Points of View[1]

The world as a spectacle is somehow different from the world as a utensil. That is, our sensorial reactions are trained satisfactorily enough so that we can compute the distance from ourselves to other bodies with enough accuracy not to bump into them. Our eye knows enough to distinguish hard from smooth, gauge distance and elevation, help us put a name on beasts and things. We can even judge of the character of people at a glance and act accordingly. But this purely pragmatic use differs from the use we make of a painted representation of the world. There we are in presence of a make-believe, and though we consent to be fooled, we know that our safety is not in the balance. So that a painting has to appeal to an eye somewhat dispossessed of[2] its utilitarian routine, ready to indulge––and the brain too––in[3] a fling between working hours, what Poussin calls aptly: “delectation.” Some commentators have linked delectation with a kind of laziness, of aimlessness. But though no utilitarian point is at stake, the optic nerve remains connected both with heart and brain. Those will work on the material propounded, interpret it, and mindless of its more immediate connotation, read its more remote, if no less real, spiritual meaning. Such theories of pictorial enjoyment as that much publicized one of “tactile values” suggest that the painter can give a more real presentation of the object, of its smoothness, ruggedness, etc., than the onlooker would perceive in[4] the model, and that this more real than real is the source of enjoyment. If this could be achieved by the artist, it would perhaps please a dog (especially if odors could be thus emphasized), but man uses too much imaginative associations to be much tickled by it. The contrary is much nearer the truth. The artist by giving a dubious, incomplete rendering of the objective world forces on the onlooker the realization that this physical world is not so real after all, that its meaning is not so much per se as that of a reflection in a mirror, or the shadow on the wall, of truer things. The very shackles of pigment limitations do free the onlooker. Painting trains men to connect optical vision and spiritual vision. We may suppose that angels, through direct knowledge of the spiritual idiosyncrasies of a man, can come to conclusions as to his physical appearance. In reverse process, the painter, starting from the physical, must rise to conclusions as to the spiritual.