Art and Imagination

Extract

The vocabulary of the art-critic seems to consist of two groups of words, those that refer to the formal or surface properties of the work of art, and those which refer to properties we can at first loosely term imaginative. The first group consists of words and phrases like “unity” (sometimes “organic unity”), “coherence”, “consistency”, “compactness”, “elegance”, and so on. The way such words are cashed will consist in an analysis of the determinate formal qualities of the work of art as evidence of the skill of the artist as a craftsman.