Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the final section of Art Is within Science, a 1969 lecture by Eli Siegel, from his magnificent, groundbreaking series on the relation between art and science.

What is that relation? The two have seemed hugely different. They have seemed in different compartments of human thought—with science standing for logic, knowing, fact, truth; and art for feeling, imagination, beauty, value. And just as people have felt a stark separation between art and science, they have felt a rift in themselves between knowledge and emotion, exactitude and imagination. The rift has been, in a sense, taken for granted, yet it has made people ashamed, agitated, deeply unsure.

These, knowledge and emotion, are opposites. And the division in oneself between them can end through the study of Aesthetic Realism and this principle, true and kind for all time: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

There Is This, Too

As we have been serializing Art Is within Science, I have commented a good deal on that schism people make between feeling and logic. However, there has also been a dishonest “joining” of those opposites. It arises from what Aesthetic Realism has identified as the greatest danger in humanity: contempt, the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” I’ll say a little here about this phony “joining” of emotion and thought, because, while it has always been part of humanity’s contempt-repertoire, it is present in our time in a way that has affected people intensely. It has made for disgust and fear in people, without their seeing clearly what it is.

It works this way: First, you have a feeling that suits something in you to have, even though it may be incorrect. It can be, for instance, a woman’s feeling that “this is the man for me—we must be together—I don’t care how mean he is to other people!” But it can also be the horrible feeling had by many persons, “People of my skin tone are simply superior!” It can be the feeling of a boss, “I want to pay my employees as little as I possibly can, even if that means they won’t earn enough to buy the food they need.” It can be the feeling that since the person you hoped would win an election did not, the election should be declared illegitimate. Then, to justify your feeling and have it prevail, you come to a false “logic” and phony “facts” about it. (You might create the “facts” yourself, or adopt those put forth by like-minded others.)

The ugliest things in human history have had with them the attempt to justify a contemptuous feeling, emotion, desire, through spurious “reasoning,” “logic,” even “scientific research.” That was so, for example, about slavery. The enslavement of people had behind it feeling of a certain kind: the emotion of superiority in looking down on other human beings; the feeling that it was comfortable to be served; the emotion of greed and self-satisfaction in enriching oneself through others’ very lives and bodies. Meanwhile, a certain phony “reasoning” was used to justify these feelings, this utter contempt. The “reasoning” was heard in speeches by Southern politicians, and in various sermons from Southern pulpits. The fake “reasoning” was even used to make the sheer brutality of slavery appear a considerate thing, a kind thing—the generous taking care of darker people.

Very Much Now

The use of dishonest “reasoning,” the amassing and distribution of “facts” that are not facts but lies, to bolster an ugly, unjust desire: this is with us very much now. Americans have seen and been sickened by multitudinous lying, including in relation to elections and our government. And it is mentioned often in the media that there’s a new suspicion and disgust regarding the Supreme Court: that Americans now see our highest court as a “partisan” institution, while once they didn’t. Yet I believe the mistrust is about something more fundamental than partisanship. It’s about the matter we are looking at, a contempt-driven joining of personal desire and spurious logical analysis. That is—rightly or wrongly—there’s a suspicion that some justices have the following unexpressed aim: “Any big decision about America should be in behalf of what enables me and my friends to feel superior and comfortable. I can make it appear that such a decision is based on legal reasoning and Constitutional expertise.”

How should we use the falsity that is so much around? People have used it to be disgusted with the world itself. There is no bigger mistake we can make. We should use whatever dishonesty we see to love truth—with all our heart and the fullness of our thought. While feeling and logic, emotion and reasoning, can be dealt with contemptuously, used against each other or joined spuriously—they can also be magnificently one. And they have been. They are one in every instance of real art. They are one in every instance of real science—because the more passionately a scientist loves truth, the better a scientist he or she is.

Eli Siegel loved truth. He sought it, honored it, and expressed it, with grand diversity and thrilling unwaveringness.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Science & Art, Together

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel has been using as text a catalogue for the 1957 exhibition by the Société des Artistes Indépendants—a show that included (for a minimal fee) the work of any artist who wished to take part. He has been translating and discussing descriptions, by Henry Valensi, of 12 artistic styles.

There are the cubistes, and Valensi describes a cubist as:

Every painter who tends not to depict persons, objects, or landscapes representationally, but to present them according to their own structure through taking them back to signs and volumes that are geometric.

Which would mean that if you accent the structure of things rather than the fullness, you’re in the cubist field.

In Cubism: Geometry, Addition, Subtraction

It happens that any surface is related to a plane, and any solid is related to a cube. So any human being can be seen as a walking oblong. The possibility of doing that, however, is a leaving out and an adding. The cubists added angles. They added planes. They added cubes. They added something like a triangle—and for the nose, we see only the triangle. Every nose is an approach to a right triangle; if you forget the person and just see a right triangle, you are already having your foot in the cubist lake. The presence of geometry in everything that is visible is undoubted, and the cubists felt that showing this would make objects more intense.

Take the oblong. The cubists would see: what is there in common among a pillar, a tree, a person, or simply an oblong of wood?

It’s quite clear that the cubists would not have occurred if there hadn’t earlier been the desire on the part of painters to see the interior of objects glowing on the outside. All painters have had that desire. There was Cézanne, with his desire to see the apple as glowing but also as having an eternal structure akin to the circle: there were two things, geometry and glow. Geometry, glow, and Cézanne are still around.

Next, we have the néo-cubistes:

Those who, in following the same principles, try to develop cubism through multiplying the planes expressing subjects and objects.

Well, I don’t see much need for the term neo-cubists—they aren’t neo enough. But it seems there is a greater multiplicity, something of manyness, in the neo-cubists.

There’s the phrase “multiplying the planes.” Science is interested in the plane. What can a plane do? What is a plane? There is something so open about a plane, and also a plain—both things: p-l-a-n-e and p-l-a-i-n. There is also something so recessive about both.

Motion & Rest

The last description is of the musicalistes:

Those who, at once “non-figurative” and “abstract,” produce an artistic expression of their feelings in a dynamic fashion, which will be successive in time and simultaneous in the work, the colors agitating through their vibrations in the manner of sounds.

This sounds better than it is.

Valensi uses the phrase “in a dynamic fashion.” Dynamic stands for motion, and the opposites of stillness and motion are around. They’re around in science. We have motion, energy, potential energy, kinetic energy. We also have various things that happen to an object, like collision, adhesion, absorption, contact—and when things are in motion and do things to other things, they’re dynamic. Painting has been that. As soon as you started painting on a wall, you became dynamic.

Meanwhile, in relation to the sciences, it’s quite clear that conchology is not as much in motion as ichthyology. In conchology you study shells with the living being gone; then, there’s the study of shellfish, which usually don’t get around as much as the other kind. But ichthyology—that’s something else.

I read these definitions because I think that—although they could be caviled at, although they’re not tremendously expressive, or accurate, for that matter—they are worth knowing. But the other large reason is that they swarm with scientific hints, intimations, qualities.

Art Subjects Have to Do with Science

Then, in this catalogue, there are the names of the exhibiters and the titles of their works. There is an artist named Francis Aggéri, and he is showing a work in granite called Fatality. Sculpture has very often tried to present an abstraction. So there is the problem of asking what Fatality or Fate is, and presenting it in granite. You can ask, How can that be done now?

There are various ways. One way is to have Fatality be some big thing whose eyes aren’t open, or who has something around its eyes. Or you have some very big thing with wings, but you give a sight of only the back of the wings of Fatality. Then, you can have something Egyptian: the head is not discernible, or the body’s shape is not discernible—it’s more like an oblong. Another way—and this would be near George Bellows—is: you have somebody with a very big right hand raised at you.

So, how did this person, Aggéri, have his sculpture of Fatality? One could find out—there are records of this show. But as we think about the matter, we are going through inference, which belongs to science. We’re thinking about what could be, what likely was. Also, we have to say, “I don’t know”—“Je ne sais pas”—which both art and science say.

Science & Art Include Vegetables

There is a painting on a subject simpler than Fatality. It’s by Aram Alalamciyan, and has a title that’s, well, understandable: Carrot and Eggplant. Through the title, we see a relation of colors. A carrot is a more glowing thing; it’s in the orange field. An eggplant’s color is different. There’s an interesting combination. Maybe there’s a plate too. And there are light and shadow. But there’s an honoring of carrot and eggplant. They don’t often get together in painting. It can be said that even Van Gogh didn’t have anything like that.

Flowers Are of Botany and Paintings

A subject that is a world by itself is just flowers. The high time for that was the 17th century in Holland, where there were certain painters known as Flower Painters; they dealt with flowers of all kinds. In this catalogue there’s a painting called Flowers (Fleurs). It is by Solange Aldric. So we have something of reality. A few paintings of flowers have become classic, but most just cheer up the observer.

Geography Is There

Another subject that is recurrent is in the title of a work by René-Marie B. D’Argonne. The title is Landscape (Paysage)—and that has to do with geography. It happens that landscape painting has fallen on unreimbursed days, but there still are landscape paintings.

Ironing Is of Physics

Then, Roger Baroth has Repasseuse, which means woman who is ironing. That is in the field of science because in ironing we have heat in relation to smoothness, and also a surface. The heat makes for smoothness—along with a flat metallic surface, and, of course, the pressure of the repasseuse. A fairly classic painting of Degas is of a woman who has been ironing, and she’s very tired and would like to stop: La Repasseuse. So a painting of ironing has been successful. There is a great deal of technique in that having of a person with an iron, the old-time iron, and then the board.

Painting has dealt with growing things. There are some American paintings—usually in county seats or in official buildings—of wheat growing. But that is in France too. And André Bihoreau has Blés en Beauce (Wheat in Beauce).

Then, two things can happen to things and they have to do with science: things either separate or they grow closer. These are in the titles of the two works by Jean Crotti. First, he has a painting with a tremendous title, The Universe and the Creator. But the other work is Désagrégation, meaning separation.

For Instance, Clouds

The subjects of painting—the subjects as such—always bring together science and art.

There is the subject of clouds. Clouds had not been dealt with exactly; Ruskin asked that they be. And Ruskin, in his writing on art, brings science and art criticism closer, because it seemed he wanted to know what frost was, wanted to know what cold weather was, and clouds, and the different kinds of clouds. He wrote on “The Truth of Clouds,” “The Truth of Water,” “The Truth of Color.” Those phrases bring the two, art and science, together. And in this catalogue there’s a subject, Cloud over the Port, of Coumian Haig.

Tools, Fabric, & Science

I ’ll read now from a book which, it happens, I had in elementary school, one of the best-written geographies: Carpenter’s Geographical Reader, by Frank G. Carpenter, published in 1902. At about the beginning of the century he went to Belgium, and he gives one chapter to Belgium. I’m reading from it because we get to an idea of science as primitive. As Carpenter’s party goes through Belgium, he sees women in the fields:

Many women are hoeing and weeding; we see them doing all sorts of farm work, and pass many fields in which they are cutting the grass and throwing it about, making hay. [P. 125]

It took a long time for humanity to get to the hoe. “Many women are hoeing and weeding”—and there is a history of weeding. “They are cutting the grass and throwing it about.” That could be a symbol: a Belgian lady might say, “As I threw the grass about, I felt it was Robert.” But the important thing is: some person found out years ago that if you took grass and you cut it, and then just left it on the ground in the sunlight, it would change into hay, which horses love. That’s science. It’s called The Great Hay Discovery.

There is this, about Antwerp in the Middle Ages:

The people then made so much money in weaving fine cloths, in other industries, and in commerce, that the leading men dressed in velvets and satins. [P. 128]

All these fabrics can be seen as decorative, and also be seen as having structure, constituents, chemistry—in the instance of velvet and satins, as being studies in rich pliability.

This, Too, Continues the Subject

There is the relation of opulence to mind in the joke in the next paragraph, which is good enough to read. We come to how things of science and art can affect mind through economics:

The burgomasters or mayors of the principal towns were very proud. It is related that when they once went to Paris to pay homage to King John of France they were displeased because they were not furnished cushions at one of the banquets held in their honor. They wished to show the French how they felt, and…took off their velvet cloaks all covered with embroidery and sat upon them. When the banquet was over, they left their cloaks on the seats. They were reminded that they had forgotten their cloaks, whereupon one of them scornfully answered, “We Flemish are not accustomed to carry our cushions away after dinner.” [P. 128]

It’s not the best joke in the world, but it brings us to the problem of what a cushion is. A cushion is a study in the square and the ellipse very often. And the wonderful thing about a cushion is that it’s mobile. It’s the early mobile art. It changes a great deal, in keeping with who uses it and how it’s used. Cushions are very tangible. They’re also yielding, and they can have various fabrics. It’s possible to do a painting of a cushion in the sunlight, or even in shadow, and have something a cushion never had before—and the cushion would like it.

So with thought of what the cushion would like, I close this presentation of science and art.