[Note to online readers: this is a rough draft of a chapter for a book currently called “Visual Worlds,” co-written by Erna Fiorentini and James Elkins. In 2016 it will be published as a textbook by Oxford University Press. The table of contents and several chapters are also online. These chapters are not finished: we are crowd sourcing the book and we’re open for suggestions. Please send all comments to James Elkins via Facebook or Academia.]

Chapter 22

Looking at an Oil Painting

We turn now from examples of looking at things not made by people (chapters 20 and 21) to examples of artifacts and artworks (chapters 22 to 25). The difference would be enormous if our subject were the objects seen: but our focus is seeing, so the difference between looking at a sunset and looking at an oil painting is a matter of language, convention, and history, and not of what is natural and what isn’t. On the other hand, the literature on how people have looked at oil paintings is extensive (even if it is not as vast as the less reflective literature on the paintings themselves), especially compared to the smaller literature on the colors of the sunset or the inside of the eye. In this chapter and the next two, we do not attempt to condense entire fields of study into 3,000 word summaries. Instead we propose, in each case, arguments that might orient readings of the more extensive literature.

The ways people have looked at paintings have been studied mainly in art history, but also in aesthetics, art criticism, conservation, market research, sociology, anthropology, and cognitive science. There are meditations on painting’s epistemology (Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art), its relation to writing (T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death), to language (Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin), to the body and philosophy (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation), and many more. Most major studies, including these examples, blend and rework disciplines, creating new forms of study and expanding the overall meaning of paintings and their capacity to function, in Western discourse, as exemplary art objects. Of all these approaches, we choose two problematics here, phenomenology and materialism, because they are arguably central to many current approaches to painting.

1. Phenomenology

In art history and art criticism, no account of our embodied responses to paintings is not indebted to phenomenology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s descriptive phenomenology of the 1940s, exemplified by the essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), is a sine qua non for much contemporary scholarship on painting. Even so, it is not routinely cited, because it seldom provides direct support for particular art historical or critical studies. Merleau-Ponty’s work involves words such as “sensation,” “experience,” “horizon,” “body,” “head,” “eye,” “touch,” and “perspective.” Art historical and art critical analyses tend to depend on more specific descriptions of individual works; this disparity opens a critical space for reflection on phenomenology’s limits. Here we concentrate on just one example, the non finito and Cézanne’s late paintings.

In Western art after the Renaissance, pictures were sometimes left unfinished intentionally, in order to create an expressive effect. These pictures, sometimes referred to as non finito, typically have gaps and less finished areas, so it is possible to imagine what the artist would have done in order to complete the work. With modern art the idea of the non finito became more complex. Cézanne is a puzzling example. Even now, after a century of study, it remains impossible to say what some of his late paintings would have looked like if he had decided to continue working on them.

Fig. [ ]. Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves, 1904-6. Basel, Kunstmuseum.

This is the way Cézanne left his painting called Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les

Lauves. Clearly he did not intend to make a traditional landscape painting of the sort that was common in his generation. But what, exactly, is missing? What would his next steps have been? He left the mountain strangely open on top, so it seems plausible that he made a decision not to continue painting its outline. But why stop in just that place? Is this the motif that Cézanne said he tried to grasp in landscapes? In Merleau-Ponty’s account, paintings like this simply “took on fullness and density,” “grew in structure and balance,” and “came to maturity all at once.” Merleau-Ponty quotes Cézanne saying he is looking for the “motif,” but it remains unclear, in Cézanne and in Merleau-Ponty, how the “motif” might be understood as visible form.

Fig. [ ]. Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves, 1904-6, detail. Basel,

Kunstmuseum.

The more you think about this problem, the more difficult it becomes. Cézanne was dissatisfied with some of his late works, and they are all in some sense experiments, a lack of finish is presumably not simply a matter of passages that are left unpainted. Because paintings like this were never conclusively finished, it is possible the non finito portions are actually the more detailed ones, so that they lack a lack of detail. It is possible to agree with Merleau-Ponty that Cézanne was accurate when he said “the landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness,” but that does not explain what happens in this painting: it explains what happens in any nonspecific painting of this type.

When it is no longer possible to distinguish what is complete from what is intentionally incomplete, the painter’s method also becomes unintelligible. A painting might be constructed from absence to presence, or erased from presence to absence. With words like those we return to Merleau-Ponty’s vocabulary: but the problem of the non-finito, and of exactly what Cézanne was doing in this painting, remain unresolved.

2. Materiality

Materialism is a recurring philosophic position that defends the primacy or existence of

the material world over thought; it has been found in the Greek philosopher Epicurus (subject of Marx’s PhD dissertation), and is often associated with the 17th century philosopher Pierre Gassendi (who also wrote on Epicurus). Materiality in art theory comes from Georges Bataille’s rejection of what he saw as the failed, insufficiently materialist conception of the surrealist André Breton. Bataille’s base materiality was an experiential reformulation that denied the dualism of mind and matter, so that there could be no “elevation of the spirit.” In art theory base materialism owes its importance mainly to the particular reading of Bataille proposed in Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’s exhibition and book Formless: A User’s Guide (1997).

In the 21st century the potentially nonsemantic, anti-historical, anti-conceptual notion of base materiality has been limited by two ways of thinking about painting that are ingrained in studio practice and in the institutional teaching of art: the ongoing interest in painting as expressive vehicle, and the disciplinary resistance to attention to material at the expense of meaning.

Fig. 1. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, detail. 1659. A. Painting as expressive medium

The reception of Rembrandt, both in scholarship and in popular writing, has to do with his psychological depth, his ability to capture personalities, conjure thought, and embody feeling. He worked in a mimetic tradition, and his skills at depiction served his interests in portraiture. He applied paint with the intention of expressing his sitter’s (or his own) inner states: their thoughts, their character, their spirituality.

From the perspective of materiality, that is an insufficient account. More is happening with paint in the Self-Portrait of 1659, for example, than is necessary for a naturalistic representation. In the usual understanding, the purpose of expressively applied paint is to communicate the sitter’s or the artist’s sensibility. In a materialist view, that is a reductive misunderstanding of how paint expresses, because in addition to expressing what is depicted, the paint is also expressive in itself.

Consider, in this light, what is happening in the paint in the Self-Portrait. The nose is greasy-looking and has a buttery spot of white. The skin is damp with perspiration, as if Rembrandt were painting himself in a hot room, and he slowly accumulated a slick sheen of sweat. As a painter works, the shanks of the brushes become repositories for dried paint, and flecks of that paint become dislodged and mix with fresh paint, rolling around on the canvas like sodden tumbleweeds. They are all over this face, forming little pimples or warts wherever they end up. There is a large one halfway up the nose. The surface texture is rougher than skin: in life, skin with this degree of relief would be scar tissue.

The paint also looks sticky, tacky, viscid like flypaper. On the nose the paint is semi–solid, as if the nose were smeared with phlegm or mucus. On the forehead, the paint looks curdled, like gelatin that is broken up with a spoon as it is about to set. There is drier paint around the eyes, and the bags under the eyes are inspissated hunks of paint, troweled over thin, greyish underpainting. The grey, which is left naked at the corner of the eye and in the folds between the bags, is the imprimatura (the underpainting) and the skin over it is heavy, thick, and clammy. The same technique served for the wings of the nose, where dribbles of paint come down to meet the nostril but stop short, leaving a gap where the grey shows through. Of course the nostril is not a hole, but a plug of Burnt Sienna with Lamp Black. Rembrandt’s thin moustache is painted with wiggles of buttery paint, almost like milk clinging to a real moustache. Over the eyes and eyelids there are thick strips of burned earth pigments—Lamp Black and Burnt Sienna—covering everything underneath. The tar spreads up and inward, and then falls into the hollows between the eyes and the nose in dense pools like duplicate pupils.

In this description, the paint is doing much more than it needs to in order to fulfill its mimetic purpose. It seems to represent itself: skin as paint or paint as skin, either way. This is a self-portrait of the painter, but it is also a self-portrait of paint.

In its hypostasis—its insistence on itself, its substance, as against its meaning—this reading of the painting is in line with Bataille’s formulation and Krauss and Bois’s reformulation: but it is also outside of historical meanings. Similar readings can be made of other painters; Gilles Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon, for example, is an extended meditation on the painter’s body (what Deleuze called, following Bacon, the “meat”), reimagined as paint, and always in danger of exceeding itself, pouring out into what Deleuze called the “circle” around the depicted body.

Fig. [ ]. Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1971.

In all these examples—the Rembrandt, Formless: A User’s Guide, and Deleuze’s study of

Bacon—awareness of the materiality of the painting is incompatible with the historical reception of the painting, in which any expressive value assigned to the paint is understood as a strategy to express the subject’s and the artist’s mind. B. Institutional resistance

Another limit to materiality in art history is exemplified by the book What is an image? (2011, from a conference in 2008), which records a discussion about the difference between image, picture, and painting, led by the philosopher Jacqueline Lichtenstein. As a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, Lichtenstein has a special interest in painting as a way to think about both pictures and images. In her seminar, scholars were invited to consider the materiality or physicality of oil painting. She cited detailed descriptions of paintings by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Denis Diderot, and Charles Baudelaire, emphasizing their interest in the sometimes illegible detail that paintings offer when they are seen from very close up. Lichtenstein’s argument was that if we consider the texts on painting produced by art history, very few are on properties specific to oil painting, such as textures, colors, and lines. More often, she argued, art historians are concerned with properties of pictures that don’t depend on their medium, so that the same points could often be made of prints, drawings, and other kinds of pictures. She pointed out that the long Western tradition known as ut pictura poesis, in which writers conjure images in prose and verse, had made it easier to write about images than pictures—and by implication, easier to write about pictures than paintings. Digital images, too, have made it easier to talk about images than pictures.

But how detailed can an historical account of a painting’s materiality be, without losing touch with historical meanings? That question is developed, implicitly, in T.J. Clark’s Sight of Death, which assays some nearly myopic readings of tiny passages in paintings by Poussin, such as this small strip in the background of Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm. The issue here is the strip of yellowish paint that serves as a foreshortened field in front of the distant figures: it is done largely in one continuous brushmark, Clark says.

Fig. [ ]. Poussin, Landscape with a Calm, and detail.

Clark’s book is subtitled An Experiment in Art Writing for several reasons, and in this

case it could be said that what is experimental is the long stretch of arguments and associations that are required to tie this strip of color back to Clark’s general reading, and to tie that meaning back into the reasons for looking at Poussin, and Poussin’s place in history and in the present. Those are not easy links to make. Extremely small passages like this one, or the detail of the Rembrandt Self-Portrait, exceed what writers like Huysmans or Baudelaire did, and those writers, in turn, exceed the current conventions of art history.

The fact that art historians do not generally pay close attention to painting’s materiality—either to the degree that Lichtenstein advocates, or the further detail that Clark has attempted—can be read as a fear of radical materiality. The “purely” or “merely” physical material is conceived as a subject that is somehow outside of historical interpretation, or even outside of rational and critical attention. It is assigned to making, to the realm of art production, and therefore it is set safely apart from historical, theoretical, and critical accounts. But these more concertedly materialist accounts show that historical and semantic meanings are not foreclosed by attention to materiality: they are simply slowed. It is harder to extract the historical and contextual expressive meaning from a painting when you are attending to its materiality. The writing becomes extremely difficult, but materiality, as Bataille knew, does not proscribe philosophy.

Text Box 1

Text Box 2

Questions and Projects

1. Pick a painting that is near where you live or work. (It does not have to be a masterpiece.) As you look, attend to how you stand, how hold your head and your hands, where you walk when you approach it, when you get tired, how long you look. Try to make a phenomenological account of the painting: how it appears to your eye and your body, and how that experience differs from seeing it in a book or onscreen. 2. Using the same painting, try to write an account of the painting’s materiality. Try to put into

words everything that makes it a painting: its apparent weight, the warp and weft of the canvas, how it has been stretched, whether it looks like it has layers, whether it has varnish. When the paint was fresh, was it buttery, sticky, or dry? When you have finished, consider the relation between your account and the reasons people may have bought, or valued, the painting. 3. Choose a famous painting, and find as many art historical accounts of it as you can. Look for moments when the writers register their bodily reactions to the painting, or speak of visiting it, or talk about how hard or easy it would have been to see in its original setting; look, too, for passages when the writers describe the painting’s materiality, the thickness of the paint. You will probably find very few such passages. 4. Continuing question 3: choose one text that you find especially good. Try writing some passages on the painting’s phenomenology or materiality (as in questions 1 and 2) in order to complement or critique the text. If possible, link your observations to things the historian says, so that you make a seamless transition from what the historian wrote to what you write. Is it possible to find something that the historian would have, or should have, included?

Further Reading Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, 1995, English translation 1999; Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 1987; T.J. Clark: The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, 2006; Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981, English translation 2005. Merleau-Ponty: “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Sense and Non-Sense, [ ]. Merleau-Ponty and art history: Art History versus Aesthetics, 2005. The nin finito: Creighton Gilbert, “What is Expressed in Michelangelo’s non finito,” Artibus et historiae, 2003, pp. 57–64; Paula Carabell, “Finito and non-finito in Titian’s Last Paintings,” Res, 1995, pp. 78-93. Breton and Bataille: Vincent Teixeira, Georges Bataille, La part de l’art (la peinture du non-savoir), 1997. Rembrandt painting: the description is from What Painting Is, 1999; Mieke Bal, Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, 1991. Deleuze on Bacon: Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis, 1999, chapter 1.