What is individualism in art

Instead of being subjected to the regulated routine of a collective workshop, he was now often on his own and developed habits compatible with his freedom. Periods of most intense and concentrated work alternate with unpredictable lapses into inactivity. Then for two, three, or four days he would not touch his work and yet be staying there, sometimes an hour, sometimes two hours a day wrapped in contemplation.

Michelangelo allowed no one—not even the pope—to be near him while he worked. Tintoretto would rarely admit friends, let alone other artists, to his studio. Many artists were clamoring for a new kind of originality, a search for new values independent of imitation. But it was literary critics rather than artists who defined the changed meaning of originality. The primary contribution came from England, perhaps influenced by Giordano Bruno's Eroici furori, published in London in and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney.

In one of his famous Spectator articles on Genius No. But Young's compelling language and metaphors assured his suc- cess.

The book was immediately translated twice into German and created—as Herder wrote—an electrify- ing effect. Young actually adumbrated the notions of the romantic concept of genius. In his claims of origi- nality Young had gone far beyond Duff, the author of An Essay on Original Genius , who, despite his adulation of originality and exorcism of imitation, demanded that an exuberant imagination must be re- strained by a proportionate share of reason and judgment—herein apparently following Gerard's An Essay on Genius, a work largely written in , but not published until Fabian, At the end of the century the radical dedication to original creation found eloquent apostles in John Pinkerton and William Blake; in their revolt against imitation both used violent language unheard before.

Did ever any one good painter arise from an academy? Blake may be the most violent exponent of spontaneity and divine inspiration but his ideas are less his own than is sometimes be- lieved. He enthroned originality and called it imagina- tion. The terms heading this paragraph have their own complex history and, at the same time, they are all closely interwoven with the growth of the concept of genius.

It has been suggested L. Pearsall Smith that this changeover began with the critical study of Shakespeare. And Ruskin still accepted these distinctions. It was also in eighteenth-century criticism that the vital function of spontaneity and inspiration was con- stantly reiterated. William Sharpe in his Dissertation on Genius , the first book on the subject, re- marked on the natural untrained powers of genius.

George Colman in his papers on Genius pub- lished in The St. William Duff singled out irre- sistible spontaneity. This list could be endlessly pro- longed, for next to the emphasis on originality and creative imagination, spontaneity and inspiration were basic to the cult of genius. No more need be said here since a great deal of ingenuity has been devoted by modern scholars to an epistemological exploration of these terms.

But a few comments on other charac- teristics of genius are in place. Genius without Learning. While Renaissance and post-Renaissance theory could not envisage great achievement without the control of the reasoning faculties and without solid intellectual grounding, those who shaped the new concept of genius created a thor- oughly anti-intellectual image of the select few: they were deemed capable of producing from pure inspira- tion. Sir William Temple had already suggested that learning might weaken the force of genius Of Poetry, And Addison made the memorable remark Spectator, No.

Impatience of Study, Contempt of the great Masters of antient [sic] Wisdom, and a Disposition to rely wholly upon unas- sisted Genius It was only natural that primitivism now appeared as an asset favoring original genius. It must be emphasized, however, that most practic- ing artists were rather conservative.

Few accepted the extravagant claims made by literary critics for natural genius. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance, condemned. The Artist as Second God. On the one hand, it was derived from Plato's theory of the furores, the inspired madness of which seers and poets are possessed; on the other hand, it looked back to the medieval idea of God the Father as artist, as architect of the universe.

When, as early as , Leon Battista Alberti suggested in his treatise On Painting that the artist may well consider himself, as it were, another god, an alter deus, he was probably prompted by the medieval deus artifex. The tertium comparationis between God and the poet or artist is the act of creation. This was often expressed for examples, Zilsel, Similarly, the influential Lomazzo in an- other work, Trattato Meanwhile, the Prometheus motif as presented by Shaftesbury influ- enced German thought with archetypal power.

This story was fully explored in a classic paper by Oskar F. Walzel Genius, Madness and Melancholy. Plato not only opened up for all times the concept of divine rapture, but was indirectly also responsible for the entrenched alliance between genius and madness. But the myth of a close alliance between genius and madness was not but- tressed until the nineteenth century by professional psychologists such as J.

Moreau, C. Lombroso, P. Moebius, W. Lange-Eichbaum and pseudo-clinical evidence, so that many great nineteenth-century minds such as Balzac, Rimbaud, and Taine took the supposed connection between mental illness and artistic genius for granted, and the belief in this connection has spread so widely that it has become, in Lionel Trilling's phrase,.

For an understanding of the idea of the mad artist before the nineteenth century, familiarity with Aris- totle's doctrine of the Saturnine temperament is neces- sary. Developing the Hippocratian humoral pathology, Aristotle postulated a connection between the melan- cholic humor and outstanding talent in the arts and sciences.

It was Marsilio Ficino who, in his De vita triplici , revived Aristotle's half-forgotten doctrine. Moreover, he took the important step of reconciling Aristotle's and Plato's views by maintaining that mel- ancholy, the ambivalent temperament of those born under the equally ambivalent planet Saturn was simply a metonymy for Plato's divine mania Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Ficino's conclusion was widely accepted: only the melancholic temperament was capable of Plato's enthusiasm.

From then on gifted men were categorized as saturnine and, conversely, no outstanding intellectual or artistic achievement was believed possible unless its author was melancholic. But even at the height of the vogue of melancholy, doubts were voiced, and eventually the Renaissance concept of the melancholicus was supplanted by the new image of the conforming artist. It was not until the romantic era, with artists such as Caspar David Friedrich Hartlaub, , that melancholy appears once again as a condition of men tal and emotional catharsis.

Nevertheless, the Greek humoral pathology was forever dethroned as early as with the publication of G. Stahl's Lehre von den Temperamenten. Sanity of Genius. Indeed, Leon Battista Alberti in the fifteenth cen- tury, Vasari, the Venetian Paolo Pini, and others in the sixteenth had a clear vision of the many accom- plishments with which talent must be endowed, and even when the modern conception of genius began to make its entry, it was first the exalted, lofty, and har- monious qualities that were regarded as characteristic of the very greatest.

Thus James Northcote left the following character sketch of his master Reynolds:. He had none of those eccentric bursts of action, those fiery impetuosities which are supposed by the vulgar to charac- terize genius, and which frequently are found to accompany a secondary rank of talent, but are never conjoined with the first. His incessant industry was never wearied into despondency by miscarriage, nor elated into negligence by success The concept of the sanity of genius is linked with the idea that exceptional work can only be accom- plished by exceptional characters and, moreover, that there is a kind of mirror-image relationship between personality and work.

As Vasari informs his readers, the lofty art of Raphael could only result from a lofty soul. Union of, and Dichotomy between, Man and his Work. The mirror-image concept has a pedigree lead- ing back to Plato's Politeia and Gorgias. Aristotle too believed in a union of the morality of the poet and that of his work.

This theory had a long life; we find it in the Stoa, in Cicero, and in Quintilian Heitmann. In fact, it is often naively applied by art historians, who are forgetting that ambiguity is a specific characteristic of the visual image: what looks chaste to one beholder may appear obscene to the next.

Reflections upon the man behind the work must therefore be regarded with considerable skepticism. There are, however, also some deliberate attempts—such as in Hartlaub and Weissenfeld — to present the old Platonic concept in a modern psy- chological dress. This story would not be complete without taking note of the fact that a theory diametrically opposed to that of the mirror image had found advocates at an early date. And from Boccaccio on, the assertion is repeated that no link exists between the author and the character of the stories told by him.

There is, in short, no link between grand auteur et homme de bien. It has been noticed that Diderot's forcefully stated thesis was readily taken up in the nineteenth century: Goethe, Victor Hugo, Paul Bourget, and others learned their lesson from him, and from here, of course, there opened anotehr avenue to the nineteenth-century theme of the alliance of genius and madness. But it has also been shown Heitmann [], pp. Other passages too show that he had not entirely dismissed the old mirror- image theory.

It is, in fact, remarkable how vigorously the doctrine of a harmony between man and work reasserted itself. This is demonstrated by material col- lected by M. Abrams , Ch. IX and K. Heit- mann The apparent impasse that mars a solution to this problem is understandable: common sense insists that every work of art bears the personal stamp of its maker. Diderot himself tried to resolve these contradictions by drawing new conclusions from the Platonic concept of divine frenzy.

We must clearly differentiate, he argued, between ourselves and. L'homme enthousiaste, qui prend la plume, l'archet, le pinceau Heitmann [ ], p. When in a frenzy he is everything he desires to be in the art that dominates him.

Art here assumes a cathartic function, a theme dis- cussed in an illuminating chapter of M. Abrams' work The extreme self- interest normally associated with genius and conceded to it by society without a murmur is and will remain at the very core of the problem of individualism. Wittkower, Born under Saturn. Fabian, Introduction to the critical edi- tion of Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius, Munich, , the most stimulating recent study on the problem of genius; P.

Society for Pure English , Tract No. Jahrhun- derts Heidelberg, , with chapters on the conception of genius in French and English aesthetics; E. The following bibliography in alphabetic sequence con- tains a few items to which no reference is made in the text, but which have proved useful in writing the article.

Abrams, see above. Alberti, On Painting, trans. Spencer London, Aretino, Lettere sull'arte, ed. Camesasca Milan, , II, Milan and Naples, , IV, Blake, Poetry and Prose, ed. Geoffrey Keynes London, , pp.

Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment first German ed. Cennino D'Andrea Cennini, Il libro dell'arte, ed. Thompson, Jr. New Haven, Dresdner, DieEnstehung der Kunstkritik Munich, ; reprint , with an excellent chapter on the artists in antiquity.

Easton, Artists and Writers in Paris. Fabian, see above, par. Flora, Tutte le opere di Matteo Bandello, 2 vols. Milan, , I, Gaye, Carteggio inedito d'artisti Florence, , II, Gerard, An Essay on Taste Edinburgh, ; 3rd ed. Edinburgh, , p. Goldwater and M. Treves, Artists on Art New York, , p. Weissenfeld, Gestalt und Gestaltung. Eduard Trautscholdt Hamburg, , pp.

Unless indicated otherwise translations are by the author of the article. Encyclopedia of Ideas. Search this site. Association of Ideas. Imprinting and Learning Early in Life. Individualism, Types of. Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer. Pre-Platonic Conceptions of Human Nature. Primitivism in the Eighteenth Century.

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Genius Musical Genius. Genius from the Renaissance to Genius: Individualism in Art and Artists. Gothic Concept of Gothic. Harmony or Rapture in Music. Impressionism in Art. Literary Paradox. Literature and Its Cognates. Motif in Literature: The Faust Theme. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. Wilde represents the anarchist as aesthete.

Anarchist writer Murray Bookchin describes a lot of individualist anarchism as people who "expressed their opposition in uniquely personal forms, especially in fiery tracts, outrageous behavior, and aberrant lifestyles in the cultural ghettos of fin de sicle New York, Paris, and London.

As a credo, individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ' free love ' and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing. In relation to this view of individuality, French Individualist anarchist Emile Armand advocates egoistical denial of social conventions and dogmas to live in accord to one's own ways and desires in daily life since he emphasized anarchism as a way of life and practice.

In this way he manifests "So the anarchist individualist tends to reproduce himself, to perpetuate his spirit in other individuals who will share his views and who will make it possible for a state of affairs to be established from which authoritarianism has been banished.

It is this desire, this will, not only to live, but also to reproduce oneself, which we shall call "activity". The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky one manifested that "The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with. Subjectivism is a philosophical tenet that accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law.

In extreme forms like Solipsism , it may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends solely on someone's subjective awareness of it. For example, Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus : "The subject doesn't belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world" proposition 5.

Metaphysical subjectivism is the theory that reality is what we perceive to be real, and that there is no underlying true reality that exists independently of perception.