JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

294Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingscorrelative of the intentional act of an imaginative consciousness. And since thisCharles VIII, who is an unreality so long as he is grasped on the canvas, is precisely theobject of our aesthetic appreciations (it is he who “moves” us, who is “painted withintelligence, power, and grace”, etc.), we are led to recognize that, in a picture, theaesthetic object is something unreal. This is of great enough importance once weremind ourselves of the way in which we ordinarily confuse the real and the imaginaryin a work of art. We often hear it said, in fact, that the artist first has an idea in the formof an image which he then realizes on canvas. This mistaken notion arises from the factthat the painter can begin with a mental image which is, as such, incommunicable, andfrom the fact that at the end of his labours he presents the public with an object whichanyone can observe. This leads us to believe that there occurred a transition from theimaginary to the real. But this is in no way true. That which is real, we must not failto note, are the results of the brush strokes, the stickiness of the canvas, its grain, thevarnish spread over the colours. But all this does not constitute the object of aestheticappreciation. What is “beautiful” is something which cannot be experienced as aperception and which, by its very nature, is out of the world. We have just shown thatit cannot be brightened, by projecting a light beam on the canvas for instance: it is thecanvas that is brightened and not the painting. The fact of the matter is that the painterdid not realize his mental image at all: he has simply constructed a material analogue ofsuch a kind that everyone can grasp the image provided he looks at the analogue. Butthe image thus provided with an external analogue remains an image. There is norealization of the imaginary, nor can we speak of its objectification. Each stroke of thebrush was not made for itself nor even for the constructing of a coherent real whole (inthe sense in which it can be said that a certain lever in a machine was conceived in theinterest of the whole and not for itself). It was given together with an unreal syntheticwhole and the aim of the artist was to construct a whole of real colours which enablethis unreal to manifest itself. The painting should then be conceived as a material thingvisited from time to time (every time that the spectator assumes the imaginativeattitude) by an unreal which is precisely the painted object. What deceives us here isthe real and sensuous pleasure which certain real colours on the canvas give us. Somereds of Matisse, for instance, produce a sensuous enjoyment in those who see them.But we must understand that this sensuous enjoyment, if thought of in isolation—forinstance, if aroused by a colour in nature—has nothing of the aesthetic. It is purely andsimply a pleasure of sense. But when the red of the painting is grasped, it is grasped,in spite of everything, as a part of an unreal whole and it is in this whole that it isbeautiful. For instance, it is the red of a rug by a table. There is, in fact, no such thingas pure colour. Even if the artist is concerned solely with the sensory relationships