Article

      Otherworldly Sight

      Apr 28, 2023

      Otherworldly Sight
      5 min read

    • Article

      Eleven Ways Of Looking At A Sunset

      Oct 19, 2018

      1. Cotton Mather, third-generation New England Puritan divine, wrote in his 1721 pamphlet India Christiana that “we have now seen the Sun Rising in the West.” Mather’s conceit was allegorical, yet an aspect of poetry’s power is its refusal to let you

      14 min read

    • Article

      The Master Of The Shadow

      Jun 14, 2023

      The Master Of The Shadow
      4 min read

    • Article

      Music and Memory

      Sep 27, 2024

      Music and Memory
      14 min read

    • Article

      In Perspective

      Dec 1, 2020

      In Perspective
      2 min read

    • Article

      Myth Makers

      Feb 1, 2022

      Myth Makers
      2 min read

    • Article

      Christmas Quiz 2023

      Nov 23, 2023

      1. Which future Chevalier came into the world on Christmas Day on Basse-Terre Island in the West Indies? 2. Melusine von der Schulenburg, born on Christmas Day 1667 and long the mistress of George I, kept a raven as a pet in her final years. Why? a.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Taos Romantics and Moderns

      May 1, 2023

      Taos Romantics and Moderns
      4 min read

    • Article

      What’s On

      Oct 30, 2017

      Becoming a Woman features nearly 120 works by some of the most prominent artists of the 18th century, including drawings, pastels, paintings, and sculptures selected from one of the world’s best private collections of French drawings. The exhibition

      2 min read

    • Article

      The 59th Venice Biennale

      Aug 23, 2022

      The 59th Venice Biennale
      5 min read

    • Article

      Stranger Things

      Aug 10, 2023

      Stranger Things
      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

    4/5

    6 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry - Jacques Maritain

      Chapter One

      Poetry, Man, and Things

      Preliminary Remarks

      1. Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin votes was both a poet and a diviner).¹ Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts;² another name for what Plato called mousikè.

      Art and poetry—one of the main purposes of this book is to try to make clear both the distinction and the indissoluble relationship between these two strange companions.

      Another main purpose has to do with the essential part played by the intellect or reason in both art and poetry, and especially with the fact that poetry has its source in the preconceptual life of the intellect. I use the words intellect and reason as synonymous, in so far as they designate a single power or faculty in the human soul. But I want to emphasize, from the start, that the very words reason or intellect, when they are related to that spiritual energy which is poetry, must be understood in a much deeper and larger sense than is usual. The intellect, as well as the imagination, is at the core of poetry. But reason, or the intellect, is not merely logical reason; it involves an exceedingly more profound—and more obscure—life, which is revealed to us in proportion as we endeavor to penetrate the hidden recesses of poetic activity. In other words, poetry obliges us to consider the intellect both in its secret wellsprings inside the human soul and as functioning in a nonrational (I do not say antirational) or nonlogical way.

      If, in the course of my discussions, I refer especially to the art of the painter and the art of the poet, it is not that I consider the other arts to be less significant. Music is perhaps the most significant of all. But music, I think, requires a separate, quite special analysis. Furthermore, this book is in no way a treatise on the arts; I am neither a historian nor a critic of art. My inquiry is a philosophical inquiry. I need examples which are closest at hand for everybody. Examples are only an inductive or instrumental way to get at ideas and to check ideas.

      2. The first two chapters in this book are, to a certain extent, introductory chapters. This first chapter, although mainly occupied with broad considerations about plastic arts, is concerned in reality with poetry—poetry in the universal sense I just mentioned a moment ago—but it is concerned with poetry from a still external, merely descriptive point of view. Its aim is only to bring us, through an inductive way, to confront some basic facts and state a basic problem. The problem will be scrutinized later.

      The second chapter deals with art, in the strictly determined sense which must be given to this word. Its aim is to establish a certain number of fundamentals, which are needed for further investigation, especially when it comes to the crucial point; the relationship between art and poetry.

      Nature and Man

      3. As soon as beauty is involved, the prime fact that is to be observed is a sort of interpenetration between Nature and Man. This interpenetration is quite peculiar in essence: for it is in no way a mutual absorption. Each of the two terms involved remains what it is, it keeps its essential identity, it even asserts more powerfully this identity of its own, while it suffers the contagion or impregnation of the other. But neither one is alone; they are mysteriously commingled.

      Man, when he feels the joy of beauty, does not only enter with the things of nature into that relationship of intentional³ or spiritual identification which constitutes knowledge—to know is to become another in so far as it is another. Man is seduced by Nature (metamorphosed as Nature may be when the object contemplated is a work of art). To some extent Nature enters his own blood and breathes his own desire with him. Whether art, in its beginnings in mankind, always had some magic purpose is a questionable assumption. But in a deeper though improper sense, art by itself involves a species of magic, which has become purified in the course of centuries, and is pure, and purely aesthetic, when the invasion of man by Nature pertains exclusively to the joy of a vision or intuition, that is, of a purely intentional or suprasubjective becoming.

      Conversely, in connection with aesthetic feeling there is always, to some degree, a sort of invasion of Nature by man.

      Take the objects of aesthetic delight which are the most completely remote from any impact of humanity: say, either a beautiful mathematical demonstration—or, in the domain of art, a beautiful abstract arrangement, an Arabic mosaic or piece of stuccowork;—or a shining flower, a gleaming sunset, a tropical bird;—or any of the great spectacles offered by wild Nature, desert, virgin forest, mountains, or those big noisy waterfalls which offer innumerable families of tourists the thrill of the sublime. Everywhere, in reality, man is there, under cover. Man’s measure is present, though hidden. All these nonhuman things return to man a quality of the human mind which is concealed in them: intellectual proportion and consistency in the case of a beautiful or elegant mathematical demonstration, or in the case of a beautiful abstract arrangement. In the case of that beauty which simply delights the senses, number or proportion is there again, and makes the senses rejoice in a property of their own; and as to physical qualities themselves, if a beautiful color in its relation to other surrounding colors washes the eye, as Degas put it, it is because it corresponds in things to the need of the eye for rhythmical concentration and release, and to that immaterial transparency through which the inner operation of the sense reaches fulfillment.⁴

      Finally, what about the great spectacles of wild Nature? Something of man is still involved—this time a certain feeling (related of itself to no aesthetic perception, I would say a brute feeling, or a merely subjective feeling) which is produced in us, and projected by us into things, and refleeted upon us by them: especially, with respect to Nature in her own fierce or solitary, unpierceable selfhood, the feeling of an infinite disproportion between Nature and man: this is not simply crushing and astounding, it also stirs in us, obscurely, vague and indeterminate heroic potentialities—we wonder in the dark through what kind of frightful experiences we might possibly overcome the very disproportion. Hence an impression both of awe and of challenge, which causes, I think, the sensation of the sublime, but which makes this sensation far distant from the pure perception of beauty and, I would say, defective in aesthetic value. (Not to speak of the fact that what is called sublime by tourists, sometimes by philosophers, is often simply what causes them to be in a daze.)

      4. Yet what I should like to emphasize now has nothing to do with the category of above-mentioned cases, where the object of aesthetic perception, though implying some inherent relationship to man, was as separate as possible from human life. My contention is that, apart from these particular cases, the beauty of Nature is all the greater, the aesthetic delight or perception in the face of Nature is all the purer and the deeper, as the impact of human life upon Nature is more profound and extensive.

      This may come about through the power of imagination. (Thus do the slow clouds moving in the sky, or the immensity of the sea—"Homme libre toujours tu chériras la mer"—speak endlessly to man of the human soul.)

      And it may come about in actual existence. Nature happens to be invaded by man in her own physical and spiritual reality, I mean, by this last expression, in her inner power of significance. And then her own beauty is best revealed. The bay of Rio de Janeiro, immense, luminous, exquisitely delineated, is one of the most rightly admired natural sites. But how much more beautiful, how much more moving—I mean moving the very sense of beauty—is the entrance, at nightfall, into the port of Marseilles, as it opens its man-managed secretive basins one after another, in a forest of masts, cranes, lights, and memories! When you drive along the Hudson River or through the hills of Virginia (it is not a question of walking, Americans do not know this meditative pleasure), imagine for a moment that the country you contemplate is still populated with Indian warriors and tents: then the beauty of Nature will awake and make sense all of a sudden, because the relationship between Nature and man has been re-established; modern inhabitants have not yet had the time to permeate the land with the form of man. But look at the violent forms, laden with human labor, that have been here and there planted in fields or along rivers by industry: here the relationship is established, Nature avows a new beauty. How is it that when coming from the ocean you pass the Pillars of Hercules and enter the Mediterranean, the beauty of the airy shores and lifelike sea bursts into a song, a triumph? How is it that the simple curves of the Campagna fill you with a plenitude of emotion which seems inexhaustible? If not because of Vergil and the Greek heroes (though you don’t actually think of them), and the impalpable breezes of memory which freshen your face. These places on the earth have been impregnated with man’s intelligence and toil. It is through history that the union of Nature and man is accomplished. As a result Nature radiates with signs and significance, which make her beauty blossom forth.

      From this analysis we may draw two conclusions. First: Nature is all the more beautiful as it is laden with emotion. Emotion is essential in the perception of beauty. But what sort of emotion? It is not the emotion which I called a while ago brute or merely subjective. It is another kind of emotion—one with knowledge:⁵ because, like the emotion produced by all those signs and that significance with which Nature invaded by man abounds, and which I just pointed out, it constitutes or integrates a delight involved in a vision. Such an emotion transcends mere subjectivity, and draws the mind toward things known and toward knowing more. And so induces dream in us.

      Second: The signs and the significance I just pointed out remain, as a rule, virtual or latent, at least at that very moment when the wanderer on the earth is struck by the impact of beauty. No particular recollection, no particular idea, is expressed in consciousness. Yet, for all that, these signs and this significance do not lose anything of their power with respect to the experience of beauty. Let us remember this fact, to which we shall have to return later. Unexpressed significance, unexpressed meanings, more or less unconsciously putting pressure on the mind, play an important part in aesthetic feeling and the perception of beauty.

      Following the same line of reflection, we also see that Oscar Wilde’s saying, Nature imitates art, is but an obvious truism, as far as our perception of the beauty of Nature is concerned. For man’s art and vision too are one of the ways through which mankind invades Nature, so as to be reflected and meant by her. Without the mirrors worked out by generations of painters and poets, what would our aesthetic penetration of Nature be? Only after Giotto had replaced by peaks and mountains the gold backgrounds of early medieval art did we⁶ become aware of the beauty of mountains. When you are walking in Rome, part of your joy depends on Piranesi; it depends also on the mirror of theater: yellow-ocher palazzi, stores, and workshops open as a grotto, people at home in old streets, are there to offer you the charms of the stage. Let us look at human faces as if they were pictures, then the pleasures of our eyes will be multiplied. An epicurean of art traveling in New York subways enjoys a ceaselessly renewed exhibition of Cezanne’s, Hogarth’s, or Gauguin’s figures, offered free of charge by nature, or of Seurat’s when all the lights are on.

      Things and the Creative Self

      5. It is not enough to consider the mutual entanglement of Nature and man in relation to aesthetic feeling or the perception of beauty. What matters to us is the mutual entanglement of Nature and man—let us say, the coming together of the World and the Self—in relation to artistic creation. Then we truly enter our subject matter. And then we have to do with Poetry.

      But while standing on the threshold I cannot help, first, complaining about human vocabulary. I need to designate both the singularity and the infinite internal depths of this flesh-and-blood and spiritual existent, the artist; and I have only an abstract word: the Self. I need to designate the secretive depths and the implacable advance of that infinite host of beings, aspects, events, physical and moral tangles of horror and beauty—of that world, that undecipherable Other—with which Man the artist is faced; and I have no word for that except the poorest and tritest word of the human language; I shall say: the things of the world, the Things. But I would wish to invest this empty word with the feelings of primitive man looking at the all-pervading force of Nature, or of the old Ionian philosophers saying that all things are full of gods.

      The Things and the artist’s Self: what can we learn on this subject from the typical forms in which the creative effort of man’s eyes and hands has manifested itself in the course of centuries?

      I do not like generalizations and bird’s-eye views. Yet I am constrained to resort to them by the method I am trying to follow in this chapter. I hope I can attach myself to broad characteristics simple and evident enough to avoid too great a risk of arbitrary interpretation.

      The crucial fact with which we are confronted is, it seems to me, the contrast and opposition between the approach and spirit, the poetic perception, of the Orient, and the approach and spirit, the poetic perception, of the Occident, as regards the relationship between Things and the artist’s Self.

      In a general way it can be said—and it is strongly emphasized by Oriental writers—that the art of the Orient is the direct opposite of Western individualism. The Oriental artist would be ashamed of thinking of his ego and intending to manifest his own subjectivity in his work His first duty is to forget himself. He looks at Things, he meditates on the mystery of their visible appearance and on the mystery of their secret life force, he reveals both in his work, either for the pleasure of man and the ornament of human life, or for the sacred rites of prayer and worship. But because Oriental art is essentially religious or religious-minded, this art is in communion with Things not for the sake of Things but for the sake of some other—invisible and adorable—reality whose signs Things are, and which, through Things, art reveals together with Things. In actual fact religion, not art, has lifted art to that level of life which is the very life of art, basically needed for its own truth and greatness, and which is the life of symbols. Oriental art is only intent on Things; but, like every genuine art, it loathes realism.

      Now there are two specific features which must be pointed out, and which help us to realize why Things and the pure objectivity of Things, not man and human subjectivity, hold sway over Oriental art.

      On the one hand, as everywhere where the religious instinct in mankind has not been transfigured by the Gospel, the various religions with which Oriental art is connected are primarily bound to keep and protect the human community through the social, legal, ritual efficacy of the sacred functions. Accordingly, Oriental art is primarily concerned with the universe of objects involved in rite; it turns away from Man to look for the sacred things meant by Things and the sacred faces mirrored in the world—a mythical universe which is extraneous to Man, suprahuman, sometimes ferociously antihuman. How could idolatry not lie in wait for such an art? As long as God has not assumed flesh, and the invisible made itself visible, man is prone to adore, together with the invisible powers, the Signs and the Things through which his art brings them to his eyes; he is all the more prone to do so as his art is more profoundly art, or endowed with a stronger symbolic virtue.

      On the other hand art, for Oriental thought, does not stop at the work done. Better to say, a work of art is not simply an object fashioned by the artist and existing on its own. The work is brought to completion, the work exists, only when it is seen—as a meeting place where two minds (the artist’s and the beholder’s) join one another: it veritably exists only as a vehicle of actual ideal communication. As a result, not only is the Oriental artist entirely intent on Things, but on Things such as to be made communicable to the minds of others. And this (together with the related ascendancy of traditional disciplines) is a further obligation for him to depart from himself and make self-forgetfulness his primordial virtue.

      6. Such is, it seems to me, the general picture, as concerns the Orient and the poetic approach of Oriental art. But let us examine things at closer range. Asia is nothing, if not spiritual, Okakura Kakuzo said, and her unity is the unity of a single spirit. Yet there is diversity in this unity. A look at the difference between the major types of Oriental art offered by India and China may help our analysis reach more definite conclusions.

      In what way is Indian art entirely intent on Things? I would say that this art is captured by Things; it means a giving up of the soul to the life-giving violence which dwells in Things and ripens into sense-striking luxuriance.

      No doubt Indian art, like Indian philosophy, is permeated with spiritual practical purpose. What is done by the artist is less a work of art than an instrument for some invisible result to be produced within the mind. I am thinking not only of those hieratic diagrams which are, so to speak, ecstatic gadgets of yoga; but also of the spiritual expression and smile through which so many images of Buddha aim to induce peace and contemplation in the beholder.

      Yet on the one hand everything which is not the Absolute is illusion; and on the other hand this very illusion is a manifestation of the Absolute, not as participated in by a created reality, but as mirrored in a dream;—and the only Self is the Absolute. Let us say, then, that this dream is sacred: just as the pure flower of the lotus resting on the surface of the water, so the mud from which it arises is sacred; everything is sacred. There is no ascetic purification of the senses, but rather self-expansion and self-evolution of a life-power which is indivisibly sensual and spiritual—until final liberation from that very life-power, and from any sensible or intellectual representation.

      And there is no ascent to the Absolute through created realities (since there are no created realities). How could the figures of the dream be of use to point to reality, the supreme, the Unique Reality? The wise man looks for pure aloofness, and turns only to his own inner self. There is no spiritualization of visible things (except in certain works of the Greco-Buddhist school). Art has its dwelling place in maya, and in the realm of senses. It depicts a mirage,⁷ but it is delivered over to the mirage, and to the unbridled exuberance of sense-captivating forms. And such a process is all the more irresistible as the prime duty of the artist, in the Oriental conception, is to identify himself with that which he has to express. Try as he may to reach beyond Nature, he can only succeed in identifying himself with the very life-force, the ferocious eros which carries the dream of the world along to ceaseless births and renewals and swarming productivity. He is vanquished by Nature, and the implacable fecundity of Becoming.

      Thus it is that Indian art, while always looking for the hidden meaning of Things, is captured by Things, as I said a moment ago, and gives itself up to their inner vital violence and outer vital luxuriance. Busy with their nine flavors, it offers us a profusion of dancing and moving, happy, poignant, heroic or pathetic, sometimes provocative, sometimes savage forms, of exquisite details, or of majestic stone outgrowths which seem enormous vegetable productions shaped from within by the soul of tropical vines and forests. It bursts forth into a riot of ornaments and embellishings. It makes us wonder whether the conviction of the illusory nature of everything proffered by the senses does not result from, and counterbalance, a most profound sensual vitality.

      So richly beautiful an art does not seek after beauty. It always remains a vehicle at the service of some practical effect, either erotic, magic, or religious. Even in its most splendid achievements it remembers the impermanence of the wooden or clay materials it used originally, as well as the impermanence of Nature (a century ago Father Hue still had the opportunity of admiring in Tibet statues carefully carved in butter). This art is not interested in the beauty of the human figure. The human figure, for it, is only a part of cosmic appearances and one of the shadows cast by the dance of Shiva.

      7. Chinese art also is entirely intent on Things: but in a way typically different from the Indian way. It is not captured by Things; rather does it capture them, in the light of a sort of animist transnaturalism. This art is a contemplative effort to discover in Things and bring out from Things their own encaged soul and inner principle of dynamic harmony, their spirit, conceived as a kind of invisible ghost which comes down to them from the spirit of the universe and gives them their typical form of life and movement.

      Here we have no dash for the Absolute, the supreme, and unique Self.⁸ We have a cosmic faith, a sacred veneration for Tao, the primal source,⁹ and for heaven, in which the spirits of all that is visibly shaped pre-exist, and from which they come down into Things to hide in them and shape and move them from within. And Things exist, be it in a fleeting manner—this native, deep-seated Chinese feeling has possibly been invaded, but has never been effaced by Buddhist irrealism; Things are not a dream, they have their own reality. Then Things themselves (since they are real participations in being) can be spiritualized—in other words the spirit they conceal can be discovered and set free by our contemplative grasping. And senses, through which Things are reached, can be purified too. Such a process describes the primary intent of Chinese art. What does the first of the famous six canons of Hsieh Ho prescribe?—To have life-motion manifest the unique spiritual resonance that the artist catches in Things, inspired as he is by his communion with the spirit of the cosmos. The second canon is no less significant. If the brush strokes which render bone structure have primacy among all means of execution, to the point of making painting, so to speak, a branch of calligraphy, it is because the very vigor and alertness of these touches (together with the quality of the ink tones) express the movement of life perceived in things and its structural harmony (and they are, at the same time, a token of the value of the artist’s inspiration).

      The Chinese contemplative painter becomes one with Things, not to be carried along by their generative torrent, but to seize upon their own inner spirit. He draws them in; he suggests their spiritual meaning, leaving aside the whole glut of sense-satiating, flesh-and-blood forms and colors, luxuriant detail, or ornament; he endeavors to make Things more impressively themselves, on his silk or his paper, than they are in themselves, and to reveal at the same time their affinities with the human soul; he enjoys their inner beauty, and leads the beholder to divine it. Thus it is that he is busy with capturing Things, as I said a moment ago.

      A second typical difference from Indian art appears in the major importance given by the Chinese artist to empty spaces, to silent times: because what matters above all is the power of suggestion of the work, and because, in the Taoist view, the nonexistent has as much significance as the existent.¹⁰ This makes Chinese painting particularly akin to music, where rests are as important as sounds—whereas the works of Indian art are filled up, packed with the irresistible offspring of life and with expressive forms that saturate the eye. There is no more anatomical science or concern in China than in India. But a running Chinese horse is the very spirit of the horse’s powerful movement, while Indian horses and elephants, dancers, and dryads are sense-astonishing or enrapturing spokes of the wheel of Nature. The flowing quality of Chinese art is more of a melody, that of Indian art, of a brimful river.

      Finally, as concerns the attitude of art with regard to beauty—a difficult subject, which I now only touch upon—I have already noted that Indian art is not directly concerned with beauty. Distinguishing between the conscious purpose of the artist and the vital dynamism of the virtue of art which is at work in him, one might say, more precisely, that neither Indian art (except by stealth) nor the Indian artist seeks after beauty, I mean for beauty’s sake.

      Nor does the Chinese artist—any more than our medieval craftsmen—seek after beauty for beauty’s sake; but Chinese art, like our medieval art, seeks indeed after beauty, as its supreme, transcendent end. In other words the search for beauty does not haunt the consciousness of the Chinese or medieval artists, who enjoy the beauty of things but want only to make a good work, and to make it a vehicle of spiritual instruction.¹¹ But the search after beauty for the sake of beauty, or as supreme, transcendent end, is present and paramount in the unconscious, intrinsic dynamism of Chinese art, and of medieval art as well; whereas the dynamism of Indian art itself tends, I would say, to a supreme end which is not beauty, but praxis, practical use, especially spiritual experience, either of the devouring impermanence of Becoming, or of the power of divinities. This virtue of art finds beauty by the way, without looking for it. Chinese art, however, despite its interest in portraiture, has not yet perceived the privileged beauty of the human figure. It is less interested in the beauty of the human body than in the beauty of landscapes, birds, and flowers.

      A temple within a large compound has a tall curved structure with a spherical structure on the top. The temple is surrounded by several smaller temples with similar architecture.

      1. Temple of Lingaraja. Bhuvaneśvara, India.

      A close-up of a statue carved on the wall of the temple. The statue has a female figure with a crown-like object on her head and an object with a wheel on the top right.

      2. Detail of the Kailasa Temple. Ellora, India.

      A fresco of a half-naked woman. The woman sits with her right leg below the thigh of her left leg and her left leg kept above her right leg. The woman wears some ornaments like a headdress, necklaces, bangles, and so on.

      3. A Young Woman Seated. Fresco, Ajanta Caves, India.

      A monochromatic sketch of a scene with a house, trees, hills, and shrubs in the front. An outline of a giant mountain range is in the background. The mountain has some trees on the peak.

      4. Hsu Shih-ch’ang. Mountain Landscape (A Scholar’s Abode). Yüan Dynasty.

      Some of the traits I just pointed out make Chinese art, in one sense, nearer than Indian art to our own art. It remains, nevertheless, dominated by the supremacy of Things over the human Self which characterizes Oriental art in general. According to this tendency toward sheer objectivity, the motion-giving and life-giving spirit on which Chinese art is intent in Things was to become a kind of typical formula assigned once and for all to the various categories of things. Even the Chinese passion for codification, canonic rules, and recipes, as well as the Chinese cult for masters in whose footprints disciples must follow, and whom they must piously copy, has made Chinese art liable to the temptation of an academicism which is no less boring than our own: hence those bamboos invariably stern in their never-yielding flexibility, those plum trees invariably courageous because they blossom in winter, those orchids invariably pure because they display their beauty in solitude, those chrysanthemums invariably noble because they have the mind of a hermit, those mountains invariably smiling in spring and sleeping in winter, those farmers invariably rustic, those ladies invariably refined, and those generals invariably brave.

      8. To what purpose did I submit these observations about Indian and Chinese art? What is the conclusion they lead us to?

      The typical difference between Indian art and Chinese art does not proceed from the Things that man contemplates. It proceeds from men who contemplate Things. All the distinctive features on which I have laid stress are but an expression of the invisible human fabric, spiritual and carnal, religious, intellectual, or emotional, depending both on nature and history, on conditioning and freedom, which is rooted in the subjectivity of the Indian people and the Chinese people. What makes Oriental art either typically Indian or typically Chinese is the fact that the particular poetic approach embodied in Chinese or Indian art—while, in both cases, turning away from the human ego to look only at Things—conveys to the work, in reality, not only an obscure revelation of Things, but also—in an involuntary, reluctant, and masked manner—an obscure revelation of the human Self as well, the collective Indian Self or collective Chinese Self.

      Furthermore, let us now take into account the great diversity of schools and styles into which both Indian and Chinese art have divided, in the course of centuries burdened with an extraordinary succession of human events, changes, and experiences. The poetic approach peculiar to each one of these schools conveyed to the works issuing from them, as well as an obscure revelation of Things, an obscure revelation of a particular collective subjectivity.

      And lastly let us look at the individual works themselves, at the great works which, traveling through the ages, bring to us the impact of some unforgettable creative intuition. In and through the admirable disinterestedness of the Oriental artist, in and through his pure effort toward Things to be revealed in their pure objectivity, it is also his individual soul, the unique quality of his singular emotion, the secret night of his own singular subjectivity, which are, despite himself, obscurely revealed to us, and which strike us in the dark. The more the personality of the Oriental artist succeeds in forgetting itself and immolating itself in Things, the more, in point of fact, it is present and revives in the work.

      Here is, then, the conclusion we may retain (a partial conclusion, since it refers only to the art of the Orient): it is that Oriental art is the opposite of Western individualism and never says I. It endeavors to hide the human Self and to stare only at Things. It is primarily directed toward communion with and expression of the transnatural, particularly the sacred content which is meant by Nature and by Things. But to the very extent to which it reveals the secret meanings of Things, Oriental art cannot help obscurely revealing also, despite itself, the creative subjectivity of the artist.¹² The more the poetic perception which animates art catches and manifests the inner side of Things, the more it involves at the same time a disclosure and manifestation of the human Self.

      The same conclusion holds true for Greek art. I observe, parenthetically, that it is not invalidated by Islamic art, which being forbidden the representation of figures (at least in public edifices), developed along the lines of a purely abstract objectivity. Islamic art is intent on mathematical harmony and rhythmic order, and yet with all its rosettes and arabesques, garlands, palm leaves, and floral tendrils, and its delight in color, it involuntarily betrays the vivid sensuousness, burned by the intellect’s refined fire, of the creative subjectivity from which it proceeds.

      As regards Hellenic art, we know (this is a commonplace observation, yet true, to be sure, and sufficient for our purpose) what testimony it affords of the Greek miracle as an epiphany of human reason. Man and reason stand facing the crushing impetus of cosmic powers and the traps set by the shrewd ruthlessness of the gods: they are set on understanding the mystery of that implacable Nature within which they remain encompassed and of that life to which it would have been better not to be born. Armed with invisible ideas they struggle with Things. Orpheus charms the beasts and is torn by Maenads. Fate and freedom are face to face. Art, then, while being aware of the suprahuman, divine or magic or dionysian power inherent in Things, strives after the intelligibility of Things and intends to bring out their connivance with Reason.

      It was when such conflict and tension made the enigmatic and threatening significance of Things still present in the victory of reason that Greek art reached its unique, everlasting splendor. Later on, it luckily preserved in a host of incomparable works its genuine poetic approach, but it was finally to succumb to the lies both of imitation and idealism. In its period of decadence it deteriorated through submission to the separate authority of a thing-in-itself to be copied, and to the search after the canons of ideal beauty of this very thing. It became self-satisfied with those perfectly rationalized but deaf-mute melting shapes, imprisoned in themselves and mirroring nothing, which Praxiteles offers to the admiration of the historians of art.

      Contrary to what we have noticed apropos of Chinese art, not only Greek art but the Greek artist himself sought after beauty, and in the most conscious and purposeful manner. This was a great event in the spiritual history of mankind: a liberation of the transcendent value of beauty, which is a participation in divine attributes, and, at the same time, an invaluable step (though naturally pregnant with those beautiful dangers that Plato cherished) in the progress of the human spirit in self-awareness. By the same stroke, Greek art perceived the privilege of man in the objective realm of beauty; it realized that the human body is the most beautiful object in nature: a revelation which was too much for it. Greek art bent in adoration before the human figure. Thus it was in the long run doubly vanquished: by nature and by the figure, by aesthetic submission to the external thing-in-itself and by idolatrous worshiping of the human body.

      In concluding these brief remarks, we must observe that beneath all essential differences, Greek art and Oriental art have a basic characteristic in common: like the art of the Orient, Greek art is entirely intent on Things; it is against the grain of this fundamental tendency that creative subjectivity is disclosed and manifested in the work, without the artist willing or knowing it. In struggling with Things and Nature, Greek art is always turned toward them. Man, privileged as his figure may be, remains an object in Nature and a thing in the cosmos, subordinate to the perfection and divinity of the universality of Things. A certain individualism starts to assert itself, it is true, but only as to the artist’s individual talent or mastery, not as to his individual self-interiority. The Greek artist had less self-forgetfulness, perhaps, than the Chinese, but only in so far as he was concerned with his own excellence in the face of beholders or competitors, rather than with his own inwardness in the face of Things. The inner mystery of personality was not yet revealed to man.

      The Advent of the Self

      9. It is in a theological form, and at the peak of the most abstract conceptualization, that the notions of person and personality were first explicitly offered to the human mind: namely, in the dogmatic formulas concerned with Christian faith in the divine Trinity—one Nature in three Persons—and in the Incarnation of the Word—a divine Person assuming human nature. At the same time the human mind was confronted with a new idea of man—the Gospels and St. Paul disclosed to it the prevalence of the internal man over the external man, of the inner life of the soul over legal or exterior forms—and it could contemplate in the Son of Man crowned with thorns the abysmal depth of the most living and mysterious Self.

      How, then, was art to go its way through the centuries dating from the birth of Christ? To make a long story short, I would say that in the course of its extraordinarily diversified evolution, our Western art passed from a sense of the human Self first grasped as object, and in the sacred exemplar of Christ’s divine Self, to a sense of the human Self finally grasped as subject, or in the creative subjectivity of man himself, man the artist or the poet.

      Shall I indicate in a most diagrammatic way the main essential phases of this evolution as I see it? In the first phase the mystery of the Person comes into sight as a mere object, in the world of Things but transcending Things. Man emerges above Nature and has vanquished the world. Here we have Byzantine art—so close, in one sense, to Oriental art, though freer from Things—with its glorious and royal, not suffering Christs; and Rome’s basilicas, and their grand mosaics, more radiant with spirituality in the barbarous centuries than at the time of Roman classicism; and Ravenna; and further Romanesque art. The immense reality of the human soul is more and more present, but not revealed, even in the manner of an object; it remains veiled behind the intellectual and universal, dogmatic significance of sacred symbols and figures. The divinity of Christ soars over everything.

      In the second phase the mystery of the Person still comes into sight as a mere object, in the world of Things though transcending Things. But now—in Gothic architecture’s times, and especially after St. Francis of Assisi—this mystery discloses its more human depths. This is the age of Duccio, Giotto, Angelico, of French and Spanish Pietà’s, and, in its final ardor, of Grünewald. Art is still dominated by sacred inspiration, and Christ is still at the center. But this time it is Christ in His humanity, in His torment and redeeming Passion—and around Him the Virgin in compassion and all the saints with their individual features and adventures, and mankind with all the characters who play their part in human life, and all nature reconciled with man in the grace of the Gospel. The human soul gleams everywhere through the barred windows of the objective world, the human Self is more and more present on the stage, in the manner of an object which art offers to our sight. Soon it will feel lost in its human loneliness, when the sacral order of old Christendom dissolves and man begins seeking on a hostile earth a place for his newly discovered autonomy. And we shall contemplate the dances of the dead, and the great existentialist distress of the later fifteenth century.

      10. I would submit that in the third phase the sense of the human Self and of human subjectivity enters a process of internalization, and passes from the object depicted to the mode with which the artist performs his work. Then occurs the outburst of individualism commonly pointed out apropos of the Renaissance, baroque art, and our classical art. Here we have not only—together with a prise de conscience of the intellectual energy or virtue of art—a prise de conscience of the working ego, exceedingly stronger than in the Greek artist. This is what happened at first—a sudden beholding of the sublimity of the artist’s calling and of the new power and ambition afforded to him by science, by anatomical knowledge, mathematics, perspective, and the discovery of three-dimensional representation in painting, which intoxicated with glory the great Italians of the second Rinascimento. But I think of something much more profound, which was to last and develop in subsequent centuries, namely the fact that the unconscious pressure of the artist’s individuality upon the very object he was concerned with in Nature came to exercise and manifest itself freely in his work.

      No doubt the old illusion in which Leonardo himself (as a philosopher, I mean, not as an artist) believed when he praised painting as the art of offering the eye perfect simulacra of natural objects remained in the ideological background. But the fact gave it the lie. Painters did not strive for external resemblance. The external form was not to be copied, but to be interpreted—thus Michelangelo’s precept, to give moving figures the form of the flame of fire,¹³ was long an accepted maxim. Over and above all, natural appearances, though still treasured and lovingly revered, were caught and carried along in the freedom of imagination fecundated by nature. We painters take the same liberties as poets and madmen take, Veronese said.¹⁴ Speaking of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: They addressed themselves, Allston rightly observed,¹⁵ not to the senses merely, as some have supposed, but rather through them to that region (if I may so speak) of the imagination which is supposed to be under the exclusive dominion of music, which, by similar excitement they caused to team with visions that ‘lap the soul in Elysium.’ In other words they leave the subject to be made by the spectator, provided he possesses the imaginative faculty; otherwise they will have little more meaning to him than a calico counterpane.

      Nature, then, with her sensible forms, always confronts the artist as a separate thing-in-itself. And the artist, it is true, no longer looks at her to draw from her symbols of supernatural realities, as the Middle Ages did, he no longer believes with Michelangelo that good painting is nothing but a copy of the perfections of God and a recollection of His painting. (He added, and this is singularly close to modern consciousness: It is a music and a melody which only intellect can understand, and that with great difficulty.¹⁶ But the artist is now very far also from seeking in Nature, as Greek classicism did, the ideal beauty of a given object grasped by the senses. Nature for him is the inspirer of an imaginary world which he draws from Things with her assistance and collaboration. And the subject on which he is intent is a fruit of imagination born of nature and permeated with nature, which he tries to make present to our eyes. Thus on the one hand he remains submitted to the primacy of the object—become, in the sense I just specified, the subject represented. But on the other hand he definitely imprints on it the mark of his own individuality, of his own style, even if it is true that he aspires to achieving style rather than to having a style.¹⁷ The work bears more openly than ever, it bears of necessity, by virtue of the typical relationship prevalent in those times between the artist and Nature, the imprint of its maker.

      An external manifestation of this fact is the multiplicity of contrasting schools and techniques from the early sixteenth century on. Even the individual factor in the mode of performing the work becomes so powerful that the greatest artists cannot actually understand each other’s art. Michelangelo was singularly hard on Flemish painting, which attempts to do so many things that it does none well,¹⁸ and El Greco said that Michelangelo was a good man but did not know how to paint.¹⁹ When, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the perfect economy of intelligence and the creative order of a reason admirably sensitive and respectful of intuition gained prevalence, the free assertion of the artist’s personality was not effaced, at least in the great achievements of classical art. Such an art has become purely human, it has got loose from sacred inspiration. But not only in Rembrandt, Zurbarán or Georges de Latour, say, in Velasquez’ portraits or Vermeer’s figures, in Poussin’s or Claude’s landscapes or Watteau’s tragic games and ballets as well, it remains open, one way or another, to that kind of religious gravity which emanates from any spiritual depth.

      Yet we know too well how our classical art was threatened by the perennial enemies of creative reason: naturalism, academicism, adoration of the perfection of means. The end came when the sense of the Sign got completely lost in corrupted classicism. But even in the great epoch the dominant concern—regarded as inherent in the very essence of art—with the subject treated and the rational consistency, the objective intelligibility of the spectacle offered to sight, continued to repress or control to a large extent creative subjectivity and obliged poetry to pass through a permanent obstacle, perhaps for a greater blessing in disguise and a more powerful assertion of its native freedom.

      It is curious to notice that

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1