Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

by Andrew S. Curran

And yet, the very fact that Diderot recognized the incongruity of writing about decontextualized paintings (for people who would never see the art itself) led him to compensate by creating an entirely different kind of art criticism. By the time that he wrote his longest and most famous Salon reviews, those of 1765 and 1767, he was not only entering into an imagined dialogue with the painters and sculptors who had produced the art; he often plunged directly into the compositions himself, sometimes as a character in the painting and sometimes as a fellow artist. In his hands, art criticism became far more than simple evaluation; it became a space of crisscrossing exchanges between the artist, the artwork, and the spectator, an opportunity to comment on and sometimes re-create the aesthetic experience of viewership.