What makes a picture, symphony or novel a work of art? Above all, it is a fabrication, a new reality imagined and created by the artist. This fiction is accomplished by the selection of elements that nature offers—colors, masses, emotions and tones, and their regrouping according to an arbitrary arrangement. The choice of these empirical factors, and their ordering—balance of masses, harmony of proportions, musical or visual rhythm—everything, in short, which establishes mutual relationships between the parts of an object—are the property of a work of art which, by this name, becomes a cosmic thing. A third phase, equally important, concludes this effort at abstraction. A work of art is isolated from its surroundings, circumscribed by the limits of its form. Accordingly, every painting is, first of all, put upon a symmetrical surface. The frame attests that the isolation of this microcosm within it is a painting. Art encloses the infinity of phenomena in the finite quality of form. It is, then, the degree of abstraction, of stylization, which determines the hierarchy of the arts. The more complete the transposition—the principles of immediate reality finding themselves eliminated and replaced by equivalents—the more sovereign is the work.
—André Levinson, 1929

The name of the Russian-born critic André Levinson (1887-1933) is nowadays known, if at all, only to the world of ballet experts, where he has long been recognized as a writer of immense intellectual authority. The publication of a volume of his writings on dance from the 1920s