Composition (art)

“ The emotion, to become definite, gathers about an idea, conceived in the terms of its own medium, as form, or color and mass, or musical relations; and this artistic idea presents itself as the subject or motive of the work. The emotion and artistic idea, in order that they may be expressed and become communicable, embody themselves in material, as the marble of a statue, the pigment of a picture, the audible tones of a musical composition. This material form has the power to satisfy the mind and delight the senses. Through the channel of the senses and the mind the work reaches the feelings ”

“ The importance of such a class of composition, therefore, depends almost entirely on the question how far the artist's soul, with its full intensity of life, and with a spiritual and intellectual wealth that is both profound and extensive, has without reserve entered vitally into such conditions, situations, and so forth; has made a home there, and from the object in question created something unseen before, something beautiful, something essentially worth our attention. ”

“ To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself:—style is in the right way when it tends towards that. All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view. So much is true of all art, which therefore requires always its logic, its comprehensive reason—insight, foresight, retrospect, in simultaneous action—true, most of all, of the literary art, as being of all the arts most closely cognate to the abstract intelligence. ”

“ Toil over arrangement and meditate over view-point and light, and though the result be the rudest, it will bear [pg 180] the impress of thought and of art. I tell you art begins when man with thought, forming a standard of beauty, commences to shape the raw material toward it. In pure landscape, where modification is limited, it begins when the artist takes one standpoint in preference to another. In figure composition, where modification is infinite, it begins with the first touch to bring the model into pose. ”

“ A few remarks on poetical composition, and we have done.—The art of composition is merely accessory to the poetical talent. But where that talent exists it necessarily gives its own character to the style, and renders it perfectly different from all others. As the poet’s habits of mind lead to contemplation rather than communication with others, he is more or less obscure, according to the particular style of poetry he has adopted; less so, in epic or narrative and dramatic representation—more so, in odes and choruses. ”

“ By the contemplation of what is good in others, 'a sense of the higher excellencies of art will by degrees dawn on the imagination; at every review that sense will become more and more assured, and the artist will then find no difficulty in fixing in his own mind the principles by which the impression is produced ”

“ The many declare they know nothing about art, the while having an all around culture in the humanities, in literature, poetry, prose composition, music, æsthetics, etc. The principles of all the arts being identical, how simple would it be to apply those governing the arts which one knows to what is unknown. The musician and poet make use of contrast, light and shade, gradation, antithesis, balance, accent, force by opposition, [pg 230] isolation and omission, rhythm, tone-color, climax, and above all unity and harmony. ”

“ The whole composition, grouped around a single man and a single place, is so well balanced and so naturally unfolded piece by piece, that the great art shown therein often at first escapes the reader. ”

“ All attempts to define absolute beauty in itself—whether as an imitation of nature, or as suitability to its object, or as a correspondence of parts, or as symmetry, or as harmony, or as unity in variety, etc.—either define nothing at all, or define only some traits of some artistic productions, and are far from including all that everybody has always held, and still holds, to be art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation—that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape—should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees. ”

“ Whether the medium be the painter's color, the musician's tones, or the poet's words, the purpose of the representation is fulfilled in so far as the work expresses the emotion which the artist has felt in the presence of this spectacle. He, the artist, more than I or another, has thrilled to its mystery, its tumult, its power. It is this effect, received as a unity of impression, that he wants to communicate. This power of the object over him, and consequently the content of his work, is beauty. ”

“ Its forms, and its symbols, and its imagery, have mingled with every branch of art, and become a universal language. It is the deification of the material world; and therefore, that art, which in its perfection may be called the apotheosis of form, finds there its proper region and element. ”

“ To wring from nature its countless harmonies of tone and colour, to seize and interpret the endless subtleties of individual form and character—these are the ideals that have inspired and have satisfied many of the greatest painters the world has produced. Who then shall say that Art has need of any other, any wider ambition? ”

“ In the compositional painting which is developing today we see the signs of the attainment of the higher step of pure art, in which the remains of the practical desire (all evidences of objectivity) can be perfectly separated, which can speak from soul to soul in purely artistic language. ”

“ The ultimate significance of a work of art is its content of emotion, the essential controlling idea, which inspires the work and gives it concrete form. In its actual embodiment, the expressive power of the work resides in the medium. The medium of any art, then, as color and mass in painting, line in drawing and etching, form in sculpture, sound in music, is its means of expression and constitutes its language. ”

“ The expression must be ordered, rhythmic, or whatever word most fitly conveys the idea of those powers, conscious or unconscious, that select and arrange the sensuous material of art, so as to make the most telling impression, by bringing it into relation with our innate sense of harmony. ”

“ There seems to be common agreement that balance, proportion, repetition, rhythm, emphasis, harmony, and color are of first importance in their contribution to beauty and that the various principles and facts concerning each should be developed in an art unit or course. ”

“ This is supplemented from still another source of value. Through artistic expression pent-up emotions find a welcome release. No matter how poignant be the experience expressed, the weight, the sting of it disappears through expression. For through expression, as we have seen, the experience is drawn from the dark depths of the self to the clear and orderly surface of the work of art; the emotions that weighed are lifted out and up into color and line and sound, where the mind can view and master them. ”

“ In art, however, there are subtler aspects to the relation between form and content, and these have a unique aesthetic significance. For there, as we know, the elements of the medium, colors and lines and sounds, and the patterns of these, their harmonies and structures and rhythms, are expressive, in a vague way, of feeling; hence, when the artist employs them as embodiments of his ideas, he has to select them, not only as carriers of meaning, but as communications of mood. ”

“ Art gives form to human consciousness; expresses or presents the feeling or the thought of man. Whatever else art may do by the way, in the communication of innocent pleasures, in the adornment of life and the softening of manners, in the creation of beautiful shapes and sounds, this, at all events, is its prime function.
While investing thought, the spiritual subject-matter of all art, with form, or finding for it proper modes of presentation, each of the arts employs a special medium, obeying the laws of beauty proper to that medium. ”

“ A genuine poem is a tree that breaks into blossom and shakes in the wind. George Eliot's elaborate composition is like a vast mural design in mosaic-work, where great slabs and delicate morsels of stone are laid together with wonderful art, where there are plenty of noble lines and generous hues, but where everything is rigid, measured, and cold,—nothing dazzling, magical, and vocal. ”

“ All art has a sensuous element, colour, form, sound—in poetry a dexterous recalling of these, together with the profound, joyful sensuousness of motion, and each [210] of them may be a medium for the ideal: it is partly accident which in any individual case makes the born artist, poet, or painter rather than sculptor. But as the mind itself has had an historical development, one form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of that development. ”

“ Before we can come to a true initiation into, and an abiding enjoyment of, the domains of representative art, we must have a keen, clear, settled, and contented view of its limitations. Far less of the fruitlessness of discontent enters into poetry and literature than into the subject of painting and sculpture. ”

“ In this way too the work of art must possess significance; it must not appear to have told its tale simply in the fact of particular lines, curves, surfaces, indentations, reliefs of stone-work, in particular colours, tones, sounds of words, whatever medium in fact art may employ. Its function is to unveil an inward or ideal vitality, emotion, soul, a content and mind, which is precisely what we mean by the significance of a work of art. ”

“ First, the theory, often called "hedonistic," that the value of art consists in the satisfactions of sense which the media of aesthetic expression afford—the delight in color and sound and rhythmical movement of line and form. ”

“ The appreciator need simply ask, What is the beauty, what the idea, which the artist is striving to reveal by these symbols of color and form? He understands that the import of the work is the idea, and that the work itself is beautiful because it symbolizes a beautiful idea; its significance is spiritual. The function of art, then, is through the medium of concrete, material symbols to reveal to men whatever of beauty has been disclosed to the artist's more penetrating vision. ”

“ Personally, I am so conscious of these insistent questions that, at the risk of some misunderstanding, I habitually describe works of art as "significant" rather than "beautiful" forms. For works of art, unlike roses, are the creations and expressions of conscious minds. ”

“ And this is the place for a remark which, in the present uncertainty of all æsthetic psychology, I put forward as a mere suggestion, but a suggestion less wide of the truth than certain theories now almost unquestioned: the theories which arbitrarily assume that art is the immediate and exact expression of contemporary spiritual aspirations and troubles. ”

“ All art, as the expression of the artist's idea, is in a certain definite sense representative. Not that all art reproduces an external reality, as it is said that painting or literature represents and music does not; but every work of art, in painting, poetry, music, or in the handiwork of the craftsman, represents in that it is the symbol of the creator's ideal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we look closer at what this opinion implies, we find in it again two elements; the content or matter in hand, and the mode and fashion of representation. In looking at a work of art we begin with what presents itself immediately to us, and after that go on to consider what is its significance or content. ”

“ Of course this principle, like the others, is an ideal or norm, which is only imperfectly realized in many works of art. Many a poet finds it necessary to fill in his lines and many a painter and musician does the like with his pictures or compositions. There is much mere scaffolding and many lay-figures in drama and novel. ”

“ This triple mode of seizing on reality offers art the well-known division into first, the plastic arts, which elaborate their content for vision in the external form and colour of objects, secondly, in the art of sound, music, and thirdly, into poetry, which as the art of speech uses tone merely as a symbol, in order, by means of it, to address itself directly to what is ideal in the contemplation, emotion, and imagination of our spiritual life. ”

“ The truly educated man in art perceives the adaptation, polish, and perfection in literature; discovers the grace, the just proportions, the ideal form and typical idea in sculpture; views the expression, grouping, sentiment, coloring, and human passion in painting; enjoys the harmonies, movements, and ideas in music, that combination of effects that makes subtile and evasive metaphors ”

“ By the originality and vigour of the spiritual life and of the emotion of which the work is an expression, together with its power of impressing these characteristics on the reader. All art is the expression of some emotion, and has for its object the production of emotions. The deeper a signet gem is cut, the sharper, the clearer are the outlines in wax. The deeper the impression in the soul of the artist, the clearer, the more forcible is its artistic expression. ”