By accident I interrupted m y previous blog. Here is the remainder of what I intended to post.  This section has to do centrally with the art of painting. "All the Arts" continues:

   "To see the world as the oneness of opposites is to do what one can to like the world, for it is only as the oneness of opposites that the world can be truly liked--otherwise one likes the world because it has been "nice" to oneself, if not to others. That the principle of art or aesthetics is the same as sanity would, by now, have been seen by people had the press discussed the truth of Aesthetic Realism....

   "Control and passion are two opposites that interest everyone....A commonplace of art history is that Ingres and Delacroix represented two contemporary possibilities of painting. Ingres is seen as a person of control who has deep feeling in his work, anyway.  Passion has been found in Ingres's portrait of M. Bertin and his ever so popular La Source. In Ingres, then, we have control and passion with the more sedate opposite leading.  In Delacroix, we have control and passion with the less sedate opposites leading. Both opposites, it cannot be said excessively, are present as one in all painting.  Hieronymous Bosch has leering passion that is also control.  Piet Mondrian has control, with passion implicit. Titian has control and passion looking like each other, as well-behaved equals coming to the feast of visual possibility at the same time.

   "If we look at a desperate and controlled sea painting of Winslow Homer, we can see passion and control given to black muscles.  A landscape of Inness begins sedately with the outdoors of the United States fetchingly composed; but underneath the leaves and the quiet and the height, is the rapture of the American painter, George Inness."

How much people want to feel our own passions, intensity of feeling is together sensibly with our logic, our control, our sense of rightness! And how beautiful, and relieving it is to see that we can actually learn from art how to see in a way that makes us confident and proud in a true way. I'll post more of "All the Arts" in the future. 

   I promised I would be posting one of the most valuable writings on art I know, Eli Siegel's description of the oneness of passion and control in "All the Arts" --which is the subtitle of an issue of the periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, published on April 20, 1977. So, here is the first installment of that document. He begins:

"Dear Unknown Friends:

   "Aesthetic Realism has tried to make two things clear, both of value to the life of man. The first of these is that all the arts, at their beginning, have something in common; and that this common thing in all the arts is the oneness of opposites, felt and worked with by an individual mind.  The second purpose of Aesthetic Realism has been the showing that what is in all the arts is hoped for by every person, for the oneness of opposites to be found in painting, music, poetry, drama, sculpture, the dance, photography, the cinema, and so on, constitutes sanity."

posted by: cwilson | 0 comments (view/add) StaticLink eSend