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). |
The actual objects presented to the artist’s vision art first deprived of all those specific characters by which we ordinarily apprehend their concrete existence — they are reduced to pure elements of space and volume. In this abstract world these elements are perfectly co-ordinated and organized by the artist’s sensual intelligence, they attain logical consistency. These abstractions are then brought back into the concrete world of real things, not by giving them back their specific peculiarities, but by expressing them in an incessantly varying shifting texture. They retain their abstract intelligibility, their amenity to the human mind, and regain that reality of actual things which is absent from all abstractions.
Of course in laying all this out one is falsifying the actual processes of the artist’s mind. In reality, the processes go on simultaneously and unconsciously — indeed the unconsciousness is essential to the nervous vitality of the texture. No doubt all great art arrives at some such solution of apparently insoluble problem of artistic creation..
P58-59
"Cezanne: a Study of His Development
by Fry, Roger
