EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Any great European artist in any period would have assumed that a borrowed form borrows meaning and that there is no difference between an idea for a painting and a composition of form. Plato’s word for form was idea.{ref2} Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century many experts believed that paintings by Edouard Manet, who was by far the most significant artist of the day, had no specific meaning. His compositions, they said, were just a variety of different colored forms and that the artist himself paid no more attention to painting a human head than he gave to the depiction of the same man’s shoes.{ref3} Just as materialist science had robbed the world of meaning, so art criticism repeated the pattern in art. The movement reached its peak in the theory of Clement Greenberg, a twentieth-century American critic, that painting should have no other meaning than the essence of its own medium: canvas, paint, flatness and frame.

Even before Foçillon, though, cultural historians trained in Germany and led by Erwin Panofsky had argued that the traditional symbolism of certain objects allowed artists to embed their images with meaning. Their prime example was how the circular shape of a straw firescreen behind the Virgin’s head in a painting now known to be by Robert Campin imitated the shape of a halo. It allowed the artist to portray the Virgin as an ordinary mother without the artificial baggage of an ancient symbol. Iconology, as the methodology is known, became popular though few examples were quite so visually intriguing as the firescreen and the halo. Many involved the changing meaning of an object over time rather than of one form being mistaken for another. Like other methodologies it succumbed to competing theories, also non-visual, that seemed to offer more promise.

A few art historians continued to focus on vision. In 1934 Foçillon restated St. Augustine’s argument from a millennium earlier that forms live in the artist’s mind.{ref4}  Forms, he argued in his book The Life of Forms in Art, are in constant change not only in the mind of the artist but as they are transmitted from one work of art to another. The metamorphosis that a form undergoes in the mind of a great artist, he declared, is unavailable to the unimaginative painter who cannot recognize the common element nor even effect the change. {ref5} If many painters cannot recognize the metamorphosis, it is not surprising then that most viewers have not been able to see them either. Indeed Foçillon’s own experience of such metamorphoses seems to have been somewhat limited because his concrete examples in art are relatively scarce. Once shown, however, the ability to see visual metamorphosis can be taught and, as in so many other talents, practice helps improve performance. (A word of warning: it is important that visual metamorphosis make sense within the work itself, the artist’s overall oeuvre and art history too. If not, the viewer can get carried away by his or her own imagination, not the artist’s.) Studying our examples, though, from a variety of periods by a variety of different artists will help strengthen your own neurons’ ability to recognize similar patterns supported by similar evidence elsewhere. Indeed the joy that comes with such recognition, fed by the neurons' release of dopamine, is as close as many will ever come to pure aesthetic satisfaction.

For a more detailed explanation, see the paper by Simon Abrahams, "How Forms in Art Work."