Croce idealizes composition. He wants to heroize initiatory formal perfections. For a poet there is certainly the spectral presence of some kind of shape for some kind of poem that he has only just begun to write. It's the instinct for form reacting the moment the event of the poem is engaged. But very often a poem is finally formed I feel it as an invincible incompleteness only when its spectral origins have been so dragged and hammered by the actual words that the poem emerges as a strange, used thing. The words of poetry answer to, as they sustain, the initial stirring of inspiration, the "psychic motion." The answering task of the writing transfigures its spectral origins. The Macchiaioli were more respectful of the initiating motif, but even they were not so pure as the Japanese scroll painter whose first painterly gesture was a finality, the end of long meditation and preparation, and left unrevised. Even the Macchiaioli would take their macchie, their plein-air color sketches, back to the studio to "finish" them, to paint them up .

I love Courbet's drawing Seated Model Reading in the Studio, the subject caught "outside the frame" of formal studio work. How supple and thoughtless she is, slouching, a little distracted by what she's reading in her book. Another mood, violently unlike that one, is struck in his Still Life with Apples and Pomegranates . The teeming internal force of the pomegranates thins out the rind and makes it shine with fever-dream vibrance. They are full of some rage of nature, something left of Persephone's appetite, her passion and its consequences in the underworld. Courbet's realism is life lived twice, in the sensuous solidity of actual appearances and in the myth that memorializes it in another present.

What does a poet want?

The thing life of paint, its immediate presence of image, without giving up the pure thought life of words.

Vasari says of Tintoretto: "He has surpassed even the limits of extravagance with the new and fanciful inventions and the strange vagaries of his intellect, working at haphazard and without design, as if to prove that art is but a jest. This master at times has left as finished works sketches still so rough that the brush strokes may be seen, done more by chance and vehemence than with judgment and design." Tintoretto's decision was more a kind of advanced abandonment. In a work like The Removal of St. Mark's Body in the Accademia in Venice the very sketchy brushwork is certainly intentional. Though it's now impossible to determine where Tintoretto's legendary haste and efficiency, his mercurial powers, became (if ever they were not) the testing of the margins of adequate representation. He pushed the representation of substance toward the spectral, toward the disintegration of corporeal solidifies. And yet whenever he chose, he could be the most sensuous of painters, as in the Accademia's Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel .

Cézanne to his dealer Vollard, who was sitting for a portrait: "You must sit like an apple."

You look at a hundred good pictures, then one begins to teach you all over again how to see. For me it's one of Degas's dancers, essence on an electric green ground of wove paper. Her tutu is just a zigzag gesture, the lower leg extended from the green, growing out of the color, defined only by the minimal outline of skirt. The mark makes a field of force. It's an image of a retinal impression reemergent from memory an act of exuberant, and maybe desperate, recovery. In the 1890s Degas's eyesight was going. He told a young painter: "It's all very well to copy what you see, but it's better to draw what you see in your mind. . . . Then your memory and imagination are freed from the tyranny imposed by nature."

Caravaggio's Sleeping Cupid in the Palazzo Pitti looks like a dissipated miniature (or shrunken) adult, with his neat row of worn-down teeth and features already pouched and sagging with the delicious torment of too much pleasure. His wings are crushed, useless beneath the weight of his stupor. Although the turned, raised hip is conventional in putti, this cupid's moist, dimpled textures make his pose the stilled, seductive, exhausted repose after lovemaking. He's not asleep, he's drugged with tastes of pleasure and death: it's an image of exalted, slightly rancid existence. Caravaggio's two Emmaus paintings are identical subject occasions for expressing very different religious feelings. In the one in London, where Christ is a rather pudgy, unsolemn presence, the presentation is a journalistic thump, the thrill of an unlikely, unforgettable event. It's operatic in feeling the stage set is elaborately dressed with a basket of fruit and the light is a medium of surprise. The energy of the recognition that in Christ's presence the body has conquered death is worked out in the excited postures of one disciple gripping the arm of his chair and the other flinging his arms open. Both it and the version in the Brera are about the witness of restoration in the human order restoration, that is, of the possibility for redemption from the sufferings natural to the human order. In the Brera painting, less flamboyant and grandiose, less charged with newsworthiness, the disciple on the right whose face we see is almost incredulous, but it's incredulity roused by fright. At the moment of consecration, of the transubstantiating gesture changing bread into flesh, his hands grip the table in terror. The disciple on the left spreads his arms, but not in a plaintive or astonished way. Rather, it's a gesture of self-surrender. (His face is hidden; I think he's Caravaggio's self in the scene.) The innkeeper standing behind and slightly to the side of Christ is at least curious, but also skeptical and wary. He's more observer than witness, he's not so susceptible to the apparency of conversion, revelation, or awe. He leans away from Christ as if the power of the event were a contagion. He's the screen between Christ and the old woman, who has the look of readiness to abandon her consciousness to the resurrected God-man.

Van Gogh writing to Theo from Arles in September 1888: "I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life my power to create." He could do without God but not without transcendence. What is that greater "something"? I think it is the consciousness which may be entirely one's own but which the artist, any artist, experiences and practices as greater and more inclusive than his own. That is how its reality is felt in one's working moments. It frees the artist into fearlessness and formal impiety.

Realism may be not so much the attempt, as Linda Nochlin says, to bring reality back alive, as a less conventionally mediated expression of eros, of the felt incompleteness of the artist seeking out the complementary incompleteness perceived in concrete reality. Painting is an act of marshaling and formalizing the evidence of that desire. Its passion is the engagement of that impossibility. 

Delacroix in his journals exclaims, "How I love painting!" No artist ever worried so much about working hard enough. He counted and recorded the number of hours. He badgered himself into productivity. And he remained throughout an enthusiast, preserving himself from what might have become mastery mongering. (He didn't want to end up like Ingres, who was so preoccupied with good style that, in Delacroix's gleeful remark, "he preferred to be stupid rather than not to appear serious .") But love of the activity is not essential to the task of making good art. Did Cézanne love painting in the same way Delacroix did? Did Van Gogh, or Giacometti? Servitude, devotionalism, research, form finding, the obsession with impossibility and incompleteness and disintegrations these are elements in the compound of modernist love and enthusiasm.

In the Scuola Grande di San Rocco . It's with the faintest touch that Tintoretto's angel restrains Abraham, though the mortal's forearms are powerfully muscled he has a Titan's god-defying musculature, here in service to divine command. Yet the faint touch of the messenger arrests all that force and will incarnate. In The Baptism of Christ the light the Holy Spirit sends down dissolves the flesh of the onlookers along the shore, turning them into scribbles of light. Below, at the baptismal pool, the Redeemer's destiny is already portended in the shadowy darkness, the meaty brownness of the earthly scene. The picture, as Matisse might say, is an image of the descent of light into the flesh.

Lesser art does not challenge itself, does not become adversarial; it can only breed its own unquestioned, and sometimes quite moving, perfections. It's singular and meticulously idiosyncratic. Eventually it proves itself to be what its time wants, not what it needs.

Baudelaire describes in the Salon of 1845 the pleasures we can get from certain energetic but mediocre paintings: "Will-power has to be well developed, and always very fruitful, to be able to give the stamp of uniqueness even to second-rate works. The viewer enjoys the effort and his eye drinks the sweat."

We attribute our own secular disinterestedness to Van Gogh when we think of him as a modernist saint on a mission to investigate forms. His impulses were as much religious and social as formal. He painted to offer his fellow earth residents some trace of redemption from the agonies of existence. We sometimes feel that desire in the arduous imaginative sympathy he showed toward his models. His intention was not to construct a formal portrait study but to make an image of an existence. When his models did not adequately meet this strain of existence, he filled the insufficiency with his own suffering resources. We hear it in the unsettling mix of knowledge, righteousness, and ingenuousness in the letters. To Theo he writes that his work "lies in the heart of the people, that I must keep close to the ground, that I must grasp life at its deepest, and make progress through many cares and troubles." When other artists speak of their working lives as a via crucis they mean it in a metaphorical, secularized sense: that the deep knowledge of forms or the realization of a work is an act of suffered redemption or justification. Van Gogh's mission was a more radical Christian one: he was artist of the Church Militant, the painter as pastoral warrior. The demands of love elemented his life and work. "The clergymen call us sinners," he says in another letter, "conceived and born in sin, bah! what dreadful nonsense that is. Is it a sin to love, to need love, not to be able to live without love? I think a life without love a sinful and immoral condition." (He was then suffering his unrequited love for the widow Kee, in 1881.) He possessed a radical Christian simplicity that in practice will often seem a derangement or idiocy. His painting was, of course, an attempt to achieve a right expression of a formal passion, but folded heavily into that was his effort to paint as an expression of love and of the need for love lest one (in his terms) be damned. The spastic riptide brushwork of some paintings bears out the rage of love. Paint's mass, color, and texture were love's substantiation. The milliner's dummy in some of Degas's paintings is a little display platform for melting ribbons, crinoline, and plumage. The shop itself was a place where new facts of a bourgeois economy were displayed, as well as the relations between buyers and their desired objects, between the shopkeeper and her goods, between the owner and her assistant. Later on de Chirico, in his metaphysical paintings, takes over the milliner's dummy, undressed, for its stately anonymity, its muteness and abstractedness. (Even Morandi painted a still life with one of them.) The featureless head and upper torso become for de Chirico an item in a new sort of genre scene, the kind that exists in the artist's head, phantasmagorical and character-less. It appears not as an object of use but as a form from which features have faded. It's an image of erasure. The figures in his metaphysical paintings, unsurprisingly, look only this side of nullity.

In the early portraits of his Uncle Dominique made with the palette knife around 1866, Cézanne was building by dismantling. It's unsettling, almost painful, to watch it happen, because he learned and progressed by turbulent, wrenching force. His undoing of the limpidities of likeness into broad viscous color armoring the picture surface color heavy like shingles or reptilian plate, as if the paint's volume could be made equivalent to the voluminous density of the thing itself was a necessary condition for constructing a painted image of nature. One of the excitements of the early paintings is the way we can see Cézanne trying to find his bearings, struggling with his instincts to perform the impossible task: to copy nature. In a painting like The Black Clock, with its oddly positioned cup and saucer and the tablecloth's gashed shadows and starchy folds, we can feel the exertion of his investigations. He was releasing into paint more immediately the bad humor and volatility he was known for. Up until the early 1870s, he was like a child in a contrary fairy tale who throws the stones he means to drop behind him to mark his trail. A Modigliani in the Barnes collection: a woman in a low-cut black gown, with the familiar cool, welcoming, aloof glance. The paint is all puckers and pinches. The surface flesh and fabric and ground is raked over. The woman's attentiveness is drawn with such controlled enthusiasm that, taken in at once, motif and execution pull us into the restless, serenely predatory presence of the subject.

With collage the modern artist adds to his formal powers that of collecting. He becomes an archivist of the actual. He can take message givers, prescriptive signs, rhetorical persuaders of all sorts wrappers, labels, newspaper clippings, photographic images, menus, printouts and slant them into a defiantly nonprescriptive, unrhetorical painting. The private language redeems public debris; signs are saved to be made over into another existence. The master image also thus becomes a kind of archeological site seeded by the maker. The recovery of visual fact is fused in a figure-ground relation with oblivion. Collage may be an art form that thrives most in a culture that easily imagines every day its own ruins.

There's often the spooked child, or wary forager, in Picasso's work. And he practiced the antagonism of magic. Sometimes the magic was apotropaic. He told Malraux that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which he called his first "exorcism painting," first came to him the day he went to the Trocadéro Flea Market and saw African masks. For Matisse and Derain, he says, they were sculptures, but for him they were instead magic items, useful intercesseurs . ("Ever since then I've known the word in French," he tells Malraux.) It was their power, and the contrariness or adversarial quality of that power, that appealed to him. "They were against everything against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood, I too am against everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! Everything! Not the details women, children, babies, tobacco, playing but the whole of it. . . . [The fetishes] were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of the spirits again, to help them become independent. They're tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent." As a form maker he was sustained by his flaring rage, antipathy, paranoia, and superstition. For him the act of painting was a crueler, and at the same time more shamanic, activity than it was for Matisse and Derain. He rejected the idea that painting is a search or quest for forms it was pure antagonistic making, inventing, striking out against the great emptiness of the not me . A good deal of his work comes directly from the sort of combative fear he saw given shape in those masks. The mask mediates between human need and self-knowledge and survival, and the sacred. Picasso said he wanted to find the mask of God, to make painting that would be the finding of the mask.

For a long time Western artists expressed their sense of the sacred by depicting the shared subject matter of Christendom, which connected them to their audience. Eliade says that the sacred, in all times, is "the revelation of the real, an encounter with that which saves us by giving meaning to our existence." The emergence of nature, I mean of the natural sublime, in eighteenth-century painting, by which time traditional scriptural subject matter had dissipated into mannered pieties, was a reclaiming of the sacred. For Courbet and later realists, the purest revelation of the real was in the physical world, in what Courbet called the concrete, especially in human toil, in the material fastness of landscape, in the luminous sexual gravity of the female form. By the end of his century, the sense of the sacred is expressed in the visible manipulation of artistic forms and material. John Berger says in his book on Picasso: "The artist who finds his subject within his own activity as an artist did not exist before the end of the nineteenth century, and Cézanne is probably the prototype." The one god finally dissolved into a vague polyvalent presence available only in the action of paint, stone, line, etc. Form itself became a sacred subject, the other reality the artist sought. The motif could be familiar still life, portrait of a gardener, landscape, bathers, dancers, laborers,

businessmen but the real topic was the artist's way of seeing and imaging forth the given. The axis shifted: the sacred no longer inhered in the sublime, absolute presence of things, it was worked into manifestation in the forms made in response to that presence. The image wasn't a mediator, it was a generator, or genitor. It did not constitute a new liturgy, it expressed the reality of transcendence without the articulation and sacramentalism of liturgy. Someday it may all seem a massive nostalgia for what Western culture felt to be its home in gods who then fled.

In a 1930 portrait of his wife Elinor Gibson, John Graham builds the paint in puckered layers. The modeling is more energetic and inventive than in a lot of his other work. (He was mostly concerned with eccentricity of image.) Half the face is creamy rose except for the blackened eye socket that was one of Graham's pictorial signatures; the other half, picking up that darkness, is burnt-cork black. Half the face, therefore, looks like patient technique, maybe a little mechanical and overdetermined; the other is emergence and formal surprise. In his 1937 book System and Dialectics of Art, Graham wrote that a work of art is "a problem posed and solved." His work is engaging insofar as it slips that overmethodical definition. His women, with their crossed or walleyed gaze, look dazed but serene, a little stupefied, stunned momentarily by the fact of their consciousness, without the remote, unsurprisable intelligence of Matisse's women or the ravenous allure of de Kooning's. His women's stare hasn't much visionary tension or awe; it's mostly just odd, bent, off center. The oddness carries over into the later paintings that encode hermetic devices, lore, magical formulas, and occult imagery. They're alive with a playful intellectual hysteria, but I never have the sense that they're realizing themselves at the margins of some formal wilderness, despite his assertions about art posing and solving problems. There's not much menace in the work, as there is even in the depthless stare of Modigliani's women. But there is that charming, mysterious cockeyed look. His women keep the world in view only by half looking away from it. Rilke, writing in 1907 about Cézanne: "[He] lays his apples on bed-covers which Madame Brémond will sorely miss some day, and places a wine bottle among them or whatever happens to be handy. And (like Van Gogh) he makes his 'saints' out of such things; and forces them forces them to be beautiful, to stand for the whole world and all joy and all glory, and he doesn't know whether he has succeeded in making them do it for him. And he sits in the garden like an old dog, the dog of his work that is calling him again and again and that beats him and lets him starve." The painter forces his motifs to be beautiful, as a poet forces his subject to be beautiful. But what does it mean to be beautiful? To remake in a language the full complicated intensities of existence. Then feel that you are even further than before from adequate completeness.

Two tiny bronzes by Giacometti from 1940-41. Mounted on large bases, the forms are smooth, and you can still see the rotundity carried over from the earlier surrealist work. But now, before he has gone over entirely to the figuration of his major style, he's still finding his way out of the conceptual harness of Surrealism and toward the confrontation with nature that will defeat and frustrate him for the rest of his life and will result in his greatest work. Within two years he begins to model the clay with an erosive passion that seems a helpless self-destructiveness. The roughed surfaces of the "new" work, after the sleek, curvilinear features of his surrealist period, become one register of his most constant anxiety the anxiety of making an adequate finished copy.

Cézanne's réalisation: nature reported to us as fused existence. We see the fused whole of Mont Sainte-Victoire, or of a plate of apples and pears, or of a hillside with birch trees, as they are imagined to exist, not as one sees them. Cézanne insisted that he painted things as they are, for what they are, as he saw them. I think he meant he painted them as they are one thing, one image in consciousness. But the realization was also nature-in-its-becoming; therefore any painting was a volumetric history, geologic, stratified, streaked with traces of emergence, fossil retentive. His short brushstrokes are willful, investigative, emotionally laden units of mass. What's made "real" in the reality of his painting is the buildup and incipient breakdown of nature's consistencies. In landscapes and even in some of the still lifes he pulls the hidden into view, onto the plane of the picture, and shows us the stress lines of that exertion. What is nature in captivity in a Cézanne still life? We not only see the surface of the fruit but also know that some surfaces and the masses they define are being pushed out at us. He paints the action of the desirous imagination as it seeks to know its object. He liked to say how badly he wanted to emulate in paint, in a still life, a tablecloth described somewhere in Balzac: a tablecloth like snow, with the little hills of rolls spread upon it. And yet why do we feel a momentary completeness of being when we look at his work, with all his constant self-confessed failures, his endless unsatisfactory "researches" (Vollard sat 115 times over three years for a portrait), the grinding habitual unhappy inadequacy of it all? Despite all that, which in Cézanne's case is to say because of it, the all is there .