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07009_Field_TCUM T574.txt
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1996-04-10
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later nineteenth century, the entire world of the arts began to
reach again for the iconic qualities of touch and sense interplay
(synesthesia, as it was called) in poetry, as in painting. The
German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand inspired Berenson’s
remark that “the painter can accomplish his task only by giving
tactile values to retinal impressions.” Such a program involves
the endowing of each plastic form with a kind of nervous
system of its own.
The electric form of pervasive impression is profoundly
tactile and organic, endowing each object with a kind of unified
sensibility, as the cave painting had done. The unconscious
task of the painter in the new electric age was to raise this fact
to the level of conscious awareness. From this time on, the
mere specialist in any field was doomed to the sterility and
inanity that echoed an archaic form of the departing