832
PARTISAN REVIEW
imply that the evolution had terminated when we arrive at the paint–
ing of hollow space. The .point of view, transforming itself from the
multiple and proximate to the single and distant, appears to have
exhausted its possible itinerary. Not at all! We shall see that it may
retreat even closer to the subject. From 1870 until today, the shift
of viewpoint has continued, and these latest stages, precisely because
of their surprising and paradoxical character, confirm the fatal law
to which I alluded at the beginning. The artist, starting from the
world about him, ends by withdrawing into himself.
I have said that the gaze of Velasquez, when it falls on an ob–
ject, converts it into a surface. But, meanwhile, the visual ray has
gone along its path, enjoying itself by perforating the air between
the cornea and distant things. In
Ladies in Waiting
and
The
S
pinneTS,
we see the satisfaction with which the artist has accentuated hollow
space as such. Velasquez looks straight to the background; thus, he
encounters the enormous mass of air between it and the boundary
of his eye. Now, to look at something with the central ray of the eye
is what is known as direct vision or vision
in modo recto.
But behind
the axial ray the pupil sends out many others at oblique angles, en–
abling us to see
in modo obliquo.
The impression of concavity is de–
rived from the
modo recto.
If
we eliminate this- for example, by
blinking the eyes-we have only oblique vision, those side-views
"from the tail of the eye" which represent the height of disdain. Thus,
the third dimension disappears and the field of vision tends to con–
vert itself entirely into surface.
This is what the successive impressionisms have done. Velasquez'
background has been brought forward, and so of course ceases to be
background since it cannot be compared with a foreground. Painting
tends to become planimetric, like the canvas on which one paints. One
arrives, then, at the elimination of all tactile and corporeal resonance.
At the same time, the atomization of things in oblique vision is such
that almost nothing remains of them. Figures begin to be unrecog–
nizable. Instead of painting objects as they are seen, one paints the
experience ?f seeing. Instead of .an object as impression, that is, a
mass of sensations. Art, with this, has withdrawn completely from the
world and begins to concern itself with the activity of the subject.
Sensations are no longer things in any sense; they are subjective states
through which and by means of which things appear.
