Whatever the point may be, people have been doing it for a long time. Ancient writers (Plato, Xenophon, Vitruvius, others) wrote in detail about symmetria, the play of proportion that lends harmony to a painting, a statue, or a building. As they saw it, symmetria is a cause; its effect is eurhythmia, the quality of being well-formed. This matters because symmetria’s harmonies reveal the structural principles of reality. To see eurhythmia in a painting is to catch a glimpse of timeless and transcendent truths. So here’s a reason to write about a well-wrought work of art: to turn viewers’ attention toward ultimate things.
I am in sympathy with none of these speculations, yet they are too persistent to dismiss. Variations appeared in the Renaissance and during the Baroque period, in Romanticism and among the late Romantics who called themselves Symbolists. In 1891, G.-Albert Aurier praised the best-remembered Symbolist painter, Paul Gauguin, for anti-realist images that “express absolute entities.” Each of these entities is a Platonic “idea” or form and thus an eternal, unchanging constituent of the real world obscured by the ordinary world of shifting and delusive appearances.
Neither Aurier nor Gauguin is, strictly speaking, a Platonist, yet the roots of their aesthetic reach back to Plato and even further, to the shadowy figure of Parmenides. For over two millennia, Western culture sustained a faith in a transcendent realm of absolutes, essences, and ultimates I’m not sure that it still does. It has been nearly a century since Piet Mondrian declared that a properly constructed composition is “an expression of true reality.” By then, Roger Fry had jettisoned form’s transcendent meanings to focus on form itself, a move Clement Greenberg made at about the time Mondrian published his statement about “true reality.” Formalism was, among other things, a declaration of independence from Plato and his tenacious legacy. For Fry and Greenberg, the point of writing about a work of art was to account for it in purely formal terms.
In his 1927 book on Paul Cézanne, Fry marks the moment when the painter “arrived at what was to be his most characteristic conception, namely, that the deepest emotions could only exude, like a perfume—it is his own image—from form considered in its pure essence and without reference to associated ideas.” So those apples on Cézanne’s table aren’t really apples in any significant way. They are occasions for the painter to display his mastery of spherical form.
Because he focused on abstract painting, Greenberg had no need to disentangle pure form from “associated ideas”—those pesky points of interest introduced by subject matter. Free to zero in on form, he argued in 1965 that “each art had to determine, by operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself.” By these means, “each art would be rendered ‘pure’ and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.”
Thus a painting is good if it acknowledges in a pictorially convincing way the formal elements that constitute the medium—primarily the shape and flatness of the canvas. A painting succeeds by deploying those elements in a manner that generates the “purely optical space” specific to painting, according to Greenberg. But “purely optical space” is an incoherent notion.
The problem is that form cannot be pure any more than space can be “purely optical.” That is because, Fry and Greenberg to the contrary, there is no form in itself, no form completely extricated from subject matter. Our minds do not let us see even the simplest form—a straight line, a circle—without wreathing it in “associated ideas.” It’s amazing to me that art-world sophisticates of the twentieth century even pretended to believe in formalism. Platonism and its latter-day variants are unconvincing—to me, at any rate—but at least those doctrines had some spiritual ambition. Formalism feels like a skimpy bag of art-world tricks. So let’s move on to content, with which form is entangled so tightly that we can never leave it behind, no matter how much a blinkered formalism might exasperate us.
Writing in the second century, Lucian praised a certain statue at Olympia, meaning that he gave it a formal analysis (assessed its symmetria), found it impressive, and called the statue beautiful (an instance of eurhythmia.) It was an image of Zeus, and I think Lucian probably took that into account as he decided that its proportions worked, as we say these days. The subject of Athena would have demanded different proportions, and no doubt there have been times when a set of proportions demanded a certain subject. Form and content make reciprocal demands and now, when the point of writing about art is so often to elucidate subject matter, I should note that form is never entirely neglected. Faced with a painting that addresses climate change or personal identity or corporate power, you can’t say if it is any good unless you say something about the way form and content work together to produce something more than an illustration of a message.
I’ll end with a question: is elucidation enough? Inevitably, I have written much about the subjects of paintings, and not only when they were figurative. An abstraction often looks to me like a seismograph—or a chart—of an individual’s being. But I feel that works of art take us beyond their subjects. How do they do that? Or where do they take us? I don’t know, though I have a few dim glimmers, and that is what I’ll be talking about next.
A bunch of apples, circles, wreathed in “associated ideas" does set the table for your essay; thanks for starting with the Cezanne works that started the formalist divergence. Somehow, the whole formalist discipline went astray into doldrums.
Gosh, those apples look yummy ! I bet they would crackle and spurt juice when we crunch into them!
Those sliding planes that flicker into circles from dabs of paint surface, and then back to a depicted juicy lunch, combine in our mind to produce a transformation. This state floats like a 'nomen' "that which is thought", or the idea of the thing that we cannot know fully, but only as we can see it. The noumenon of the apples is indicated by the phenomena that Cezanne creates by his shifting planes on the surface. The paintings are fascinating and always will be because they float viewers into this transformed state--- wonderfully suspended between perceptions and thoughts. The subjects, apples, trees, heads or fields, reveal our ideas and thoughts and grant viewers the meanings that they take. Sometimes, these meanings even inspire our lives, make us better as people. "Wreathing associated ideas" from subjects is a wonderful circular simile for the conversations and meanings that you propose as the value of the arts.
It seems that works of art can and do take us somewhere beyond their subjects, somewhere else, into states of human awareness and appreciation of life. Certainly, dear Mr Ratcliff, this is worth writing about. And, Thank you for it .
Thanks! Elucidation is enough for me, and, so is Plato. Elucidation might mean “True Reality” to Mondrian. To me, this implies Clarity, as difficult a word to define or explain as Naturalism, except to say it’s how ‘my’ eye sees something, sometimes.
We’re able to tell the difference between Cezanne and Chardin because they see differently. I don’t think it has anything to do with the prior knowledge we have of the time in which they painted.
If an abstraction looks to you as a sort of seismograph of an individual’s being, isn’t that the same as Cezanne’s deepest emotions, seeping out like perfume, as Roger Fry said?
Philip Guston is a good study, in his breaking away from abstraction to become delighted to be able to paint Things, and tell a story.
Some see the work as sloppy and vulgar, but I see it as carrying over the refined and formal elegance of his prior abstractions.