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ARTURO FONTAINE

Danto had style, a good style. When I make this aesthetic judgment, I’m sure I am right, although justifying my claim is another matter. We cannot define what good style is, yet we know it when we see it. Danto was engaged with questions of style all his life, as a philosopher and as an art critic. The last chapter of his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is devoted to metaphor, expression, and style. It is as if his whole exploration of the concept of a work of art culminates with his reflections on the nature of style. Hemingway said he had tried 39 versions of the final words of his novel Farewell to Arms. Asked why by Paris Review interviewer, George Plimpton, his famous response was: “getting the words right.” As a novelist myself, I’m absolutely sure that whether a page has life or not is a question of finding the right words. Why is style so crucial?

When I say that Danto had also a distinctive style – as I hope my samples of his writings will show – this does not mean that he wanted to erase the frontier between philosophy and literature. Philosophy is concerned with truth in an altogether different way than literature is, and Danto believed it important to maintain this distinction. Derrida’s alleged proposal – to read philosophy, the whole history of philosophy as literature – is, as Danto wrote, like visiting “a museum of costumes we forget were meant to be worn” (Danto 1986, 160).

Danto began with Buffon’s classic dictum (1753): “style c’est l’homme même” – style is the man himself. How did Danto interpret this dictum? Let us turn to an example of visual art: Lichtenstein’s “Portrait of Madame Cézanne” (1963) reproduces Erle Loran’s diagram of Cézanne’s famous painting of his wife. Loran’s diagram, included in his book, Cézanne’s Composition, attempts to show the geometric structure of the painting using lines, arrows, and vectors. Visually, says Danto, Lichtenstein’s picture and Loran’s diagram are roughly the same. However, the former is a work of art and the latter only a diagram. Why?

Danto used this example to distinguish between a straightforward representation – a diagram – and a picture that is about a diagram (Danto 1981, 141ff). Lichtenstein’s artwork is about the way Cézanne painted his wife. In other words, Lichtenstein was presenting with a certain ironic distance, how Cézanne looked at the whole world, namely, as geometric figures, as diagrams. Even his wife was seen in this fashion. Lichtenstein’s canvas, according to Danto, tried to inspire a certain critical attitude toward this “geometrizing vision.”

Danto’s main point, however, was that works of art, in contrast with mere representations, use the means of representation so as not to exhaust what one is communicating in what is being represented. His suggestion was that “in addition to being about whatever they are about, (artworks) are about the way they are about” (Danto 1981, 148–149). Style has precisely to do with “the way” artworks “are about whatever they are about.” So, Cézanne’s apples, thanks to his style, are not just about apples, but about apples as seen by Cézanne. This is how we need to interpret Buffon’s dictum.

Danto further believed that “style has to be expressed immediately and spontaneously.” He thought style was visible to others and invisible to the self, like “my face is visible to others but not to myself” (Danto 1981, 206). I don’t think Danto got this right. Style is not at all immediate and spontaneous. Take Flaubert: “One has to read, to meditate, to think always about style. … Patience and constant energy are required” (Flaubert, 13/13/1846).¹ His letters show how much he struggled to achieve the style he was aiming at. Or Hemingway: “Since I started to break down all my writing … and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult…” (Hemingway 1964, 132). Hemingway’s style was not spontaneous but the result of a conscious and sustained effort.

Flaubert wrote that “style is only a way of thinking” (Flaubert 1859). What Danto said of Lichtenstein’s “Portrait of Madame Cézanne” is a sample of Danto’s style as a philosopher. Style is not something added to what the work of art reveals, so to speak, but it is part of the revelation. As Nussbaum asserts, “style makes itself a statement” (Nussbaum 1990, 7). Danto’s thesis about style is analogous to what Proust wrote in À la recherche du temps perdu: “style … is not a question of technique but of vision.” Proust believed that style “is a revelation” of “the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to us.” Thanks to art we have “as many worlds as there are original artists” and each one sends us “his special radiation” (Proust 1927, 254). Danto was a good reader of Proust; I remember him quoting from Proust’s novel very often in his seminars. This was when he was writing The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.

Danto draws his idea of style (Danto 1981, 163) from Frege’s notion of Färbung (coloring). Frege also uses the word Beleuchtung (shading). Dummett calls this aspect of language, “tone.” (Dummett 1973, 2, 84) The difference between terms like “perspiration” and “sweat” or “dog” and “cur” or “horse” and “steed” turns more on their tone than on either their sense or their reference. Tone draws on with subjective associations, “the mood,” the “feeling” of the hearer or reader or the “atmosphere” of a poetic language or “aura” (Frege 1892a, 1892b, 1897, 1906a, 1906b, 1918). Tone allows and prevents substitutions, say, between “dog” and “cur.” At the same time, Danto recognized that insofar as “Färbung” for Frege was a “dismissive” term, it little helped us to understand what style is or why it matters (Danto 1986, 136–137). But if style for Frege was only a matter of tone, for others it bore on sense (Kortum 2013), allowing it to bring cognitive import to subjective associations which, I think, was Danto’s real intention.

A work of art is “about something” and an embodiment of that aboutness. There is nothing in the object itself that makes it an artwork. It is our gaze, our way of looking at it from the point of view of the concept of art: what makes it art. This is, roughly, what Danto meant. If an object is seen as a work of art, it requests an interpretation, and this means one has to deal with the material embodiment of the work. For Danto, as for Adorno, interpretation is essential. Adorno considered works of art as “enigmas” or “question marks,” awaiting “their interpretation.” Interpretation sustains the “demarcation line between art and non-art” (Adorno 1970, 124, 128). Danto writes that “the question of when is a thing an artwork becomes one with the question of when is an interpretation of a thing an artistic interpretation” (Danto 1981, 135). His extensive art criticism focuses, then, on the way artworks are about.

For Danto, to interpret is “to grasp the metaphor that is always there” (Danto 1981, 172). Metaphors and style are not only present in artworks. Moore, Wittgenstein, Quine had style. Romeo sees Juliet as the sun; Benjamin Franklin saw George Washington as the sun. In fact, at the very end of the Constitutional Convention – presided over by Washington – Madison reports hearing the following conversation: “Whilst the last members were signing it (the Constitution) Doctor Franklin looking towards the President’s Chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. I have, said he, often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun” (Farrand 1911, 648). Franklin’s witty remark had style, but he did not, with his analogy, thereby create an artwork. The presence of a metaphor and the demand for interpretation are insufficient to draw the demarcation line between art and not-art. Danto knew this by delivering necessary but not sufficient conditions for something to be art.

Danto loved Chardin. Proust wrote that Chardin “brings together objects and people in these rooms that are more than an object, and even than a person, perhaps, being the scene of their existence” (Proust 1895, 20). Diderot wrote about Chardin’s “handling” as “so magic.” Danto saw “acts of transfiguration … of the commonplace. Transfiguration is not much of an improvement on magic,” he explained, “but at least it gives us a model: Christ appears to his disciples as transfigured.” But then he insisted that the religious analogy would not lead us to understand “how by means of paint and varnish” Chardin achieved his “miracle” (Danto 2005, 37).

A painting by Chardin, “Still life with plums” (ca 1730),² says all it has to say with forms and shades, and with brushstrokes. We see the brushstrokes as some plums, the one closest to the viewer perhaps overripe and about to split open, a half-empty bottle of red wine, a simple glass with water and two baguettes. The bottle and a baguette are partly seen through the clear glass and water. All rests on a thick, wooden, humble table. The brushstrokes are not just brushstrokes: they are more to make the bottle of wine, the plums, the glass, the bread, and the worn-out table. The scene expresses a certain mood. Common objects are transfigured by the artist’s gaze. We see an entire way of life. Here is the “magic,” how he creates the feeling of being at home in this world, a feeling of love in the way he looks at these things.

If the “I” is not another object of the world, but rather a point of view, and artworks show “the world as given” by the “I” of the artist, then through artworks the “you” of the spectator, listener, or reader undergoes a transfiguration and becomes, up to a point, the artist’s “I.” For Danto, “the greatest metaphors of art” are those in which “the spectator identifies himself” with the character. Reading Anna Karenina, I see myself as Anna and “to see oneself as Anna is in some way to be Anna.” To see “one’s life as her life” is an experience that changes one’s life (Danto 1981, 172–173). It is not enough for me to look at the world alone from my window. Great works of art reveal aspects of the world that enlarge my own perspective. Chardin’s vision changes my perspective.

The revelation of Chardin’s artwork springs from those brushstrokes. Thanks to this partial and momentary metamorphosis, I see the plums and, partly through glass and water, the fat and half empty bottle of red wine and the baguettes from Chardin’s first-person point of view. For that to happen, personal style is a must. In this particular painting, you look at the brushwork and you see traces of the movement of Chardin’ hand. The pulse and touch of the dead artist’s hand is still there, present and immediate.

Danto’s deep criticism of R.B. Kitaj in this context is telling. The meaning is not incarnated in the paintings themselves; Kitaj wanted for us to be guided by the autobiographical “prefaces” that accompanied his works. His “Self-Portrait as a Woman” (1978) shows a woman naked outdoors and we are expected to see her as a portrait of the artist. To see this you must read the title and the catalogue texts, because “typically … the paintings are assigned meanings without anything happening to the painting as viewed” (Danto 2000a, 130). Contrary to Chardin’s work, what the painting is about was not fully painted. Kitaj’s painting is an artwork, but it is powerless.

Hegel claims that in a work of art “meaning” and “appearance” ought to be “penetrated by one another” (Hegel 1835, 93). He believes that aesthetic judgments are about “the appropriateness or inappropriateness” of “content” and “means of presentation” (Hegel 1835, 11). This is largely Danto’s approach – the aesthetic failure of Kitaj’s “Self-Portrait as a Woman” is precisely a consequence of the lack of connection between the meaning and its material embodiment. A work of art ought to be “a piece of visual thought” (Danto 2013b, 165). “Prefaces,” external words, don’t do the job painting is supposed to do. When explanations are more interesting than the artwork itself, the artwork fails.

Consider Danto’s comments on a painting by Rothko. Given its abstraction, simplicity, and absolute dependence on the nuances of pigments, it is extremely difficult to translate the artwork into words. That is a good thing. “The rectangles, in ‘Untitled’ (1960) share no boundaries. … So what does being close to them reveal? The amazing edges of the rectangles, and the way underlayers of paint reach through the rectangles to give a sense of translucency. These forms are not pure red and pure black, as they appear from afar. The extraordinary beauty is due to the way the edges of the forms appear to penetrate and to be penetrated by the ground color of the paintings; and to the way the undercolors flicker through the surface colors. These animate the forms as well as the colors through irregular pulsations of light” (Danto 2000b, 341). Rothko thinks with his colors. As opposed to Kitaj’s “Self-portrait as a woman,” where the meaning has not been integrated with its brushwork and remains external to it, Rothko’s thinking appears in and through his painting of colors and forms. And what about the meaning? Does this painting have one? “Beauty,” simply, so claims Danto, is “the meaning of Rothko’s work” (Danto 2000b, 342).

We do make aesthetic judgments and expect others to share our point of view. We comment on a film’s poignant dialogues, the elegant design of a chair or a fork, the nostalgic sadness of a nocturne, the balance of a building’s façade, the magnificence of the sea as it rises and explodes into foam against a rock, and so forth. When we express these judgments we invite someone else to share in our experience. Aesthetic judgment transfers an aesthetic experience. Yet are the judgments ever final? Being drawn from interpretation, do they ever exhaust an artwork’s meaning? Often what comes after gives a different value to works that were produced before: impressionism changes the way in which Velázquez’s paintings are seen, Picasso makes us see African masks from a new outlook. Danto suggests that artworks are like events in how they “derive their importance from what they led to.” Nevertheless, his interpretation of artworks remains tethered to the artist’s intentions, restricting, in my view, the scope and potential meaning of artworks (Danto 1986, 44, 1997, 75; 2013a, 15 and ff; 2013c, 386–387).

Hegel wrote that an artwork is “essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind” (Hegel 1835, 71). One could say that style similarly is a sort of address, an invitation to another person. Good writing summons the reader to experience the text in a certain way. Danto’s own style was an invitation, almost intimate, to engage his enticing and entertaining way of thinking. There is something contagious about it. In reading Danto, his voice continues to resonate. His writing creates the impression that he is speaking and simply registering his thoughts and imaginings as they come. “He allows his prose to wander and invites the reader to wander with it,” observed Christopher Sartwell (Sartwell 2013, 711). Often, in the midst of rigorous conceptual analysis, he introduces amusing and telling fictional characters. “Testadura,” is a favored example, “a plain speaker and noted philistine,” who could only see Rauschenberg’s “Bed” as a real and dirty bed, or the drips of paint given to plain sight.

When Danto addressed abstract expressionism, he talked about the paintings themselves, but he also captured a certain Tenth Avenue atmosphere of the times. He wrote of a canvas itself describing

a rotation through ninety degrees from its vertical position on the easel to its horizontal position on the floor, which the painter crouches over like a frog-god. But the drip is also evidence for the urgency of the painting act, of pure speed and passion, as the artist swings loops and eccentric arabesques across the surface, sending up showers and explosions of spatters. And since he merely executed the will of the paint to be itself, the artist had nothing of his own to say. This went with that studied brutishness of the Dumb Artist exemplified over and over again in the artworld of the time by really quite intelligent men and women who pretended to a kind of autism, and went around in clothes so splashed with paint that the very costume was an advertisement for the closeness between the artist and his work (Danto 1981, 109).

I have quoted this passage at length to show Danto’s gift as a writer. The painter is a “frog-god,” who with the “studied brutishness of the Dumb Artist” fills the canvas with splashes and drips of paint. This ironic passage is very much in the spirit of Lichtenstein’s “Brushstrokes” or Rauschenberg’s “Bed” and their allusions to Pollock’s drip painting. The reader enjoys the wit and spontaneity in Danto’s style, a style where often the risk and adventure reveal the daring on his part to take unfamiliar philosophical paths.

Style is part of our everyday life. A living room may be decorated in a modernist style, but also with a personal flair or touch that stands out against the background of a prevalent style. People dress and adorn their bodies, says Hegel, because of the need to alter the external world. The human being recognizes himself as such, as free, as a person, by altering the world. The world modified by human activity may be like a fingerprint of the self and, therefore, may allow self-recognition. The human being is always striving through different activities ultimately “to make this foreign world for himself,” because otherwise “he is not being at home in it” (Hegel 1835, 31, 98). Art is an attempt to mold and mark and humanize the external world, and so is style. Language is public, and when we recognize someone’s style, it is because the writer has impressed his first-person perspective into the material of language, thus making a home in it, a home the reader may also inhabit.

Style, as I have stressed, is not a mere container of something totally alien, namely, meaning. But here, too, as Danto well knew, translation of words and language, is a deep problem. Proust, as translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, is the same and not the same Proust who wrote in French. Following Quine, a skeptic of synonymy, one might say that “what matters is likeness in relevant aspects” (Quine 1953, 60). Danto has a pithier thought: “Try writing about Proustian jealousy with Hemingway sentences” (Danto 1981, 197). But if meaning is fused with the style of the writer, what is captured better by writing about Danto’s style than reading Danto without any companion at all?