Facs
Transcript
reality is expressed is the style of a work of art. I will come to this; style is of fundamental importance. The style of a work of art is an expression of the encounter of the artist with ultimate reality, even if he expresses ultimate reality in atheistic terms.
Now in this sense we can say, in this third function – to express – we have reached, more than in the two others, the heart of the artistic function. Its greatness is its expressive power, and the basis of its expressive power is the encounter between the creative artist and the reality which he encounters.
This is the first consideration which I want to make. Now I come on this basis to the way in which the expression is done. This is symbol. I have already spoken last semester about religious symbols. We have to come back to them if we relate them to artistic ones. But I didn't speak about artistic symbols and their relation to religious ones. That is the next thing we must do, especially if we agree that the expressive function of art is its basic function and its most characteristic and innermost function.
Let me say a little about symbols generally. There are, first, two groups of symbols, the one which should be called signs, but since we cannot do this – the linguistic development has ruined the word symbol as [it has] most other words, and we must walk all the time through this slum of a ruined language which we must move in, in modern times – for very different reasons, which we will explain later. Since this is so, we must speak of reflective symbols, psychological symbols, and, most important, of representative symbols.