Etienne Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy, especially medieval philosophy, The book is about the kind of reality proper to paintings and their relation to the natural order. He writes in the Preface:My own problem exactly is: what has a philosopher to learn from painting? This book, therefore, is the work of a philosopher asking himself philosophical questions on what he happens to know about a certain art. Just as we can philosophize about science, about history, or about religion, so also we can philosophize about art. The first chapter of this book will make clear, I hope, the reason it has seemed advisable to confine this inquiry to what philosophy can learn only from the art of painting." Read more
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A philosopher's reflections on painting
This is a wonderful book for anyone interested in what makes a good painting. It is a very eloquent reflection by a philosopher, Gilson, as part of the Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Gilson's ideas are considered a bit passé in the art world now, but they're still worth reading. He's largely arguing against the position that paintings are supposed to say something. For example, he argues that paintings are essentially non-representational. So he distinguished between paintings and pictures. Pictures are representative; the best picture is the one that looks the most like what it is supposed to represent. But this can't be what it means to be a painting if we think that things like Impressionist art are also good paintings. Otherwise we would have to say that the Impressionists did a bad job because all of their paintings look like sort of fuzzy versions of the original. Rather, Gilson says these kinds of paintings are typical of the move away from paintings as pictures to paintings as paintings. Paintings as paintings are, properly speaking, attempts to create purely aesthetic beauty-the beauty of lines, shapes, and colors. So, for example, in a Cezanne it is not the representation of apples and pears which is important, but only the beauty of the colors, shapes, and lines by which they are depicted.That's a very quick and dirty summary of Gilson's argument. If you're interested in painting or other fine arts and you're at least a bit philosophically inclined, I think you'll like this. It's not always particularly exciting, but it really does make a good, solid argument. Like, I said, if you agree with Gilson that beauty is what makes good art, then you won't be very popular in the art world these days.
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