Art and Emotion

1. In your own words give a definition of the term "Expressivism"

Expressivism is a form of "Expressionism" with is a school art in which the artists convey their various emotions and feelings into their art. Expressivism is applied to all art but does is not just applied to the visuals of art itself. It is very similar to the 19th Century "Romanticism" which implies that all art is closely related to feelings and emotions. Emotions and expressing those emotions to inspire their pieces of works is important for these artists.

2. How does Tolstoy define expressivism?

Tolstoy says:

'Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.'

What he is saying in this quote is that all artists use experiences and the emotions in life and bring that out in the pieces of art that they create. The way that you can determine the success of the painting is if these same emotions are felt by the audience looking at it.

3. Give an example of an argument against emotional experience being the root of artistic production.

When looking got an emotion in a single piece of art, we seem to be ignoring the differences between complex and simple pieces of art. There are cases however where a lot of emotion in a piece of work is easily done. However the same cannot be said about more complex pieces of art. Art such as a play has a lot of different characters with various relationships with each other that change throughout the play which makes it impossible to say if there is just one emotion at work. An example of Othello by Shakespeare is given in which if the character Othello symbolizes jealousy and Iago symbolizes malice then what is the emotion being portrayed in the play. This range of emotions is found commonly in tragedies and the same can be said for his other tragedies as well.

4. Does the portrayal of emotion in a work of art require that emotion to be actually felt by the

audience.

There is an important gap in the idea of expressivism that exists between the audience and 

the artist. Should we be feeling the same emotions that the characters or the artist is feeling when he created the play? No, which may not seem that obvious given the fact that we do sometimes feel sadness when reading or watching something saddening but this does not we have failed to appreciate the film because we have failed to feel these emotions. An example of this is that if a character is racist, do we need to be racist in order to feel the same emotions? The point that this makes is that a play or work of art is not successful based on whether the audience feels the same emotions.

5. Compared to Tolstoy, in what way does Collingwood's theory offer a more sophisticated 

view of expressivism? Give at least two examples.

Collingwood says that expressivism is not about art work being influenced by the emotions of the artists. He also says that art itself, is not an emotion experience of something that has happened before the piece has been created but rather that the emotion has been gradually refined and identified during the creation of that piece of art. The artist would create this piece of art layer by layer until it was finished and only then would the emotion that the artist was trying to convey, would be seen. 

‘Every imaginative experience is a sensuous experience raised to the

imaginative level by an act of consciousness’ Collingwood

He is saying that every thought and emotion that if felt from the piece of art is not from raw emotion but instead the imagination and thoughts of the artists.It also further proves the point about the simple version of expressivism that Tolstoy came up with that fails to understand the imagination of the artist which he feels plays a very central role. Imagination is part of 'art proper', as equally as expression. A piece of art cannot me made entirely from emotions as it must go through the imaginative process in order to become an imaginative discovery. This means that each piece of art is all about self-discovery and going through the entire process of creating a piece of work.