Susanne Langer - Art Quotes

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Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

Susanne Langer
Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.

Susanne Langer
All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

Susanne Langer
Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.

Susanne Langer
The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

Susanne Langer
The image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art — plastic, musical, poetic, balletic — serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

Susanne Langer
We have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance.

Susanne Langer
Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

Susanne Langer
If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably.

Susanne Langer