L’art comme pratique transformatrice au XXe siècle : la soma-esthétique de David B. Milne (1882–1953)

For most of the 20th century the dominant trends of art history and theory, from protoformalism to poststructuralism, have valiantly devoted their efforts to the formulation of scientific instruments whose disciplinary benefits remain very important despite some contestable ideological excesses. To this end, these approaches have nonetheless consciously excluded the lived situatedness of numerous remarkable bodies of works as a valid factor of analysis. The artistic practice as an art of living in the strongest sense, the manner in which art transforms the artist who grasps it as a realm of exploration of the self, the ethics that accompanies any aesthetic, as well as the majority of questions related to creation and subjectivity have all been part of a systematic repression in the study of visual arts.  We suggest that it is precisely this repressed lived dimension that is manifesting as a symptom or a backlash in the research concerning the spiritual in art that has multiplied since the end of the 20th century. This research indeed mediates at its core a conception of art as a human conduct capable of transforming and expanding one’s consciousness, even elevating it to a state of transcendence. It succeeds, however, by repeatedly resorting to the sacred, the numinous or the inexpressible, and in so doing escapes a necessary questioning on the concrete practice of art and its specific interactions with the human being.  Questioning this dual shortcoming – the repression of the artist’s experience, the omission of the reality of the practice – and responding with a new secular and scientific methodology of analysis allowing to better understand how art forms are linked to human attitudes and pursuits is the central problematic of this thesis. To this end, the discipline of somaesthetics elaborated by philosopher Richard Shusterman (USA, 1949–) serves as our principal theoretical resource. This pragmatist conceptual framework enables the analyst to consider the artist as an active body-mind guided by a personal melioristic objective that is inseparable from his/her realisations; it consequently encourages an inventory of the artist’s works, writings and lifestyle, including physical, attentional and spiritual practices, and makes it possible to draw from this research material a non-hierarchical description of the analytical, pragmatic and practical aspects of the artist’s creative approach.  Applied here to the endeavour of Canadian painter David B. Milne (1882–1953) – an exemplary case for having been labeled alternately an « ultramodern » painter and a « deeply spiritual » artist – somaesthetics produces an unprecedented connection between the artistic facts judged legitimate (the works, definitions of art and influences) and the biographical information deemed anecdotal (the ethical, procedural, domestic, experiential and intimate data). This interaction clarifies Milne’s positions and actions in his cultural-historical context, offers a precise understanding of his painting as an exercising and transformative ground, reframes his body-mind gestures within the practices necessary to the act of creation, and thus revises the restrictive modernist interpretation of his work without resorting to an all encompassing spirituality.  In describing « artistic meliorism » as a full-fledged field of research, this thesis finally wishes to rehabilitate a section of art history’s historiography which is already sensitive to the human experience but has been reduced to silence by the dominant discourses. It strives to continue it by contributing to the movement of critical reclamation of the « life and work » model that is currently emerging and that revitalises the communication of art by affirming its potential of being a tool for existential knowledge.

Keyphrases: David Brown Milne (1882–1953), Richard Shusterman, David Brown Milne (1882–1953), Meliorism, Somaesthetics, Pragmatism, Richard Shusterman, Self-fashioning, Canadian art, Modern art, Painting, Artistic creation