272
PARTISAN REVIEW
But there they are: depicted, stolen from the incessant movement
of the Passion; and the sorrow of Christ, imprisoned in images of
violence and beauty, cries freshly to us every day in the indifferent
halls of museums. The style of a painter is a conjunction of nature
and history, a presence imposed on that which perpetually passes.
Art
realizes, with no apparent effort, that reconciliation of the
particular and the universal of which Hegel dreamed. Perhaps
this
is
the reason why epochs like our own, enraptured by unity, turn
toward the primitive
arts
where stylization is most intense and unity
most exciting. The strongest stylization is always found at the be–
ginning
and the end of artistic epochs; this explains the power of
negation and transposition that has stirred up all of modern paint–
ing in a disorganized impulsion toward being and unity. The
admirable lamentation of Van Gogh is the proud and despairing
outcry of all artists. "I can very well, in life and in painting also,
do without God. .But I cannot, suffering creature that I am, do
without something greater than myself, something that is my life,
the power to create."
But the revolt of the artist against the real-and this makes
it suspect to a totalitarian revolution-contains the same affirma–
tion as the spontaneous revolt of the oppressed. The revolutionary
spirit, born of total negation, felt instinctively that there was in
art
a consent as well as a refusal; that contemplation threatened to
outweigh action, beauty to outweigh injustice, and that, in certain
cases, beauty was in itself an injustice without remedy. Besides, no
art can exist on a total refusal. Just as all thought means some–
thing, even the thought of no-meaning, so there is no art of no–
sense. Man can take on himself the denunciation of the world's
total injustice and demand a total justice that he will be alone in
creating. But he cannot affirm the total ugliness of the world. To
create beauty, he must at the same time refuse the real and exalt
certain of its aspects.
Art
questions the real, but does not shun
it.
Nietzsche was able to refuse all transcendence, moral or divine, by
saying that such transcendence led to a calumniation of this world
and
this
life. But there is perhaps a living transcendence, promised
us by beauty, which may make us love and prefer to any other
our own limited and mortal world. Art thus brings us back to the
origins of revolt, in the degree to which it tries to give form to a
