Dear Unknown Friends:

The lecture we are beginning to serialize, How Aesthetic Realism Sees Art, is important historically—important in art history and the history of Aesthetic Realism and humanity. This talk, which Eli Siegel gave in January 1956, is also enormously important for the present moment: for life and art and our nation today.

Attending the talk were working artists, some of whom were students of Aesthetic Realism, some of whom were not. Less than a year earlier, the Terrain Gallery had begun. And here I refer readers to Carrie Wilson’s authentic and gripping “Brief History” of the Terrain, on that gallery’s website. Carrie Wilson is a coordinator of the Terrain, and I quote just a little from her “Brief History” to help place the lecture we’re now serializing. She writes:

The Terrain Gallery…opened in 1955 under the direction of [artist] Dorothy Koppelman, and took as its motto this statement by the founder of Aesthetic Realism, poet and philosopher Eli Siegel: “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.”

Ms. Wilson writes that in 1954 Mrs. Koppelman presented an idea to her colleagues, including artist Chaim Koppelman, poet Sheldon Kranz, and poets and photographers Nancy Starrels and Louis Dienes:

She proposed “Some Notions with a Hope of Motion on a Gallery”: “It’s a place where, through the graphic arts mainly…, the Aesthetic Realism point of view will be shown. I hope to show as clearly, as pointedly, as delightfully as possible that through paintings, sculpture, poetry, literature, the world makes great sense.” —And so the Terrain Gallery came to be.

Today

The Terrain has continued these 66 years—with a richness of diversity and with critical scrupulosity and pizzazz. It has shown in its exhibitions and talks that the explanation which has been called the Siegel Theory of Opposites is true: true about art of all the millennia and about art created today. Writes Ms. Wilson:

Eli Siegel’s now historic Fifteen Questions, “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?,” [was] first published in the opening announcement of the gallery….And in December of that year [it] was reprinted in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.”

And today, a person looking at the Terrain Gallery’s website will, I believe, find it thrilling—will feel there is no more exciting website about art.

The talk we are serializing is about the visual arts, principally painting. But Eli Siegel is the critic who, after all these many centuries, explained what beauty is, beauty in all the arts, and anywhere. And he has shown why art matters, matters fundamentally and always. He has shown that art is about our own lives—through its structure, its very technique. The reason is in this great Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

In the 1956 talk, Mr. Siegel quotes contemporary reviewers and critics of past centuries to show that opposites have been noticed by them, and sometimes seen as vital. Yes, opposites have been perceived, because to look with any attention and depth at a work is to see them. But no critic, from the great Aristotle on, saw what Mr. Siegel did. What is the difference between opposites being simply there, in an artwork, and their being one? Are opposites just present in a beautiful thing—present perhaps in the form of some compromise or balance or “happy medium”—or are they livingly inseparable as they embrace in their difference, even their battle, as they intimately and grandly enhance each other? Are the opposites, as Mr. Siegel said in another talk, “in an eternal hug”?

And no critic before him saw that they are our opposites. Let’s take, for instance, the first pair of opposites in Mr. Siegel’s Fifteen Questions, freedom and order:

Does every instance of beauty in nature and beauty as the artist presents it have something unrestricted, unexpected, uncontrolled?—and does this beautiful thing in nature or beautiful thing coming from the artist’s mind have, too, something accurate, sensible, logically justifiable, which can be called order?

This question is about the greatest need of America and Americans now. I say, very swiftly but also carefully: we need to see these opposites as one for our democracy to be secure. Right now there is a horrible notion of freedom in persons who are trying to turn America into something to serve themselves, something to belong only to them and people they associate with themselves. To lie, to change any fact to suit oneself, to try to pass laws based on fakery and cruelty—these arise from a notion of freedom which is not at one with, but severed from, the need to be “accurate,” “logically justifiable.” Unless people see that accuracy is the same as freedom, thoughts will be sloppy and unjust and a nation will be in peril. Art, Aesthetic Realism explains, can show us that these opposites, freedom and accuracy, are one.

Further, Eli Siegel is the critic who delineated something else that humanity has needed terrifically to understand: the anti-art, anti-justice force in everyone. It is the desire for contempt: the desire to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

The Terrain Gallery & Reviewers

In her history, Ms. Wilson quotes Alma Vincent, writing in The Villager in 2000. Ms. Vincent says of the Terrain Gallery:

While art critics praised early exhibitions in their reviews…[t]he one reviewer to write about the value of the Terrain’s point of view was Bennett Schiff, then art critic for a major New York newspaper….He wrote [in 1957]: “There probably hasn’t been a gallery before this like the Terrain, which devotes itself to the integration of art with all of living according to an esthetic principle which is part of an entire, encompassing philosophic theory,…Aesthetic Realism: The art of liking oneself through seeing the world, art, and oneself as the aesthetic oneness of opposites, the theory…developed by Eli Siegel….It is a building, positive vision.”

Increasingly, the critics kept away. I write about this quietly and succinctly here, though my feeling about the matter is tremendous, and I could say very much about it. For now I’ll say this: There was anger at the Aesthetic Realism seeing of art, not because it was untrue but because it was true and its truth included so much. Persons who saw themselves as authorities took as an affront the need to learn centrally about a field they preened themselves on having mastered. This new knowledge was not just another angle on art, another course to take: it was about the very basis of art and every artwork ever made—and it was about oneself, the self of the critic. There was discomfort and indignation, where there should have been careful looking and, if one’s looking showed Aesthetic Realism to be true, happy gratitude. That would have been an accurate critical activity. In the meantime (I say quietly), it is my opinion that art was hurt by the critics of the 1950s and later; and, very much, so was humanity.

Meanwhile, the opposites are here. And Aesthetic Realism is here, beautifully teaching us what they are, in art and in us.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

How Aesthetic Realism Sees Art

By Eli Siegel

The subject of this talk is the way Aesthetic Realism sees art. I had a problem about how to deal with it tonight. There is the way which artists have scolded for a couple of hundred years at least: the way of strict philosophy, metaphysics straight. Now, I love that, but I’ll wait. Aesthetics is a part of philosophy, and Aesthetic Realism sees aesthetics as the same as ontology, the study of being: that is, when you know what things are, you see the beauty in them. That is the meaning of the motto that the Terrain Gallery uses: “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.” This means that when something is seen as it deserves to be seen, you are seeing it also in its beauty; and anytime art has occurred, the reality of a thing has got what it deserves. However, I won’t speak this way tonight, because it is necessary to be very specific at times. And the best way of being specific is to start with the moment.

Tomorrow there likely will be some reviews of shows. As most of you know, there are more shows in New York than ever before, and more galleries, and they are being reviewed. If what I have said is correct, the way a critic tomorrow or the next day will review a show will exemplify what I have said. I think it will.

Color and Line

Let’s take a series of reviews that appeared in Saturday’s New York Herald Tribune, by Emily Genauer and Carlyle Burroughs. Now, these reviews aren’t so different from reviews in the Athenaeum of 1842. In the Athenaeum of 1842 a gentleman could say, Mr. Popkin’s last landscape handles color quite well; in fact, there’s a touch of excitement in Mr. Popkin—but his draftsmanship is still something to look for. We hope that in next year’s showing, Mr. Popkin will have caught up in his draftsmanship.

What is that about? The reviewer, whom we might call Dilke—it’s a name connected with the Athenaeum—is asking for the oneness of color and line. Draftsmanship, design, drawing, all have to do with line, and this particular reviewer is saying Mr. Popkin’s is inadequate. So Mr. Popkin doesn’t belong with Turner or, for that matter, with Ingres, a contemporary, of whom the reviewer might have heard. Today’s reviews deal with the same matter, and sometimes we have a great shout of satisfaction. For example, we have the following, under the heading “Colescott at The Contemporaries”:

Linear labyrinths spill boldly over luminous color areas in the watercolors, drawings and serigraphs of Warrington Colescott at The Contemporaries. Occasionally they spell out an identifiable form, like a bridge, or a building. It’s not for this but, rather, for their extreme animation of design and the way line and color balance each other that they will be admired.

If Miss Genauer were here, I’d ask her: “Miss Genauer, did you call for the putting together of opposites?” And she might say, “No, I was just doing my job.” I’d say, “Doing your job seems to be not only the calling for opposites but the saying that you found them.”

What does this mean: “[It’s for] the way line and color balance each other that they will be admired”? You will notice that one pair of opposites in this review is outline and color. There is something being said about contained and not contained. We have “spill boldly over,” and the idea that things are repressed and expansive. I do predict that words exemplifying these opposites will be used while journals print art criticism.

Another review reads:

At first glance John von Wicht’s pictures at the Passedoit Gallery look like pure abstractions compounded of areas of fresh color criss-crossed by staccato diagonal lines. Only it turns out that they have subjects—ship masts against a harbor sky, or blue water seen through palings, or a lighthouse by moonlight. And that makes them all the more enjoyable.

Which means that by some great luck John von Wicht not only looks abstract but he also has a subject: which means he’s putting together impersonal and personal. Then Miss Genauer says, “And that makes them all the more enjoyable.” In other words, John von Wicht has got together fresh color and staccato lines, and also the abstract and a subject—the pure painting and also the representative. And in his doing so, Miss Genauer says, John von Wicht, so far you’re okay.

Excitement and Restraint

If you read the reviews, you will find that the critic sometimes says an artist got too excited and didn’t have restraint. Then, some unfortunate beings are said to be so restrained that they forget to be excited. Then, some spill over and some hold back too much. And so it goes on. We’ll take another review:

John Laurent has put together his semi-abstract landscapes and harbor scenes, on view at the Kraushaar Galleries, with an orderly sense of design, subtle color and delicate linear pattern. Somewhere down the line, however, he seems to have lost any rapture that the contemplation of nature may have stirred in him. His pictures are oddly detached, as if he looked on all themes as grist to his compositional mill, and, more serious, never felt any real excitement about painting itself, either.

This was said by various people about Raphael: that he wasn’t excited. It was said by Delacroix about Ingres—he wasn’t excited. And it was said also by people about the Cubists and Abstractionists—they weren’t excited. Be that as it may, people look for two things: they look for excitement and repose, and that is the same thing as happiness. Aesthetics has to do with the self. Whenever we are happy we are in a state of repose and excitement at the same time. The next time you’re happy, you can check. If you’re happy now, you can check now. This is not something to look for in some strange place; you can see it now. You yourself are art in action, and the problems are always there. We’d like to be expansive and we would also like to be contracted. And every problem that is in a painting is somehow asked about by a person. This can be shown.

However, in a talk given to aesthetics, it is necessary to place a technical problem like that of line and color. And I did not want an occasion like tonight’s to be given to a discussion too bare, too philosophic, let us say. So I’m going to continue with statements made in these reviews and show their meaning in the history of aesthetics.

What Did Earlier Critics See?

There have been Academy lectures—lectures presented at the Royal Academy of Arts. The most famous are those of Reynolds; but strangely enough, Fuseli was also an Academy lecturer. There was Barry. And then there was John Opie (1761-1807). In 1806 Opie delivered lectures on art to the students of the Royal Academy. And the problem Miss Genauer raises in her reviews was taken up by Mr. Opie. In fact, every time you speak on art, you have to talk about color and line and their relation. And their relation is what Aesthetic Realism is interested in. The relation, according to Aesthetic Realism, goes more and more towards identity; that is, there is an attempt to make the thing from which line comes and the thing from which color comes the same thing.

Opie says something about this, and he says it pretty charmingly. He also uses past authorities. One of these is the Frenchman Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy (1611-68), whose Latin poem De Arte Graphica was published in 1668 and caused a stir among the few persons who had an interest in art. It has remained. Reynolds annotated it, but John Dryden, one of the important English poets, translated it into English prose. And so in 1806 when anybody was assigned to lecture at the Royal Academy, it was supposed that he knew Fresnoy. Opie says in his fourth lecture:

In allusion to the uses and effects of colouring,…Fresnoy not improperly calls it the handmaid of her sister Design, for whom she procures lovers by dressing, painting, ornamenting, and making her appear more bewitching….[But if the design] be mean or vicious, the…colouring will be wholly thrown away,…making what was in itself bad appear ten times worse by comparison.

So there’s a hint here that color and line may go badly together. This has often happened.

That was Opie, referring to Fresnoy. Next I think it well to read Fresnoy himself. This is now 1668, perhaps earlier. And the question is: Is Fresnoy going after the same thing that Genauer may go after tomorrow? Is he in the midst of this problem of color and line, and what does the problem mean? I’ve hinted that it is essentially philosophic. It takes a certain form in the history of painting, but it begins with reality. This is the verse translation by William Mason. Coloring is personified:

The question is whether these lines, in all their quaintness, have to do with what Mr. Colescott succeeded in doing. Miss Genauer said Mr. Colescott got a right “balance” between color and line. But we have to go into the word balance. We’ll see that at times it means identity; and what does that mean? We know it’s felt that Cézanne said he was not so much for the outline, for contour. We also know that the Impressionists did something new with the relation of line and color. We know that there was a big fight between Delacroix and Ingres. We know that a similar fight existed between Michelangelo and the Venetians. What does it mean? Where does it come from?

Ourselves

Line and color represent without and within, and these are of our very selves. These are the fate of ourselves. A problem that is of reality and of people is dealt with by the artist. Aesthetic Realism is interested in where the problem begins, because, again, the practical artistic problems begin with aesthetics, just as our own lives begin with something we don’t know.