different concepts of truth in french and 'anglo-saxon' art

the 19th century and the early twentieth century saw a movement in both literature and painting to bring aesthetic expression closer and closer to realistic expressions of our everyday experience, rather than the mythic and noble themes and styles that had dominated previously. indeed, this movement went beyond conventional realism in its search for veracity, toward extravagant depictions of subjectivity--of course in proust, woolf, and joyce, but also implicitly in impressionist painting itself.

this movement toward everydayness and intersubjectivity is well known and excessively discussed, especially by wittgensteinians, who seem to find in it a justification for their own boring academic-bourgeois complacency.

but what is perhaps too seldom noted is the different character of the french movement toward the everyday and the truths derived from everyday experience, and the 'anglo-saxon' (as they put it) movement toward the everyday.

specifically, french art moved toward a husserlian understanding of truth, while anglo-american art moved toward an empiricist/pragmatist understanding of truth.

for the french, everyday experience was a source for truths that were themselves ideal and not merely empirical 'matters of fact.' although aesthetic truths are derived eventually from our experience, artists like proust gave priority to the ideal forms rather than the particular and concrete realities. real experiences were mere models for the creation of beautiful, non-temporal objects. for the french, the significance of everyday experience lay in the possibility of its transformation into idealities that are superior to their origins. again, this is essentially the same relation that husserl has to particulars and matters of fact.

at the same time, anglo-american art was also aiming toward truth. but rather than capturing in the art-object an ideal beauty or an ideal form, anglo-american art attempted to put the viewer into contact with the empirical fact as such--not considered as a universal rule or an abstract idea that would exist in some sense outside of our real world, but the fact as it is in the very concrete empirical reality we inhabit.

this is the source of the surface ugliness of much anglo-american art. consider constable and eakins, but more importantly hemingway and hammett, author of the maltese falcon and the 'matter-of-fact' noir tone that bogart translated to film. these artists are not in search of ideal beauty, are not attempting to escape the world or subordinate the empirical to the ideal. rather, they are attempting to come to grips with our empirical reality as such, with the factual truth of that reality.

so while on the surface the american and french movements toward experiential truth in art seems to be quite similar, they are finally quite different, because the kinds of truth they pursue are directly opposed. in more recent times, the best comparison would be between balthus and lucian freud: balthus, despite his medievalisms, is essentially within an advanced version of the proustian vision, ideality drawn from everyday reality. lucian freud is not attempting to turn the real into the ideal, but to reveal the real as it is.