The following is a selection of the books from which I have drawn while writing the foregoing text, and which I recommend to those wishing to explore the subject further. I include occasional details and asides that do not belong with the presentation of my argument in the previous six chapters. When a text is available in several equally available editions, I simply give the publisher and date of original publication, if known.
A very useful compilation when it comes to documents of modern art is the far-ranging and well-introduced three-volume series Art in Theory, published by Wiley-Blackwell and here abbreviated as AIT. Two volumes, Art in Theory 1648–1815 (AIT1) and Art in Theory 1815–1900 (AIT2), were edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger (2001, 1998): the third, Art in Theory 1900–2000 (AIT3), only by Harrison and Wood (2002).
1. IMAGES AND MARKS
Original and image The Second Commandment is given in Exodus 20, verse 4; the excerpts from the Wisdom of Solomon (in the Apocrypha, or non-canonical books of the Old Testament) are from chapter 13, verses 13–16, and chapter 15, verse 4. An interesting discussion of Jewish attitudes to images and idols can be found in Carlo Ginzberg, ‘Idols and Likenesses: Origen, Homilies on Exodus 13:3, and its Reception’, in John Onians (ed.), Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich (Phaidon, 1994).
The story of the Corinthian maid is given in Pliny’s Natural History, book 35, section 43. The contention that representation emerges from the desire for substitutes is made, in different ways, in two of the standard modern texts on the concept: Ernst Gombrich’s Meditations on a Hobby Horse (Phaidon, 1963; originally published as an essay, 1951) and Louis Marin’s Portrait of the King (1981: translation by M. Houle, Macmillan, 1988). To quote the latter, ‘What is re-presenting, if not presenting anew (in the modality of time) or in the place of (in the modality of space)? The prefix re- introduces into the term the value of substitution.’
The principles of sacred art are discussed in Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Ikon (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992). Plato writes against painters in The Republic, Book X; the reasons for his arguments against them are discussed in Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun (Clarendon Press, 1977). Aristotle writes about them rather more generously in the Poetics. It is worth noting that he does not consider mimesis to be the sum total of painting: a painting ‘may be admired for its colour, or for some other such reason’, he allows. The implication of Aristotle’s theory, that mimesis belongs with children’s play, was expanded into a general theory of the arts by Kendall L. Walton in Mimesis as Makebelieve (Harvard University Press, 1990).
The Byzantine Iconoclast controversy is described in Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei (Yale University Press, 1990). David C. Freedberg, in chapter 14 of his far-ranging, brilliant and passionate The Power of Images (University of Chicago Press, 1986), discusses iconoclasm in general.
The imitation of nature A very useful survey of classical, medieval and Renaissance ideas about imitation, giving original texts side by side with English translations, can be found in E. Tatarkiewicz’s three-volume History of Aesthetic Ideas (1927: translation, Continuum, 2005).
Shakespeare, in The Winter’s Tale (1611), meditates on art’s relation to nature. Perdita dislikes streaked flowers:
For I have heard it said
There is an art which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating nature.
Polixenes replies:
Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes…This is an art
Which does mend nature – change it rather – but
The art itself is nature. (IV, iv, 86–96)
A good book on the meanings of nature is Kate Soper’s What is Nature? (Wiley, 1995), particularly chapters 7 and 8.
Dürer’s remarks about dreamlike imagery are quoted in The Grotesque in Art and Literature by Wolfgang Kayser (translation, Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 22. Alongside Tatarkiewicz, a deeply learned and philosophically considered account of pre-modern thinking about painting is given in David Summers, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Erwin Panofsky’s Idea (University of South Carolina Press, 1968) is the standard account of this term in relation to art theory.
The 18th-century change in artistic theory is detailed in Tzvetan Todorov’s elegantly written Theories of the Symbol (1977: translation, Blackwell, 1982) and in Jean Clay’s sumptuously illustrated Romanticism (1980: translation, Phaidon, 1981). Both of these French academics tend to argue for the conceptual shift as a logical advance in theory, opening the way towards ‘modern art’. The historical value of their arguments, however, is sceptically appraised in Matthew Craske’s brilliant Art in Europe 1700–1830 (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Paintings and marks The growth of semiotics as a field of enquiry is described in Todorov’s book (see above): he cites St Augustine’s De musica as crucial to its intellectual articulation. Semiotics as a modern discipline was defined by the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce in his writings from 1866 onward: these are summarized in T. A. Goudge, The Thought of C. S. Peirce (University of Toronto Press, 1950). Peirce distinguished three types of sign:
the icon, which refers to something by resembling its apparent form; the index, which refers to something by pointing the attention towards it – typically, as being the cause of the sign; and the symbol, which refers to something purely because of an agreed relation, within a system such as language.
Many writers on art theory are fond of this classification, and expend much ink on distinguishing, for instance, the iconic qualities of a photograph (its likeness to the subject) from its indexical properties (its having been caused by the transmission of light). Peirce’s terminology is not used in this book, however, because it seems to me to propose three classes of entities, where it should be discriminating between three attitudes towards entities: this objection follows from the final section of my chapter 6. Other standard accounts of semiotics are given in Roland Barthes’s Elements of Semiology (translation: Cape, 1968) and Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics (Indiana University Press, 1976).
Plato’s Cratylus discusses language on the model of picturing throughout. The tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, like that of the Corinthian maid, is first given in Pliny’s Natural History, Book 35. On the growth of the ‘window picture’ and ‘artificial perspective’, see John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London, 1957).
Style and substitution The quotations from Thomas Hobbes are from Leviathan (1651), chapters 16 and 45. The territory of this section is explored by Craig Owens in a superb provocative essay, ‘Representation, Appropriation, Power’, in his book Beyond Recognition (University of California Press, 1987). Owens acknowledges the work in this field by Gombrich and Marin (see above).
Creation and contemplation The ‘anything = art’ conceit, most famously expounded by Marcel Duchamp in his signed urinal exhibited in 1917, is discussed by Arthur Danto in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981). Danto philosophizes elegantly and informatively but somewhat circuitously, since he seems to define art as whatever is fit for him to philosophize about. On the logic of the Mass, see Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (Dacre Press, 1945), chapter 9, ‘The Eucharist as Anamnesis’. The Chinese practice of treating stones as objects of aesthetic contemplation is discussed in John Hay, Boundaries in China (Reaktion, 1994). The idea of aesthetic contemplation itself is defined by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790).
2. SIGHT AND KNOWLEDGE
Portrayal and observation On infant recognition of faces, see R. L. Fantz’s paper ‘Pattern Discrimination and Selective Attention as Determinants of Perceptual Development from Birth’ (1966), in Perceptual Development in Children, edited by A. Kidd and J. L. Rivoire (Inti Universities Press, 1966). On the Makapansgat pebble, see Desmond Morris, The Human Animal (BBC Books, 1994). The whole theme of this section – the centrality of figures in visual representation, and the psychology of viewing them – is exhaustively explored in Freedberg’s The Power of Images (see above). A closely argued objection to the idea that ‘portrayal is a non-historical idea’ can be found in Norman Bryson’s brilliant, dense and challenging Vision and Painting (Yale University Press, 1986).
David Hume talks about tables in his Treatise of Human Nature (1738), II, iii; Jacques Lacan talks about desks in his essay ‘The Freudian Thing’ (1955: translation in Ecrits: A Selection, Routledge, 2001), section 8. The description of observation as having your cake and eating it echoes Friedrich Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics (written 1823–7): ‘Vision finds itself in a purely theoretical relationship with objects, through the intermediary of light, that immaterial matter which truly leaves objects their freedom, lighting and illuminating them without consuming them.’
Painting as model for knowledge Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting (1435) remains awesome in its boldness and clarity of conception; Leonardo da Vinci’s posthumously published Treatise on Painting (1651) expands on the same theoretical ground. James Elkins in The Poetics of Perspective (Cornell University Press, 1994) does his erudite best to downplay the cohesive force of Alberti’s ‘window’ image for painting in the Renaissance, though I would argue that then, as now, when people generalized about painting it was exactly this type of thinking that backed up its cultural status.
Optics, Painting and Photography by M. H. Pirenne (Cambridge, 1970) covers the ground of this section, as do Martin Kemp’s scrupulous and beautifully illustrated study of theory and practice between the 16th and 19th centuries, The Science of Art (Yale University Press, 1990), and Jonathan Crary’s Foucault-influenced Techniques of the Observer (MIT Press, 1990). The invention of photography and its impact are described in Aaron Scharf’s authoritative account Art and Photography (Thames & Hudson, 1968). David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge (Thames & Hudson, 2001) is expanded in his A History of Pictures (Thames & Hudson, 2016), written with Martin Gayford. On Alhazen and perspective, see Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad (Harvard University Press, 2011).
René Descartes’s ‘Dioptrics’ in his Discourse on Method (1637), John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), David Hume’s Treatise (see above) and George Berkeley’s A New Theory of Vision (1708) make better reading than most second-hand accounts of them; you may find the same of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781, revised 1787) or you may opt for Stephan Körner’s book Kant (Penguin, 1955). Joshua Reynolds is another theorist who speaks immediately from the pre-modern past, in his Discourses to the Royal Academy: I quote from the thirteenth Discourse, delivered in 1786. Fox Talbot’s remarks are from the volume with which he introduced photography to the Victorian public, The Pencil of Nature (1844).
Photography and Realism Max Buchon brought the term ‘Realism’ into a discussion of Courbet in an 1850 essay: see AIT2, p. 364. On the digital manipulation of photography, in a context of debates about representation, see W. J. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye (MIT Press, 1992). Romanticism and Realism is an illuminating collection of essays on 19th-century French painting by Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner (Faber, 1984). The ethos of Romanticism is also superbly discussed in Joseph Leo Koerner’s Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (Reaktion, 1994), one of the most enjoyable books I encountered in researching this text. The whole 19th-century artistic movement to which Courbet belonged is defined in Linda Nochlin’s Realism (Penguin, 1971).
Sensation Charles Baudelaire distances himself from Courbet in the Salon of 1859, available in selections of his criticism. Théophile Thoré’s Salon de 1844 has been reprinted by Kessinger Publishing (2010). John House’s Monet: Nature into Art (Guild, 1988) discusses the painter’s rationale. On ‘sensation’, Stéphane Mallarmé’s precept could equally be quoted: ‘To paint, not the thing, but the effect that it produces.’
Two demanding but rewarding essays treating the aspects of Cézanne that are relevant in this context are Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (University of Chicago Press, 1985) and John Elderfield, ‘Dreamscapes’, in Modern Painters, volume IX, no. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 60–65. The most eloquent essay on the painter remains Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘The Doubt of Cézanne’ (1945: translation in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, Northwestern University Press, 1994, edited by Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith). Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu (‘The Unknown Masterpiece’, 1832) can be found in many collections of his stories: I translate from a line that reads ‘Je ne vois là que des couleurs confusément amassées et contenues par une multitude des lignes bizarres qui forment une muraille de peinture.’
Realism since Cézanne For Cézanne’s impact on Picasso and Braque, see John Golding, Cubism (Faber, 1959; third edition, 1988) and John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, volume 2 (Jonathan Cape, 1996). The two paintings of Lahore come from W. G. Archer, The Paintings of the Sikhs (HMSO, 1966). The demotion of perspective is treated in Elkins’s The Poetics of Perspective (see above). Alice Neel’s comments on portraiture are given in Jeremy Lewison’s essay ‘Showing the Barbarity of Life: Alice Neel’s Grotesque’, in his Alice Neel: Painted Truths (Yale University Press, 2010). Bridget Riley writes about ‘surprise’ in ‘The Pleasures of Sight’, included in The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley: Collected Writings 1965–99 (Thames & Hudson, 1999, edited by Robert Kudielka).
The problems of late 20th-century ‘realism’ are touched on in Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press, 1987), which quotes the painter Janet Fish:
I do not consider that the appearance of the world has been established. Even though you and I may have each accepted particular conventions as a way to begin to approach seeing, analysis and reconstruction of appearances can only be a matter of imagination. To say one is a realist is a statement of approach and not a matter of fact.
Crane suggests that ‘a single painting is no longer sufficient to capture the multidimensional quality of contemporary reality in a meaningful way’. In 2016, shortly before the present edition of this book went to press, an important new volume appeared, discussing many of the themes treated in this section: Timothy Hyman’s The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the 20th Century (Thames & Hudson, 2016). Hyman’s thoughtful arguments differ from my own while overlapping with them. I recommend them to anyone interested in the topic.
3. FORM AND TIME
Form and bodies The drawing of the car was by a man named Cal, from Toronto, who had been totally blind since the age of two and had no recollection of ever seeing a picture. It is taken from John M. Kennedy’s fascinating Drawing and the Blind (Yale University Press, 1993). A good survey of the deep complexities of the concept of form, from a scientist’s point of view, is given by William R. Uttal in On Seeing Forms (Psychology Press, 1988).
Time and stories On the evolution of writing, see Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing (Cross River Press, 1992); also Roy Harris, who emphasizes that writing was from its basis an independent alternative to painting, rather than an outgrowth of it (The Origin of Writing, Bloomsbury Academic, 1986: new edition, 2013). The relation between painting and writing is explored with sharp sophistication by W. J. T. Mitchell in Iconology (University of Chicago Press, 1986).
History painting’s history The disciple who bears witness is St John in his Gospel, chapter 21, verse 24. Pope Gregory writes about church images in his Letters, 11.10. Horace’s formulation occurs in his Ars poetica (‘The art of poetry’, c. 19 bc). The affair of The Death of General Wolfe is recounted in A. U. Abrams’s book The Valiant Hero: Benjamin West and Grand-Style History Painting (Smithsonian Books, 1985).
Beauty and modernity Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon (1766) remains a fresh intellectual adventure after 250 years, worth reading in its entirety: see the edition with translation by Allen McCormick (Baltimore, 1984). Flaubert enthuses about the historical sense in a letter of 1 July 1860, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert (Farrar, Strauss & Young, 1953, edited by Francis Steegmuller). Delacroix depreciates it in his Journal for 1 September 1859, here translated by Walter Pach (1937). Courbet insists on representing the present epoch in a letter to younger painters dated 25 December 1861. On 19th-century attitudes to the theme of history in painting, see also Werner Hofmann, Art in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1968). The concept of art’s ‘timelessness’ is famously explored in John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819), or in the sonnet (1857) in which Baudelaire has Beauty state her case: ‘I hate all movement, displacing the lines…’. The translated excerpts from Baudelaire’s indispensable essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ can be found in AIT2, p. 493.
Modernist time Jules Laforgue’s interpretation of Impressionism is in AIT2, p. 937. What ‘modernity’ meant for painters in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries is the subject of Kirk Varnedoe’s stimulating A Fine Disregard (Thames & Hudson, 1990). Aaron Scharf’s Art and Photography (see above) is also relevant here. Henri Matisse’s 1908 ‘Notes of a Painter’ is included in AIT3, p. 72, but the translation given here is my own.
The amazingly fertile theorizing of Russian artists in the revolutionary period is collected and edited by John E. Bowlt in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde (Thames & Hudson, 1976), in which can be found the quotations from Osip Brik and Alexandr Rodchenko. Harold Rosenberg on ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952) and Allan Kaprow on ‘Happenings’ (1961) can be found in AIT3, on pp. 581 and 703.
Postmodernism and myth Narrative painting between the world wars is extensively discussed in Timothy Hyman, The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the 20th Century (see above). Theodor Adorno’s remark ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ appeared in his 1949 essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’. Anselm Kiefer’s words about mythology come from an interview given to The Times in 2007. The passage about Neo Rauch from Peter Schjeldahl – the pithiest and most pleasurable art critic writing in English in recent decades – can be found in Schjeldahl’s essay collection Let’s See (Thames & Hudson, 2008).
4. EXPRESSION
The meanings of expression The Chinese scripture named the Tao Te Ching, composed at least 2500 years ago, is available in many translations. No general remarks about painting, such as these aim to be, can possibly ignore Chinese traditions, but it is hard to avoid perfunctory simplifications when the main argument must be about Western traditions. G. Rowley’s Principles of Chinese Painting (second edition, Princeton University Press, 1959), James Cahill’s The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan (Harvard University Press, 1996) and John Hay’s ambitious poetic essay ‘Boundaries and Surfaces of Self and Desire in Yuan Painting’, in Boundaries in China (Reaktion, 1994, edited by John Hay) give interesting Western characterizations of Chinese theory and practice. On Kagaku, see T. Miyagawa, Modern Japanese Painting (Kodansha, 1968).
Alberti’s remarks on movements of the soul occur in Book II of On Painting. On Renaissance and academic theories of expression, see Ernst Gombrich, ‘Expression and Action’, in Symbolic Images (Phaidon, 1972). The text of Charles Le Brun’s 1668 ‘Conference on Expression’ is in AIT1, p. 131. French academic theory in the age of Charles Le Brun and Roger de Piles is the subject of Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s excellent The Eloquence of Color (University of California Press, 1994).
Markets and persons Friedrich Schlegel’s new frameworks for ‘Romantic’ thought are set out in ‘Critical Fragments’ (1797) and ‘Athenaeum Fragments’ (1800): see AIT2, pp. 899–909. Philipp Otto Runge writes about the expression of feeling in an 1802 letter, AIT2, p. 980. The quotation from John Ruskin is from his Modern Painters (1843), volume I, section 1, chapter 4. The theoretical turning from ‘painting/world’ to ‘painting/painter’ is accounted for in Tzvetan Todorov’s Theories of the Symbol (see above) and M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford University Press, 1953); for a contrast to these accounts, see Matthew Craske’s Art in Europe 1700–1830 (see above).
Colour There are many writers who have treated theories of colour in subtle detail (the remarks here are necessarily very broad-brush) – not only Martin Kemp’s The Science of Art (see above), but also John Gage’s Colour and Culture (Thames & Hudson, 1995) and many of the writings of Michael Baxandall. Ruskin writes about ‘flat colours’ in The Elements of Drawing (1857), Letter I, Exercise 1, note 1. Excerpts from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810) can be found in AIT2, p. 1080. Baudelaire’s thoughts on the subject are in his Salon of 1846: see AIT2, p. 259. The comment on paint tubes and Impressionism is reported in Jean Renoir’s memoir of his father, Renoir (Hachette, 1962), p. 77. The quotations here from Van Gogh are from letters written on 18 August and 16 October 1888: see Vincent van Gogh: The Letters (Thames & Hudson, 2009). Gauguin’s remarks to Sérusier, reported by Maurice Denis, were recorded in a 1906 publication, Gauguin, by Jean de Rotonchamp.
Mind and spirit The Novalis fragment of 1800, proposing that ‘the world must be romanticized’, forms an epigraph to Joseph Leo Koerner’s Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (see above), which expands upon it illuminatingly. The quotation from Joshua Reynolds is from the sixth Discourse to the Royal Academy, delivered in 1774; William Blake’s combative marginalia to the Discourses were written sometime around 1808. On Georgiana Houghton, see Tom Gibbons, ‘British Abstract Painting of the 1860s’, Modern Painters, volume I, no. 2 (1988), pp. 33–37. For a general view of this area of art history, see The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986).
The sublime is defined by Immanuel Kant (developing Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757) in the Critique of Judgment (1790). For extended discussion of this theme, go to the Tate website, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/the-contemporary-sublime-r1109224, accessed 19 January 2017, where a selection of essays gathered under the research project The Art of the Sublime includes my own ‘Contemporary Art and the Sublime’ (2012). Henry van de Velde’s handsome phrases come from an 1893 lecture collected in Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henri Dorra (University of California Press, 1995), p. 120.
Matisse talks about his ‘good armchair’ in the ‘Notes of a Painter’ (see above). Vasily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1913) and, still more, Paul Klee’s writings On Modern Art (1924) are central formulations of 20th-century painting doctrine to rank alongside Matisse’s. Both are excerpted in AIT3, pp. 86, 343 respectively.
Bodies An interesting insider’s survey of Surrealism is René Passeron’s Encyclopedia of Surrealism (1975: translation, Phaidon, 1978). An account of the increasing turn, from the 1920s onward, towards body-based values in painting is given in Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press, 1993). The intellectual shift towards ‘anti-ocularity’ is also treated in scrupulous detail by Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (University of California Press, 1993). One of the best discussions of Mark Rothko’s paintings I have read is Anna Chave’s Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction (Yale University Press, 1991): the quotations from Peter Selz and from Rothko himself (speaking in 1951) come via Chave. Merleau-Ponty’s eloquent essay ‘Eye and Mind’, from which I quote, can be found in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (see above).
Communication The issue of ‘humanism’ versus ‘anti-humanism’ is explored, along with many other themes in recent painting, in Morgan Falconer’s thoughtful and judicious survey, Painting beyond Pollock (Phaidon, 2015). My quotations from Julian Stallabrass’s sharply written High Art Lite (Verso, 1999) summarize the arguments he develops on pp. 55–59.
The casting of painters as shamans is argued for in Michael Tucker’s Dreaming with Open Eyes (Aquarian Press, 1992), an argument that chiefly applies, I think, insofar as painting is a matter of performance before an audience. It might be said that my own account of painting should have begun with cave art; I would reply that this is effectively only part of 20th-century art history. Awed and stirred by the continually expanding evidence of palaeolithic representation, we speculate indefinitely about the meanings it may have borne; but we have lost the context of discourse that would integrate the extant fragments into the shuttling of theory and practice I deal with here. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art (Cambridge University Press, 1998) by Paul G. Bahn is admirably level-headed, stressing the diversity of possible reasons for painting in preliterate societies and cautioning against presumptuous interpretations.
The predicament of all expression-based theories of painting, touched on here, had been formulated in the 14th century by the Chinese painter Ni Zan, in an inscription on a painting of bamboo for a patron called I-chung:
I-chung always likes my painted bamboo. I do bamboo merely to sketch the exceptional exhilaration in my breast, that’s all. Then how can I judge whether it is like something or not…Often when I have daubed and smeared a while, others seeing this take it to be hemp or rushes. Since I also cannot bring myself to argue that it is bamboo, then what of those who look? I simply don’t know what sort of thing I-chung is seeing.
(Quoted from Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih [1037–1101] to Tung Ch’i-ch’ang [1555–1636] [Harvard University Press, 1971] by John Hay in ‘Boundaries and Surfaces of Self and Desire in Yuan Painting’, see above.)
5. THE ARTS AND ART
Comparison and contemplation Alberti’s dedication to fellow Florentines comes in the Prologue to On Painting. Leonardo teases sculptors in Leonardo on Painting, (Yale University Press, 1989, edited by Martin Kemp, pp. 38–39). Baudelaire’s ‘Why Sculpture is Boring’ is part of his Salon of 1846: the excerpt is my translation. My understanding of the issues at stake in the 18th-century exaltation of ‘fine art’ draws on Larry Shiner’s illuminating The Invention of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Art as freedom The strand of thought that I describe as ‘freedom from’ is discussed with much sophistication in Joanna Drucker’s Theorizing Modernism (Columbia University Press, 1995). On Picasso’s interest in Manet and Baudelaire as he worked on the Demoiselles d’Avignon, read John Richardson’s Life of Picasso, volume 2 (see above). Braque’s thoughts about Cubism, first published in 1917, can be found in AIT3, p. 209. Duchamp’s quip about the USA is in ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, originally published in The Blind Man, New York, 1917 (AIT3, p. 248). Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger made their aesthetic propositions in Du cubisme (1912: excerpted in AIT3, p. 187).
The specific medium and the specific object The celebrated essays of Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenberg are excerpted in AIT3 (p. 512; pp. 529, 554). Pollock’s 1950 radio interview is transcribed in AIT3, p. 574. The young Frank Stella produced his soundbites in a 1964 interview quoted in Harold Rosenberg’s The De-Definition of Art (1972). Donald Judd’s aesthetics are explored in the volume Donald Judd (Tate Publishing, 2004), with essays by Nicholas Serota and others.
Fun The idea of ‘fun’ advanced here overlaps partly with some eminent theorists’ concepts, e.g. art as ‘play’, as discussed by Plato, Goethe and many others, and ‘carnivalesque’, the literary mode characterized by Mikhail Bakhtin and adapted by writers such as John Docker in his Postmodernism and Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Brian O’Doherty’s memorable essay Inside the White Cube (1976) was republished by the University of California Press in 2000. An incisive essay on the fate of painting as a cultural phenomenon is Peter Wollen’s ‘Into the Future: Tourism, Language and Art’ in his Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Verso, 1993).
6. REPRESENTATION
Levels of representation The quotation from Runge is from the letters cited above: AIT1, p. 979. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, published by Penguin in 1972, has never gone out of print. The book that made Foucault internationally famous, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; reissued translation, Vintage, 1994), starts with an arresting account of Las Meninas, viewing Velázquez’s masterpiece as ‘the representation of Classical representation’. All the writings of T. J. Clark – not only The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 1985) – are of the deepest interest to anyone wishing to understand how visual art and human history have interrelated. Another writer who brought political integrity to the theme of representation was Craig Owens: see the essays collected in Beyond Recognition (University of California Press, 1994).
The writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, in particular ‘On the Relation of Optics to Painting’ (1881), were highly influential in the late 19th century and remain exemplary in their clarity on perceptual problems; see Helmholtz on Perception (Wiley, 1968, edited by R. M. Warren). For Peirce, see the notes to chapter 1. Gottlob Frege’s important distinction is set out in the essay Sense and Reference (1892). Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures were collected after his death as Course in General Linguistics (1916). Jean-François Lyotard’s comment about post-Cézannian painting comes in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford University Press, 1992). Roland Barthes coined the phrase l’effet de réel in a 1968 essay of that name.
‘Theory’ Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy was first published, posthumously, as Philosophical Investigations (1953). Jacques Lacan’s tortuous thoughts can be found in Ecrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (Routledge, 2001); Madan Sarup’s Jacques Lacan (New York, 1992) offers a pleasantly written introduction to the thinker. Also see the symposium Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster (New Press, 1998). Of Grammatology (1967: translation, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) is the easiest of Jacques Derrida’s texts to read; unfortunately in this context, Derrida’s The Truth in Painting (1978: translation, University of Chicago Press, 1987) turns out to be a convoluted tease on the hopes opened up by its title, finally affirming nothing about the art. See also Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, edited by P. Brunette and D. Wills (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Gerhard Richter’s thoughts are collected in The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1961–2007 (D.A.P., 2009). ‘You see, all art has now become...’ is from David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson, 1980). The source for the ludicrous course prospectus from which I quote was a London college which shall remain nameless. Two distinguished texts in this field of enquiry, however, were Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting (Yale University Press, 1983) and Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 1985). The host of commentaries relating to the ‘Sokal affair’ are listed on Professor Sokal’s web page, www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/ (accessed 16 January 2017). Semir Zeki gave neuroaesthetics a public profile with Inner Visions (Oxford University Press, 1999). A characteristic selection of the theory-allusive picture-making of the 1980s is the exhibition catalogue A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation (MIT Press, 1989).
‘The death of painting’ Rodchenko recorded his 1921 obsequies on painting in a 1939 manuscript, ‘Working with Mayakovsky’. Douglas Crimp published his essay ‘The End of Painting’ in the journal October in 1981. Ad Reinhardt’s intransigence is represented in Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (University of California Press, 1992). Robert Morris talked about ‘tedious object production’ in a 1969 text: see AIT3, p. 868. For Sherrie Levine’s 1982 ‘Statement’, see AIT3, p. 1066.
The Jean Baudrillard Reader (Columbia University Press, 2008, edited by Steve Redhead) provides a useful introduction to this lively provocateur. Craig Owens’s comments on Neo-expressionism are in ‘The Discourse of Others’ (1983), an essay collected in Beyond Recognition (see above). Laura Mulvey’s influential article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ was published in 1975: see AIT3, p. 963.
Lane Relyea offered thoughts on the triumph of ‘discourse’ in the art world to a 2003 discussion hosted by Artforum magazine: https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=200304&id=4507, accessed 16 January 2017. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about ‘universal untruth’ in The Gay Science (1882), section 107.