Germanificação de Alemanha

Overcoming the Germanification of Europe
16. April, 2016

A student of mine met an old art collector at an art fair. They exchanged a few words and the collector agreed to visit the young man’s studio. The old collector struggled up all the stairs to the young painter’s loft  studio, but was at last at the doorstep.

The painter bid him humbly welcome, and, with heavy breath, the collector entered the studio.

Those old looking pictures… Is that what you wanted to show me? He asked.

Yes…, replied the proud young painter.

But this is not art… have you fooled me all the way up here to see those dark paintings… those sad faces?

The painter stood silent, shocked.

Don’t you trick people like that, said the collector before leaving.

The old man was fooled, but by whom?

Most people are of the opinion that the French artist Paul Cezanne found everything in himself. But what is “oneself?” Cezanne’s notorious color palette: 40 pure and unmixed colors. In a painting, the depiction of a shoelace was to have as much importance as the human eye.
Where did these ideas come from?

Who instructed the modern artist to paint like a child?¹

After mediocre attempts to create baroque pictures, Cezanne read the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) The Critique of Judgment and became an illustrator of Kant’s rules of art.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant searched for truth in the beauty of art. A silent beauty, with no reference to anything,² was the ideal for him. And art’s creator, a genius with a big G, possessed a gift with no references from this world.³
Goethe advised all artists to read “The Critique of Judgment”⁴

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

According to Kant:

• The genius never uses a borrowed form; technique therefore cannot be utilized.⁵
• The genius fumbles to something no one has seen before.⁶
• The genius is the example of beauty; all other artists must be judged according to this genius.⁷
• The genius operates with the same habits of living as previous geniuses. So if, for example, you were a composer studying Beethoven, you would not imitate his music, but his coffee habits.⁸
• And at last, the Genius should not blend colors, because each individual color would then get dirty.⁹

Half a century prior to Cezanne, Madame De Stäel was on a trip to Berlin, and came back in excitement; the country of great thinking: L’Allemagne.
The cultural life of France is enlightened by the thoughts of German idealists, such as G. Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who writes in his Aesthetics that classicism’s imitational form is not good enough.
– Spirit must find its greatness in itself¹⁰

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