Realist by Nature, by Nature Abstract: Personalist Aesthetics in Mounier and Henry
In the “sketch for a personalist aesthetic” in Le Personnalisme (1949), Emmanuel Mounier cautioned that the tendency towards abstraction in modern art was a sign of nihilism; but he also saw in it a promise to reveal a reality which transcends our habitual view of the world. To Mounier, there is a paradox in the nature of art: it is both realist and abstract; it deals with the reality of beings wh