Art.-morgan- Concepts of Abstraction in French Art Theory From the Enlightenment

Concepts of Abstraction in French Art Theory from the Enlightenment to ModernismAuthor(s): David MorganSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1992), pp. 669-685Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709943 .

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Concepts of Abstraction in French Art Theory from the Enlightenment to Modernism

David Morgan

Although it has not often been pointed out, the term "abstraction" has been used since the eighteenth century to illumine the complex relation between the work of art and nature. 1 Whereas modern notions of abstraction sever this relation entirely, discussions of abstraction from the En- lightenment to the late nineteenth century, despite their many differences, share a single conviction. This is the belief that the artist's subject is an essence (ideal, metaphysical, or fantastic) which must be purged of the extraneous aspects of its instantiation in nature before it may be suitably visualized in the work of art. I intend to show that this is the case by examining several important moments in the history of French art theory from Diderot to Gauguin. In order to compare the earliest debates concerning the role of abstraction with subsequent and more familiar views, I shall follow the discourse in the second half of the eighteenth century in some detail, then examine key developments in the nineteenth century. I shall conclude by considering one theory of non-objective art in the early twentieth century in order to demonstrate both the difference and the continuity in treatments of abstraction.

Recent scholarship on the history of abstraction in modern painting has correctly emphasized the influence of neoplatonic philosophy on

' Studies which have traced the discussion to moments prior to the late nineteenth century include Otto Stelzer, Die Vorgeschichte der abstrakten Kunst (Munich, 1964); Andrew Kagan, "Representation, Abstraction, and the Absolute in Art," Arts Magazine, 52 (1977), 136-40; David Morgan, "Concepts of Abstraction in German Art Theory, 1750- 1914" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1990), and "The Idea of Abstraction in German Art Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50 (1992), 231-42; and Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism. Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), ch. 2.

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Copyright 1992 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.



670 David Morgan

French art theory in the nineteenth century.2 It is fascinating to note, however, that discussion of "abstraction" as a procedure in the visual arts precedes the nineteenth century and was premised on empiricist, not idealist philosophy. This is due, it would seem, to the predominant influence of British philosophy in France. John Locke's philosophy of abstract ideas played an important role in French art theory by helping to redefine "ideal imitation."

In his widely-read book, Les Beaux Arts reduits a un meme principe (1746), Charles Batteux reiterated much French Academic theory since Le Brun.3 All the efforts of genius consist in making a selection of the most beautiful parts of nature in order to form an "exquisite whole."4 Early in his treatise, Batteux repeated a familiar anecdote of the ancient painter, Zeuxis, touchstone for so many discussions of painting since the Renaissance. Zeuxis, we are told, did not copy a single beautiful figure when he set out to create a portrait of Helen but gathered together the separate features of several different women. "He formed in his mind a factitious idea which resulted from uniting all these features: and this idea was the prototype or the model of his picture, which was probable [vraisemblable] and poetic in its totality and only real and historical in its parts taken separately."' This conceptual hybrid is what Batteux called "la belle Nature": "not that which is, but the true which could be, the truly beautiful, which is represented as if it really existed."6 Yet here Batteux's thought becomes unclear, for it was not just the ideal synthesis of beautiful parts which the artist imitated but the beauty of the parts themselves. Therefore, beauty itself was not only ideal but actual and scattered through nature. The purpose of the artist's idea was to assemble the parts into a single ideal whole. Thus, one must conclude, "la belle Nature" was for Batteux both actual and artificial, though visible as a whole only in works of art.

Batteux's account of imitation was challenged by Denis Diderot, who proposed an alternative understanding of the artist's prototype or model. In the preface of his Salon de 1767 Diderot rejected the long-held belief that "la belle Nature" existed in any actual form to be imitated and

2 Mark Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Ab- stract Painting (Cambridge, 1991), and "Gauguin's Neoplatonism and 'Abstraction' in Late Nineteenth-Century French Painting," Art Journal, 46 (1987), 15-21.

3 Charles Batteux, Les Beaux Arts reduits a' un meme principe (Paris, 1746); for a discussion of Batteux's work and its significance, see Andre Fontaine, Les Doctrines d'Art en France (Paris, 1909), 203-7; see also Francis X. J. Coleman, The Aesthetic Thought of the French Enlightenment (Pittsburgh, 1971), 94-106, for a placement of Batteux within the broad context of theories of imitation in eighteenth-century French aesthetics.

4 Batteux, Les Beaux Arts reduits, 9. 5 Batteux, Les Beaux Arts reduits, 24-25. All translations are my own unless otherwise

indicated. 6 Batteux, Les Beaux Arts reduits, 26-27.



Abstraction in French Art Theory 671

asserted that it was entirely ideal in existence.7 Indeed, Diderot questioned the very idea of the imitation of nature as the essential activity of artistic genius. The artist who copies objects does not produce "the true line, the line of beauty, the ideal line but a line in some way altered, deformed, individual, 'portraitique,' " what amounted to "a copy of a copy."8 Did- erot even claimed that it was impossible to find a perfect example of any single object in nature. Where then is the "true model" to be found? Only in the artist's mind.

Agree therefore that this model is purely ideal, and that it is not borrowed directly from any individual image of nature, the copy of which would have remained in your imagination and which you could recall, hold beneath your eyes, and copy servilely, unless you did not wish to make yourself a portraitist. Agree therefore that when you make the beautiful, you do not make what is, not even what could be.9

The last line is clearly directed at the traditional position taken by Batteux. Unfortunately, Diderot is not much clearer than Batteux on crucial points."1 Diderot attempted to conceive of a mode of imitation that eluded the ambiguity of "la belle Nature." To do so, he adopted the platonic model of mimesis to criticize the imitation of visible nature since, as Diderot claimed, the artist of genius does not content himself with the third rank of the copy of a copy but strives to attain the second rank, the level of phenomenal nature itself, which Plato regarded as the emanation or copy of "truth." Diderot then neatly equated this highest level of platonic metaphysics with what the "modem Plato" called the "general idea."11 But it is here that Diderot is so taxing. Who is this "modern Plato"? The answer becomes clear when Diderot continues by pointing out that the "general idea" exists only in the mind, not in nature. A good guess is John Locke, although he makes a strange bedfellow with Plato. Locke had restricted abstract ideas to the mind where they were formed

'Denis Diderot, Salon de 1767, repr. in Denis Diderot, Salons, III, ed. Jean Seznec (2nd ed., Oxford, 1983), 56; in his Recherches philosophiques sur l'origine et la Nature du beau (printed under the title "Beau" in the second volume of the Encyclopedie [1752]), Diderot claimed that Batteux failed to explain just what "la belle Nature" was. Repr. in Denis Diderot, Oeuvres esthetiques, ed. Paul Verniere (Paris, 1965), 406; see also Diderot's Lettre sur les sourds et m uets (1748) for criticism of Batteux's notion of "la belle Nature."

8 Diderot, Salon de 1767, 57. 9 Ibid., 59. 10 For a comparison of Batteux and Diderot and a helpful analysis of Diderot's contra-

dictory thought on imitation, see Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 115-28.

11 Diderot, Salon de 1767, 57: after citing Plato's theory of mimesis, Diderot stated: "Pour bien saisir cette theorie tres abstraite, il faut remarquer que ce que notre Platon moderne appelle ici l'idee generale, le Platon ancien l'appellait la verite ou le premier type."



672 David Morgan

from sense data as designations of classes of objects.12 Of course, by Diderot's day he was not the only philosopher to have done so; yet he was doubtless the most important and well-known to have advanced the claim within the context of empiricist philosophy. Although Diderot's own countryman, Condillac, followed Locke in his famous Essai, Diderot was probably referring to the Englishman."3 In an important discussion of beauty written after Condillac's work, Diderot provided a definition of abstraction which he lifted from a passage in Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, which was itself a paraphrase of Locke's view of abstraction.14 Furthermore, the entry "I'abstraction physique" in the Encyclopedie was based entirely on Locke's discussion of abstraction and quoted his work at length.15

Yet it remains puzzling why Diderot bothered to introduce Plato's view of art here. It may be that he wished to undermine in no uncertain terms the notion of literal imitation in art or that he sought to preempt a platonist's dissent from his views by regarding Plato's epistemology as really nothing more than an ancient version of Locke's. Whatever the case, Diderot's shift to Locke is crucial for it enabled him to advance his argument against the doctrine of imitation linked to "la belle nature" by locating the artist's model in his mind, where general ideas are conceived as abstractions from sense data. It is to this model alone that the artist is to aspire. To the artist's claim that he uses several models, taking from each what is beautiful in it, Diderot reacted by asking how he could recognize such beauty? Conformity to the antique, he asserted, was not a sufficient answer. Diderot criticized the modem dependence on antique art as the exact opposite of what ancient artists had achieved. To reform nature after the antique, Diderot pointed out, was only to work after a copy.'6 Imitating antique art amounted to studying nature "as perfect and not as perfectible." Artists who do this do not approach "the ideal model or the true line, but draw closer to the copy they possess of it.""17

But Diderot was unable to show how such an ideal model or "intellectual image" qua Lockean abstract idea served in practice as the basis of artistic imitation. In a disappointingly vague passage he attempted to

2John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford, 1894), I, 206-7.

1' Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746), repr. in Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, I, ed. Georges Le Roy (Paris, 1947), 24-25, 48-53.

14 Diderot, Recherchesphilosophiques sur l'origine et la nature du beau (Oeuvres esthetiques, 432), for the original text, see note 30 below; Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1726), 2-3, cf. Locke, Essay Concern- ing Human Understanding, I: 213.

5S Encyclopedie, ed. Diderot and D'Alembert (Lausanne, 1778), I, 179-87. 16 Diderot, Salon de 1767, 61-62. 17 Ibid., 61.




demonstrate how ancient artists achieved the true model. By long observation, the application of taste, instinct, and accumulated experience and by the desire to elevate humanity above its condition, to impress on it a divine character, Diderot asserted, the ancients succeeded in reforming the basic structure of the human form in their art. He then extended this development into the modern period, in which he included the guiding lights of the French academic tradition, Raphael and Poussin, thereby reclaiming them for his view of imitation over against Batteux's:

With time, by a slow and pusillanimous march, by a long and laborious groping, the reformation extended to the lesser parts [of the human form] . . . effacing without rest and with an astonishing circumspection the decay and deformities of tainted nature, either in its source, or by the necessity of its condition, always removing itself from the portrait, from the false line, in order to elevate itself to the true ideal model of beauty, to the true line; the true line, the ideal model of beauty which exists nowhere but in the heads of the Agasiases, the Raphaels, the Poussins, the Pugets, the Falconnets.'8

Although Diderot did not state why moving away from the deformities of nature led artists toward the elevated status of the ideal model of beauty, he was probably following Locke's version of abstraction, which distanced the refined abstract idea from the original sensory impression. As the Lockean "general idea," the ideal model was taken by Diderot to be the aim and exemplar of a gradual evolutionary development in the history of ancient art, which began with a primitive imitation of nature but thereafter undertook a course of corrections or refinements whose impetus was not a desire to imitate but to perfect the human form in accord with an abstract or general idea.19 Diderot concluded that it was

18Ibid., 60: "Par une longue observation, par une exp&eience consommee, par un tact exquis, par un gout, un instinct, une sorte d'inspiration donnee a quelques rares genie[s], peut-etre par un projet naturel a un idolatre d'elever l'homme au-dessus de sa condition, et de lui imprimer un caractere divin, un caractere exclusif de toutes les contentions de notre vie chetive, pauvre, mesquine et miserible, ils ont commence par sentir les grandes alterations, les difformites les plus grossieres, les grandes souffrances. Voila le premier pas qui n'a proprement reforme que la masse generale du systeme animal, ou quelques-unes de ses portions principales. Avec le tems, par une marche lente et pusillanime, par un long et penible tatonnement, la reforme s'est etendue a de moindres parties, de celles-cy a de moindres encore, et de ces dernieres aux plus petites, a l'ongle, a la paupiere, aux cils, aux cheveux, effa,ant sans relache et avec une circonspection etonante les alterations et difformites de Nature viciee, ou dans son origine, ou par les necessites de sa condition, s'eloignant sans cesse du portrait, de la ligne fausse, pour s'elever au vrai modele ideal de la beaute, a la ligne vrai; ligne vrai, modele ideal de beaute qui n'exista nulle part que dans la tete des Agasias, des Raphaels, des Poussins, des Pugets, des Falconnets."

19 In his Paradoxe sur le comedien (1773), Diderot argued that the "modele ideal" was not a chimera but an idea derived from nature after the fashion of Locke's abstract idea. When in the dialogue Diderot's interlocutor is told that this "ideal model" cannot exist since "il n'y a rien dans l'entendement qui n'ait ete dans la sensation," he responds: "II est vrai. Mais prenons un art a son origine, la sculpture, par exemple. Elle copia le premier



674 David Morgan

not by the aid of "an infinitude of small, isolated portraits that one raises himself to the original and primary model."20 The artist of genius follows another path, "that of the human spirit in all its pursuits," by which he meant, presumably, the use of reason (the "general idea") in approaching perfection. Copying models of any external sort-from art or nature- could only harm men of genius, as indeed was the case with modem artists' dependence on ancient art.21

The critique of imitation was pursued by Diderot's friend and fellow partisan of the Enlightenment, Frangois-Jean de Chastellux, in an article on the "ideal" in the Encyclope'die. Encouraged by Diderot's attempt to redefine imitation in terms of the evolution of art guided by the progressive representation of an abstract ideal, Chastellux argued that the historical impetus toward ideal beauty in art was not imitative, but creative. He asserted that the legendary Zeuxis had not merely selected and copied beautiful parts22 but made "simple studies" of each model. Chastellux insisted that it was "with the help of abstraction that [Zeuxis] succeeded in painting a perfect figure."23 By "abstraction" the painter was able to conceive of, imagine, invent the "admirable concept" of his subject and therefore create his image without actually imitating a model or group of models. Rather than distinguish between nature and la belle Nature as Batteux and the academic tradition had done,24 Chastellux differentiated two separate genres of painting. The imitative selected from and copied nature exactly; the ideal genre "searches for abstract and ideal beauty" and requires true genius.25

Chastellux enumerated three advantages in works of art that exhibited ideal beauty and were therefore superior to the imitative genre. First, the ideal excites new sensations and fills viewers with images they have never seen. Second, the ideal gives us "a grand idea of our own powers," since the artist is able to rise above nature in representing thought and supernatural events. And finally, the ideal genre in art bestows a great treasure on the

modele qui se presenta. Elle vit ensuite qu'il y avait des modeles moins imparfaits qu'elle prefera. Elle corrigea les defauts grossiers de ceux-ci, puis les defauts moins grossiers, jusqu'a ce que, par une longue suite de travaux, elle atteignit une figure qui n'etait plus dans la nature" (Oeuvres esthetiques, 339).

20 Diderot, Salon de 1767, 62. 21 Diderot, Salon de 1767, 63, 64. 22 See Chastellux's article on the "Ideal," in the Encyclopedie, eds., Denis Diderot and

Jean d'Alembert (Berne and Lausanne, 1778), XVIII, 148-58; Charles Batteux had claimed that Zeuxis's method of combining a selection of beautiful parts was "la pratique de tous les grands Maitres sans exception," Les Beaux Arts reduits 'a un meme principe, 24-25.

23 Franqois-Jean de Chastellux, "Ideal," 149: "ce fut sans doute par le secours de l'abstraction qu'il parvint a peindre une figure parfaite."

24 Charles Batteux, Les Beaux Arts reduits a' un meame principe, 27. 25 Franqois-Jean de Chastellux, "Ideal," 149.




imagination, for from the moment that "our soul is elevated above vulgar and familiar objects, it recovers all its liberty."26

The motive behind the history of the fine arts was not a drive to imitate but rather a human instinct for creating and shaping form as the expression of human thought. It was the search for pleasant sensations ("sensations agreables") which led to a progressive realization of ideal beauty in art, an evolutionary development-Chastellux spoke of it as the "progress" of human industry and as a "groping" (tatonnement, the term Diderot also used), in which imitation played little or no part.27 He turned to the history of architecture and music-arts which he acknowledged imitated nothing-in order to demonstrate that imitation was unneces- sary. He then applied the results to painting and sculpture. If the compo- nents of a figure, Chastellux reasoned, are no less varied than the different sounds of music, why may not painting and sculpture be arts of creation no less than of imitation? "Why may not one find beauty [in a painting or sculpture] as one finds the motif of a sonata or of a minuet?"28 Chastellux described the creative impulse at work in all the arts as an instinct which "makes us augment and diminish, retouch and correct until we are happy with our work"29-terms which suggest the mental operation of invention, in which abstraction played a key role.30 Indeed, Chastellux identified

26Ibid., 155. 27 Ibid., 152; in his monumental work, De lafelicite publique (1772), praised by Voltaire

as superior even to Montesquieu's Esprit des lois, Chastellux affirmed "la perfectibilite de l'espece humaine" and wrote: "il existe dans toutes les conditions [of nature, including human society] un attrait irresistible qui porte tous les etres vers le meilleur etat possible" (De la felicite publique, new edition [Paris, 1822], I, 26); thus, for Chastellux, advocate of the Enlightenment, the progressive evolution in art mirrored the progressive perfection of humanity; this development in both society and art was not the product of the imitation of nature, but an innate condition of humanity as a part of nature.

28 Chastellux, "Ideal," 152. Emphasis in original. 29 Chastellux attempted specifically to show that the "progress" from beat to melody

to harmony in the history of music was not powered by the imitation of nature; he then extended the argument to all of the fine arts: "Or, je voudrois bien savoir quelle part a eu dans ce progres, l'imitation de la nature? Le chant des oisseaux n'est pas mesure, leurs concerts n'ont point d'harmonie et sont souvent tres-discordans. Qui ne voit que les beautes de la musique sont toutes ideales et produites part le tatonnement, c'est-a-dire, par cet instinct qui nous fait augmenter et diminuer, retoucher et corriger jusqu'a ce que nous soyons contens de notre ouvrage? Soyons donc plus justes envers les beaux-arts et rendons- leur les titres de noblesse qu'on veut leur oter. Ils ne sont pas seulement imitateurs, mais createurs; et non contens de copier la nature, ils savent l'embellir, ils savent exprimer la pensee de l'homme, pensee qui n'est que le resultat de ses desirs ambitieux, et de l'ardeur avec laquelle il cherche le plaisir" ("Ideal," 153).

30 Cf. Diderot's definition of mental powers and abstraction: "L'ame a le pouvoir d'unir ensemble les idees qu'elle a reques separement, de comparer les objets par le moyen des idees qu'elle en a, d'observer les rapports qu'elles ont entre elles, d'etendre ou de resserrer ses idees a son gre, de considerer separement chacune des idees simples qui peuvent s'etre trouvees reunies dans la sensation qu'elle en a recue. Cette derniere operation de l'ame s'appelle abstraction" (Oeuvres esthetiques, 432, emphasis in original).



676 David Morgan

"abstraction" and "exaggeration" as the "two great means" by which art succeeds in interesting and moving us "more than even nature."31 Chastellux did not deny that imitation belonged to art, but insisted that ideal beauty was the product of a creative instinct that perfected art over time.

The important theoretician of art and leading member of the academic establishment Quatremere de Quincy, whose work represents the culmina- tion of the classical tradition in France, took over the discussion of imitation and the ideal and provided an unusually systematic and lucid treat- ment of them. In 1805 Quatremere published the first edition of his treatise on the ideal in the visual arts in part as a rigorous response to an essay of the same year by the scholar Emeric-David, who claimed that Greek art was not based on the ideal, but on real models. "Abstract beauty," Emeric- David wrote, "is the chimera of lazy artists who neglect visible beauty."32 Quatremere countered by distinguishing sharply between particular and ideal imitation, by which he understood a thorough subordination of the optical imitation of nature to the vision of what he called the "interior eye. "33 More than any French writer before him, Quatremere stressed the distinction of art and nature by focusing on the artificiality of art in its dependence on pictorial conventions and the artist's inner conception. In a long essay of 1823, which drew on two previous decades of reflection on imitation, Quatremere defined genius as that internal sense which alone determines the object of "moral or intellectual pleasure."34 Quatremere argued that the pleasure of imitation arose in the comparison of two like objects, image and model. The more they are alike, however, the less the pleasure in comparing them, since the intellectual effort required to do so is negligible. Accordingly, "the degree of merit of every imitative mode

3' Chastellux, "Ide'al," 153. 32 Quoted in Helen T. Garrett, "The Imitation of the Ideal: Polemic of A Dying

Classicism," Publications of the Modern Language Association, 62 (1947), 737 (my translation). For Quatremere's response to Emeric-David, see Essai sur l'ideal, 19-26; Quatremere and Emeric-David had both competed in an essay contest-which the latter won-spon- sored by the Institut and based on the following question issued in 1801: "Quelles sont les causes de la perfection de la sculpture antique et quels seraient les moyens de l'atteindre?" In 1805, Emeric-David published his views under the title Recherches sur P'art statuaire (Paris, 1863); for further discussion of this debate, see Helen Garrett, "The Imitation of the Ideal," 735-39; and William Rubin, "Allegory Versus Narrative in Quatremere de Quincy," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44 (1986), 385.

33 Antoine Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy, Essai sur l'ideal dans ses applications pratiques aux oeuvres de l'imitation propre des arts du dessin (Paris, 1837), 29; this essay was originally written in 1805; hereafter abbreviated as Sur l'ideal.

34 Quatremere de Quincy, Essai sur la nature, le but et les moyens de l'imitation dans les beaux-arts (Paris, 1823), 176: "et ce qui est l'objet du plaisir moral ou intellectuel, ne sauroit etre ni cherche ni trouve que par ce sens interieur qu'on appelle le genie." Hereafter abbreviated as Sur l'imitation; the English translation given in the text is from An Essay on the Nature, the End, and the Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts, tr. J. C. Kent (London, 1837), 201; hereafter cited as On Imitation.




of the pleasure peculiar to every art may be estimated by the distance or difference separating its imitative elements from the elements of that portion of nature which constitutes its model."35

In order to underscore the difference between particular imitation and ideal (or "abstract") imitation, Quatremere emphasized the preeminence of the intellect in artistic creation. To imitate nature "is to study man under the laws of the human species." The result was, as in ancient Greece, "an abstract and generalized image."36 The artist may create ideal beauty only by "the power of ideating or generalizing in abstraction the true model which guides him in his work."37 He accomplishes this by first conceiving of or inventing "in abstraction" an intellectual model. It is this rather than external nature which the artist imitates when creating his work of art.38 But this was no purely brain-born image nor was it an image glimpsed in a platonic vision. This internal model ("modele interieur") results from knowledge of the human form acquired by long study and observation.39 The internal model is produced from an understanding of the laws characterizing the human species. Contrary to what has been suggested by several writers, Quatremere did not espouse a neoplatonic epistemology or a visionary metaphysics of artistic creation.'" Rather than attribute the artist's internal model to a mystical vision or an imaginative chimera, Quatremere maintained that it "could only be the result of observations, comparisons, combinations of all sorts, which forms the science of the imitation of the human body."41 In this regard Quatremere had more in common with John Locke and Joshua Reynolds than with Plotinus.42

35 Quatremere, On Imitation, 160. 36 Quatremere, Sur l'ideal, 46, 54. 37 Ibid., 31. 38 Ibid., 83-84; Sur l'imitation, 314-16. 39 Quatremere, Sur l'imitation, 308, 316. 4 Quatremere's doctrine of ideal beauty and imitation has been placed within the

nineteenth-century tradition of French spiritualism and the platonist revival associated with such figures as Chateaubriand, Victor Cousin, and Charles Leveque. See Rene Schnei- der, L'Esthetique classique chez Quatremere de Quincy (Paris, 1910), 42-43; Helen T. Garrett, "The Imitation of the Ideal: Polemic of a Dying Classicism," Publications of the Modern Language Association, 62 (1947), 740-41; and William Rubin, "Allegory Versus Narrative," 383-84.

41 Quatremere, Sur limitation, 316; see also Sur l'ideal, 44, where Quatremere stated that the abstract method of imitation worked toward "un sorte de recomposition des formes de l'individu, en les soumettant a la critique d'une etude generalisee sur un grand nombre d'individus, et perfectionnee par des observations successives." Like Diderot in his preface to the Salon de 1767, Quatremere appealed to Plato and Cicero (Sur l'ideal, 13-26; Sur l'imitation, 243-51) for testimony on the priority of the internal model in ideal imitation, not as a wholesale subscription to antique metaphysics.

42 Hoyt Trowbridge first pointed out that the philosophical disposition evident in Reynolds's Discourses on Art is Locke's empiricism: "Platonism and Sir Joshua Reynolds," English Studies, 21 (1939), 1-7; I have also discussed the influence of Locke on Reynolds



678 David Morgan

Quatremere's theory of ideal imitation interposed the artist's internal model between nature and the artistic image. The artist does not merely invent forms ex nihilo but modifies existing individuals in accord with the internal image he has conceived from study of and reflection on his subject matter. This intellectual conception of the artist's subject serves to distance ideal beauty from vulgar reality.

Quatremere's argument was directed primarily at all forms of naturalistic art. In "identifying his work with the individual model," the artist exchanges "the freedom of an imitation for the servileness of a copy."43 This occurs in the art of painting whenever the painter conceives "that he was faithfully imitating nature, by reproducing, as in a mirror, the deformities which belonged only to the individual he had for his model, by reducing the works of imitation to a mere impress, a kind offacsimile destitute of beauty, and deprived of every characteristic of true imitation."44

Quatremere called this "true materialism," a "purely sensual taste," and urged that historical painting "appeal to the mind." Preoccupation with the inferior pleasure of sense impressions led, in his view, to a choice of subjects and a "servile manner of representing them," which "reduces, as regards the mind, the distance that separates the model from the image."45 The "value and efficacy of imitation" properly understood de- pend on the mind's "overleaping the distance that separated the object imitated and the means of imitation."46

Quatremere maintained that the pleasure of imitation or illusion (not to be confused with deception) arises "from a sort of working of the mind by which the mind itself finishes the work of art."47 Since every work of art that is properly imitative is distinct from nature by virtue of its artificial character, the mind, not the eye, compensates for the difference. The artificiality of art consists of the conventions or rules that it employs to balance the elements of sameness and difference in resemblance. Whereas on the one hand the artist observes the laws and general characteristics of objects, on the other hand he is confined to flat, unanimated, and, in the case of sculpture, uncolored media. According to Quatremere, the conventions of art adjust for these differences from nature, allowing the viewer to overcome them and perceive the artwork as a resemblance, though never as a deception.48 Quatremere likened the conventions to the rules of a card game. Each player must observe the arbitrary but consistent

and a number of his contemporaries. Morgan, "Concepts of Abstraction in German Art Theory, 1750-1914," 1-19.

43 Quatremere, On Imitation, 103. 44 Ibid., 110-11. 45 Ibid., 181-82. 46Ibid., 144. 47Ibid., 141. 48 Quatremere, Sur l'imitation, 270, 266, 117ff.




rules if the game is to be played successfully.49 The result in art is an "illusion" whose secret the viewer only half shares. The viewer is not deceived to take the work of art as nature itself but is persuaded by knowledge of the rules of art to perceive it as an imitation of nature. The purpose of art is not to duplicate nature but to provide pleasure by creating what Quatremere referred to in his essay on the ideal as a "new nature," a "second creation."50 Art operates as a "parallel" of nature.51 Contrary to Batteux, but consistent with Diderot, Quatremere asserted that Zeuxis did not copy select parts from nature, but "consulted" them, compared them with his own conception, and changed them at his pleasure in the task of visualizing his idea.52 A beautiful figure, Quatremere claimed, is not a collection of beautiful fragments; but it "must have been conceived, imagined, and composed for itself and must have been made without the aid of any sort of assembly understood as actual or real."53

Quatremere's attempt to dismiss direct imitation in favor of the device of artifice, his elaborate defense of the ideal and abstraction, and his appeal to a reserved classicism did not meet with avid acceptance among the younger, romantic generation in France, which harbored a new taste for the meticulous realism of Delaroche, the immediacy of nature in art, the pathos of violent and exotic scenes such as those by Delacroix, and themes of the contemporary world. Consider, for instance, the polemic aimed by writer Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne at contemporary "classiques," who advocated painting "l'homme" as such:

But they do not imagine that this man is not an abstract being, that he belongs necessarily to a certain epoch, that he must have an age, a gender, a country. Separate him from all of these circumstances and I no more understand the man than I understand the tree independent of the ideas of oak, beech, orange, etc. Ask a painter to paint for you a tree in itself and see how he responds. Without a determinate form, the essence of things [le fond des choses] escapes US.54

This critique of abstraction, which approximates Bishop Berkeley's critical response to Locke's theory of abstract ideas, was accompanied by a fundamental shift in art theory in France. The individual perhaps most responsi- ble for this change was Victor Cousin, the first important French philoso-

49 Ibid., 119. 50 Quatremere, Sur l'ideal, 6,7. 51 Quatremere wrote that the artist was to consider "le monde individu ... comme

moyen de parallele, propre a guider son imagination, a elever la conception d'un sujet, de l'ordre individuel a la region du type universel." Sur l'ideal, 44; cf. Sur l'imitation, 11.

52 Quatremere, Sur l'ideal, 85-86. 53 Quatremere, On Imitation, 347. 54 Published in the Globe, June 10, 1826; repr. in Pierre Trahard, Le Romantisme

defini par le Globe (Paris, 1925), 141; quoted in Helen T. Garrett, "The Imitation of the Ideal," 741 (my translation).



680 David Morgan

pher, it is important to note, to attempt a presentation of contemporary German and Scottish thought at the Sorbonne.55 Cousin's teacher at the Ecole Normale, Royer-Collard, had extended Thomas Reid's critique of Locke and Hume to Condillac.i6 There was, therefore, a tidal change in French philosophy composed of different currents. But whether the new tendencies favored Reid's realism or German idealism or both, the new directions were clearly inimical toward British empiricism and French sensationalism.

In his 1818 lectures on the beautiful, Cousin began by differentiating between real and ideal beauty and examined the distinction in the debate between Quatremere and Emeric-David." According to Cousin, propo- nents of real beauty claimed that it was achieved artistically by the imitation of beautiful parts scattered through nature and drawn together by the artist; whereas the partisans of ideal beauty proceeded by making what Cousin called "a complete abstraction of the models of nature," working "de tete."58 Cousin, for his part, argued that real and ideal taken separately were both in error. Instead, the two had to be united. When he returned to the problem of creating artistic beauty in a later chapter, Cousin distin- guished between what he called "comparative" and "immediate abstraction,"59 and regarded the second genre as the only means capable of uniting real and ideal beauty.- The first he defined as what amounts to a crude empiricism: "first we examine several individuals; we overlook their differences, that we may attend to their resemblances; thence we form a kind of collective unity."'61 Such a method, Cousin agreed with Qua- tremere, could never achieve the ideal since it was derived only from the real, which contained only inferior expressions of beauty.62 Cousin defined "immediate abstraction" as the means by which the absolute or ideal is grasped in the finite and individual without any use of comparison. By

55 Frederic Will has discussed the influence of Kant and Hegel on Cousin's aesthetic in Flumen Historicum: Victor Cousin's Aesthetic and Its Sources (Chapel Hill, 1965), 71- 82, noting that Cousin met Hegel in 1817. James Manns has studied the influence of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid on Cousin and his student Jouffroy, "The Scottish Influence on French Aesthetic Thought," JHI, 49 (1988), 633-51.

56 Manns, "The Scottish Influence on French Aesthetic Thought," 639. 57 Victor Cousin, The Philosophy of the Beautiful, tr. Jesse Cato Daniel (London, 1848),

13-14, 32-33; Cousin first presented his views in an early essay entitled "Du Beau Reel et du Beau Ideal," which was published in Premiers Essais de Philosophie, 1816.

58 Cousin, Philosophy of the Beautiful, 13-14. 59 Ibid., 34-35. 60Ibid., 37-38. 61 Ibid., 34; cf. Condillac's empiricist definition of abstract ideas: "Nous avons vu que

les notions abstraites se forment en cessant de penser aux proprietes par oiu les choses sont distinguees, pour ne penser qu'aux qualites par oiu elles conviennent" (Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, 48).

62 For a discussion of Quatremere's influence on Cousin, see Frederic Will, Flumen Historicum, 31-34, 64-70.




ignoring in an object "whatever is variable, contingent, determined" and by fixing one's attention on the "invariable, the undetermined and the necessary," Cousin claimed the artist could avoid the need to compare several individuals in order to arrive at an ideal representative. According to Cousin, immediate abstraction resulted in "an absolute, abstract and immediate idea," a notion which has been linked to the philosophy of Reid.63 Another important source for Cousin was, of course, ancient philosophy. Plotinus taught that a material thing was beautiful by virtue of its "sharing in a formative power which comes from the divine forms."64 He reasoned that the soul knows beauty "at first glance" because it shares in the transcendent reality of Beauty, and therefore recognizes itself immediately. According to Cousin, the difference between immediate and comparative abstraction was the presumption that the "absolute" or ideal was to be found in each object and could be recognized there as an expression of the infinite or God at one level or another on a platonic scale of beauty extending from God downward through ideal beauty, real beauty, and finally to objects of sensation.65 Once disengaged from natural forms, the imperceptible ideal beauty, recognized by our transcendental power of "reason," is realized or expressed in art as a higher approxima- tion aimed toward the infinite.

Cousin based his assertion that ideal beauty was abstracted immediately from individual instances in nature on the belief that everything visibly beautiful in art and nature is beautiful only as an external expression of the inner reality of spiritual beauty, which Cousin equated with truth itself, being, the eternal, the infinite.66 Cousin applied this view of expression to all of nature: "All is symbolic in nature: form is not form only, it is the form of something, it unfolds something inward. Beauty, then, is expression: art is the seeking after expression."67 Physical as well as ideal beauty is the signature of an invisible or spiritual beauty.

This view was taken over by Cousin's student, Theodore Jouffroy, who also used the term "symbol" to designate the determinate form which expresses the infinite, and which Jouffroy and Cousin variously referred to as soul, force, power, idea, spirit, or the invisible.68 In a course of lectures given in his apartment in 1826 Jouffroy affirmed the view that

63 Manns has pointed out the similarity of Cousin's immediate abstraction and Thomas Reid's notion of the knowledge of first principles, "Scottish Influence on French Aesthet- ics," 641.

6Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.2; in Plotinus, I, tr. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 239.

65 Cousin, Philosophy of the Beautiful, 47, 39-40; Frederic Will has considered at length the influence of platonism on Cousin's thought. Flumen Historicum, 14-55.

66 Cousin, Philosophy of the Beautiful, 113, 117. 67 Cousin, Philosophy of the Beautiful, 117. 68 Theodore Simon Jouffroy, Cours d'esthetique, ed. Ph. Damiron (Paris, 1843), 162;

Victor Cousin, Du Vrai, Du Bien et Du Beau (20th ed., Paris, 1878), 190-91.



682 David Morgan

69 the symbol was an externalization of a hidden, imperceptible essence. But more than his teacher, Jouffroy applied himself to the study of the dynamics of the symbol. All the elementary properties-form, extension, color, sound, movement, texture, and so on-that make up the appearance of objects, Jouffroy wrote, possess a physical and moral sense.70 The physical sense is what they are, the moral what they express. Jouffroy contended that these elementary properties or symbols converge in different objects and, "like languages," render nature immaterial, active, moral, intelligent, invisible.71 These languages, he said, are divided among the arts which occupy themselves with expressing the soul. Each language has its "alphabet." Painting's language is composed of forms and colors.72

In his lectures, Jouffroy dwelled only briefly on specific considerations of the intrinsic significance of such objects as the human visage, animals' bodies, trees, and single lines. Depending on their precision and clarity, all forms suggest an emotional state. Certain trees, for instance, possess a form which indicates sadness; others appear endowed with elegance or grandeur. Even lines, whether in the human face, in animals or vegetables, exhibit expressive character: "the oval line or spiral appears more elegant to us than the interrupted or broken line. We attach to the serpentine line a different sense than to the broken line."73 Such lines awake in us a "moral idea," which is the line's expression, its "hidden and mysterious meaning."74 In order to underscore the independent symbolic virtue of the elementary properties of objects of perception, Jouffroy contrasted the oval with the square and the straight line with the serpentine. Each contrast is impressed on the mind as two different images with correspond- ingly distinct emotional sensations. Their difference suggested to Jouffroy that each figure possessed an independent, intrinsic "sens moral," or symbolic character.75

Cousin and Jouffroy were instrumental in establishing a new framework for the discussion of art. Such concepts as a visual language of form, the intrinsic significance of shape, line, and color as visual expressions or symbols of invisible, inner content, and the work of art as the objective visualization of a transcendent idea all became the basis of symbolist art theory. Of course, Cousin and Jouffroy were hardly alone in setting this new agenda. Of fundamental importance for the development of symbolist aesthetics were the contributions of Baudelaire and of the lesser known but influential Dutch theorist and architect, Humbert de Superville, and

69 Jouffroy, Cours d'esthetique, 158. 70Ibid., 162-63; 164. 71 Ibid., 164. 72 Ibid., 164-65. 73Ibid., 135. 74Ibid., 163. 75Ibid., 163-64.




the translation of Schopenhauer's work in the 1880s-all of which, among others, took up many of the themes listed above.76 I should like to proceed, however, by moving to symbolist art theory and its concept of abstraction.

The idea of the emotional significance of forms entertained by Jouffroy was applied to artistic practice by Paul Gauguin. In a letter of January 1885 the painter discussed his compelling sensations of objects and concluded that there were noble lines and lying ones; that a straight line expressed infinity; that the curved line defined creation. He also mentioned number symbolism and the superior expressive power of color, noble tones, and peaceful harmonies." The personal character of these remarks, their situation within the private imagination of the artist himself, is crucial. Gauguin advocated a willful and distinctly personal distortion of appearances in the pursuit of visualizing for himself and evoking in others the reverie and feeling which he nurtured as the source of his art. In an often-cited letter of 1888 he reinserted the term "abstraction" into aesthetic discourse in the attempt to characterize the artistic procedure which he recommended to an artist-friend: "[s]ome advice: do not paint too much after nature. Art is an abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation which will result than of nature. Creating like our Divine Master is the only way of rising toward God."78 According to Gauguin, abstraction consisted of modifying appearances in response to one's own vision or to the intrinsic ability of color and form to incite inner sensations. The artist uses color in order "to give the musical sensations which flow from itself, from its own nature, from its mysterious and enigmatic inner force."79 Painting in response to this "inner force" rather than copying nature was "divine" and able to reveal the divine in a way that recalls Plotinus's claim (reiterated by Schopenhauer) that the work of art was not merely a copy of a copy when it was informed by an idea.

Gauguin's art was very favorably received by the critic Albert Aurier, who regarded it from the vantage point of an explicitly neoplatonic aesthetic. In an essay on Gauguin and symbolism in painting Aurier wrote that to the artistic genius all the "relative beings" or objects of nature were "letters of an immense alphabet," a mysterious dictionary of signs used to translate the Ideas into the special languages of poetry and paint-

76 For helpful discussions of Jouffroy and Cousin in the context of subsequent art theory, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Symbol and Myth (Cranbury, N.J., 1979), 82-83; and Misook Song, Art Theories of Charles Blanc, 1813-1882 (Ann Arbor, 1984), 21-29.

" Lettres du Gauguin 'a sa femme et a ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue (Paris, 1946), 45.

78 Repr. in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley, 1968), 60. ' From "Diverse Choses," unpublished manuscript of 1896-97, reprinted in Chipp,

Theories of Modern Art, 66.



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ing.0 In Gauguin's landscapes of Martinique and Brittany "each line, each form, each color" is said to be "the verb of an Idea."8' What Aurier admired in Gauguin's painting was a detachment from the surfaces of nature which the artist achieved by treating paint and composition in a way that was increasingly independent of any sensations he received from his subject. In Aurier's estimation this enabled Gauguin (and any symbolist painter) to attend to his own and, for Aurier, ultimately metaphysical ideas for which the objects of nature were so many "signs" of a transcendent and superior realm. For both Gauguin and Aurier natural objects were suitable only for the artist's freely imaginative transformation of them into an increasingly private and hermetic language of visual signs whose vocabulary Aurier characterized as "style," by which he meant something almost discursive in its constrast to material objects. The rela- tionship between image and nature had become quite tenuous.82

Such discussions of the "language" of art permeated art criticism and theory in the late nineteenth century. The art historian Robert Goldwater was surely correct when he suggested that the interest in various theories of the meaning of line, color, and composition was intended to take art beyond realism.83 But the break with nature did not arrive until shortly before the outbreak of the first world war when artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay, who were both significantly indebted to symbolist aesthetics and avant-garde art in France, created truly non- objective styles of painting. "Form alone," Kandinsky wrote in the section entitled "The Language of Form and Color" in his seminal Concerning the Spiritual in Art, "even though totally abstract and geometrical, has a power of inner suggestion."84 What distinguishes Kandinsky's position here from his predecessors such as Jouffroy and Gauguin is that this conviction warranted the founding of a radically new artistic practice. He pursued what would become after 1914 the complete autonomy of non- objective form. Kandinsky regarded form as the visualization of an inner meaning whose artistic expression was governed by "inner necessity," the mysterious force that informs all authentic art, and recalls yet another similarity to Cousin and Jouffroy. Kandinsky sought to make the case for abstract art by arguing that the elimination of naturalistic forms allowed

80 Albert Aurier, "Le symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin" (1891), repr. in Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1893), 213.

81 Ibid., 218. 82 A corollary to the radical difference between art and nature posed by symbolist

aesthetics is the fundamental contrast between Reid's appeal to "common sense" in matters of taste and the elitist cult of the artistic genius hailed by Schopenhauer and Aurier and put into practice by Gauguin's entourage of young artists at Pont-Aven.

83 Robert Goldwater, "Symbolic Form-Symbolic Content," in Acts of the XXth Inter- national Congress of the History of Art, IV (Princeton, 1963), 118-19.

84 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, tr. M. T. H. Sadler (New York, 1977), 28.




a purer manifestation of the inner necessity, that is, allowed form and color to "speak" for themselves. He severed the link between art and nature by redefining abstraction as the artist's response to an invisible force or depth whose presence had been occluded by what Kandinsky considered the materialist worldview of nineteenth-century naturalistic art. It was not that the inner necessity was incapable of expression in realistic styles of painting but rather that recent naturalism had ignored it and that a hitherto unrealized purity of "resonance" could be achieved in abstract forms.

As a concept in art theory, abstraction went from refining imitation to undermining it to eclipsing it altogether. Within the framework of the "ideal" in the eighteenth century, abstraction was based.on Locke's derivation of the general idea from simple sensations. In the nineteenth century this notion of abstraction was replaced by the romantic concept of expression. Later in the century a radical idealism inspired by Plotinus and Schopenhauer led artists and writers to privilege the inner world of the imagination over nature as the source of art. And in the early part of this century artists dispensed with any representation of nature by understanding abstraction as a representation of mysteries best kept free of naturalistic depiction. Although there was no longer a question of purging an essence of its peculiar features in nature, non-objective abstraction still exhibited the essentialist desire to visualize an essence such as Kandinsky's "inner necessity."

In each phase, however, abstraction entailed the removal of what was considered (by whatever means and for whatever reason) inessential. Abstraction for Quatremere was a means of eliminating from imitation anything less than universally representative of humanity as determined by empirical study. For Cousin abstraction consisted of removing what was inessential to the ideal form as revealed by an act of immediate intuition. Gauguin defined abstraction as the removal of whatever in the original object restricts the artist's dreaming. And for Kandinsky, as we have just seen, to abstract meant to eliminate all forms of naturalistic representation in order to allow the artist to respond freely to the intrinsic capacity for expression possessed by color and form.

Valparaiso University.



Art.-morgan- Concepts of Abstraction in French Art Theory From the Enlightenment

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