Dualistic models in art

A Dualistic model is a type of model that uses opposites to describe and explain a phenomenon with a systematic use of opposites. Dualistic models, models of opposites or contrasts have been used in Western philosophy and art since Heraklitus, Pythagoras and Plato. Heraklitus was the philosopher who introduced the dualistic way of thinking in order to understand and explain the world. Pythagoras expanded this model. He said the world could be explained with nine pairs of opposites:

• Finite, infinite,
• odd, even,
• one, many,
• right, left,
• rest, motion,
• straight, crooked,
• light, darkness,
• good, evil,
• square, oblong.

Some sources add:

• male, female.

See also Table of Opposites

Plato reduced this to two pairs of opposites + being (that which is): Sameness, difference, motion, rest, being. See also Sophist

Christianity's dualism divided the world into heaven and hell. The Catholic Church showed it dramatically in paintings by Domenico di Michelino and in sculpture, especially in the reliefs tympanum over the main church entrance doors in the Middle Ages.

Hegel's and Goethe's science and poetry were inspired by dualistic philosophy and Goethe's Farbenlehre is a result of this thinking used in the field of natural science:

Goethe's colour circle (see Color wheel) organized the elements of a complex phenomenon as colours using a system of complementary colours: Red, yellow and blue. His colour circle is a model based on opposites that shows harmonic and contrasting relationships between basic elements of colour (the primary colours, which are complementary colours). Goethe’s model and theory was anchored in a "physiological" explanation of the phenomenon. When the eye perceives a pure colour (blue), the sensation forms its contrast in the after-images (orange) in order to establish a balance or harmony. "When the eye sees a colour it becomes immediately active and ... provokes another colour, which together with the first one contains the totality of the colour circle(§805). Yellow demands red-blue (violet), blue demands red-yellow (orange), purple demands green and vice versa (§810). This makes the experience of oppositions and the quest for balance, according to Goethe, rooted in man's own physiology and gives Goethe a very good argument for placing the basic colours in a specific relation to each other in his circular colour model., but also Ruskin, Wölfflin, Worringer and used opposites as a substantial part of their theories. We don’t know the same phenomenon in relation to form: If we look intensely at a cubic form and turn our eyes away, we don’t experience organic forms as after-images. But on the other hand we experience that contrasted forms make each other much more vibrant - just like contrasted colours.

Heinrich Wölfflin's dualistic art theory: Art historian Heinrich Wölfflin is among the most prominent theorists who have worked with the use of opposites or dichotomies as an art analytical method. Herbert Read wrote in the preface to the English edition "Classic Art" (1952/1994) on Wölfflin that "he had found art criticism a subjective chaos and left it a science." Wölfflin began his theoretical career with the book "Renaissance und Barock" from 1888. In 1898 appeared the book "Die Klassische Art", which dealt with high-Renaissance art and architecture. Among other things, through these books and his numerous lectures he developed his art theoretical method, as he explained in his books "Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe" (1915) and "Italien und das Deutsche Formgefühl" (1931). He stated a number of pairs of opposites, which were used to provide a basic structure in art analyses; "opposite poles, ..., between some artistic spirit oscillates", as Herbert Read described it in the preface to "Classic Art. This contrast method was not only confined to the theoretical, but also included in his slide shows using two slide projectors to illustrate the contradictions visually, and focus on some significant trends in period artworks, with analysis of painting, sculpture and architecture. Wölfflin wanted to get out of style history, as an art historical method, which is understandable in view of his contemporaries, where historicism, eclecticism and Beaux-Arts was largely becoming a kind of fossil in the middle of a dynamic age where industrialization took off. He wanted to study how the styles could be assessed and characterized through their use of form types. "It was Wölfflin’s distinction that he, first of all, kept his eye steadily fixed on the work of art, and began to analyse what he saw, and to classify the results of such a visual analysis" 45

Wölfflin's pairs of opposites in ”Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe”: Linear - painterly Flat - depth Closed form - open form Unity - diversity Clarity - ambiguity

In Wölfflin's book, "Italien und das Deutsche Formgefühl" from 1931 (The Sense of Form in Art), the following contradictions: Shape - outline Regularity - order Unity - part Calm/relaxed - tension Grandeur - simplicity

Wölfflin was, of course, criticized for his lack of interest in the symbolic content of works of art and he was fully conscious of this lack. He used contradictions as an analyst and not as an artist. This meant that his focus was a shift from tension to categories, which he was very aware that one should not use too mechanically. He was not a formalist, but wrote that in order to distinguish between 16th- and 17th-century art, he had set 5 concept pairs.46 Wölfflin pointed out that there was no need for a hierarchy between these dichotomies – it can be disregarded. The criteria for selection of these dichotomies were not further explored. Rudolf Arnheim explains this in “Art and visual Perception – a psychology of the creative eye”: “Visual experience is dynamic.... What a person or an animal perceives is not only an arrangement of objects, of colour and shapes, of movements and sizes. It is, perhaps first of all, an interplay of directed tensions. These tensions are not something the observer adds, for reason of his own, to static images. Rather, these tensions are as inherent in any percept as size, shape, location, or colour. Because they have magnitude and direction, these tensions can be described as psychological “forces”.”

Johannes Itten's model: Johannes Itten used contrasts as a central part of his teaching methods at the Bauhaus School in Weimar. He was inspired by Adolf Hölzel. His model divided forms into three groups: Squares and rectangles, vertical, horizontal. Triangles, oblique forms. Circle, oval, wave, spiral. This model can also be seen as geometric versus organic with crystalline forms in the middle. Itten called the two extremes geometric and rhythmic. In the middle, Itten places the diagonals/obliques because movement is a link between geometric and organic. If you add movement – asymmetry, the oblique line – to a geometric form it becomes much more dynamic and organic.

Herbert Read and Wilhelm Worringer: Geometric and Organic. Abstraction The problem about which contrast forms we can characterize as basic is important. Herbert Read said in his book "The Meaning of Art": “The two types of contrasted art – geometrical and organic – persist through the history of art.” Read refers to the two kinds of aesthetic experience or sensibilities related to art, one who prefers geometric and inorganic forms and another that prefers naturalistic and organic forms. He refers to Wilhelm Worringer's book “Abstraction and Empathy". Wilhelm Worringer wrote:"“Just as the urge to empathy as a pre-assumption of aesthetic experience finds its gratification in the beauty of the organic, so the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in the abstract law and necessity”.

References

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