Volume 37, numéro 2, 2012 Idea in Art L’idée dans l’art Sous la direction de Adele M. Ernstrom et Gwendolyn Trottein

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The series of projects sketched and commented by the goldsmith-sculptor Benvenuto Cellini for the seal of the newly formed Accademia del disegno in Florence (1563) constitutes a curious milestone in the history of Idea in art. Artemis of Ephesus as the idea della natura, the nurturing goddess of disegno, figures on several of these drawings before giving way to her brother the sungod Apollo, described also as a god of nature and disegno, but of a disegno more rivalrous than foundational, and defined textually as of two types: idea in the artist’s mind or drawing with lines. But rather than succumbing to the growing tendency of the century to prize either of these aspects of disegno over the fully executed work of art, Cellini’s seals, despite the circumstances of their genesis and their esoterism, as several passages in the artist’s autobiography and technical treatises also attest, aim at affirming the overriding importance of art, especially figural sculpture, as tangible aesthetic object.

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What exactly is Idea, the concept whose history Erwin Panofsky investigates in the wake of Ernst Cassirer’s explanation of its “systematic meaning?” Is it still the ancient Platonic Idea, so often invoked, but paradoxically incompatible with art, or is it a new concept, that which fostered the emergence of art theory during the Renaissance? And what relationship does it entertain with the artists’ Idea, another name for disegno, whose definitive theory is found in Federico Zuccaro’s 1607 treatise, the culmination and theoretical finale of the Renaissance? Panofsky, finding it impossible to follow the problematical strand proffered him by Cassirer, leaves us in his Idea with the task of untangling an almost inextricable skein, one from which emerge little by little the contours of another history, a history no longer leading dialectically from Plato to Kant, and from the condemnation of artists and poets to a philosophy of symbolic forms, but, via highly convoluted paths, from the appearance of art theory to the birth of aesthetics.

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In a letter to Chantelou dated 22 December 1647, Poussin writes of a painting to be executed that he has found its thought, “I mean the conception of the idea, and the work of the mind was complete.” It follows that Poussin’s idea belongs to the theoretical component of painting, namely the composition, and the idea constitutes the represented object aimed at by invention, which converts a historia into a picture and whose procurement provides sufficient satisfaction to an erudite painter like Poussin. Idea is the end or aim of pictorial thought and the regulative means for producing the visible work. Beyond a then perceptible tension between an ideal, indeed a divine Idea, to which Félibien’s idea of the painter comes close in his first Entretien, and an agent or force of conversion of the discursive into the figural, idea belongs henceforth also to the theory of the art of painting, as is witnessed by the titles of works by Fréart or Roger de Piles (Idée de la perfection de la peinture, Idée du peintre parfait): such an idea is thus a regulated presentation of what the painter must do if he wishes to excel. It is no longer conceived or made visible by the painter, but by a kind of enlightened connoisseur, not yet called a critic, but who distances himself sufficiently from the art of painting to teach and to adjudicate good taste. Not only does idea then aid, not in the fabrication of good paintings, but rather in the evaluation of painting, as Roger de Piles underlines at the end of his opuscule introducing the Abrégé de la vie des peintres, but it could well be formative or constitutive of taste itself—a shift by which Idea comes, by the century’s end, to regulate not the production of works, but the judgments passed on them.

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En 1856, dans son compte-rendu des trois premiers tomes des Peintres modernes, Elizabeth Eastlake critique l’insistance avec laquelle John Ruskin affirme le primat des idées en art tout en n’attribuant au langage du peintre qu’une fonction instrumentale. Aux « idées de vérité », inhérentes à la nature, aux « idées de beauté », non sélectives, et aux « idées de relation », dont il se sert pour censurer certaines oeuvres de Raphaël, elle oppose les qualités propres à la peinture, celles que la peinture met en oeuvre en utilisant les ressources de son propre langage, à savoir la couleur, la forme, l’ombre et la lumière, ainsi que l’expression. Puis, dépassant le cadre de cette opposition, elle va jusqu’à soutenir que « les meilleures idées » font partie du langage du peintre. Sans se référer à la théorie du disegno, elle semble néanmoins invoquer l’indissociabilité du concept et de la pratique caractéristique de cette tradition. La proximité de la thèse d’Eastlake avec l’esthétisme en germe dans les Feuilles d’automne (1856) et Le Vallon du repos (1858) de John Everett Millais, autant que les affinités qu’elle suggère entre la musique et l’art visuel indiquent un changement de paradigme qui annonce les thèmes majeurs du Mouvement esthétique de la fin du XIX^e siècle.

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Max Liebermann est surtout connu comme peintre naturaliste/impressionniste. Il était également un écrivain passionné : Die Phantasie in der Malerei (L’Imagination dans la peinture) est l’expression la plus développée de sa théorie de l’art. Au tournant du XX^e siècle, les écrits allemands sur l’art ont souvent opposé le naturalisme français à l’idéalisme allemand. Liebermann tente de concilier ces oppositions en proposant une théorie de l’art qui rejette ce qu’il considère comme des catégories absolues, telles que le naturalisme et l’idéalisme, et les remplace par ce qu’il estime être des termes relationnels, tels naïf et sentimental (découlant de Schiller). Cet essai discute du rapport de la théorie de l’art de Liebermann à sa pratique à travers une analyse de son tableau L’Atelier (1902) et de la relation de celui-ci avec Las Meninas de Velázquez. De même que la théorie d’Erwin Panofsky sur l’Idée dans l’art et l’analyse de la théorie de l’argent de Georg Simmel, la théorie de l’art de Liebermann s’articule sur le rapport entre la distance et la présence. L’enjeu pour ces écrivains est la compréhension du relationnel comme une caractéristique fondamentale de la subjectivité moderne.

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This article examines the survival, in post-World War II American abstract painting and especially in the formalist critique interpreting and legitimizing it, of age-old debates concerning the primacy of thought over the mimetic representation of the world that have characterized occidental art theory since Plato. The history of these debates, which the Renaissance took up again and channeled in more aesthetic than metaphysical directions, has been masterfully summarized by Erwin Panofsky in his celebrated essay of 1924 dedicated to idea. One of the pivotal points of that theory as a whole is the relationship established between the plan or intention of the work (dessein) and the drawing or sketch (dessin) which gives it form. This article argues that modernist painting, although radically abstract and apparently devoted to the triumph of the colour field alone, paradoxically fails to reflect upon itself without recourse to a principle of internal articulation wherein subsist avatars of the old alliance between dessein and dessin. The radical transformation of art’s context of production and reception, brought about by the instauration of modernity, introduces however a third term into the equation, design (de-sign), which expresses the fear of a definitive loss: that of the capacity of art to reflect upon the world and provide meaning.

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This study demonstrates how the long-established problematics of idea reappeared in an original fashion in self-descriptive works of conceptual art, as well as in works of contemporary artists quoting their predecessors of the 1960s. A recent drawing by the Quebecois artist Mathieu Beauséjour reveals the complexity of the issues addressed in self-descriptive works. It posts the phrase Les oeuvres parlent d’elles-mêmes, which lends itself to a two-fold reading: either the works speak of or about themselves (self-referentiality of Kosuth’s neon piece Five Words in Blue Neon), or they speak by or for themselves (the tendency toward autonomy of works seeking to rival art history in the usage of the verbal language used to describe them). These two tendencies are examined in three canonical conceptual works: Joseph Kosuth’s Five Words in Blue Neon, Dan Graham’s Schema, and Robert Morris’s Card File. However, several recent productions employ once again the process of self-description, while subverting the transparency and autonomy striven for by the models they take as sources, as is the case in the neons and textual works of the Canadian artists Ron Terada and Kelly Mark, the British artist Tracey Emin, and the Mexican artist Stephan Brüggemann. Through ironic self-depreciation and caustic praise of their forerunners, these works reveal simultaneously the hold of expectations and of institutional conditions, and the ambiguity of their critical position with respect to that context.