Analysis Of Leo Tolstoy 's ' The French Artist '

According to Tolstoy, the true purpose of art is connected to our abilities to feel emotion. “To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art” (Tolstoy,66 ). Much like food is necessary for sustenance, art is necessary for our sympathetic capacities. In order for this form of communication to occur, the artist must have the capacity to express and transmit through his art, while the audience must have the capacity for sympathy in order to feel the artist’s expression. According to Tolstoy, simply transmitting an emotion is not enough to define art. A true work of art must be infectious to its audience and be able to express individual feelings lucidly and purposefully.

1. Plato and Tolstoy argued that art can be dangerous because audiences can identify with many of the characters portrayed in any specific work, and

To categorize art by such vague criteria as expression and form would be difficult if it were not for the several prevailing theories presented by Tolstoy and Bell. According to Tolstoy’s theory of expression, something is art only if it successfully does the following. First, it must have been created with the intention of being art and revealed to an audience through a publicly accessible medium, even if the audience is a single individual. These mediums must be physical things such as shapes, actions, or words in order to be available to its viewers. Second, the medium of art must be an individualized work that has not been replicated or mass-produced. Third, he believes that the art must convey the feeling or emotion that the artist experienced while producing the art. This emotion must also be evoked within the audience. Lastly, the work must require self-mediation or clarification in order to be interpreted by said audience as art. As a result, a work is not required to be about something in order to be art.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is an article about the life of famous artist, Marcel Duchamp and his reasoning behind his art pieces. By the time World War One broke out, Duchamp was disgusted by the works of other artists, claiming that they were working to only please the eyes and that there was no real meaning behind their works. Initially a traditional painter, painting impressionist paintings before shifting towards cubism, Duchamp was rejected by the artistic community, who claimed that his works were too different, even the Parisian

In the early eighteenth-century, a letter from Peter the Great’s court was sent to Russian publishers declaring that all material must be printed with the intention to maintain “The glory of the great sovereign and his tsardom and for the general usefulness and profit of the nation” (The Cambridge History of Russia). The effects of this proclamation reverberated throughout Russia for centuries and laid the foundation for future rulers such as Catherine the Great and later Alexander III to fortify the position of the censor. The strengthening of the Russian censor, consequently, manipulated and stifled the country’s most influential wordsmiths. No Russian writer was safe from the censor, not even a master like Leo Tolstoy. Specifically, in

The engulfing size of the painting (250.5 x 159.5 cm) drives the audiences mind into a hypnotic frenzy as they are overwhelmed by bright and sensual colours, which, have the ability to evoke deep emotions and realisations. Kandinsky has portrayed this through the disorientation of his own personal visions of society during the industrial revolution. The rough yet expressive outline of buildings, a rainbow and the sun gives reference to realism as it allows viewers to connect and understand underlying motifs and shapes yet is painted abstractly to move away from the oppressive and consumerist society. Thus, Kandinsky breaks boundaries through his innovative approach to his art-making practise concluded from his personal belief of ‘art for arts sake’. He believed that art should mainly convey the artist’s personal views and self-expressionism that translated a constant individuality throughout his work from an inner intentional emotive drive. This broke traditional boundaries as art in the renaissance period was meant to be a ‘narration’ or an artwork where an audience could learn and benefit from. This is evidently shown in Composition IV as it exemplifies Kandinsky’s inner feelings towards the industrialised society

In John Berger’s essay “Ways of Seeing,” he shares his view on how he feels art is seen. Mr. Berger explores how the views of people are original and how art is seen very differently. By comparing certain photographs, he goes on to let his Audience, which is represented as the academic, witness for themselves how art may come across as something specific and it can mean something completely different depending on who is studying the art. The author goes into details of why images were first used, how we used to analyze art vs how we do today, and the rarity of arts. He is able to effectively pass on his message by using the strategies of Rhetoric, which include Logos, Pathos, and Ethos.

For Tolstoy, the value of art comes from the function art serves in society and in human historical development. Art appears in everything that lives and should have the force to bring people together as a community. For him expressionism in art is a means of communication, in such as a language. Therefore, language can be described as a form of art under the theory of expressionism. Speech transmits the thoughts and experiences of mankind, serving as a means of expression among them; art also acts in a similar manner by sharing emotions. If people could not be affected by art, we would still be in the era of savagery. Referring back to the author of our book, John Fisher, emotional communication is essential to art. Fisher also states that too much harnessed emotion will tend to lower the value of art.

When I first saw this painting I knew it was the one I wanted to do for my formal analysis paper because of how abstract and unique the piece was. This painting can be taken in so many different ways, which is one thing I love about abstract art; not everyone is going to see the same thing. It fits into this class because it was from 1912, not from any recent time period. Kandinsky’s painting shows that since before 1912 people often times judge others, or objects, from their appearance rather than their inner

When a child draws, their art hangs on a refrigerator. However, when an adult imitates children’s drawings, their art hangs on a museum wall. Throughout Jean Dubuffet’s art career, he expressed this desire to emulated children’s art. But not only children’s art, he engrossed himself in the works created by asylum inmates. When children and the asylum inmates draw, their drawings spawn from a raw and natural place. Dubuffet connected to that “naïve” way of expression. Also, he found a barrier between himself and professional artists. In his mind, the production of art must emanate “in a completely spontaneous and immediate way”.

The most important trait in defining art is its beauty. As complex as the term “art” can be, the term “beauty” is nearly just as complicated. In order to understand art more clearly it is important to understand beauty. “We label an object beautiful because it promotes an internal harmony or ‘free play’ of our mental faculties; we call something ‘beautiful’ when it elicits this pleasure.” (Freeland 8). As defined above, beauty is not a direct message. It is something that subconsciously allows man to feel good and pleasurable. There is “an internal harmony” when we observe something beautiful that allows us to take away a deeper understanding of a work of art regardless of it being “nice looking” or “ugly”.

A work of art can capture a moment in a person’s life. When observing art it’s almost like a snapshot of a brief point in time. The artist tries to create this specific point, and within this creates a story or meaning. The art has something to say and the artist wants you to react or take something away from this experience. The reaction is the function of the specific work of art. Whether it’s a favorable or awful reaction, the viewer still walks away changed.

Leo Tolstoy compares art to speech by mentioning that art is a form of communication. The communication that Tolstoy writes about in “What Is Art?” is of two types, good and bad. According to Tolstoy, good art is what carries humanity towards perfection (Tolstoy 383). It is this movement forward in humanity that is emphasized by Tolstoy. Tolstoy informs his readers that speech is what teaches knowledge from human history, but art is what teaches the emotions of mankind’s past. As knowledge becomes obsolete in society it is replaced by new and more relevant information. Tolstoy asserts that emotions act the same way. The purpose of art is to express new and more relevant feelings to humankind. The new feelings are for the

In this essay I will analyze and evaluate how Duchamp’s exhibition of readymade objects changed the status and value of artistic authorship. Readymade is a term devised by Marcel Duchamp in 1915 to label manufactured objects remote from their practical setting and raised to the prestige of art by the action of an artist’s choice and label.

In a ‘tradition breaking spirit’ [D’Alleva, 2012], that characterised modernist artists, early in the twentieth century, Duchamp abandoned traditional ideas and techniques, to create a new kind of ‘art’, one that the idea behind a work of art is more important that its visual realization, the ‘retinal’. The ready-mades was the product of Duchamp’s questioning what art is.