Contemplation (painting)

For some art criticism, contemplation is considered one of the foundations of classical painting . It describes the ability to partially or completely separate colors from their representational meaning in the eye.

The earliest evidence of this ability can be found in art theoretical treatises of the Renaissance and in the traditional words of various masters, such as Michelangelo Buonarrotis and Jean Siméon Chardins . As one of the outstanding masters of recent history, whose work is said to be excellently based on contemplative vision, alongside Paul Cézanne , the main exponent of impressionism, the painter Claude Monet is considered . A large number of biographical, psychological and art studies studies have been written about his “eye”. The first more extensive theoretical explanations on the subject are provided by the writings of John Ruskin . But even his work has not enforced a specific canonical concept of contemplation for the visual arts, so that in addition to his “innocence of the eye”, a number of similar terms or paraphrases have been coined. For example Max Imdahl's “seeing seeing” or Konrad Fiedler's “pure seeing”. The advantage of the concept of contemplation lies in its cultural-historical dimension.

On the concept of contemplation

The Latin contemplatio is a synthesis of con (together, with) and templum (the holy place or space of God) and means something like looking, looking purely; but also: passive, inactive. It is based on the Greek theoria and theorein , as much as: purely receiving, purposeful approach to reality. Aristotle defines contemplation in his ethics as: “ ... the activity of the spirit, an act of looking, which is distinguished by its serious dignity, does not strive for any outside goal, moreover perfect pleasure - which in turn intensifies the activity - according to its nature closes; And when that which is self-sufficient, that which is at rest in oneself and, within human limits, the indefatigable and everything else that is ascribed to man at the height of happiness, appears in this activity, so it follows that this activity represents man's happiness in perfection. "

Contemplation, as an ideally pure looking, is of fundamental importance for the diverse movements of mysticism . In contemplation, “looking” or “looking” should be opposed to the confusion of all human desires and wills. Philosophy and mysticism, as well as Buddhism , which is shaped by meditation , certainly know the concrete or figurative as a point of reference and reference to contemplation. Because the lofty goal here is not turning away from nature or creation, but a freshly directed, purified new seeing. Plotinus, for example, writes of: " ... lingering with him [seeing the divine] and enjoying things there, in such a way that someone becomes both subject and object of seeing himself and other things ". Johannes von Kreuz calls this looking “ loving attention ”, he comments: “ The soul must pay loving attention to God, only this, without specifying itself in acts; She has to behave in a pure receiving manner, without her own busyness, with the resolute simple attention of love, just as someone opens his eyes in loving mindfulness. “ In this sense, Dante places this pure expectation or pure reception above love:

" By looking [ne l'atto che vede] bliss is achieved,

not through love; it only follows

when it has sprung from vision as its source.

And the merit that one has by grace

and acquiring goodness is measure of seeing.

So you go up from grade to grade. "

Contemplation in the fine arts

It was only from the Renaissance onwards that there were documents that prove the connection between contemplation and painting. According to Leonardo da Vinci : “ The painter ... behaves like a mirror that changes into all the colors that the things opposite him have. And if he does so, he'll be like second nature. “ Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1584) narrates:“ This is how Michelangelo , this outstanding sculptor, painter and architect, used to say that no reasons, neither geometry, nor arithmetic, nor perspective, use man without the eye, that is without training the eye in the concept of looking [in saper veder] and letting the hand do it. And he said that and added that, as much as you train the eye in this sense, namely in nothing but pure looking, without distinguishing more angles, lines or distances, you gain the freedom of the hand to create any desired figure, but never other than what one would expect to see in perspective. "

A letter from Nicolas Poussin is also often placed in this context. According to Poussin, who in this letter defends his work against critics who, according to him, lack the decisive competence for a well-founded judgment. He explains: “ You have to know that there are two ways of looking at objects: on the one hand, simply looking at them, and on the other, looking at them carefully. Simply seeing is nothing more than receiving in the eye the form and similarity of the things seen. But to see an object by looking at it means - beyond the simple and natural perception of the form by the eye - to look for the means with a special procedure to recognize the same object well: one could say that the simple view [aspect] is a natural process and what I call prospect, an act of the mind that depends on three things, namely the understanding eye [savoir de l'oeil], the line of sight and the distance of the eye to the Object. And it is this knowledge that it would be hoped that those who intervene to pass judgment would be well instructed in it. “In fact, this passage is as legendary in research as it is controversial in its precise sense. Undeniably, however, in this theorem of Poussin, another way of seeing is delimited from the recognition of "form and similarity".

Goethe , too , had experience in making himself understandable with this difficult object: “ Now we claim, even if it sounds somewhat strange, that the eye does not see any form, since light, dark and color together make up what makes the object of the object that distinguishes parts of the object from one another for the eye. And so we build the visible world out of these three and at the same time make painting possible ... ” John Ruskin explains these difficulties a little closer in his“ The Elements of Drawing ”:“ Only through a series of experiments do we come to the conclusion that a black or gray spot is the dark side of a solid body, or that faint coloring is an indication that the object in question is far away. The whole painting depends on whether we succeed in regaining what I would like to call the innocence of the eye. By that I mean a kind of childlike perception with which we perceive patches of color for what they are, with no awareness of what they mean - as a blind person would see if suddenly he could see. "

Paul Cézanne's description of his contemplative immersion in front of the “motif” makes the connection to mysticism particularly clear: “ The artist must be like a phototechnical plate on which the landscape emerges. ... The painter's whole will must be silent. He should silence all voices of prejudice. To forget! To forget! Create silence! Be a perfect echo. The landscape is mirrored, humanized, thinks itself in me. I rise with her to the roots of the world. We germinate. A tender excitement seizes me and from the roots of this excitement the sap, the color rises. I was born in the real world. I see. ”And elsewhere:“ You have to create your own look, that means you have to see nature as if no one had ever seen it before. See like a newborn baby. “ Henri Matisse puts it in exactly the same way :“ Everything we see in daily life is more or less distorted by our acquired habits. The effort necessary to free yourself from the image-making process requires a certain courage, and this courage is indispensable for the artist, who has to see everything as if he were seeing it for the first time. One must be able to see throughout one's life as one looked at the world as a child, because the loss of this ability to see also means the loss of all original expressions. I think z. B. that nothing is more difficult for the artist than to paint a rose, because in order to create it he must first forget all the roses painted before him. "Monet teaches the painter LC Perry neither special techniques nor abstractions or ideals of any kind, but initially only subordination to the motif:" When you go outside to paint, try to take the objects you have in front of you - a tree, a house, a field or whatever - to forget. Just think, here is a blue square, here a pink rectangle, here a yellow stripe, and paint it as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it depicts your own naive impression of the scene in front of you . "

In a conversation with Claude Monet, Clemenceau emphasizes a difficulty of a more human than technical nature, but precisely for that reason of a significance in art criticism that is difficult to assess. In particular, the claim to general comprehensibility or general accessibility of art, or the human vulnerability in view of special abilities from which they must feel excluded: " For me, this is humiliating, because we both see by no means the same things. I open my eyes ... but I remain trapped on the surface ... While looking at a tree, all I see is a tree. You, on the other hand, have your eyes half closed and think: How many tones and how many colors are there in the shining transitions of this one tribe ... And Monet replied to me: You cannot know how true it all is. This is the joy and agony of my days. "

Ernst Gombrich (1978), based on “ modern science ”, makes fundamental objections to the possibility of contemplative experience: “ ... this ideal of pure observation without preconditions, on which the theory of induction was based, has emerged in science as well as in education Art proved illusory. Modern science has sharply criticized the idea that it is possible to keep on observing without being influenced by any expectations. Karl Popper emphasized that we are unable to turn our minds into a blank slate, as it were ... but that every observation presupposes a question that we address to nature, and that every such question includes a preliminary hypothesis ... “But without the integration of something new, no sensitive or cognitive processes can be imagined. Therefore it does not have to be convincing to dismiss the diverse documents that are important for art criticism with reference to an unattainable ideal. Other voices in art criticism have rejected the possibilities of scientific judgment in these areas of art altogether. Paul Valéry writes : “ The artist's observation can reach an almost mystical depth. The illuminated objects lose their name: shadows and brightness form systems and very special problems that do not belong to any field of science, that do not relate to any practice, but their whole existence and their value depend on certain peculiar correspondences between the soul, the eye and the hand to a person who is born to find it in himself and to make it his own creatively. "

To intervene in this “ interpretation of nerve signals ” (Ingo Rentschler) through meditation or contemplation wherever the human limit may lie , various documents indicate that contemplation in painting can only be compared very problematically with a relaxation technique . For example, various letters from Monet show the effort that it takes to separate the colors from the object. Also in this sense Cézanne: “ How difficult it is to see an apple! “On the other hand, the comparison with concentration seems to be restricted in a special way, since the human will is often only given a contradicting or paradoxical function. Cézanne once expresses this paradox of contemplation in a succinct practical teaching: “ Do not draw it [the motif] towards you, but bow to it. "

literature

Kurt Badt: The Art of Cézanne. 1956.
Henry Bergson: The Perception of Change. 1946.
Gottfried Boehm: A Copernican Turn of View ”,“ Longing. About the change in visual perception. 1995.
Georges Clemenceau: Claude Monet. 1929.
Konrad Fiedler: About the origin of artistic activity. 1887.
Joachim Gasquet: Cézanne. 1921.
Christian Geelhaar: Le spleen de Giverny. In: Claude Monet: Nymphéas. Impression - vision. Exhibition catalog. Kunstmuseum Basel, 1986.
Gustave Geffroy: Monet: Sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre. 1924. (parts translated into: Stuckey, 1994)
Hans Graber: Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet. According to their own and others' testimonies 1943.
Hermann von Helmholtz: Optical about painting. 1876.
Hermann von Helmholtz: About human vision. 1855.
Hermann von Helmholtz: lectures and speeches. Friedrich Vieweg and son, Braunschweig 1884.
Ralf Konersmann (ed.): Critique of seeing. Reclam, Leipzig 1997.
Max Liebermann: Claude Monet. In: The imagination in painting. Writings and speeches. 1927.
Paolo Lomazzo: Trattato dell 'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura. Milan 1584.
Roger Marx: Claude Monet's Water Lilies. 1909.
Henri Matisse: About Art.
Guy de Maupassant: The Life of a Landscape Painter. 1886.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The eye and the mind (L'Œil et l'esprit). 1960.
Dieter Rahn: The eye of painting. Color and nature in Turner and Monet. 1986.
John Ruskin: The Elements of Drawing. 1857.
Karin Sagner-Düchting: Claude Monet: 'Nymphéas'. An approximation. 1985.
Charles F. Stuckey (Ed.): Claude Monet. 1994.
Paul Valéry: Pièces sur l'Art, Paris. 1934.
John S. Werner: Aging through the eyes of Monet. 1997.
Quotations from letters from Monet in: Sagner-Düchting (1985); in Gordon / Forge (1985); in Stuckey (1994); Geelhaar (1986)