Walking through the exhibition “An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine,” I was put in mind of the philosopher Susanne K. Langer and her book Problems of Art, published in 1957.1 In a chapter titled “Expressiveness,” Langer differentiates between “the expression of feeling in a work of art” and self-expression. For Langer, expressiveness is experience given shape and vitality through the artist’s realization of form. “What [the artist] expresses,” she writes, “is . . . not his own actual feelings, but what he knows about human feeling.” The jumble of life, then, is not explicated but made recognizable and whole. Langer adds that this “knowledge may actually exceed his entire personal experience.” In contrast, she...

 

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