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Tag: Henri Matisse

The humanities is devoted to a “bad picture” of intentionality. And the devotion to this picture is embraced above all by anti-intentionalists. Looking closely at the seemingly suspect commitments of two conceptually driven artists—Le Corbusier and Henri Matisse—I show the necessity for distinguishing between inner and outer, idea and execution, and how those terms are mutually imbricated. Failing to address “private” experience, as anti-intentionalists do, generates an inverted form of Cartesianism.
Let me be clear, the problems I raise do not stem from a dissatisfaction with the way October authors repeat a kind of party line. In fact, I envy the unity and consistency of the resolve and of course their massive impact on the discipline (what is there, politically speaking, besides anti-hierarchy in the humanities?). My point is that the basic set of claims shared by many of these authors is mistaken.
We should give ourselves up to the lies of art to deliver ourselves from the lies of myth: it is by this very paradoxical and singular way of absorption into the framework of one of the “great works” of the Occident that Picasso belongs to myth. For if it is true that he always sought to combat myth, making him even more dependent on it, he only succeeded by turning myth’s own arms onto itself—that is, the “lie.”