ABSTRACT
Sartre, to be sure, offers us no complete theory of art. For instance, one finds in his writings no set of criteria by which one can demarcate works of art from ordinary, everyday objects. Even though one can speculate about the ontology of the work of art, and perhaps do so in an informed manner, the ontology of the work of art does not seem to have been one of Sartre’s priorities. Rather, his contribution to aesthetics lies elsewhere: namely, in his descriptive account of aesthetic experience. To be precise, his contribution is twofold. It is the account itself – the details of his description – but also the themes which unfold in it: freedom, situation, but above all, imagination. The crux of Sartre’s views on painting can be summarized with ease. The
object of aesthetic appreciation, he declares, is not the set of material elements of the painting. It is, rather, the irreal content which consciousness forms once the materiality of the work of art is animated by an imagining consciousness. In a word, the awareness of the object of aesthetic appreciation is not perceptual but imaginative. But the ease by which we can summarize the main tenets of Sartre’s position should not lead us to believe that Sartre’s position is trivial. The truth is very much the opposite. Sartre’s views on art are shaped by his phenomenological account of imagination, and the latter is a study of both great complexity and philosophical importance. In it, Sartre undertakes tasks that are perhaps too numerous to be listed here. Inter alia, he explicates the structure of imagination; elucidates what
takes place when one looks at a painting, photograph, or a caricature and articulates what occurs when one watches a play or an impersonator; shows how imagination is both non-pictorial and distinct from perception; explains imagination’s relation to freedom; clarifies the role of belief and feeling in imagination; speaks of pathologies and their relationship to imagination; and, as already announced, explains the role of imagination in aesthetics. The aim of the essay is to demonstrate that Sartre’s descriptive account
of aesthetic experience can engage in a meaningful and fruitful conversation with non-representational painting. More specifically, it aims to show that the Sartrean account can bring forth and explain characteristics of non-representational paintings without either reducing or transforming them into works of art which are more adequately classified as belonging to different art movements. The link between imagination and aesthetics determines the course of
this essay, for only in the aftermath of an examination of imagination can one speak of Sartre’s views on painting. The structure of the essay is as follows. The second section illustrates why, according to Sartre, imagination is both non-pictorial and distinct from perception. The third is devoted to an examination of painting and focuses primarily on three themes: the role of the canvas, the nature of the aesthetic object, and the relationship between the two. The fourth section, by using the late works of Mark Rothko as an example, demonstrates how the Sartrean account of aesthetics also applies to non-representational paintings. The significance of this application lies in the fact that for Sartre, the painting itself (a real, physical object) is never the object of aesthetic appreciation, a point which holds regardless of the artwork’s genre. It is usually thought that non-representational works, in virtue of the fact that they lack recognizable content, refer to nothing, and point to nothing besides themselves. By demonstrating that Sartre’s account applies to nonrepresentational as well as to representational painting, the essay contests this conviction and argues that non-recognizability in content is not sufficient to show that the object of aesthetic appreciation must be a real, physical object.
