Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing How Aesthetic Realism Sees Art, a landmark lecture Eli Siegel gave in January 1956. In it, he illustrates that new way of seeing art and its relation to everyone’s life which is the basis of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

We’ve reached the third part of our serialization. As I described in the previous two issues: less than a year before this talk, the Terrain Gallery had opened, a gallery based then—and excitingly, freshly, powerfully all the years since—on the great principle just quoted. And simultaneous with its opening was the publication of Eli Siegel’s Fifteen Questions, Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? The month prior to this lecture, Is Beauty was reprinted in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. And now, in January 1956, Mr. Siegel is speaking, in this talk, to working artists, some of them students of Aesthetic Realism, others not. To illustrate what art fundamentally is, he quotes contemporary reviewers and also statements made in previous centuries.

What I have just written is background. But I cannot resist saying again, as a person who has looked closely at the subject: Yes, what makes a thing beautiful, what distinguishes art from not-art, has been defined at last, after all the many centuries; and it has been defined by Eli Siegel. Further, the relation of beauty to our own hoping, tumultuous lives has been explained. We are trying to do what art does: make a one of intellect and emotion; truth and imagination; order and freedom; our individual self and our relation to thousands of things, happenings, people, a whole world not ourselves.

Titian: Art and Ethics

Some days ago, there appeared in the New York Times an article that I see as important. It is important because it raises newly, for our own time, a question that has been present in art history. It was much present in the 19th century, and John Ruskin and Walter Pater stood notably for disagreement about it. The question is: what is the relation between art and morality, beauty and ethics? In the Times of August 12, art critic Holland Cotter writes about an exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It features, he writes,

a cycle of six monumental oil paintings of mythological scenes that Titian, who died in Venice in 1576, produced, late in his career….Purely in terms of formal innovation and historical influence, great is what this art is….Yet the same exhibition raises troubling questions about how, in art from the distant past viewed through the lens of the political present, aesthetics and ethics can clash.

One of the paintings, the one Mr. Cotter discusses most, is The Rape of Europa. He calls it “Titian’s superlative creation,” yet he says:

Its theme—a young woman…is abducted and forcibly impregnated by a god in disguise—can’t help but put us on red alerts today….In fact, the whole cycle, with its repeated images of gender-based power plays and exposed female flesh, invites #MeToo evaluation, and raises doubts about whether any art, however “great,” can be considered exempt from moral scrutiny.

Aesthetic Realism is very clear about this mightily important subject: if something is real art, it is also real ethics—whatever its subject matter. Titian’s magnificent work The Rape of Europa deals with a cruel situation. But other great art deals with cruelty: every crucifixion does; and certainly a work like Picasso’s Guernica does. We need to ask, What distinguishes a beautiful painting of crucified Christ from one that is not beautiful? And as to “exposed female flesh”: the nude body has been a huge subject of art—and what makes one nude art and another not? Aesthetic Realism explains that the distinction as to beauty, the ever so technical distinction, is also the distinction as to ethics.

Eli Siegel defined ethics as “the study of what the outside world deserves from you.” The chief matter in giving something what it deserves is to see it as itself, fully particular, yet as having to do with the whole world. All ethics honors at once a thing’s individuality and its relation. These are opposites. To be ethical is to try to be fair to something as at once throbbingly itself and vitally related to other things. And that is what art does.

On the other hand: if we’re unethical about, unjust to, a person, we don’t want to see the person as an individual, nor do we want to see him or her as having to do with a wide, diverse world. Instead, we see the person as something either to dismiss or to manage as we please.

Why It Is Ethical

So let us consider the beauty and ethics of Titian’s Rape of Europa. As Holland Cotter tells us, it and the other paintings in the cycle are based on passages from Ovid’s long poetic work Metamorphoses, written in 8 ad. Europa is a young woman to whom Jupiter appears in the form of a white bull, a creature so sweet, that she places a garland of flowers on its head and climbs upon its back. But suddenly, because Jupiter is within that bull’s form, he carries her into the sea to take her where he can abuse her.

What we have in this painting is a tremendously ethical dealing with an unethical thing. Titian gives to Europa what Jupiter robbed her of: her full, individual reality, and her rich, accurate relatedness. I’ll mention only a few aspects of the ethics that is the same as the art, the art that is the same as the ethics, of this beautiful work.

It is very affecting that the main subject of the painting is not in the center but to the side, principally the lower right quadrant. There Europa, distraught, is stretched against the back of the bull, who, swimming, carries her away. Titian shows her to us as an individual, real: we see her feelings, her thought, in the very flesh of her body, in the motion and angles of her limbs. She is mind and body, together. With all the tumult of her displaced clothing and bare limbs, she has great dignity: that dignity is in the strong diagonal she forms, which rises, from her expressive left toes, upward toward the painting’s edge.

And there is her relation to the world. She holds in her raised right hand a reddish-orangish-pinkish cloth that waves and curves, with much substance, in the air. It meets and joins with similarly colored orange-pink streaks in the sky; and through this meeting and likeness there is the feeling: Even in your distress you have the largeness of the world with you, akin to you. That elevated curving cloth is also related in color to the cloth that is under her and on the bull’s back. And that pink-orange-red is in the ball of her right foot, raised in space, where it seems to tell of her distress. Color can stand for our relation to so much.

There are two winged cherubs, with arrows, who have flown in from the upper left. They are alarmed and seem to say, We would like to protect you. And there is a little cherub on the lower left, who looks at Europa; his legs are placed somewhat like hers, only inverted. With that likeness and his looking at her, he seems to say: I sympathize; I want to feel what you feel. Through the middle of the painting are sky, land, water, those fundamental things of earth. Placed so centrally, they say: This happening has to do with the whole world.

And there is the bull. His nose has that red-pink-orange color too. Holland Cotter says his eyes are “avid.” Yet even so, his expression seems to me sad and puzzled, not fierce, as though the bull is feeling: I don’t want to be used for such cruelty—how could this happen?

Except for Europa’s raised right leg, the joined bodies of young woman and bull form a kind of recumbent triangle. What does that primal structure mean here? As with the triangular forms that critics have noticed in Picasso’s Guernica, we have art saying: Yes, evil exists; but there are eternal forms in things, whatever happens, and they criticize evil even as they show it. Art says: There is structure in this world, no matter what vicious deeds human beings (or Greco-Roman gods) may do.

So, as to the misused Europa herself, we have in the technique of the whole painting a seeing of her as at once Individuality and rich Relation. And that way of seeing is ethics itself.

There Are the Words of Ovid

The ethics which is art is in the poetry of Ovid that affected Titian. I have translated, into English free verse, the final dactylic hexameter Latin lines of Ovid’s telling about Europa and Jupiter-as-bull. Ovid’s lines have a plainness of statement, a factual quality, yet deep feeling become music is in those Latin lines; and I’ve tried to convey their simultaneous definiteness and reverberating feeling. (You’ll see that Titian has altered some of Ovid’s details.) So this is Europa borne onward by the bull:

There is much more to say about the Titian painting and the ethics of its art. However, I’ll quote one passage from the Cotter review in relation to the lecture we’re serializing. Throughout the talk, Mr. Siegel speaks about the opposites of outline and color—and shows that critics for hundreds of years have felt these must be one in painting. Well, Holland Cotter joins those critics as he comments on the power with which Titian used paint:

Standing inches from the picture’s surface you see…: his magician’s hand is right there in dabs, flicks, swirls that barely coalesce into images, yet do.

This is a saying that Titian used paint in such a way that color became outline.

To conclude for now, here are two sentences from Eli Siegel’s essay “Art as Ethics.” They have what people today, looking to be moved by art, and hoping to like themselves, want to know:

Ethics occurs when in some situation a person gives entire justice to himself by giving entire justice to something he meets. Since art results from justice to an individual and an object at the same time, art is ethics.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Outline and Color Go On

By Eli Siegel

The problem of line and color has sometimes been solved quaintly. I’ll read from a magazine of 1930, one of the sumptuous magazines at the time, called Formes, translated too in an English edition, though it was published in Paris. (And sometimes we see it was published in a non-English-speaking milieu because of the mistranslations in the English.) In the May 1930 issue there is an article on the sanguine drawings of Renoir—drawings in rust-colored chalk. This article shows that when people want to deal with the opposites, they do try to identify: see the opposites as one. Cézanne and Renoir are akin in this: they try to identify the two opposites; they try to show there is no distinction.

Renoir, late in his career, found himself wanting to do these sanguine drawings. They’re not exactly color, but they’re not black and white. The article on them is by Germain Bazin. We have this passage:

And, ever after, Renoir knew why, more imperiously than any logic could explain, an unknown force had put a brush in his hand. He knew himself and set out resolutely on his own road. It was to be a beautiful journey.

So we have something that is unconscious and that is exact. In my writing on Jackson Pollock, I try to relate unconscious with exactness, and conscious with exactness. The purpose of conscious and unconscious in the long run is the same. The purpose of the unconscious is to be right; the purpose of the conscious is to be right. Otherwise we are doomed, not just to noble conflict, but to ignoble wobble.

This writer points out the relation of Ingres and Renoir. He says:

Two men alone save the integrity of the form in the 19th century: Ingres and Renoir. From Ingres’ efforts form emerged, puny, sinuous, pale and abstract; out of Renoir’s spontaneity it is born, generous, dense, sanguine and alive.

What does that mean? Does that mean that Renoir is trying to deal with the question that Fresnoy put forth, and the other writers I quoted—that Dryden commented on; that Reynolds commented on, lectured on; that Opie commented on while commenting on Fresnoy and Dryden; that Waters dealt with? Aesthetic Realism says yes. Alive today, very much alive, is the problem of form and color. But it’s alive because it’s reality.

In order to study the problem, understand it, we have to see it in all its forms. We have to see that the Greeks, despite the attempts of many to show they really cared for color, didn’t care as much for color as they did for line. (That’s outside of the fact that color could be hard to get to then.) We find that Asian art deals with the problem too.

There is the attempt to identify the two, line and color, and I think we can see this in the passages I’m quoting from the article by Germain Bazin.

It is wrong to say that Ingres’ form tends towards form as a type, it returns to it; that of Renoir tends towards it. It tends towards because it is expansive, it is expansive because life animates it. That is Renoir’s great contribution. Cézanne said: “Contour escapes me.” Renoir could say: “I escape contour.”

It’s a lovely game. It’s a very lovely game: Cézanne is going to have contour escape him and Renoir is going to escape contour. But what is it about? It is about how we want to be separate and also the same as something. Really, Cézanne didn’t hate contour—it wasn’t that bad. And neither did Renoir. But they had the great itch as painters to try to show that line and color were the same. Cézanne had his way and Renoir had his way. Bazin tries to explain it.

Another sentence of Germain Bazin:

Form, with Renoir, is not, therefore, concentrated (in the classical manner) but irradiating.

That’s our friend expansion and contraction. Then about Renoir’s later work:

Which is not to say that Renoir returned to the formal disintegration of Impressionism, since this irradiation which emanates from form is not at the expense of its density.

Bazin’s idea is: of course Renoir didn’t return to his earlier Impressionist way—because the Impressionists were terrible; they tried to dissolve form with nothing but sunlight and scintillations and all kinds of color effects ending nowhere—but Renoir, no, he does better now. I still think that if any sin has been committed, both Renoir and the other Impressionists have sinned. I think the later Renoir is as bad as the Impressionists—trying to say there’s no distinction between form and color!

Another Voice

The problem goes on. We have the director of the National Gallery in London, Charles J. Holmes (1868-1936), writing on the same subject as Fresnoy, Dryden, Reynolds. He says that if you’re going to combine form and color—watch out!

If form is simplified, color must be simplified also. If form is distorted, the color change must be equally drastic. Here, indeed, we have a useful touchstone for much modern painting. And in the best work of Gauguin and Van Gogh and in the still life pieces of Cézanne, this correspondence is maintained.

That passage too is about the twelfth pair of opposites I wrote of in Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? So I’ll read the question about Outline and Color now:

Does every successful example of visual art have a oneness of outward line and interior mass and color?—does the harmony of line and color in a painting show a oneness of arrest and overflow, containing and contained, without and within?

What Are We Liking?

Whenever a person says he or she likes a painting, I believe it can be shown that unconsciously the person likes opposites. Are they there?—that’s the first question. The question in my title was meant: Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?

I have looked at a blade of grass, and found a blade of grass sturdy and also willowy, bending. And I’ve said my like for this blade of grass comes because the grass is there yet oh how it waves. I’m not going to say that grass is better than a willow tree or better than a panther, but the first thing is to see that the willow, the panther, a bit of fabric, a graceful dancer, and grass have something in common: the opposites—here, firmness and flexibility. Further, it can be shown that the artist is trying to put them together.