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PARTISAN REVIEW
to the interplay of the personal and the contextual, the willed and the
unavoidable, the physical and - for lack of a better word - the spiritual.
He is both passionate about his subjects and eminently reasonable.
In
Theory and Philosophy of Art,
we see him checking informed conjecture
against the verifiable, weighing probability against fact, and arriving at
highly personal, intuitive, yet convincing interpretations. Only one essay
in the collection, "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art:
Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs," (1969) seems less than individual, at
least in its beginning, a generic acknowledgment of the ideas of Derrida
and company: "My theme is the non-mimetic clements of the image- sign
and their role in constituting the sign."
The essay examines a fundamental element of image-making: the sup–
port - its nature, its expanse, its confines, its very texture. Schapiro re–
minds us that though we generally assume that a sheet of paper or a can–
vas is rectangular, clearly defined, and smooth, this is a relatively modern
convention that "corresponds to nothing in nature or mental imagery
where the phantoms of visual memory come up in a vague unbounded
void." He tracks the changing relation of image to field through time,
making provocative observations almost as asides, along the way. "The
new smoothness and closure," he says, "made possible the later trans–
parency of the picture plane without which the representation of three–
dimensional space would not have been successful."
The essay addresses orthodox semiotic questions of the effect of ori–
entation and "handedness" - right or left - on perception, as well as is–
sues of the relationship of image
to
edge: is the edge a defining bound–
ary or an interruption of a continuous expanse? But what really interests
Schapiro is how the nearly irreduceable ground and frame can change
from unavoidable necessities into active components that affect the
meaning and the expressive sense of other clements. This transformation,
when other aspects of the picture are freed from service to representa–
tion, seems to Schapiro to form the raw material of abstract art, or as he
puts it in correct semiotic-speak: "the far-reaching conversion of these
non-mimetic elements into positive representations (whose) functions in
representation in turn lead to new functions of expression and construc–
tive order in later non-mimetic art."
The tone and language are atypical. Is the essay simply a demonstra–
tion that a senior, established scholar can speak the mo t
au courant
of
academic languages? Perhaps. But the essay ends with a discussion of
Mondrian and Degas that abandons familiar semiotic locutions for the
fresh, trenchant synthesis that we expect of Schapiro. Discussing Mondri–
an's unpredictably proportioned rectangles and Degas's abruptly cropped
