The paper attempts to expound the basic postulates of Ivan Focht’s philosophy of art as comprehensively as possible. Given the absence of more extensive monographs on Focht’s philosophical work, efforts are made to correlate his aesthetic standpoints and to compare the same with relevant standpoints of both Croatian and European aesthetic-philosophical thought. Accordingly, the expected scientific contribution pertains primarily to the establishment of an interpretive basis for both the future evaluation and future interpretations of Focht’s works. Methodologically, the paper is based on an analysis of Focht’s original texts, but also on relevant classical and recent secondary literature. The author’s considerations presented in the paper have resulted in four essential and underlying designations of Focht’s ontology of art. First, it turns out that, methodologically speaking, Focht’s aesthetics is objectivism, i.e. that it sets forth from the form and structure of aesthetic objects (formal aesthetics). Drawing on the idea that the structure of aesthetic objects is layered (e.g., N. Hartmann, R. Ingarden), Focht drafts his structure scheme, according to which aesthetic objects have three basic plans (the material-physical, the objective-display, and the spiritual-metaphysical plan). Second, in ontological terms, Focht’s aesthetics advocates essentialism, i.e. the view that aesthetic forms precede the existence of aesthetic objects. Starting from the ideal character of art, Focht does not accept fully the phenomenological distinction between ideal aesthetic objects and real works of art because he believes that the moment of modality is crucially determined by exactly the ideal character of art. Third, Focht’s aesthetics is permeated by gnoseological realism which takes the position that aesthetic forms exist objectively or that they are not the product of the consciousness of aesthetic subjects. It is also from gnoseological realism that the understanding that aesthetic acts are conditioned significantly by aesthetic objects stems. Correspondingly, it could be said that, in gnoseological terms, Focht represents a distinctive amalgam of Platonism, i.e. phenomenology, and dialectical materialism. Fourth, Focht’s ontology of art is based on ontological monism and gnoseological dualism. His ontological monism is most obvious in the constitutive analysis of aesthetic objects, i.e. in Focht’s scheme of the structure of works of art, while his gnoseological dualism is revealed in a special way in Focht’s understanding of artistic cognition as a dialectic relationship between subject and object. In conclusion, it should be noted that Ivan Focht’s ontology of art contains theoretical achievements that can fully support the judgment on the authenticity of his approach to the aesthetic phenomenon. Exiting the field of art and entering the realm of nature and the naturally beautiful – so as to draw closer to the metaphysical sense of the identity of matter and spirit – is what ultimately remains as the final result of Focht’s philosophy of art.