Abstract

This chapter describes the painter Adolph Menzel, who devoted himself to the task of making pictures. Plato thought of the painter as merely recording an image that was delivered to the senses. It is easy to make a picture of anything, he wrote; one simply holds a mirror up to it. The human action of seeing is, for Plato, also akin to holding up a mirror to the world. What one sees are nothing but images. Enter Menzel, whose work embodies a commitment to the refutation of this Platonic idea. The sketches of this compulsive and unstoppable artist, no less than his oil paintings and his gouaches, are not so much documentations of what there is as investigations of the way we manufacture our own experience. Ultimately, what Menzel teaches is that art can be a way of doing philosophy.