Artful mind: Svetlana Alpers on Richard Wollheim

RICHARD WOLLHEIM, who died upon November 4, 2003, at the age of eighty, was individual of the leading philosophers writing upon art and on the mind in the twentieth hundred Art and Its Objects (1968 expanded 1980) upon Art and the Mind (1974) Painting as an Art (1987) The Thread of Life (1984) and upon the Emotions (1999) were among the compelling works he wrote. But listing titles hardly does justice to the man or to his work. Wollheim's friends were at a loss: by what means does one go on with one's be in possession of work when his sustaining passion for painting and his endles vitality in pursuit of it are gone? His life, like his writing, was a remarkable bid, not without its distress, to chase matters of the mind while acknowledging that individual is also at the pity of one's emotions.

Art and Its particulars in which Wollheim set forth his general aesthetic, is dazzling. Easy to read, it is difficult to take in. Addressing questions fundamental to the philosophy of art, Wollheim argues, among other things, that we posses an innate human capacity for representational seeing, which he famously called "seeing-in." We diocese an object in the paint that marks a surface rather than alternatively seeing marks or seeing an percept In looking at a painting, this primitive human ability (which likewise enables us to diocese say, figures in clouds) is constrained by the agency of the fact that what we are seeing is intended by the agency of an artist. If, as Wollheim argued, criticism is retrieval--that is, a reconstruction of the creative proces by the agency of means of which a given artwork came into being--it go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs that a retrieval of the artist's intentions, broadly speaking, would be a central ambition of the critic.

Wollheim realized philosophy could be forbidding in its "uncorrupt form." "Like paint"--there is amusement in the voice--"it requires that we find ourselves in it before it gives us anything." Those not finding themselves in philosophy may revolve to Painting as an Art, which grew without of his 1984 Mellon prelections (an honor normally reserved for art historians). Here he station out a system of contemplation about painting (the art for him) and went upon to example this in the viewing of works shut to his heart--by Bellini, Titian, Poussin, Ingres, Manet, Picasso, and de Kooning, among others. The more philosophical sections of the work entertain basic questions that are rarely in like manner boldly addressed. Wollheim considers in what way it is that the materials of painting can be transformed into a medium which can be manipulated with equal reason as to give rise to meaning. It is the internalizing of this possibility into the painter's activity and its repeated renewal above time that has made for the history of the art of painting.

Unlike the luminous exhibition reviews Wollheim wrote in his last years for the English art journal recent Painters, the critical writing in Painting as an Art is exceedingly complex--in part because it is used to tease without elements of a general combination of parts to form a whole Take, for example, the fine evocation of the mental state--momentary, preoccupied, troubled--of the subdues in Manet's single-figure compositions. Wollheim's account quiescences on positing an (invisible) internal spectator within the pictures whose character is, roughly put, to invest with a body a sense of the inaccessibility of the depicted figure. This internal spectator functions as a protagonist for the imagination ("central imagining") of the one and the other artist and viewer. The positing of the internal spectator, for me at least, does not work in pictorial limits Despite that, one remains persuaded by dint of Wollheim's characterization of Manet's paintings, as by means of the thought that painting can have meaning in exces of what "seeing-in" alone can account for.

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Wollheim had many art historians (and many artists) as friends. on the other hand he was out of sympathy with a great deal of art-historical writing of his time. He was whimsical about the matter: "Many art-historians, in their scholarly work, make do with a psychology that, if they tried to live their lives by the agency of it, would leave them at the extremity of an ordinary day without lover friends, or any insight into in what manner this had come about." He sustained an interest in traditional connoisseurship because of its potential (as at the same time unrealized) to offer a theory of the individual artist's turn of expression But he had no use for the distractions from art tendered by the new social history of art. And in a number of papers, he challenged the confusion between pictures and language in semiotic and structuralist theories, with special respect to its debilitating effect upon an account of pictorial meaning.

Wollheim, in move round was of little interest to art historians more engaged with institutions or ideologies or collection of lawss than with artists making art. And his unwavering confidence in a universal human nature (which must have been experimented when he came under enemy fire in World War II), informed by dint of psychoanalytic theory, was out of favor.

After retirement from University body London, in 1982, Wollheim taught at Columbia before taking up a position at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985 I became a friend of Richard's then. There was a captivating sociability about him--new restaurants to make experiment of new people he wanted single to meet. He preferred to do his writing upon a pad at a cafe table. The preface to single book thanks cafes in four cities.