The best way to describe the approach or attitude toward visual art uncovered by Gustaf Britsch is to encapsulate his empirical findings into a few basic principles from on which to proceed.

 A caveat is necessary before we continue. Although this website uses the word Gestalt liberally, this approach has nothing directly to do with Gestalt psychology. An artist’s act of imagining a picture in its entirety and then sketching it quickly, always keeping the entire picture in mind, on the canvas shares the concept of Gestalt psychology of seeing things (considering them) in their entirety, not as independent, discrete parts.

 The science of psychology was in its infancy during this period in history and there is no evidence to assume that Britsch knew about the studies in Gestalt psychology that were taking place in Berlin in his day. Britsch’s search for the answer to the question “what is visual art” took him from the salon of Heinrich Wölfflin to recognized artists of his time and evolved into an empirical study of the question. If one is going to learn about visual art, why not talk to those who create it? (Egon Kornmann commented that at most of the art congresses in the Europe of his time hardly any practicing artists were in attendance.)

 In attempting to answer the question “what is visual art?” Britsch needed to limit his field of study. He decided to eliminate all that, in his view, which was non-essential. This meant all historical, cultural, and other extraneous subjects as well as a work of art’s consideration as an object of aesthetic emotional experience. This left him with what he called “the artistic facts.” He defined artistic facts as those mental conditions that enable the artist to create artistic form. The mental achievement of which he spoke is the ability to transform visual experiences into artistic form.

 Please note that Britsch at no time discounted historical or cultural consoderations of works of art. He considered all of those approaches valid. He also did not negate the existence of aesthetic emotional experiences. He wanted to recognize and emphasize the mental achievement that results in works of art.

 Britsch also did not minimize human experience, on the contrary, he considered it the raw material of the artist that when transformed produces artistic form. We will return to a consideration of artistic form later.

 The consideration of the meaning of works of art and the selection of those elements that deliver particular kinds of meaning do not play a role in Britsch’s consideration, because during the period of time in which he considered his answer, such considerations were left to the art historians to work out. The subjective elements of perception, how and why an individual perceives an object, did not play a role in Britsch’s considerations. We will, therefore, not consider them in our discussion here.

 Human experience is multidimensional. Aristotle referred to sensual experience as the source of knowledge; St. Thomas Aquinas postulated the acquisition of knowledge by the action of the human intellect on the experience provided by the senses. The field of psychology introduced the consideration of human emotions to the complex of sensual experiences. When intellectual reflection is added to sensual and emotional experience, the result is a multifaceted, ever changing idea of human experience.

 In order to comprehend the multidimensional, multifaceted complex of human experience, philosophers from Aristotle to the present have struggled to discover the underlying principles behind these complex layers of experience. Are these theories based only upon pure speculation? Do they provide us with a plausible hint at an underlying structure of meaning?

 No single theory can account for the multidimensionality of human experience. As a result, today there is what can be called a general rejection of philosophically-based theories and the ascension of scientifically-based theories or, in some cases, non-theories. What cannot be scientifically measured, weighed, and probed cannot be taken seriously into account. Britsch, it will be seen, attempted to do just that. His greatest desire was to create what he termed “a science of art.”

 Basic Principles

 We have hinted at some of the basic principles above:

 - Visual art should be judged on its pictorial data alone.

 - A work of art is the product of an autonomous mental activity, a mental digestion and transformation of sensory experience into a newly created visual entity.

 - This newly created visual entity is characterized by a functional interrelationship of all of its parts.

 - This activity is independent of conceptual intellectual calculation and takes place solely within the realm of visual experience. Its results may be defined as a sensory creation.

 - This sensory creation or visual configuration may be called the artistic form. It is the language by which the artist expresses his ideas visually and artistically. (It is the artistic form by which any content of representation becomes and artistic content. Form and content cannot be separated from each other; they are an invisible unity.)

 

For more, please see Theory 101. (Coming soon.)