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Painting as an Art
In Painting as an Art, which began as the 1984 Andrew Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., philosopher Richard Wollheim transcended the boundaries and habits of both philosophy and art history to produce a large, encompassing vision of viewing art. Wollheim had three great passions--philosophy, psychology, art--and his work attempted to unify them into a theory of the experience of art. He believed that unlocking the meaning of a painting involved retrieving, almost reenacting, the creative activity that produced it.
In order to fully appreciate a work of art, Wollheim argued, critics must bring to the understanding of a work of art a much richer conception of human psychology than they have in the past: Many [critics] . . . make do with a psychology that, if they tried to live their lives by it, would leave them at the end of an ordinary day without lovers, friends, or any insight into how this came about. Many reviewers have remarked on the insightfulness of the book's final chapter, in which Wollheim contended that certain paintings by Titian, Bellini, de Kooning, and others represent the painters' attempts to project fantasies about the human body onto the canvas.
Reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Times, Daniel A. Herwitz asserted that Wollheim had done no less than recover for psychology its obvious and irresistible place in the explanation of what is most profound and subtle about paintings.
In order to fully appreciate a work of art, Wollheim argued, critics must bring to the understanding of a work of art a much richer conception of human psychology than they have in the past: Many [critics] . . . make do with a psychology that, if they tried to live their lives by it, would leave them at the end of an ordinary day without lovers, friends, or any insight into how this came about. Many reviewers have remarked on the insightfulness of the book's final chapter, in which Wollheim contended that certain paintings by Titian, Bellini, de Kooning, and others represent the painters' attempts to project fantasies about the human body onto the canvas.
Reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Times, Daniel A. Herwitz asserted that Wollheim had done no less than recover for psychology its obvious and irresistible place in the explanation of what is most profound and subtle about paintings.
384 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 24, 2025
In this book, you’ll find fascinating discussion of various philosophical questions concerning the nature of a painting (e.g., What do we encounter when we engage with a painting? Are there things we encounter which are significantly different from one another, and how are we to understand each, e.g., how can different things we encounter pertain to the painting in different ways?). You’ll also find beautiful analyses of various paintings (mostly 17th-20th century European painting), not unlike precise analyses of poems, which focus less on the historical background and impact of these paintings, but rather on certain basic dynamics or structures of the paintings themselves which illustrate Wolleheim’s philosophical points.
I’ll just focus on two of the philosophical questions Wollheim addresses. He argues that we should distinguish between what is represented in a painting, on the one hand, and what is depicted. His concept of “seeing-in” is treated here. When we look at a cloud, we may see “in” it a horse or dragon. It is integral to the visual experience that we are aware of phenomena holding at two independent registers. One register is what is physically there, like the surface of the canvas and colors placed upon it. The other register is what we see in the painting by virtue of encountering its physical presence. We do not confuse the two in viewing painting, and we can’t ignore one or the other. According to Wollheim, the content of a painting is what a viewer can see in it when they are appropriately position and follow through in seeing the painting in accordance with certain of the artist’s intentions. He also asks the question of what can be represented in painting. There are many things, like objects and events; and particular objects and the kinds under which particular objects can fall; and
Wollheim gets into this issue through a thought-provoking set up. He asks, what is the nature of the apparent relation between the painting itself and what we see in it? There are various ways of explaining how this works in painting. One could say that the painting enables the viewer to have an illusory experience, in which the viewer believes that they see what is represented. Second, one could say that the painting visually resembles that which it represents, and this makes it possible for the viewer to see the relevant things in it. Third, one could say that the viewer is invited to play a game of make-believe in engaging with a painting. Fourth, one could say that the painting functions on the basis of consisting of symbols which are referentially connected to certain things external to the painting itself.
Wollheim argues that each of these positions is problematic. He offers his alternative, that paintings work by engaging our capacities for expressive perceptual experience. In expressive perception, we can see something as expressing a certain emotion for instance. We can perceive a song as expressing melancholy. We can perceive a painting as celebratory. This is not the same as experiencing the painting as representing a celebration of some sort; no, the relevant emotion expressed would be more like a vibe or aura of the painting as a whole. Wollheim holds that this is a genuine variety of seeing and is closely related to seeing-in. He doesn’t go into this, but maybe a capacity for this basic variety of seeing is built into us by virtue of the evolutionary importance of detecting emotions in others; and this gets extended in our engagement with artworks.
Wollheim holds that paintings can have one or two kinds of spectator represented in the painting. First, there’s the spectator implicit in the perspective or point of view which looks onto the scene represented in the painting. Call this an “external spectator.” Most paintings have this role occupied. Relatively less commonly, there can be a second, “internal spectator” implicit in the consciousness which witnesses the scene. It is more than just a point of view, but there is implicitly a sort of attitude, persona, or particular consciousness which accounts for the sorts of features which mark the painting and may be understood as that which is salient to this persona, or which ends up there due to how the persona has interacted with their subject matter.
Wollheim treats this issue by examining the difference between Manet’s and Degas’s painting styles. Degas’s paintings tend to have only the first kind of spectator. The ballet dancers, for example, he represents are impersonal; we see them caught up in their everyday routines, and we get the impression that the exact moment of their lives represented is totally arbitrary. In contrast, Manet’s portraits of various individuals tend to capture them in a special moment which is provocative for us. We can see that they are caught up in a potentially life-changing or -threatening affair, for example. So in seeing these individuals, we also see an implicit persona whose interests in such rare or intense moments of life structure and explain what we see of these individuals. Wollheim points out that there is variation in how deeply our aesthetic experience is impacted by our identifying with this internal spectator between paintings which have this role occupied.
Reading analyses of painting like this is fascinating. It has never occurred to me to look at paintings with considerations of this character in mind. I sometimes pay attention to formal characteristics of composition and color use, etc. But this sort of consideration is not merely formal like this. How could one understand it? It’s as if the medium of a painting itself, and the human act of making a painting, inevitably leads to the painting responding to certain questions (e.g. who is seeing the scene depicted?) If this is not straightforwardly a formal dimension of a painting, maybe it can be called psychological-structural, or something like this. I wonder what other considerations of this character could be tracked and meaningfully change one’s capacities to engage with painting.
A few side-points I found compelling. How does the history of Western painting progress, and what does progress in painting even look like? Wollheim proposes that artists often do not have a fully determinate conception of the point of a piece prior to its completion, and over the process of painting, they’ll often realize that something the painting implicitly contains could be made explicit and taken up as the theme of the painting itself. For example, the impressionists discovered a certain way of depicting space and light. This was a cool idea. I wonder whether it contains seeds for generalization into an account of creativity at large. There’s some dialogue between the maker and what they’re creating such that through bursts of noticing or reflection, the maker can seem to know what was important all along, which was formerly implicitly there, and bring that out in the open; and through iterations like this, a creative work builds up.
I also was interested in how Wollheim defines “expressive perception” on the basis of examples of how we pick up on emotions had by others, which gets extended into our picking up on emotional tones which can be expressed by paintings (perhaps more precisely as ways something would be represented if the person representing it, or the implicit spectator, had a certain mood or emotion). I really like Mitchell Green’s Self-Expression and think there are interesting connections here.
While obviously not every painting primarily expresses an emotion, it seems that the concept of emotion can open the door to a larger category. Emotion is always tied up with the significance something has for us in light of our interests and needs. Trivially, every painting expresses significance in this sense. Maybe paintings in particular express significance in special, profound ways, because they themselves are not the objects whose significance we’re sensing; rather, it’s the objects and events a painting represents whose significance is the center of our attention. The fact that these objects and events don’t exist, but are represented in a certain way by an artist, surely enables this significance to be distorted, exaggerated, or different from the significances of everyday real-life objects and events in some other sense. There are also good connections here to be had with Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe.
I’ll just focus on two of the philosophical questions Wollheim addresses. He argues that we should distinguish between what is represented in a painting, on the one hand, and what is depicted. His concept of “seeing-in” is treated here. When we look at a cloud, we may see “in” it a horse or dragon. It is integral to the visual experience that we are aware of phenomena holding at two independent registers. One register is what is physically there, like the surface of the canvas and colors placed upon it. The other register is what we see in the painting by virtue of encountering its physical presence. We do not confuse the two in viewing painting, and we can’t ignore one or the other. According to Wollheim, the content of a painting is what a viewer can see in it when they are appropriately position and follow through in seeing the painting in accordance with certain of the artist’s intentions. He also asks the question of what can be represented in painting. There are many things, like objects and events; and particular objects and the kinds under which particular objects can fall; and
Wollheim gets into this issue through a thought-provoking set up. He asks, what is the nature of the apparent relation between the painting itself and what we see in it? There are various ways of explaining how this works in painting. One could say that the painting enables the viewer to have an illusory experience, in which the viewer believes that they see what is represented. Second, one could say that the painting visually resembles that which it represents, and this makes it possible for the viewer to see the relevant things in it. Third, one could say that the viewer is invited to play a game of make-believe in engaging with a painting. Fourth, one could say that the painting functions on the basis of consisting of symbols which are referentially connected to certain things external to the painting itself.
Wollheim argues that each of these positions is problematic. He offers his alternative, that paintings work by engaging our capacities for expressive perceptual experience. In expressive perception, we can see something as expressing a certain emotion for instance. We can perceive a song as expressing melancholy. We can perceive a painting as celebratory. This is not the same as experiencing the painting as representing a celebration of some sort; no, the relevant emotion expressed would be more like a vibe or aura of the painting as a whole. Wollheim holds that this is a genuine variety of seeing and is closely related to seeing-in. He doesn’t go into this, but maybe a capacity for this basic variety of seeing is built into us by virtue of the evolutionary importance of detecting emotions in others; and this gets extended in our engagement with artworks.
Wollheim holds that paintings can have one or two kinds of spectator represented in the painting. First, there’s the spectator implicit in the perspective or point of view which looks onto the scene represented in the painting. Call this an “external spectator.” Most paintings have this role occupied. Relatively less commonly, there can be a second, “internal spectator” implicit in the consciousness which witnesses the scene. It is more than just a point of view, but there is implicitly a sort of attitude, persona, or particular consciousness which accounts for the sorts of features which mark the painting and may be understood as that which is salient to this persona, or which ends up there due to how the persona has interacted with their subject matter.
Wollheim treats this issue by examining the difference between Manet’s and Degas’s painting styles. Degas’s paintings tend to have only the first kind of spectator. The ballet dancers, for example, he represents are impersonal; we see them caught up in their everyday routines, and we get the impression that the exact moment of their lives represented is totally arbitrary. In contrast, Manet’s portraits of various individuals tend to capture them in a special moment which is provocative for us. We can see that they are caught up in a potentially life-changing or -threatening affair, for example. So in seeing these individuals, we also see an implicit persona whose interests in such rare or intense moments of life structure and explain what we see of these individuals. Wollheim points out that there is variation in how deeply our aesthetic experience is impacted by our identifying with this internal spectator between paintings which have this role occupied.
Reading analyses of painting like this is fascinating. It has never occurred to me to look at paintings with considerations of this character in mind. I sometimes pay attention to formal characteristics of composition and color use, etc. But this sort of consideration is not merely formal like this. How could one understand it? It’s as if the medium of a painting itself, and the human act of making a painting, inevitably leads to the painting responding to certain questions (e.g. who is seeing the scene depicted?) If this is not straightforwardly a formal dimension of a painting, maybe it can be called psychological-structural, or something like this. I wonder what other considerations of this character could be tracked and meaningfully change one’s capacities to engage with painting.
A few side-points I found compelling. How does the history of Western painting progress, and what does progress in painting even look like? Wollheim proposes that artists often do not have a fully determinate conception of the point of a piece prior to its completion, and over the process of painting, they’ll often realize that something the painting implicitly contains could be made explicit and taken up as the theme of the painting itself. For example, the impressionists discovered a certain way of depicting space and light. This was a cool idea. I wonder whether it contains seeds for generalization into an account of creativity at large. There’s some dialogue between the maker and what they’re creating such that through bursts of noticing or reflection, the maker can seem to know what was important all along, which was formerly implicitly there, and bring that out in the open; and through iterations like this, a creative work builds up.
I also was interested in how Wollheim defines “expressive perception” on the basis of examples of how we pick up on emotions had by others, which gets extended into our picking up on emotional tones which can be expressed by paintings (perhaps more precisely as ways something would be represented if the person representing it, or the implicit spectator, had a certain mood or emotion). I really like Mitchell Green’s Self-Expression and think there are interesting connections here.
While obviously not every painting primarily expresses an emotion, it seems that the concept of emotion can open the door to a larger category. Emotion is always tied up with the significance something has for us in light of our interests and needs. Trivially, every painting expresses significance in this sense. Maybe paintings in particular express significance in special, profound ways, because they themselves are not the objects whose significance we’re sensing; rather, it’s the objects and events a painting represents whose significance is the center of our attention. The fact that these objects and events don’t exist, but are represented in a certain way by an artist, surely enables this significance to be distorted, exaggerated, or different from the significances of everyday real-life objects and events in some other sense. There are also good connections here to be had with Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe.
August 8, 2013
The most important discussion of the meaning of visual art I have ever read.
July 12, 2020
Loved this book - particularly the final lecture about the body in art.
February 2, 2023
C'était un jolie ouvrage sur l'art.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews