Beaux-Arts

“ No longer models for posterity, the ancient authors have become books like any others, less interesting for the majority of readers than the works of modern literatures.
⁠It is the fashion nowadays to discuss the crisis which threatens all the arts. We must, however, remember to preserve a distinction. We must divide the arts into two categories: those which serve to amuse men by helping them to pass the time agreeably, like music, the theatre, and, to a certain degree, literature; and those which serve to beauty the world, like architecture, sculpture, painting, and all the decorative arts. ”

“ AND now we come to that great and important subject, the Fine Arts, which day by day are becoming more appreciated and find a rapid increase of patrons. It is true that there are some who do not regard Art as an essentiality, and who are even indifferent to it as an ornament. ”

“ Able at last to interpret the painter's medium, the appreciator comes to seek in pictures not primarily an exhibition of the craftsman's skill, not even a recall of his own pleasurable experiences, but rather, beyond all this, a fuller visible revelation of beauty.
The essential significance of art, that art is revelation, is illustrated not only by painting but by the other arts as well. ”

“ It is only of late, and chiefly by a superficial imitation of foreigners, that we have begun to use the word Art by itself, and to speak of Art as we speak of Science, or Government, or Religion: we used to talk of the Arts, and more specifically of the Fine Arts: and even by them were vulgarly meant only two forms of art, Painting and Sculpture, the two which as a people we cared least about—which were regarded even by the more cultivated among us as little more than branches of domestic ornamentation, a kind of elegant upholstery. ”

“ Even thus the spirit, immersed in things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it transparent, is the artist's function. ”

“ And chiefly the great representative and imaginative arts—that is to say, the drama and sculpture—are to teach what is noble in past history, and lovely in existing human and organic life.
4. And the test of right manner of execution in these arts, is that they strike, in the most emphatic manner, the rank of popular minds to which they are addressed.
5. And the test of utmost fineness in execution in these arts, is that they make themselves be forgotten in what they represent; and so fulfil the words of their greatest Master,
"The best, in this kind, are but shadows." ”

“ I have spoken of poetry, but all the other modes of art produce similar effects in their degree. The races and nations whose senses are naturally finer, and their sensuous perceptions more exercised, than ours, receive the same kind of impressions from painting and sculpture: and many of the more delicately organized among ourselves do the same. All the arts of expression tend to keep alive and in activity the feelings they express. ”

“ The arts which employ any of these senses must satisfy their bias, however much they may appeal to higher faculties; nothing which rankly offends them can by any possible means be made beautiful. Thus painting must be charming in color, and music in tone; and certain colors and tones are charming for no deeper reason than that which makes certain foods palatable.
The interest in perception [3] assumes special prominence in the great visual art of painting. ”

“ But in the fine arts, to whose labours, taste, by these philosophers, is confined, truth is beauty, falsehood deformity; hence, to discriminate between even their minutest shades, requires the constant exercise of the most refined taste. Or, shall we maintain with others, that beauty consists in certain arrangements and proportions of the parts to a whole; or in the fitness of means to an end? This, as far as an intelligible description of beauty, applies equally to the pursuits of the philosopher and of the artist. ”

“ Into the service of this luxurious and immoral life the Fine Arts were now called, and of the motives which animate such life they become largely an expression. The mediæval endeavour to embody the beauty of Christian ideals in works of art gave place to the desire to make the Fine Arts minister to sensuous pleasure and to mundane pride. ”

“ The Web.—Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. ”

“ Brief as the review has necessarily been of the decorative arts adorning life throughout the centuries which have passed in rapid succession before us, they have taught two great facts—the beauty of art as an adjunct to the most ordinary demands of domesticity, and the value of the study of the varied arts of past ages as an addition to the requirements of our own. ”

“ Hence we have said that the object of taste is beauty, as perceivable in the works of nature and art: thus confining its province to literature and the fine arts, which reflect nature either by direct imitation, or by more remote association. ”

“ The present volume is offered to the public, under the impression that the general cultivation of practical taste, and an acquaintance with the principles of the Fine Arts, are not only desirable in the light of acquirement, but must eventually prove highly beneficial to the useful arts of the country. ”

“ The kind of vision that he gives us will depend, of course, upon the materials of his art—it will be one thing in sound, another in color or line or patterned words. Even as we demand of art in general a unique value, as fulfilling a unique function, so we shall demand of the different arts that each provide us with the unique beauty which its materials can create. ”

“ THROUGHOUT the entire history of the fine arts, no period of æsthetic innovation and endeavour has suffered from public malignity, ridicule and ignorance as has painting during the last century. The reasons for this are many and, to the serious student of art history, obvious. ”

“ However, I have not undertaken to talk to you of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, in the narrower sense of those words, since, most unhappily as I think, these master-arts, these arts more specially of the intellect, are at the present day divorced from decoration in its narrower sense. Our subject is that great body of art, by means of which men have at all times more or less striven to beautify the familiar matters of everyday life: a wide subject, a great industry ”

“ I do not mean that they cannot on that account be useful, for without doubt utility itself contributes to beauty; but only that they owe their form primarily to the aesthetic interest. The motive of fine art in its purity appears when special materials are selected on account of their plasticity and their appeal to the more highly developed senses. Fine arts that employ one medium are now separated and perfected through the cultivation of expert proficiency. ”

“ However, these particular affinities are lost in proportion as the works of these three kinds of art rise to a greater elevation, and it is a natural and necessary consequence of their perfection, that, without confounding their objective limits, the different arts come to resemble each other more and more, in the action which they exercise on the mind. ”

“ Form a taste of painting, sculpture, and architecture, if you please, by a careful examination of the works of the best ancient and modern artists; those are liberal arts, and a real taste and knowledge of them become a man of fashion very well. ”

“ Then, too, the demand for literal presentment of the superficial facts or phases of nature often removes the painter and his picture still farther from the architectural, decorative, and constructive artist and the handicraftsman, who are bound to think of plan, and design, and materials—of the adaptation of their work, in short—while the painter seeks only to be an unbiassed recorder of all accents and sensational conditions or nature and life,—and so we get our illustrated newspapers on a grand scale. ”

“ and, if it is to be made an art, requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation, as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or cold marble, compared with having to do with the living body—the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts; I had almost said, the finest of the Fine Arts. ”

“ The Fine Arts will also form an interesting portion of this division. The object will be, in a few popular histories, to trace the origin, rise, and progress of Sculpture, Painting, Engraving, Music, &c., and their influence on mankind. ”

“ This exceptional position will only be given to men of sufficient esthetic power to appreciate all the fine arts; and they should be capable of practising at least the three arts of form simultaneously, as was done by Italian painters in the sixteenth century. ”

“ There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts. ”

“ It seemed, in fact, a new development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was as completely refined from all utilitarian coarseness as it could have been in either of the fine arts. ”

“ And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. ”

“ It is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of those arts. ”

“ In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other. ”

“ Though much of that exists in our modern decorations, it is highly desirable that it should not partake of that character; a little taste, a little poetry, gracefulness, order, and some display of general knowledge, of artistic combinations and principles, cannot fail to make our productions more valued and valuable. Give a tinge of some originality,—display an attempt of your own inventive powers, based upon acknowledged principles of beauty and effect, and your productions will soon reach an eminence of which art is ever capable! ”

“ They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun, they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression out of direct experience, with an eye to nothing but quality and proportion as conceived by them. ”

“ And yet there is great enjoyment, to some people, in the contemplation of a beautiful building or statue or painting,--as of a beautiful landscape or of a glorious sky. The ideas of beauty, of grace, of grandeur, which are eternal, are suggested to the mind and soul; and these cultivate and refine in proportion as the mind and soul are enlarged, especially among the rich, the learned, and the favored classes. So, in high civilizations, especially material, Art is not only a fashion but a great enjoyment, a lofty study, and a theme of general criticism and constant conversation. ”

“ Her first impulse was to try and maintain it—why not use the protective arts with which love inspired her? She who lived so keenly in the brain could live as intensely in her feelings; her quick imagination tutored her looks and words, taught her the spells to weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of passion, both clinging fast to the visible, the palpable in their relation, as if conscious already that its finer essence had fled. ”

“ MANY persons of culture and poetic imagination, with a keen sense of the beautiful, but with little knowledge of living nature, believe and maintain, and in one sense justly, that certain works of old and modern masters are works of high art, from color, grouping, elegance of figures, and the various accessories which, in themselves, or by ideas and emotions excited by them, make painting and sculpture very powerful agents in instructing and elevating kind. ”

“ The special pleas of painters, whether for realization or decoration or illustration, are, of course, to be heard and accepted in part; but we are not to believe in any one of them to the utter exclusion of the others. Each is excellent of its kind, so far as it goes; but in our final judgment of the work of art we may conclude that the sum of the whole is greater than any of its parts, and that truth to nature, individuality, imagination, pictorial poetry, decorative beauty, subject—all the elements—go to the making of what is called “great art.” ”

“ If we follow, in the history of painting, the attitude of artists of different epochs and nations toward their art, if we consider what is to them more essential: painting itself or the ideas painting conveys, we notice two fundamental currents in artistic activity. One has sprung from an exclusive quest for beauty, the source of the other is the desire to impress, by means of painting, something amusing, or instructive, or denunciatory. ”