The Brain-Eye

New Histories of Modern Painting

Eric Alliez, Jean-Clet Martin, Robin Mackay

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783480692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history, The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked ‘case studies’ in which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations unleashed by ‘painter-researchers.’
Rather than outlining a new ‘philosophy of art,’ The Brain-Eye details the singular problems pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne recount the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in his Colour Theory, in the name of a “true hallucination” and of a logic proper to the Visual.
A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art, The Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic revolution in modern painting.

Chapter 1

June 19, 1799—The Goethe Transformation

May God us keep

From Single vision and Newton’s sleep!

—William Blake, Poems from Letters

Closing my eyes and lowering my head, I was able to imagine a flower in the centre of my eye: and to perceive the flower in such a way that it did not remain even for a moment in its initial form, but spread out, and yet other flowers, with coloured as well as green leaves, continued to unfold from within. These were no natural flowers, but imaginary ones, and yet they were as regular as stonemasons’ rosettes. I could not fix this cascading creation, yet I could make it last as long as I wished, neither diminishing nor intensifying. I was able to produce the same effect by imagining the decoration of a coloured disc, which likewise ceaselessly transformed itself from centre to periphery, just like those kaleidoscopes that were only invented in our times.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Beiträge zur Morphologie

And what is seeing without thinking?

—Goethe, Italian Journey

1

The events that blossom in the eye, those uncommon colour events that Rousseau still associated with the sensibility of a distant boreal people, find in Goethe, from the time of his flight to Italy,1 the Künstler capable of bringing them back to the plane upon which they take shape, to constitute the profile and the animated depth of the visible. Pointing the way towards this refined enjoyment of ‘the world’s surface’2 of which ‘we Cimmerians’—enveloped in ‘eternal fog and gloom’ under the greyness of a ‘turbid [Trübe] sky’3—know nothing, the discovery of colour, ‘the ultimate art of colour’ (in the words of painter Philipp Otto Runge) will parallel the progressive discovery of the art of painting with a living art, an art of life in seeing that belongs to a ‘rebirth [Wiedergeburt]’, an Italian ‘second birth’, ‘remolding’ the poet ‘from within’, and which ‘is still in progress’.4 Like a flower at the centre of the field of vision that ‘forms unexpectedly’. . . .5

‘We thus identify with colour. It attunes the eye and mind in unison with it [Man identifiziert sich alsdann mit der Farbe; sie stimmt Auge und Geist mit sich unisono]’.6 Like an echo of that verse in the first act of Faust II (in a scene rewritten during the visit to Rome) which, as colours emerge from a grey ground, exalts in ‘this rainbow-hued [. . .] reflection’ that is none other than ‘life’, as the blinding whiteness of the sun ‘shin[ing] at my back’7 is rendered into the polychromatic creations of appearance, the Farbenlehre’s famous passages on this identification with colour emphasise the far from classical significance of an analysis of the experience of vision that will nonetheless distance itself from the heartfelt formulae of romantic pathos. (The latter will be mocked in the 1780 ‘dramatic fantasy’ entitled The Triumph of Sensibility). As announced from the time of Goethe’s return from Italy (approximately 1790), the requisite of immanence demands that vision be treated as an experience unshackled from any model foreign to the visible—even a poetic model given over to the inspiration of the Dichter . . . —because it is ‘nature as a whole’, become living, that through colour and light ‘manifests itself [. . .] in an especial manner to the sense of sight’,8 a nature, which the eye itself, in perceiving it, will begin to ‘speak’.9 Having thus renounced any attempt to trace, like Rousseau, the field of its harmonics from language, since one cannot ‘express clearly in words the effect a colorful object has on your eyes’,10 Goethe was of the opinion that the ‘difficult science of the theory of colours’11 does not take its lead from the object of knowledge either, according to the mechanistic model of light imposed by Newton’s prismatic experiment:

Until now light has been viewed as a kind of abstraction [eine Art von Abstraktum], an entity existing and acting by itself, determining itself in some way, and creating colour out of itself. To turn lovers of nature away from this mode of thinking, to make them aware that prismatic and other phenomena involve not an unbounded determinant light but rather [. . .] a luminous image [Lichtbild] [. . .]. This is the problem to resolve, the goal to be attained.12

To insist that this luminous image is not the result of the dispersion of light, of the mechanical division of an ‘abstract light [abstraktes Licht]’ within the prism (the ‘prismatic phantom’) and its diffraction into ‘rays’ according to the laws of optics, but instead the result of its limitation by ‘some darkness’ amounts to positing immediately that the Farbenlehre, qua doctrine of colours or Colour Theory, is no Treatise on the Rainbow for which ‘colours in their specific state [would be] contained in light as originary modes of light which only manifest themselves through refraction and other external conditions’.13 And that consequently it would be impossible to account for them with the mathematical model of a quantitative scale of colours obeying an abstract analogy with the notes of the musical scale (‘as the cube-roots of the squares of lengths of a monocord which produce the tones of an octave, the sol, la, fa, sol, la, mi, fa, sol, with all their intermediate degrees corresponding to the colours of those rays, in accordance with the established analogy’).14 To object, then, against Newton, and contrary to an account of light suggesting that it can be grasped externally as a given substance whose mechanism might be treated by physics, that ‘light is not visible qua light, but only when it appears in the form of an image’.15 This means that one must—like Aristotle, and those Greeks for whom ‘science gave forth life’16—hold to the sensible image itself, so as to submit colours to the living plane of the eye upon which they gain a sense that can account for the genesis of the visible; a plane that is not the wholly physical plane of a ‘real’ supposedly independent of the organ that perceives it, the retina that takes possession of it and, already, fosters within it aesthetic landscapes.

‘To destroy the aesthetic image is also to destroy truth’, as Simmel sums up in a landmark formula. Explaining this Goethean phenomenon, whose consequence—drawn in full by the author of the Farbenlehre—is that we must ‘conceive of science as an art’ in order to find in it ‘any kind of totality whatsoever’,17 Simmel writes,

Because beauty represents the incarnation of an ideal content in real being, to accord it overall supremacy is to abolish the fundamental opposition between the spiritual principle and the natural principle, between the subjective principle and the objective principle of being—it is to recognize the absurdity of such an opposition. This is why Goethe finds in beauty the infallible criteria for the correctness of knowledge: at the instant when the (material or intellectual) decomposition of the object annuls the beauty of its appearance, it also thereby proves the inexactitude of the results obtained. The dismemberment of nature ‘with levers and screws’ is a theoretical error because it is an aesthetic error.18

On the basis of Goethe’s chromatic analysis, Schopenhauer will reactivate on his own account this challenge to a nature derealised by Newtonian mechanism, and which takes ‘for extensive what is intensive, for mechanic what is dynamic, for quantitative what is qualitative, and for subjective what is objective, in that the object of [Newton’s] study was light when it should have been the eye’.19 It could not be clearer: the comprehension of colours, the analysis of their relations and their mixtures, relates to a ‘subjective’ retinal geography. The landscape of colour is condensed from the precincts of the eye; it must be referred back to the ocular sphere within which colour is immersed and differentiated by degrees of contraction and curvature, as the qualities of the perceived world are superposed within the intimacy of vision, and in order that they may be so superposed—like an image on a cone whose coordinates are deformed and reorganised according to a design and assemblage quite different from that of the objects supposedly reflected in it. For Schopenhauer, the world of colour is inseparable from a kind of anamorphosis unrelated to any ‘thing’, and which is hardly even ‘natural’ since it is entirely beholden to the subterra...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• 1 June 19, 1799—The Goethe Transformation
• 2 Delacroix and the Massacre of Painting
• 3 On the New Path of the Contemporary: The Manet Plane
• 4 Grey Times on La Grande Jatte (The Extraterrestrial/Seurat/The Machine-Eye)
• 5 Gauguin, or the Eye of the Earth
• 6 Ten Variations on Cézanne’s Concentric Eye
• List of Works Studied
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• About the Authors