Painter and the Pledge of Silence

Abstract

The essay discusses whether painting can be a socially engaged art. Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave a negative or at least skeptical answer. However, the essential fact that the images are silent does not prevent them from potentially obliging their viewers. The silence of the painter is not a negative act. Counter-examples that test the position of the generation of French phenomenologists will be sought in the Spanish and Yugoslav tradition of visual arts, primarily in the works of Francisco Goya and Đorđe Andrejević Kun.