Another of Burke’s observations merits attention because it heralded the possibility of emancipating works of art from classical mimetic laws. In the long debate over the relative merits of painting and poetry, Burke sided with poetry. Painting is taken to task for imitating models, and for its figurative representations: if art’s object is to create intense sensations in those for whom it is intended, imagistic figuration is a limiting constraint on the possibilities for emotive expression. However, in the language of arts––and particularly in poetry, which Burke did not consider a genre with regulations but the field for countless active investigations of language––emotive powers are free from the verisimilitudes of figuration. “To represent an angel in a picture, you can only draw a beautiful young man winged; but what painting can furnish out any thing so grand as the addition of one word, ‘the Angel of the Lord?’ “ And how does one go about painting––in such a way that strength measures up to feeling––the “universe of death” where ends the voyage of fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost?

Words have several advantages when it comes to expressing feelings: they are themselves charged with passionate connotation; they can evoke matters of the soul without having to consider visibility; finally, Burke remarked that “by words we have it in our power to make such combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise.” The arts, with whatever their materials, pressed forward by the esthetics of the sublime in a quest for intense effects, can and must overlook mimetic models that are merely beautiful, and must test their limits through surprising, difficult, shocking combinations. Shock is, par excellence, the evidence of (something) happening, rather than nothing at all. It is suspended privation.

Burke’s analyses could easily be resumed and elaborated in a Freudian-Lacanian problematic (precisely what Pierre Kaufman and Baldine Saint-Girons have done). But I am bringing them up in a different spirit, the one the subject of this article––the avant-garde––demands. I have tried to suggest that at the dawn of romanticism Burke’s esthetic of the sublime, and to a lesser degree Kant’s, outlined a world of possibilities for artistic expression through which the avant-gardes would later wend their way. There are no direct influences, no empirically observable connections. Manet, Cézanne, Braque, and Picasso probably did not read Kant or Burke. What I am suggesting is more a matter of irreversible deviations in the directional course of art, deviations that have affected all the valences of the artistic condition. The artist would begin to attempt combinations in order to create events. The amateur would no longer experience simply pleasure or derive some ethical benefit from his contact with art, but would instead expect an intensification of his conceptual and emotional capacity, an ambivalent joyousness. The art object would no longer bend itself to models, but would try to present the unpresentable; it would no longer imitate nature but would be an artifact, a simulacrum. The social community would no longer recognize itself in art objects, but would scorn them, reject them as incomprehensible, and then would accept that the intellectual avant-garde might preserve them in museums as the remnants of offensives that bear witness to the power, and the rawness, of the spirit.

With the advent of sublime esthetics, the stake of art in the 19th and 20th centuries was to be witness to indeterminacy. For painting, the paradox that Burke signaled in his observations on the powers of words is that such testimony can only be achieved through determined methods. Support, frame, line, color, space, the figure were all to remain subject to the representational constraints of romantic art. But this contradiction of ends and means had, as early as Manet and Cézanne, the effect of once again casting doubt on the legitimacy of certain rules that determined representations of the figure in space and the organization of colors and values since the quattrocento. Reading Cézanne’s correspondence, one understands that his accomplishment was not that of a talented painter finding his “style,” but that of an artist responding to the question: what is a painting? His work had at stake to record on a support only those “chromatic sensations,” those “petites sensations,” that would, according to Cézanne’s hypothesis, of themselves constitute the entire pictorial existence of an object––a fruit, a mountain, a face, or a flower, without consideration of history or “subject,” of line, of space, even of light. These elementary sensations are hidden in ordinary perception. They are only accessible to the painter, and therefore can only be reinstated by the painter, through the expense of an interior discipline that rids perceptual and intellectual fields of prejudices as deeply ingrained as vision itself. If the viewer does not submit to a complementary interior process, the painting will remain senseless and impenetrable to him or her. The painter must not hesitate to run the risk of being taken for a mere dauber. “One paints for very little.” Recognition from the regulatory institutions of paintings––Academy, salons, criticism, taste––is of little importance compared to the discernment the painter-seeker brings to the success obtained by the work of art in relation to what is really at stake: to reveal what makes one seen, and not what is visible.