Art as History

This essay was written in 1953.

 

In art, past, present, and future meet; and so they do in history. Art consists of the abiding, the expected, the basic, and so does history. Only, history seems to deal with particular, unlooked for events, while art seems to deal more with the usual, with existence as continuous. History seems to say that a thing which was, is and will be; art more that a thing which is, was and will be. Yet art is history, too. Art is history, for art like history gives a oneness to events, shows a meaning in what has been and is.

There is a picture of a man in a forest. The man is a new being, the forest is old. An animal in the picture scurries across old ground. These new and old things are made one in the picture. The immediate and the permanent, the fresh and the old are made one in the picture. The purpose of history is to show the present through the past, the past as if it were present.

Everything that is, has happened. Everything then is an event. The new and old are in constant relation. A blade of grass is in a war; a tree is in a political campaign; a hill exists while a dynasty changes. Time is a great combiner of everything. Art, as a combiner, is like time. Art serves as time in a presentation of objects.

Suppose a historian were dealing with the year 1616. He has to give solidity to the idea of 1616. He does this through selection. Many, many things were in 1616. The historian has to select and arrange. He presents a picture of a time, a form, an idea. If a person thinks of the year 1927, an idea becomes a picture. The visual in his mind illustrates a form.

In history, things seem to play and to proceed by law. From one point of view, history is senseless. In one year, there is a big wind. The next year a king dies. The year after an important scientific work is published. The next, there is an epidemic of a kind somewhere in Europe. Events seem to have no composition, no coherence at all. If a historian is true to his task, he shows the freedom in happenings and the law. The freedom and the law in events are what the artist shows, too. Both in history and art, play and purpose are depicted; play and purpose are causes, too.

Difference and Simultaneity

Art shows the full meaning of difference and simultaneity. If a bucket and a dog and a sunbeam and a broom and a bit of bread are in the same room, art can say of them: They have been brought together in time and space, therefore they can be brought together in form, too. The historian of Europe can feel a relation among events like the relation among objects in a room. History goes for this, for history is the utmost imagination and the utmost precision—as art is.

The historian says: These were together. Let us see how. The artist says: These can be together. Let us see how. But what can be together, is together. And what is together, as art sees it, always was together.

In history, at any one time, there is an event, close to other events, but related to all. History has its points of view. It is inclusive and exclusive. It can start with a nation and go to a county, or go from a county to a nation. In history, things are quiet and noisy at the same time. The Civil War goes on while a mother with spectacles grows tired. Clouds were lazy while the cannon of Gettysburg were busy. The historian has to feel, see, all this arrangement of events or situations. If he sees them rightly, he makes and finds an explanation as form. This explanation is like what brings things together in a painting.

The explanation of history for events is, that the universe has brought them all forth. That would not make these events seem any the less casual or disorderly; but if we see the universe as an immediate and everlasting oneness of sameness and change, then we are seeing events as an artist sees the events in his picture. Art goes on the deep premise that everywhere things are and change; that new and old are one in sight; that the immobile and the leaping are one; that principle and manifestation are one. The historian sees the rush and turbulence of events as now still, even while they are seen in motion; he sees a principle, or should, in the most casual happening; he describes a happening or a scene to show a principle; he brings together the persistence of a city or country, while showing commotions in them. Boston, for example, in the year 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, was the quiet Boston of 1790, and yet a different Boston; and a historian of Boston should show this.

Reality as Casual and Orderly

Art describes reality as casual and orderly. That seems to be the way history is. If a historian presents events truly, they will seem casual and orderly. The historian will make picture and law akin. History is both “picturesque” and a presentation of principles. Principle becomes visual, or pictorial, in art.

Art justifies the working of the world in time, by showing that discrepant objects or events can be in composition. History seems to be so confusing, but if events on a canvas can make a one, why not events in time? In our minds the past is a picture. Somehow, we say a picture of the past, not a symphony or a poem. This is because in our minds once anything is felt as the past, it becomes quiet, like space and color and line. The future is that way too. Time, as present, is that which appears as motion.

Everything that is in a picture has been in time, too. An object in a picture carries its time with it. Suppose we consider a picture of Poussin, The Funeral of Phocion. First, there is the foreground; then there is the middle ground; and last the remote. As we have these in mind, they are like beginning, middle, and end; also like past, present, and future. It is our past which we are as we meet the present. The past is what we meet things with. The present is that which we see as joining past and future; and it is neither the past nor future, and both. Well, in the foreground of Poussin’s picture, something definite and quiet is going on, the carrying of Phocion’s body. It is like something we see as past affecting us more than what is immediately going on: in Poussin’s picture, the past is immediate; something that has been, is indeed rather far off, is continuing. The immediate as reminiscent is managed by Poussin by making the carriers of Phocion’s body seem alone, unnoticed, forlorn where the picture begins. In the middle ground there is more activity. There is more living diversity. In the background of the picture, trees become one with old stone, hills with quite fresh, dignified buildings. And the sky is the newest and oldest thing in the picture. Space and the visual are used to express time. History presents time as a picture.

Space and Time as One

In order to see art as history, it is necessary to see that we are always trying to see space and time as one. That space and time are one is another way of saying that rest and motion, the absolute and relative, the permanent and momentary, universal and local are one. Because art shows rest and motion as one, it also shows space and time as one, the absolute and relative as one, the permanent and momentary, and the universal and local.

It is well to take the last two pair of ontological manifestations: the permanent and momentary, and the universal and local. The history of history is about how men of letters have tried, in describing the past, to be just to man in general while being just to a man, say, in the forest of Ardennes in 1418; to present reality while describing goings on in a parish. What goes on in art is a joint offering of time and space, too. Everything that is, has occurred and occurred in time. We don’t see what a thing is, until we see it as an occurrence.

Existence is an occurrence which somehow represents the always or eternal, or infinite; and existence is the eternal, too. Art and history both show how what is represented, what is a manifestation in time, is also the infinite. The infinite become concrete is in both.

We shall see art as history when we think of the things in a picture as events which have got the form they were looking for, and which therefore show the meaning and beginning of all that is, the import of reality. Events are not complete unless they are seen with form. When the history of the nineteenth century in the United States is written entirely, the events will show reality itself: the sameness and change in reality, and in everything we see or meet. At that time, events will be a picture. There will be stillness and motion among the events.

Art has always been history. History when it has had, in some fashion, the picturesqueness of Michelet and the principles say of Hegel, has been art too; at this time, it is visual and abstract, color and form, volume and surface. Historians are going after a full picture of the world. Meanwhile, some of that picture is in every painting both thought and seen, lived and within oneself.