Art as Rightness

This essay was written in 1953.

Art gives a chance for everything to be right, by being seen right. A broken bit of stone doesn’t seem the most correct object in the world, but placed by some black velvet, the stone, in its brokenness, can appear to do something right. At least it makes the velvet mean more. A broken bit of stone in twilight does add something to the twilight, while presenting itself handsomely. Art justifies the existence of objects, and makes the world in which they all are seem sensible. When we see a thing as in itself justified in its existence and as saying something worth feeling about all else, we see that object as right. An ugly thing has this in common with an attractive thing: it can be in a valuable, correct relation with something else. And an ugly thing is not ugly, is right, when seen as having relations in itself; that is, when it is seen as a whole with parts, an arrangement with details.

A shark can be seen as right in two ways: One, it can be seen as simply a successful shark-arrangement, with all its details going for unmistakable sharkness. Two, it can be seen in relation to a cliff, or hill by the shore, or to a butterfly; at this time the shark serves the meaning of cliff, hill, or butterfly, and that much is doing a right thing. Sharks as to cliffs are right; sharks as ones with parts, compositions with details, are aspects of correctness.

Our Deepest Desire

As much as we are not pleased by things, we don’t see them as right. Where we are not pleased by the world, it is not right as to us. All dullness is a chiding of evolution or Jove or just existence. Art, depicting evolution or the works of Jove or the operations of, situations in existence, works to show these are right. Since our deepest desire is to see existence as right, and since it is not easy to see existence as right, art comes to the rescue of confusion, apathy, and sogginess—ills to which the mind of man has a proneness. Art goes on the supposition that original sin is to see the world as dull, not interesting enough, not lively enough—not right enough. Art takes wearying or unseen objects—Cinderellas—and makes them sprightly, engaging, properly mind-fIlling. Art rights perceptive wrong.

All paintings say: You might not have seen this in just this way, and now you can. Paintings are awakening, delightfully chiding informants. They ask us to welcome more. Through paintings, what we should be horror-stricken to have in our homes is given valuable lodgment in our minds.

For example, we are asked to see Giovanni Bellini’s Condottiere as beautiful. Somehow, we do. The face of the mercenary warrior we should shun, on an ordinary occasion. It is forbidding, severe, not benignant. Bellini, however, has seen the condottiere as of art. Art is the great welcomer, the great Endower with Rightness. So Bellini, as artist, makes a composition of the fierce man. A soft, black, rich cap goes with his unrelaxed, somewhat threatening visage. The eyes themselves are an ellipse in grey-white and two circles within each other, with a black circle high in a grey-green one. These two circles and an ellipse have two diagonals joined above them, which are eyebrows not placidly disposed. There are diagonals and curves in the face, too, all serving art as they serve this composer and advocate of the uninviting.

Much more could be said of the presence of the tranquillizing and satisfactory within a being himself not tranquillizing. One could point out an engaging curve within a bellicose chin; the lips are tight, but they also have their curves. An ear is a darksome arrangement of depths and elevations, accompanied by angles and curves. It is, however, the fabric the condottiere is wearing which Bellini uses most to reconcile us with the harsh strength of the face as simply psychological. This fabric is rich, golden, various, ornate—a little silly in its luxurious, unexpected traceries. Face fights the golden fabric; but as we accept both we arrive at rightness through struggle. The face does belong to the paradise of form, harmony’s habitat. The golden fabric has been assisted by the rich, soft, black cap, and the face—already, as I said, with its aspects of reconcilement—joins the accepted. Bellini has been Form’s Usher—to be a little Elizabethan about it.

So art makes a thing look right by showing that within a thing there are relations making that thing one thing, yet alive with otherness. Somehow, to show an ugly thing as inevitable and one, is to show it as right: at that moment it expresses the depth of things. But to show a thing as one is to show how its details or parts go together, and in doing this you make an object seem more than it may first seem to be. The beak of a hawk has its objectionable side, but the way that beak is made can be liked. How a thing is, understood, is more beautiful than what a thing quickly seems to be: that is the message of art about good and evil.

While a thing has relations within it (a hawk’s beak has curves and diagonals in it, texture and line, color and verticals) it also has relations without. A hawk’s beak is related to a rose; blue sky; a large leaf; a great oak. And when we think of the hawk and hawk’s beak in relation to these, and many other things, something happens to hawk and hawk’s beak. The repellent, while still existing, may be merged with something else. Art merges javelin with blue sky, while still sustaining the conspicuousness of javelin.

Relation Goes for Rightness

Art can be right about ugly things, but of course it can be right about “middling” and attractive things. Relation in art always goes for rightness, no matter what the thing in play. Lorenzo Lotto’s St. Jerome is an engaging example of things in art right as to each other. One has the somewhat naked body of an old man, before slanting, uncertain rocks. The feet of the old man, St. Jerome, slant, too. There is a book, apparently a folio, open against a small rock. Little stones curve about the little height St. Jerome is on. His white beard goes down. To the right of the picture is dark, large rock, diagonal and vertical, merging with a tree and rich leaves. Something like a little sapling grows out of the rock just behind St. Jerome. Saplings are elsewhere. There are two full-grown trees growing quietly and vertically out of hidden flat land. There is a little plain or meadow meeting again high rock. In the distance there are low, dark growths, buildings, and sky.

If Lorenzo Lotto knew what he was doing, all the things he got into his painting are right as to each other. Composition is a right arrangement of rightnesses, however unexpected. A rightness is felt in the painting. Cliff and folio and beard and meditative old face and juttings do seem to go rightly. Lorenzo Lotto has been the imaginative advocate of reality.

Dürer’s Melancholy is a renowned example of rightness about a wrong situation; for melancholy, as such, is hardly right. The picture says that the greatest sadness can be seen rightly. In simple philosophic terms, Wrong can be Perceived Rightly. When wrong is a subject for right perception, it, art says, is right. For that is right which has a right effect; and when a thing is the cause of right perception, it has had a right effect. Dürer’s picture is a showing of confusion, disappointment, and some deep anger. Methods for finding order have failed. Knowledge has been pushed back. Compasses can do no more as an animal sleeps. A big sphere is next to broken things. Light seems to be acting darkly. Tiredness and absence of meaning are predominant. —But all this is seen. Dürer is saying that unsuccessful seeing, when seen, makes for success. We can be right about where we haven’t been right.

Insufficiency, art states, when seen, is nearer right than “sufficiency” not seen. A fraction seen clearly becomes a whole number: if we see all of 5/17 we are seeing the unity, the entireness of 5/17. The relative becomes absolute, and the broken whole. The principle working is that the entire world of rest and motion, mass and form, is present even in an incomplete, a wrong, an ugly thing. The universe seen in the unpleasant insect gives meaning to the insect, transmutes it truly and valuably.

How can there be a broken shingle without some presence of the whole shingle? How can there be a shingle without reality present in it? Once an error exists, you can be right about it. It is something like this behind the rightness of Bosch, Grünewald, Hogarth, Ensor—all who have honestly presented the ugly, the deformed, the grotesque, the repulsive.

A picture is wrong when it doesn’t accept, assert the full isness of something. When one feels that a thing is, one is interested in what is happening in it, and what it has to do with. Rightness, in the long run, in a picture is successful interest because it has been honest interest. In a picture—as elsewhere—to understand a thing is to be that thing. This interest unites all kinds of art.

As soon as an artist feels that the Virgin is, he can be right about her. To create is to feel that a thing is: and to feel that a thing is, is to feel what it is; all that it is, or has; and all that it has to do with. This feeling is the beginning of rightness in art. The criticism of a picture begins also with feeling that the picture is—and all that it is, and, yes, all that it has to do with. What a picture truly has to do with is in the picture.

Any Object Is More Than It Seems

All schools of art have said that previous or other schools have not been right, because objects have had more than these schools have given them. The big change in art has come to this possible statement by an Art Protestant: “Any object is more than it seems to be to many people, and therefore if you paint it only as it seems to be to these people—or Academicians, timid ones, yourselves! —then you are not right. We are right because we see the object more as it is in itself, more in relation. Our rightness exists because we see the object as form; you see it only as it has been seen.”

Something like this has been said by any group of artists in revolt, any artist protesting. Gentlemen, the artist has said frequently, the visible world is more than you show. —These revolts, protests, manifestoes have really gone for more rightness. We are right as much as we give visible reality all that it deserves: and it seems the visible has always deserved the invisible.

Craft is delightful rightness; technique is lively correctness. Rightness, seen entirely, is an absolute: an absolute of correctness and fulfilled perceptive desire. Rightness is a compound of the melting fruit and the trisquare.

When Renoir painted Madame Chocquet he said, This is what I see as right about the object which is, or who is, Madame Chocquet. Renoir had a way of seeing most definite French ladies in a pleasing mist. Madame Chocquet, while staid, while having plump dignity, has a taking vagueishness about her. She is decorous, attractive body inclining towards the wraith. Determination and sweetness are also hers. A definite though delicate line of nose, goes with clear ellipses of eyes. One can say that Renoir was right in seeing Madame Chocquet the way he did, while one believes that a painter could be right in another way. The rightness of a thing is all the ways it can be seen rightly: just as 100 is 67 and 33; 44 and 56; 23, 21, and 56; 110 minus 10; and so on. Rightness is really one of the most flexible things one can think of.

It is necessary that if we feel a thing right in art, we see this rightness like all rightness. So if we feel that the circle in motion of Blake’s Angel Binding the Dragon is right, we should ask: What has this rightness to do with everything else that might be called right? We should ask this for the honor of art. We certainly are not honoring art if in any way we grant that there can be a rightness of effect in art without a rightness of truth or fact; and we are not honoring art if we grant that what has a right effect in art is contrary to what has a right effect in ordinary life.

Art is rightness. Its rightness explains, is not contrary to, the rightness of mechanics, statistics, mineralogy, botany, physics, millinery, baking, glazing, medicine, law. The rightness of art intensifies, illuminates, makes profound the rightness of the physical sciences, the crafts, the trades, the professions. Then, too, art explains, deepens, the rightness one may feel in ordinary life: the rightness of being on time, carrying umbrellas, keeping out leaks, keeping accounts. Somewhere, that 7 and 3 make 10 is an artistic fact. The purpose of art is to give accuracy to flesh, odor, life, meaning: not to supersede it.

All this is necessary; for art is a way of seeing the world as right. Our way of seeing the world as right should not be disparaged a bit; should be loved with a fiercely adequate love.