The Birth of Tragedy |
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived … I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..." (Walden, 1854). |
It is in the still-life that we frequently catch the purest self-revelation of the artist. In any other subject humanity intervenes.
It is almost impossible that other men should not influence the artist by their prejudices and partizanship. If the artist rebels against these, the act of rebellion is itself a deformation of his idea. If he disregards them and frees himself from all the commonplaces of sentiment, the effort still leaves its traces on his design. But the still-life excludes all these questions and guards the picture itself from the misconstructions of representation. In still-life the ideas and emotions associated with the objects represented are, for the most part, so utterly commonplace and insignificant that neither artist nor spectator need consider them.
It is this fact that makes the still-life so valuable to the critic as a gauge of the artist’s personality. How many obscure points in Raphael’s artistic psychology might be cleared up if we had a series of still-life by him.
P41 X
P41 X
"Cezanne: a Study of His Development
by Fry, Roger
