Jean-Paul Sartre och konsten: Bildfilosofi, Existentialism och Biografi i Sartres konstnärstexter om Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Lapoujade och Tintoretto

Abstract

Sartre ́s writings about artists and their artistic works in the 1940s until the1960s seems to be related to his biographical writings about authors, his phenomenological philosophy of imagination based on Husserl ́s theories, his existential phi- losophy and to his personal biography. His main theory of the image explains the difference between the physical pain- ting on the wall and the imagined picture in the observer ́s consciousness. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze in what way these theories are mirrored in Sartre ́s writings about four artists, the modernist artists Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Lapoujade and the renaissance painter Tintoretto. The focus of this thesis is also to investigate in what way Sartre, in his personal encounter with the artists and their works in the studios and their works shown in exhibitions, reconsiders his original theories. The reconsideration concerns the ima- gination theory, the artist ́s part in the creation of the artwork, Sartre ́s view on sculpture and how the artistic materials, like the effect of colors, contribute to Sartre ́s definition of what is beauty in art. The thesis also heighlights the phenomenological interpretation theory of Sophie Astier-Vezon and the existential and biographical interpretation theory of Michel Sicard in order to discuss a Sartrean aesthetic theory based on his writings about art.