This article examines contemporary representations of sakura (cherry blossom) in cosmetics marketing. Since the Heian period, sakura has been loved and regarded as having tangible and metaphorical significance in Japan. Imagery of sakura is rich in ambiguity and has a complex history as evident in its use in the militaristic promotion of heroism, especially related to the Second World War. However, in recent decades, sakura imagery has proliferated across a range of popular culture both inside and out of Japan. In (...) this article we focus on the circulation and meanings of sakura imagery accessible and appropriated in Australia with specific attention to cosmetics. Sakura offers not only aesthetic pleasure but also potentially some health benefits. Our discussion draws on data from surveys and interviews with participants in Australia about their perspectives of sakura aesthetics related to colour symbolism. This is accompanied by close analysis of colour symbolism in recent perfume, skincare and cosmetic marketing, branding and packaging which use sakura imagery. We argue that, using the complex symbolism associated with the wide colour spectrum, sakura imagery has now been refashioned as a versatile promotional tool in the global market, as exemplified by the brand engagement of sakura-themed cosmetics. (shrink)

With this area of the second triad contrasts above all the last sefirah, in which all these colours, as well as the various nuances of white-red, red-white, and a mixture of both, flash all together or one after the other, as they did already in Azriel and often in the Zohar. Since she represents the divine power closest to the created world—in part even immanent in it, she is the richest in symbolism, and in colour symbolism as well. (...) Here the Kabbalah returns, in mystical correlations and transformations, to older motifs, some of which we have already discussed above. (shrink)

The prominence and peculiarity of color in French symbolist verse have often been noted. Yet the dominance of color in symbolism is not the result of aesthetic preference or mere poetic technique, as has been previously argued; rather, color functions, with the synaesthetic poetic context of which it is an integral part, as the direct manifestation of a particular metaphysical stance. Color leads to the heart of what symbolism is, for it is the paradigmatic (...) literary expression of a general spiritual crisis—a crisis in epistemology. The nineteenth century extended seventeenth-century empiricism—an empiricism which had invented mathematical measurement as the gauge of reality and which resulted in a predilection to see most authentic knowledge as quantifiable. The logical corollary of such a predilection is that all sensory experience is regarded as suspect. Newtonian physics had rationalized the laws of the universe in reducing its properties to atomical structures and laws of motion. Nothing, it seemed, was left unexplained. Those areas of perception which remained unquantifiable were dispelled as illusion or attributed to the necessary limitations of the human mind. The theories of John Locke act as a kind of historical watershed in this regard: they are the classic philosophic expression of the disjunction between sensory experience and knowledge which, in its nineteenth-century versions, would lead to the symbolist revolt. Françoise Meltzer is a professor of French literature and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is the translation of Christian Metz's "Trucage and the Film" . She is the author of The Trial of Psychoanalysis, Salome and the Dance of Writing, and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the color meaning in the film of the famous Chinese director Zhang Yimou "Hero", the conceptual understanding of color as the main semantic element of the artistic solution. The object of research is the techniques of visual solutions in cinema. The perception of color in the culture of different peoples differs in certain nuances and depends on many factors, including national traditions and historically established stereotypes. Films by Chinese, Korean, and Japanese (...) filmmakers are interesting from the point of view of color solutions, as they differ in artistic originality and often offer the Russian audience an extraordinary semantic solution of the idea not only at the level of comprehension of the content, but also at the level of a specific color palette. The author similarly examines the color symbolism of Zhang Yimou's film "Hero". The conceptual content of the visual-figurative series, the originality of the coloristic solution of the film is comprehended. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the study of the color symbolism of Zhang Yimou's film "Hero" in the aspect of the correlation between the perception of the coloristic solution of the visual series and the conceptual content of the film. The author comes to the conclusion that despite the ambivalence of perception of a particular color in visual art, the coloristic solution is predetermined by the conceptual content of each episode, so color becomes the leading semantic concept of Zhang Yimou's film "Hero". (shrink)

The research conducted in this article is aimed at analyzing color symbols in Russian, French and Chinese linguistic cultures using the analysis of phraseology and proverbs. The research methodology is based on a comparative analysis of phraseological units and proverbs containing color components in these languages. In the course of the study, both common and unique features in the color symbolism of each of the linguistic cultures under consideration were identified. Through a comparative analysis of phraseology (...) and proverbs in different languages, it was possible to better understand how color embodies cultural norms, worldview and historical contexts in each nation. This allowed us to see which aspects of color are particularly significant for each culture and what associations and symbolic meanings are associated with them. Special attention is paid to the analysis of differences and similarities in the interpretation of color in the idiomatic expressions of each language. This allows us to understand which cultural and historical factors form unique views and ideas about color in each of the linguistic cultures under consideration. The study also highlights that the interpretation of color symbols in idiomatic expressions depends on the cultural and historical contexts of each language. Idioms are a reflection of the collective consciousness and worldview of the people, and the study of color phenomena in idioms helps to better understand national identity and linguistic evolution. In addition, the study found that the red color can acquire different meanings and connotations in different languages, despite common dictionary definitions. This indicates that the use and attitude towards the color red depends on the cultural and historical characteristics of each language group. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it combines linguistic analysis with the analysis of cultural characteristics and uses the methodology of synergetic symbolism. This approach allows us to understand how the interaction of different colors creates new symbolic meanings and associations specific to each culture. (shrink)

Colour shapes our world in profound, if sometimes subtle, ways. It helps us to classify, form opinions, and make aesthetic and emotional judgements. Colour operates in every culture as a symbol, a metaphor, and as part of an aesthetic system. Yet archaeologists have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to the form and material value of the objects they find and thereby overlook its impact on conceptual systems throughout human history.This book explores the means by which colour-based cultural understandings are (...) formed, and how they are used to sustain or alter social relations. From colour systems in the Mesolithic, to Mesoamerican symbolism and the use of colour in Roman Pompeii, this book paints a new picture of the past. Through their close observation of monuments and material culture, authors uncover the subtle role colour has played in the construction of past social identities and the expression of ancient beliefs. Providing an original contribution to our understanding of past worlds of meaning, this book will be essential reading for archaeologists, anthropologists and historians, as well as anyone with an interest in material culture, art and aesthetics. (shrink)

An ancient and enduring cross-cultural mythology explores what the texts generally perceive as a paradox: the birth of white offspring to black parents, or black offspring to white parents. This mythology in the Hebrew Bible is limited to animal husbandry, but in Indian literature from the third century B.C.E. and Greek and Hebrew literature from the third or fourth century C.E. it was transferred to stories about human beings. These stories originally express a fascination with the dark skin of “Ethiopians” (...) , and a fantasy of white children born to them. But when ideas about human race arise in Europe after the sixteenth century, the stories reverse their color schemes and shift their emphasis to investigations of the paradox of black children born to white parents. In our day, racism is clearly a strong factor in the media fascination with court cases about in vitro fertilization in which black children are born to white parents. This development suggests that the symbolism of black and white was not originally, nor need be now, racist, but that, once racism is current, it is hard to reclaim the nonjudgmental innocence of the earlier texts. Many of these texts explained the paradox of children who differ from their parents in color by invoking the concept of parental impression , which argues that whatever a woman thinks of or sees at the moment of conception influences the physical form of the child. This doctrine, which was known in ancient Israel, in Greece, in ancient India, and in Europe well into the twentieth century, primarily addresses an entirely different obsession—the problem of paternal insecurity—and generally draws heavily on sexist and misogynist attitudes toward women. Yet, when it was appropriated into the narratives of off-color offspring, it offered, in place of the more obvious explanation , an alternative fantasy that softened the culpability of women. So, too, when applied to stories of color-contrasting offspring in European narratives, even after the sixteenth century,the idea of parental impression functioned as a force against racism ; the Lamarckian or Lysenkan idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics—the privileging of nurture over nature—argues against the belief that one’s racial stock determines who one is. Thus this doctrine, farfetched as it seems to us , dulled the edge of ancient antagonism toward women and modern European antagonism toward the descendants of the “Ethiopians.” A study of the variations of this myth across cultures has much to tell us about the ways in which myths about women and myths about people of dark skin color are transformed under the pressure of later tropes of sexism and racism. (shrink)

We perceive color everywhere and on everything that we encounter in daily life. Color science has progressed to the point where a great deal is known about the mechanics, evolution, and development of color vision, but less is known about the relation between color vision and psychology. However, color psychology is now a burgeoning, exciting area and this Handbook provides comprehensive coverage of emerging theory and research. Top scholars in the field provide rigorous overviews of (...) work on color categorization, color symbolism and association, color preference, reciprocal relations between color perception and psychological functioning, and variations and deficiencies in color perception. The Handbook of Color Psychology seeks to facilitate cross-fertilization among researchers, both within and across disciplines and areas of research, and is an essential resource for anyone interested in color psychology in both theoretical and applied areas of study. (shrink)

The 2016 launch of the courier giant—Dalsey, Hillblom, and Lynn’s Advanced Regional Centre in Singapore—was significant not just for the scale of the facility and its impressive level of innovation, but for the visual identity and branding of DHL’s red and yellow corporate colours. These colours, as is evident in all branding, set it out from the rest, and have become a symbol of power and domination. This resonates with the use of colour categories to isolate human beings into unjust (...) classes that manifest divisive social and racial hierarchies. The symbolism of colourism and ethnicism viewed either plainly or as metaphors, lies in the “othering” of fellow human beings for discrimination and scapegoating. The markers are the same, whether in the case of George Floyd or the victims of discrimination and/or recurrent massacres in Nigeria. This essay explores how, by creating a visible barge of “otherness,” the current political leadership either shirked responsibility in the face of discriminations, or contrived excuses for the endless massacre of minorities in Nigeria. (shrink)

The subject of the study is color symbolism in F. Fitzgerald’s novel «The Great Gatsby» in the aspect of an ambivalent understanding of the conceptual solution in the use of a certain color in creating images of characters, in describing the setting and semantic content of the ideological content of the work and its screen interpretations. The object of study is color as a meaning-forming concept in literature and cinema, the symbolism of color. The (...) work of Francis S. Fitzgerald «The Great Gatsby» is of interest in the study of the influence of color palette. The main research methods are analytical and comparative historical. The color concepts of F. S. Fitzgerald's book “The Great Gatsby” and film adaptations are comprehended. This work by F. S. Fitzgerald is of interest to the modern Russian reader and viewer due to the fact that the problems raised in the novel are still relevant today. The writer touches on the popular theme of the American dream in literature and cinema. The story of the main characters is a vivid example of the illusory nature of this dream, and the lifestyle of the characters and their worldview demonstrate spiritual emptiness and cold indifference to everything except money and wealth. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the study of the ambivalence of perception of the coloristic solution of the images of characters in the book in comparison with its screen interpretations. The author comes to the conclusion that F. S. Fitzgerald in the novel «The Great Gatsby» uses a color palette in creating images of characters and describing the scene in such a way that the ambiguity in the perception of color most unexpectedly and sharply emphasizes the problems raised and becomes the basis for rethinking the ideological content of the work. (shrink)

The art of traditional painting and ceramic painting in China has a long tradition, in particular in understanding the role of color in the compositional and semantic structure. The principles of creating a color image have long been associated with national peculiarities of perception of shades and their combinations, as well as philosophical ideas. Technological features and properties of glazes imposed certain restrictions on the use of expressive possibilities of color by Chinese ceramic artists. The object of (...) this research is the works of Chinese painting and ceramics, the subject is the principles of color formation in these arts. Particular attention is paid to identifying similarities in approaches to color transfer in paintings and ceramics. The author's special contribution to the study of the problem is an attempt to characterize and compare the role of color in the art of Chinese painting and ceramic painting. The article defines a number of general principles of correlation and harmonization of colors in the two arts. The traditions of the color formation of works of various epochs are traced, the peculiarities of their evolution are established, the colors characteristic of painting and painting ceramics of different historical periods are revealed. The article examines the essence and symbolism of different colors, which are based on national philosophical and cultural ideas. The conclusion is made about the significance of the color image and color formation for the works of ceramics and painting in China. (shrink)

Traditional Chinese landscape painting serves as a profound cultural and spiritual expression, reflecting the Chinese people's reverence for nature through symbolic representation, aesthetic philosophy, and artistic craftsmanship. Since its emergence during the Tang Dynasty, landscape painting evolved into a distinct art form characterized by spiritual contemplation and cultural symbolism. Its development through the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties led to the establishment of northern and southern schools, each with its unique techniques and philosophical underpinnings. In modern society, technological (...) advancements and the influence of Western art have posed new challenges and opportunities for landscape painting. This study explores the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of landscape elements in traditional Chinese art while examining innovative techniques that merge classical aesthetics with modern artistic expressions. Through analyzing the works of key landscape painters, the study highlights advancements in thematic representation, stylistic innovation, and symbolic meaning, offering insights into how traditional landscape painting can be revitalized in contemporary art while preserving its cultural and spiritual heritage. (shrink)

Cet article a pour but de retracer, à partir de l’exemple des étendards polonais du xxe siècle, la genèse et le fonctionnement à travers le temps de cet important support identitaire. L’iconographie et la chromatique vexillologique ont un rôle précis à jouer dans la transmission intergénérationnelle de la mythologie nationale. À partir d’un échantillon thématique de bannières des immigrées polonaises en France, nous nous interrogerons sur l’évolution ou l’immuabilité de cet imaginaire spécifique conditionné non seulement par le temps et l’espace, (...) mais surtout par le besoin collectif de représentation. This article aims to trace selected examples of Polish flags from the 20th century, focusing on their meaning and function, as they were crucial to cultural identity. This is also how the iconography or the color of the flags played an important role in shaping the intergenerational transmission of national and private mythology. Our goal is to show the evolution, as well as the timelessness of this imagery, on the basis of thematically and chronologically circumscribed sets of examples of twentieth century Polish émigré flags from Northern France, where they played an important social and political role. (shrink)

A simply written and beautifully illustrated collection of meditations, this book explores each year and phase of life. Hans Korteweg, a well-respected Jungian scholar, offers simple yet profound insights into the qualities, challenges, and possibilities each cycle of life brings to one's lifelong journey toward happiness and fulfillment. Full-color illustrations.

This paper examines the color symbolic values in two different and unrelated languages, Arabic and English. It analyses the colors mentioned in the Qur’an semiotically and their translation based on Peirce’s semiotic model of sign interpretation, while considering the socio-cultural differences that influence the understanding and rendering of color signs, informed by corpus-based analysis. Although the Qur’an contains the most basic colors like other languages, the semiotic values of some colors are different. The study shows that colors in (...) the Qur’an, and Arabic in general, are tightly linked to the environment and culture of the early Muslims who received the Qur’an first-hand from the Prophet. These colors as situated in their culture could appear positively or negatively to users in other languages in a way that is not intended in the source text. Therefore, the translator’s awareness of the socio-cultural signs could bridge the gap between the different systems of codification and recodification of signs. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the role of stained glass in the visual semiosis of religious buildings in Crimea. The object of the study is the stained glass decor of the sacred architecture of the Crimea. The research uses the methods of cultural (hermeneutic and semiotic) and artistic (idiographic and structural) analysis of stained glass art in the sacred space of Crimean architecture, the method of analysis of previous studies, the method of synthesis in conclusions regarding the development of (...) stained glass in the Crimean cult architecture. In the study, the authors considered the following areas of the topic: the development of stained glass art of the Crimea in sacred architecture; the meaning of color and subject symbols in stained glass compositions of religious buildings of the Crimea. The main conclusions of the study are: 1. Stained glass art, more precisely, its subject component, is not authentic for the Crimea, it appears in the decor of residential and public buildings during the late XIX century, the beginning of the eclecticism of Art Nouveau and imitation of Gothic and Byzantine models. Colored glass in earlier periods decorated the windows of well-to-do houses of representatives of various Crimean ethnic groups, however, stained glass as a phenomenon was not characteristic of sacred structures. 2. Due to its geographical location, Crimea is a multicultural and multi-confessional territory, where various religious trends developed: ancient pantheism, Byzantine Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism with the colonization of Catherine's time, Islam, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Judaism. Stained glass windows in religious buildings of various faiths, in addition to decorative function, play a symbolic role, conveying through color, symbolism of abstract and object forms one or another sacred meaning. 3. A special contribution of the authors to the study of the topic is the cataloging, art history and cultural description of examples of stained glass art in the sacred architecture of the Crimea. The scientific novelty of the study is that the authors for the first time carry out an ontological analysis of stained glass art in the sacred visual semiosis of the Crimea and analyze its semiotic aspects. (shrink)

This Special Issue comes at a time when African countries and the Global South in general are facing unprecedented crises in securing energy to power their economies. The crises are necessitated largely by the developed Western countries exerting enormous power and pressure upon the developing world to move away from fossil fuels, while at the same time the West is increasing its uptake on fossils. However, with critical self-reflection we are able to understand that a crisis of this nature is (...) not without historical precedence, as it is preceded by a series of other forms of injustices meted out upon the formerly and still colonized peoples. And not long ago, the COVID-19 pandemic on the health front, and the handling thereof, showed just how skewed and divided the world still is and laid bare race-laden inequalities both at local and global levels. So to be sure, the current crises are part of the history of struggle against race-based social injustices and demonstrate Western desire to continue its stranglehold over its former colonies. And although the energy transition is dubbed the “Just Energy Transition,” for those in the developing world who are negatively affected, there is clearly nothing “Just” about it. So whereas we generally tend to speak of social or historical injustices such as the energy crises and COVID-19, at an epistemological front we find cognitive injustice. Accordingly, the articles in this issue contribute to a series of responses by the anticolonial movement (broadly defined) in relation to injustice, particularly its epistemological ramifications on knowledge and knowledge production in the relation between the colonizer and the colonized, the center and the periphery. Furthermore, the historical exclusion of African and other non-European peoples from participation in reason had the effect that Africans in particular were precluded from philosophy itself, a phenomenon that African philosophy and associated disciplines are today still grappling with in the academy. So in a word, the articles make an important contribution insofar as reckoning with the impact that race and the history of racism has had in philosophy in particular, both as a discipline and as a human mental activity.It should be remembered that the exclusion of Africans from reason and eventually from philosophy is preceded by an earlier one, the exclusion of Africans from recognition at a human level, qua rational beings. One can talk of a history of depersonalizations and dehumanizations; of massacres and deracination inflicted upon the oppressed owing to the colonial encounter. This is why for a scholar and a philosopher of the periphery, to use Enrique Dussel’s term, philosophical inquiry cannot and ought not be divorced from human reality. In fact, scholars of the periphery often stress the need for philosophy not to abstract too much from reality; and for philosophy to confine itself with liberatory human ends, among other things. There are a number of thinkers of the periphery who famously harp upon this point. For instance, Lewis Gordon has introduced the concept of “disciplinary decadence” by which he laments the fetishization of methods and whereby disciplines become an end in themselves, thus not necessarily serving human needs. Other thinkers in this school of thought include the likes of Enrique Dussel, Charles Mills, Cornel West, Angela Davis, and George Yancy to mention but a few. Yancy speaks of the “Density project” with which he has a normative injunction upon Black philosophers. In a similar vein, Dussel remarks in the Philosophy of Liberation that “Philosophy, when it is really philosophy and not sophistry or ideology, does not ponder philosophy. It does not ponder philosophical texts, except as a pedagogical propaedeutic to provide itself with interpretive categories. Philosophy ponders the nonphilosophical; the reality.”1 This reality, as is averred, is in existential phenomenology, not merely objective reality or perhaps something out there existing on its own accord, but rather it is what Jean-Paul Sartre associates with “human reality,” which is reality as lived by people of flesh and blood. So in a world demarcated between center and periphery, human beings and subhumans, whites and Blacks, the anticolonial thinker cannot afford not to raise questions relating to social existence, “the reality.” Thus for those in the academy, one must be able to come to terms with the reality of non-Western and “non-scientific knowledges” (after Boaventura De Sousa Santos) not being recognized as credible knowledge, coupled with the possibility of being forgotten, of being completely wiped out from history. And, as we see with Bernard Matolino’s article in particular, this is the battle that African philosophy has vigorously had to deal with in the previous two or three decades.In the Western canon, philosophy is generally taken to begin with the Greeks and this, as is observed, is no historical accident but forms part of a project to relegate previous philosophical traditions to relative obscurity, and to preclude the rest of humanity from participation in reason. The idea is that for Western modernity to be a viable project, oppressed cultures must out of necessity be denied reason. On this very point, Frantz Fanon would remark in Black Skin White Masks in the following manner: “That victory [on the rational front] played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer.”2 In this regard Mogobe Ramose’s article notes how the Aristotlean concept of man as a rational animal becomes a misnomer insofar as this relates to the Black person. With this sleight of hand, previous civilizations such as the African (Egyptian) and Arab traditions in philosophy are supposed to vanish from history and from the epistemological landscape. In this regard, Mills’s insights will continue to haunt philosophy well into the future, long after his passing. Mills had noted that a typical philosophy program in the Westernized university will normally start off with the two Greek philosophers, namely Plato and Aristotle. From here it moves to cover the Middle Ages and probably end with theories on liberalism. And although this period covers a history of more than two thousand years of Western philosophy, there will be little or no mention of traditions that shaped philosophical thought prior to the Greeks.The above notwithstanding, the articles in this issue show, however, that not only are Africans and oppressed peoples endowed with reflective reason, but that they also possess a unique brand of philosophy. By and large, the articles not only affirm the epistemological standpoint of African philosophy but show its own genealogy, discourse, and objectives among other things.With these short remarks, the following articles cut across these thematic areas: metaphysics of race, epistemic racism, racial ontology, feminism, and decolonial literature. Accordingly, the article by Bernard Matolino begins by delving into the metaphysics of race and notes that while there is no proof that there are distinct races (after Kwame Appiah), race as a matter of social life is alive and relevant. Further, his article goes on to demonstrate how African philosophy emerged as a form of protest and native philosophers’ need to show that indigenous peoples always had a philosophy. In a similar vein, Edwin Etieyibo’s article discusses epistemic racism, and how color prejudice historically translated to other forms of racial injustices such as epistemic racism. His article makes use of the works of such thinkers as Anibal Quijano and Ramon Grosfoguel to trace the genealogy of such injustices in the modern period.Siphiwe Ndlovu’s article looks into the problem of Black marginality, particularly in the modern period. He locates his musings within the social contract tradition but suggests a reading of contemporary marginality through the lens of Mills’s racial contract. Accordingly, instead of seeing Black marginality as a function of exclusion or being cast outside the contract, the article argues that such marginality is due not from exclusions per se but rather from inclusion albeit only as junior—and therefore inferior—partners in the racial contract.Mogobe Ramose’s article begins by endorsing Kwasi Wiredu’s view that there is nothing wrong with African philosophy being preoccupied with questions that are not exactly identical to those of non-African philosophies. Furthermore, his article traces, through D. M. Goldenberg, the roots of anti-Black racism from “colour symbolism” among the Arabs in the classical world, through the Rabbinic era, and later taking the form of race prejudice in Christianity. At the crux of his article is the argument that the prevailing practice of fragmenting the human race into multiple bits and pieces is against the pursuit of justice and peace in human relations.The article by Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse considers Anika Mann’s arguments on race and feminist standpoint as an existential standpoint and foundation. She takes up Mamphela Ramphele’s initial autobiography, Mamphela Ramphele: A Life, to critically reflect on what the actions of “non-subservient Blackwomen” reveal about the lived experience of being Black and a woman under Apartheid South Africa.The article by Siseko Kumalo infuses decolonial and literary criticism as projects that may allow for a recognition of the “ontological legitimacy” of amaqaba (those who rejected colonial influences and education). Through a close reading of S. E. K. Mqhayi’s Intshayelelo: Imbali, the article engages with the question How does a model of inclusive national identity in South Africa, once established, get us to the point of recognition for the Indigene? (shrink)

Georges Seurat, one of the most popular and admired of post-Impressionist painters, has been the focus of much attention in recent years. This book by Paul Smith views the artist in a new context and explodes some of the myths that have grown up about him. Challenging the assumption that Seurat's work was scientific or that it expressed a serious commitment to anarchism, Smith instead traces the painters involvement with the various factions of the avant-garde and shows that he was (...) perhaps the earliest exponent of Idealism in modern art. Smith studies contemporary interpretations of Impressionism and analyzes how the groups surrounding Seurat constructed meaning from his art. From this investigation he creates a portrait of Seurat as one who was willing to accept, even encourage, interpretations of his art that he may not have intended. Smith shows, for example, that the "scientific" account of Seurat's color first developed by Félix Fénéon actually represents the theory and practice of Pissaro. He examines Seurat's involvement with anarchist critics and concludes that he merely posed as a painter with left-wing sympathies in order to benefit from the publicity these writers gave him. He explains that Seurat was sympathetic to Symbolism from its very inception and that he and his early Symbolist critics developed a theory of his art that was founded on Schopenhauer and Wagner's ideas on art. And he explores the ways that Seurat focused on the musicality of art and on incorporating certain "musical" features in his work. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, this book presents a convincing new interpretation of the work of a major artist. (shrink)

The objective of the study is to trace the evolution of costume design in the Song Dynasty, highlighting key aesthetic influences, materials, and techniques employed in clothing creation and to explore the underlying aesthetic principles and thoughts that guided costume creation in the Song Dynasty, including notions of beauty, harmony, and symbolism. This study try to investigate the specific materials and techniques used in creating Song Dynasty costumes and their impact on the overall aesthetic value, considering aspects such as (...) fabric, embroidery, dyeing, and tailoring methods. In the course of the aesthetic study, this study looked very closely at artworks from the Song Dynasty in an effort to comprehend the aesthetic concepts such as beauty, harmony, and symbolism that influenced costume design during that time period. During the materials and techniques investigation, this study used scientific approaches to get a better understanding of the materials that were used in the production of the costumes. Additionally, this study worked with specialists to get a more in-depth examination of the processes used for dyeing, embroidery, and tailoring. According to the findings, the aesthetic ideals that guided costume production underwent a process of evolution during the course of the Song Dynasty. During the early decades of the 20th century, there was an emphasis placed on elegance and harmony with nature. This is shown in the usage of delicate silks and subtle floral designs at the time. When Neo-Confucianism became more popular, ideas of integrity and symmetry began to influence costume design (Table 1 and Table 2). This resulted in color combinations that were more harmonious and the integration of yin-yang symbols.. Pseudo-evidence on silk, sophisticated needlework, state of the art natural coloring procedures and ahead tailoring techniques demonstrate how such components played their particular part towards the attractiveness of cloth products made under Song Dynasty. Firstly this research gives an understanding of the interplay diverse influences such as changing circumstances from historical, cultural and artistic perspectives that fused together to form a rich legacy in beauty and elegance that adds immensely to the understanding of the aesthetic nature of costume design throughout Song Dynasty. (shrink)

The article deals with the contemporary processes in the field of heraldry in Luhansk region limited by the chronological framework of the early 90's of the twentieth century till the present time. The choice of the theme is determined by the fact that no comprehensive analysis of the development of the city emblem has been made. It is also necessary to make historical and professional analysis of all its aspects, namely the peculiarities of its development, the features of the symbols (...) of city signs, the problems of creation and confirmation of new emblems. The author has studied the specific features of the heraldry formation in the region using periodical materials, documentary sources and images of emblems. The paper has traced the debates as of the re-approval of historical emblems of Luhansk and its evolution. A number of modern municipal emblems have been analyzed as regards their subject matter, color and symbols. The compliance of the emblem with the heraldry rules has been found out; their disadvantages have been described and proposal of their improvement have been suggested. It has been concluded that the modern heraldic process in the Luhansk region is characterized by simultaneous coexistence of professional and amateur emblem formation. According to the author's calculations, 28 of 37 cities are provided with municipal emblems but most of them must be improved because of their uniformity, colors congestion and low artistic level of accomplishment. The author cities the heraldry developments of specialists, members of Ukrainian Heraldry Society A.Zakoretskoho and O.Zhytnychenko as an example of successful emblems that correspond to classical heraldry and have a deep original symbolism. (shrink)

From the Introduction: The papers collected in this book are based on the assumption that art, as any other activity of the mind, is subject to psychology, accessible to understanding, and needed for any comprehensive survey of mental functioning. The author believes, furthermore, that the science of psychology is not limited to measurements under controlled laboratory conditions, but must comprise all attempts to obtain generalizations by means of facts as thoroughly established and concepts as well defined as the investigated situation (...) permits. Therefore the psychological findings offered or referred to in these papers range all the way from experiments in the perception of shape or observations on the art work of children to broad deliberations on the nature of images or of inspiration and contemplation. It is also assumed that every area of general psychology calls for applications to art. The study of perception applies to the effects of shape, color, movement, and expression in the visual arts. Motivation raises the question of what needs are fulfilled by the production and reception of art. The psychology of the normal and the disturbed personality searches the work of art for manifestations of individual attitudes. And social psychology relates the artist and his contribution to his fellow men. A systematic book on the psychology of art would have to survey relevant work in all of these areas. My papers undertake nothing of the kind. They are due to one man's outlook and interest, and they report on whatever happened to occur to him. They are presented together because they turn out to be concerned with a limited number of common themes. Often, but unintentionally, a hint in one paper is expanded to full exposition in another, and different applications of one and the same concept are found in different papers. I can only hope that the many overlappings will act as unifying reinforcements rather than as repetitions. These papers represent much of the output of the quarter of a century during which I have been privileged to live, study, and teach in the United States. To me, they are not so much the steps of a development as the gradual spelling-out of a position. For this reason, I have grouped them systematically, not chronologically. For the same reason, I did not hesitate to change the words I wrote years ago wherever I thought I could clarify their meaning. Removed from my original intimacy with the content, I approached the text as an unprepared reader, and when I stumbled, I tried to repair the road. In some instances, I recast whole sections, not in order to bring them up to date, but in the hope of saying better what I meant at the time. Some of the earlier papers led to my book, _Art and Visual Perception_, which was written in 1951 and first published in 1954- Sections of the articles on perceptual abstraction, on the Gestalt theory of expression, and on Henry Moore are incorporated in that book. Others continued where the book left off, for instance, the attempts to describe more explicitly the symbolism conveyed by visual form. The short piece on inspiration provided the substance for the introductory chapter on creativity in my more recent book, Picasso's Guernica. Finally, in rereading the material, I was surprised to find how many passages point to what is shaping up as my next task, namely, a presentation of visual thinking as the common and necessary way of productive problem solving in any human activity. Ten of the papers in this book were first published in the _Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism_. To mention this is to express my indebtedness to the only scholarly periodical in the United States devoted to the theory of art. In particular, Thomas Munro, its first editor, showed a great trust in the contribution of psychology. He made me feel at home among the philosophers, art historians, and literary critics whose lively propositions inhabit the hostel he founded and sustained. To him, as well as to my friends of the University of California Press, who are now publishing my fourth book, I wish to say that much of what I thought about in these years might not have been cast into final writing, had it not been for their sympathy, which encouraged the novice and keeps a critical eye on the more self-assured pro. There are a few scientific papers here, originally written for psychological journals but free, I hope, of the terminological incrustation that would hide their meaning from sight. There are essays for the educated friend of the arts. And there are speeches, intended to suggest practical consequences for art education, for the concerns of the artist, and for the function of art in our time. These public lectures are hardly the products of a missionary temperament. In fact, I marveled why anybody would go to a theorist for counsel, illumination, and reassurance in practical matters. However, when I responded to such requests I noticed, bewildered and delighted, that some of my findings pointed to tangible applications, which were taken to be useful. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Sources for Hume's Opening Remarks to Treatise LIVJII Graham Solomon Hume opens Book I, Part IV, Section III of the Treatise with these remarks: Several moralists have recommended it as an excellent method ofbecoming acquainted with our own hearts, and knowing our progress in virtue, to recollect our dreams in a morning, and examine them with the same rigour, that we wou'd our most serious and deliberate actions. (...) Our character is the same throughout, say they, and appears best where artifice, fear, and policy have no place, and men can neither be hypocrites with themselves nor others. The generosity, or baseness of our temper, our meekness or cruelty, our courage or pusilanimity, influence the fictions of the imagination with the most unbounded liberty, and discover themselves in the mostglaring colours. Who were these moralists? One looks in vain in the work of Malebranche, Locke, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson for such a recommendation. Did anyone make that recommendation? One moralist who did was "John Shadow," in a letter to Joseph Addison published in The Spectator, no. 586, 27 August 1714. Addison introduces Shadow's letter with the remark that it "is built upon a thought that is new, and very well carried on; for which Reasons I shall give it to the Publick without Alteration, Addition, or Amendment." I quote at length, for easy comparison with Hume: Sir, It was a good Piece of Advice which Pythagoras gave to his Scholars. That every Night before they slept they should examine what theyhad been a doing that Day, and so discover what Actions were worthy of Pursuit to Morrow, and what little Vices were to be prevented from slipping unawares into a Habit. If I might second the Philosopher's Advice, it should be mine, That in a morning before my Scholar rose, he should consider what he had been about that Night, and with the Volume XVI Number 1 57 GRAHAM SOLOMON same Strictness, as if the Condition, he has believed himself to be in, was real. Such a Scrutiny into the Actions ofhis Fancy must be of considerable Advantage, for this Reason, Because the Circumstances which a Man imagines himself in during Sleep, are generally such as entirely favour his Inclinations good or bad, and give him imaginary Opportunities of pursuingthem to the utmost; so thathis Temper will lye fairly open to his View, while he considers howitis moved when free from those Constraints which the Accidents ofreal Life put it under. Dreams are certainly the Result of our waking Thoughts, and our daily Hopes and Fears are what give the mind such nimble Relishes of Pleasure, and such severe Touches ofPain, in its Midnight Rambles. AMan that murders his Enemy, or deserts his Friend in a Dream, had need to guard his Temper against Revenge and Ingratitude, and take heed that he be not tempted to do a vile thing in Pursuit of false, or the Neglect of true Honour... I think it has been observed in the Course of your Papers, how much one's Happiness or Misery may depend upon the Imagination: ofwhich Truth those strange Workings ofFancy in Sleep are no inconsiderable Instances; so that not only the Advantage a Man has ofmaking Discoveries ofhimself, but a Regard to his own Ease or Disquiet, may induce him to accept ofmy Advice... Shadow has been identified as the poet John Byrom by various of the later editors of The Spectator? Of these, D. F. Bond footnotes Byrom's reference to Pythagoras, noting the publication in English of André Dacier's The Life ofPythagoras, with his Symbolism and Golden Verses; together with the Life ofHierocles, and his Commentaries upon the Verses. Bond notes Hierodes' comments on the following Verses: Never suffer Sleep to close thy Eye-lids, after thy going to Bed, Till thou hast examin'd by thy Reason all thy Actions of the Day Wherein have I done amiss? What have I done? What have I omitted that I ought to have done? If in this Examination, thou find that thou hast done amiss, reprimand thy self severely for it: And if thou has done any Good, rejoice. Dacier cites Porphyry and Marcus Aurelius... (shrink)

From the Introduction: The papers collected in this book are based on the assumption that art, as any other activity of the mind, is subject to psychology, accessible to understanding, and needed for any comprehensive survey of mental functioning. The author believes, furthermore, that the science of psychology is not limited to measurements under controlled laboratory conditions, but must comprise all attempts to obtain generalizations by means of facts as thoroughly established and concepts as well defined as the investigated situation (...) permits. Therefore the psychological findings offered or referred to in these papers range all the way from experiments in the perception of shape or observations on the art work of children to broad deliberations on the nature of images or of inspiration and contemplation. It is also assumed that every area of general psychology calls for applications to art. The study of perception applies to the effects of shape, color, movement, and expression in the visual arts. Motivation raises the question of what needs are fulfilled by the production and reception of art. The psychology of the normal and the disturbed personality searches the work of art for manifestations of individual attitudes. And social psychology relates the artist and his contribution to his fellow men. A systematic book on the psychology of art would have to survey relevant work in all of these areas. My papers undertake nothing of the kind. They are due to one man's outlook and interest, and they report on whatever happened to occur to him. They are presented together because they turn out to be concerned with a limited number of common themes. Often, but unintentionally, a hint in one paper is expanded to full exposition in another, and different applications of one and the same concept are found in different papers. I can only hope that the many overlappings will act as unifying reinforcements rather than as repetitions. These papers represent much of the output of the quarter of a century during which I have been privileged to live, study, and teach in the United States. To me, they are not so much the steps of a development as the gradual spelling-out of a position. For this reason, I have grouped them systematically, not chronologically. For the same reason, I did not hesitate to change the words I wrote years ago wherever I thought I could clarify their meaning. Removed from my original intimacy with the content, I approached the text as an unprepared reader, and when I stumbled, I tried to repair the road. In some instances, I recast whole sections, not in order to bring them up to date, but in the hope of saying better what I meant at the time. Some of the earlier papers led to my book, _Art and Visual Perception_, which was written in 1951 and first published in 1954- Sections of the articles on perceptual abstraction, on the Gestalt theory of expression, and on Henry Moore are incorporated in that book. Others continued where the book left off, for instance, the attempts to describe more explicitly the symbolism conveyed by visual form. The short piece on inspiration provided the substance for the introductory chapter on creativity in my more recent book, Picasso's Guernica. Finally, in rereading the material, I was surprised to find how many passages point to what is shaping up as my next task, namely, a presentation of visual thinking as the common and necessary way of productive problem solving in any human activity. Ten of the papers in this book were first published in the _Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism_. To mention this is to express my indebtedness to the only scholarly periodical in the United States devoted to the theory of art. In particular, Thomas Munro, its first editor, showed a great trust in the contribution of psychology. He made me feel at home among the philosophers, art historians, and literary critics whose lively propositions inhabit the hostel he founded and sustained. To him, as well as to my friends of the University of California Press, who are now publishing my fourth book, I wish to say that much of what I thought about in these years might not have been cast into final writing, had it not been for their sympathy, which encouraged the novice and keeps a critical eye on the more self-assured pro. There are a few scientific papers here, originally written for psychological journals but free, I hope, of the terminological incrustation that would hide their meaning from sight. There are essays for the educated friend of the arts. And there are speeches, intended to suggest practical consequences for art education, for the concerns of the artist, and for the function of art in our time. These public lectures are hardly the products of a missionary temperament. In fact, I marveled why anybody would go to a theorist for counsel, illumination, and reassurance in practical matters. However, when I responded to such requests I noticed, bewildered and delighted, that some of my findings pointed to tangible applications, which were taken to be useful. (shrink)

The role of the reader is central to the epistolary genre because the letters anticipate a reader within the novel's framework. There is the letter's intended recipient , the occasional interceptor, the invented publisher and/or editor who organize the collected correspondence, and the extrafictional reader who reads the collection in its entirety, including the disclaiming or condemning prefaces which precede it. The epistolary form, however, with so many layers of readers, considerably complicates the issue of reader response. If we share, (...) for example, Stanley Fish's assumption that "literature is in the reader," the epistolary novel apparently reverses the formula: the reader is in the literature.And yet it is in the novel of letters that the reader, the fictional reader, most clearly creates the text. Let us return to Merteuil's admonishment to Cécile: "Voyez donc à soigner davantage votre style…. Vous voyez bien que, quand vous écrivez à quelqu'un, c'est pur lui et non pas pour vous: vous devez donc moins chercher à lui dire ce que vous pensez, que ce qui lui plaît davantage."2 If a reader's response to a given sentence is colored by the previous one, the epistolary novel achieves the same effect within a larger unit: each letter is determined by the one which precedes it. In this sense the letter is a grammatical unit, a larger sentence. Moreover, a letter-novel presents the possibility of an architectural as well as conceptual interruption. That is, whereas insufficiencies in a first-or third-person narrative must consist of circumlocutions, repetitions, and exclusions of information, the letter-novel can create a concrete insufficiency by a lost, suppressed, stolen, or interrupted letter. In such cases the letter must function without its precedent since the destinataire remains empty-handed. Thus, the epistolary novel has a great capacity for mise en abîme.Both inside and outside the narrative, there always is a destinataire; and even if he is the wrong one in the context of the récit he is the intended one for the histoire.3 In any case, the extrafictional reader is the final destinataire and holds a privileged position. And yet, he too is subject to interruptions: here the editor rears his head by claiming in footnotes that a letter is lost, too damaged to decipher, or so boring or obscene that he has seen fit to exclude it; these footnotes are the only "letters" addressed to and meant for us. At this point the editor removes his mask but remains on stage. Apart from such tricks, however, we do read every letter available, each of which is addressed to another reader, a system of the once removed or of the "letter in suffrance." Or, loosely interpreting Jacques Lacan, a purloined letter means that a letter always arrives at its destination.42. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liasons dangereuses , letter 105, p. 247; all subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and will be identified by letter and page number in the text. "Therefore attend more to your style....You must well know that, when you write to someone, it is for him and not for you: you must therefore seek less to tell him what you think, than what pleases him more"; here and elsewhere my translation.3. I am using the French terms of Gérard Genette to avoid confusion caused by English equivalents. "Récit is often translated as discourse, plot, narrative, subject, narration; histoire as story, events, myth, and so forth.4. See Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on'The Purloined Letter,'" trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 : 38-72; all further references to this work, abbreviated as "SPL," will be included in the text. The final sentence reads as follows: "Thus it is that what the 'purloined letter,' nay, the 'letter in suffrance' means is that a letter always arrives at its destination." What Lacan means by this statement has to do with the language of the unconscious, or of unconscious Desire. Each individual sends his own message of "truth" of identity. Earlier in this passage Lacan says: "The sender, we tell you , receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form." Françoise Meltzer is an associate professor of Romance language and literatures and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. Her previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse" and the translation of Christian Metz's "Trucage and the Film" . She is presently working on the relationship between rhetoric and psychoanalytic terminology. (shrink)

The author presents a varied menu of ideas and experiences in many areas - in research, in diagnosis, and in psychotherapy, each using art media with patients of all ages. She integrates art, phenomenology and gestalt psychology, describing specific techniques and findings. Part I of the book lays out the theoretical foundations and the techniques; Part II addresses the formal components used in art therapy - line, shape and colour in their interrelated dynamics and discusses other aspects and modes of (...) symbolic expression found in clients' work. Part III looks at symbolic expression through the scribble, offering a system of classification, diagnostic possibilities and case studies of work with eating disorders. Part IV focuses on art expression for art therapy diagnostics, including a method for qualitative diagnostics, and a first full diagnostic battery for adolescents. Part V is devoted to Holocaust children's art expressions, highlighting the power of art expression in children under ultimate stress, the intensity of their inner experience, and its visualization in the structure of the pictures. The book is for art therapists and advanced students. It can be used as a textbook on phenomenological art therapy; for therapeutically-oriented art teachers, educators and social workers; and for practicing psychotherapists, to see that art is a source of expression demonstrating how a person is. (shrink)

Eight papers followed by a discussion and an epilogue.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 115-120 [Access article in PDF] Commentary Seeing Cultural Conflicts Some years ago the great intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin made an important statement about what has become known as multiculturalism: We are urged to look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy, or judged in (...) terms of some one absolute standard.1He distinguishes such pluralism from relativism, which holds that different cultures (or individuals) have tastes or attitudes that are not objectively valid. Multiculturalism is, he thinks, an important position; relativism is not. Berlin describes what has now become a very familiar cliché. There are many diverse social systems. And since each has real value, we try to understand every other culture on its own terms.A great deal has been written recently about cultural conflicts. What can visual art show us about this subject, about relationships between radically opposed societies? Pre-modern civilizations were not usually tolerant of exotic cultures. Islam and Europe were often at war. "The menace of Islam was seen as something which threatened the souls as well as the bodies of Christian Europe."2 But although the Italians often fought with their Muslim neighbors, they did also import carpets to decorate the interiors of palaces and, in Venice, to adorn the facades of their homes.3 And many Venetian paintings depict these Islamic rugs. In Giovanni Mansueti's Miracles of the Bridge at San Lio (1494), now in the Accademia, Venice, or in Vittore Carpaccio's Meeting and Departure of the Betrothed (1490) showing the Episodes from the Life of St. Ursula, carpets are represented. In such pictures, the historian Paul Hills observes:... rich colours in soft textiles overlay the hardness of marble; and the eye of the Venetian painters and their public became attuned to fine degrees of hardness and softness, of fixity and pliancy, as when silken textiles move in a current of air but marbles stand fast. 4The Venetians were famous for incorporating alien artifacts, making them "their own without losing a sense of the exotic and the unfamiliar."5 And so it is unsurprising that painters freely inserted objects from another culture into works of art. The exotic decorative fabrics must surely have inspired the [End Page 115] Venetians. But because Islamic culture was foreign, Renaissance Europeans did not say much about the aesthetic qualities of these carpets.Representations of carpets are also found elsewhere in Italian art. The Siena Cathedral contains frescoes by Pinturicchio (1502-9) showing the life of Pius II, the fifteenth-century Pope. In the sixth scene, he enters Mantua to preside over the assembly called to mount an expedition against the Turks.6 (The venerable Christian capital Constantinople had just fallen to the Muslims.) On the table in the porch sheltering the Pope and his attendants, under some books, is a magnificent carpet. Even as these Christians plot, the room is decorated by art made by their enemies. Perhaps the carpet placed underfoot in this picture is treated as a trophy, like the flags of the defeated foes displayed in military museums. But often in other European paintings, Islamic rugs are depicted set on tables or hung from windows in ways that acknowledge their visual appeal.7Renaissance Italians seem to have had no concern with understanding Islamic carpets. Modern historians, by contrast, interested in the elaborate symbolism of these carpets, note that the rugs serve sacred functions.8 The Quran gives elaborate directions about how and when to pray. But it does not mention carpets. "Apart from mosque lamps the only other furnishing commonly found in mosques was some kind of floor covering," a historian explains.9 "The custom no doubt evolved from the religious requirement that all must enter the mosque unshod." Because carpets are used for prayer, both believers and Christians naturally associate them with religious observances. Non-Muslims also have long made use of these beautiful artifacts, sometimes cautiously—a fourteenth-century Spanish rabbi did say that a carpet depicting the Kaaba... (shrink)

While different groups of viewers may have sought different values in Cézanne's art, the artist's manner of painting and personality both contributed to the ambiguity of his work. Until the last decade of his life he seldom exhibited, and even then his paintings seemed unfinished. He was generally regarded as an "incomplete" artist and often as a "primitive," one whose art was in some way simple or rudimentary, devoid of the refinements and complexities of his materialistic, industrialized society.1 He was (...) seen as an isolated man who lived apart from other painters and found human relationship and communication difficult. Yet for some symbolists it was this alienation and mystery which made Cézanne's art so attractive. As early as 1891, Fénéon found it appropriate to refer to "the Cézanne tradition," a designation which indicates the influence of the legendary account of the artist promulgated by Gauguin and his associates.2 Gauguin had painted landscapes with the reclusive artist during the summer of 1881, was impressed by his odd style, both personal and pictorial, and in a letter to Emile Schuffenecker of 14 January 1885 described Cézanne as embodying the mysticism of the Orient.3 Such a characterization held special meaning for those like Gauguin who had come more and more to search for an ultimate truth in the experience of the mystical, the transcendental, the intensely real. For the symbolist painter or writer, primitives lived in harmony with the real world; they had an intuitive, mythic understanding of their environment. Most modern Europeans, in contrast, viewed the world through false and short-sighted analytic reason and thus saw only immediate causes and effects, not eternal universal principles. They were Christians who could not see the truth of Buddhism; they were socially indoctrinated Parisians who could not see the purer structure of human society in provincial Brittany; they were refined painters of nature who could not see the expressive power of a flat area of color surrounded by a broad outline. For Gauguin and the symbolists, Cézanne, living in isolation in his seemingly unsophisticated native Provence, qualified as an enlightened contemporary, an inspiring force, a primitive artist. · 1. For Cézanne as "incomplete," see, e.g. Thadée Natanson, "Paul Cézanne." Revue blanche 9 , p. 496; and Gustave Geoffrey, "Paul Cézanne" , in La Vie artistique , p. 218. For Cézanne as "primitive," see, e.g., Georges Lecomte, L'Arte impressionniste , pp. 30-31; and Maurice Denis, "Cézanne" , in Théories, 1890-1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, 2d ed. , p. 246. The late nineteenth-century notion of the "primitive" artist was very broad. Included in the category of primitives were artists of the ancient Orient, artists of the earlier stages of development of various Western styles , provincial or uneducated European artists, and those of contemporary non-European societies. With regard to the negative evaluation of modern Western European society, see, e.g., Victor de Laprade, Le Sentiment de la nature chez les modernes, 2d ed. , pp. 483-88; and Albert Aurier, "Essai sur une nouvelle méthode de critique" , "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin" , and "Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh" , in Oeuvres posthumes , pp. 202, 216, 262-63.· 2. Félix Fénéon, "Paul Gauguin" , in Oeuvres plus que complètes, ed. Joan Halperin, 2 vols. , 1:192.· 3. Lettres de Gauguin à sa femme et à ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue , p. 45. Félix Fénéon, André Mellerio, and Emile Bernard also associated Cézanne's style with mysticism. Richard Shiff is an associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written a related article, "The End of Impressionism: A Study of Theories of Artistic Expression". His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship" and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation". (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

In its first paragraphs the paper aims at presenting the key-concepts and problematic issues of the philosophy of colours developed by Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888-1966) in her essay Farben (1929). One of the most brilliant pupils of Husserl, Conrad-Martius developed a Realontologie of colours, a sophisticated description of their ontic genesis and structure, according to the realistic interpretation of phenomenology characteristic of the circles of Munich and Göttingen. While deeply indebted to Goethe’s morphological approach, Conrad-Martius’s doctrine was able to influence the (...) “rigorous” Kunstwissenschaft of Hans Sedlmayr and his school. The final paragraphs of the paper show how Sedlmayr, colleague of Conrad-Martius at the University of Munich in the Fifties, tried to make such a phenomenological-ontological perspective fruitful for the interpretation of images belonging to the domain of visual arts, insisting on the ontic roots of chromatic symbolism. (shrink)

Trucage then exists when there is deceit. We may agree to use this term when the spectator ascribes to the diegesis the totality of the visual elements furnished him. In films of the fantastic, the impression of unreality is convincing only if the public has the feeling of partaking, not of some plausible illustration of a process obeying a nonhuman logic, but of a series of disquieting or "impossible" events which nevertheless unfold before him in the guise of eventlike appearances. (...) In the opposite case, the spectator undertakes a type of spontaneous sorting out of the visible material of which the filmic text is composed and ascribes only a portion of it to the diegesis. The services of the department of agriculture have worked more quickly because they were approached in an appropriate manner: this amounts to the diegesis. The film makes light of this sudden rapidity; ironically, it exaggerates it: here is the intention, which amounts to the enunciation. In the exact degree to which this perceptible bifurcation is maintained, the connotated will be unable to pass for denotated, and there is no trucage. The optical effect has not merged with the usual game of the photograms, the entire visual material has not been mistaken for the photographic, the diegetization has not been total. Christian Metz, one of the foremost French theorists of the cinema, is the author of Essais sur le signification au cinéma, Propositions méthodologiques pour l'analyse du film, and Langage et cinéma. He is Sous-Directeur d'Etudes Suppléant à l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. This is the first English translation of "Trucage et cinéma," which appeared in Essais sur la signification au cinéma . Francoise Meltzer [the translator of this essay] is a professor of French literature and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Trial of Psychoanalysis, Salome and the Dance of Writing, and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. Her essay, "Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse," is published in Critical Inquiry in the Winter 1978 issue. (shrink)

The main conclusion of Nigel Hiscock's important but ill‐arranged book is that the ground plans of abbeys and cathedrals of the tenth and eleventh centuries incorporate Platonic wisdom—hence the “wise” in the title catchwords, which come from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians . There Paul likens himself to a sapiens architectus who lays the foundations on which others erect the building. In three of the four translations in The Complete Parallel Bible, however, Paul does not declare himself wise but, (...) rather, “skilled” or “trained.” The discrepancy makes an emblem for Hiscock's investigation: Did the architects deliberately express geometrical ratios significant in Platonic philosophy in their designs or did they proceed by applying their practical skill and training to the lie of the land and the resources available? A subsidiary question is also symbolized in Paul's verse: Was the designer a wise cleric who set the proportions and left the heavy work to someone else?Hiscock builds his answers in two ways. For one, he delivers a chrestomathy of Platonic snippets known in the tenth century and a few telling quotations from wise clerics—the latter concern the expression of significant numbers in the church fabric: a baptistery is octagonal because of an association between creation and the number eight, and a church with a half‐dozen altars is complete because of the perfection of the number six. But, Hiscock emphasizes, numerology does not account for floor plans, and to test the wisdom of the designers he scrutinizes plans of two dozen churches, especially those associated with monastic reformers. He expresses his results in color‐coded lines superposed on the plans, some one hundred of which comprise a valuable appendix.An example will indicate the interest of the findings and the riskiness of the business. The crossing of the transept at St. Michael's Abbey, Hildesheim, makes a square ABCD, proceeding clockwise from A in the northeast corner. AD and BC prolonged give the line of nave piers, AB and DC prolonged that of the arms of the transept. Lines drawn from B at angles of 54° and 60° with BC cut CD extended in E and F, respectively, locating the end piers in the side aisles. Now 60°, as the invariable angle of a three‐sided figure all of whose parts are equal, carries a cornucopia of Platonic and Christian symbolism. Also 54°, because derivable from a pentagon, has the pregnant significance of the figure five, which is the sum of the first male and first female numbers. Repetition of the transept square fixes the nave piers. Then lines between piers, pillars, and pilasters make the special angles with the north‐south and east‐west lines of the grid all over the plan.How much of this construction is mere coincidence? Requiring the intervals between piers in the same line to be equal, we have DE = FE = FD/2. And so it is: / = 0.51. Otherwise put, if angle FBC is 60° and E divides FD equally, angle EBC must be 54° without reference to a pentagon. Against such arguments, Hiscock observes that his analysis has uncovered previously unknown relations between churches confirmed by documents and that his technique, when applied to large nineteenth‐century buildings with repeated bays such as the Crystal Palace, picks out relatively few structurally significant elements.Hiscock is senior lecturer on the design, theory, and history of architecture at Oxford Brookes University and a master craftsman. His scrupulously prepared color‐coded drawings contain much of interest and pleasure for a geometer. Has he definitively answered the old vexed question whether the sapiens architectus intended to express ancient wisdom in his plans? If the architect thus proposed, did his builder faithfully dispose? Paul again may give guidance. “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile”. (shrink)

Probably colour is the best worked-out example of allegedly neurophysiologically innate response categories determining percepts and percepts determining concepts, and hence biology fixing the basic categories implicit in the use of language. In this paper I argue against this view and I take C. L. Hardin's Color for Philosophers [1988] as my main target. I start by undermining the view that four unique hues stand apart from all other colour shades (Section 2) and the confidence that the solar spectrum (...) is naturally divided into four categories (Section 3). For such categories to be truly universal, they have to be true for all peoples and in Section 4 I show that Berlin and Kay's [1969] widely quoted theory of basic colour categories is not sufficiently supported to lend it any credibility.Having disposed of the view that inspection of language or ‘pure’ perception unveils the universal colour categories. I turn to neurophysiological and psychophysical theories of colour vision to see whether they provide a more solid basis for deciding what the innate response categories are. In Section 5 I show that Hardin's account of the opponent-process theory neither supports his view that ‘colour-coding’takes place early in the visual neural pathway, nor his view that knowledge of colour vision science will help us solve many philosophical mysteries about colour.In Section 6 I give a more detailed review of what is known today about the neurophysiology of colour vision and I show that there's nothing in the brain which could be called a colour module, let alone a module with homunculi for particular basic colour categories. In Section 7 I show that psychophysical models do not support such rigid constraints on category formation either. Hence (Section 8), at least in the case of colour, current science supports a plasticity in the formation of categories that goes far beyond the requirements of those naturalistic philosophers who would like to ground primitive concepts in biology. (shrink)

Martine Nida-Rümelin (1996) argues that color science indicates behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion is possible and raises this possibility as an objection to functionalist accounts of visual states of color. I show that her argument does not rest solely on color science, but also on a philosophically controversial assumption, namely, that visual states of color supervene on physiological states. However, this assumption, on the part of philosophers or vision scientists, has the effect of simply ruling out certain (...) versions of functionalism. While Nida-Rümelin is quite right to search for empirical tests for claims about the nature of visual states, philosophical issues remain pivotal in determining the correctness of these claims. (shrink)

Perspectivalism is a semantic theory according to which the contents of utterances and mental states (perhaps of a particular kind) have a truth-value only relative to a particular perspective (or standard) determined by the context of the speaker, assessor, or bearer of the mental state. I have defended this view for epistemic terms, moral terms and predicates of personal taste elsewhere (Brogaard 2008a, 2008b, forthcoming a). The main aim of this paper is to defend perspectivalism about color perception and (...) color discourse. The content of color perception and color discourse, I will argue, has a truth-value only relative to an appropriate viewing condition and the perceiver, or a perceiver deferred to. (shrink)

This article considers distinct ways of understanding the world, referred to in psychology as Functions of Consciousness or as Cognitive Modes, having as the scope of interest epistemology and natural sciences. Inspired by C.G. Jung's Simile of the Spectrum, we consider three basic cognitive modes associated to: (R) embodied instinct, experience, and action; (G) reality perception and learning; and (B) concept abstraction, rational thinking, and language. RGB stand for the primary colors: red, green, and blue. Accordingly, a conceptual map between (...) cognitive modes and primary and secondary colors is built based on the physics and physiology of color perception and epistemological characteristics of the aforementioned cognitive modes, leading to logical relations structured as an Hexagon of Opposition. Finally, this model of cognitive modes is applied to the analysis and interpretation of some important episodes in the historical development of physics and technology. (shrink)

Colors are of philosophical interest for two kinds of reason. One is that colors comprise such a large and important portion of our social, personal and epistemological lives and so a philosophical account of our concepts of color is highly desirable. The second reason is that trying to fit colors into accounts of metaphysics, epistemology and science leads to philosophical problems that are intriguing and hard to resolve. Not surprisingly, these two kinds of reasons are related. The fact that (...) colors are so significant in their own right, makes more pressing the philosophical problems of fitting them into more general metaphysical and epistemological frameworks. (shrink)

The goal of the present paper is to defend against a certain line of attack the view that conscious experience of color is no more fine-grained that the repertoire of non- demonstrative concepts that a perceiver is able to bring to bear in perception. The line of attack in question is an alleged empirical argument - the Diachronic Indistinguishability Argument - based on pairs of colors so similar that they can be discriminated when simultaneously presented but not when presented (...) across a memory delay. My aim here is to show that this argument fails. (shrink)