Extract

In his 1912 Notes of a Painter Matisse confronted a public who “likes to think of painting as an appendage of literature and therefore wants it to express not general ideas suited to pictorial means, but specifically literary ideas.”258 This was twenty-four years after Whistler’s Art and Art Critics: Pamphlet on Art Critics was published, challenging the concept of criticism as literary completion of the work of art. Matisse, whose oeuvre was philosophically supported by the early formalists Fry and Bell, went along with the aestheticist and early formalist portrayal of the relationship between the thought and the work, claiming that:

The painter’s best spokesman is his work, because the thought, the idea, must not be considered as separate from the painter’s pictorial means, for the thought is worth no more than its expression by the means. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.259

This claim obviously puts into question mark the meaning of the concepts of artistic “content” and artistic “translation.” Instead of content and translation we find non-material and material elements taking part in the internal order of the work. Perception cannot tell these elements apart; the distinction between nonmaterial and material elements in the artwork is merely a product of a superfluous speculation. This scheme has a direct bearing on Wilde’s theory of art criticism. My understanding of the artwork as a productive-opaque symbol, as deep-form, will make sense of this...