I should like to thank Otávio Bueno for occasioning this research and providing insightful recommendations; as well as Juliette Ega, Max Profaizer, Juan Carlos Bosacoma IV, and William Ostergaard for their comments that spurred some of these ideas.
1Realist approaches to critiquing artworks often draw from classical or medieval conceptions of beauty and art. In the history of philosophy, these theories originated before the modern surge in surreal art, and so are not often applied to these works. Classical and medieval theorists surely had ideas of surreal stories in mythology and religion, but the artistic movement we today call surrealism did not exist for these scholars to analyze or incorporate into their ideas. These ideas had objective conceptions of beauty and broader classifications of art, seemingly running against the grain of the modern theories of taste and fine arts that developed alongside the surge of surrealism and abstract art. Admittedly, these aesthetic theories have been neglected in contemporary philosophical discourse. Aristotle and Plato receive mention, but either as figures in the history of thought or as adapted to modern sensibilities. St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the largest medieval philosophers, is hardly mentioned at all. Nevertheless, there is something crucial about these classical and medieval conceptions of art and beauty that seem to fill gaps in our aesthetic thinking. While some will see these older theories as trite, outlived, or restrained, I believe the versatility of these ideas serves well in analyzing wide ranges of art. If a realist theory, created to explain the beauty and craftsmanship of classical Greek, Roman, and Christendom art, can explain salient critical features in modern artworks, such as surrealist ones, there would be much to say about its merits.
2Engaging in philosophical discourse about the merits of such a potentially eloquent theory ought to benefit the sphere of aesthetics. There is no doubt that contemporary aesthetic approaches It will profit us, then, to navigate through the aesthetic theory of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas in order to analyze surrealism through a realist lens. We will proceed to grasp these realist ideas as the method by which we discuss the merits of our selected art pieces and apply them to select pieces of art to create a paradigm for a realist approach to criticism of surrealist art. It must be admitted up front that our selection of artworks is not comprehensive, nor do they represent the totality of surrealism. Nevertheless, in choosing certain prevalent pieces by Salvador Dalí, we may point out some salient features within surrealist art that lend themselves to a realist aesthetic reading. In doing so, I hope to provide a new, overlooked paradigm for analyzing artworks that originally seemed to be incompatible with it.
3It would not be possible to analyze an array of artworks without a clear, coherent idea of art and beauty. I have referred to our approach as a “realist” one, but this must be explained. Realism in aesthetic theory, as I use it, should not be confused with realism in art, or the technique in art whereby the artist attempts to portray a scene with great detail. Instead, it refers to two key intertwined aspects: the objectivity of beauty and realist metaphysics. The realist conception of art, then, is much more metaphysical than other theories of tastes. Beauty, as we will see, is rooted in being, which is therefore predicable of an object and mind-independent, tying both key aspects of our theory together. Art, as well, is better understood from a metaphysical analysis of the work as an artifact. Keeping this in mind, we must relate both art and beauty to realist metaphysics in our discussion.
4To Aristotle, art involved the application of skill to a craft. The Greek word he used was techne, implying some sort of skillful productivity; as he says, “Every art is concerned with bringing something into being… Art, then, as we have said, is a productive state that is truly reasoned” (Aristotle, Ethics VI, iv). In this way, art can be considered in a very broad sense as the making of some work. The classic work by Sun Tzu is called The Art of War; we often hear about the “art of medicine,” a saying that has persisted from Galen’s works into modern medical practice; many practitioners of some craft would say that what they do is an “art.” Placing the label of “art” on these activities is by no means contrived but instead emphasizes the breadth and craftsmanship involved in all arts.
5As the practice of skillful production, as David Oderberg (2004: 69) says, “the artist… drinks copiously from the well of metaphysics.” In the act of production, the artist imposes a form upon some given proximate matter to create a new object. It is likely that the form imposed in production is accidental, thus creating an artifact, rather than substantial, but the very imposition of that accidental form causes it to nevertheless be something new when considered as a whole. It is not necessary for the artist to be aware of the metaphysics of their work, but the metaphysical reality shapes the work, nonetheless.
6When we consider art in a more refined sense, however, we find that the “fine arts” involved have a unified purpose in the making of their objects: representation. It is simple to see how paintings and statues can be considered representations, as they depict certain objects instead of comprising those same objects. Films and theater arts do the same, only as the objects are in motion. In other words, the painted tree is not identical with the real tree, and the actor is not identical to his character. Aside from visual art forms, music, literature, and poetry can be conceived as representational because they direct the imagination to certain concepts, feelings, or sensations that they convey.
- 1 Id quod visum placet. See Clarke 2001: 298.
- 2 This is not to discount the debate on whether beauty is a transcendental or not. For a viewpoint th (...)
7Beauty, on the other hand, relates to metaphysics in a more intimate way. In simple terms, it is “that which, contemplated, gives delight”1; but it ultimately embraces all universal being. In St. Thomas’s theory of the transcendentals, or terms which are convertible with being in reality but add to it in ratio, there is good reason to list beauty among them.2 Being is one insofar as any being is a unified being and not some other being, adding a relation to other beings; it is true in its intelligibility and adherence to form, adding a relation to the intellect; and it is good insofar as it is directed toward a natural causal end, adding a relation to the will or finality of a thing. Similarly, beauty adds to being in its relation to both intellect and will. Whereas the will is directed toward the individual, the intellect is directed toward the universal. Beauty draws our will to the individual being, not to acquire it qua individual being (Vijgen 2004: 80), but to contemplate it in its universality.
8There are certain formal characteristics of beauty as well, namely integrity, harmony, clarity, proportion and perfection. If beauty is to be a metaphysical concept, these characteristics must also be related to beauty in metaphysical ways. Just as beauty is a relation of a thing’s actuality to its form, these constituent aspects of beauty characterize the ways in which this relation can be considered. Integrity signifies a wholeness of the being, relating existence and essence or form and matter of the being through a fundamental unity. Substantial beings are unified by virtue of their substantial form, and artifacts are unified due to the accidental form imposed upon it. Insofar as this integrity of the being or artifact is seen, the being is beautiful. Harmony signifies the complementarity of causes. Tied with proportion, harmony is found in things insofar as they aid in actualizing each other or are actualized in themselves. This is due to the proper proportion between matter and form, existence and essence, or causal powers and the exercise thereof. Harmony and proportion relate to integrity in considering the causes of being but differ in considering it not as a whole being but as the relation between the causes themselves. Clarity signifies the intelligibility of the object through the apprehension of its form. A being which moves from potentiality into actuality fulfills its essence, bringing the truth of the being into a greater light. Perfection, as is evident from all that has been said, relates to each of these constituent aspects of beauty by bringing being into a fuller act (for an in-depth discussion of each “formal constitutive element”, see O’Reilly 2007: 19-26).
9In addition to the defining characteristics of these constituent aspects, we see that they relate to the other transcendentals as well. Each constituent concept explains the way in which beauty relates to the will and the intellect as do the good and true respectively. The integrity of a thing reflects the one in conveying the wholeness of the thing’s act. The harmony and proportion of a thing shows its relations to its causes or other beings like the relational desirability of goodness. The clarity of the thing relates to its intelligibility and fullness of form, relating it to its truth. In this, there is some way in which beauty and its constituents encompasses a relation of us to the world in all relational respects, which led Jacques Maritain (1920, tr. 1974: 44) to aptly call beauty “the splendor of being and of all the transcendentals combined”.
10We can see how art and beauty relate to realist metaphysics, but how do they relate to each other? There is, of course, this mediating bridge of metaphysics between the two, but this bridge is one that can be crossed freely. We can consider fine art as the work itself or the objects the work represents. The work itself is contemplated insofar as it adequately represents the objects within it. Because all art aims toward making some good, thereby bringing something into being, all artworks are beautiful insofar as they are skillfully made (Steinberg 1941: 485). This does not entail, however, that artistic realism is the only beautiful style. Different methods of representing objects or ideas can be adequate in the objects or ideas they are attempting to convey, though it is up to the art critic, informed by metaphysics, to determine what skills and techniques actually fulfill an adequate representation. This approach to the work itself is similar to contemporary discussions of form in art, but, just like form and matter in metaphysics, it must be acknowledged that this form cannot be understood without its content united to it. Just as form and matter, essence and the actus essendi, act and potency comprise two sides of the metaphysical coin, so too do form and content comprise two sides of the aesthetic coin properly understood.
11This differs when we take up the perspective of representation. Art in this sense need not be beautiful to be considered art—or even to be considered good art. An artwork may attempt to represent an ugly object to evoke a response from or instill an idea in the viewer. The object of representation, albeit ugly, may be well depicted precisely because it portrays the ugly object as ugly. Here, the form comes to give shape to the content, and good artwork is seen when its end of representation is fulfilled well. The interplay between the two must be seen in action, as they remain inseparable, even if they are really distinct.
12The importance of defining art and beauty is matched by the importance of categorizing the defining features of surreal art. It is obvious that we will need to consider at least a few pieces of surrealist art to find salient features that characterize them qua surrealist.
13Three works by Salvador Dalí will serve as the basis of our categorization. While surrealism extends beyond Dalí, and our description here is by no means intended as an all-encompassing analysis, many of the aspects of these works are characteristic of surrealism as a movement. One of Dalí’s most famous works, The Persistence of Memory, is easily recognizable by seeing its three melting clocks. The first melting clock spills over a ledge in the foreground. A fly on top of the clock seems to indicate decay as the clock loses its form. Right behind the first, a second clock melts atop a singular empty tree branch. The third one sits in the middle of the painting, laying over a disproportional face-like shape with a nose, eyelid, and tongue. There is a fourth clock sitting in front of the first, but this one does not melt; instead, several ants stand upon it, showing the same decay of time as the fly does. Each of these clocks and figures lay amidst a barren field with a jagged hill on a fading lake in the background. Its title signifies the meaning of the scene: As time passes, memory persists with distortion and decay, until one finds themselves in a barren, rocky space of their mind. None of these objects described retain their normal context or shape: The clocks are intact but melting, the insects are attempting to seize inorganic matter, the tree and field are barren, and the face-like figure is incomplete and disfigured.
14The next work, The Temptation of St. Anthony, depicts a historical scene in which Satan comes to tempt and torment the holy hermit St. Anthony the Great. The desert is, once again, barren, leaving all forms of familiarity. In the bottom left foreground, we see St. Anthony on one knee next to a skull, bracing himself upon a rock. He is completely naked, and his hair and beard look unkempt, but he defiantly holds a cross made of sticks aimed at a horse and a parade of elephants. The horse and elephants are all on thin legs resembling sticks or wires as they slowly charge St. Anthony’s position, yet the horse rears on them at the sight of St. Anthony and his cross. The horse, presumably Satan, reveals his hooves with a dark green substance dripping from them. The elephants are carrying a naked woman atop what seems to be a candle holder, a monument or Egyptian obelisk, and a cathedral with the doors open to display the nude torso of another woman. Behind this parade is a cloud of smoke covering another elephant with what seems to be a furnace stack trailing the rest and a building. St. Anthony, not fearing death as indicated by the skull and owning nothing as shown by his nakedness and disheveled appearance, can be seen as using his strength and the power of the cross to ward off the Devil and his temptations of lust, glory, and comfort that lead to smoke, confusion, and fire. The distortion of ordinarily beautiful objects again permeates the message of the work.
15Finally, Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) portrays the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. We see Jesus in a position usually seen during crucifixion—arms spread out and feet overlapping—but upon a tesseract floating over a black-and-white checkered floor. Kneeling before him is a woman gazing upon his suffering. There appears to be a lake with a small horizon beyond the scene, but most of the scene is dark and obscured. The painting focuses on Jesus as He undergoes His Passion while removing the contingent surroundings and leaving on the essential pieces of Christ, His cross, and a prayerful disciple. In addition to this isolation, the placing of Jesus on a floating tesseract cross removes the familiarity of the traditionally conceived cross by adding a new dimension and an impossible aspect to the essence of Christ’s suffering. By taking the ordinarily understood story and placing it into a new context, the painting causes us to contemplate the meaning of the scene in light of Dalí’s suspension of reality.
16From these works, we can find aspects and techniques common among surrealist works that characterize it as surrealist. The main component seen throughout these works is the suspension of reality by placing ordinary objects in unusual or dreamlike situations. As the name “surreal” signifies, the scenes portrayed by surrealist art mix objects with which we are familiar in scenarios or with other objects that seem to defy the normal context in which we usually see them. In The Persistence of Memory, the clocks are melting, the face is misshapen, the tree is empty, and the landscape is barren; The Temptation of St. Anthony shows a parade of disfigured elephants behind a giant horse; and Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) suspends a tesseract cross over a chessboard. The natural order is often inverted, and the depicted scene creates its own reality contrary to the one in which we live. By combining the ordinary with the extraordinary or impossible, surrealist works of art call us to reconsider the objects as they are juxtaposed. At times, it calls to mind the weirdness or wrongness of the scene in which we find ourselves (on the phenomenon of weirdness, see Fisher 2016: 15). We recognize the basic objects, but they are not placed properly within the order of nature. Things are not the way they should be; simply put, something is off, but it is difficult to tell exactly why. Other times, it forces us to consider the symbolic relations between the content of the art. While surrealism is often characterized as dreamlike—and rightfully so—the Surrealists themselves instead make great use of the word “imagination” to describe their approach (see Matthews 1962: 145-146). Imagination by itself certainly does not characterize Surrealism or its art. All art makes great use of the imagination to draw their viewers to new heights or depths, but surrealist art makes peculiar use of the imagination by picturing objects apart from their natural order. The Surrealist artists let their imaginations take over, allowing for its free exercise to portray fantastical phantasms as a way to demonstrate its centrality—as opposed to that of deliberate rational control—in creative expression (Costello 2019: 314; cf. Mathews 1962). The art, in so doing, calls into question the nature of the objects portrayed as well as their necessary and contingent relations.
17These features embodied in surreal art capture a new way of expressing the traditional ideas of art and beauty expounded above. By taking the objects represented and engaging in the characteristic distortion or suspension that flees from their normal context, Dalí represents the objects in a way that allows us to contemplate their ordinary relations in this extraordinary surreal artwork.
18The disfiguration of objects in surrealism portrays the distortion of form, leading to a lack of integrity, clarity, and perfection of the objects. While realist metaphysics explains the relationship between the object and its actualization through form, it is intuitive that the objects represented are, in some way, not supposed to be in reality the way they are shown. The explanation simply gives us a framework in which we can understand the beauty or ugliness of the objects represented. The privation of beauty in the objects represented causes a kind of ugliness within them and therefore an unpleasantness in their contemplation. In The Persistence of Memory, the melting clocks, disfigured face, empty landscape, and barren tree are certainly unnerving. Human development is directed toward certain anatomical regularities, trees are directed toward growing leaves, and clocks are designed to be circular. When these causal ends are disrupted, there is some introduction of imperfection and deviation from formal actualization. Similarly, the distorted, giant horse and elephants in The Temptation of St. Anthony leave the viewer uneasy, as is shown by St. Anthony the Great’s brave stand against the parade. There is something about the anatomy of organisms that has a kind of normativity, and a distorted form fails to fulfill a true or complete instance of that thing. By making the elephants and the horse elegant in certain areas but misshapen in others, Dalí portrays well the underlying ugliness and evil of the enticing objects he is portraying. Memory over time, represented by the landscape and clocks, is a beautiful thing but becomes barren and distorted into the ugliness of dementia or forgetfulness due to age. The external goods of lust and power seem enticing to man, but the terror instilled by the horse, seemingly Satan or a demon, and the malformed elephants who bring forth these things represent the essential evil of sin. Only St. Anthony remains intact, as his holiness in resisting these temptations allow him to retain his integrity and perfection.
19Here arises a paradox: How can we analyze surrealist art in these realist terms if it distorts objects instead of accurately representing them? This apparent paradox only exists if we misunderstand representation as rote photographic depictions. A proper view of representation will include symbolism in its toolbox, as these representations need not be perfect illustration of the object itself. Fine art has no strict requirement to represent individual instances but can represent more universal themes. If we take The Temptation of St. Anthony, we see that the painting represents a horse, which in turn represents Satan. The depiction of Satan or the distortion of memory, however, allows us to explore the relationship between the object and its representation. The works attempt to show sin and evil by representing them, but not in themselves, as to portray evil in itself would be impossible. A metaphysical realist understanding of evil reveals that evil is not an essence but rather a privation of being. Evil is parasitic of the good and is only found in things insofar as those things lack integrity or perfection (Aquinas, S.C.G. III, 7). Because evil is not a thing in itself, it cannot be directly portrayed in fine art; instead, it must be depicted as a privation in an already existing essence. With this privation, the beings become uglier as they become more evil, and the representation of evil—whether natural or moral—in the distortion of objects causes the objects of representation to lack beauty as well.
20On the other hand, the weirdness and suspension can also show us an even deeper beauty of the representation. In Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), the elevation and isolation of Christ and the woman portray this odd natural impossibility, but not in an ugly way. Gravity is defied and the scene is placed in an unfamiliar landscape, so there is something that must be causing these anomalies to occur. The tesseract as well makes us question the very dimensionality of the scene in which we find ourselves. Dalí’s exploration of the ways in which God can suspend natural laws to suffer for the sins of all attempts to portray the goodness, power, and mystery of God. The scene is deepened even more when the woman is isolated, showing that Christ’s suffering is dedicated to individually to each person. An atheist or agnostic may disagree with the premise of the painting, but the work at least calls to the minds of viewers the question of whether this great metaphysical power is true. If it is, Dalí seems to imagine it as a simple kind of beauty; if it is not, then we must ask whether this simplicity exists.
- 3 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this question; the ways in which this weirdness (...)
21Even with the weirdness or even ugliness in the representational objects of surrealism, we see that the objects are faithfully and clearly represented. Dementia, or memory loss in general, sin, and temptation are portrayed as ugly, as they are a lack of being in their real subjects, such as the one experiencing memory loss or the temptations facing the holy St. Anthony. The simple goodness of the divine is portrayed as beautiful because, if the divine did exist, it would exist as the simple epitome of being. There is no doubt that the beautiful aspects of the paintings constitute it as good art, but even the ugly ones contrast themselves with the inherent goodness of the complete subject. Beyond these examples, the weirdness of surrealism may even call to mind those aspects of things which are difficult to notice. We have seen how, for example, Dalí’s portrayal of Christ’s crucifixion brings forth issues of order and contingency that are not typically seen in traditional portrayals or popular piety. These surreal representations can provide us with new knowledge about the objects of representation by placing them in a new light, but they can only do so insofar as they reveal the being that is truly present in them.3 The convertibility of being, goodness, and beauty explains why their portrayals in surrealist art are intertwined. These transcendentals put another analytical tool in the art critic’s toolbox in order to understand the reality of the good and evil and their concomitant beauty and ugliness. By portraying these objects faithfully—by showing the good as good and the evil as evil—it allows us to contemplate the totality of the scene and thereby perfect our own minds and wills by coming to enjoy the beauty, know the truth, and desire the good.
- 4 Ibid., Q. 3, A. 4, ad. 6.
22Even further than analysis of aspects of the surrealist art, we can find the cause of these phenomena within the imaginative method of the Surrealists. In allowing their imaginations to overtake their work, the Surrealists provided ripe ground for such weird or even wrong images and likenesses. The imagination, counted among the inner senses by St. Thomas, holds the sensible forms of objects to create phantasms, or vivid pictures of sensations, even in the absence of sensible objects (Aquinas, S.Th. I, Q. 78, A. 4). This imaginative method can then lead to unusual scenes, as “the imagination usually apprehends a thing as it is not, since it apprehends it as present though it is absent”; this leads St. Thomas to quote Aristotle as saying, “Imagination, not sense, is the master of falsity” (Aquinas, Q.D. Veritate, Q. 1, A. 11). This is not to scorn imagination, but to recognize the way in which it can mislead us, as is evident within surrealist art. When these sensible qualities are rearranged to provide us with various phantasms of things we have never seen, we can often encounter weird, wrong, or characteristically dreamlike scenes. An artist’s imagination allows him or her to conjure and create these images while the intuition of the viewer’s intellect, in seeing the weirdness or wrongness of objects within the work, forces the viewer to consider why there is such a metaphysical disproportion—perhaps an ugliness—within the work. Still, some beauty must shine through the work in order to be considered a work at all. By virtue of the art’s existence, we see being. Even in this imaginative sphere, St. Thomas recognizes that evil, disease, or privations of all kinds cannot be directly represented; they can only be shown as within real beings.4 This is the critic’s aesthetic motive of all that we have analyzed.
23It may be surprising that such an objective approach is being used to appreciate a self-described “irrational” art style, but I believe these analyses are faithful to their principles. When an early critic of Surrealism, Charles E. Gauss (1943:42–44), explicitly denied the coherence of the “truth, beauty, and goodness” of surrealist art, calling it “nothing more than an art of nonsense” that attempts to create “a position of artificial respectability”, we must disagree with him in the sense we have described. Far from this, we can analyze surrealist art in terms of these transcendentals and find that they have great aesthetic and metaphysical value. Gauss’s criticisms hold as applied to the movement of Surrealism conceived by the Surrealists, but we need not fall into an intentional fallacy by following the words of these artists as the sole guiding principle. Statements of artists certainly prove to be useful in certain circumstances, but we may use these objective principles to analyze their art without relying on what they have said about it. Much of contemporary opposition to surrealist art relies upon this conception of surrealism as portrayed by the Surrealists or their pupils instead of utilizing an objective conception of beauty and art. These early criticisms remain today in those opposed to Surrealism even though there has been a shift in widely held aesthetic views. Since Gauss’s time, there has been a clear change in attitudes toward Surrealism, but our principles may provide objective analytic tools to motivate such changes in attitude that permit a critical attitude toward Surrealism while being able to appreciate surrealist art. In one sense, Gauss is correct to criticize Surrealism; in another, he goes too far in dismissing surrealist art. Perhaps we can sum this up by saying that the Surrealists got Surrealism wrong—but time and space prohibits us from fully defending this thesis. For now, we may be content with recognizing the comprehensive ability to fairly analyze the art itself and not what the artists believed about it.
24There is a deep metaphysicality to surrealist art. Intended or not, the art invites us into deep metaphysical contemplation. By isolating the objects and portraying them in weird manners, we are called to reflect upon the objects in a new light by noticing the suspension of the normal relations between objects and considering them through the relations imposed upon them by the artist. Perhaps this is not what the Surrealists desired in their imaginative method, but a sober analysis of the inebriated fantasy within the surrealist art points us toward metaphysics. Dalí exemplifies that in his works we have considered, and this same theme runs throughout all surrealist art. Different surrealist works, of course, lead to different metaphysical approaches; nevertheless, our analysis here serves as an example into how we can apply the realist approach to metaphysics to aesthetic theory. In analyzing this contemplation of art, we can enrich the way in which we approach all types of art, and perhaps consider art as one of many windows into metaphysics.