We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity ...to figurative art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry is the heaven of the working reason. Poetry is a divination of the spiritual in the things of sense--which expresses itself... in the things of sense, and in a delight of sense. Metaphysics also pursues a spiritual prey, but metaphysics is engaged in abstract knowledge, while poetry quickens art. Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence. Metaphysics enjoys its possession only in the retreats of the eternal regions, while poetry finds its own at every crossroad in the wanderings of the contingent and the singular. The more real the reality, the superreal (I would not give up this word to the Surrealists), the superreal which both seek, metaphysics must attain in the nature of things, while it suffices to poetry to touch it in any sign whatsoever. Metaphysics gives chase to essences and definitions, poetry to any flash of existence glittering by the way, and any reflection of an invisible order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art p...urifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe wh...ich modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the wo...rks of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the... abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called "Sympathetic Nature."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control o...ver what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is t...o things made by his art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »