The Death of the Subject in Art – Part V: Idealism and Romanticism

The Ideal Subject, Absolute Spirit and the Romantic Work of Art

"The spirit of this world is spiritual essence permeated by a self-consciousness which knows itself to be directly present as a self-existent particular, and knows that essence as an objective actuality over against itself. But the existence of this world, as also the actuality of self-consciousness, depends on the process that self-consciousness divests itself of its personality, by so doing creates its world, and treats it as something alien and external, of which it must now take possession [...] But the renunciation of its self-existence is itself the production of the actuality, and in doing so, therefore, self-consciousness ipso facto makes itself master of this world [...] I have the certainty through the other, viz. through the actual fact; and this, again, exists in that certainty through an other, viz. through the I [...] When we consider this new form and type of knowledge, the knowledge of self, in its relation to that which preceded, namely, the knowledge of an other, we find, indeed, that this latter has vanished, but that its moments have, at the same time, been preserved; and the loss consists in this, that those moments are here present as they are implicitly, as they are in themselves."

The German idealists who were shaped by Kant’s critical philosophy [Fichte, Schelling, Schiller, Hegel (each with his own agreements, resistances and transformations)] look at the world that is crystallizing before their eyes (in politics, economy and policy) and see the deep rooting of the sensible world within spiritual life. As so often in history, when the world of the senses grows stronger, spirit is pushed to the margins. Idealism rises up against positivism, against the world as mere object, against a science that receives its truths out of things as they are in themselves, independent of the knowing subject. For the idealist, as long as the human being does not understand that he himself, his body and his life, stand behind the conscious form of things and laws, he and his world will remain alienated from themselves. The idealist wants to reintroduce spiritual meanings into the world, not as merely transcendental values but as concrete, rational ones. There is no reality that is not thought. Only what is thinkable is real, and only what is real is thinkable, since what is not thought has no independent existence and no purpose of its own (Marcuse 1951).

The philosophy that Hegel and German idealism propose already contains within itself the truth of all earlier philosophies and of the whole stock of experience accumulated by logicians and by humanity as a whole on its journey toward the freedom of reason, toward pure truth. It is a philosophy of a humanity gifted with self-consciousness, demanding sovereignty over human beings and things, claiming the right to shape the world according to these principles, a philosophy that heralds the elevated ideals of modern, individualistic society.

Hegel will say that there is an absolute being, and that this being is a subject that unfolds (toward freedom) and changes itself by negating itself through internal transformation, that is, through historical events. The ideal subject is this “absolute” (analogous to God or to nature in Spinoza). It is the totality of being that thinks the whole of reality. Consciousness is constantly occurring, it is within itself. Therefore practical reason precedes pure reason and advances spontaneously. It cannot be represented as something merely passive. The essence of all this reason (the absolute subject) is to reveal itself within the positive world, through its representative, the human subject. The human being, as the embodiment of the subjectivity of absolute mind in the concrete world, expresses the process of becoming in the form of freedom and culture.

In this way philosophy returns to its sources, in which it is the highest form of human knowledge. It becomes the science of reality, since it alone explains the relation between essence and existence. The human being, like the world, marches toward an ideal telos. He organizes his own reason, the reason of his society and the structure of his state according to his practical thought, which itself must be freed from blind and selfish drives. Progress is therefore moral progress. From here idealism seeks the political sphere in which the general (objective) will, the spirit of the people and of humanity, might be realized. Ideal ideas such as those of Rousseau and Kant describe the revolutions that shook Europe at the end of the eighteenth century (Marcuse 1951). What does the individual demand when he calls for revolution, if not the basic claim that political and social institutions be brought into harmony with his freedom and welfare, with his right to happiness. This is also what the idealists ask for in their philosophical systems, to liberate the individual so that he may be his own master, the sovereign ruler over his own development. “From now on, the world will be an order of reason; the world becomes real only by virtue of the power of comprehension of consciousness” (Marcuse 1951).

When these voices sharpen the ideal power of the individual they come to argue that cognition is grounded in nothing but itself, and that every thought or phenomenon is nothing but an expression of the subject. The precise formulation would be that the subject’s thoughts are the world itself, that the world is a process shaped by human thought, and that only in the individual does consistency and full actuality exist. “When I posit reality outside myself, it is not outside me but in me myself, in the limitation of my being.”

Unlike Kant, idealists like Fichte and later Schelling place the consciousness that seems to stand outside the subject within the I itself, thereby abolishing the division between object and subject and thus also dissolving the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. Beyond creating his world, the subject creates himself out of an internal freedom that is teleological yet lacks a given end.

"Man is hence the redeemer of nature toward which all typology in nature aims. The word that is fulfilled in human beings is in nature as a dark, prophetic (not yet fully pronounced) word. Hence, the portents that contain in themselves no interpretation and are explained only by man [...] Still, idealism itself [...] activity, life and freedom only are the truly real with which even Fichte’s subjective idealism can coexist; rather, it is required that the reverse also be shown, that everything real (nature, the world of things) has activity, life and freedom as its ground or, in Fichte’s expression, that not only is I-hood all, but also the reverse, that all is I-hood [...] Idealism actually first raised the doctrine of freedom to that very region where it is alone comprehensible. According to idealism, the intelligible being of every thing and especially of man is outside all causal connectedness as it is outside or above all time. Hence, it can never be determined by any sort of prior thing since, rather, it itself precedes all else that is or becomes within it, not so much temporally as conceptually, as an absolute unity that must always already exist fully and complete so that particular action or determination may be possible in it."

“Nature receives within me its consciousness in general, but only by beginning from my personal consciousness and proceeding from there toward the consciousness of the universal being, through illumination.” The world as consciousness is therefore endlessly active, and for that reason it is both creation and fact at once, so says Fichte.

Like Leibniz’s monads, mind is a mirror attuning itself to the image of reality. The “fact” is produced in the act of freezing the moment in which nature moves and passes before the subject’s curious gaze. In other words, with the act of consciousness the perceived object is already there. The statement is at once also an act of creation, like the power of God. “And God said: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” God acts in this way, everything is the fruit of his thought. If the subject were to exert courage and effort in this given moment, he could discover within it all the possible configurations of the universe.

Fichte asks how it came about that reality took precisely this form, why the subject chooses this garment (these properties) out of all possible garments. He answers: things are thus because I think them thus, what he calls “the creative power of man”. The harmony of the properties and laws of nature belongs to me. “But I, what I call I, my personality, am not myself the creative force of human nature, but only one of its manifestations.”

The I together with all that it calls its own is a link in the determinism of natural necessity (as the I is in Spinoza an attribute of God or of nature). If there is any force outside the I it is the necessity of the complete becoming that the I produces in its thought. Becoming is in itself, a force that moves itself continually. This force can exist for the I only insofar as the subject “feels the activity”. The subject becomes a being embodying the natural force, the power of thought. It is, precisely, the activity of nature itself, the force that creates the movement of becoming.

To clarify: within the forces of nature (motion, creation, thought) there are internal laws and purposes. These manifest and pass through reality, and in the human being all the forces are brought together in their unity when he exists for himself. Only by virtue of these can the subject see itself as free in the unity of its ways of life, even as those ways restrict its power (“Synecdoche, New York”).

“The natural vocation of the plant is to develop in accordance with rules, of the animal to move according to purpose, of the human being to think [...] In self-consciousness I see myself as free. From reflecting on nature as a whole I find that freedom as such is impossible. The former must submit to the latter, for it can be clarified only by the latter [...] Nature seems doubled in him and becomes mere being, being and consciousness at once.”

Consciousness is no longer a foreign place in nature whose link to being is incomprehensible, but rather the essential attribute of being. Nature is infinitely creative, and the human being is its highest product. It is as if nature looks at itself in the human and sees itself. The human gaze on his reality is like a dream dreaming its own thought. Thought itself is the source of being and of the reality that the subject imagines. The consciousness of all subjects is the complete consciousness of existence itself. Each individual, from his unique point of view, steps out of himself through the power of creation and acquires a view of himself within the whole. Every subject is unique because in each the humanized nature sees itself from another angle, and each sees himself as “I” and the other as “that one”. From here emerges the moral basis (again, close to Spinoza).

All these conclusions frighten Fichte. “Nature acts in me.” “It makes me what I must be.” “I stand under an inexorable necessity.” This sounds like pure fatalism. The subject wants to be independent, wants itself to be the cause of its own vocation, wants to reveal itself in infinitely many modes like nature itself, wants to set its end in motion according to its own will, wants the reality that lies beyond the picture. The subject stands between the fatalism of natural causality and the purposiveness of its inner will. This is also the eternal struggle between the human being and the spirit of the world.

Fichte’s idealist spirit offers the following solution: “The reality that you imagined you already saw, a world of sense independent of you, which you feared might enslave you, has disappeared. For this whole world of sense is created only through mind and is itself the mind within us. But mind is not reality, precisely because it is mind.”

The human being is given the instrument of mind, which he is obligated to quicken at every moment, to think, act, create, shape, look inward and outward. He must be awake to reality and question it, since there his freedom resides (Hegelian freedom is objective freedom. A subject that carries consciousness will necessarily attain freedom only in the form of “we”, not of “I”). Once the subject posits the I as self, the self covers the whole of reality. Only in this way can the human being construct his personal identity.

"In the first place in regard to the relation of the inner to this its outer, it is clear that that relation seems bound to be understood in the sense of a causal connection, since the relation of one immanent and inherent entity to another, qua a necessary relation, is causal connection [...] the freedom of being-for-self only proves itself in the ease with which it enters into relation with everything and preserves itself in this multiplicity."

Like Fichte, Hegel attempts a synthesis between Spinoza’s ideas and those of Kant. The concept of the human being is his history. The process of reality gives birth to essence. What I feel in the object is its present moment, its actuality in general, as a process of facts, the true content of experience. The dwelling place of the universal is the subject, not the object. The universal exists in mind. There is no object in itself; it exists “because I know it”. The I is subject to a dialectical process. The temporary results of this process appear in the world and pass away. The world itself is the sphere in which the spirit of absolute consciousness unfolds toward absolute truth. “The real whole is not the result but the result together with its becoming.”

Spirit exists for itself and therefore is the only true actuality. It is a higher dimension of being that has no limit. Hegel’s spirit is spontaneous in its self arising. It requires no forces outside itself. It is the mover. History is the phenomenal manifestation of the unfolding of spirit. Culture is what binds individuals together. In this cultural idealism the wall between the individual and the absolute collapses. The absolute subject loves its world, humanity and itself through them, and thus the vital force comes into being. The human way of existing in the world is determined by the transformation of external being into spiritual reality. In this spirit the universal realizes itself.

“These determinations of thought, their substance and the ground of their reality, is the I [...] These thoughts become fluid when pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment only [...] when pure self-certainty strips itself.”

The I discovers its actuality through the other, and in their dialogue the dialectic is born. The individual contributes through his mental activity to “the overall enterprise of spirit”. When he is free in his mind he fulfills the essence of the world. The human desire of the individual to reach understanding regarding truth and reality is itself the inner process through which thought advances toward its highest comprehension (thought, truth) – “Synecdoche, New York”.

“The individual exists in himself and for himself. He is for himself, or is a free activity. He is, however, also in himself, or has himself an original determinate being of his own, a character which is in principle the same as what psychology sought to find outside him.”

Hegel’s ideal subject does not play the role of a singular, private subjectivity. It is the absolute as expressed in the spirit of consciousness. The absolute is subject. The absolute spirit itself is the inner history of all human experience. This subject is absolute knowing, not a singular event but a mode of existence and of everyday life. It is expressed in history, culture and human thought as their content.

“Of the absolute we must say that it is essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it truly is, and therein lies its nature to be actual, subject, or the coming to itself.”

Precisely because the becoming of spirit is only for itself, as its own cause, it realizes the idea of freedom. In a reflective act the human being can realize this idea as well. When the human subject, as the embodiment of spirit in concrete history, recognizes the content of spirit, he establishes by means of it the expressions of the identity of his period and his society, that is, he presents as an image a state of consciousness corresponding to the general situation.

The historical process of mind shapes reality in countless concrete forms (laws, institutions, science, intersubjective relations and so on). The individual can inscribe his freedom by critically examining the realization of the principles of spirit in reality (morality, philosophy, religion, state). “The subject has gained its world and knows it – to be its own actuality, to be reason.”

Just as the human subject negates itself (I - not I; mine - not mine; reality - phenomenology; the subject identifies itself through the image of its opposite), so the dialectical spirit struggles with itself on its path to truth (Marcuse 1951). Essence is in the inner world of things, so the subject can negate every temporary state in order to continue toward complete knowledge. “The individual understands himself, his consciousness, his history, and he comes to see these elements as belonging to his own selfhood, not as imposed upon him by accident.”

Thought is always present. Self-consciousness is the source of the whole activity of spirit, therefore there is no reason for the human being to be alienated from his world. He is in an ongoing process of becoming and of rational identification with the fundamental components of the concrete reality of his culture and his society (every rational being is real). “The subject must take the world and make it its own concern if it wishes to see itself as the sole reality. In that case the process of knowledge becomes the process of history.”

Being and thought are both, in a sense, Spinozist modes of absolute mind. The truth of reality is its becoming, a historical circle whose end lies already in its beginning. This truth is not expressed as substance but as subject. “The absolute as subject” has a logical consciousness and the same structure as the existential thought of a human subject (the capacity for self-consciousness, reflection, the existential and developmental structures of human subjectivity). The living substance is the being that is truly subject, that is, and this is the same thing, truly real only insofar as it is the movement of positing itself or the mediation of itself by becoming other.

From here Hegelian phenomenology becomes the expression of the inner logic of the unfolding of the world spirit along the infinite axis of time, whose ticks are images of the self-conscious principles required for transhistorical development. In other words, inner, phenomenological and subjective necessity is a moment of outer, spiritual and objective necessity, and what stands at the basis of all data is the absolute spirit of the world of thought.

In a different linguistic frame: the phenomena (as expressions of the necessity of spirit) are like frozen images, moments in the movement of concrete truth, in a regular becoming with a definite direction. If, in the ideal world, human existence is concentrated in the power of thought, and by this power the human being constructs the world of reality and its history, which is reason, then the only direction for elevated thought (which concerns thought itself, the world as subject) is a concrete aspiration toward a rational and free order of life.

I learned that immediate becoming – thought arising out of its own activity, creating itself out of itself – belongs to a purely rational world, the result of free thoughts. It is no accident that Hegelian idealism wants, by means of this language, to elevate philosophy to the rank of science, since philosophy, as a discipline, is the main representative of the realm of intellect and introspection. Idealism seeks to educate human beings to a mental effort by which they may acquire knowledge concerning the principles of their reality.

From here phenomenology becomes a process of educating spirit, of shaping it into culture by itself. The educator is humanity as a whole. The human being aspires, and is educated, to break free from the immediacy of merely natural life, the life in which we are immersed without introspection, toward reflection and the gaze of pure reason. “No less is it necessary to learn how to strengthen or refute this thought by reasons, to grasp the rich and concrete fullness with determinate concepts, and to know how to present about it ordered information and measured judgment.” Only in such cultural education will the human being understand and know himself, his world, his place and his time. Is this not the clear beginning of the modern project, as “project”, as a timeless structure that human reason constructs and develops.

The human being, with his knowledge of the general spirit, recognizes the demands of that spirit and thus transcends natural life toward dialectical reason. The relation to the self, personal maturity, cultural knowledge, intellectual cultivation – all these are not merely the private sphere of the individual but his cognitive relation to absolute spirit. From here comes the Hegelian “Dasein”, being there, being in the world in attunement to an inner absolute thought, in reflective thinking in which the meaning and purpose of human spirit are disclosed.

It is easy here to be seduced and dream of an ideal world as the realization of the subject’s free thought, but spirit does not act according to the essence of happiness alone. Like the human subject, as I have already indicated, in its process spirit advances and destroys what it has been, and who it has been. Without this, the pages of history could not be filled. Looking backward, the fact is that human memory of its own history is dominated by revolutionary events. There are revolutions, and they are not carried out by pure spiritual reason alone but by its representatives in concrete reality, the individuals.

Here, says Marcuse, comes a man, Napoleon by name, who wishes to realize the aspirations of absolute spirit, to bring blessing to humanity. The blessing will arrive on a platter of destruction and millions of human corpses. For Hegel, who saw and felt the French Revolution (Marcuse 2001), it was a revolution in thought that matched the necessity of absolute spirit, the subjective interest of consciousness. The revolution is the activity by which spirit negates itself, as if examining itself to see whether it is suited to the era, to the contemporary human being, in order once again to continue and advance toward truth, toward freedom. The revolutionary realizes this freedom in his physical action. The revolution, as the realization of the freedom of spirit, brings about the freedom of the subject.

Every phenomenon is the embodiment of potential at a given historical moment. Likewise, a particular thought of a particular period is the offspring of the spirit of that time. From here also Hegel’s own ideas are the outcome of concrete events in his country and society, and the French Revolution marks the horizon of development of those concrete events.

“Images that follow one another, without representing anything, without value and without purpose. I myself am one of those images, and not even that – only a blurred image of the images. All reality becomes a marvelous dream, without life to be the subject of the dream and without spirit to dream it, and this dream about a dream binds and traps it.” (“Synecdoche, New York”)

If we try to describe Caspar David Friedrich’s painting “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (1818), we will want to use exactly these words. With the same words we could describe the whole doctrine of the Romantic movement in art. If there is an absolute subject that creates with its imagination, then the artist, poet, musician or painter is the one who presents that creation before its own expression, the human being.

The art that Hegel and his companions call for is bold and revolutionary. It must display self-consciousness as the expression of the spirit of absolute knowing. Artistic activity realizes philosophical ideas and creates the possibility of overcoming the alienation between human being and world. The very act of creation is necessarily affirmative.

From these premises Romanticism demands that we shatter the synthetic glass that has been glazed over reality by modern science and bourgeois culture. It seeks simplicity, the natural state in which spirit is revealed. This natural state can be pure and good or wild and free. Aesthetic pleasure is thus the wonder before the spirit of being, before existential meaning, before human creation (Berlin 2001). “True poetry is at once intuition and thought. Images, parables, concrete and abstract symbols, this is the double world of the human soul.”

The absolute subject and its truth are mysterious, and there is no reason to express this mystery in empirical language. There is always a region of darkness and secrecy in both nature and the human soul, a mystery that neither scientist nor politician can penetrate. “Woman on the Balcony” (1824) by Gustav Carus is an example. “Myths convey this mystery in artistic images and symbols, which manage to connect the human being to the mystery of nature without words.”

Kant’s aesthetic judgment is also a kind of universal, intuitive subjectivity. Aesthetic pleasure, when it is free of interest in the object, is judged from the pure subject. In the act of aesthetic evaluation the subject embodies his relation to the object without purposive desire. This power of judgment opens for the subject the possibility of self-discovery under concepts of abstract pleasure. The artist’s spirit acts with awareness of the absolute subject and thus gives form to things as they are grasped in general spirit and thought.

In its role art can present nature as different possibilities of freedom (Janson 1970). Romanticism seeks to break any barrier that prevents direct access to sublime, picturesque, ever moving nature. It craves human history, its revolutions, love, passion, freedom, violence, everything that the history of reason has to offer. The human being wanders with this landscape, his humanity unfolds within it, he can behave in it naturally, authentically. This landscape is the product of his own creation. “In the name of nature, the romantic worshiped liberty, power, love, violence, the Greeks, the Middle Ages” (Janson, p. 454).

Janson presents these ideas through the landscapes of Friedrich and John Constable. The landscape is a human artwork (not nature as mere object), and within this creation both yearning and longing for annihilation into paradise, into legend, into an ideal reality that can contain the full sensitivity of the human being, come to expression. “The Polar Sea” (1824) by Friedrich or “The Opening of Waterloo Bridge seen from Whitehall Stairs” (1817) by Constable, for example. At the same time these paintings also express “the unresolved tension between the longing for innumerable experiences and the worship of the self of the individual, which necessarily produced a neurotic paralysis of the capacity for choice.”

“Romanticism is not to be found in the choice of themes nor in accurate truth, but in the mode of feeling. It can be found only within.” (“Synecdoche, New York”) The romantic sees the world as his own dream, as an endless bundle of possible experiences. The creator need not select a single specific experience and name it. Hence the mist, the blurring, the longing for the past (Greek tragedy, the Bible, Shakespeare), for the divine whole, for the unknowable in itself, unfelt and unseen. “The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides” (1827) by William Blake, which echoes Dante’s Divine Comedy, or “A Dream in the Apennine” by Samuel Palmer (1864), are examples. Faust himself is an expression of the human struggle against his own negation, an expression of longing for the divine being, for the principles of absolute spirit, the good, the natural.

Just as the philosophers of idealism strive for spontaneity of spirit and immediacy, so in Romantic art, the more immediate the drive and passion, the more authenticity and value they acquire. The romantic being sees and recognizes spirit, the history of reason and its unfolding. As a revolutionary historical unit, political, cultural, social and artistic, it strives to rediscover itself. In this way Victor Hugo’s “Legend of the Centuries” (1859) presents history as universal myth, as a world epic stretching from Adam and Eve, through Jesus, social poems and religions to the conquest of the world by the human spirit (Locher 1962).

This longing for nature, origins and spirit will shape many of the wandering heroes of Western literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. “If nature serves as your teacher, your soul will grow great,” says Goethe. And Faust adds: “I have left the fields. In the shade of the deep night they sleep. Night of holy silence awakens within us the superfluous soul. The wild drives rest with every living act. The love of human beings stirs secretly, and in secret the love of God stirs.” Romanticism at its best. This is an artistic expression of Rousseau’s “Man is born free”, the struggle of the human being’s apriori goodness against the corrupting bourgeois economic culture of interest. “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Creator,” writes Rousseau in “Emile” (1762). Emile, like spirit, seeks to preserve the beginning of its history, the good kernel in the human being.

Following this, Delacroix also wishes to return to the primal nature of the world, before culture corrupted it. He himself sails to African lands to observe the simple human being, happy “in his stupidity”, living the elementary truth. “The Women of Algiers” (1834) is an example. He writes:

“Truth is described to us as naked [...] I can conceive that only for abstract truth. But every truth in the arts comes about through means in which the hand of man is felt, and consequently with the form agreed on and adopted in the same time when the artist lives.”

From all of this we see that the artist has the capacity to educate toward the possibility of realizing the ideal, toward personal, conscious expression. That is why Romanticism loves the lyrical poem, the solitary cry, heroism, the historical and revolutionary event, the upward gaze, passion, feeling (Berlin 2001). “The Derby of Epsom” (1821) by Théodore Géricault, “Seascape Study with Rain Cloud” (1824) by Constable, or any painting by Delacroix, for instance.

I learned that in order to realize the vocation of inner spirit, the human being is obligated to create, to act. Only thus does he express his freedom. If he does not act and remains passive toward his reality, he is considered dead to spirit. Therefore, in his creation, the human being, like the absolute subject, does not seek only the happiness and calm of a rational, artificial world. He wants to experience, to dare (theses that will be fully articulated by Nietzsche). It is enough to read Herder or Hamann to grasp the desire for spontaneous, sensual, emotional, intense, authentic and personal expression that magnifies the I in creation.

From now on art is no longer meant only to represent but also to express the inner world of the creator. We see this in the emotional explosion of Beethoven, terror, fear and joy together, in contrast to the order of Mozart or Bach. The sound is more internal, the note more eccentric. If we understand music as an art that works emotionally without words, as abstract yet accessible to intuition, we will see it as an ideal art for Romanticism (Talmon 1973). This is no longer the same objective order, the same unified, classical, Catholic harmony. The world is different, interesting, unstable, challenging and inexhaustible. “The romantic did not seek to discover universal truth but longed to experience reality in a way that was entirely his own. He sought to achieve this not through thought but through feelings, emotions, imagination, instincts, dreams and memories.”

If we look closely at J. M. W. Turner’s “Wreckers Coast of Northumberland” (1836) or “Calais Pier” (1803) we see a summary of these ideas. The spirit of nature, like the human soul, unfolds through the storm, the fire, the passion. The striving toward the self, toward the essential, leads to delirium, to a somnambulant dream.

If the secret, the mystery, of the absolute subject as of the human being is internal, then the introspective gaze will reveal not only the history of human wisdom, of reason or of moral goodness, but also horrors, drives, darkness, violence and death. These too are truth, the reality of the concrete world. “The Nightmare” (1781) or “The Night-Hag Visiting the Lapland Witches” (1796) by Henry Fuseli, or many of Francisco Goya’s paintings, for example “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (1797). I will return to Goya later through modernism.

With Goya begins the realist process, the movement of realism that emerges at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It records the modern world, phenomena and events, the subject who creates his world. Delacroix writes:

“...to record the manners, ideas and aspect of the age as I myself saw them, to be a man as well as a painter, in short to create living art, that is my aim.”

We see these words most clearly in “Liberty Leading the People” (1830).

I learned that reality itself is art, creation. By recording it, the human being records himself and can see through it his history and his soul, the possibility of his freedom and his place in the world. From here there is no escape but to move on to the next chapter, to “the modern subject”.