Painting and Ontology: D. H. 
Lawrence as an Art Historian
Milovan Novaković
Singidunum University, Faculty of Media and Communications, Karađorđeva 65, 11000 Belgrade, 
Serbia
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4670-847X
milovannvkvc@gmail.com
More than any other twentieth-century writer, D. H. Lawrence developed a 
profound understanding of painting and evaluated this art form through the 
prism of his idiosyncratic ontological scheme. In allegiance to his polaristic 
philosophy, in which everything is created by the opposition of static and 
dynamic, mind and body, optical and tactile, “Will-to-Motion” and “Will-to-
Inertia,” light and darkness, Lawrence conceived the history of visual arts as a 
mirror of this universal opposition of ultimate metaphysical forces. Despite his 
general view that Western art was entirely under the dominion of idea, mind, and 
light, Lawrence pointed to several examples in which dark, bodily, and haptic 
experiences were processed pictorially. This essay intends to introduce Lawrence 
as an art historian who understood works of art and art historical periods as 
constituted out of a never-ending power struggle between the corporeal and the 
spiritual, and who always sought and called for their reconciliation and balance 
in his literature.
Keywords: philosophy of culture / literature and painting / English literature / D. H. 
Lawrence / ontological polarity / Cézanne, Paul / Riegl, Alois / Wölfflin, Heinrich
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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 46.2 (2023)
For D. H. Lawrence, the writer who auscultated with subtle sensitivity 
a dim pre-conscious and pre-mental throbbing, images were a form of 
the expression of the deepest physical and intuitive experiences upon 
which verbal statements could not cast light. Our initial contact with 
the world is through images that, held intact by intellectual conscious-
ness of sharp contours, clear-cut shapes, and objective representations, 
address our most primal feelings: they “fulfill a certain state of feeling-
awareness” (Lawrence, Apocalypse 91) and evoke the abyssal vibrations 
of physical knowledge. The paintings are perhaps the only images, in 
times when imaginative thinking is suppressed by cogitation and utili-
tarian reason, that still can “arouse the deep emotional self, and the 
dynamic self, beyond comprehension” (49).
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This is the reason why Lawrence, throughout his life, had a consistent 
“blood-relationship” with the painting: the strong affinity towards pic-
torial art is traceable in most of his writings, while his alertness to visual 
phenomena, attentive perception, and penetrating intuition reveal a 
writer who possessed, as it were, the painter’s eye. Although allusions 
to actual and fictive artworks and artists often complement his narra-
tives, for this writer painting was less a means to supplement or enrich 
a narrative than a distinct creative activity that must always articulate 
“the background or structural skeleton of some theory of being, some 
metaphysics” (Lawrence, Study 87). With a deeply ingrained aversion 
to an aesthetic attitude of detachment and disinterest and obstinately 
faithful to his art for my sake credo (Lawrence, Letters I 491), Lawrence 
always looked at painting through the lens of his peculiar metaphysi-
cal outlook. For this philosophically minded littérateur, who did not 
shrink away from plunging into the depths of speculative thought, the 
history of painting was charged with the same aporias that at all times 
occupied and defined metaphysical reflection.
Thus, his view of painting, like his notion of literature, is inextri-
cable from his general ontological attitude. While Lawrence thought 
that the philosophical beliefs of a writer must not be explicitly enunci-
ated in their “art-speech,” he still overtly developed his doctrine and 
expressed his worldview—one might even say his cosmology—not just 
in his philosophical treatises but also in his novels and poems. Yet the 
intricate Seinstheorie of this writer—that often oddly veers into mythic, 
religious, pantheistic and animistic ideas, thereby deviating from the 
systematic academic philosophy—is not easy to untangle, even though 
a set of idées fixes looms throughout his writing and sets a foundation 
for his peculiar metaphysical constructions.
The vision of human beings in the modern industrial world as mecha-
nized and automatized creatures devoid of feelings, passions, physical 
touch, and sexuality, as egoistic monads fatally deprived of warm-hearted 
connection with each other and natural and cosmic forces, induced 
Lawrence to relentlessly dissect and expose, as he saw them, the harmful 
ideas in which modern society had indulged. Through a piercing analysis 
that goes to the very nucleus of Western civilization, Lawrence decided 
that the root of all evil was the disastrous idealist conception inaugurated 
by Plato that reduced the whole universe to mental formulas and cere-
bral clichés. “We insist over and over again,” he gravely warned,
on what we know from one mere centre of ourselves, the mental centre. We 
insist that we are essentially spirit, that we are ideal beings, conscious personali-
ties, mental creatures. As far as ever possible we have resisted the independence 
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of the great affective centres. We have struggled for some thousands of years, 
not only to get our passions under control, but absolutely to eliminate certain 
passions, and to give all passions an ideal nature. (Lawrence, Reflections 130)
Hence Lawrence repeatedly urged the reinstatement, or more precisely, 
the rehabilitation of the reality of physical existence and a balanced re-
lationship between the corporeal and the spiritual. He pointed out that 
apart from mental knowledge that scans things in their sharp isolation 
and separation, reducing the inexhaustible abundance of rapport to the 
trifling and dry subject-object relation, there is also the type of knowl-
edge whereby man intuitively experiences beings and things in their 
emotional unity and togetherness and thus connects with the entire 
universe. Lawrence emphasized the difference between what he called 
“blood,” “primal,” or “physical consciousness” operating in the unfath-
omable and inexhaustible depths of visceral, bodily, tactile sensuality 
and sexual experience, and “mental consciousness,” that, depending 
on “the eye as its source or connector” (Lawrence, Letters II 470), ab-
stracts realities and reduces them to bloodless ideas, representations, 
and mental images. Considering modernity as irreparably corrupted by 
the harmful activities of reason and spirit, Lawrence tried to restore the 
“blood-knowledge”—the only mode of apprehension that makes possi-
ble “a subtle, perfected relationship between me and the entire universe 
that surrounds me” (Lawrence, Study 150). Moreover, he recognized 
this “quick,” deeply emotional, sanguineous relationship in the dynam-
ic structure underlying the whole universe: the cosmos consists of an 
eternally changing and living bloodstream of many distinct yet mutu-
ally influencing vital and active flows, of which human being is just one 
particular instance. For the world, as Lawrence elsewhere spelled out, 
is “a great complex activity of things existing and moving and having 
effect” (Lawrence, Apocalypse 95), and “each thing, living or unliving, 
streams in its own odd, intertwining flux” (Lawrence, Study 147).
Despite the frequent critical placement of Lawrence, due to his 
emphasis on the intimate, interpenetrating relation between all exis-
tents, among the nineteenth-century thinkers who conceived beings 
and objects as attributes of an all-unifying, undifferentiated substantial 
force, he broke with such monistic conceptions at a young age, endors-
ing heterogeneity and distinctness as necessary principles of universal 
activity. He wove into his ontological system the “inexorable law of 
life,” according to which each entity is a unique, incomparable, self-
realized whole, yet maintaining its integrity and unity only through 
interaction with other entities to which it transmits its force and by 
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which it is likewise affected (Lawrence, Reflections 358). In such an 
unusual scheme that combines two opposite metaphysical concep-
tions—static and dynamic, absolutist and relativistic, homeostatic and 
allostatic—there is at play, at the same time, a stubborn subsistence, 
the self-conservation of an entity in its realized integrity—its impen-
etrable being—and the inexorable craving of that entity to expand and 
outpour itself and establish a responsive contact with other entities 
and the entire universe. “Everything that exists, even a stone,” declared 
Lawrence, “has two sides to its nature. It fiercely maintains its own 
individuality, its own solidity. And it reaches forth from itself in the 
subtlest flow of desire” (343).
Since everything consolidates, condenses, and realizes itself only 
through intense relationship and in mutuality with other things, 
Lawrence turned to a notion that can be traced back to the pre-Socratic 
sages and later became a buzzword among numerous thinkers employed 
to emphasize the contrasting structure of the material world: polariza-
tion. According to this law of dual attraction and repulsion, “the indi-
vidual is never purely a thing-by-himself” and “cannot exist except in 
a polarized relation to the external universe,” since life, as Lawrence 
said, “is one long, blind effort at an established polarity with the outer 
universe, human and non-human” (Lawrence, Psychoanalysis 39, 41).
Among all types of entities and in all domains of experience, Lawrence 
recognized this concerted action of obstinate singularity and fluctuating 
relativity—expressed in terms of the polarity of centrifugal and cen-
tripetal movement, expansion and contraction, self-maintenance and 
self-giving—as the fundamental principle of cosmic functioning. To 
describe this dynamic duality, he resorted, on different occasions, to 
antonyms such as Law and Love, Will-to-Inertia and Will-to-Motion, 
voluntary and sympathetic, flesh and spirit, physical and mental, dark-
ness and light, South and North, etc. The preponderance of one of the 
opposing terms inevitably leads to discordance and decomposition: 
remaining locked or nestled in the cocoon of one’s own voluntary, all 
too isolated self, leads to stagnation and putrefaction, while excessive 
flowing out of oneself and sympathetic interfusion with otherness bring 
about irreversible dissolution and demise. The reasons for Lawrence’s 
vehement resistance to Christianity lay precisely in the belief that due 
to the yearning to merge into other beings—which means to submit 
oneself to the notion of sacrificial, spiritual love—each pristine, whole-
some individual loses its incomparable integrity and ceases to exist. On 
the other hand, a self-devouring wallowing in immutability, as a process 
of slow but inevitable destruction of life, encouraged Lawrence to see 
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the creative flow, transformation, and never-ending renewal as a crown-
ing existential principle. Between these two ultimate tendencies—invo-
lutive and evolutive, solipsistic and participative—a balance must be 
established leading to a blissful and pure state wherein each entity, living 
or non-living, simultaneously pulsates in its singleness and opens itself 
up, realizing its unicity in contact with other things and the whole envi-
ronment. In a polarized relationship of entities, simultaneously joining 
and sundering from each other, in this “mutual unison in separateness” 
(Lawrence, Women 264), one can find the basis of Laurentian ontology. 
Birkin’s appeal to Ursula in Women in Love illuminates Lawrence’s idea 
of polarized balance, his discordia concors: “What I want is a strange 
conjunction with you […] not meeting and mingling […] but an equi-
librium, a pure balance of two single beings.” (148)
For Lawrence, the history of civilization conforms to this polar 
scheme: there are periods when stagnation and torpor reign, when 
everything falls into sameness and stability, locking itself into unbreak-
able self-contentedness, and periods when the human beings expand 
and unfold, unselfishly exchanging their energy with other living and 
non-living entities. Ideally, there are occasional moments when those 
opposing tendencies effectuate a dynamic, polarized harmony. The his-
tory of painting—which, to Lawrence, always echoes the broader spiri-
tual situation—is also marked by this ontological polarity.
In Study of Thomas Hardy, his confessio fidei and the first composi-
tion containing theoretical considerations of the correlation between 
metaphysics and painting, Lawrence describes two underlying forces 
that “cause the whole of life, from the ebb and flow of a wave, to the 
stable equilibrium of the whole universe” (Lawrence, Study 55) and 
calls them Will-to-Inertia and Will-to-Motion: the first he identi-
fies with the (female) principle of withdrawal, self-maintenance, and 
immanence; the second with the (masculine) principle of unfoldment, 
growth, and transcendence. When converted into the language of art, 
the two wills correspond to the tendency of particular artistic periods 
or styles to be either closed in a static and fixed form or to be opened 
out in a dynamic and protean relation. Convinced that medieval art 
in its motionless, stable, and bounded figures reflected the theological 
doctrine of the all-encompassing, sempiternal God, Lawrence wrote 
that the architecture of the period was marked by “utter stability, of 
movement resolved and centralized […] that has no relationship with 
any other form, that admits the existence of no other form, but is con-
clusive, propounding in its sum the One Being of All” (61). Tightly 
enclosed individual shapes distinguish medieval artistic expression as 
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a whole, so the movement embodied in the architecture and painting 
was centripetal, immuring every figure or object in their uncomfort-
able outlines: “The Cathedrals, Fra Angelico, frighten us or bore us 
with their final annunciation of centrality and stability. We want to 
escape.” (65) If in the Middle Ages there was a prevalence of the Will-
to-Inertia, imposing a static, rigid appearance on artistic form, then 
in the Renaissance, the centrifugal principle was shattered and allevi-
ated by the burst of “relative movement […] movement driving the 
object” (62), and through the balance of the two tendencies a perfect 
and complete expression was temporarily realized. A particular instance 
of such viable synthesis of passive and active forces was the work of 
Sandro Botticelli, in whose paintings the inflexible compositional 
armature was broken and polarized with pulsating and rhythmic ele-
ments. Describing Primavera, Lawrence emphasized how around the 
female figure who “stands there […] as the naked, almost unwilling 
pivot, as the keystone which endured all thrust and remained static,” 
still transpire vibrant motions—“living, joyful forces” opposed to the 
general steadiness (65).
Yet shortly after Botticelli, the dynamic relatedness of loose flowing 
and static firmness begins to be disrupted, and due to the pendulum 
swinging towards the Will-to-Motion, painting increasingly retreats 
from objective density and formal integrity: “Ever there is more and 
more vibration, movement, and less and less stability, centralization.” 
(Lawrence, Study 64) The waning of the centripetal force, the female 
principle associated with immanence and enstatic compactness, is 
caused by the unbridled and insatiable male urge towards transcen-
dence and ecstasy, by the unrestrained activity of the mind. The Will-
to-Inertia, due to which man intuitively and sensually feels each entity 
as a real and resistant mass, was substituted by the Will-to-Motion, 
with such an effect on human beings that, having lost the immediate 
contact with tangible substances and physical experience, they begin to 
perceive realities visually and cerebrally, in clear consciousness, trans-
forming them into disembodied mental representations. If the medi-
eval painting, therefore, was based on sharply defined contours indicat-
ing the palpable qualities of the depicted figures, then the Renaissance, 
breaking the density and solidity of circumscribed forms, started to 
appreciate only their observable, untouchable traits. According to 
Lawrence, this shift was the natural outcome of the growing ascen-
dancy of the rational and subjective mind, which does not meet things 
in blood-intimacy but as cold and distant visual representations arbi-
trarily worked out and combined in the brain. Hence, in painting after 
Milovan Novaković:     D. H. Lawrence as an Art Historian
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the Renaissance, shapes were either devitalized and geometricized, 
wedged in strictly linear perspective constructions, as in Raphael and 
all later so-called classical artists, or disintegrated and sacrificed to the 
all-pervading ripples of optical light-and-shadow, as in Correggio and 
all the subsequent “luminous” painters. In both instances, pictorial art 
relied upon an ocular way of attending to the world and experiencing 
reality as a remote panorama, thereby neglecting all the bulbous and 
physical attributes that stir the sense of touch.
The history of painting in Europe reflected this shift in the human 
psyche when it ceased to feel things through the sense of touch and 
began to contemplate appearances through the sense of sight. With a 
growing accent on optical qualities, fluidity, and interweaving of forms, 
in post-Renaissance art, physicality and solidity gradually etherized and 
dispersed. Characteristically, Lawrence clarified that:
Since the Renaissance there has been the striving for the Light, and the escape 
from the Flesh, from the Body, the Object […]. In painting, the Spirit, the 
Word, the Love […] has appeared as light […]. It is light, actual sunlight or 
the luminous quality of day, which has infused more and more into the defined 
body, fusing away the outline, absolving the concrete reality, making a marriage, 
an embrace between the two things, light and object. (Lawrence, Study 78)
At the same time, “the old desire, for movement about a centre  of rest, 
for stability, is gone, and in its place rises the desire for pure ambience, 
pure spirit of change, free from all laws and conditions of being” (79). 
Painting then started to deal with pure forms and colors and by their 
interplay objects were melted into smooth, optical images, relieved of 
their opaque qualities. Indeed, after the invention of central and aerial 
perspective, artists usually strived to subordinate distinct figural values 
to the homogeneity of the overall composition. The stability, delinea-
tion, and palpability of definite objects thawed into a uniform visual 
whole. As soon as the inert, deep-glowing essence of touchable things 
ceased to be depicted, and everything merged into a pictorial totality, 
a path was anticipated, leading through Rembrandt and other painters 
of light-unity to the “perfect glowing One-ness” of William Turner, in 
whose works the corporeal, inert substance was so aerified that what 
only remains of it was “a mere bloodstain […] a ruddy stain of red 
sunlight within white sunlight” (82). It was Turner who inspired he-
liophilic and retinal impressionist painters to blot out the contour as 
the fundamental guarantee of corporeal integrity and transmute reali-
ties with pure colors into a diaphanous enveloppe and dazzling light. 
Thus, they brought to an end the dynamic tendency that broke with 
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the primitive and medieval concept of form as motionless and rigid. 
Arnold Hauser cogently noted that “in the dialectical process repre-
sented by the history of painting, the alternation of the static and the 
dynamic, of design and color, abstract order and organic life, impres-
sionism forms the climax of the development in which recognition is 
given to the dynamic and organic elements of experience and which 
completely dissolves the static world-view of the Middle Ages” (Hauser 
111). The idea that, since the Renaissance, European art had endured 
the gradual triumph of pure dynamics and volatility, interfusion and 
merger, over discrete, self-sufficient, substantial form, was also shared 
by Lawrence.
If his conception of polarity required the compresence of stability 
and animation, no wonder that Lawrence so resolutely asseverated the 
rebirth of bodily life and denounced the ocularcentrism of Western 
thought: “I’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too 
visual—we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see.” 
(Lawrence, Women 78) Undoubtedly, the utilitarian and functionalist 
will to live “entirely in the light of the mental consciousness” (Lawrence, 
Reflections 135) and to “think there are only the objects we shine upon” 
(Lawrence, Letters I 503–504), subdued the dark palpitations of visceral 
life, blood-knowledge and flesh-awareness, and put all accent on optical 
perception. The habit of visualization, as Lawrence argued, marked the 
“development of the conscious ego in man,” and since the Greeks “first 
broke the spell of ‘darkness’” (Lawrence, Study  145), everything has 
been seen in the all-pervading light of self-consciousness. Plato already 
defined sight as the noblest sense since it guarantees clear perception 
of things and, therefore, access to universal truths. So it is hardly sur-
prising that “the majority of Western philosophers have used optical 
analogies to provide terms for the essence of cognition and the foun-
dation of cognizability” (Sloterdijk 50). Due to the focus on vision 
and clear-sightedness, Western philosophy had constantly shrunk away 
from bodily knowledge, striving to suppress and subject to mind all 
the dark processes of instinctive life. And sight, as “the ideal distance-
sense,” enabled “this complete neutralization of dynamic content in 
the visual object, the expurgation of all traces of causal activity from 
its presentation” (Jonas 149, 146–147), creating the preconditions for 
a theoretical, purely conceptual view of reality devoid of affects, pas-
sions, and physical influences. Due to such optical levelings, every cos-
mic force impacting the human body becomes “a calmed abstract of 
reality denuded of its raw power” (148). Visual perception, the main 
instrument for the constitution of the ego and the perception of reality 
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through a dispassionate subject-object relation, was also the reason why 
painted figures were deprived of their singularity and delicate related-
ness and wedged into an impeccable optical continuum.
To draw attention to the significance of touch in a mechanized, 
lifeless, mind-obsessed civilization so corrupted with self-conscious-
ness and “optical idealism” (Sloterdijk 50), Lawrence referred to the 
intuitive, physical consciousness of ancient cultures, to their emotional 
involvement with the cosmos. The Egyptians “fumbled in the dark, 
and didn’t quite know where they were, or what they were,” Lawrence 
wrote, “they only  felt  their own existence surging in the darkness of 
other existences” (Lawrence, Study 145). Africans, too, possessed “dim 
eye-vision and the powerful blood-feeling” (147). Even a child never 
looks purely visually, yet always “from his breast and his abdomen, 
with deep-sunken realism,” and when he sees an animal, he sees it not 
as a “correct biological object” but “a big living presence of no particu-
lar shape” (Lawrence, Psychoanalysis 121). The trouble with sight is that 
it involves “objective curiosity” (102), so one discerns things as strictly 
atomized, unable to create any deep connection with and among them. 
Touch, on the other hand, constitutes a tight physical bond between the 
toucher and the touched, not the distal, optical relation of the knower 
and known, but the clasp of two bodies enhancing their singularity 
and integrity. Lawrence loved to write about the sanctity of touch, the 
“spark of contact […] spark of exchange” (Lawrence, Mornings 92), as 
the only mode of relation that preserves the integrity of interacting 
beings. “This constancy is preserved by intimacy of contact, physical 
immediacy,” he said, “but this physical immediacy does not make 
the two beings any less distinct and separate. It makes them more so” 
(Lawrence, Reflections 124).
The last utterance adumbrates the peculiar logic of Laurentian 
ontology: our singleness increases the more closely we are coupled with 
the universe, the more we embrace otherness: in a word, the more we 
are subtly polarized. So, if in literature and painting we want to con-
vey the polarized relationship of things beating in the very heart of 
the universe—which for Lawrence is their sole task—we must count 
much more on the closeness of touch than objectifying optical percep-
tion. Since the plastic arts “depend[s] entirely on the representation of 
substantial bodies, and on the intuitional perception of the reality of 
substantial bodies” (Lawrence, Late  193), it is of the utmost impor-
tance for painting, after the centuries-old reign of light and the com-
plete optical rationalization of the world, to renew itself through a pro-
found appreciation of real entities and their mutual relationships.
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In an essay accompanying his London exhibition of 1929, Lawrence 
interpreted the history of Western civilization through the millen-
nia-old struggle of mankind to subject carnality and sexuality to the 
entrenched mechanisms of the mind and reason. “The history of our 
era,” he declared,
is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative 
body for the glorification of the spirit, the mental consciousness […]. Art, that 
handmaid, humbly and honestly served the vile deed, through three thousand 
years at least. The Renaissance put the spear through the side of the already 
crucified body […]. It took still three hundred years for the body to finish: 
but in the nineteenth century it became a corpse, a corpse with an abnormally 
active mind … (Lawrence, Late 203)
Lawrence believed that fear of the body shaped the entire tradition 
of European painting and that due to the persistent urge towards 
spirituality, the Will-to-Motion, and dematerialization, “the most 
joyous moment in the whole history of painting” was the escape of 
the Impressionists from “the tyranny of solidity and the menace of 
mass-form” (197) into luminous infinity and all-pervading radiance. 
Yet amidst the irresistible impulse towards complete disembodiment 
and dissolution, a French artist, Paul Cézanne, indicated the possibil-
ity of recovery by evoking the haptic lumpiness of things. It is an art-
historical cliché that this painter aimed to substitute the Impressionist 
idea of the world as transient and fluid with a painterly conception that 
reinstates stability and density. He gave reasons for such conclusions 
by often saying that he wanted to “render the cylindrical essence of 
objects,” “the weight of things” and their “solid appearance” (Doran 
87, 89). But what other critics saw as the painter’s formal idiosyncrasy, 
Lawrence understood as an unprecedented perturbation in the human 
psyche, with far-reaching implications—so significant that he will see 
in Cézanne’s work the only attempt in the modern era to break with 
the suppression and denial of physicality and substance. Rendering 
such prosaic objects as an apple or a jug, the painter becomes a rescuer 
and a restorer of bodiliness:
The actual fact is that in Cézanne modern French art made its first tiny step 
back to real substance, to objective substance, if we may call it so […]. But 
Cézanne’s apples are a real attempt to let the apple exist in its own separate 
entity, without transfusing it with personal emotion […]. It seems a small 
thing to do: yet it is the first real sign that man has made for several thousands 
of years that he is willing to admit that matter actually exists. (201)
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Yet, as Lawrence further explicates, Cézanne succeeded in reestablish-
ing mass in painting precisely because he “wished to displace our pres-
ent mode of mental-visual consciousness […] and substitute a mode 
of consciousness that was predominantly intuitive, the awareness of 
touch” (211)—or, to put it ontologically, because he awoke the Will-
to-Inertia and an attitude that allows to every single thing its secre-
tive substantial integrity. It would be misleading, however, to assume 
Lawrence wanted to make a mere reversal and stress matter instead 
of the spirit: to potentiate either of them means stagnancy and dis-
solution, for “nothing is or can be created save by combined effort of 
the two principles” (Lawrence, Study 121). Accordingly, he dispraised 
both the primitive artworks that, like the African sculpture in Women 
in Love, are arrested in their constricting Will-to-Inertia, as well as the 
modern artworks disintegrating in their utter kineticism, their unre-
mitting Will-to-Motion. Simultaneously obtaining permanence and 
change and joining absolute contour with relative color, Cézanne’s 
works involve the rare but requisite balance or lively contrast of the two 
wills. From numerous sayings of the artist, it is possible to gather that 
he strove to convey at once the stability of the form and the lability of 
its becoming: i.e., to engender outlines and forms through overlapping 
and intertwining strokes. Cézanne often used to say that “drawing is 
the relationship of contrasts or, simply, the rapport of two tones, white 
and black,” and that “the secret of drawing and modeling” lies in “the 
contrast and connection of colors” (Doran 17, 188). What differenti-
ates him from other modern painters is precisely the conjugative brush-
work that helped him to paint objects as self-standing and mutually 
correlated. Kurt Badt admired Cézanne’s ability to evoke or produce 
solid and tangible objects employing active chromatic relationships, 
and through agitated chromatic plasma make the objects stay in “‘mu-
tual self-preservation’ in the togetherness” (Badt 172). He said that 
the substance of Cézanne’s pictures had “acquired such an enormous 
wealth of shades and relationships that it appeared to vibrate in the in-
terplay of these combinations, or to undulate gently,” yet “the world of 
objects which was being evolved out of this substance was still” (169). 
The coexistence of kinesis and stasis in Cézanne’s compositions in-
spired Lawrence to similarly describe the effect of his paintings as calm 
tension and tense calm: “It was part of his desire: to make the human 
form, the life form, come to rest. Not static—on the contrary. Mobile 
but come to rest. And at the same time, he set the unmoving material 
world into motion.” (Lawrence, Late 213) However, to achieve both 
solidity and vibrancy as inimitably as Cézanne, what Lawrence calls 
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“intuitive awareness of forms” and “physical awareness” (207) is neces-
sary, which is a pre-mental, pre-cognitive mode of consciousness mak-
ing no separation between spiritual and carnal knowledge, and “which 
alone relates us in direct awareness to physical things and substantial 
presences” (192). Such “physical intuitional perception” (191) allows 
us to simultaneously feel the inherent power of entities and their grav-
ity, as well as their flickering streaming in the dynamic togetherness. 
Lawrence called for the polarized equilibrium of animation and rest in 
artistic expression as early as the Study of Thomas Hardy: “The artistic 
form is a revelation of the two principles of Love and the Law in a state 
of conflict and yet reconciled […] active force meeting and overcoming 
and yet not overcoming inertia. It is the conjunction of the two which 
makes the form.” (Lawrence, Study 86, emphasis mine)
The form wherein the two tendencies essential for the life of the 
universe come together, Lawrence will detect in only one more artistic 
tradition: Etruscan. In the tomb paintings of this ancient civilization 
a living bond of interflowing and interanimating entities is pictorially 
conveyed, with the use of contours not created mechanically and cold-
eyed, and a mellow composition that is not, as in dry, European expres-
sion, “merely a contact of surfaces, and a juxtaposition of objects” 
(Lawrence, Sketches 54). Such disegno connettivo  reflects the vision of 
cosmic relatedness where all things are married and in closest physi-
cal affinity: “Here, in this faded etruscan painting,” Lawrence wrote, 
“there is a quiet flow of touch that unites the man and the woman on 
the couch, the timid boy behind, the dog that lifts his nose, even the 
very garlands that hang from the wall.” (54) If design is “a recogni-
tion of the relation between various things, various elements in the 
creative flux” (Lawrence,  Study  147), then the “wonderfully sugges-
tive  edge  of the figures,” and the “flowing contour” of Etruscan art 
(Lawrence, Sketches 123–124), allowing each shape to softly exchange 
its force with the energy of the environment, was a formal embodi-
ment of the tender, the warm bond they felt with the whole universe. 
Again, here are at play the two underlying forces of Lawrence’s ontol-
ogy, as well as the two principles of his notion of art: each thing retains 
its assertiveness and stability, its unfathomable quiddity, while at the 
same time pouring out of itself and openly sharing its “quick” with the 
milieu; each thing is a dense mass whose integrity is the outcome of its 
correspondence with other entities. Of course, Lawrence once again 
underlines the necessity of a polarized balance between those two dif-
ferent directions, as exemplified in the Etruscan worldview:
Milovan Novaković:     D. H. Lawrence as an Art Historian
55
It must have been a wonderful world, that old world where everything 
appeared alive and shining in the dusk of contact with all things, not merely 
as an isolated individual thing played upon by daylight; where each thing had 
a clear outline, visually, but in its very clarity was related emotionally or vitally to 
strange other things, one thing springing from another, things mentally contra-
dictory fusing together emotionally … (124, emphasis mine)
All these utterances demonstrate that Lawrence’s notion of pictorial 
form and his vision of art history stemmed from his general philo-
sophical position. Since “life is so made that opposites sway about a 
trembling centre of balance” (Lawrence, Study 151), the picture in its 
formal arrangement must attain the equilibrium of polar forces of in-
spissation and dissipation, inertia and motion, constancy and change, 
that underpins the universe itself. Illuminating sources confirming 
that the twofold, contrastive pictorial form is obtainable only through 
concerted workings of stabilization and agitation, solidification, and 
effluence could be found not only in Lawrence’s discursive writings 
but also in his novels. At one point in Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel, a 
painter, and the novel’s main character, describes his picture as a vague 
and wavering organic mass whose light is both inside and outside the 
shapes, or rather in-between, begetting, in turn, permeable and palpi-
tating painterly tissue:
It’s because there is scarcely any shadow in it—it’s more shimmery—as if I’d 
painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the 
stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the 
real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside, really. (Lawrence, 
Sons 183, emphasis mine)
And how can we escape the impression that Lawrence’s account of 
Birkin’s copying of a Chinese drawing of a goose in the water reminds 
us of the balance between static centrality and dynamic fluidity the 
writer had previously recognized in Botticelli’s works: “I know what 
centres they live from—what they perceive and feel—the hot, stinging 
centrality of a goose in the flux of cold water and mud.” (Lawrence, 
Women 89, emphasis mine) Centrality and flux, Will-to-Inertia and 
Will-to-Motion, self-maintenance and self-giving—these are the ulti-
mate laws of ontologia laurentiana whose interaction makes reality. The 
writer tried to realize such an ever-changing balance of concentration 
and emanation, centrifugal and centripetal forces, absolute contour and 
relational color even in his own paintings. His intention to preserve in 
painting not only the body of things and their intensive power but also 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2023
56
their extensive capacity to get in touch with other things was attested 
by an invaluable reminiscence of Brewster Ghiselin. Trying to portray 
fish in the water, Lawrence complained to Ghiselin that he had painted 
them “isolated in the midst of bare space in a way that deprived them 
of their actual relation to other things, to water,” adding that this was 
the result of his “spiritual will […] refusing to admit and to express the 
relatedness, the vital interchange, between them and all other things, 
each in their special quality and degree” (Nehls 295). For that reason, 
the writer made every effort, as Ghiselin conveys,
to find some expression in paint for the relations of things […] perhaps by 
means of the touching and mingling of colors flowing from different things 
[…]. Later, in his room, he showed me a black and white drawing he had been 
doing of a nude man and woman in a kind of complicated electric field […]. 
In it he had tried to show the special rhythms of the different parts of the body, 
the head, the breast, the belly, the loins, as they subsisted in themselves and in a 
pattern of relations. (295–296, emphasis mine)
However, to consider that the ontological polar scheme, the universal 
play of two contrary forces is embodied in the formal constitution of 
artworks as well as in the historical course of art is not an idea peculiar 
to Lawrence, since similar conceptions amused many art historians at 
the beginning of the last century. His reasoning that the history of 
painting was shaped by the gradual suppression of “blood-conscious-
ness” focusing on the reality of tactile, bodily experience in favor of 
an aloof optical perception and rationalized knowledge, is irresistibly 
reminiscent of the opinion of Alois Riegl, who described the history of 
art as a transition from an objective, tactile ancient art into a subjective, 
optical art dominant after the late Roman period. The Viennese art 
historian believed that “the art of all of antiquity can be characterized 
as a fundamental objectivism, for it has aimed at the clearest possible 
delineation of the individual figure in all dimensions” (Riegl,  “Late 
Roman” 181), and that such manner of depiction is a consequence of 
the fact that ancient people experienced the world through the sense 
of touch. What he calls “haptic objectivism” (185)—that is, the expe-
rience of things as physically opaque, tangible, and impenetrable—is 
what Lawrence calls the Will-to-Inertia. On the other hand, when, in 
Hellenistic high relief, encapsulated forms were melted by the excessive 
use of light and shadow, Riegl concluded that the late art of antiquity, 
by emphasizing pure optical qualities, “broke free of the objectivism 
of the classical conception and paved the way for modern subjectiv-
ism,” so that “all later art since the Middle Ages aimed at representing 
Milovan Novaković:     D. H. Lawrence as an Art Historian
57
the subjective aspects of the appearances” (177). This assertion exactly 
matches Lawrence’s thesis that after the medieval period there was a 
rise of the Will-to-Motion in painting that diminished the self-stand-
ing value of figures by submitting them to either strictly geometrical, 
optically unified structures or to vibrant compositions made of lumi-
nous values. Yet the analogies do not end there, for both Riegl and 
Lawrence thought that two primordial poles—tactile and optical, static 
and dynamic, immanent and transcendent—corresponded, respective-
ly, to southern, Roman plastic art, which strived to present bodies as 
insulated and inert forms, and northern, German optical art, which ac-
centuated incorporeal and form-breaking qualities. Even though noth-
ing suggests that Lawrence ever read Riegl, their similarity becomes 
striking, given that the latter also maintained that “the extreme isola-
tion of individual natural things from each other,” just as much as “the 
extreme connection among them,” produced sterile, lifeless forms: in 
the first case by their “atomization,” in the second case by their “evapo-
ration in the infinite” (Riegl, Gesammelte 60). Hence for Riegl, the 
synergy of the plastisch-nahsichtige and optisch-fernsichtige is required, 
for “each direction, if pursued one-sidedly, inevitably leads to weariness 
and torpor, while in mutual, albeit often antagonistic interpenetration, 
they have brought about the fruitful development to this day” (59).
Lawrence’s Will-to-Inertia and Will-to-Motion found an even more 
apparent counterpart in the conceptual antinomies on which Swiss art 
historian Heinrich Wölfflin based his theory. He was known for the 
argument that, in the history of Western art, there are two fundamen-
tal manners of expression, reflecting two different modes of human 
understanding of reality: a linear, tectonic style, characterized by a 
closed form and embodying a tactile sense of things; and the painterly, 
a-tectonic style, characterized by an open form and representing a reti-
nal approach to the world. The linear style involves “the solid figure” 
and “the enduring form” which reveal “the thing in itself,” while the 
qualities of painterly style are “changing appearance” and “movement” 
that render “the thing in its relations” (Wölfflin 27). When trans-
lated into Laurentian terms, the closed form is the plastic manifesta-
tion of the Will-to-Inertia, a linear enclosure evoking the stability and 
immutability of things; the open form is a painterly embodiment of 
the Will-to-Motion where everything looks “as vibrating” and where 
“picturesque movement-effects” blur surfaces and outlines (26). Not 
only that, Wölfflin shares Lawrence’s conviction “the most decisive 
revolution which art history knows” occurred during the Renaissance 
when the “tactile picture” (Tastbild) was replaced with the “visual 
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58
picture” (Sehbild) (21): namely when the linear style of isolated shapes 
was superseded by the painterly style of loose and connective strokes. 
Again, not unlike Riegl and Lawrence, Wölfflin claimed that the delim-
ited, inert form is peculiar to Southern cultures, while in the Nordic 
regions prevails the beauty of “the boundless and infinite” (148).
Finally, what Lawrence might have thought about post-World War 
II painting, if his life had not ended prematurely in 1930, seems no less 
intriguing to imagine. Given his repudiation of Cubism and Futurism, 
his incapacity to conceive painting beyond a figurative framework, and 
his general stance that modern society was ensnared in the mechanism 
of abstract thought and therefore deprived of the eros essential for gen-
uine creativity, one could hardly expect that he would have accepted 
what we call gestural painting. For him, this kind of painting would be 
just another cerebral exercise of bloodlessness, the product of all too 
mental beings bereft of the power to instinctively feel and depict real 
entities, transforming them, instead, into thick coats of paint and flat 
surfaces and making formless and contrived configurations.
However, numerous testimonials and statements obliquely evince 
that this writer might have appreciated pictures where physical and 
material, tactile and manual qualities are stressed: i.e., works wherein 
the actual materiality of the subject become viscous and thick paint-
erly facture. “Play with the paint […] forget all you learned at the art 
school” (Nehls 22), Lawrence urged his stepdaughter, pointing out 
the importance of a spontaneous, unpremeditated painterly gesture. 
Several times he spoke of the hand as a part of the body that “flick-
ers with a life of its own,” an organ that “has its own rudiments of 
thought” (Lawrence, Study 167) and does not require the mediation of 
the brain to perform its meaningful actions—whether writing or paint-
ing. Modern paintings, even of those artists and movements which 
Lawrence steadily devalued, relied heavily on the autonomous work-
ing of the hand, on its instinctive and unpredictable dance across the 
picture plane, and its close contact with the support. It seems Lawrence 
himself recognized the physical charge of the accentuated brushwork, 
explaining why oil painting is much closer to him than watercolor: 
“One can use one’s elbow, and in water it’s all dib-dab.” (Lawrence, 
Letters VI 329) And when he expressed in a letter his abhorrence of 
matte surfaces, adding instead that he loved “to paint rather wet, with 
oil, so the color slips about and doesn’t look like dried bone” (Lawrence, 
Letters V 637), this writer-painter seems to embrace the paint-eroticism 
that distinguished post-war artists such as Willem de Kooning. After 
all, did not de Kooning comment that “flesh is the reason oil paint 
Milovan Novaković:     D. H. Lawrence as an Art Historian
59
was invented”; and was not he an artist who “handled his hands as if 
they had an aesthetic life of their own” (Shiff 66, 56)? It is hard not to 
notice a close resemblance between Lawrence’s notion of the painting 
process as a physical operation with the gestural style when, in “Making 
Pictures,” he stated that the essential part of creation is to lose oneself 
in a picture which must come “out of the instinct, intuition and sheer 
physical action” (Lawrence, Late 228, emphasis mine) or when we read 
the following lines from the poem “The Work of Creation”:
Even an artist knows that his work was never in his mind, 
he could never have thought it before it happened. 
A strange ache possessed him, and he entered the struggle, 
and out of the struggle with his material, in the spell of the urge 
his work took place, it came to pass, it stood up and saluted 
his mind. (Lawrence, The Complete 577)
Moreover, Lawrence’s belief that a picture must “hit deep into the sens-
es […] hit down to the soul and up into the mind,” and that “the mean-
ing has to come through direct sense impression” (Lawrence, Letters VI 
505–506), corresponds to the desire of modern painters to forge pal-
pable and often impasted surfaces that would directly affect not just the 
eyesight but also the sense of touch. What chiefly connects Lawrence 
to such artists, despite insurmountable differences and disagreements, 
is precisely the importance of touch. The word touch designates, at the 
same time, physical, bodily contact, and the pictorial mark, the trace 
of the painter’s hand. So, if Lawrence often spoke, as his friend Earl 
Brewster informs us, about the tactile qualities of his pictures and that 
“instead of a brush he frequently painted with his thumb” (Nehls 126), 
it is not unreasonable to extrapolate that he might have recognized in 
gestural painters a devotion to physical intuition, which is revealed in 
the picture through palpable facture and the blind somatic absorption 
of the artist in the creative act. This accent on the manual gesture, 
loosening into an unpredictable painting procedure, and the touchable 
mass of paint might have appeared to Lawrence—who could not have 
imagined how monstrous the tomb of “ghosts” and “replicas” techni-
cal, mechanized society would become—as an artistic attempt to es-
cape from the global tyranny of disembodiedness and anemia. Indeed, 
in the work of these artists, too, one can identify the Laurentian desire 
to assert carnal reality through the haptic values of the picture and im-
mediate painterly action.
If nothing else, in this gravitation of modern painters towards a 
blind awareness pivoting on the actions and deep knowledge of the 
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60
body, one could recognize the working of the Will-to-Inertia that still 
preserves the unshakable ipseity amidst the unbridled Will-to-Motion 
unable to stop its centripetal drive towards total disembodiment and 
dissipation—le grand néant.
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New York, NY: Routledge, 2014.
Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York, NY: 
A Delta Book, 1966.
Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. London: Penguin Books, 
1995.
Lawrence, D. H. Late Essays and Articles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2004.
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Lawrence, D. H. Letters II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Lawrence, D. H. Letters V. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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1986.
Lawrence, D. H. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin Books, 1993.
Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Nehls, Edward, ed. D. H. Lawrence. A Composite Biography Vol. III, 1925–1930. 
Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.
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New York, NY: Continuum, 1988. 173–190.
Riegl, Alois. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Augsburg: Benno Filser Verlag, 1928.
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Milovan Novaković:     D. H. Lawrence as an Art Historian
61
Slikarstvo in ontologija: D. H. Lawrence kot 
umetnostni zgodovinar
Ključne besede: filozofija kulture / literatura in slikarstvo / angleška književnost / D. 
H. Lawrence / ontološka polarnost / Cézanne, Paul / Riegl, Alois / Wölfflin, Heinrich
D. H. Lawrence je bolj kot katerikoli drug pisatelj dvajsetega stoletja razvil 
globoko razumevanje slikarstva in to umetniško zvrst ovrednotil skozi prizmo 
svoje povsem samosvoje ontološke sheme. V zvestobi svoji polaristični filozo-
fiji, v kateri je vse ustvarjeno z nasprotjem statičnega in dinamičnega, uma in 
telesa, optičnega in taktilnega, »volje-do-gibanja« in »volje-do-inercije«, sve-
tlobe in teme, je Lawrence pojmoval zgodovino vizualnih umetnosti kot zrcalo 
univerzalnega nasprotja med temi vrhovnimi metafizičnimi silami. Lawrence 
je kljub splošnemu prepričanju, da je zahodna umetnost v celoti podrejena 
ideji, umu in svetlobi, opozoril na več primerov, v katerih so likovno obdelana 
tudi temačna, telesna in taktilna doživetja. Namen prispevka je predstaviti 
Lawrencea kot umetnostnega zgodovinarja, ki je umetniška dela in umetno-
stnozgodovinska obdobja razumel kot večni boj za prevlado med telesnim in 
duhovnim, in ki je v svoji literaturi vedno pozival k njuni medsebojni spravi 
in ravnovesju.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK  130.2:7.01 
821.111.09Lawrence D. H.:75
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i2.03