What is a Picture? What is a Picture? Depiction, Realism, Abstraction Michael Newall University of Kent, UK © Michael Newall 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–27655–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 Convention 9 2 Seeing and the Experience of Pictures 19 3 A Theory of Depiction 42 4 Resemblance 66 5 Transparency and Resemblance 95 6 Realism 114 7 Varieties of Realism 135 8 Abstraction 172 Notes 199 Index 229 v Figures 3.1 Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Fish, 2003 50 4.1 Occlusion shape 71 4.2 D rawing after Georges Seurat, Seated Nude: Study for Une Baignade, 1883, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 81 4.3 Doric column 84 4.4 Drawing after details of (from left to right) Still-Life with Eggs and Game (detail), from the House of Julia Felix, Pompeii, first century AD, Museo Nazionale, Naples; Still Life with Water-Fowl and Flask of Water (detail), from Herculaneum, first century AD, Naples Archaeological Museum; Bowls of Fruit and Amphora (detail), from the House of Julia Felix, Pompeii, first century AD, Museo Nazionale, Naples 88 4.5 Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Fish, 2003 91 5.1 Drawing after René Magritte, La Condition Humaine, 1934, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 96 5.2 Adam Friedrich Oeser, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, etching, 1755 99 7.1 Marginal distortions in a linear perspectival construction of a row of equally thick columns 143 7.2 Fragment of a wall decoration in stucco and paint from Boscoreale, overlaid with the ‘vanishing-axis’ schema, first century AD, Museo Nazionali, Naples 144 7.3 Drawing after wall painting from Boscoreale, first century AD, Metropolitan Museum, New York 145 7.4 Drawing after a detail of Jean Metzinger, Cubist Composition (Landscape), 1912, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 152 7.5 Drawing after Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, A Bowl of Plums, c. 1728, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC 156 7.6 D rawing after Georges Braque, The Round Table, 1929, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC 158 8.1 D rawing after Wassily Kandinsky, Black Relationship (Schwarze Beziehung), watercolour and ink on paper, 1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York 173 vi Figures vii 8.2 Irving Biederman, ‘Recoverable’ and ‘non-recoverable’ volumetric form 179 8.3 Cylinder and block with three-pronged vertices indicated 184 8.4 D rawing after Pablo Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), 1910, Museum of Modern Art, New York 186 8.5 Drawing after Pablo Picasso, The Guitar Player, 1910, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 187 8.6 Detail of Figure 8.5 with T vertex deleted 189 8.7 Transparency in planes and diffuse bodies 193 Acknowledgements Many people have helped me in writing this book, by commenting on parts of the text, and supporting its development in more practical ways. I am especially grateful to George Couvalis, Alan Lee, Richard Woodfield, Ted Cohen, Catharine Abell, Dominic Lopes, John Hyman, Jonathan Friday, Hans Maes, Jennifer McMahon, Luke Bowering, and an anonymous referee for Palgrave Macmillan. Each has given valuable advice at critical moments in the book’s development. Those flaws that remain are wholly my own. I am grateful to the University of Kent for allowing me a term of study leave to work on the manuscript in 2007, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, which funded another term of writing in 2008 through their Research Leave Scheme. The Nordic Artists Centre in Dale, Norway, and its then Director Elisabet Gunnarsdottir provided a wonderful environment in which to work during the summer of 2007, as did the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Australia for a few months in 2008. Parts of this book have appeared elsewhere, and I would like to thank the editors and publishers of these journals for permission to use these materials here. Chapter 2 incorporates ‘Pictorial Experience and Seeing’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 49, 2009, 129–141. Parts of Chapter 4 first appeared in ‘Pictures, Colour and Resemblance’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 56, 2006, 587–595, and ‘Pictorial Resemblance’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 68, 2010, 91–103. Chapter 5 is a revised ver- sion of ‘A Restriction for Pictures and Some Consequences for a Theory of Depiction’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61 (4), 2004, 181–194. I thank Akiyoshi Kitaoka and Irving Biederman for generously allow- ing me to use their images in this book. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has allowed me to reproduce Oeser’s etching from a slide of the frontispiece of its copy of Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, and I appreciate its enlightened and unu- sual policy regarding permissions. I am grateful for John Newall’s help with other images, especially Figure 4.4 which he drew. The other fig- ures are my own work, mostly drawn after existing artworks. viii Introduction 1. Depiction and seeing Although philosophers as diverse as Plato, Descartes and Peirce have remarked on it, depiction has only become the topic of sustained philo- sophical attention in its own right in the past few decades.1 This interest developed following the publication of art historian E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion in 1960.2 Gombrich’s ideas stimulated philosophers, notably Richard Wollheim and Nelson Goodman, who responded with distinc- tive views of their own.3 Since then there has been a stream of papers on the topic, and there is a growing collection of philosophical mono- graphs that take depiction as their subject. The relatively brief period over which this scholarship has developed and the substantial attention the topic is now receiving might inspire an optimistic thought: that the problems of depiction – of what a picture is and how depiction works – are ones that could be solved to (relatively speaking) general satisfaction in the not so distant future. In fact I do not think this is an unlikely prospect. There is nothing like a consensus yet – indeed there are many competing positions – but I believe developments in this direction have occurred. A new attempt to solve these problems, as I intend to present, will need to take these developments into account. Before identifying these advances, and sketching my own approach, it will help to define my objects of interest – pictures and depiction – and outline the major kinds of theory that have been developed to explain them. What, then, do I mean by ‘picture’? A picture is a kind of repre- sentation; that is, it arouses in the viewer the thought of some other, typically absent, item – the picture’s subject matter.4 Of course, many things besides pictures represent – words, sentences, maps, diagrams, codes, sculptures, insignia, and so on. Pictures, however, exhibit a 1