Art as Selection

This essay was written in 1953.

Art is selection, because reality is a having and a leaving out. An object is a presence of addition, subtraction, and neither. In art, selection is for the purpose of inclusion; subtraction is for the purpose of addition; one leaves out in order to see more. It is the right of every oblong of wood to have a hole through it, a line on it, a chip taken from it. These vicissitudes of selection are of the wood, because they’re the wood as possibility.

The principle of selection is something like this: There is a shining square of black wood. You put a wavering line of silver-grey in it. Doing so, you may take away some of the wood. However, because the smooth black has now a line of silver-grey, it is what it is as black wood and something else as silver-grey line. But an object is always sameness and change, itself and relation. The black wood loses some of its blackness; but gets more of its essential being; some wood has been lost, but relation has been gained. What has happened is a little like what takes place when a child gives away one or two of some little candies in a bag to some little friends. A few candies have been lost, but relation has been gained.

The Purpose of Painting

The purpose of painting is to show the reality in a visual object. Reality must have change, does have change. Selection is a way of showing reality as change in an object. You leave out something of the object itself, to show what the object is, means. The presumption is that meaning is more crucial than apparent physical intactness.

To elongate an object is to accent the object as change. The object is shown more as it is, by being shown more as it is not. After all, to get to the essence of anything, you have to leave out something. In reality manifestation is an interference with essence, while showing what essence is. In other philosophical terms, appearance is an obscuring of reality, while it is a showing of it. What art does is to show appearance as not obscuring reality; to show appearance as reality straight. Appearance is both economy and superfluity. As appearance, four peanuts and three combs on a bench may draw attention only to themselves; as such, they’re economy as to themselves, but superfluity as to eternal, essential reality. As appearance, used by a painter, these objects serve permanent reality: as to strictly themselves, there is superfluity taking place. Fancifully, one can think of the peanuts and combs asking, Why do we have to be a means to eternal, Cézannian form: we are quite pleased being ourselves. The body may see a coat, but then the coat may see the body, as superfluous.

Distortion is always a presence of energetic subtraction or addition; and distortion is an aspect of selection. Idealization is also an aspect of selection. What Ensor and Hogarth did is akin to what Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes did. Reality can be shown more as it is, which means as it is, through grotesqueness or sweet Celtic symbol. The question always is: was the interaction of order and disorder, beauty and ugliness, symmetry and asymmetry in reality adequately apprehended?

The Pervasiveness of Selection

There is not a term in art which doesn’t have something to do with selection. Suppose we take, as a means of showing somewhat casually the pervasiveness of the idea of selection, Thomas Munro’s description of Vermeer’s The Artist in His Studio (Great Pictures of Europe, 1930). The first sentence of this description is: “The illusion of reality is immediate and surprising.”

Illusion, as we shall see, is arrived at by fullness of presentation, but it is also arrived at by leaving out. One can feel the essence of space by putting a bird where no bird was; or by thinking of space without air. We can have an illusion by thinking of a building on empty ground or by imagining the Woolworth Building as vanished, with serious Indians traversing the grass which in 1580 was where the building is now. Again philosophically, matter can be seen as a selection of space. Complete emptiness or non-being is also a “selection” of space. If a painter puts in a clump of trees, in adding this clump of trees to the space that might have been, he is selective with space. To add is to select as to the thing that was. Vermeer by adding has selected, and, as Munro says, has made for an illusion. Both form and matter can be seen as illusions of each other and of what they both represent.

The next sentence of Munro is: “One is suddenly looking into an actual room, full of solid furniture and hangings, in which a painter in Dutch costume sits motionless for an instant to glance at his model.”

The word it is profitable to linger on in this sentence is solid. Solidity itself is both a presence and absence. It is the presence of compactness, but the absence of flexibility; a kind of freedom. Vermeer is going after freedom in this painting—all painters do; but he uses solidity to get it with. A thing can be shown by what it is, and what it isn’t, and by something it is like partly. The idea of a girl in Botticelli or Henry James can be helped by thinking of her just as she is; by thinking of her in relation to some portly French manufacturer or rotund Italian judge; or by thinking of her in relation to her aunt. In all three processes there is selection. One can choose to be alone; to leave a group of people for a larger group; or to leave a group of people for just one person. These kinds of choice or selection we see in painting; without selection painting could not do what it does, be what it is. I think it can be seen that solidity is inclusiveness and exclusiveness. Solidity is reality, and reality is selection. What art does is to show that the selectivity of reality is its generosity.

The next sentence of Munro is: “The instant is prolonged, held rigid in eternal calm and silence.” In this sentence, we see selection as to time. An instant is the most selective thing there is; all uniqueness is selective. What is eternal is the least selective thing there is. What is not included in eternity? Yet here we have the instant merging with an idea of “eternal calm and silence.”

The Largest Idea of Selection

It is in this particular sentence that the largest and sharpest idea of selection can be found. Selection says that 23 can sometimes represent 100 better than 100. At a certain time, it is better that 100 be 23 than that it be anything else.

What a thing is is all it can’t do without. But what a thing can do without has a way of accompanying that thing. Art says that the fact that a man has line may be more important than that he has two aunts, and one fur coat, and strong shoulders. Any detail within a man or any object can be seen as more important than the man or object ordinarily speaking.

A man doesn’t see himself as having circles. Most men would prefer to see their heads as heads, not as an arrangement of circles, ovals, straight lines, planes. Yet a circle can be more representative of reality, can be more reality itself, than the ambitions of that man. Mr. Hampden is lines and planes. As lines and planes he is near to everlasting reality. When Mr. Hampden is painted by a bold, good contemporary painter in southern New Jersey, he is seen as lines and planes. The painter doesn’t see Mr. Hampden as related to essential reality, to eternal form, through his having a car and three nieces. The painter sees the lines, the planes, the contour, the color, the volume as such in Mr. Hampden as his visiting rights to being and the eternal. So there is artistic selection, which may be benevolent and beneficent.

Styles in Painting

Styles in painting have selection as central. The Byzantines thought that by seeing people and things as rigid and grave, reality would be served. And the rigidity and gravity of reality are reality. It seems the Byzantines in painting had a hard time being frivolous, tail-waving. Giotto in his very subjects selects, as all painters do. There is determined sweetness in his work, affirmed presence of a world beyond this. So certain lines are selected by Giotto. History makes one leave out; what you’re doing makes you leave out. Yet, we can be certain, that Giotto, as did Puvis de Chavannes and Gaugin later, selected certain impressive staticness as representative of reality. Giotto saw depth in surface: he did not have to get depth through victories in perspective. Later painters retain and leave out. Curves are selected; and serious diagonals not so much. There is a presence of more color; and a different attitude to color (all attitude implies selection). The mystery of everything is felt by Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt. Leonardo selects soft lines and definite lines as a means of showing this constant mystery. Rembrandt uses light and dark.

And paintings became stouter and thinner, faster and slower, more rigid and more joyous, more ascetic and more voluptuous—because reality becomes more the more ways are selected, arrived at, come to, for showing it. Reality is all its ways, all the ways it can be seen. An object is all the ways it can be seen. So when Veronese selects, and adds richness; and Modigliani selects, and adds length; and de Chirico selects, and adds height and dark and stone; and Delacroix selects, and adds color as energy—in each instance, through the selection, through the style, reality is enriched. Being enriched, it is seen more as it is.

Art, as selection, says that if you leave out, you show; if you include, you show. This means that all reality is infinite and finite at once; it is the utmost in inclusiveness, and the utmost in simplicity; while gorgeous, rich, and earthy, it is the lightest line, the sharpest point, the freest freedom.