It is difficult to define art in a single sentence. Its aim is to express emotions, experiences and ideas that are beyond the reach of language. There would probably be no painters or sculptors if everything they wished to say could be conveyed in a few well-chosen words. If art, then, is entirely concerned with what cannot be expounded, how can we define its true character? Language can do no more than circle around the kernel of the problem. Nevertheless, there has been no lack of attempts at explanation from Antiquity to modern times.
Medieval thinkers based their interpretation of art on the philosophy of Plato and St Augustine. For them, this meant that there should be a harmonious relationship between the part and the whole. There was no question of the imitation of Nature in either the theory or the practice of art. Such ideas did not come to the fore until the Renaissance, when art was made to reflect man’s newly-awakened sensuous approach to the natural world about him.
The copying of Nature — based on the philosophy of Plato’s pupil Aristotle — has continued in favour up to the present day and prevents many people from having access to wide realms of creative art. It was an entirely misleading theory, which could not truly widen the art of Classical Antiquity or even that of the Renaissance; it was strongly opposed by the protagonists of the Romantic Movement (c. 1800), who rightly maintained that artistic creation depended on the imagination and that the latter was not required for the mere copying of Nature.
Nineteenth-century naturalism was, it is true, once again less interested in imagination, and Zola’s famous dictum that art was ‘Nature seen through the individual temperament’ gained ground everywhere. But here the individuality of the artist is at least allowed to inform his work, even though its purpose is still to mirror Nature.
None of these explanations is completely right or completely wrong; each is only a half-truth and can at most characterize the art of a certain epoch; they do not explain the phenomenon of ‘art’ itself. If we survey the field of creative art, we see at once that, besides the artist who ‘forms’, there must be substance which can be given form. The raw material — the sculptor’s block of marble, the artist’s paints, the mason’s load of stone — has to be brought to life.
A wooden building of necessity differs from one made of ferroconcrete. A rigid Egyptian statue owes its form to granite and basalt just as the Gothic Madonna owes hers to the grain of the wood. The impact made by a fresco derives not only from the painter’s skill and purpose, but also from the medium he uses. Primitive art — and modern art, too, when it tries to get to the roots of primitive creation — shows that art begins with the very experience of the material. A beautiful piece of stone or wood engenders inspiration.
We must remember that the theme is as much ‘material’ for the artist as is the clay, wood or stone. The theme must likewise be brought to life; it, too, must receive form. Its individual components must be integrated into an organic whole. A lump of clay is no entity, but merely part of an amorphous mass. A landscape, likewise, is merely the sum total of its part. A work of art is more than this — it possesses a ‘wholeness’ of its own. To help us understand such a philosophy of art, we might turn to the constellations of the heavens: add one to the seven stars of the Great Bear, or take one away, and the entire effect would be altered, so rhythmically and tellingly are they grouped.
In the same way, those who look at a work of art should receive the impression that there is neither too much nor too little, that everything is in its appointed place. A work of art must stand up to this test, whether it is large or small, monumental or intimate, impetuous or calm, naturalistic or abstract. In this respect, each true work of art possesses the quality of perfection. Goethe explained how this is possible, even though the artist himself is, like all men, imperfect. The miracle of a work of art, he says, can be compared to the miracle of procreation: just as a child can be greater than its parents, so the work of art -the child of the world outside the artist and of the world within him — can be greater than both.
But what of the actual subject-matter which the majority of sculptures and paintings seek to portray? What of their content? Is this of secondary importance? Certainly not — although we cannot insist that, as a matter of principle, there be a ‘subject’. Architecture, one of the noblest of the arts, has no need to imitate anything in Nature.
Nevertheless, a specific object can play a very important part in art, for it, together with the theme, often provides the impetus for creative activity by firing the artist’s imagination. To those who look at a picture, furthermore, it serves as a bridge that leads them to the work of art. But if the beholder goes no farther and imagines that it is enough to be absorbed in the ‘subject’ alone, he has merely entered the forecourt of art’s temple.
We need not be artists to be able to portray an object with pencil or brush; anybody can do that more or less adequately. Art begins only when we can perceive the realm of pure form beyond the outward manifestation, and only those who pay as much attention to the interpretation as to the object portrayed will truly understand a work of art.
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