DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68516#0048
ART-HISTORY AS AN ACADEMIC STUDY
considerable number of people in each successive generation to be one
of extraordinary importance.
The artist is then a man who has experiences of one kind or another
which excite him in such a way that first of all for his own satisfaction he
wishes to hold them in the focus of attention until he has exactly ap-
preciated their quality, and this holding in focus results in the work of
art, poem, picture or what not. Most men live through one experience
after another without, as it were, stopping the current of life to enquire
further about them—with the artist certain experiences have the power
to arrest his attention so much that he turns aside from the current of
life and waits until he has fixed that experience fully in his consciousness
and extracted its full savour.
Nor is it necessarily the most poignant and exciting experiences which
bring about this contemplative apprehension—often experiences quite
trivial in themselves, like Monsieur Chardin’s, may have the power thus
to arrest and stimulate an artist. The poet is distinguished by the width
and range of experiences provocative of such contemplation. With the
artist it is almost always primarily a visual experience, although it is
possible that an experience of a non-visual kind may be projected out-
wards in visible forms.
But whatever the stimulating circumstance may be, we must notice
this, that the experience is composed of two elements: one the situation,
the external stimulus, which in the case of art we may generally identify
with the subject of the picture, and the other the whole nature of the
artist which causes his reaction to that stimulus to be just what it is.
Now this second element, brought by the artist, inevitably colours
deeply the resulting experience—so that no two artists subjected to the
same outward stimulus can possibly produce identical works of art.
Now, as we might expect, these two elements in the work of art—the
external situation and the artist’s reaction—vary immensely in pro-
portion. Some artists bring to every experience so marked—it may be so
distorted or it may be so profound—a nature that every experience they
record is as it were lost in that. Thus whatever El Greco paints we are
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considerable number of people in each successive generation to be one
of extraordinary importance.
The artist is then a man who has experiences of one kind or another
which excite him in such a way that first of all for his own satisfaction he
wishes to hold them in the focus of attention until he has exactly ap-
preciated their quality, and this holding in focus results in the work of
art, poem, picture or what not. Most men live through one experience
after another without, as it were, stopping the current of life to enquire
further about them—with the artist certain experiences have the power
to arrest his attention so much that he turns aside from the current of
life and waits until he has fixed that experience fully in his consciousness
and extracted its full savour.
Nor is it necessarily the most poignant and exciting experiences which
bring about this contemplative apprehension—often experiences quite
trivial in themselves, like Monsieur Chardin’s, may have the power thus
to arrest and stimulate an artist. The poet is distinguished by the width
and range of experiences provocative of such contemplation. With the
artist it is almost always primarily a visual experience, although it is
possible that an experience of a non-visual kind may be projected out-
wards in visible forms.
But whatever the stimulating circumstance may be, we must notice
this, that the experience is composed of two elements: one the situation,
the external stimulus, which in the case of art we may generally identify
with the subject of the picture, and the other the whole nature of the
artist which causes his reaction to that stimulus to be just what it is.
Now this second element, brought by the artist, inevitably colours
deeply the resulting experience—so that no two artists subjected to the
same outward stimulus can possibly produce identical works of art.
Now, as we might expect, these two elements in the work of art—the
external situation and the artist’s reaction—vary immensely in pro-
portion. Some artists bring to every experience so marked—it may be so
distorted or it may be so profound—a nature that every experience they
record is as it were lost in that. Thus whatever El Greco paints we are
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