Art

ART in the broadest sense is the crystallization of archetypal values. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, To Have a Center)

ART is the quest for – and the revelation of – the center, within us as well as around us. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, To Have a Center)

ART is an activity, an exteriorization, and thus depends by definition on a knowledge that transcends it and gives it order; apart from such knowledge, art has no justification: it is knowledge which determines action, manifestation, form, and not the reverse. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of ART)

ART (authentic and normative): Authentic and normative art always tends to combine intelligent observation of nature with noble and profound stylizations in order, first, to assimilate the work to the model created by God in nature and, secondly, to separate it from physical contingency by giving it an imprint of pure spirit, of synthesis, of what is essential. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of ART)

ART (essential function of sacred art): The essential function of sacred art is to transfer Substance, which is both one and inexhaustible, into the world of accident and to bring the accidental consciousness back to Substance. One could say also that sacred art transposes Being to the world of existence, of action or of becoming, or that it transposes in a certain way the Infinite to the world of the finite, or Essence to the world of forms; it thereby suggests a continuity proceeding from the one to the other, a way starting from appearance or accident and opening onto Substance or its celestial reverberations. (GTUFS: LogicT, The Argument Founded on Substance)

ART (function): ART has a function that is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a “sympathetic magic”; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our return to the “kingdom of God that is within you.” The Principle becomes manifestation so that manifestation might rebecome the Principle, or so that the “I” might return to the Self; or simply, so that the human soul might, through given phenomena, make contact with the heavenly archetypes, and thereby with its own archetype. (GTUFS: TransfMan, ART, Its Duties and Its Rights)

ART (general): ART is in a general way both a means of expression and a means of assimilation: expression of our qualitative – not arbitrary and chaotic – personality, and assimilation of the archetypes thus projected; it is therefore a movement from ourselves to ourselves, or from the immanent Self to transcendent Being, and conversely; a purely empirical “ourselves” means nothing, all values being rooted in the Absolute. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Message of a Vestimentary ART)

ART (mission of): To remove the shells in order to reveal the kernels; to distill the materials until the essences are extracted. Nobility is nothing else but a natural disposition for this alchemy, and this on all planes. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, To Have a Center)

ART (modern conception): The modern conception of art is false insofar as it puts creative imagination – or even simply the impulse to create – in the place of qualitative form, or insofar as a subjective and conjectural valuation is substituted for an objective and spiritual one; to do this is to replace by talent alone – by talent real or illusory – that skill and craftsmanship which must needs enter into the very definition of art, as if talent could have meaning apart from the normative constants that are its criteria. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of ART)

ART (perfect): Perfect art can be recognized by three main criteria: nobility of content – this being a spiritual condition apart from which art has no right to exist – then exactness of symbolism or at least, in case of profane works of art, harmony of composition, and finally purity of style or elegance of line and color, we can discern with the help of these criteria the qualities and defects of any work of art whether sacred or not. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of ART)

ART (pictorial – figurative and decorative): Pictorial art in the widest sense – we mean by this the animation of surfaces by means of colors, be it by paintings properly so called, by drawings, engravings or embroideries – implies essentially two dimensions or modes, the figurative and the decorative, both occurring occasionally in the vestimentary art of the Indians as well as in the decoration of their tents. The first mode is executed by the men, the second by the women, which is full of meaning: in effect, the figurative art refers to what is determined – or central in a certain sense – and the decorative art to what is indetermined and spacious or to all-possibility; and this independently of the particular meanings that either the figurative drawings or the geometrical motifs may have. Or again: the figurative art expresses the content of our consciousness, the decorative art our substance; thus it is that man represents an idea whereas woman embodies a manner of being, an existential materia in which the idea may fix itself and expand; it is the complementarity between Truth and Virtue. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Message of a Vestimentary ART)

ART (purpose): The purpose of art is not a priori to induce aesthetic emotions, but to transmit, together with these, a more or less direct spiritual message, and thus suggestions emanating from, and leading back to, the liberating truth. (GTUFS: LogicT, The Saint and the Divine Image)

ART (reason for being): The reason for being of art – as a fortiori of spiritual ways – is the passage from accidentality to the substance or from the world of husks to that of the archetypes. (GTUFS: SurveyME, The Mystery of the Hypostatic Face)

ART (sacred): Sacred art is the form of the Supra-formal, it is the image of the Uncreate, the language of Silence. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of ART)
Sacred art is Heaven descended to earth, rather than earth reaching towards Heaven. (GTUFS: DivineHuman, To Refuse or to Accept Revelation)
Sacred art . . . transmits not only abstract truths conveyed by symbolism, it equally transmits, precisely by its beauty, the perfumes, at once vivifying and appeasing, of the Divine Love. (GTUFS: DivineHuman, Aspects of the Theophanic Phenomenon of Consciousness)
An art is sacred, not through the personal intention of the artist, but through its content, its symbolism and its style, that is, through objective elements. By its content: the subject represented must be as prescribed either when following a canonical model or in a wider sense; always, however, it must be canonically determined. By its symbolism: the sacred personage, or the anthropomorphic symbol, must be clothed or adorned in a given manner and not differently and may be making certain gestures but not others. By its style: the image must be expressed in a particular hieratic formal language and not some foreign or imagined style. In brief, the image must be sacred in its content, symbolical in its detail and hieratic in its treatment; otherwise it will be lacking in spiritual truth, in liturgical quality and – for all the more reason – in sacramental character. On pain of losing all right to existence, art has no right to infringe these rules and has the less interest in doing so since these seeming restrictions confer on it, by the intellectual and aesthetic truth, qualities of depth and power such as the individual artist has very small chance of drawing out of himself. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of ART)
An art that does not express the changeless and does not want to be itself changeless is not a sacred art. (GTUFS: LightAW, The Ancient Worlds in Perspective)

ART (sacred / profane): Sacred art is made as a vehicle for spiritual presences, it is made at one and the same time for God, for angels and for man; profane art on the other hand exists only for man and by that very fact betrays him. Sacred art helps man to find his own center, that kernel the nature of which is to love God. (GTUFS: SPHF, Aesthetics and Symbolism in ART and Nature)

ART (sole obligation): It is not the sole obligation of art to come down towards the common people; it should also remain faithful to its intrinsic truth in order to allow men to rise towards that truth. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of ART)

ART (supernatural value): The supernatural value of sacred art arises from the fact that it conveys and communicates an intelligence which is lacking in the collectivity. Like virgin nature it has a quality and function of intelligence which it manifests through beauty because in essence it belongs to the formal order; sacred art is the form of the Supra-formal, it is the image of the Uncreate, the language of Silence. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of ART)

ART / Beauty: Certainly art belongs by very definition to the formal order, and who says perfection of form, says beauty; to claim that art has nothing to do with beauty, on the pretext that its immediate end is spiritual, is as false as to affirm the contrary: that beauty is the exclusive end of the work of art. Beauty essentially implies a container and a content: as to the container, it is represented by conformity to the laws of harmony, or regularity of structure, whereas the content is a manifestation of “Being” or of “Knowledge” or again of “Beatitude” – which brings us back to the ternary aspect of Atma – or more precisely a varied combination of the three elements; it is, moreover, these contents that determine a priori the container. (GTUFS: LogicT, The Saint and the Divine Image)

“ART for art’s sake”: The error in the thesis of “art for art’s sake” really amounts to supposing that these are relativities which bear their adequate justification within themselves, in their own relative nature, and that consequently there are criteria of value inaccessible to pure intelligence and foreign to objective truth. This error involves abolishing the primacy of the spirit and its replacement either by instinct or taste, thus by criteria that are either purely subjective or else arbitrary. We have already seen that the definition, laws and criteria of art cannot be derived from art itself, that is, from the competence of the artist as such; the foundations of art lie in the spirit, in metaphysical, theological and mystical knowledge, not in knowledge of the craft alone nor yet in genius, for this may be just anything; in other words the intrinsic principles of art are essentially subordinate to extrinsic principles of a higher order. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of ART)