Christa Giles

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nouveau.˝ 478 Wilde similarly believed that art did not have
to express feelings through its subject matter.
Indeed art rejects the burden of the human spirit and
gains more from a new medium or a fresh material
than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from
any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of
the human consciousness. 479
In painting the emphasis on pictorial surface and the way
in which the artist arranged that surface freed him from
mere imitation of nature. Mauris Denis encapsulated this
idea in 1890 when he said, ˝Remember that a picture–before
being a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote-is
essentially a plane surface covered with colours assembled
in a certain order.˝ 480 The work of art could then function to
evoke responses on both emotional and intellectual levels
transcending the need for direct representation. Du Jardin
expanded on this idea:
In painting as well as literature the
representation of nature is idle fancy…On the
contrary the aim of painting, of literature is to
give the sensation of things…what ought to
be expressed is not the image but the
character.