ars adeo latet arte sua

"The sketches of great masters are often more effective than their finished paintings. Of course another advantage contributes to this, namely that they are completed at one stroke in the moment of conception." p 99, On the Inner Nature of Art

(I will return to this at the end)

Schopenhauer's remarks about the aesthetic capacity of sketches strongly reminded me of Picasso's line drawings. Schopenhauer describes sketches as often being more powerful than finished paintings and offers a couple of reasons. First, as he says, "Something, and indeed the final thing, must always be left over for it to do," (p 99). The artwork always comes short of capturing fully that which it represents, so art ultimately works through the "medium of imagination" (ibid.) rather than appealing only to the senses. Moreover, the essential aspect that art should be working towards is not the thing's  form in the world (in this case, a live dove) but the Idea of the thing (the Idea of a dove). The second reason Schopenhauer gives for the frequent supremacy of sketch over finished work is that it is "completed at one stroke in the moment of conception" (ibid.). This connects to his notion of "clever deliberation and persistent premeditation" (ibid.) leading the artist away from the moment of "inspiration" (ibid.). I believe Schopenhauer is saying that when a person is seized with artistic inspiration they are in touch with the true essence of a thing, the characteristic of a dove that gives it it's dove-ness. To take that feeling of inspiration and translate it into deliberate thoughts is a movement away from the thing-in-itself.

Here are a couple more examples of Picasso's line drawing. Above is a photo by Gjon Mili that utilizes a long exposure time to capture Picasso drawing a bull with light. This seems to fit almost exactly Schopenhauer's preference for works that "are completed at one stroke in the moment of conception." However, below is the first hint that this might not be exactly so. 

This is another line-drawing of a bull by Picasso which resembles fairly closely the abstract, simple nature of the light drawing. But if we're trying to keep to Schopenhauer's criteria then the pair of these sketches poses a problem: is one an adaptation or copy of the other? If so, can we tell which is prior? According to Schopenhauer, the further an artist gets from "the moment of conception" the less quality their work has, due in large part to the artist's over-thinking of the subject. In most cases Schopenhauer defers to simplicity as a sign of an artist getting to the essence in their work. In response to this conception of simplicity I would like to offer one last Picasso example (or, rather, 11):

From top to bottom, left to right, are the 11 plates in Picasso's "Bull" series. In order, these sketches show the process of abstraction Picasso used to move from the detailed sketch in the upper left to the incredibly simple sketch in the middle of the right-hand column. In each plate Picasso exaggerates a feature or takes away detail. Picasso employs a strategy of cutting up the bull into skeletal or muscular sections (Pablo himself liked to jokingly use the metaphor of 'butchering'), which allows him to reduce the detail in the early plates down to simple, evocative lines. By Plate XI he has managed to use only a handful of strokes to capture the bull. I think one of Schopenhauer's main argumentative issues is his misunderstanding of artistic creation. This is not to say he is ignorant of the process; if I recall correctly he at one point gets into the minutiae of tempered tuning in music. Rather, Schopenhauer underestimates how crafty simplicity can be. As Ovid said of Pygmalion's statue in Metamorphoses: "Art so conceals its own artistry." 

Finally, to return to the piece at the top of the page: Bach's Quaerendo invenientis Canon a 2, from the larger musical work The Musical Offering. This two-voice fugue sounds simple even by Schopenhauer's standards. However, what Bach has done in creating this fugue is far from simple. The fugue is an example of something called a 'crab canon'. A 'crab canon' is something like a musical palindrome, where the line is written in such a way that, when played both forwards and backwards, it harmonizes with itself. Below is a video which provides a visualization of the underlying complexities of composition of what seems to be an exceedingly simple piece.