Free to look, free to shape

Three philosophers and a pair of boots

On 13 November 1935, in Freiburg, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger gave a lecture on “The Origin of the Work of Art.” (He repeated it in Zurich in January 1936 and recast it in Frankfurt that winter; it was first printed in 1950.) To show what a work of art does, he chose a painting by Vincent van Gogh of a pair of worn shoes. He called it “a well-known painting by van Gogh, who painted such shoes several times,” and never said which one. Out of the shoes he built a woman: a peasant woman in a field, in wind, with the dampness of the soil on the leather. Then he admitted that “from van Gogh’s painting we cannot even tell where these shoes are.” The field, the furrows, and the wind were his own additions.

The art historian Meyer Schapiro replied in 1968 in an essay called “The Still Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh.” Heidegger had told him in a letter that he meant a picture he saw at an exhibition in Amsterdam in March 1930. Schapiro identified it as a canvas now in the Van Gogh Museum, Shoes, painted in Paris in 1886, and argued that the boots were not a peasant woman’s at all. They were the artist’s own, the shoes of “a man of the town and city,” and Heidegger, Schapiro wrote, had “imagined everything and projected it into the painting.” In 1978 the French philosopher Jacques Derrida joined in, with an essay in La Vérité en peinture (The Truth in Painting) that began from Schapiro’s note, and went on, as it is commonly reported, to ask whether anyone can tell whose shoes they are. Van Gogh made at least seven or eight such still lifes, in Paris in 1886–87 and in Arles in 1888. Three famous minds looked at one picture of boots and could not agree. They did agree that the boots had become something to look at.

Production through freedom

The second of the lectures’ six answers is freedom. The word has a precise history. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), section 43, Immanuel Kant wrote, in James Creed Meredith’s 1911 translation, that “by right it is only production through freedom, i.e. through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action, that should be termed art.” His example is a bee. We like to call what bees build, their regularly constructed cells, a work of art, but “we only do so on the strength of an analogy with art.” As soon as we recall that no rational deliberation lies behind their labor, we say it is a product of their nature. A second distinction in the same section: free art is play, “an occupation which is agreeable on its own account,” and the other kind is labor “only attractive by means of what it results in (e.g. the pay).” Hegel, in the introduction to his Aesthetics, also tied true art to freedom: in Osmaston’s 1920 translation, “fine art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is also thus free,” meaning free of service to outside aims. (The line the lecture quotes from Hegel, about “the free, concrete life of spirit,” could not be matched to any wording in the translation this course could read, so it is not used.)

The lecture reads the word in its own way. A thing is free, it says, when we attend to it for itself, and not for use. A water bottle on the table becomes art the moment we really look at it. A discus thrower in bronze is freed from the contest: nobody needs him to win a trophy or to bear the pressure, and we can look at the shape of his body for its own sake. Tableware so fine you hesitate to eat from it has become something to look at. A worn-out pair of shoes, put under glass, is no longer something to walk in. This is the lecturer’s extension of Kant’s word, and a good one, but it is not what section 43 says. For Kant, freedom there means rational choice, as against instinct, and play, as against wages.

The nearer Kantian idea is disinterest. In section 5, “taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest.” In section 2 Kant imagines being asked whether the palace in front of you is beautiful. You may answer that you do not care for things “merely made to be gaped at,” or that you would not trouble to conjure the palace into existence if you had a comfortable hut. All that matters for beauty, he says, is whether the mere representation of the object pleases. And near the end of the third “moment,” he sums it up: beauty is “the form of finality in an object, so far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end.” Modern translators call it purposiveness without purpose.

The play drive

In 1795 the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller carried the idea further. His Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man began in 1793 as letters to a patron, the Danish prince Friedrich Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg, who had given Schiller a pension after an illness. The original letters burned in a palace fire in Copenhagen in February 1794, and Schiller rewrote and enlarged them for his journal Die Horen, where they appeared in 1795. Schiller had welcomed the French Revolution and turned from it in horror as the Terror began, and the letters ask whether beauty might make people fit for freedom.

Schiller proposed two drives in human beings, the sense drive, which ties us to matter and the moment, and the form drive, which seeks law and order, and a third, born when the two are balanced: the play drive. Its most quoted sentence is in the fifteenth letter: “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays” (in a nineteenth-century English translation; the German is der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist). His example is a statue, the Juno Ludovisi, a colossal head now in the Palazzo Altemps in Rome. What speaks from her face is neither charm nor dignity, he says, because it is both at once; the whole form “rests and dwells in itself.” The Greeks, he adds, set the ever-serene free from the chains of every purpose, every duty, and every care. A thing freed from use, in this reading, is what play makes.

The one quality

The lectures’ third answer begins with a change of eye. In August 1890, in the magazine Art et Critique, a French painter just short of twenty, Maurice Denis, wrote: “Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” Twenty-four years later the English critic Clive Bell, in Art (1914), asked what quality is common to “Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne.” His answer: “lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.” These aesthetically moving forms he called “Significant Form,” the one quality common to all works of visual art. In Chinese the term is rendered 有意味的形式 (yǒu yìwèi de xíngshì), “form that has meaning.”

For Bell, what a picture is of is irrelevant. William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station (1862) shows a crowd at Paddington. It is not a work of art, Bell wrote; it is “an interesting and amusing document.” Its lines and colors recount anecdotes and show the manners of an age, and “they are not used to provoke aesthetic emotion.” Bell credited his friend Roger Fry for tempering the theory in their conversations. Fry’s “An Essay in Aesthetics” (1909) was a first statement, and the exhibition he organized, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, at the Grafton Galleries in London from November 1910, made the term “Post-Impressionism” famous. A critic, Frank Rutter, had used it three weeks earlier, so Fry did not invent it.

The lecture is eager to widen the claim. It says the materials of art hardly matter: marble, bronze, oil, and ink can take any form, and what changes through the ages is form. It chooses its examples to show that the same concern runs through all periods and places: the twist of the Greek discus thrower, a Northern Wei jade figure, a Han tomb brick with a horse, Chinese wild cursive script, and the abstract painters of the twentieth century. Two details need correcting. The lecture says oil paint replaced egg tempera because tempera was too expensive, but standard accounts cite the way oil blends, the longer working time, richer color, and, for canvas, cheapness and size, and give no cost reason. And Greek and Roman marbles, the model of pure form, were not white. They were painted. The exhibition Gods in Color, curated by the archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, opened in Munich on 16 December 2003, and reconstructed the sculptures in bright patterns, and the white marble ideal arose because the paint had weathered off long before the antiquarians of the eighteenth century looked. The Roman historian Pliny even records the sculptor Praxiteles saying that he valued most the statues “to which Nicias has set his hand,” Nicias being a painter.

Form can also be a matter of number. In about the middle of the fifth century BC, the sculptor Polykleitos wrote a treatise on ideal proportion, now lost, and made a bronze spear-bearer, the Doryphoros, to demonstrate it. The doctor Galen reported centuries later that the work was called the Canon because it had a precise commensurability of all the parts to one another, beauty lying in the proportions of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and the wrist.

Weighing a picture

The lecture’s long demonstration is a card game. Paul Cézanne painted five versions of The Card Players between about 1890 and 1895, using local farmhands as his models; they hang in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Courtauld in London, and a private collection, reportedly bought by Qatar’s royal family in 2011 for $250 million or more. The version the lecture discusses is the Orsay one: two men face each other across a small table, the left one in a tall-crowned hat with a pipe, the right one in a lower soft hat, a tall dark bottle upright near the middle of the table and a little right of center, a chair back showing at the far left edge, an orange table. The lecture reads it as a balance of weights: an arm on each side makes a scale-beam, almost symmetrical but not quite; the dark bottle weighs down the right; the chair back stops the picture from tipping to the corner. Everything leans, and everything is caught. It reads the dividing lines of the background as an early Mondrian.

The lecture then says colors have weight: red feels light and rising, like fire and the sun; blue is heavier, like the sea; yellow is loud; black is heavy and white is light. That is a teaching story, not an established finding. Designers do say that dark, saturated, large, or isolated things tend to pull the eye and feel heavy. There is no law that red is light and blue is heavy. Try the idea with a toy.

Cézanne gave one famous rule, but it was advice and not a description of his own method. In a letter to a young painter, Émile Bernard, on 15 April 1904, he told him to treat nature “by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.” Piet Mondrian took the idea of structure to its limit. In Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930, now in the Kunsthaus Zurich), the ground is white, thick black lines run across it, a large red square fills the upper right, a small blue square sits lower left, and a thin strip of yellow touches the lower right. His rule: three primary colors, three “values” (black, white, and gray), and two directions. The lecture’s own examples run on to Mark Rothko’s stacked fields of soft color and Jackson Pollock’s poured paint, which it reads as the rhythm of a person’s movements. Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 is in the Museum of Modern Art; it is roughly nine feet by seventeen. In August 1949 Life magazine asked in a headline whether he was “the greatest living painter in the United States.”

Chinese readers will know a long tradition that prizes line for itself. Xie He, a critic of the sixth century, listed six laws of painting, and the second is 骨法用笔, “bone method in using the brush”: each stroke should carry structure and energy. The Tang monk Huaisu’s Autobiography, in wild cursive script, is dated by its own colophon to the year 777, and scholars still debate whether the scroll in Taipei is his own hand or an early copy. Critics have compared Pollock’s poured lines to calligraphy. The likeness is in the gesture, not in any borrowed writing.

The challenge

The lecture gathers its three answers and then breaks them. Imitation, freedom, and form each explained part of what we call art. In 1917 a urinal arrived at a New York exhibition. It copied nothing. It was made for use, and was still a plumber’s fixture. It had no beauty of line to speak of: it looked like every other on the shop’s shelf. “Imitation plus freedom plus form is not Duchamp,” says the lecture. The lecture draws a different conclusion from the failure: not that we need a better definition of the object, but that we should stop asking only what is art, and ask under what conditions something becomes art. The American philosopher Nelson Goodman had put it the same way in 1977, in an essay called “When Is Art?”. The next lesson takes up the case the three answers could not hold.