Art - Words of Wisdom

Sri Aurobindo

The first and lowest use of Art is the purely aesthetic, the second is the intellectual or educative, the third and highest the spiritual.

Pg 439, Vol 1, CWSA

What Nature is, what God is, what man is can be triumphantly revealed in stone or on canvas.

Pg 451, Vol 01, CWSA

Art for Art's sake certainly; Art as a perfect form and discovery of Beauty; but also Art for the soul's sake, the spirit's sake and the expression of all that the soul, the spirit wants to seize through the medium of beauty.

Pg 451, Vol 01, CWSA

The Mother

The discipline of Art has at its centre the same principle as the discipline of Yoga. In both the aim is to become more and more conscious; in both you have to learn to see and feel something that is beyond the ordinary vision and feeling, to go within and bring out from there deeper things.

28 Jul 1929, Pg 105, Vol 3, CWM

Look again at what the moderns have made of the dance; compare it with what the dance once was. The dance was once one of the highest expressions of the inner life; it was associated with religion and it was an important limb in sacred ceremony, in the celebration of festivals, in the adoration of the Divine.

In some countries it reached a very high degree of beauty and an extraordinary perfection.

28 Jul 1929, Pg 111, Vol 3, CWM

If art is to manifest something in the divine Life, there also a vast and luminous peace must express itself.

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Supreme art expresses the Beauty which puts you in contact with the Divine Harmony.

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Good taste is the aristocracy of art.

Pg 122, Vol 12, CWM

But then quite recently, I suddenly felt this, this sensation of something very new, something of the future pushing, pushing, trying to manifest, trying to express itself and not succeeding, but something which will be a terrific progress over all that has been felt and expressed before; and then, at the same time is born the movement of consciousness which turns to this new thing and wants to grasp it.

1 Jun, 1955, Pg 188, Vol 07, CWM

Modern art is an experiment, still very clumsy, to express something other than the simple physical appearance. The idea is good — but naturally the value of the expression depends entirely on the value of that which wants to express itself.

12 Aug 1963, Pg 236, Vol 12, CWM