A work of art may certainly convey the essence of a multitude of experiences, and sometimes in a remarkably condensed and striking way. Selection and simplification occur for the sake of expressing the essential. Courbet often conveys the essence of a liquidity that saturates a landscape; Claude, that of the genius loci and of an arcadian scene; Constable, the essence of simple rural scenes of England; Utrillo, that of the buildings in a Paris street. Dramatists and novelists construct characters that extricate the essential from the incidental.
Since a work of art is the subject-matter of experiences heightened and intensified, the purpose that determines what is esthetically essential is precisely the formation of an experience as an experience. Instead of fleeing from experience to a metaphysical realm, the material of experiences is so rendered that it becomes the pregnant matter of a new experience. Moreover, the sense we now have for essential characteristics of persons and objects is very largely the result of art, while the theory that is under discussion holds that art depends upon and refers to essences already in being, thus reversing the actual process. If we are now aware of essential meanings, it is mainly because artists in all the various arts have extracted and expressed them in vivid and salient subject-matter of perception.
John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934)
Header: Gustave Courbet, La Trombe (1870)
landscape theory 