Word: ortega
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...that double-edged dictum, Spanish Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset cuts the ground from under the moderns and anti-moderns alike. Writing with gloomy detachment in the current Partisan Review, Ortega traces the evolution of painting from Giotto to Picasso, describes it as "a unique and simple action with a beginning...
Giotto, says Ortega, was "a painter of solid and independent bodies." Three centuries later, Velasquez emphasized "hollow space"-the area between the eye and the thing seen. In recording only a dazzle of colored lights, the impressionists brought painting smack up to the retina. Picasso carried the same process a step further, painting what was back of the eyeball, inside his head. "[In the Picasso school] the eyes, instead of absorbing things, are converted into projectors of private flora and fauna. Before, the real world drained off into them; now, they are reservoirs of irreality...
...guiding law . . ." Ortega concludes, "is one of disturbing simplicity. First things are painted; then, sensations; finally, ideas. This means that in the beginning the artist's attention was fixed on external reality; then, on the subjective; finally, on the intrasubjective. These three stages are three points on a straight line...
Solid Ground. "Man needs faith," said Ortega, "he needs belief as a soil and a solid ground where he may stretch his limibs and rest." Man is constantly getting lost, he conceded, but being lost is actually a "dramatic privilege" and not an evil. When lost, the man who has faith turns himself into an instrument of orientation "to guide him and to return him to himself ... If man had not been lost, countless times, on land and sea, the points of the compass would never have been developed...
...recollect that any civilization ever perished from an attack of doubt," Ortega said. "I recollect that civilizations usually die through the ossification of their traditional faith, through an arteriosclerosis of their beliefs...