Facs
Transcript
within the limits of this special estate, be it the king, be it the beggar, and everything in between. Now these are what I could call economic will, or economic valuation, not in terms of prices but in terms of expressions of the meaning of life. So if you discuss these things, don't complain, with a kind of complaining sentimentality, that this bad materialistic interpretation of history devaluates all the wonderful high values which we have in our wonderful society – don't say this, especially that it is atheistic and has many other moral failures from the point of view of suburban bourgeoisie, but use your academic mind and criticize, not in terms of sentimental complaint about these bad people, but criticize in terms of logical analysis and show them what actually the concept of the economic means. And if you do this, then you also do something else: you show how right they are in their analysis; that actually you cannot write a history of the artistic interpretation of the human face, in the Western world, without continuous references to the economic foundation. I once have written an article, in a collective work called The Christian Answer (1945) – “The Analysis of Our Time”* – and to show the way in which the idea of personality (which I have discussed in the last hours) has developed, I added pictures: the personality in a man like Giotto, in a man like Titian, in a man like Rembrandt, and in a man like American 19th-century Sargent, showing the differences, not looking so much at the valuation or
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*The actual title is “The World Situation,” in the book edited by H. P. Van Dusen. Note that in later republication, the pictures are omitted. – Ed.