JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

The work of art295between forms and colours, he chooses a rug for that very reason in order to increasethe sensory value of the red: tactile elements, for instance, must be intended throughthe red, it is a fleecy red, because the rug is of a fleecy material. Without this “fleeciness”of the colour something would be lost. And surely the rug is painted there for the redit justifies and not the red for the rug. If Matisse chose a rug rather than a sheet of dryand glossy paper it is because of the voluptuous mixture of the colour, the density andthe tactile quality of the wool. Consequently the red can be truly enjoyed only ingrasping it as the red of the rug, and therefore unreal. And he would have lost hisstrongest contrast with the green of the wall if the green were not rigid and cold,because it is the green of a wall tapestry. It is therefore in the unreal that the relationshipof colours and forms takes on its real meaning. And even when drawn objects havetheir usual meaning reduced to a minimum, as in the painting of the cubists, thepainting is at least not flat. The forms we see are certainly not the forms of a rug, atable nor anything else we see in the world. They nevertheless do have a density, amaterial, a depth, they bear a relationship of perspective towards each other. They arethings. And it is precisely in the measure in which they are things that they are unreal.Cubism has introduced the fashion of claiming that a painting should not represent orimitate reality but should constitute an object in itself. As an aesthetic doctrine such aprogramme is perfectly defensible and we owe many masterpieces to it. But it needsto be understood. To maintain that the painting, although altogether devoid of meaning,is nevertheless a real object, would be a grave mistake. It is certainly not an object ofnature. The real object no longer functions as an analogue of a bouquet of flowers or aglade. But when I “contemplate” it, I nevertheless am not in a realistic attitude. Thepainting is still an analogue. Only what manifests itself through it is an unreal collectionof new things, of objects I have never seen and never will see, but which are not lessunreal because of it; objects which do not exist in the painting, nor anywhere in theworld, but which manifest themselves by means of the canvas, and which have gothold of it by some sort of possession. And it is the configuration of these unrealobjects that I designate as beautiful. The aesthetic enjoyment is real but it is notgrasped for itself, as if produced by a real colour: it is but a manner of apprehendingthe unreal object and, far from being directed onto the real painting, it serves toconstitute the imaginary object through the real canvas. This is the source of thecelebrated disinterestedness of aesthetic experience. This is why Kant was able to saythat it does not matter whether the object of beauty, when experienced as beautiful, isor is not objectively real; why Schopenhauer was able to speak of a sort of Suspensionof the Will. This does not come from some mysterious way of apprehending the realwhich we are able to use occasionally. What happens is that the aesthetic object is