The visual arts in French

Figuratif looks like « figurative » and covers only half of it, and the missing half already has a French word of its own. English uses « figurative » for two unrelated things: for language that is not literal — « a figurative expression », « the figurative sense of a word » — and, in the gallery, for art that shows recognisable objects. French keeps those apart. Figuratif belongs to the gallery and nowhere else: un peintre figuratif, une série figurative, the opposite of l’art abstrait. The other sense is figuré, and it lives almost entirely inside one pair of phrases, au sens figuré against au sens propre, which is how every French dictionary labels its entries. So une expression figurative is not French for a metaphor at all; it would suggest an expression that depicts something. Both adjectives were built on the same figura and then sorted by their suffix, one for the painter and one for the grammarian, and neither will do the other one’s work. A third relative belongs on the same page: une figure de style is the device itself, what English calls « a figure of speech ».