Subject (art)

“ What is, then, we may ask, the relation of the fact of the subject to the beauty and final message of the work?
The pleasure which attends the recognition of the subject is a legitimate element in our enjoyment of art. But the work should yield a delight beyond our original delight in the subject as it exists in nature. ”

“ A work of art, a piece of nature, is judged by its degree of attainment to that end; the explanation of its beauty--of its degree of attainment, that is--is found in the effect of its elements, according to psychological laws, on the aesthetic subject. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And through the whole of following life, whatever power of judgment I have obtained, in art, which I am now confident and happy in using, or communicating, has depended on my steady habit of always looking for the subject principally, and for the art, only as the means of expressing it. ”

“ Art consequently, through the ideality above explained, exalts objects otherwise unimportant, determining them, despite their ordinary character, in a fixed relation to her own medium and essential aim, and by so doing secures from us a sympathy in subject-matter which otherwise would not have enlisted our serious attention. ”

“ There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion than that of the perfect dependence of the “moral” sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. ”

“ The presence in various degrees of these three conditions—individuality, clearness, and sincerity—decides the merit of a work of art, as art, apart from subject-matter. All works of art take rank of merit according to the degree in which they fulfil the first, the second, and the third of these conditions. ”

“ When, however, we find a modern writer defining the beautiful as "that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium," [55] we feel, or at least I feel, that something must be wrong. ”

“ In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes it a fine art. ”

“ In the actual to discern the ideal, in the appearance to penetrate to the reality, without taking leave of the material to reveal the spiritual,—this is the mystery and vocation of the artist, and his achievement is art. ”

“ If you seek to find this in pictures you will soon learn to distinguish between those (too many of which are painted to-day) whose only excellence lies in trick of handling or cunning disposition of color-masses,—because these things are all of which the artist has thought,—and those that have grown out of the highest art-desire, which is to bear some message of the restfulness, the power, the beauty, or the innocence of nature to the hearts of other men. ”

“ This, then, is the fourfold work of literature, and if you want to be perfect you must be perfect in each part. Art must inspire and shape each and all, but only the first, the Idea, is pure art; with Plot, and Construction, and Style there is an alloy of artifice. ”

“ That genius or invention consists chiefly in borrowing the ideas of others, or in using other men’s minds.
2. That the great style in painting depends on leaving out the details of particular objects.
3. That the essence of portrait consists in giving the general character, rather than the individual likeness.
4. That the essence of history consists in abstracting from individuality of character and expression as much as possible.
5. That beauty or ideal perfection consists in a central form.
6. That to imitate nature is a very inferior object in art. ”

“ The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals—music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life—are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. ”

“ The great secret, on the other hand, of the beauty of the most exquisite specimens of modern art, lies in the simplicity of expression which they bear, in their production of one uniform emotion, from all the parts of one harmonious composition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The interpretation of art, for which we look to criticism, deals with the picture, the statue, the book, specifically in its relation to the appreciator. What is the special nature of the experience which the work communicates to us in terms of feeling? In so far as the medium itself is a source of pleasure, by what qualities of form has the work realized the conditions of beauty proper to it, delighting thus the senses and satisfying the mind? These are the questions which the critic, interpreting the work through the medium of his own temperament, seeks to answer. ”

“ This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself, and especially its genesis out of life. ”

“ For beauty is the power possessed by objects to quicken us with a sense of larger personality; and art, whether the arts of form or of representation, is the material bodying forth of beauty as the artist has perceived it and the means by which his emotion in its presence is communicated. Upon this conception of beauty and this interpretation of the scope and function of art rests the justice of the personal estimate. ”

“ You may separate these two groups of artists more distinctly in your mind as those who seek for the pleasure of art, in the relations of its colours and lines, without caring to convey any truth with it; and those who seek for the truth first, and then go down from the truth to the pleasure of colour and line. ”

“ To this prolific source may be traced much of that many-colored interest which we take in their various forms as presented by the imagination,--in every thing, indeed, which is true, or even partially true, to the great Principle of Harmony, both in nature and in art. ”

“ As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm—the form in all its characteristics.
If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Till all their souls are stain’d with smut and soil,—
More human seem these when the hands of art
Have grasp’d their better traits and hold them forth.
And men who see these better traits, and see
The tender touch of art that holds them forth,
Behold a beauty never else beheld ”

“ We may examine the relations in which our subjective impressions stand to the products of art, and learn how far such sensations developed, in time and space, to lead us to the consciousness of beauty. ”

“ To sum up shortly—truth of form, and colour, and expression, will make a fine, perhaps even an impressive picture, but hardly a great one; in order to do that the artist must be possessed of the power of seizing the essence of the scene, of penetrating beneath the first commonplace view of the subject, and finding every element of true meaning and beauty which lies in his subject. ”

“ A further consideration of the true nature of beauty, and therefore of the vocation of the artist, will aid us still more in our endeavor to show the high dignity of art and of aesthetics. The history of philosophy presents us with many theories on the nature of the beautiful ”

“ Any work of art which represents, not a material object, but the mental conception of a material object, is, in the primary sense of the word ideal; that is to say, it represents an idea, and not a thing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not reckoning the thoroughly inaccurate definitions of beauty which fail to cover the conception of art, and which suppose beauty to consist either in utility, or in adjustment to a purpose, or in symmetry, or in order, or in proportion, or in smoothness, or in harmony of the parts, or in unity amid variety, or in various combinations of these,—not reckoning these unsatisfactory attempts at objective definition, all the æsthetic definitions of beauty lead to two fundamental conceptions. ”

“ Now art, to my mind, should be one of our main sources of happiness; and under the inappropriate word art, I am obliged, as usual, to group all such activities of soul as deal with beauty, quite as much when it exists in what is (in this sense) not art's antithesis, but art's origin and completion, nature. ”

“ The objects of art, as we have seen, are interesting and attractive in themselves, for the material of which they are formed, and for the form which the artist has given them. But they are interesting in another and possibly as important a way: they are instruments of expression. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To realise this situation, to define, in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist may have, indeed, to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a thousand-fold. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every work of art springs from a definite concept held by the artist, some piece of reality clearly understood and sincerely felt, insisting on expression at his hands precisely because it affects him emotionally. ”

“ Sketches in which an artist gives nothing more than his momentary impression, i.e., lets himself go subjectively, leaving the object, both as regards its meaning and its appearance, quite in the background, are now admitted to be finished works of art. ”

“ What is the object of art? Is it not, or should it not be, to make us imagine better conditions than that which at present exist in the world, and by so imagining to prepare the way for the coming of such conditions? ”

“ The "æsthetic element," then, is in our view neither a theory of the beautiful, nor a philosophy of art, but a component and indivisible part in all human creations which are not mere works of necessity ”

“ To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art. ”

“ But, as the mental 156 is the peculiar feature that places man apart from and above animals,—so ought all that he does to be apart from and above their nature; especially in the fine arts, which are the intellectual perfection of the intellectual. And nothing short of this intellectual perfection,—however much they may be pictures, poems, statues, or music,—can rank such works to be works of Fine Art. ”

“ The artist or the art-critic, discriminating still, even among these raw materials of human creation, derives an elaborate and subtle delight from the suggestiveness of their colours, their odours, and their fabrics—conscious all the while of wondrous and visionary evocations, wherein they take their place. ”