Repository | Book | Chapter

In Max Beckman's first sentence here, he underlines a popular idea about modern art. The idea that a painting somehow fixes the artist's own experience, the events of his mental life, in visual form. Fixing something is a way of re-ordering it which holds it together and makes it more permanent. This is one of the ways in which art has traditionally acquired value, for it connects with the ultimately Platonic idea that that which is most permanent is most real. When this is married to a common assumption stemming from Romantic art theory, that the artist is one who sees and feels more deeply and intensely than others, then works which seem to fix the events of his internal life become especially significant. The events which Max Beckman speaks of are not just the external events of public life, but those "immaterial" events of his own thoughts, feelings, memories and responses. But he speaks also of 'spiritual" events, those which seem to illuminate deeper or more general human or even cosmic concerns. In this first remark, then, there is a personal statement about the relationship between painting and the artist's subjectivities and an implicit claim about the deeper significance or value of art. Since Beckman spoke these words however, many of the assumptions and implications involved in such ideas have been widely challenged, both within art theory and in the practice of painting itself.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-3847-2_2

Full citation: