THE EYE IS A PART OF THE MIND
209
write off the "accidents" of visual appearance. He welcomes their
occurrence, but pictures them as the negotiable shapes assumed by
transient energy. And in this adaptability to every optic impulse
modem art is more closely linked to its naturalistic ancestry than to
the unworldly stylizations of the past. Its affinity with medieval
art
remains, after
all,
purely negative. Modem and medieval art agree
that reality is not so much revealed as masked by surfaces. But, as
at a carnival, the choice of a mask may betray the reveler's charac–
teristic nature, so surfaces bespeak something as to the truth below.
And the truths inferred by modem and by medieval artists lie at op–
posite poles of interpretation.
v
It remains to speak of so-called non-objective art. Here
surely all connection with the outer world is cut. The forms that here
emerge mean nothing, we are told, but private states of feeling; and,
for the rest, they are pure form, a music for the optic nerve. The
following passage from Ortega y Gasset ("On Point of View in the
Arts,"
PARTISAN
REVIEW,
August 1949) may serve as an example of
the common view: "Painting," Ortega writes, "completely reversed
its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, en–
deavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented
objects.... The [artist's] eyes, instead of absorbing things, are con–
verted
into
projectors of private flora and fauna. Before, the real
world drained off into them; now they are reservoirs of irreality."
This seems to us an open question still. For we are forced to
ask:
by what faculty of mind or eye does the artist discover and
distill
the forms of his private irreality? Whence come the plastic
symbols
of his unconditioned subjectivity? Surely no amount of in–
trospection will yield shapes to put on canvas. And if this is so,
from what external quarter proceed those visual stimuli which the
artist
can identify .as apt and corresponding to his inner state?
Obviously, any attempt to answer such a question will be so
highly speculative as almost to vindicate
in
advance the voices of
~nt.
Yet it seems worth considering the testimony of those artists
and critics who have pointed to the impact of science on contempor–
ary
art.
