I recently finished reading Richard Wollheim's "Painting As An Art".

I found much of it stimulating in the close attention paid to particular pictures and thought provoking with regard to his theory of "seeing in" as the way to understand our perception of paintings.

On the other hand, his use of psychoanalytic theory left me with questions.

Surprisingly, his use of this theory reminded of some recent reading of mine in evolutionary psychology. Both Wollheim and the evolutionary psychologists stress the significance of a common human nature and are inclined to downplay the importance of systems of symbols or culture in general.

I do think that a substantive concept of human nature makes sense, and I am open to the possibility of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalytical theory contributing to an understanding of of human nature.

Altogether less agreeable to me is the tendency of these theories to smuggle in a social ontology in which culture is merely the creation of atomized individuals. One can believe in the evolved nature of the mind and allow for the possibility of certain kinds of psychic forces at work in the individual without denying the importance, still less the existence, of social facts. Thinking about languages as at once learned and used by individuals but also existing as entities external to those individuals is helpful here.

Image: The Construction of the Tower of Babel -- Folio xvii, The Bedford Book of Hours -- 1423 - 30 - The British Library.

#Wollheim #RichardWollheim #PaintingAsAnArt #EvolutionaryPsychology #Psychoanalysis #SocialOntology #Art #Philosophy #IlluminatedManuscript #BookOfHours #BedfordBBookOfHours #15thCenturyArt #TowerOfBabel

As I mentioned in a post I wrote a few minutes ago, Richard Wollheim's "Painting as an Art" has gripped me because it invites the reader to join the author in looking at pictures closely. His obituary mentions his own method as he applied it in galleries:

>> I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at. <<

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/nov/05/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries

Image: Richard Wollheim -- British Academy

#RichardWollheim #PaintingAsAnArt #PhilosophyOfArt #Aesthetics #ArtCriticism #Art #Philosophy

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Nicholas Poussin -- Rinaldo and Armida -- 1628/30 -- Dulwich Picture Gallery

>> The subject of the painting comes from the 1581 epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso (1544-95). The poem is set at the time of the First Crusade, at the end of the eleventh century, and follows the tale of fighting Christians and Saracens. In this scene, the Saracen sorceress Armida moves to kill the sleeping crusader Rinaldo. Just as she is about to strike, however, she falls in love with the Christian hero. << (Dulwich Picture Gallery)

I've been engrossed in Richard Wollheim's account of this picture in "Painting as an Art". I won't attempt here to summarize his argument, but will instead jump to his conclusion, "that for Poussin the victory of reason over concupiscence is achieved through reason borrowing the resources of concupiscence. For him the defeat of desire by reason is experienced as the victory of one kind of desire over another."

This understanding of the picture is close to my own approach to thinking about ethics and value, one that owes much to Hume's description of reason as a slave to the passions. Wollheim, however, does not present an argument about metaethics; instead, he invites us join with him at looking deeply into the picture and follow his argument about how we see a picture, how a knowledge of other pictures might help us better understand this one, and how the picture can be both informed by an understanding of psychology and also enrich that understanding.

Some of Wollheim's claims in "Painting as an Art" strike me as tenuously supported conjectures, but his attention to the paintings themselves always excites me. His writing makes me long to go back to the pictures themselves, this stimulus being a sign of good writing about art.

I've written about a closely related scene from Tasso before as represented by....

#Art #Painting #NicholasPoussin #FrenchArt #17thCenturyArt #RinaldoAndArmida #Tasso #GerusalemmeLiberata #RichardWollheim #PaintingAsAnArt

https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/collections/objects/32381#information

I was not familiar with this picture before seeing it mentioned earlier this evening in Richard Wollheim's "Painting As An Art".

Now I am eager both to see and learn more about it for a couple of reasons.

In the Wollheim, "Gypsy With A Cigarette" is dated to the early 1860s, the author noting this early period as one where Manet was not drawing attention to his painterly activity on the canvas.

The Princeton museum, as well as discarding "gypsy" in favour of "woman" in the title, dates the picture to the alte senties or early eighties. Looking closely at the picture online, i thought that Wollheim's description of the surface was not borne out: I was interested to read that there is uncertainty about whether the picture was in fact completed. I really would have to see the picture for myself to decide on the value of Wollheim's judgement.

I'm also fascinated by the cigarette. Even if the picture dates from 1880, this date is still about four decades before it became acceptable for French women to smoke in public.

My interest in the cigarette is not purely historical. I gave up smoking years ago and would encourage other to do likewise, yet I still feel entranced by the cigarette's modern elegance (Note to self: read Richard Klein's "Cigarettes Aer Sublime".)

As I look at the web image, I'm just delighted by it as a picture!

#Manet #WomanWithACigarette #Art #Painting #FraenchArt #19thCenturyArt #Smoking #Cigarettes #RichardWollheim #PaintingAsAnArt