Renée Jeanne Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Carl Dreyer, 1928
Here is a fresh way of dividing up the visual arts as objects that are appreciated for their things, whether in painting or sculpture; experiences, as the emotions and ideas generated from the visual object, as is clear in Abstract Expressionism; and images, which are what are in the mind of what has been produced, like the face of the actress, Falconetti, in Dreyer’s film, “Joan of Arc”. This division can be considered metaphysical because they refer to three kinds of being, but they are actual , however abstract, because they name and refer to actual properties that exist in the world and compared to one another rather than indivisible and inevitable such as real metaphysical properties like free will or cause.This division is different from the usual ways of classifying visual arts. The most common one is historical. Textbooks of art history divide periods from Egyptian to classical to Christian to secular and then to modern, Impressionism a bridge to the preoccupation with what the artist interprets the painting to be, and then on Asian and pre-literate art, those added to new wings in museums, and then to contemporary art, the latest additions made distinct even if of shorter duration because they are more known to the contemporary consciousness. That telescoping of more recent history also applies to what is apparently the non-historical division of another principle for dividing the visual arts, which is by their media. There is painting and sculpture and architecture and also recently textiles, whether quilting or courtourie, and also cinema, even though people wonder about its cross with storytelling, some art aficionados are more concerned with the visual quality of films than of their narratives. Everybody argues about the edges rather than the essences.
One of the most accessible forms of art available to children is the room of armor found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The armor is different from other things because of its time and the shapes. These objects are designed to protect combatants while being flexible enough to allow some mobility and so the various parts are designed to work together smoothly. Clearly, armor is rightly understood as an object that is artful as well as artistic because it conveys warfare in a previous age even if I was not particularly taken with it when I was young because more representational art engaged me. Another object that did engage my younger interest was the gate in the Spanish room (where the Christmas tree sands) that showed the appeal of Spanish culture, what were its gentle curves and overall majesty. Those are clearly things that also express mood and meaning\, which are the hallmarks of art.
If you think about it, representational art, the reproduction of lives and landscapes and still pictures seen within the frame surrounding the canvas on which it has been painted, are also things. Otherwise, we could not very well understand at what we are looking at; a portrait of life rather than life itself, three dimensions turned into two, making use of paint so as to create its effects, the parts of the picture arranged in a composition so that it cuts off the sce at its four ends, a kind of balance between those elements, the artist choosing which colors and objects to provide mood and meaning, so that the viewer is prompted to ‘read” the painting. “A window in the world” indeed, though also seen as the limitations imposed by the artist, as when a poet decides to form his words into a particular rhyme scheme. A canvas is always asking what a painter will fill out of the nothingness and for ages it is to copy what is to be seen in the world because capturing that seems worthwhile, previously even to when words were able to capture what it was they came to represent.
Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished St. Jerome in the Wilderness, 1480 - 1490
A good way to understand painting as a thing made within the constraint of a flat rectangle is to look at some of the various versions of St. Jerome in the wilderness that were painted in the late fifteenth century. They show them to be varied enough to invoke interest in the distinctiveness of the painters as they make their art while still confined to standardized techniques and ideas. Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished “St. Jerome in the Wilderness”, composed between 1480 and 1490, segments the parts of the picture. In the center is the molding of the face, deep into the subject being distracted or perhaps internal, a kind of suffering, faces always da Vinci’s long suit. The background gives a sense of distance, a characteristic motif of the period, while the lion stretched out in front of St. Jerome shows his back, especially the long tail elongating the lion’s spine. A speculation or recreation imagines that the space in the upper right would show a picture of Christ on the Cross, which makes sense becau8sethat image is presented in Cima de Congliano’s “St Jerome in the Wilderness” from about 1500-1505
The thing about da Vici’s version is that it is fragmented into its parts on the canvas, each area having its own subject and presentation, some fresh (the lion and the face) but some conventional (the background). Da Vinci is, of course, capable of integrating the parts into a single whole, as he does in the Last Supper, where the ensemble of faces makes each of them distinct even though the effect is to see them as a whole, never as successful as being a painting that is a single composition as well as an assemblage of one until Rembrandt. What the da Vinci painting shows is that the parts of a painting work simultaneously, the viewer shifting back and forth between the various parts of it and so seeing the painting as related in that simultaneous way, as that is opposed to a story, where a novel is separated by chapters as the reader proceeds sequentially and so supposing time intervenes and so causes events while that is not necessary in painting, where everything is going on at once. The story of the lion, and the legend attached to it, is next to the perhaps spiritual or mental image of Christ and the setting amid the mountains.
The Conegliano St. Jerome is better integrated but it also is assembled within the frame from its parts. On the right is a blue hued painting of St. Jerome praying to Christ on the cross, which is to the left, and is a tall vertical line, while the mountains in the background are in the center and a set of stones indicating a cave is on the right but is cut off by the frame, the end of the canvas, which suggests that the viewer need not see the cave, only the suggestion of it, while the stones in front of it are given in detail, suggesting the ruggedness but also the artfulness of depicting stones. What ties the segments together is the storyline about a prayerful person pursuing his ascetic devotions but also the blue water in the center behind the rocks tied in with the other blue parts. So color and cropping allow a way to fashion various images into a whole. There is a need to do something about integration in a picture.
Cima da Conegliana, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1495
Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1496
Albrecht Durer who did a St. Jerome in the Wilderness in 1496 did not use color to tie together the parts on his canvas. He restricted himself to thick and thin lines on the picture. There are vertically composed mountains on the left and the figure of St. Jerome in the center while the lion is beside him to the right. What provides a pleasing formation is the comparison between verticals and horizontals and added on is a diagonal whereby a path away from the right indicates the obligatory rendition of distance. This is a very abstract configuration that contemporary critics would find familiar but I assume that early modern painters and draftsmen also understood, all in the inevitable service of tying the elements of a painting or drawing into a unity, an element of art at least as important as the unities of time and space were essential to Aristotle’s conception of drama.
A second kind of art has to do with experience, which means that art consists of the emotional experience that is engendered by artistic presentations which somehow corresponds to the real and imaginary worlds from which the experience is drawn and distorted. It takes a moment to unpack what is meant by “experience”, that best understood in John Dewey’s “Art As Experience”. In the later parts of the Nineteenth Century, psychologists used the relationship between stimulus and response as a way to show cause and effect in people. If a flame approached your hand, you went ouch. There is a direct implication of one external event to a person’s sensation. But by the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Pragmatists abandoned that point of view, even if Skinner would later on clearly retain that framework. William Janes in “The Varieties of Religious Experience’ was interested in elaborating the consciousness of a believer as, for example, “once” or “second” born rather than what were the roots that led people to become religious in the first place. That is also true of other complex states of consciousness, as is the case in art and literature, and literary and art critics knew that. You could look at the picture or you could look at the emotional or intellectual response and it didn’t matter because it amounted to the same thing because what you earned and your failure to read the picture or novel properly was the result of failed attentiveness from in the response was what had been in the painting or the book as rather than the inevitability of its message coming through, the reader or audience the equivalent of being color blond or maybe lived for so long in a cave that they could not get the interactions between people that were involved in dialogue. Or, to look at the object rather than the response, maybe the author had not displayed dialogue well enough so that the irony of how Emma was clueless was insufficiently spelled out, though, of course, Jane Austen had done that over and over again.
Green and Tangerine on Red, Mark Rothko, 1956
An experience, therefore, is neither a cause nor an effect but is a representation of something in the world or in the imagination (for what could it otherwise be?) as that is crafted so as to convey its distinctive nature, a representation having all the ambiguities of how it is like and unlike its object, such as the extent is objective (as if copied from nature by an artist like Church, or subjective, as when Picasso represents in “Guernica” the anguish and pain of wartime, or the difference between the real in the sense of visually accurate, on the one hand, or the unreal, which is fantastic, as in Surrealism, where figures are somewhat but not quite accurate representations. A good example of representation is found in Rothko’s Abstract Expressionism which some people will say is about nothing but has simply abstracted out of portraits and landscapes the colors and shapes, those laid bear for themselves alone, even if artists have always known that embedded in their portraits were lines, shapes and color. But take another turn. What is happening is that the shapes and color are themselves subject matters, explored for their own sakes, and so Rothko in, for example, his 1956 “Green and Tangerine” provides elemental patches, as the philosophers would say to refer to an impression not yet formed into colors, of the two colors that are surprising in each of their qualities and juxtapositions, also requiring attendance by Rothko to the multiple decisions he made: just how large the painting would be; how thick is the paint itself, what creates an unexpected juxtaposition of shades of or different colors, and so on, the colors and shades in realistic portraiture designed to provide meaning to a representation, the figure good or bad or in turmoil, while the colors in a Rothko just reveal themselves and so are thought to be meaningless rather than about themselves A view of a Rothko is liberated to think of the scheme for itself rather than as a realistic portrait or landscape, enjoying being outside the everyday which usually encloses our lives.
It is curious that getting back to the elemental seems liberating because a portrait has been shed of its appearances, of what we see in everyday life, as if we had a new kind of x-ray vision that can shed a scene of its figures and meanings, but the same is knot the case with the case of sound, a less powerful taste than sight, because elemental forces of sound, like the repetitive sounding of drums seem confining and deadening rather than liberating,the aesthetic experience of sound coming to be liberated into the religious terms for being “ethereal” or “sublime” because of pianos and violins and clarinets. The other senses of touch and smell create no art at al even if they are pleasant and even taste,let me be forgiven by the great chefs, also does not convey much meaning, despite Levi-Straus’ attempt to explain otherwise, and story requiring not a sense but mind itself to allow there to be a bridge across time so that cause can be said to precede effect. In short, art is valued as the main candidate of experience for itself rather than the facts, either of color or shape or face that art can reveal, which it did when Holbein made portraits so that Henry VIII could find out what these real people looked like. Experience is a very different standard to use for art than is the object itself, previously referred to as the art of making a thing into a thing through the organization of its parts.
The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, Rembrandt, 1662
There is a third kind of entity that constitutes art. It is neither the object in the world that has been fashioned as art, nor is it the experience of having labeled a picture as an aesthetic object and so see the meanings and emotions evoked by treating it as art. Rather, it is the image in itself that is taken from the art object so that it is no different from thee multiple views a person sees as he or she walks up a street without thinking of them as a succession of snapshots framed as stills, but just what it is that is notices every so slightly altered as you walk forwards. It is art without thinking of it as art.But it is very difficult to eliminate the frame if one at all notices that a view is striking. Think of Rembrandt’s “The Syndics”, which might as well have been a posed photograph, akin to those taken through photography with an assemblage of the Supreme Court or a baseball team. The syndics are also looking forward to the photographer or the artist; they are also wearing their similar, collective costume; they are poised for the moment before going on with their businesses. Try to forget that and go at the image itself which can reveal information and emotion about that assemblage. Each of the syndics (or the baseball players) have distinct faces even if they are all serious minded. They show themselves as indicating a common purpose because of their dress, eve if the clothing in the syndics is of appropriate business attire rather than a uniform; and they are pausing in their efforts because it is important that they be assembled and recognized as such, and in that last observation or recognition are jumping back into being within a frame.
Yet somehow viewers separate the image from its frame or its being as art and look to the substance rather than the composition or the other filters through which the image is understood. We look at “Guernica” to see atrocities rather than a suffering bull as its central image; we see the immodesty of a naked woman at a picnic luncheon rather than about how fantasy and reality are superimposed by an artist; we see Leonardo’s face in St Jerome as poignant and deep and not just an icon of spirituality.A good way of unleashing an image from its artistry is in photographs. Sure, many of them are composed, even when the photographs were made in wartime. While Civil War photographs may have been composed, the point was to get information about what the devastation looked like, how people were quartered, and how Grant was seen as surrounded by his generals, the point of the last of them that there seemed to be a lot of generals to conduct a war. The viewer saw that. Yes, the raising of the flag in Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jimi was rigged and came across as aesthetic and emblematic, but there are so many other war photos which are less concerned with composition than getting the facts: what it looked like and not just heard on the radio what FDR said to Congress during his Dec. 8th, 1941 Day of Infamy Speech. You had to be there. Similarly, there are loads of footage of the attack on Congress on Jan. 6, 2020 and very few, if any, were well composed. The footage recorded what happened, was a record, rather than a work of art.
Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, March 1936
Not only war or political images can emerge out of art into being something aside from art. Any image can reverberate on its own out of the available images loaded from life and, indeed, made use of by artists aside from their compositions as what convey meaning and emotion. The child in any crib, pondered by any parent, can be appropriated as the Christ child and added on any number of meanings. Anyone walking down the street can see how buildings superimpose themselves with other buildings and so create complicated spaces with horizontals, verticals and diagonals quite aside from the fact that those relations are also explored by artists given to cityscapes. The artist then is to capture a particular available image in a way so that it is more striking, as when Dorothea Lange captured Okie women moving West.