Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 29 Fall 2011

              Santayana and the Avant-garde:
Visual Arts in the Context of
Democracy, Norms, Liberty, and
Social Progress
George Santayana (1863-1952) defined, at the very beginning of his
philosophical career, the basic traits of his lifelong interests. Some of them
clearly show him as an artistic philosopher having a profound political
sensitivity. Hence, Santayana (in his letters to William James) admitted (in 1888) that
the reason why he started philosophizing was his interest "in seeing what pictures
ofthe world and of human nature men had succeeded in sketching" (LGS 1:97),
and, at more or less the same time (1887) he stated that "my vocation is toward
the human, political problems" (LGS 1:41). He confirmed the latter even more
tersely (in 1905): "I am a Latin, and nothing seems serious to me except politics"
(LGS 1:330). Simultaneously, he had been able to use this political sensitivity to,
among other things, easily recognize the influences of extra-artistic factors and
non-aesthetic impacts, such as various kinds of powers, upon various kinds of the
fine arts and aesthetic doctrines. For example, while studying the Christian arts in
Berlin's museums as a graduate student, he noticed that they (the Christian arts), "in
the service of religion, express the thwarting ofthe natural tendency ofthe soul, the
crushing of spontaneous life by the pressure of overwhelming external power" (LGS
1:38). His leaning towards seeing the arts as, more often than not, closely related to
various arrangements of social and political powers was life long; in his last book
published during his life, Dominations and Powers (1950), he not only expressed
a pessimistic reflection on whether it is "a gain in dignity" that the contemporary
art (excluding, perhaps, architecture) has become "bohemian," but also put this
pessimistic reflection in the context of expanding democracy;
Perhaps it is incidental to democracy to eschew patronage of any sort, and rely only
on what the average loose individual can discover in his insulated self-consciousness.
And certainly the democratic public respects the self-advertising artist and gives him
free rein, as an ancient city or an aristocratic society would never have done. The artist
now belongs to the Intelligentsia, which feels itself to be a sort of aristocracy; whereas
formerly he passed for a worthy artisan, perhaps a singular genius, but never for a lord
of life (DP 276).
This takes me to the main purpose of the present paper, that is, taking a look,
through Santayana's eyes, at some trends ofthe visual arts within the artistic avant-
garde at the turn ofthe 19th and 20th century — especially cubism, expressionism,
fauvism, and also abstractionism and surrealism. Santayana himself was by no
means a member or a sympathizer ofthe avant-garde movement; yet, he developed
his philosophical and aesthetic concepts at the same time as the avant-garde gained
impetus. Although his output is full of references to classical arts and aesthetics,
especially the Greek, he does not fail to recognize the meaning of some ofthe avant-
garde movements, especially cubism; and yet, he criticizes them as such.