In his posthumously published diary, the well-known Italian writer Cesare Pavese notes, “It is an interesting idea that in art feeling is the purely mimetic part, the accurate description of the silence of the sea” (Pavese, 1980, translated from the Dutch edition). It would seem that Pavese is poking fun at the conventional definition of “mimesis”; here the concept does not merely mean the representation of external reality but also, and especially, the portrayal of an emotional state of mind, the artist's inner reality, his dreams, emotions and obsessions. In this sense all art is of course mimetic, even abstract painting, music or lyric poetry. Pavese's statement, however, is not entirely nonsensical. As we have already seen, Plotinus interpreted “mimesis” in such a way that the work of art is seen as the ever-imperfect imitation of the pure Form or Idea which is present in the mind of the artist from the very start. We also noted that many Renaissance artists were inspired by a notion of ideal beauty which served as a guideline or a model during the creative process. These less radical versions of the “mimesis” theory move towards the idea that the true work of art is located somewhere in the artist's mind, and that the task of the artist is to give shape to this pure idea or form in his work of art. The emphasis here is no longer on the imitation or reproduction of supersensible (Plato) or sensible reality, but on the representation of an idea previously formed in the mind of the artist. Ultimately, it would seem that it is a matter of representing the artist's inner reality. And perhaps, or rather, undoubtedly, Pavese wishes to point this out to us by means of his seemingly enigmatic statement.
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Further Reading
For the quotation of Cesare Pavese, see:
Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living, London: Quartet Books, 1980.
Hegel's statement on expression in art:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory lectures on aesthetics, London/New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
Classical source of the expression theory:
Lev Tolstoy, What is art? London / New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
Criticism on Tolstoy in the work of Arnold Hauser:
Arnold Hauser, The social history of art, Vol. IV: Naturalism, impressionism, the film age, With an introduction by Jonathan Harris, London / New York: Routledge, 1999 (Originally published in 1951).
Classical sources of the Croce-Collingwood theory:
Benedetto Croce, The aesthetic as the science of expression and of the linguistic in general. Part 1. Theory (Aesthetic as the science of expression & of the linguistic), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 (New translation by Colin Lyas, superseding the earlier, defective translation by D. Ainslie). Lyas' translation is based on the most recent Italian edition of Croce's Estetica (1990).
Robin George Collingwood, Principles of art, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976 (Originally published by Clarendon Press in 1938).
Some excellent, analytically oriented discussions of the Croce-Collingwoord theory:
Oets Kolk Bouwsma, ‘The Expression Theory of Art’, in: Max Black (Ed.), Philosophical analysis: a selection of essays, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950 (71–96). Most recent edition by Books for Libraries Press in 1971. This article is the most classical one on the CC-theory.
John Hospers, ‘The Croce-Collingwood Theory of Art’, Philosophy, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, 1956 (291–308). In this article the name CC-theory has been used for the first time.
Haig Katchadourian, ‘The Expression Theory of Art: A Critical Evaluation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1965 (335–352).
Richard Wollheim, ‘A Critique of Collingwood and the Ideal Theory of Art’, in: George Dickie and Richard J. Sclafani (eds.), Aesthetics: a critical anthology, New York: St Martin's Press, 1977 (125–140).
See for Croce and Collingwood's philosophy of history:
Benedetto Croce, Theory and history of historiography, London: Harrap, 1921.
Robin George Collingwood, The idea of history, London / New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 (Originally published by Clarendon Press in 1946).
On expression theory in general:
Anne Sheppard, Aesthetics: an introduction to philosophy of art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. See on expression Chapter 3.
Alan Tormey, The concept of expression, With an introduction by Arthur Danto, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Guy Sircello, Mind and art. An essay on the varieties of expression, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Recommended works on hermeneutics and the interpretation of art:
Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: interpretation theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer, Evanston. IL: Northern Western University Press, 1969.
Hans-georg Gadamer, Truth and method, London/New York: Continuum, 2004 (Originally published by Seabury Press in 1975). First German edition: Wahrheit und Methode, Tubingen: Mohr, 1960.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The relevance of the beautiful and other essays, with an introduction by R. Bernasconi, Cambridge/New York/ Cambridge University Press, 1986.
For the quotation by Kandinsky, see:
Wassily Kandinsky, On the spiritual in art, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1982.
Crucial for the exploration on Kosuth and his ideas is:
Kosuth, Joseph, Art after philosophy and after: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991. (This work has a difficult but very interesting introduction by Gabriele Guercio and a playful foreword by the French philosopher François Lyotard. It also contains an extensive bibliography on readings of and about Kosuth, and nearly all publications on conceptual art.)
For the concepts of language game and family resemblances:
L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, London: Blackwell, 1976 (Originally published in 1953).
For the primary sources for the Arcades Project, see:
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, New York: Belknap Press, 2002.
Paul Scheerbart, The gray cloth: Paul Scheerbart's novel on glass architecture, Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
For the secondary sources on the the Arcades Project, see:
Susan Buck-Morss, The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Beatrice Hanssen (Ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, London: Continuum, 2006.
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(2009). Expression Theories. In: Thinking Art. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5638-3_3
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