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Transcendental Painting | ||||||||
| A philosophy of painting | |||||||||
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| Ways out of crisis | |||||||||
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In the general radical change happening at the turn of the 19th century, painters such as Kandinsky, Malevich, Delaunay, Mondrian, Klee, and Itten are also searching for the origin of artistic expression and strive after "pure reality", "pure energy", "pure vitality", "pure colors". They plead for distance from the object, for letting colors and surfaces talk as such, and move towards abstraction. With his "School of pure vision", Egon von Vietinghoff shares their ideas (und befreit sich auf seine Weise vom Realismus). But like Mondrian, Delaunay, and Vlaminck he turns away from cubism after a short period of time. |
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But despite common dissatisfaction and concurring fundamental ideas, his logic leads him to opposite consequences. For him, the visual arts are a language needing objective forms in order to be understood. Since colors are always related to objects (except in the case of light refractions), painting has to be concrete for him. While his contemporaries turn more and more to planes and coolness, his own works become more plastic and warm. |
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| Independently of current tendencies, he begins to study the originals of the Old Masters and daily travels back and forth between the Louvre Museum and his studio in Paris in order to put down his observations experimentally. Thus he discovers not only the technique of mixing oil and resin, but also the spiritual aspect of genuine works of art. In his terminology, the way of looking at things is called "vision", the painting making such visions visible "Transcendental painting". |
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Transcendental Painting |
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In order to perceive the world, he opens up to the phenomena of nature. However, it is not the surface of things he paints but their disintegration into color interactions taking place before his eyes. He reproduces a play of colors in which he submerges, and not a collection of individual narrative observations. Since the play of colors and light emanates from existing things his Transcendental painting is concrete, but inasmuch as it reproduces sensations and not measurable characteristics of things, it is at the same time the opposite of naturalism. | ||||||||
| On the one hand Transcendental painting does not copy, and on the other hand it does not invent anything by means of intellectual construction. It looks for the nature of the world and by way of its sensations it reaches metaphysical insights. Thus Vietinghoff finds an alternative to the extreme poles of naturalism and abstraction or of copy and construction. |
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Looking exclusively at the play of light and colors, he lets the observer see the simple miracles of life. In doing so, even his art provokes in periods of abstract and politically committed painting. | ||||||||
| Departing from a philosophical and mystical concept, he understands imagination in the sense of creative ability as the possibility of the human spirit to perceive transcendently. In artistic intensification, intuition – a sort of "sixth sense" – leads to inspiration and uses imagination as an organ of perception of the irrational, absolute reality which we can only divine temporarily with our limited view of the world. Imagination is therefore no original thought, no speculative dream-world, no willful reconstruction and no alienation of phenomena. |
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The School of Pure Vision |
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| The road to transcending painting goes by way of a certain type of seeing, an "abstract" vision of things. | |||||||||
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As children, we had to learn to see spatially. When projected on the background of the eye, pictures are displayed as planes, just as on the canvas of the painter. Concrete seeing occurs only by the interaction of the eye and the touch. It results from many small experiences and is mixed with the knowledge of the material world which originally is not of visual nature, i.e. has not reached consciousness by way of the eye but sondern sich z.B. auch auf Tastsinn und intellektuelle Reflexion abstützt. | ||||||||
| Vietinghoff understands "abstract" and "pure" consistently in the sense of related to color, produced on the basis of nothing else but the visual function of the eyes, but not as abstract in the sense of geometric, plane-based or symbolic. Purely visual means based on purely sensual perception, unaltered by addition, alienation or mental intention – or in other words free of acquired knowledge. |
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In years of meditative visual exercises, he opens himself to unintentional perception of the objects as color surfaces existing side by side; thus he makes himself ready for inspiration. In this "school of pure vision" earlier understandings and assumptions of the materiality of things fade out: they disintegrate into individual color areas leaving the inner dynamics of light and color to be realized as the only facts. The three-dimensional things are temporarily translated by the artist into color planes placed side by side. The observer has no trouble to retransmit them into spatial seeing since human beings are used to seeing concretely. | ||||||||
| Vietinghoff compares the transcending artist with his meditative concentration of pure, unintentional perception to an archer in Zen Buddhism: both eliminate will and thinking in meditation and open up to experiences differing from the usual ones needed for the management of day by day life. The world appears as nothing more than the interaction of hues and shadings in a color context, i.e. as symphony of colors or as "drama of color and form", showing the observer an aspect differing from the one he knows already. |
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