Expressing Emotions through Art: The Essence of Feelings

Think about the last time a piece of music gave you chills, or a painting stopped you in your tracks. What was happening in that moment? Most likely, you were picking up on something the artist felt – and feeling a version of it yourself. This is not accidental. For many philosophers and artists, it is precisely the point. The idea that art is fundamentally about feelings – the artist’s feelings, transmitted to the viewer – is one of the most influential and enduring perspectives in the philosophy of art. It forms the backbone of what is broadly known as the expression theory of art, and it raises deeply interesting questions about what art is, what it does, and why it matters.

What does it mean for art to “express” feelings? 🔗

At its simplest, the expression theory holds that art is not primarily about representing the world accurately or producing beautiful objects. It is about communicating inner emotional states. The artist externalizes something felt within – anxiety, grief, joy, longing – and the artwork becomes the vehicle through which that inner state reaches another person.

This might sound straightforward, but it raises immediate philosophical puzzles. Is the artwork expressing the emotion the artist felt while creating it? Or is it expressing something the artist clarified and came to understand through the act of creating? And must the viewer feel the same thing the artist felt, or something adjacent to it? These questions have been answered differently by different thinkers, giving rise to a rich tradition of debate within aesthetics.

In the expressionist movement (roughly 1900-1950), the central motivation was to communicate one’s feelings through a medium to others. Form followed function: if a technique conveyed the artist’s feeling effectively, the technique was justified – regardless of whether it produced a pretty or realistic picture. Distorted faces, jagged lines, and clashing colors were not errors; they were deliberate emotional signals.

Benedetto Croce: art as intuition and inner expression 🔗

Among the philosophers who have most rigorously examined feelings in art, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) stands out as foundational. His 1902 work Aesthetic – fully titled Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic – argued that art is a form of intuitive knowledge: the most immediate, pre-rational way that the human spirit grasps reality.

For Croce, before we can conceptualize or reason about anything, we first intuit it – we receive a direct impression of it. This impression is inseparable from feeling. Feeling, for Croce, is necessarily part of any mental activity, including bare perception – it is a form of mental activity itself. What the artist does is take these vague, inchoate feelings and give them clarity through expression. The act of expression is therefore also the act of artistic creation.

This leads Croce to a striking conclusion: intuition and expression are not different things for Croce. Since intuition clarifies and objectifies vague emotions, calling it expression is appropriate. The work of art, in this sense, exists first and foremost in the mind of the artist – not as a canvas or a sculpture, but as a fully formed inner vision. The physical object (the painting, the poem) is what Croce calls “externalization”: a means of sharing that inner vision with others, but not the art itself.

Art is not imitation 🔗

Croce was explicitly opposed to the older view that art is fundamentally imitation (mimesis) – the idea, associated with Aristotle, that the artist’s job is to copy or represent the external world. Croce argued that art is intuitive expression, and both he and Collingwood tended to dismiss creation that does not satisfy this model as not truly artistic. For Croce, reducing art to imitation overlooks what makes it distinctively human: the capacity to give form to inner experience, to make felt states visible and shareable.

According to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the process of artistic creation, as understood by Croce, is one in which, through articulating inchoate feelings and impulses, the artist comes to express a particular, unique emotion – thereby bringing it to their own conscious awareness. The emotion is not pre-formed and then “put into” the artwork; it achieves its particular character through the very act of expression.

R.G. Collingwood: art as imaginative expression 🔗

R.G. Collingwood, the British philosopher, developed a closely related but distinct version of the expression theory in his 1938 work The Principles of Art. Like Croce, he rejected the idea that art is craft or mere skill, and insisted that its essence lies in emotional expression. But Collingwood placed special emphasis on imagination.

For Collingwood, art is imaginative expression – it is imaginative activity whose function is to express emotion. He distinguished between what he called “art proper” and various forms of pseudo-art: craft, entertainment, magic, and representation. Only genuine expression – in which the artist does not start with a fixed goal but discovers what they feel through the creative act – counts as art proper.

Collingwood also introduced an important nuance: the artist is “aware of an excitement going on within him,” the source of which he may not fully understand. Art is the process of bringing that excitement to clarity. This is why, for Collingwood, the artist does not set out knowing exactly what emotion they want to convey – they discover it in the making. The audience, in turn, participates actively: the audience’s role is collaborative, in the sense that the artist is concerned to express emotions that are mutually held.

This collaborative dimension is significant. It means that art is not simply self-expression broadcast outward; it is a shared emotional language. The viewer is not a passive recipient but an active re-creator of the imaginative experience.

Tolstoy: art as emotional infection 🔗

No account of feelings in art would be complete without Leo Tolstoy’s bold and provocative theory. In his 1897 essay What Is Art?, Tolstoy rejected beauty-based definitions of art entirely and proposed something far more functional: art is the deliberate transmission of feeling from one person to others.

Tolstoy described this transmission as “infectiousness.” The activity of art is based on the capacity of one person to receive another’s expression of feeling and to experience those feelings themselves. If the audience is genuinely moved – if they feel what the artist felt – then art has succeeded. If not, it has failed, no matter how technically accomplished it may be.

Tolstoy identified three conditions that determine the degree of infectiousness. The individuality of the feeling transmitted matters – the more specific to the person, the more successful the artwork. The clearness of the feeling transmitted aids the transition. And the sincerity of the artist is the most important of all: the force with which the artist genuinely feels what they are expressing. Without sincerity, even technically brilliant work repels rather than infects.

Tolstoy also gave art a strong social and moral purpose. The supreme aim of art, for Tolstoy, should be the generation of emotions that evoke love and solidarity, promoting spiritual unity. Art’s highest function was not aesthetic pleasure but the forging of human bonds through shared feeling.

Where Tolstoy and Collingwood diverge 🔗

Though both Tolstoy and Collingwood are expression theorists, they disagree on a crucial point. Collingwood held that Tolstoy was gravely mistaken about the nature of expression – that Tolstoy got the phenomenology of expression wrong and as a result misconstrued the expressive project. Specifically, Collingwood denied that it is the aim of the artist to arouse emotions in the audience. For Collingwood, the artist does not know in advance what emotion they wish to produce; they discover it through creation. If an artist does try to produce a predetermined emotion in the audience, this is actually the opposite of genuine art – it is manipulation, not expression.

Tolstoy, by contrast, required that art achieve uptake – that the feeling actually be transmitted and received. For Tolstoy, art is a necessarily relational activity, and uptake of the expressed feelings must be achieved for a creation to truly be “art.” An artwork that moves no one, however sincere its creation, falls short of the standard.

Feeling vs. emotion: a distinction that matters 🔗

Contemporary aesthetics has pushed us to draw a more careful distinction between feelings and emotions – a distinction that earlier expression theorists often blurred. Emotions are typically understood as intentional states directed at specific objects (fear of something, love for someone), while feelings are more diffuse – the phenomenal quality of an experience, the “what it is like” aspect of consciousness.

A study published in Philosophia (Springer) argues that the artistic expression of feeling has too often been overlooked in favor of emotion, and that many eminent voices in aesthetics – Croce, Dewey, Langer, Bosanquet – would agree that feeling is no less important than emotion for understanding artistic expression. Susanne Langer, for instance, held that art creates “symbolic forms expressive of human feelings” – meaning that art does not directly convey the artist’s personal emotion but gives form to the structure of feeling as such, making inner life articulable and communicable in a way that language alone cannot.

This distinction matters because it shifts the question from “did the viewer feel what the artist felt?” to “does the artwork embody and communicate a recognizable felt quality?” The latter is a weaker, and arguably more defensible, claim – one that survives even when the personal biography of the artist is unknown.

Criticisms of the expression theory 🔗

The expression theory is compelling, but not without its critics. Several serious objections have been raised against it.

First, there is the paradox of expression: if emotions are private, internal objects, and artworks are physical, external objects, then it seems impossible to merge the internal private states with the external public ones. How exactly does a feeling become embedded in paint or sound?

Second, some critics question whether the artist’s intention or emotional state is even relevant to the artwork’s value. W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s famous concept of the “intentional fallacy” suggests that the artist’s intended meaning – and by extension, their felt state – is neither available nor appropriate as a standard for judging a work. The work, once made, stands on its own.

Third, the theory leaves under-explained the process by which an audience comes to know the work and its expressive character – how we map elements of the externalized work back to the mental states of the artist. And it sits uncomfortably with the widespread recognition that great works admit a variety of interpretations and emotional responses, not a single fixed one.

Finally, there is the question of abstract or conceptual art – work that seems deliberately to resist emotional content. The history of art since the mid-20th century has produced many such works, and the expression theory struggles to account for them without considerable stretching.

Why feelings in art still matter 🔗

Despite these criticisms, the core insight of the expression theory remains powerful. Art, unlike a logical argument or a scientific report, communicates something that resists full articulation in propositional language. Communication through art is successful when the audience, through contemplating the work, comes to recognize or share the mental condition that is the work’s existence. That recognition – the feeling of having encountered something true to an inner state you could not quite name – is what distinguishes art from mere decoration or entertainment.

This is also why art continues to function as a form of human connection across time, culture, and language. A viewer who knows nothing about the personal life of Edvard Munch can still feel the anguish in The Scream. A listener who has never met Beethoven can be moved to tears by the Ode to Joy. Something crosses the gap between one inner life and another – and that crossing, however philosophically mysterious, is what the expression theory is trying to explain.

What do you think? If an artist creates a work in a state of deep personal grief, but the viewer experiences it as joyful or uplifting, has the artwork succeeded or failed at expressing feeling? And does it matter what the artist actually felt, if the work moves us powerfully on its own terms?

References

1. https://philosophicaleggs.com/130-the-expression-theory-of-art/
2. https://www.routledge.com/Aesthetic-As-Science-of-Expression-and-General-Linguistic/Croce/p/book/9781560008187
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/croce-aesthetics/
4. https://23043765.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2025/06/17/expression-theory-croce/
5. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/artistic-expression/v-1/sections/expression-theory
6. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collingwood-aesthetics/
7. https://majamalmcrona.medium.com/the-work-of-art-as-an-emotional-response-efafa36121c5
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Art
9. https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/09/09/leo-tolstoy-what-is-art-infectiousness/
10. https://www.thecollector.com/leo-tolstoy-what-is-art/
11. https://pressbooks.ccconline.org/introtophilosophy/chapter/9-6-art-and-the-emotional-life-schopenhauer-and-tolstoy/
12. https://faculty.fiu.edu/~harrisk/Notes/Aesthetics/1238%20PHI3800%20Sequential%20Lectures/PHI3800%20Lecture%2013%20-%20Expressive%20Theory-%20Collingwood.htm
13. https://repository.wellesley.edu/_flysystem/fedora/2023-11/WCTC_2023_BaileySophiaTallulah_TheArtofInfection.pdf
14. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-020-00252-z