nt as to the nature of his
organisation, and ease the way for our aesthetic emotions? If he give to
his forms so much of the appearance of the forms of ordinary life that
we shall at once refer them back to something we have already seen,
shall we not grasp more easily their aesthetic relations in his design?
Enter by the back-door representation in the quality of a clue to the
nature of design. I have no objection to its presence. Only, if the
representative element is not to ruin the picture as a work of art, it
must be fused into the design. It must do double duty; as well as
giving information, it must create aesthetic emotion. It must be
simplified into significant form.

Let us make no mistake about this. To help the spectator to appreciate
our design we have introduced into our picture a representative or
cognitive element. This element has nothing whatever to do with art. The
recognition of a correspondence between the forms of a work of art and
the familiar forms of life cannot possibly provoke aesthetic emotion.
Only significant form can do that. Of course realistic forms may be
aesthetically significant, and out of them an artist may create a superb
work of art, but it is with their aesthetic and not with their cognitive
value that we shall then be concerned. We shall treat them as though
they were not representative of anything. The cognitive or
representative element in a work of art can be useful as a means to the
perception of formal relations and in no other way. It is valuable to
the spectator, but it is of no value to the work of art; or rather it is
valuable to the work of art as an ear-trumpet is valuable to one who
would converse with the deaf: the speaker could do as well without it,
the listener could not. The representative element may help the
spectator; it can do the picture no good and it may do harm. It may ruin
the design; that is to say, it may deprive the picture of its value as a
whole; and it is as a whole, as an organisation of forms, that a work of
art provokes the most tremendous emotions.

From the point of view of the spectator the Post-Impressionists have
been particularly happy in their simplification. As we know, a design
can be composed just as well of realistic forms as of invented; but a
fine design composed of realistic forms runs a great risk of being
aesthetically underrated. We are so immediately struck by the
representative element that the formal significance passes us