JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

The work of art291being a painting, but he does try to explain how it is possible to see somethingas a painting. He also claims that a painting may effect peculiar ontologicalsyntheses. For example, he says in What is Literature? that ‘Tintoretto didnot choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or toprovoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguishor anguished sky: it is an anguish become thing, an anguish that has turnedinto yellow rift of sky’ (p. 3). It is doubtful whether Sartre knows Tintoretto’sintentions, and doubtful whether they affect the truth of the crucial identificationof anguish with the yellow sky. Anguish is an emotion, something intrinsicallyunobservable but undergone. A painted rift in the sky is observable and itlacks literal sense to say it is undergone, even though I might undergosomething on observing it. However, if we could see anguish it might looklike Tintoretto’s yellow sky. Anguish and his sky have something in commonwhich is more aesthetically conspicuous than the differences between them.The yellow sky could be an expression of anguish. It could be anguishmade outward in paint, rather perhaps, as speech is the expression ofthought. Speech is thought made outward in sound. Can you hear thinking?Perhaps listening to speech is the nearest possibility.Rather as a piece of music is neither its performance nor its score, apainting is not a distribution of paint on canvas even though to destroy anintentionally painted canvas is enough to destroy a painting, and tointentionally put paint on canvas is enough to bring a painting into existence.A painting is not identical with what is necessary and sufficient for its existence.The painted canvas is only the distribution of paint molecules on a surface,or a grouping of phenomenological colours. Something makes the canvas,wood and paint count as, say, a painting of Charles VIII. A painting is not whata painting is a painting of (excluding certain ambitiously self-reflexivepaintings). A painting of Charles VIII is not Charles VIII. A painting is something‘between’ the canvas and what it is a painting of. It is neither but it dependson both.Sartre says a painting is an ‘unreality’, and an ‘aesthetic object’. It is aproduct of the special kind of consciousness he calls ‘imaginativeconsciousness’. Rather dramatically, imaginative consciousness negatesthe world and freely generates its own substitute unrealities. Visuallyconfronted with the physical object that is wood, canvas and paint imaginativeconsciousness sees this as a painting of Charles VIII. The content of thisact of imagination is not an image. Sartre is not claiming that an image of