Guided by a pure spirit

Ecstasy of St. Therese (detail) Bernini 1652

"The sublime, like the beautiful, is prodigally diffused throughout the whole of nature and the capacity to apprehend both is implanted in all men; but the potentiality to do so is unequally developed and must be aided by art." Schiller





Origine de Monde Courbet


The year was 1866 and Courbet was already a well-known painter in France for his technical skill, but mostly for his critical and corrosive attitude towards the bourgeois society and its moral values.
The Origin of the World was an inspired work of art, visionary even,a most important aesthetic act and a work of grandeur.




Begining of the World Brancusi 1920



Origine de Monde Pionteki Kehrlein 1985

.......

Sublime

Figure with meat Francis Bacon 1954

Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that paradoxically offers its spectator pleasure. Victor Hugo wrote, "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."




Saturn devouring His children Goya 1820

Goya painted this on the wall of his home, late in life, and was apparently suffering. We could say this was a sort of catharsis, a cleansing experience bringing pity and fear into their proper balance to achieve the sublime.




Self Portrait "deuil" Michael Kehrlein 2008

I painted this after the the death of my brother, a large painting, 5 by 5 feet, to purge the pain i felt.


Mother and Child divided Damien Hirst 1993

The impossibility of achieving or retaining an idealised (lost) unity (often coupled with a fear of fragmentation)







Therese Kehrlein Ansel Adams 1940

My mother...

metamorphosis

Woman with Necklace Picasso 1963

Plato opined that beauty lay in harmony and proportion, and was best discerned by the mind, not the eye.



Nude Chiam Soutine

Soutine was untraditional and uncouth. He was also maladroit . With portraits, he seems to have locked libido-wise onto certain parts of the sitter environment, and to have dismissed others. Faces and bodily postures can be uncanny, but backgrounds are often muddy messes, and hands can be almost comical. The fingers look like careless swipes or like deranged worms attempting to take off. These dualities are part of Soutine's essence. A more physically-driven painter than even Pollack, he seems to have worked in a frenzied, semi-trance, attached to his "existent" like certain American Indian initiates were attached to hooks through their chests to the "sun." When Soutine is "on," he produces paintings that are peristaltic, semi-metamorphic, absurd, brilliant, poignant, and unforgettable.


Seated Woman Modigliani


Modigliani originally saw himself as a sculptor rather than a painter.






Painting of Sue Tilly Lucien Freud 1963

Freud both highlights and undercuts the erotics of the female nude, opting out of the idealizing tendencies of much of the history of Western art.



Seated Nude Jacques Lipchitz 1915


Woman III Willem de Kooning 1953

Aggressive brushwork and strategically placed high-key colors merged with images of toothy snarls, overripe, pendulous breasts, enlarged eyes and blasted extremities to reveal a woman seemingly congruent with some of modern man's most widely held sexual fears.

αισθητικός (aisthetikos)

Venus of Willendorf 25000 years old


The earliest undisputed art originated with the Aurignacian archaeological culture in the Upper Paleolithic. However, there is some evidence that the preference for the aesthetic emerged in the Middle Paleolithic, from 200,000 to 50,000 years ago. Some archaeologists have interpreted certain Middle Paleolithic artifacts as early examples of artistic expression.



Venus de Milos anonymous 130-100 av. J.-C

Greek philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Plato felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness.



Sleeping Venus Giorgione finished by Tiziano(backround) in 1510


For Kant "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation. Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once.
Viewer interpretations of beauty possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of education and awareness of elite cultural values; therefore taste can be learned. Taste varies according to class, cultural background, and education. According to Kant, beauty is objective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone. The contemporary view of beauty is not based on innate qualities, but rather on cultural specifics and individual interpretations.





Venus of Urbino Tiziano 1539


For Schopenhauer aesthetic contemplation of beauty is the most free that the pure intellect can be from the dictates of will; here we contemplate perfection of form without any kind of worldly agenda, and thus any intrusion of utility or politics would ruin the point of the beauty.



Pregnant Woman Picasso 1950


The philosopher Denis Dutton identified seven universal signatures in human aesthetics:
1. Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized, and admired.
2. Non utilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and don't demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.
3. Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
4. Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
5. Imitation. With a few important exceptions like music and abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.
6. Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.


Dutton's book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, was released in January, 2009. It proposes that the commonly held modernist view that art appreciation is culturally learned is wrong and that art appreciation stems first from evolutionary adaptions made during the Pleistocene.



Untitled Mark Rothko 1953

Venus

Venus of Hohle Fels 35000 years old

"Beauty evokes a feeling of pleasure. This pleasure is closely connected with our infantile desire for security. Those forms or shapes which we associate with the satisfaction of this desire for security will forever give us that sense of complete satisfaction. In so far as the child's original notions of security are connected with the form of his mother, the curves and tactile planes in the human form are the origin of this satisfaction. The artist draws on these areas of security when he depicts the human body. The love for these human shapes is then transfered to similar shapes in the world at large" Mark Rothko




Princesse X Brancusi 1915

Feminine changed into masculine ( we can associate the image to the phallic representations of antiquity) becomes the eternal androgyne, the complete primordial "être", the origin of humanity as was described by the oldest religions of the world.


"Eros" Pionteki Kehrlein 1984

Antiquity relates all their abstractions to expressions of the human personality, and do so thoroughly, that they provide the artist with the most enviable sort of vehicle for the representation of his plastic notions. For, from the begining of things, the human figure has always been the artist's most complete examplification of plastic coherence.

Nascita

Nascita. Michael Kehrlein

Today is the birthday of Tactile Aesthetics! Here i want to explore with you this wonderful world through sculpture and painting. Some of the art works will be my own but i want to explore many other artists from the begining to today. I will talk about what art means to me and how it has effected my life.