Painting and Ontology: D. H. Lawrence as an Art Historian

Abstract

More than any other twentieth-century writer, D. H. Lawrence developed a profound understanding of painting and evaluated this art form through the prism of his idiosyncratic ontological scheme. In allegiance to his polaristic philosophy, in which everything is created by the opposition of static and dynamic, mind and body, optical and tactile, “Will-to-Motion” and “Will-to- Inertia,” light and darkness, Lawrence conceived the history of visual arts as a mirror of this universal opposition of ultimate metaphysical forces. Despite his general view that Western art was entirely under the dominion of idea, mind, and light, Lawrence pointed to several examples in which dark, bodily, and haptic experiences were processed pictorially. This essay intends to introduce Lawrence as an art historian who understood works of art and art historical periods as constituted out of a never-ending power struggle between the corporeal and the spiritual, and who always sought and called for their reconciliation and balance in his literature.