On Formalism and pictorial organization

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 59, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 127-137

  Wollheim, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049274585     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0021-8529.00013     Document Type: Review

References (13)

1. Roger Fry, Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), pp. 15-16
2. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), particularly pp. 55-91 and 289-306
3. For a discussion of "seeing-in," see Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), Supplementary Essay IV
4. and Painting as an Art: The Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Princeton University Press, 1987, and London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), Lecture 11
5. The only Formalist critic whom I know of who is prepared to concede that, in most cases, the representational content of a painting has to be taken into account if we are to extract the form of a painting is Clive Bell. See Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1914)
6. This point is prominent in the argument of E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: The Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (London: Phaidon Press, 1960)
7. For a vigorous and cogent attack upon the feasibility of applying the concept of syntax to painting, see Flint Schier, Deeper Into Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chap. 4
8. Yve-Alain Bois, "The Semiology of Cubism," in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 169-221 (with discussion and notes)
9. See also Yve-Alain Bois, "Kahnweiler's Lesson," reprinted in Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (MIT Press, 1990), particularly pp. 82-94
10. Rosalind Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," in Picasso and Braque, pp. 261-305 (with discussion and notes)
11. The diacritical view is also to be found in, e.g., Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press, 1993), p. 151
12. Rosalind Krauss, "In the Name of Picasso," in Art in Modern Culture, ed. Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 210-221
13. This essay is an adapted version of On Formalism and Its Kinds, a lecture delivered at the Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona on September 29, 1994, and published in a bilingual edition, English and Catalan, by the Fundacio Antoni Tapies. I should like once again to express my thanks to all those in Barcelona connected with the lecture and its publication, as well as to Philip Alperson, for their interest and encouragement. The original text of the lecture was read to the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Montréal, November, 1996, with responses by Norman Batkin and Whitney Davis