Improvisation in Painting

This chapter concerns the relevance of improvisation in regards to painting. Painting, in fact, is ordinarily considered a typical case of a non-performing art, i.e., a kind of art in which spectators do not directly perceive the artist’s performance, but aesthetically enjoy the final product. In these arts – photography and cinema, literature and non-performative poetry, painting and sculpture, architecture and design, etc. – it is usually the case that process and product neither coincide nor happen simultaneously, and the aesthetic experience of the artistic achievement occurs once the performance has finished. Pictorial improvisation can surely take place in the mode of a performance; artists, for example, can paint in front of an audience, possibly interacting with other performers. The last aesthetic aspect of pictorial improvisation the authors want to consider is the element of variation, as exemplified by the different versions of the image Mount Saint-Victoire, painted by Cezanne.