Theory Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, Society

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Theory and Philosophy of Art:
Style, Artist, and Society

SELECTED PAPERS

MEYER SCHAPIRO

G EORGE BRAZILLER

NEW YORK

THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF AR T

ndemned in perpetuity, he said, to repeat his doubtful successes, the
Jtic little landscapes with horsemen, remembered from the African
.vels of his youth. In this mood, he undertook the trip to Belgium
d Holland, not knowing whether a book would come out of it,
hough urged to write by his friends who had enjoyed the brilliance
his casual talk on the painters of the past and knew his gifts as a
·iter. He was certain only that the journey would not contribute to his
:, for he felt rightly that his troubles as a painter were lodged too deep
thin his personality to be resolved by new inspirations from the past.
Lt this concentrated, solitary experience in a foreign land was a pow
[ul reawakening; it stirred his energies as nothing had done before.
1e accumulated forces of a lifetime were suddenly sparked, and in a
N months, with an incredible speed, he wrote out this book which
presents his gifts better than his paintings, refined as these may be. It
1ched a greater public and provoked controversies that have not yet
me to an end. It won the admiration of Flaubert who saluted
·omentin as a literary master. On the strength of the book, he posed
s candidacy for the French Academy as a man of letters; he was
:feated by a minor art critic who had the bad grace to attack his dead
ral a few months later. Fromentin’s writings had brought him no
izes like his pictures, but his name is more secure through his books.

The Still Life as a Personal Object
A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh

(1968)

I N HIS ESSAY 0 N The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin

Heidegger interprets a painting by van Gogh to illustrate the
nature of art as a disclosure of truth. 1
He comes to this picture in the course of distinguishing three
modes of being: of useful artifacts, of natural things, and of works of
fine art. He proposes to describe first, “without any philosophical theory
… a familiar sort of equipment-a pair of peasant shoes”; and “to
facilitate the visual realization of them” he chooses “a well-known
painting by van Gogh, who painted such shoes several times.” But to
grasp “the equipmental being of equipment,” we must know “how
shoes actually serve.” For the peasant woman they serve without her
thinking about them or even looking at them. Standing and walking in
the shoes, the peasant woman knows the serviceability in which “the
equipmental being of equipment consists.” But we,

as long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the

empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never

discover what the equipmeiltal being of equipment in truth is. In van Gogh’s

painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. There is nothing sur

rounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong, only an

undefined space. T here are not even clods from the soil of the field or the path

through it sticking to them, which might at least hint at their employment. A

pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet .

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread

of the worker stands forth . In the stiffly solid heaviness of the shoes there is the

accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uni

form furrows of the field, swept by a raw wind. On the leather there lies the

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. t is curious that many years before, Fromentin had noted in a draft of an unpublished essay on
)ainte-Beuve that the great critic was a double nature, weak and contrite, a man of memories,
·egrets, and tempered impressions.

~romentin ‘s contemporary and admirer, Jacob Burckhardt, who quoted with approval F romentin ‘s
Jhrase about Rubens- “sans orages et sans chimeres”–<:riticized Rembrandt rather harshly as a ninter of the "canaille." But unlike the Frenchman , he found Rembrandt lacking in spirituality. 134 135 r v THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF ART mpness and saturation of the soil. Under the soles there slides the loneliness the field-path as the evening declines. In the shoes there vibrates the silent I of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by complaining anxiety about the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having ce more withstood want, the trembling before the advent of birth and shiver ~ at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth d it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected longing the equipment itself rises to its resting-in-self. 2 ·ofessor Heidegger is aware that van Gogh painted such shoes J times, but he does not identify the picture he has in mind, as if ifferent versions are interchangeable, all disclosing the same A reader who wishes to compare his account with the original e or its photograph will have some difficulty in deciding which • select. Eight paintings of shoes by van Gogh are recorded by de lle in his catalogue of all the canvasses by the artist that had been ted at the time Heidegger wrote his essay.3 Of these, only three the "dark openings of the worn insides" which speak so distinct he philosopher.4 They are more likely pictures of the artist's own not the shoes o{a peasant. They migfltbe shoesne-had worn i-~ =w-ounne pictures were painted during van Gogh's stay in Paris ~6-87; one of them bears the date: "87''.5 From the time before Nhen he painted Dutch peasants are two pictures of shoes-a pair m wooden clogs set on a table beside other objects. 6 Later in Aries nted, as he wrote in a letter of August 1888 to his brother, "une :le vieux souliers" which are evidently_~iJ own. 7 A second still life eux souliers de paysan" is mentioned in a letter of September :o the painter Emile Bernard, but it lacks the characteristic worn e and dark insides of Heidegger's description. 8 ..._ . - - - . . ! - - - - , reply to my question, Professor He1deggcrnas kindly written at the picture to which he referred is one that he saw in a show at ~rdam in March 1930.9 This is clearly de la Faille's no. 255; there lso exhibited at the same time a painting with three pairs of 10 and it is possible that the exposed sole of a shoe in this picture, ed the reference to the sole in the philosopher's account. But 1 36 FIGUREr. Vincent van Gogh: Shoes, r886, oil on canvas, 15 x r8Vs", Vincent van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF ART A NOTE ON HEIDEGGER AND VAN GOGH 1 neither of these pictures, nor from any of the others, could one 1erly say that a painting of shoes by van Gogh expresses the being ;sence of a peasant woman's shoes and her relation to nature and c ~.E_ey are the shoes of the artist, by that time a man of the town cjty. Heidegger has written: "The art-work told us what shoes are in 1. It would be the worst self-deception if we were to think that our ription, as a subjective action, first imagined everything thus and projected it into the painting. If anything is questionable here, it ther that we experienced too little in contact with the work and we expressed the experience too crudely and too literally. But e all, the work does not, as might first appear, serve merely for a ~r visualization of what a piece of equipment is. Rather, the equip tal being of equipment first arrives at its explicit appearance ugh and only in the artist's work. 'What happens here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh's ting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant's s, is in truth." 1 1 'las for him, the philosopher has indeed deceived himself. He has ned from his encounter with van Gogh's canvas a moving set of :iations with peasants and the soil, which are not sustained by the ue itself. They are grounded rather in his own social outlook with eavy pathos of the primordial and earthy. He has indeed "imagined ything and projected it into the painting." He has experienced too little and too much in his contact with the work. fhe error lies not only in his projection, which replaces a close ttion to the work of art. For even if he had seen a picture of a peas IVOman's shoes, as he describes them, it would be a mistake to sup- that the truth he uncovered in the painting-the being of the s-is something given here once and for all and is unavailable to perception of shoes outside the painting. I fimll iothing in legge;'s fanciful descriptio~ of the sllOe-;-p}ctured by van Gogh could not have been imagined in looking at a real pair of peasants' s. Though he credits to art the power- of givi;gto a represented oT shoes that explicit appearance in which their being is dis- ----- 138 closed-indeed "the universal essence of things," 12 "world and earth ) in their counterplay" 13-this concept of the metaphysical power of art remains here a theoretical idea. The example on which he elaborates with strong conviction does not support that idea. --- Is Heidegger's mistake simply that he chose a wrong example? Let us imagine a painting of a peasant woman's shoes by van Gogh. Would it not have made manifest just those qualities and that sphere of being described by Heidegger with such pathos? ""' Heidegger would still have missed an important aspect of the painting: the artist's presence in the work. In his account of the picture ( ·--------- he has overlooked the personal and physiognomic in the shoes that made them so persistent and absorbing a subject for the artist (not to speak of the intimate connection with the specific tones, forms, and brush-made surface of the picture as a painted work). When van Gogh depicted the peasant's wooden sabots, he gave them a clear, unworn shape and surface like the smooth still-life objects he had set beside them on the same table: the bowl, the bottles, a cabbage, etc. In the later picture of a peasant's leather slippers, he has turned them with their backs to the viewer. I4 His own shoes he has isolated ;n the ground; he has rendered the~-;~ if facing us, -;~d so worn and wrin- kled in appearance that we can speak of them as veridical portraits of aging shoes. We come closer, I think, to van Gogh's feeling for these shoes in a paragraph written by Knut Hamsun in the 188os in his novel Hunger, describing his own shoes: "As I had never seen my shoes before, I set myself to study their looks, their characteristics, and when I stir my foot, their shapes and their worn uppers. I discover that their creases and white seams give them expression- impart a physiognomy to them. Something of my own nature had gone over into these shoes; they affected me, ~a breathing ~o~tion of my '- very self. 15 ~paring van Gog]l'~ painting with Hamsun's text, we are /Interpreting t~p;i~ting in a different way than Heidegger. The philosopher finds in the picture of the shoes a truth about the world as ( c_) ·- / ' ~ (' ' 139 --· {>

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THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF ART

dampness and saturation of the soil. Under the soles there slides the loneliness

of the field-path as the evening declines. In the shoes there vibrates the silent

call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal

in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by

uncomplaining anxiety about the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having

once more withstood want, the trembling before the advent of birth and shiver

ing at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth

and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected

belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-in-self. 2

Professor Heidegger is aware that van Gogh painted such shoes
~ral times, but he does not identify the picture he has in mind, as if
different versions are interchangeable, all disclosing the same
:h. A reader who wishes to compare his account with the original
:ure or its photograph will have some difficulty in deciding which
to select. Eight paintings of shoes by van Gogh are recorded by de
‘aille in his catalogue of all the canvasses by the artist that had been
ibited at the time Heidegger wrote his essay.3 Of these, only three
w the “dark openings of the worn insides” which speak so distinct
a the philosopher. 4 They are more likely pictures of the artist’s own
es, not the shoes of a peasant. They miglit be shoes Fle”had worn i-n
llallirout tli:e p[ctures were painted during van Gogh’s stay in Paris
I 886-87; one of them bears the date: “87” .s From the time before
6 when he painted Dutch peasants are two pictures of shoes-a pair
:lean wooden clogs set on a table beside other objects. 6 Later in Aries
painted, as he wrote in a letter of August 1888 to his brother, “une
~e de vieux souliers” which are evidentlyJ!is own. 7 A second still life
·’vieux souliers de paysan” is mentioned in a letter of September
.8 to the painter Emile Bernard, but it lacks the characteristic worn
fa~ and dark insides of Heidegger’s description. 8
In reply to my question, Professor Heiaegger has kindly written
that the picture to which he referred is one that he saw in a show at
LSterdam in March 1930.9 This is clearly de Ia Faille’s no. zss; there
; also exhibited at the same time a painting with three pairs of
es, 10 and it is possible that the exposed sole of a shoe in this picture,
Jired the reference to the sole in the philosopher’s account. But

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FIGUREr. Vincent van Gogh: Shoes, r886, oil on canvas, rs x r8Ys”, Vincent van Gogh Museum,
Amsterdam.