Beauty and the Artistic Painting

What is art? What is beauty? What is the artistic painting, and how do we appraise it? Is there a difference between an artist and an amateur of art?

— I should like to put these questions to those who oppose the modern trends in art, and to those who stand bewildered before a modern artistic painting, not knowing by what measure to appraise it — which freezes the painting in their eyes and creates that divorce between the appreciative public and the creative artist.

— The spirit, or the spirit of the age, does not appear clearly except when true humanity is realized through it, and that comes about only through the close union of faith, the arts, and the sciences in a given age — and this union appeared clearly in earlier civilizations, such as Pharaonic Egypt and Chaldean Syria, in China, and in the age of the Renaissance in Europe. Whoever stands before the artistic production of one of these civilizations can judge its philosophy, its religion, and the sciences that prevailed in it — because art, ever since man has existed, is that manifestation of this close union, which in turn expresses all humanity in the various civilizations.

— And there is no disparity of esteem between a Pharaonic art and a Chaldean art, between a Byzantine art and a Greek art, between the art of the blacks of Africa or the reds of America — so long as each of these arts has given the best expression to the feeling and aims of a community of which it is a part — so long as that art was the fruit of that firm union of the faith, sciences, and philosophy of that nation.

And has the idea of beauty differed in the various civilizations, and has the manner of expressing it differed as well? — Of course — for every civilization aimed at a certain thing along with the course of its dull daily life — and this aim the artist loved without knowing it — so his production came as an interpretive copy of that civilization in its entirety.

— For example:

When the Greek artist, in his search for beauty, sought symmetry and equal or proportionate division within known laws and measurements, in order to make the art of living statuary a freezing of a particular movement at a limited moment, and then in order to set an order for this fixed movement, he relied entirely upon nature to help him, and it became the source of his inspiration, so that he no longer thought of anything but copying it faithfully... The examples of this are many; I single out among them the Venus de Milo and the Apollo of Phidias.

The neighbor of this Greek, the Byzantine artist, at the height of his spiritual mission, was searching for a spiritual beauty — and that not by harmony, nor by symmetry, nor by equal or proportionate division, nor by copying nature faithfully and relying upon it entirely as the Greek did; rather he set about creating figures strange in build and proportions — unfamiliar in ordinary life — all of his own creation and invention, in order to show forth through them that spiritual beauty; and these extraordinary proportions produced beings that seemed the work of magicians.

The Byzantine artist expressed exactly the feeling of a nation whose authority was divine in its source — théocratique — abounding in faith, admitting no dispute in its beliefs — for his production interprets that: the Byzantine icons and works came to resemble one another until they became like a perpetual repetition — and in our old Greek Orthodox churches we have many examples of them — for they express not individual differences and personal opinions, but the assured conviction of the believer in a state where believers abounded.

And again: when the artists of the age of the Renaissance were enamored of religious or historical subjects, expressing them in dark, unfrank colors, with their love of depth and its display by means of light and shadow, and their study of movement in an anatomical — that is, dissective — and profound study, in order to show volumes clearly, as though floating in far space —

the Impressionists in the nineteenth century turned to an entirely different beauty. They loved the light of the sun and its reflection upon things, and the display of the frank primary colors of the rainbow; therefore they neglected historical subjects, to go out to nature and draw from it their joyous subjects, moving under the light of the sun. They neglected forms and their volumes, and far and near, in order to study color and its changes in the humid atmosphere, which has the power of breaking the white rays of the sun.

Again, whereas the artists of the eighteenth century saw beauty in turning classical art into a romantic art abounding in superficial excitements of emotions and movements that have a beginning and an end — such as the paintings of Watteau & Fragonard: if the scene shows a lover with his beloved, he leans toward her and her head bends to incline toward him, and the trees above them stretch their branches to bend and lean over the pair, and the wind lends its aid to tilt the girl's dress and the youth's kerchief, and even the running river would divert its course for their sake — and so on, repetition in the whole movement to say the same thing —

and was the eighteenth century, in point of intellectual and religious activity, anything but an unoriginal repetition of the beliefs of classicism? In contrast with romanticism, the Pharaohs, two thousand years or more before Christ, saw beauty in silence, in stillness and solidity, and in hinting at movement and emotions with a hint that scarcely shows.

— Will human beings, then, given the difference of the idea of beauty in the various civilizations and the difference of the ways of expressing it, agree, I wonder, on which is the most glorious painting??

As for the painting or the artistic piece, whether it be painting or sculpture, its spiritual value — or the value of the human being in it — does not go back to what the painting represents of war stories or religious stories, political stories, or other tales told with some or with much genius — no; the artistic or human value in it goes back to the style and the ways particular to each art, woven tightly together with the vitality and the feeling of the artist in the depths of his soul in showing forth the faith, philosophy, sciences, and aims of the age in which he lives, and to the choice of ways and success in them to the degree of perfection — and to the proportions of the artistic piece, each affecting the other — and to its vitality, expressive of a sensibility which is the daughter of the thought, emotion, feeling, culture, and personality of the artist himself — and it is ignorance, utter ignorance, to appraise the painting for its subject only.

— If it represents a battle, the subject is a trivial thing with respect to art; it pleases the common crowd and does not convince the elect — for the common run of people take comfort in the subject because it represents something, exactly as they would take comfort in the same subject were it a photograph; there is no difference for them, save that the one is the work of a human hand and the other the work of a machine...

— The elect, however, go in their search beyond the subject; they go to the art, and this means to the particular ways and styles and the inventions in the artist's expression of his feeling, his faith, and his aims — and whenever an artist in some painting succeeds in expressing not only his own feeling, faith, and aims, but the feeling, aims, faith, and sciences of an entire nation, that painting is among the greatest of paintings — a chef-d'oeuvre — whether it represented a military parade, or a religious story, or a beautiful view, or a still life, or anything else. Most of Cézanne's paintings represent either Mont Sainte-Victoire or a few apples scattered among vessels; and most of Braque's subjects are nothing but a pitcher, or a table, or a fish on a plate, or other such trivial subjects.

The idea of art for art's sake is an unacceptable idea — acceptable only when it means man for man's sake. For whether the artistic piece goes back to the Pharaohs or to the Greeks, to the Byzantine or to the Gothic, to the age of the Renaissance or to the romantics, the sublime among them is the painting in which is summed up everything the priest, the scholar, and the poet wished to say in a given age — it is the painting that gives the best expression to the feeling and aims of a nation, refusing every value that the artist does not live together with his nation. Knowing that every age has its styles, and every age its way of living, and every age its different sciences and different creeds.

— Will human beings, then, agree on the most glorious painting among the various civilizations, I wonder?

— Every state has its men, and every age a beauty which the artist discovers, if he is an artist — and we must not confuse the amateur of art with the genuine artist. The amateur is a person who does not differ from the artist in sincerity and perseverance; he differs from him in the power of creation.