Intuition, Expression And Art

What is art? It is a question that can never be ignored by any aesthetic school or any trend of artistic thought. As the first important school of contemporary western aesthetics, expressionist aesthetics holds its own unique views of art.There are two forms of Expressionism, i. e. expressionism as an aesthetic school, and as a trend of artistic thought. They differ from each other, while also have some connections. According to expressionist aesthetics as an aesthetic school, art is an elementary form of the pure cognition of mind, an expression of feelings or intuitions, and is the expression of artists' own mind. Expressionist aesthetics is mainly represented by Benedetto Croce, Robin George Collingwood, Bernard Bosanquet, Edgar Carritt, Louis Arnaud Reid and so on. As a school of modernist aesthetics in the sense of both time and theory, it's different radically from the traditional aesthetics, and is characterized in particular by non-rationalism, aesthetic purism and strong subjectivity. Its key concern is art, therefore it's large the philosophy of art.Croce is the founder of expressionist aesthetics. He urges that art, as a kind of spiritual activity, is just intuition or expression, and has expressiveness as its essential characteristic; and that art is neither a physical reality nor an utilitarian activity, neither a moral activity nor some conceptual knowledge. Collingwood, as a follower of Croce, has inherited, improved and promoted Croce' s theory of art. Collingwood states that the nature of art is artists' expression of their own feelings by creating an imaginary experience or activity for themselves. He makes deep and systematic inquiry into the imaginativeness of art.As important expressionist aestheticians, Bosanquet, Carritt, Reid are also engaged in studying art, thus enriching and developing the expressionist theory of art. Thanks to their common efforts, expressionist theory of art becomes the main school of western art theories in the first half of the twentieth century, which exerts huge influence on the contemporary and following theories of art and results in great values to late contemporary theories and practice in art.After examining the theory of art essence by the expressionist aestheticians such as Croce, Collingwood, Bosanquet, Carritt and Reid, we find that it has successfully achieved the modernist turn of aesthetics, and also the ontological, the subjectivist and the linguistic turn of art, and that its key theme lies in the diligent and endless exploration for the independence of art , emotionality in art , and humanity by art.