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interpretation ofwhat the act of painting meant to this artist, who (Wollheim
speculates) wished to bring about "the humanization of the father." Another
chapter offers an account of how certain paintings constitute metaphors of the
body as a container (a Kleinian notion). Wollheim seems to entertain two
competing senses ofcontainment, but does not recognize them as such: first, a
body or vessel can be a space in which an unspecified number of objects
might, as it were, float around; second, a body (like the human body) can be
"full" and of fixed mass and density. The first type of container corresponds
to some of the Renaissance pictures Wollheim discusses, and the second to
works by de Kooning.
Although the chapters devoted to interpretation are organized around
themes and critical concepts (such as pictorial metaphor), they read very
much like a first-person narrative, an account, as the author puts it at one
point, of "what I see, and feel, and think." The reader may even sense here
the working of imaginative, projective fantasies usually associated with the
writing of an autobiographical novel;
Painting as an Art
represents the
culmination ofa lifetime of fascinated musings over the meanings ofa number
of paintings that were objects ofthe author's own psychological investment
from an early age, especially works by Poussin. In his end-notes Wollheim
refers some of the more challenging of his musings to Freud and Melanie
Klein, yet certain of his associations can seem only more artistic than critical,
that is to say, they are creative, arbitrary, and personal. For instance, he
links Poussin's motif of snake and water to the weapons of "infantile sadism
... biting gums_or teeth, and burning urine." But the water in question,
seen in Poussin's
Winter,
suggests cold much more than "burning." The
reader is offered an interpretation that provokes but hardly convinces; it
comes from a writer who claims that direct inspection of a picture will
yield the artist's intentions, therefore the "meaning" of the work. There
is little for the reader to do but find the interpretation intuitively agree–
able or disagreeable. What Wollheim offers, finally, is observation
without theory, however much it has been prefaced by theory. And his
ambitious book ends up being entertaining but hardly instructive.
RICHARD SHIFF
