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In passing we may note that ‘clear in all its parts’ does not mean that all its parts have clear colors, clear forms, clear locations, clear relations. A painting of Rembrandt's, in which light penetrates and pervades the dark body of space in one and another area, and in which by this means the sense of obscurity and profound mystery is realized, is also ‘clear in all its parts’. The clarity we must have in mind is not clarity of the visual materials but clarity of the visual-spiritual meaning or order. Rembrandt's obscure depths are among the clearest of all artistic achievements. The culminating point is reached where the form in which the visual conception is developed stands out clearly, is complete and necessary to the artist. The visual conception has been worked out and brought to the point at which “‘this way and no other’ becomes a necessity for him”. (Ibid., p. 57.) The unclarity, fragmentariness and arbitrariness of the world of ordinary vision, because of which it is a chaos of unrelated phenomena, has given way to a clear and coherent order, connected by means of a comprehension of the internal relationships of the visual world, complete in itself and pervaded by necessity.
It is not an accident that art seeks to realize the unity of ideality and actuality in the form of the semblance. Semblance or appearance, by its very nature, is that actuality whose being consists in being ideal and that ideality whose being consists in being actual. Semblance is the show of being, abstracted from reality and held by mind in the position of mere show. In art, the work's being lies in its being abstracted from its physical existence as a mere thing or instrument and in functioning as a show (cp. Heidegger,The Origin of the Work of Art, transl. inPhilosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. A. Hofstadter and R. F. Kuhns, New York, Random House, 1964). This abstraction represents the negative side of the aesthetic attitude in its relation to its object, the excluding act by which it separates its object from the surrounding actuality. The positive side consists in the impulse to behold the semblance, thus abstracted, as the being in which ideality and actuality are realized in one; that is, the positive side of the aesthetic attitude is the drive toward the realization of the artistic idea. Only in semblance can the artistic idea be realized. Semblance is the necessary foundation, the element in which artistic thought and action germinate and dwell and in whichought andis find their unity. This has important consequences for the nature both of religion and of philosophy.
In Alfred Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, pp. 119–123, and translated by Margaret Scolari, Museum of Modern Art., 1951.
“Looking at his early work in particular, one may be inclined, as generations have been, to regard Caravaggio as an artist who renders what he sees with meticulous care, capturing all the idosyncrasies of his models. Caravaggio himself seems to have spread this legend, but we have already seen how little it corresponds to the facts. Moreover, apart from his recognizably autograph style, he developed what can only be called his own repertory of idiomatic formulas for attitudes and poses, the recurrent use of which was surely independent of any life model. In addition, he sacrificed by degrees the interest in a logical disposition and rational coordination of the figures in favor of the emotional impact he wished to convey. This tendency is already noticeable in the earlyMusical Party, and is much more in evidence in the works after 1600. In one of the most striking pictures of this period, theConversion of St Paul, it is impossible to say where the saint's lower right leg would be or how the attendant's legs can possibly be joined to his body.” Rudolf Wittkower,Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750, The Pelican History of Art, Penguin Books, 1958, p. 26.
‘New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea’ in Arnold Schönberg,Style and Idea, Philosophical Library, New York 1950.
The Rodin-Book, in Rainer Maria Rilke,Selected Works, Vol. I, Prose, translated by G. Craig Houston, New Directions, Norfolk, Conn. 1960, p. 118.
Paul Valéry,The Art of Poetry, Vintage edition, pp. 84–85.
Note that Valéry connects this harmony of the poem with a harmony of the self. P. 79: the above citation continues, “for it can only be an exceptional form of stimulus that simultaneously produces the exaltation of our sensibility, our intellect, our memory, and our powers of verbal action, so rarely granted to us in the ordinary course of life”. Again, in ‘Remarks on Poetry’, he says: “Poetry must extend over the whole being; it stimulates the muscular organization by its rhythms, it frees or unleashes the verbal faculties, ennobling their whole action, it regulates our depths, for poetry aims to arouse or reproduce the unity and harmony of the living person, an extraordinary unity that shows itself when a man is possessed by an intense feeling that leaves none of his powers disengaged. (211).Further remarks: Literature, says Valéry, “never possesses me wholly unless I find in it traces of a thought whose power is equal to that of language itself. The force to bend the common word to unexpected ends without violating the ‘time-honored forms’, the capture and subjugation of things that are difficult to say, and above all the simultaneous managements of our syntax, harmony, and ideas (which is the problem of the purest poetry) are in my eyes the supreme objects of our art.” (“Concerning ‘Le Cimetière marin’”, p. 145.) Note that the harmony stands between the syntax and the ideas, i.e. the sound and the sense, and is their synthesis.
Kandinsky,Essays über Kunst und Künstler, edited with commentary by Max Bill, Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart, 1955, p. 194.
Op. cit. Verlag Benteli, Bern-Bümpliz 1945, p. 15.
From the Hilla Rebay edition,On the Spiritual in Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946; See the Wittenborn, Schulz edition, New York 1947,Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 35: “The internal beauty is achieved through necessity and renunciation of the conventionally beautiful. To those who are not accustomed to it, it appears as ugliness; humanity in general inclines to external beauty and knows nothing of internal beauty. Almost alone in abandoning conventional beauty and in sanctioning every means of expression is the Austrian composer, Arnold Schönberg.” Schönberg was one of the members of ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ group.
Incidences, N.R.F. 1924, p. 217; cited by Henri Peyre,Le Classicisme Français, New York, 1942, p. 124.
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This article is a version of a chapter in a forthcoming book in Aesthetics to be published in 1969 by George Braziller, Inc., New York City.
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Hofstadter, A. From beauty to aesthetic validity. Man and World 1, 165–190 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01258400
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01258400