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Depiction and Painting
A Theory and History of Art
1950 – 2000
Gerry Bell
© Gerry Bell 2008

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Content
Part One – Theory
Content 3
Introduction 4
Detailed Table of Contents for Part One 7-8
1. The Problem with Pictures 9
2. Depiction Revised 23
3. Depiction Pursued: Five Issues 31
4. Expression and Style 45
5. Depiction and Art 55
6. Art History 64
7. Interpretation 72
8. Realisms 79
9. Painting 89
10. Summary 104
Part Two – History
Detailed Table of Contents for Part Two 109-111
11. Modernism and Abstraction 112
12. Modernism 1912-1950: ‘Simultaneous and Successive Depiction’ 126
13. Late Modernism 1950-1960: ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ 138
14. Post-Modernism and Pop Art: Painting Printing 1960-1970 150
15. Post- Modernism Continued: Painting Photography 1962-1978 164
16. The End of Post-Modernism: ‘Bad’ Painting, Neo-Expressionism and New
Image Painting. 176
17. Abstraction in Late and Post-Modernism 189
18. ‘Expanded Materials’ in Late and Post-Modernism 204
19. Globalism 1985-2000 223
20. Conclusion 249
Bibliography 259-305

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Introduction
The scope and method to this study are unusually broad. Scope extends from a
review of theories of depiction, in art history, aesthetics, psychology and descriptive
geometry, to related issues of style, expression, interpretation and painting, to their
application in art criticism.
The aim is firstly to provide an adequate theory of depiction, one that holds for the
full range of examples, then to demonstrate how the theory may overcome certain
stylistic problems for the study of recent art. There is a danger obviously in
stretching research too thinly, in providing only a superficial account of this range
and confusing some traditional boundaries. This is set against the prospect of a
more effective integration, a greater understanding of depiction and a more
consistent and discriminating view of recent art history.
The study thus proceeds by careful and extensive reference, allows that the reader’s
expertise may not extend equally to all areas visited, explains basic principles on
many, perhaps obvious points. It takes time to traverse the full breadth of topic,
may seem unduly pedestrian on certain points. Indeed, theoretical issues may tax the
reader anxious to embark upon simply a novel art history. The study falls readily
enough into two parts, theory and history, but history cannot be read with profit
before theory, nor theory fully appreciated without its application to history. The
theoretical issues prompt a series of bold departures, although implications for
history may not always be obvious. But assuredly, all are needed to build a theory of
any strength or conviction, and the problems to be addressed require just this of
theory. There is no point advocating a theory of lesser scope, no point reviewing art
history supported by anything less.
The problems for recent art history concern firstly the concept of abstraction in
depiction and its relation to competing and more concrete styles. Mistakes over the
distinction between the picture plane and picture surface, about varieties of picture
plane or schemes of projection and perspective and the role of painting in depiction

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are carried through to problems with stylistics. The period of Modernism inflates to
unmanageable proportions and then makes problems for the extent of Post-
Modernism. While the study shares an interest in these periods with a great deal of
recent scholarship, it is distinctive in this concentration upon stylistics.
Method of research is conspicuous where art history is more fully engaged.
Research here regroups established works according to stylistic features derived
from the theory of depiction. Method makes for new styles rather than the more
usual elaboration on source for a given style. New styles are rarely offered as
replacements for established ones, but rather as additional categories that ease and
integrate the system of styles within and around the periods of Modernism and
Post-Modernism.
Modernism and Post-Modernism are revised in duration and constitution. However,
where new sub-styles are introduced and names coined, such as ‘Overstyle’ and
‘Rerealism’, they are placed in inverted commas throughout the text, acknowledging
novelty. This also applies to terms introduced for special techniques or features
such as ‘layout’, ‘traction’, ‘interruption’ and ‘readily-made’. Following this emphasis
upon stylistics, analysis of individual works here is primarily concerned with
identifying salient features and demonstrating how they work or refer, rather than
interpreting the fuller ramifications of source. In cases where a substantial body of
interpretation exists for a given work or artist’s style, standard publications are
acknowledged in footnote, along with key agreements or disputes. Because of the
amount of ground covered, descriptions are necessarily brief. Hopefully, rigour and
clarity avoid any impression of flippancy.
Scope and method are thus granted latitude only to address vital issues and afford
necessary revision. The work of Nelson Goodman proves an underestimated
resource in this. Adopting and adapting his aesthetic for this purpose makes the
study a very rare foray indeed. Where the study succeeds, a good many aspects are
to be credited to his work, at least by the good mannered reader. And success is to
be measured in both a more adequate theory of depiction and a more complete and
coherent history for recent art. This is the test the study sets itself, that sanctions
departures in scope and method and that the patient reader is finally asked to apply.

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To note particulars of presentation, the study falls into twenty chapters and two
parts. Chapters One to Ten are devoted to theory, Eleven to Twenty to history. A
table for each part details the progression of chapters, relevant reading, artists and
styles (see navigation bar). The many illustrations accompanying the text are
provided by links in the PDF files or from a list on the illustrations page. This
enables the illustrations to be found on-line, even as the relevant text hurries from
any point on a page where an illustration might usefully be inserted. It also allows
the text to use many more and often larger illustrations than might practically be
inserted, many more than might be afforded in permission and copyright
clearance. It is unfortunate that the illustrations cannot accompany the reader who
wishes to read a printed copy, or off-line, but the reader is free to copy or print the
illustrations. Hopefully this arrangement is not too inconvenient.

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Part One
THEORY
Chapter Title Description
1
Page
9
The Problem
with Pictures
Brief history of competing
theories of depiction, their
application in art history and
aesthetics, from Gombrich to
the late nineties.
Main
Reference
E.H. Gombrich, Nelson
Goodman, Richard
Wollheim, Roland Barthes,
Umberto Eco, Norman
Bryson, W.J.T. Mitchell,
Erwin Panofsky, Rosalind
Krauss, James Elkins,
Julian Bell.
2
Page
23
Depiction
Revised
A closer look at Nelson
Goodman’s theory of
reference, a revision
proposed.
Goodman, Gombrich,
Mitchell
3
Page
31
Depiction
Pursued
Applies new theory to five
key issues for depiction –
depth, distortion, caricature,
fiction and found or natural
images
John Willats, J. J. Gibson,
Goodman, Gombrich,
David Marr et al, John M.
Kennedy, Wollheim,
Stephanie Ross
4
Page
45
Expression
and Style
Reconciles the new theory of
depiction with Goodman’s
views of expression as
metaphor, together with its
relation to classification of
style, or stylistics.
Goodman Wollheim,
Gombrich, John Constable,
Monroe Beardsley, W.K.
Wimsatt, Arthur Danto,
5
Page
55
Depiction and
Art
The problem of beauty or
excellence in depiction and
art. Combining the proposed
theory with Goodman’s view
of cognitive effectiveness.
Goodman, Catherine Z.
Elgin, Gombrich,
Wollheim, George A.
Kelly.
6
Page
64
Art History
The problem in Gombrich’s
historical approach to (and
definition of) art, in
particular concerning the
twentieth century.
Gombrich, Goodman, Bell,
David Carrier.

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Page
72
Interpretation
The problem of interpretation
underpinning an historical
definition of art. Radical
relativist approaches to
interpretation (and history).
An irrealist method to history
outlined.
Gombrich, Martin
Heidegger, Jurgen
Habermas, Joseph
Margolis, E.D. Hirsch,
Peter Caws, Claude Levi-
Strauss, Jacques Derrida,
Jean Baudrillard, Jean-
Francois Lyotard, Michel
Foucault, Hans Gadamer,
James F. Harris, Harvey
Siegel, Goodman
8
Page
79
Realisms
A pluralistic view of stylistic
realism, or realisms,
demonstrated by analysis of
the work of Pollock.
Gombrich, Goodman,
Elgin, Mitchell, Jackson
Pollock, Claude Cernuschi,
Irving Sandler,
9
Page
89
Painting
A pluralist view of painting.
The crucial difference now
between the work of sole and
multiple instances in
depiction and art. Then looks
at formalist criticism based
upon theories of painting, for
the formulation of
Modernism, as a period style.
Goodman, Wollheim,
Walter Benjamin, Bell,
Clement Greenberg,
Immanuel Kant, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Michael
Fried, Thierry de Duve,
William Rubin, Frank
Stella, Donald Judd.
10
Page
104
Summary
The contribution made to
theory here, its place within
Goodman’s larger aesthetic,
or irrealism.

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The Problem with Pictures
The problem with pictures is in how we make sense of them, how we recognise
them and the kinds of meanings found there. There are a number of conflicting
explanations and disagreements are longstanding, widespread and deep-seated.
Explanations quickly appeal to fundamental ideas about our understanding of the
world, its organisation and customs. In particular, pictures are bound up with the
concept of art, its history and criticism, and to pursue an understanding of these, we
must take a position on pictures. In art history the explanation of pictures is sought
in terms of their tradition and influence. Tradition is variously described in terms of
a context, as the history of a culture, or in terms of a concept, as the history of
depiction or pictorial properties. Neither extreme is tenable. To explain everything
in terms of context, is to drain the concept of a picture of all meaning, to result in
all history and no art, while to explain everything in terms of the concept of a
picture, is to drain its context of meaning, and result in all art and no history. So the
problem lies in deciding how much is internal to a picture, usually termed its formal
or technical properties, and how much is external, the influence of time and place.
In recent times discussion generally takes as its starting point the work of E. H.
Gombrich. By tracing a number of influential reactions to his work, we can
appreciate firstly how the problem is compounded, how disagreements over the
nature of pictures add to disagreements over art and its history, and secondly how
the problem persists, how even as recent efforts enlist other disciplines to explain
pictures and art, these versions no longer describe the same objects of earlier study.
In truth, they are no longer versions that resolve the problem with pictures, but
rather new problems that urge their substitution. Gombrich’s contribution extends
from the very popular introductory history, The Story of Art, to detailed studies in the
psychology of visual perception and the development of pictorial style, advanced

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initially in Art and Illusion, and later in The Image And the Eye. 1 Taken together, they
present a view of art as the advance of pictorial sophistication, through experiments
with novel applications and techniques, towards a mode that more fully matches the
experience of visual perception. This emphasis upon matching a picture to the
experience of looking at an object, led many readers to assume that Gombrich took
pictures to be in essence illusions; that delude the viewer in some way into believing
in the presence of the object, rather than just a picture of the object. Indeed the
very title of Art and Illusion hints at such a stance. It is an over-simplification to be
sure, but points to a real and unwelcome consequence in appealing to principles of
visual perception. It also obscures the view of art that accompanies this view of
pictures.
The Story of Art famously opens with the axiom ‘There really is no such thing as Art.
There are only artists.’ From this, Gombrich argues that the concept or definition of
art covers all objects so classified only retrospectively, that the concept properly can
only be understood as an historical sequence or chain, each link continually revising
the concept. It is, above all, a powerful argument for the history of art. But if art is
simply the history of artists, it begs the question how the activity of artists is to be
described? For Gombrich the activity is simply the advance of representation.
Representation need not be narrowly understood as pictorial representation of
course, but the focus of Gombrich’s history is upon the plastic arts, and gives pride
of place to depiction and painting. This commitment to an advance in depiction
introduces a second feature of his view of the history of art. It is the idea that
developments in pictures are progressive and absolute, have a history beyond any
one culture or version of art. The development of the western pictorial tradition is
seen as discoveries concerning the nature of visual perception, confirmed by optics
and geometry. Pictures using systems of perspective for example, are seen as
coming closer to showing an object the way we ‘naturally’, or ‘really’ see it.
For the moment it is enough to see how Gombrich’s view of depiction relates to his
view of art history. But it is with Art and Illusion and its more substantive arguments
for the development of pictures that a critical dialogue arises. Reactions to his view
1
Gombrich, The Story of Art, (16 th ed) Oxford/London, 1995, Gombrich, Art And Illusion,
Oxford, 1960, Gombrich, The Image and the Eye, Oxford/New York, 1982.

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of pictures, did not initially pursue its relation to art, but concerned themselves
rather with the explanation of pictures as illusions. Two of the most searching
critiques arose in the work of the philosophers Nelson Goodman and Richard
Wollheim. 2 Both rejected the behaviouristic view of perception, and the naturalism
it derives from principles of optics, both rejected the idea of an illusion, fostered by
marks upon a surface, as a picture. But they did so for different reasons.
Wollheim pointed to the inconsistency in Gombrich’s view of perception. On the
one hand Gombrich asserts that seeing is bound up with knowing, that all
perception is interpretation, but on the other, that it is nevertheless possible to
depict according to what we ‘really see’. 3 Yet to claim that there is some particular
thing that we really see is precisely to distinguish between what is really there, and
how it is interpreted. Wollheim also took issue with the view that perception
operates according to a process of schema and correction. Initial schemas in
perception cannot be corrected as a pictorial schema is corrected, by comparing it
with an equivalent perception in real life. An initial perception can only be refuted
or verified by subsequent perceptions. This crucial difference between plain
perception and pictures weakens the argument for an underlying process of schema
and correction. Wollheim’s objections to the idea of pictures as illusions centre on
Gombrich’s discussion of the famous rabbit/duck ambiguous drawing. 4 He argued
that the drawing presented two distinct interpretations, a surface and an image,
which Gombrich mistakes for being mutually exclusive. For Wollheim, the
interpretations are compatible yet distinct, to see the rabbit or the duck, is not to
deny that they are a certain configuration of ink on paper, or a surface. The matter
of an illusion arises only in the exceptional circumstances of a trompe l’oeil picture,
usually a mural integrated within an architectural setting, which cannot be detected
from certain angles.
Goodman’s response was more sweeping, and came as part of his own theory in
Languages of Art. He began by rejecting not only the idea of illusion in pictures, but
2 Goodman, Languages of Art (2 nd ed) Indianapolis, 1976. The second edition is used throughout,
here. Richard Wollheim, On Art and the Mind, London, 1973, pp. 261-284.
3 Gombrich, 1960, p. 278.
4 Ibid.4. Versions of this drawing have a long history in discussions on visual perception, both in
the experiments of perceptual psychologists, such as Norma V. Scheidemann, Experiments in
General Psychology, Chicago, 1939, p. 67, fig 21, and in the work of philosophers such as
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 1953, p.194.

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of any likeness or resemblance as the means by which a picture represents an object.
He advanced two powerful arguments to this end. Firstly not all resemblances are
representations: two apples may resemble one another but do not therefore
represent one another. Resemblance is a two-way or symmetrical relation: each
apple equally resembles the other. Representation, on the other hand, is a one-way
or asymmetrical relation, a picture represents an apple, but an apple does not
represent a picture of one. Secondly, not all pictures are resemblances. A picture of
a fictional beast such as a unicorn does not resemble anything, literally. At best it
complies with preceding descriptions or pictures. Moreover, pictures resemble other
pictures as much if not more than they resemble any of their objects, yet usually
represent objects not other pictures. Goodman declared that pictures represent or
refer, not because they resemble but because they denote, are properly a mode of
notation. But while he rejected resemblance as necessary or sufficient condition for
depiction he allowed that it arises between picture and object as a result of custom
or familiarity. He thus allowed for realism and illusion, but insisted they are relative
to notation, context and custom. While Goodman also found much to commend in
the relativism of Gombrich’s account of schema and correction, he pointedly
rejected the idea that the rules of perspective are faithfully derived from the laws of
optics, and provided a set of damaging counter-examples, succinctly concluding:
‘Briefly, the behaviour of light sanctions neither our usual nor any other way of
rendering space; and perspective provides no absolute or independent standard of
fidelity’. 5
A measure of the impact of Goodman’s arguments is found in Gombrich’s
subsequent book, The Image and the Eye. Here Gombrich abandoned arguments for
perspective derived from the geometry of light, and proposed more modestly, an
‘eyewitness principle’. 6 But Goodman also pointed to a more disturbing relativism
in schema and correction or making and matching. Gombrich’s position was that
what we match or use pictures for, depends on what we make, but the process is in
the long run an accumulative one, so that by matching one thing and then another,
bit by bit we make the picture perfect match, an illusion. The prospect to which
Goodman pointed is that while different matches depend on different makes,
5 Goodman, Languages of Art, Indianapolis, 1976, pp. 16-19.
6 Gombrich, 1982, p. 281.

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different pictures of an object then have a way of turning into pictures of different
objects. 7 The matches never quite add up, the makes are never just re-makes.
In the essay Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation
Gombrich sought to defend the view of naturalism in pictures and to reconcile it
with the need for conventions. 8 It takes pictorial rules or conventions as versions of
perception, hence versions of illusion, versions of an object. It was notable also for
inclusion of a response from Goodman, who managed to seek common ground
while insisting that the distinction between nature and convention was also relative.
Gombrich appealed to a behaviouristic view of image recognition amongst animals
and insects, and to its instinctual basis. ‘We are programmed to be more easily
triggered by some configurations than by others.’ 9 The argument can establish
resemblance as a necessary and ‘natural’ relation for substitution, but not
representation. Birds and fish may be deceived by a representation, but it does not
therefore function as a representation or reference. Distinction between
resemblance, substitution and reference may be elastic, or graded, as Gombrich
argued in ‘Pygmalion’s Power’ in Art and Illusion, but if the distinction between
nature and convention is relative, as Goodman declared and Gombrich conceded,
then reference still remains less natural, or more conventional. The lack of birds and
fish enrolling in art classes might cinch this point. So there was no comfort there
for Gombrich, no strict accuracy in labelling of Goodman as a conventionalist.
But while the case for pictures as an illusion cannot co-opt representation to
resemblance, cannot draw support from the geometry of light, nor a biological
disposition to perspective, and finally cannot resist conventions, the case for
pictures as denotation, also has problems. Goodman’s ideas for a depictive notation
stretch the concepts of syntax and semantics into dense analogues, in order to
explain why pictures can acquire resemblance, while notations such as writing
cannot. In fact the combined dense analogues do little more than dissolve the
concept of notation. 10 A further requirement for relative repleteness of syntax
7 See treatment of invention, fiction and representation-as in Goodman, 1976, pp. 21-34
8 Gombrich, 1982, pp. 279 - 297
9 Ibid. pp. 285-6
10 There is acknowledgement that such density is the antithesis of notation. See Goodman, 1976,
p.160. Goodman divides reference into denotation and exemplification with denotation then
divided into description and depiction. Descriptive notation includes writing, mathematical and

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assumes elements of one scheme of depiction may be always included within
another, so that for example what is depicted in a simple line diagram, such as a
floor plan, may be more fully depicted with the inclusion of tone or shading, colour
and perspective. 11 But aspects of line cannot always be accommodated with aspects
of tone without altering their constituent character, in fact shifting emphasis where
line coincides with shade or contrasts with light, just as tone cannot be
accommodated with all colours without losing key integrities of grey, and the same
holds for volume, scale, projection and perspective. Thus the concept of repleteness
of depictive syntax and of pictures as a mode of denotation - but without a notation
- also proves something of a stumbling block.
Similarly, analysis of pictures in terms borrowed from structural linguistics, or as
semiotics, struggle to detect the requisite syntax. The initial studies of Roland
Barthes and Umberto Eco for example, although hardly responding to Gombrich,
ultimately rely upon an ‘iconic’ or resemblance relation; cannot reconcile it anymore
effectively with reference nor adequately distinguish or explain ‘plastic’ qualities to
depictive meaning. 12 Strictly, semiotics extends only iconographic and iconological
analysis here. Following controversies between schools argue for various ranges of
depiction as the proper domain of study and against the narrowness of mere
linguistic transcription of depictive meaning, but do not otherwise advance the
problem. 13 Later developments, grouped as post-structuralism, tend to reject a
unitary code to semiotics and a fixed ideology supporting objects. Such approaches
gradually disengage from the problem with pictures and its application to art
history; in fact prefer to straddle disciplines, generally in the cause of social or
cultural analysis. However, in the late seventies and early eighties a number of
musical systems, slides toward depiction with analogue scales and dance notation for instance.
Analogue density of syntax and semantics no more than collapses notation, may perhaps organise
notations usefully, as in James Elkins, The Domain of Images, Ithaca/London, 1999, but can only
say in ways depiction is not notation (and therefore denotation).
11 The example of a floor plan is not used by Goodman, but is consistent with the argument for
repleteness. See Goodman, 1976, p.230.
12 See Barthes, ‘Rhétorique de l´image’, in Communications, 4, 1964, pp. 40-51, Barthes,
Elements of semiology, (1967) London, 1969, and Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, (1976)
Bloomington, 1980.
13 For a detailed history of semiotic studies in the period see Göran Sonesson, Pictorial concepts:
Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the visual world. Lund,
Sweden, 1989 and introductory essay, ‘Pictorial semiotics’ online at
http://filserver.arthist.lu.se/kultsem/encyclo/pictorial_semiotics.html (03). Also, controversy
surrounding the paraphrasing of depictive meaning, here, interestingly parallels arguments for the
‘heresy of paraphrase’ in poetry. See for example, Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the
Tradition, Chapel Hill, N.C. 1967.

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writers in the English-speaking world began to reflect these concerns while
addressing art history more exclusively. The work of W.J.T. Mitchell, Norman
Bryson and Rosalind E. Krauss, to name only three of the more prominent
exponents, variously revisited the distinction between depiction and denotation. 14
Mitchell’s work is the more general, surveys a history of writing about pictures as a
way of noting the difference between writing and depiction, considers concepts of
depiction and underlying ideologies from this. However, given the attention paid to
the contributions of Goodman and Gombrich, the work is of more interest to
aesthetics and art history, and given the equivocation in matters of ideology, of less
interest to the roving commission of ‘critical theory’. 15 Goodman’s theory is
scrutinised for historical and ideological tendencies (recklessly aligning a
metaphorical iconoclasm in Goodman’s frequent reversals of orthodoxy with the
literal iconoclasm of the Reformation and Puritanism) and curiously takes
Goodman’s reference schemes as canonical to Modernism. 16 Gombrich’s position is
taken as drawing a line between nature and convention or artifice in depiction. Yet
the historical and ideological dimension to Gombrich’s position, its implicit
definition of art, goes unexamined. Mitchell’s own position comes to little more
than an affirmation of the value of writing about depiction, a predictable preference
for writing (even in matters of pornography) and later treatments favour either the
combination of text and depiction in works, as in Blake’s illuminated manuscripts or
the works of Robert Morris, or no more than glosses critics such as Clement
Greenberg, Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss on the nature of abstraction in
depiction. 17
Bryson’s work also commences with a critique of Gombrich and concludes that
resemblance and illusion are incompatible with the ambiguities and interpretation
available to a sign or denotation. But this is assumed rather than argued. At the
14
Key publications for each are: W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image Text Ideology,
Chicago/London, 1986, Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, New
Haven/London, 1983, Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other
Modernist Myths, Cambridge/Mass./London, 1986. Krauss’s influence also extends through her
co-editorship of the journal October, featuring an array of prominent critics including Annette
Michelson, Douglas Crimp, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster.
15 Critical theory here used in the sense given by The Frankfurt School of Marxist analysis.
16 Mitchell, 1986, p.71 footnote 27.
17 Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago/London, 1994, 111-180, pp. 213-280.

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same time he rejects any simple structuralist analysis of iconography as too static
and lacking the continual interaction with the world. The system or structure is thus
understood as in a constant state of flux. Just what state of incompleteness may be
taken as acceptable or useful to the dynamic sign system is unclear. 18 Rejecting a
resemblance relation for depiction, Bryson persists with the application of syntax
and proposes a detail of parsing and tense, in ‘deixis’ as the basis of depiction. But
since the rest of syntax and semantics has proven ineffective in earlier semiotic
studies, not surprisingly, this term taken in isolation hardly fares any better.
‘Deixis’ is taken as the rhetoric of a narrator, of terms indicating presence of a
speaker in a discourse, and so a bodily or physical aspect as well as an explicit
temporal dimension. In depiction this translates as a distinction between ‘The Gaze’
where deixis is absent, together with bodily and sequential reference, and ‘The
Glance’, where deixis is present, through details of material indicating how long and
in what way the depiction was made. The distinction thus attempts to account for
the ‘plastic’ qualities that troubled early semioticians, and roughly parallels the
‘indexic’ aspect to signs proposed by C. S. Peirce, but without Peirce’s overlapping
and ancillary categories, relinquishes much in the way of traditional iconography and
stylistics. 19 The necessary distinctions to materials and techniques are far from
convincing in the array of examples provided because they assume a given identity
to object depicted, and distinctions by which bodily signs are assigned materials or
techniques equally beg greater scrutiny, (bodily signs surely admit subtle, minute and
time-consuming gestures as well as bold, brief and grand ones, just as ‘Gazes’ grade
into ‘Glances’) There is then the question of just how these distinctions are
preserved any easier than preceding semiotics in the aforementioned constant flux?
Finally, if most painting operates according to ‘The Gaze’ rather than ‘The Glance’
as would seem to be the argument, the distinction is rendered somewhat trivial,
while if ‘The Gaze’ only indicates ideological issues of sexuality and power, as
Bryson seems to suggest, then depictive meaning simply collapses into ideology. But
surely neither ideology nor depiction is served by such crude reduction.
18 Bryson, 1983, pp. xiii-xiv.
19 For Peirce on semiotics see ‘Speculative Grammar’ ‘Letters to Lady Welby’ and ‘Existential
Graphs’ in C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, Boston, 1931.

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Drastic reduction of depictive meaning to ideological ends is also a feature of the
work of Krauss at this time. Famously, she argued for grids as the basis of
abstraction in depiction and painting, for their rigour and constraint as the ultimate
test of originality or invention, and for such originality as the basis of Modernism
and a capitalist ideology. 20 The post structuralist influence here is in the rejection of
pure or neutral ‘formal’ means to depiction, in their relentless assimilation by
iconography, and the ultimate disclosure of a stark ideological function. The
promotion of grids is also seen as fundamental to depiction in resisting commentary
or language. For Krauss it represents Modernism’s ‘will to silence’ and the isolation
of the visual arts in ‘a realm of exclusive visuality’. 21 This is not to say that less is
written or said about abstract works, or that less abstract works encourage
commentary any more, but rather how fundamental the gulf between the verbal and
visual is for an understanding of depiction, and how much more obvious this
becomes with abstract work and its commentary.
However this sweeping thesis is unconvincing on a number of counts. There is
firstly the laxity with which the term ‘grid’ is applied to various examples in order to
place them at the centre of abstraction. Contrary to her claim, the ‘grid’ does not
appear in Cubism for example – this is one myth Krauss actually encourages. 22 Nor
is it constituted by the mere intersection of transom and mullions in the windows
depicted within the examples by Friedrich and Redon, as claimed, and what
metaphors they may provoke there are hardly inherited by any subsequent use of
windows, glass, quadrilaterals, parallel or intersecting lines or in fact grids in
depiction. Moreover, actual grids when present in paintings are neither dominant
nor essential in abstraction. More importantly, abstraction does not directly inherit
the content of more concrete depiction. Each formulation of the grid, or other
20 Krauss, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, Cambridge/Mass./London, 1986, p.161.
21 Krauss, ‘Grids’ in Ibid. p.9.
22 A grid surely requires a consistency to parallel lines and intersecting angles that Cubist works
simply do not possess. Lines, while mostly straight in Cubist works are neither always coextensive
with the picture area, of uniform intervals, thickness or indeed parallel. They do not
therefore constitute a ‘grid’ as it is commonly understood. The same holds for cited works by
Malevich, Late Mondrian, Reinhardt and Albers. The grid more accurately arises in Modernism
around 1918, through the influence of experimental psychology and in particular the study of
colour. See for example John Gage, Colour and Culture, London/New York, 1993, p. 258.
Mondrian introduces the grid in a series of works titled Composition with Grid between 1918 and
1919, in a style usually described as De Stijl or Neo-Plasticism, quite distinct from Cubism,
while Klee notably uses it in various works throughout the twenties and early thirties.

18
arrangements of only straight lines, revises content by its formal terms. No claim
for sheer or absolute originality in materials or techniques arises in abstraction for
this reason; materials are no more than revised by various abstraction. Therefore
Modernism places no higher premium upon originality than preceding periods, and
originality in and of itself offers no distinctive character to the ideology of a period.
Nevertheless this view has been influential in shaping a history of abstraction and
Modernism, and is important here as an example of how the problem persists, even
for an approach that hurries to ideology. It shows that the concerns of a broader
social history cannot quite ignore the problem with pictures – even very abstract
pictures – in advancing interpretations, without fatally compromising explanation.
Iconography must recognise formal features to a picture if it is to exploit its
content, and formal features depend upon a theory of depiction. There can be no
‘all history and no art’ if the objective is still to address art.
Mitchell, Bryson and Krauss all look to denotation to explain depiction, if not as a
distantly related system then as an opposing one, feeding off or complementing
depiction. Against this scrutiny of reference, the problem of depiction is also
pursued in support of resemblance. The philosopher and art critic David Carrier
considered at length Gombrich’s position in relation to the art history that
accompanies it. Carrier surveyed a history of art history method in Artwriting and
concluded that differences lay in conceptions of a picture and confusions arising
from its ‘conventional’ basis. 23 He defended Gombrich’s naturalism, rejected
semiotic theories, lumping together Bryson and Goodman for example, but could
offer no compelling account of realism upon which to base such a defence, and
curiously interpreted The Story of Art as announcing an end to depiction and art with
Cubism. 24
Resemblance was also at the heart of Wollheim’s Painting as an Art, which included
criticisms of Gombrich and Goodman, as well as social and cultural approaches,
and offered new views on pictures and art. 25 His approach emphasised a
psychological context, and the importance of intention in determining depictive
23 David Carrier, Artwriting, Amhurst, Mass., 1987.
24 Ibid. p. 88.
25 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, London/New York, 1987.

19
meaning. It deftly avoided the notorious intentional fallacy by insisting upon a
standard of correctness for pictorial representation, the details of which are
reviewed in Chapter Four. It is enough here to indicate the emphasis upon
psychology. Intention runs counter to Goodman’s theory, under which the rules of
notation determine meaning, but is accommodated within Gombrich’s theory, as
the means of distinguishing between skill and will, between what the maker
achieved and what was attempted. 26 It might be thought that a theory grounded in
illusion would have no need of such ‘conventions’, but as seen, conventions have a
way of seeping into the matter.
As noted, Wollheim was critical of illusion, and sought to reconcile the perception
of a picture as surface and image. He referred to this as ‘two-foldness’ and argued
that we see the picture as an image, on a surface. 27 But what is meant by the surface
apart from the image is uncertain. If only the markings of the image comprise this
surface, then we cannot see these at the same time as the image, since they are the
image under one description, the markings under another. In truth Wollheim’s is a
resemblance theory, adopting a psychological disposition to ‘see-in’ and find such
images in a surface, as a necessary condition to depiction, and where in accordance
with the intention, sufficient. It avoids the implausibility of illusion but begs the
question in what way the surface is seen as resembling an object. Goodman, by
contrast, consolidated his position with subsequent books, Ways of Worldmaking,
stressing firstly the pluralism of his approach, and its application to stylistics, Of
Mind and Other Matters refining notation and realism and Reconceptions in Philosophy and
Other Arts and Sciences with Catherine Z. Elgin, expanding on multiplicity of
reference and exemplification, but all three books argued against intention in
determining depictive meaning. 28
Two further contributions are of note, The Domain of Images by James Elkins and
What Is Painting? by Julian Bell. 29 Elkins, while essentially hostile to Languages of Art,
26 Gombrich, 1960, p. 56, pp. 65-67.
27 Wollheim, 1987, pp. 46-47, 72-75.
28 Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis, 1978, Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters,
Cambridge/Mass./London, 1984 and Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, Reconceptions in
Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences, London, 1988. Catherine Z. Elgin, With Reference To
Reference, Indianapolis, 1983, offers an extensional rather than nominalist theory of meaning.
29 James Elkins, The Domain of Images, Ithaca/London, 1999, Julian Bell, What is Painting?
London/New York, 1999.

20
applied Goodman’s ideas of pictorial notation to examples that combine writing
and decorative or abstract elements with depiction in various ways. 30 He assumed
this to be a misuse of the theory, (when the theory accounts for the full spectrum of
notation, of which depiction occupies one end) and assumed that even though the
theory is incoherent as an account of depiction, this presented no impediment to its
application to the rest of the notational spectrum. But this is rather like using a
compass, knowing it cannot find true north, but expecting to navigate by the other
directions. Elkins supplemented Goodman’s views with a more traditional view of
pictures as resemblances - although curiously the view is drawn from Wittgenstein
rather than Gombrich, and proposed a two-level model of depiction, one for
resemblance to objects and relations, the other for rules of interpretation. But this
no more than registers the difference between nature and artifice again.
However Elkins also usefully pointed to flaws in Goodman’s argument for
repleteness in the cited but unillustrated example of matching curves for a finance
graph and a drawing of a wave by Hokusai. 31 Not only is it hard to find examples
from these sources that suitably match curves, (although a complete match is not
vital to Goodman’s point) but Goodman’s argument that all of the (hypothetical)
Hokusai drawing’s properties contribute to its meaning, while only the two
dimensional co-ordinates of the graph count as its meaning, rather confuses the
issue. Crucially, matters of the thickness of line or texture of paper, may express, or
exemplify, but do not depict the wave. The wave is not depicted as having a
widening black line riding on its crest, for example. Expression and exemplification
are taken as modes of reference distinct from depiction under Goodman’s theory,
although all three may be present and combined under various schemes. The
mistake is in confusing repleteness of reference, which combines depiction,
expression and exemplification, with mere repleteness of depiction, which perhaps
might amount to the conformity or acceptance of an object under a given scheme,
to its realism in effect. What is otherwise notable in Elkins’ efforts is the
determination to find an integration of writing with pictures and decoration, if not
30 For hostility to Languages of Art see Elkins, 1999, p.66. While not a history of art, The
Domain of Images does include examples of twentieth century abstraction and so is of interest
here. Elkins engages more directly with 20 th century art in What Happened to Art Criticism?
London & Chicago, 2003 (a prelude to a longer study, planned as Success and Failure in
Twentieth Century Painting).
31 Ibid. p.70.

21
as notation, then in some way to say how resemblance relates to these forms of
reference, to the beauty and effectiveness of decoration and design.
Julian Bell’s book on the other hand came with the assistance and endorsement of
Gombrich but a similar hostility to Languages of Art. 32 It ostensibly dealt with
pictorial representation and Modernism, but rapidly sketched along themes of
psychology, philosophy, history and economics, leaped back and forth from ancient
to contemporary art, obscure to familiar works. His grave suspicions about the
nature of expression have much in common with both The Story of Art and Art and
Illusion. Discussion of the Gombrich - Goodman exchange commenced by
considering a realist seascape by William Wylie. 33 Not only did Bell come firmly
down on the side of Gombrich in finding the illusion of the sea compelling (‘we
gaze at the picture and sniff the imaginary brine’) but immediately linked this to the
case against iconography, (and by implication, semiotics) and an appeal once more
to a native substitution or illusion as the basis of depiction. Yet the distinction
between substitution and depiction goes unacknowledged, and the use of such a
concept in a brief account of Goodman’s notational approach, all but renders it
incoherent. What is conspicuous in the book is the slender basis provided by
Gombrich’s views for an adequate account of the art of the twentieth century.
Tellingly, Bell had nothing to say about the closing chapters to The Story of Art, with
their extended criticism of contemporary art and society, and while Bell can at least
accommodate artists such as Stella, Guston and Richter, his story echoed
Gombrich’s as one of dissipation and failure.
What is clear from this review of the problem with pictures is the continuing
stalemate presented by the Gombrich – Goodman exchange, of resemblance versus
reference. Discussion is still brought back to the claims of illusion fostered through
substitution and inherited by depiction and amounting to a conventional or rule
bound ‘illusion’. But is such a claim coherent, much less plausible? Against this,
there are Goodman’s arguments that resemblance is symmetrical, and therefore an
32 Gombrich’s endorsement appears on the front cover, Bell credits Gombrich’s assistance in the
acknowledgements. Bell’s hostility toward Languages of Art registers in the description of its
‘suave insensitivity’. See Bell, 1999, p. 239. His later publication Mirror of the World, London,
New York 2007 looks to a more global history, significantly traces broad humanist themes rather
than stylistic issues.
33 Ibid. pp. 225-230.

22
object ought to represent a picture as much as a picture represents an object, or that
pictures resemble other pictures more than their objects, yet they refer to their
objects more than other pictures. Or, that there are pictures for which there are
strictly no objects for them to resemble, such as pictures of unicorns. Yet for all
this, if pictures denote in order to refer, they apparently do so without a notation.
The following chapter therefore returns to the issue of resemblance versus
reference, to see if something has not been overlooked or unexplored. Since Bell
has performed this service for Gombrich, this study does as much for Goodman.

23
Depiction Revised
The problem for a theory of depiction has been shown to be the reconciliation of
illusion and notation. Neither is adequate, since illusion commits us to a perceptual
mistake, or delusion, which does not square with the facts of everyday experience
with pictures, while notation commits us to a familiar principle of reference, but
cannot explain how such a notation might operate. It can explain in what ways it
must differ from writing, or descriptive notation, but amounts to no more than
saying it is no longer notation. On one hand the proposal is for a resemblance
relation between picture and object, and on the other for a reference relation. Both
agree that sooner or later they need the other, but in acquiring them they also lose
some of their explanation. The illusion theory takes depiction to be tamed or
conventionalised illusions, while the notation theory takes depiction to be a scheme
that cultivates resemblance. But is an illusion still an illusion if it is rule bound? Is a
notation still a notation if it resembles its object? Seemingly, stubbornly, the
relations of resemblance and reference refuse to merge, resemblance is a
symmetrical or two-way relation, reference is asymmetrical or a one-way relation.
The task now is to look a little closer at Goodman’s theory of reference to see if
there is a way around this. Goodman proceeds from arguments about the nature of
reference, based upon denotation, but denotation is not the only mode or route of
reference to his theory. He admits exemplification as the relation between a sample
and referent, or the way in which it points to only some of its properties. 34 For
example a swatch of cloth exemplifies colour, weave, texture and pattern of a
certain type or bolt of cloth, but not its size or shape, age or smell. The swatch has
these other properties, but they are not referred to, or exemplified. Equally the bolt
of cloth has properties that are not possessed or sampled by the swatch, such as its
34 Goodman, 1976, pp.52-57.

24
place and manner of storage. Exemplification is reference to only selected
properties possessed by a sample.
Such reference might also be taken as a way of allowing resemblance. The sample
and its referent share a symmetrical relation in selected respects, they share certain
properties, and yet the sample refers to the type of cloth, while the cloth resembles
in some respects, but does not refer to the sample. The fact that an exemplification
refers only to some of those properties that it possesses, also suggest that it is
reflexive or self-reference. One of Goodman’s objections to taking pictures as
resemblances is that representation, or reference cannot be reflexive, while
resemblance can – ‘An object resembles itself to the maximum degree but rarely
represents itself’ – yet in the case of exemplification it evidently can represent itself
in selected respects. 35 This seems much closer to the requirements for depiction and
suggests that depiction might more profitably be taken as a mode of exemplification
rather than denotation.
The question then arises what is it that a picture exemplifies? What property does it
share with its object and then sample or correctly display? 36 The property is simply
two dimensions, or two-dimensionality. Two dimensions are of course contained
within three dimensions in fact any number of two-dimensional planes may be
constructed as slices within a three-dimensional volume. So we have a shared
property between picture and object, if as yet a very general one. Does it hold for all
depiction? Let us begin with the most basic pictures, for example, a single familiar
object that might be produced by a pre-school, pre-historic or primitive artist,
which is to say, they have basic skills in depiction, and in which is typically offered
an outline or silhouette. Something like two dimensions is detected in the
observation of distinct sides or single aspects of an object or in rudimentary
relations between parts, in an overall profile or shape reliably identified or
resembling an object. Such observations are useful because they are quick to make
and easy to remember. They also make depiction easy to learn.
35 Goodman, 1976, p.4.
36 Although a quirk of language, makes a picture’s object, its subject, following Goodman, the
term ‘object’ is maintained here for any ‘subject’ of a picture.

25
A basic picture also requires the picture surface exemplify, or find the means to
display its two-dimensionality. For the surface is not only a two-dimensional plane
of course, even in the case of a pristine sheet of the smoothest white paper – it is
still a three dimensional object, with a thickness and texture of some kind, whereas
a two-dimensional plane has no thickness, no surface or texture, merely space
extended along two axes. The surface can however exemplify its two-dimensional
plane through the use of distinctive markings or features that not only set it apart
from other kinds of surface, but then also serve to distinguish other kinds of
surfaces or objects, so that properties thus distinguished then also sample materially,
or much as a swatch does, and crucially, may also be taken in combination with
depiction. Equally, such markings may also form distinctive patterns or designs that
need not be taken as a resemblance to an object, or strictly as depiction, yet
nevertheless exemplify two-dimensional elements and relations, and are also
accompanied by the sampling of three-dimensionality, in the kinds of markings and
material used.
Line is the simplest and easiest means of translating perceived planes or shapes of
objects into depiction because the two-sided nature of a line gives the inside and
outside of a shape the same value – as space – in an outline of the shape. The
articulation of the shape depends upon the width of the line, its extent or length,
and its direction, up and down, left or right. This is two-dimensionality proper, even
where the maker or user is unaware of the fact. Similarly, relations between more
than one shape in a depiction share these same fundamental articulations. Once
lines create shapes as outlines, we have two dimensions, and these are shared with,
or truly resemble shapes detected in the sides or single aspects of an object. So we
have resemblance, but do we have reference? The outline refers to an object’s
shape, while an object’s shape does not refer to the outline, because the line is
around the shape, rather than part of it, and is, like the exemplifying practices of a
swatch, a means of displaying two dimensions upon a surface. Hence we have a
one-way reference and a two-way resemblance, in certain selected respects. Line is
obviously not the only means for displaying two dimensions upon a surface, but its
simplicity and efficiency in these basic stages, make it the crucial example. Nor do
outlines necessarily depict the shapes of an observed or three-dimensional object.
Their formal or intrinsic properties as pattern or design may equally develop an

26
appreciation of two-dimensional ordering; suggest fictive versions of extant objects.
While such activities are commonly overlooked in an account of depiction, at the
expense of pursuing parallels with writing and description, an important part of the
revision of depiction lies in re-aligning pictures with patterns. 37 This aspect also
becomes important in the appreciation of abstract painting. But before explaining
this, we need to look briefly at why this attention to two-dimensional judgements is
important.
Firstly, the concept of three dimensions or depth can only be understood in
contrast with two dimensions. So the reason two dimensions are so basic, is because
the concept of three-dimensional space or depth is so basic. A ready objection may
run that we understand three dimensions intuitively – in our ability to navigate to
them, much as Gombrich urges a functional or behavioural definition for such
understanding in a squirrel’s jumping abilities in ‘The Analysis Of Vision’ in Art and
Illusion. 38 The difference is in definitions of understanding. The squirrel’s
understanding of space and light is measured by the behaviourist as its ability to
‘navigate’ them, but to perform more elaborate functions, such as remember,
compare, analyse, measure, construct and communicate, requires a more elaborate
view of understanding, and in this case, a more elaborate understanding of space.
Discerning separate sides to an object, and the shapes associated with them, may
seem an innocent task, but need hardly remain one. Such shapes not only simplify
the tasks of remembering and recognising the object, by breaking it down into
smaller tasks, but it also make more of the object – literally. It discerns more
qualities or properties of the object and so furthers knowledge. Equally,
appreciation of pattern, of measurement and proportion, axes of symmetry,
37 Pattern obviously deserves a far more extensive analysis than space permits. Gombrich
carefully surveyed the history and literature of pattern in the underrated, The Sense of Order,
London, Phaidon, 1979. Notable preceding publications include Owen Jones, The Grammar of
Ornament, London, 1856, Charles Blanc, Art in Ornament and Dress, Paris, 1886, Wilhelm
Ostwald, Die Welt der Form, Entwicklung und Ordnung der gesetzlichschonen Gebilde,
gezeichnet und beschreiben von Wilhem Ostwald, (4 Vols) Leipzig, 1922-25. Understandably
mathematicians are drawn to questions of two-dimensional geometry, such as Andreas Speiser,
Theorie der Gruppen von endlicher Ordnung, Berlin, 1923, and Herman Weyl in Symmetry,
Princeton, N.J. 1952. Related mathematical insights, are explored in Martin Gardner, The
Ambidextrous Universe, New York, 1964, Michael Holt, Mathematics in Art, London/New York,
1971, and more recently various tiling problems – complex patterns - are considered in Roger
Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, Oxford/New York, 1990, pp. 168-181 and Penrose, Shadows
of the Mind, Oxford/New York, 1994, pp. 29-33.
38 Gombrich, 1960, p. 276.

27
variations and orientations of a motif, serve to further principles of organisation in
perception and cognition. It is not so much that depiction permits opportunities
unavailable to observers of an object directly, but rather that we make more
opportunities, and more of the opportunities, with depiction. Contrary to
Gombrich’s model of the artist matching a picture to nature, in the manner of
Constable or Cezanne, the appeal more typically is to the picture more removed.
We do not have or need the opportunity to look over the artist’s shoulder and
compare picture with object to appreciate depiction. Rather we test the picture
against our knowledge of such objects and pictures. Hence the crucial role of
memory in basic depiction for the primitive, pre-historic or pre-school artist, the
task is clearly not one of illusion, or even of matching a present object, but of
organising and testing what is known and remembered of an object. In the simplest
of examples, let us take a line drawing of a cat, (Figure A) in the manner favoured
by children and created by conjoining the letters M O Q in ascending scale and
descending sequence, thus:
Figure A
Even in such a basic depiction, we can observe a
surprising number of things about this cat, such as
which way does its tail point? (Left or right?) Is the
cat facing us, or does it sit with its back to us? How
much wider is the cat’s body than its head? Are its
ear raised or lowered? Is it sitting or standing? Is it
looking to the side or ahead? How tall are the ears compared with the head? In
other words, any number of questions concerning measurements, placements, or
plottings, across the two dimensional plane, or certain questions concerning the
object’s position or attitude toward the two dimensional plane, may be answered
even in a basic line drawing. Clearly this is not so much a question of realism as of
resemblance struck on stark linear or two-dimensional terms. There can be no
confusing of the drawing with the actual presence of a cat.
Rather the drawing supplies answers to these questions on just the terms on which
this resemblance is made. Indeed the power and pleasure of such basic pictures lies
entirely in their appeal to memory and the understanding that guides resemblance.

28
Neither the primitive, pre-historic or pre-school picture-maker concern themselves
with the presence of a model for this reason; two dimensions are easier to keep in
the head than the eye. A basic picture is a way of testing this memory and
prompting closer understanding. The understanding is of both the depicted object
and the scheme or style of depiction. The thick and wobbling line used here
samples a given tool upon a surface in contrast with surrounding text and scale of
font, and an uncertain level of expertise. The sample sorts the depiction against the
materials used, understands materials as well as depiction.
So a basic picture essentially maps or outlines a shape of an object. Indeed maps
offer another good example of why two dimensions prove so useful. One is free to
chart up and down, left and right, in any order, any direction or combination of
directions. A map offers any number of routes, and allows one to comprehend the
terrain across and between as well as along given routes. Depiction is thus bracketed
with maps, diagrams, patterns and other two-dimensional schemas, because this
multi-directional mapping stands in stark contrast with denotative or descriptive
modes of reference. The difference arises because language and language-based
references are committed to a temporal and one-directional ordering. Time may
cease to be one-way in sub-atomic or macrocosmic physics, but for the sizeable
stretch in between that is our main concern, it remains reliably one-way. Two
dimensions of course exclude not only depth but also time, and depictions allow us
to look at objects and scenes in more than one way or indeed more than one
direction because of this. They may lack movement - without time - but a freeze
frame, as is now so familiar, allows scrutiny of qualities unavailable in the flow of
motion. A prompt objection may be that surely comic strips, film and television
demonstrate that depiction and two-dimensionality need not exclude time. But the
succession of images available in these examples remain fixed in a single sequence
and even where they may be viewed in reverse, the sequence remains the same, we
may reverse direction of a route in some circumstances, but we cannot re-route any
given image in the sequence. Each image remains a given moment, and the value of
the freeze frame lies precisely in what its route or motion has concealed. The point
of two-dimensional perception and depiction is really to supplement a temporally
ordered perception, with a spatial one, as a way to see out of time or around time,
and something more of the world.

29
The distinction between time and space is by no means new to discussion of
depiction. It is most notably identified with Lessing’s famous essay on The Laocoon,
and more recently has been the subject of an extended analysis by W. J. T.
Mitchell. 39 Here the arrangement shares none of Lessing’s critical or prescriptive
principles concerning art, indeed, as will become clearer in later chapters, the
position is quite the opposite, recognising a complementary function to the two
modes. Mitchell is largely concerned with detecting ideological tendencies beneath
Lessing’s view, which need not concern us here, however it is worth noting that his
attempt to demolish the time/space distinction, by claiming the difference between
pictures and language as one of degree rather than kind, is one based upon a
conception of pictures as a mode of denotation – after Goodman – and obviously
rejected here. 40
A new theory of depiction as a mode of exemplification, sampling twodimensionality
has now been outlined. The theory adheres to Goodman’s
framework of reference, and maintains the functions of exemplification and
denotation. It accepts the syntactic and semantic analysis of notation, but finds
analogue densities finally at odds with these terms, and of limited use in
understanding depiction. 41 The revision is not that drastic in the larger scheme of
things, as shall be shown. The new theory reconciles the requirements of a
resemblance and a reference relation and avoids the commitment to an illusion in
the recognition of two-dimensionality on a surface, and to a notation in its
structure. An illusion may occur in as much as two-dimensions may be mistaken for
three dimensions, but in general this is not the experience of looking at a picture,
and part of the reason we have dwelt upon the simplest of line drawings is to
emphasise this. A picture remains a reference or a representation, in as much as the
39 Mitchell, ‘Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre’ in Iconology, Image,
Text, Ideology, Chicago/London, 1994, pp 95-115. G. E. Lessing, ‘Laocoon’ in Laocoon, Nathan
the Wise, Minna von Barnelm, London/New York, 1930.
40 Mitchell, 1994, p.102. In passing, Mitchell’s subsequent attempt to lump all artefacts together
as ‘spatio/temporal structures’ seems less than useful, distinguishing neither between forms of
art, objects or reference.
41 Since depiction is so closely tied to two-dimensionality here, depiction used in discussion
elsewhere, in sculpture, drama and literature for example, is consigned to loose talk. While
sculpture is mainly concerned with three-dimensionality or material sampling, and so shares
resemblance with depiction, in drama and literature depiction at best refers to a density or
circumspection of reference, especially linked with depiction, and dealt with in Chapter Five.

30
surface is altered or marked in such a way as to exemplify its two-dimensional
properties, but this system is not a notation, because of its multi-directional
character.
But while this formulation allows for a distinction between patterns and pictures,
the demarcation begs further attention. For example, simple symmetrical shapes
such as a circle or a square are not generally understood as a picture of a circle or a
square, but just as an instance or presentation rather than a representation. This is
not to say that pictures cannot include a circle or square, or be of a circle or square
in some further three-dimensional scene, or indeed use a circle or square to depict
some three-dimensional object, only that a circle or square are often used for either
purpose. The same outline may serve as either or both, a lesson in geometry or
linear depiction. Just when a circle depicts a sphere or disc as opposed to merely
instantiating a circle, is by no means clear-cut, but is largely a matter of scheme and
style, even when schemes and styles allow ambiguity. But rather than pursue stylistic
features directly, the next chapter tests this theory of depiction against more
elaborate kinds of picture and issues raised by other theories. Implications to the
reshuffle of reference within Goodman’s theory are also to be traced along this
path.

31
Depiction Pursued
Five Issues
This chapter looks at how the proposed theory of depiction handles more elaborate
kinds of pictures and at the issues raised by other theories. First and foremost there
is the issue of depth, and the controversy surrounding systems of projection and
perspective. A second and related kind of picture is the distortion derived from an
unusual lens, such as an anamorphic lens, which perhaps raises the question
whether a surface’s two-dimensional markings can adequately explain our
recognition of such pictures. The third issue concerns caricature, which resembles
its object paradoxically, by exaggerating features and relations. A fourth and
surprisingly similar issue is that of fiction, and whether a depiction of a fictional
entity such as a unicorn or Homer Simpson, can truly be said to resemble their
objects? (When there truly are no objects for them to resemble). Finally there are
those depictions found in an idle gaze at stains on a wall or in the shapes of foliage
or clouds, and whether these are truly surfaces, adequately exemplified as twodimensionality?
1. Depth
So far we have looked at how two dimensions can be exemplified and depict one
side or aspect of an object, and build a basic picture plane. Having established this
basic two-dimensionality or picture plane, further developments are essentially
concerned with how to accommodate more than one side of an object upon this
plane, or conversely, construct two-dimensionality at more remote and
sophisticated angles to the object. The move is ultimately to accommodate depth, or
three-dimensionality; to map features not only in terms of up and down, left and
right but back and forward. But where two dimensions are contained in three and

32
may be detected and displayed accordingly, three dimensions obviously do not ‘go
into’ two. Depth must be treated differently.
John Willats has demonstrated how much of this development, both in children’s
pictures, and in the history of art, echoes the aims and methods of various schemes
of descriptive geometry, and its elementary projections of orthogonal, oblique, and
parallel oblique schemes, and various perspectives. 42 Willats rightly stresses the folly
of seeing a ‘recapitulation’ or an evolutionary agenda in the comparison between
children’s pictorial competence and various stages of art history, and instead points
to the distinct uses for various projections and perspectives, and the shifting
requirements made of pictures throughout art history.
But before discussing kinds of depth, some elementary distinctions between
projections and perspectives should be noted (Figure B). The basic pictures so far
considered conform to
orthogonal projection,
and align the picture
plane to one side of the
depicted object. Oblique
projections essentially
align the edge of two
sides of an object with
the picture plane, using
either a horizontal edge
or a vertical edge. While
this is clumsy as a
description, it is probably
more familiar in examples
Figure B
of photography, where a long lens is used for close-ups of distant
objects, and which thereby ‘flattens’ the adjacent sides of an object
against the picture plane. More adventurously, parallel oblique schemes propose a
42 John Willats, Art and Representation: New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures, Princeton,
N.J. 1997. Figure B is owed to this publication.

33
diagonal, or oblique angle to one or more adjoining sides, as distinct from simply a
diagonal shape to a side, and now serves as basically a third axis, in between the
vertical and horizontal axes of the picture plane. Again, this is a view available to
long lens photography and something easily found in non-pictorial or plain
perception. Parallel oblique projections thus register depth at an ascending angle for
objects, while vertical or horizontal planes contained, remain constant in size or
length to the picture plane.
Perspective supplies one or more vanishing points, according to a notional or not
necessarily included, horizon. The difference between parallel oblique projections
and perspectives is rather like the difference in photography between using long and
wide lenses, for close and distant objects. In fact the wider the lens, the more
vanishing points a scheme introduces, a very wide lens gives a ‘fisheye’ depiction,
with vanishing points at every point on the perimeter of the necessarily circular
picture plane. Yet we can still make sense of the picture, we can still ‘see’ in this
way, even if it seems uncomfortable or unnatural. The issue of artifice and nature is
returned to shortly. Here a little more of Willat’s position needs to be appreciated.
While Willats is anxious to emphasise the varying uses for these schemes of depth
and to some extent their co-existence, nevertheless his view of the development of
pictorial depth, still places perspectives as the goal to which a picture ‘faithful’ to the
principles of visual perception aspires. In this he adheres to the tradition that draws
upon the work of the psychology of visual perception, particularly the work of J. J.
Gibson, R. L. Gregory, Gregory’s collaborations with Gombrich, and the fieldwork
of John M. Kennedy. 43 It is a view of perception that rests upon an optical stimulus,
or information transmitted by the rays of light, reflected from an object to the
viewer, which then allows the viewer to perceive the object. In the case of
depiction, the rays of light are called upon to carry two lots of information, firstly
about the picture surface, and secondly about the object depicted. Gibson
characterises this information as ‘invariants’ that separate out the distance, surfaces
and contours of an object, from accidental effects of time or motion, for example.
Yet Gibson’s behavioural or evolutionist bias leads him to look for invariants on
43 James J Gibson, The Perception Of The Visual World, Boston, 1950, R. L. Gregory, The
Intelligent Eye, London, 1970, E.H Gombrich and R.L. Gregory, Illusion in Art and Nature,
London, 1973, John M. Kennedy, The Psychology Of Picture Perception, San Francisco, 1974.

34
only the crudest of ‘environmental’ bases, so that two-dimensionality for example,
eludes him. Willats thus inherits a view of depiction as exchanging rules or
conventions for depth with a more vivid experience or illusion, in keeping with a
plain or natural perception.
Yet as shown, we see depth in any number ways and for any number of reasons.
Not only are such ways familiar to the conventions of photography as well as
drawing, but to our plain or non-pictorial experience. The eye’s lens, like a camera’s
lenses, is variable, and if it has an invariant it is variation. The appeal to a native
perception guided only by principles of surfaces, contours, occluding lines, planes
and so forth, is no more than a behaviourist’s makeover for the innocent eye, and in
denial of a more than visual mind. To quote Goodman (ironically, in support of
Gombrich):
The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past, and by
old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers heart and brain. It
functions not as an instrument self-empowered and alone, but as a dutiful
member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it
sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes,
discriminates, associates, classifies, analyses, constructs. 44
Goodman’s firm rejection of Gibson and Gombrich’s view of perspective and the
perception of depth fuelled a long-standing controversy between theorists deriving
their views from principles of optics, and those deriving their views from symbol
systems such as Erwin Panofsky or Meyer Schapiro, and opposing schools of
psychology such as Arnheim, and Goodman, who combines both. 45 The argument
is essentially over whether perception is natural or conventional, inherent or
learned. In the earlier exchange noted between Gombrich and Goodman they find
common ground in the acceptance that some conventions allow for others, or that
conventions are built upon conventions, and therefore some seem comparatively
natural, others artificial. But Goodman then asked where do we draw the line? And
is it important? 46 Pursuing the most natural is a path of infinite regress.
44 Goodman, 1976, pp. 7-8.
45 See for example the exchange in articles by Goodman, Gibson and Gombrich in Leonardo,
1971, No 4. See also Panofsky, ‘Die Perspective als symbolische Form’ in Aufsatze, 1927, pp.
99-167. Schapiro, Modern Art: 19 th and 20 th Centuries, New York, 1978, pp. 185-211, Arnheim,
Art and Visual Perception Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1954.
46 Gombrich, 1982, p. 284.

35
Clearly Willats was unimpressed by such relativism. Yet the problem cannot be
ignored, and ultimately undermines much of his findings. For example, concerning
the chapter on optical denotations where he claims ‘very few artists have, in fact,
attempted to replicate the appearance of the optic array directly’ - there is a
disturbing lack of awareness of the sheer futility of the suggestion. 47 Not only is
there no way to replicate light with paint ‘directly’, but ‘the appearance’ of the optic
array surely depends upon what is being looked for, and how, in Gombrich’s terms,
what can be matched depends upon what can be made. The extensive studies by
Gombrich concerning just this question, and concluding with just this answer, seem
to have been lost on Willats, all the more curious since Gombrich is a much cited
source as well as something of a mentor. 48 Similarly, summary of Seurat’s approach
to painting as ‘an artificial pictorial effect that refers to the effects of light but does
not replicate them directly’ (my italics) commits him to the twin follies of a belief in
pictorial effects that are not ‘artificial’, and a belief that light might somehow be
substituted with paint. 49
Turning to the matter of depicting several related objects and to options available to
projections and perspectives, the picture plane may firstly accommodate more than
one object by extending laterally or vertically. In the case of the ancient Egyptians,
lateral extension also introduces a reduced directionality to the picture, and a
tentative step toward writing. Two-dimensional mapping or ‘topological’ relations as
Willats terms them, also result in the ‘fold-out’ picture, identified by A. L. Nicholls
and J. M. Kennedy in the work of young children, and by Willats in icons of the
Byzantine and Orthodox churches. 50 Here, adjacent objects in a scene may be
depicted from conflicting aspects – a house seen from in front, a field seen from
above, but sharing an edge as an of axis upon which one might ‘fold’ the picture to
create a three dimensional model.
47 Willats, 1997, p. 133.
48 Ibid. p. xii. See also Gombrich, 1960, pp. 313-314, ‘For if we have learned anything in the
course of these chapters it is that representation is never a replica. The forms of art, ancient and
modern, are not duplications of what the artist has in mind any more than they are duplications of
what he sees in the outer world’.
49 Willats, 1997, p. 145.
50 Nicholls and Kennedy, ‘Drawing development from similarity of features to direction’ in Child
Development: 63, 1992, pp. 227-241. Willats, 1997, pp. 194-199.

36
The fold-out picture may also be seen as a kind of collage or made up of a series of
smaller pictures, each of a single object, and related to one other so that each shares
a common axis and dimension, while their second, conflicting axis – it need not run
at 90 degrees, need not be readily ‘foldable’ - constructs divergent versions of the
picture plane. Depth or a third dimension here is understood in just these terms: as
simply a realignment of each object/picture plane’s axes. Various kinds of multiple
pictures arise, combining various projections and even perspectives, and some of
these are dealt with as anomalies and some as plain ineptitude by Willats. The
tradition of Persian and Indian miniatures offers many examples of depth and scale
jumps that are often reminiscent of modern photo-collages, and while the use to
which such a technique may be put is clear, predictably Willats concludes:
Thus, although individual parts of the scene look strongly threedimensional,
the eye cannot make sense of the space of the scene as a
whole, and this destroys the illusion of a real three-dimensional scene and
flattens the picture. 51
Tactfully, one might reply that it depends on which mind the eye serves. More
constructively, one might suggest that more than one look, or more than one
perspective are also properties of vision, that we do not necessarily look only in one
direction, or on one focal length, or from one position, in viewing a scene, let alone
a picture.
Beyond the foldout or multiple pictures, there is the development of more
integrated approaches to depth. The picture plane, while initially aligned with a
single side of an object, introduces additional and unaligned sides (or parallel
oblique projections) These are the elementary projections that emphasise one
corner of an object – and promptly confound Gombrich’s famous axiom for the
development of perspective, namely that it ‘rests on a simple and incontrovertible
fact of experience, the fact that we cannot look around a corner’. 52 Projections
progress to the alignment of axis or connecting edge of two adjacent sides, leaving
both or more unaligned, and hence understood as receding in depth from the
aligned edge. These are the isometric, diametric and trimetric oblique projections
illustrated in Figure B. In each case the picture plane is gradually separated or
51 Willats, 1997, p. 228.
52 Gombrich, 1960, p. 250.

37
distanced from a direct alignment with the object and becomes instead a ‘slice’
across a three-dimensional space or the traditionally understood ‘window’ frame
before the object. In this there is general agreement with the findings of David Marr
and associates, of a development from object-centred descriptions to view or scenecentred
descriptions. 53
The achievement of perspective, in this view, is precisely the realisation that a twodimensional
plane may be constructed anywhere within a three dimensional space,
and that it need not align itself wholly or solely with solid objects, but instead locate
itself in relation to an horizon and one or more vanishing points. It is this flexibility,
rather than its illusionary properties, that play an important role in the dominance of
perspective as a pictorial tradition. Vanishing points allow depth to be understood,
not in terms of any one oblique plane or angle, but as all planes or edges aligned to
a vanishing point and the picture plane. It allows for a greater integration of objects,
in a number of interesting ways, but the point here is simply that horizon and
vanishing points provide further means of constructing three dimensions from two.
2. Distortion
An argument made against a two-dimensional view of the picture surface, and in
favour of an optical view of perception, concerns the recognition of distorted
images, such as an anamorphic image, that can only be viewed correctly when the
viewer stands to the side of the picture surface rather than in front of it. Kennedy
claims that such depictions support the view that it is the optical information
supplied by the surface, or the light rays reflected from it, that enable the perception
of a depiction, rather than the surface ‘itself’, or the surface unviewed, or perhaps
the surface understood as various markings viewed only from in front of the picture
surface, and presumably in a ‘light-free’ environment. 54
Taking the example of a photographic plate, he argues that it is the chemical’s
structure rather than the chemical’s distribution on the picture surface that directs
53 Marr, ‘Representing visual information: a computational approach,’ in Computer Vision, A. R.
Hanson and E. M. Riseman (eds.) New York, 1978, pp. 61-80 and Marr, Vision: A
Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual
Information, San Francisco, 1982.
54 Kennedy, 1974, p.36.

38
the light. But since the chemical’s distribution is surely part of its structure, this
distinction too fails to isolate the picture surface from the light reflected from it.
‘Any theory that relies on descriptions of elements and their distribution on a
surface is inconvenienced by anamorphics’ he concludes, but no more
inconvenienced than the viewer, of either the surface or its light isolated from each
other. 55 The argument fails because it assumes the surface is to be described from
only one angle - in front - while its light allows another option. But the description
of the surface is the description of its reflected light. We view an anamorphic
picture with light, whether we stand in front or to the side of a picture, only one
view easily supplies us with a picture, but this viewing condition supplies us with the
‘informative light’ only because it issues from an ‘informative’ surface, or the
surface rightly taken, or so sampled.
3. Caricature
The issue of caricature poses problems for a theory of depiction in as much it
allows deliberate exaggeration or distortion of an object for comic effect, while still
preserving the object’s resemblance and identity. On the one hand we readily
recognise the object, while on the other we are aware that it does not ‘really’ look
this way. Apart from the surprise and humour that results, the issue draws forth
several deeper questions concerning the resemblance we hold for an object, the
expressive, and accidental qualities we allow it, the means by which these are
brought about in depiction.
Gombrich and Wollheim make important contributions to the issue and Willats has
also made some interesting suggestions concerning topological functions for
caricature. 56 But here attention remains on certain converging interests of
Gombrich and Wollheim. 57 Gombrich’s treatment covers a broader range of
caricature, dealing with both the caricature of certain persons as well as the
whimsical creations of Walt Disney or James Thurber. He points firstly to the
wholistic and complex nature of perceived likenesses in portraits, and faces in
general, and to the difficulty of settling on a characteristic expression for an
55 Kennedy, 1974, p.36.
56 Willats, 1997, p. 72.
57 Gombrich, 1960, pp. 279-303. Wollheim, 1987, pp. 69-70.

39
individual, as well as a characteristic expression for general states of mind, such as
happiness or despair (which can often look alike). For Gombrich this process
amplifies his view of pictorial development, as one of schema and correction. A
schema is a traditional means or format that is tested with some new aim or task,
and if successful, is ‘corrected’ to include this aim, or is recognised as a new, in this
case, funnier version of the tradition. With caricature the correction occurs not by
trying to observe some new or different part of an object, but rather by
deconstructing or toying with the means, and then testing to see if it still matches or
resembles the object. For Gombrich the humorous side of this is bound up with
dark psychological taboos concerning unconscious hostilities toward the object. But
humour apart, this model also suggests the uneasy relation between expression and
representation, between shifting properties attributed to an object, and their impact
upon its identity.
For the moment it is enough to indicate how this issue leads directly to that of
expression. Expression is addressed in the following essay. Wollheim’s contribution
finds its clearest account in Painting as an Art. 58 His view is bound up in a discussion
of the kinds of things that can be painted and depicted generally. His categories for
depictive content take the form of a cross-classification that runs along one axis
from objects to events, and along the other from particulars to kinds. A particular
object such as the portrait of Madame Moitessier by J. A. D. Ingres, is made up of
kinds of particulars, so to speak, such as a portrait of a woman, a young person, a
French citizen, born in the early nineteenth century, middle class, self-assured, and
so on. One constructs the individual according to which kinds one knows and sees
them belonging to - except in the case of caricatures - where a person may be
depicted as belonging to an impossible kind, such as an animal or, in the example
used by both Wollheim and Gombrich, the French emperor Louis Phillippe turning
into a pear in Les Poires by Phillipon.
The idea of caricature as a misclassing has parallels with Gombrich’s model of
schema and correction and the experimental or testing nature of depiction, although
Wollheim does not pursue its application outside of persons, to a dog in a Thurber
or Disney cartoon, for example. What is important about Wollheim’s formulation is
58 Wollheim, 1987, pp. 69-71.

40
its location within the categories outlined. Caricatures play with the misuse of kinds,
but more earnest depiction relies upon the same ladders of kinds, rendering an
object in degree of particularity. The difference between seeing a picture of a young
woman and just seeing a young woman for example, is taken to lie in the greater
particularity of the direct perception. 59 Yet the danger lies in offering an example
purely by description, or without illustration, for the young woman hypothetically
pictured, is surely located after a fashion, perhaps even to a time of day, and even
when we do not learn the name and history of the young woman from the picture
(a situation that may equally apply to direct perception), pictures of young women
come in many kinds, from the formal portraits by Ingres, to the Madonnas of
Raphael, the ballet students of Degas, the sun bathers of Renoir, and the
housewives of Vermeer, for example. The particular proliferates in pictures as
vigorously as in direct perception. Then again, while kinds are as common to
pictures as to direct perception, yet they differ as much between direct perceptions
as between pictures. So again, direct perception offers no clear model for depictive
meaning. These issues are given a very different treatment by Goodman, but his
discussion of caricature centres mainly on representing-as, as when a person is
depicted as a pear, or vice versa, and will be considered under the following issue of
fiction.
However, the philosopher Stephanie Ross has provided a useful discussion of
caricature, in terms strikingly consonant with Goodman’s theory. 60 She pointed
firstly to the problem of establishing caricature as an exaggeration of distinctive,
standard or truthful features of the object. No such features may be reliably
identified. They depend upon too many conflicting interests, and kinds of pictures.
Yet caricature remains a reliable category, we rarely revise what is and is not a
caricature, even if acknowledging a grey area. Indeed, we can often judge a picture
to be a caricature without fully identifying the object. She further argued that the
practice of caricature does not require necessary and sufficient conditions, that not
only can we recognise caricature on the basis of experience with pictures, take and
treat them differently from other pictures, but also that our experience in these
matters extends to direct perception and - crucially for Goodman’s theory - to the
59 Wollheim, 1987, p. 71.
60 Ross, ‘Caricature’ in The Monist, 58, 1974, pp. 284-293.

41
projection of predicates. 61 Predicates and projection will also be explained under the
issue of fiction. In stressing the interdependence of pictures and direct perception in
complex projection, Ross effectively denies Wollheim’s distinction as well.
Yet Ross’s account still leaves the problem of caricatures as pictures that are ‘less
realistic and which demand we see reality (which includes people and pictures) in
terms of them’. 62 In other words, there is still the paradox of the unrealistic
somehow accepted as realistic. To remedy this we can firstly distinguish caricature
from other less realistic pictures, for example note that caricature typically does not
just build a novel perspective, such as that of a fisheye lens, nor does it achieve the
complexity of a portrait by Picasso or Goya, to use Ross’s examples. So caricature is
neither in the business of a comprehensive system of depth nor an especially
complex version of the object. Rather, how it pictures is a matter of mere pastiche
and parody, recognisable in itself, as noted. The ridicule is directed as much to the
basics of drawing and portraiture as it is to its object, and because it is bound much
more closely to norms of depiction it is both more superficial and amusing as well
as more dependent upon a standard and familiar object. Thus we have pictures about
realism, rather than realistic pictures, and objects that easily survive such minor
versions. Finally, Ross rightly pointed to the parallels between metaphor and
caricature. Not all caricature strictly functions as metaphor, but both ‘inhabit a
continuum with literal ways of depicting reality’ and ‘are vehicles for conciseness,
novelty and economy of expression’. Differences between strict depictive metaphor,
or allegory, and caricature come under greater scrutiny when the study looks to the
history of painting in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
4. Fiction
Like caricature, fiction involves the ability to deal in particulars and kinds,
individuals and classes. Yet fiction asks a more pointed question of theories of
depiction based upon resemblance, since there are no actual or existential objects
for pictures of unicorns or Homer Simpson to resemble. Intuitively, one might
suppose a resemblance to a kind of horse, with a horn on its forehead, or to a kind
of middle-aged man, bald, sallow complexion, five o’clock shadow, pronounced
61 Ross, 1974, pp. 284-293.
62 Ibid. p. 291.

42
exophthalmia, will suffice. But where reference is understood as strictly to actual
individual objects, they will not. For Goodman, pictures, like names, obtain
predicates, and a nominalist ontology requires fictive pictures be taken firstly to
depict or denote no actual or individual object, or as null-denotation. 63 A nulldenotation
is understood to reverse the direction of its reference, to point to (or
place its predicate in) only a sort of picture. A unicorn-picture or a Homer Simpsonpicture,
are here the preferred nomenclature, taken as a more accurate indication of
reference direction, rather than implying there is an actual object, or a predicate
extended beyond the fictive picture.
Null denotation thus directs reference to the way we use or sort pictures, even at
the expense of having a further or actual object. Expanding on sorts of pictures is
not an idle exercise, as pictures of actual objects must all belong to sorts of pictures,
must be an x-picture of a y-object, and sometimes a y-as-x-picture. A unicornpicture
or a Homer Simpson-picture go to organising the workings of pictures in
the same way as class terms sort pictures of young women as young womenpictures,
not that all pictures containing young women need be classed as young
women-pictures, or that young women-pictures need contain only young women.
Importantly, the sorting of pictures and objects does not in Goodman’s view
require prior definitions or acquaintance with rules. It proceeds by trial and error,
practice and precedent, can learn sort of picture from object or vice versa, and
complies with consensus. This urges the parallel with language acquisition, and the
commitment to depiction taken as denotation. Yet Goodman’s view also aligns
fiction with fundamental processes of classification and construal, and fiction duly
emerges a more dignified and vital activity.
How is this nominalist view of fiction reconciled within a view of depiction as
exemplification? 64 If anything the view of depiction as exemplification makes it
clearer that fictive or null depiction functions as a form of self-reference, requiring a
two-way or resemblance relation. In exchanging null denotation for null depiction,
the study exchanges the notion of a null yet converse denotation, for the two-way
63 Goodman, 1976, pp. 21-26.
64 Although Goodman explicitly denies that exemplification may be fictive (Goodman, 1984, p.
60) this is taken here to apply to material exemplification, or exemplification of threedimensional
properties, rather than depictive exemplification.

43
reference of exemplification. The proposed theory therefore allows resemblance for
fictive pictures, but only to sorts of pictures, through effective sample. Depiction
may still be allied to predication. Nominalism is available even in the absence of
denotation. However for ease of exposition the study remains Platonist and talk
henceforth remains of properties rather than predicates.
5. Found Depiction
Natural objects may also exhibit depiction, such as the faces and figures found in
stains on a wall, the moon, clouds or foliage. Their occurrence is generally taken as a
contributing factor, to a greater or lesser extent, in the discovery or invention of
depiction. Wollheim in particular places great emphasis upon them, and upon our
natural ability to ‘see-in’ and find such depictions. 65 Gombrich devotes a chapter to
their ability to provide suggestive ‘schemas’, which our projections can ‘correct’, and
in this way serve as a source of inspiration for artists. 66 Neither view is disputed
here; rather the opportunity is taken to point to something more these objects share
with the perception of two dimensions.
It is an obvious but overlooked quality, and it is not always associated with a
surface. It may arise amongst disparate objects seen in silhouette, or in a space
between the shapes of clouds. What occurs is the perception of a certain irregularity
and complexity of structure that taxes expectations or familiarity with certain
objects or spaces. We are caught up in unexpected detail, and look for a simpler way
of organising it. We see faces and figures because we have the most elaborate and
elastic constructs for these objects, and they are equally mobile or organic objects as
a result. They are wilfully misapplied in such depiction, as an experiment in
obtaining a simpler or more familiar configuration. They need not be illusions. That
depends how wilfully they are misapplied. It is unlikely, or extremely difficult to find
a depiction of a microwave or a lawnmower for example, in stains or clouds,
because our perceptions of these objects lack the elasticity to accommodate enough
variation, and equally difficult to find such depictions in the plain perception of
complex but regular objects such as an air conditioning grill or bookshelf.
65 Wollheim, 1987, pp. 48-51.
66 Gombrich, 1960, pp. 154-169.

44
In explaining how a surface must exemplify two dimensions in order to function as
depiction, the need to ensure that the markings on the surface stand out, or alert us
to their special quality as a surface, has been noted. In fact they function in much
the same way as the examples drawn from nature, in foiling perception of the
picture surface, as other than exemplifying two dimensions. In nature we find
depictions when we cannot find enough that is predictable and simple in our
perceptions, and in culture we find depictions when we learn how to reorganise
surfaces, in special ways.
Conclusion
The proposed theory of depiction now stands consolidated by engagement with five
key issues. The theory takes depth as variously constructed by schemes of
projection and perspective, in projection by angle contrasted with axes of picture
plane, in perspective by angles determined by nominated horizon and vanishing
points. It ranges schemes according to integration of object with picture plane, to
behind or beyond it. Expanding on schemes amounts to expanding on sorts of
objects depicted and presents opportunities for caricature and fiction. Caricature is
taken as in Gombrich and Wollheim, to be a testing of objects and pictures, and as
in Ross, to be a practice that requires neither ready recognition nor resemblance for
the object, nor fixed features to a scheme or style. Caricature is also interesting
because it prompts the issue of expression, and with it draws depiction toward a
theory of art. Similarly, fiction is taken as a further means of construction for
schemes of picture and object, and available to Goodman’s nominalist ontology, by
null-depiction, rather than null-denotation. The issues of distortion and found
depiction here allow us to distinguish between optic conditions and favoured or
available schemes for depiction, their accidental occurrence and frail conformity.
Having established this broader foundation for the proposed theory, it now turns to
five further issues, in expression and style (together), art and its history (together)
interpretation, realism and painting.

45
Expression and Style
The issue of expression arose in considering caricature and the issue of style arose
in Chapter Two concerning classification and practice of exemplification. This
chapter traces important links between the two, looks firstly at their treatment
under Goodman’s theory and shows how depiction taken as exemplification now
requires some further distinction to accommodate expression, but remains
consistent with Goodman’s views on reference and stylistics. The position is then
contrasted with those of Gombrich and Wollheim.
What is expressive and usually amusing in caricature is the latitude or variation
granted the object and its sort of picture. But even caricatures vary in degree of
expressiveness as well as in what is expressed, and expression is not only or even
mostly by caricature. Expression in reference is commonly understood as a matter
of how as opposed to what is stated. Obviously not all reference or statements are
counted equally or especially expressive, rather expression registers only where
means or ends offer surprising or novel variation. What is expressed in a statement
sometimes amounts to the ways it departs from standard accounts, identifies a
novel aspect or point of view to an issue or object. But expression more typically is
a matter of how rather than what is stated, depends upon tone of voice, rhetoric
and other performance in utterance, upon vocabulary and syntax in writing and
especially figures of speech, sometimes upon typeface, layout and design, and in
depiction upon especially materials and technique.
In Languages of Art analysis of expression begins with descriptive notation or writing,
and focuses upon figures of speech, their range of elements or ‘schemata’, their
realm of application and importantly their occasional re-application or transfer of

46
range and or realm. 67 Irony for example is understood as reversed schemata,
whereby range of elements is applied to the same realm in reverse order, so that a
misfortune becomes ‘a fine thing’ or a windfall ‘tough luck’. A similar revision of
range might explain caricature, whereby proportion, modelling, and facial
expression for example, still obtain the same realm but revise ordering of elements.
But Goodman does not suggest this. Where transference is of both range and
realm, figures essentially function as metaphor, but Goodman also demonstrates
that the model of transfer holds for simile, euphemism, personification, synecdoche,
antonomasia, litotes, hyperbole and meiosis, under and over use thereof. Expression
is now seen as relative to familiarity or usage of range or realm for schemata. Talk
of schemata recalls Gombrich’s schema and correction, and Goodman’s discussion
of ‘ping and pong’ in synaesthetic transfers readily acknowledges the precedent. 68
However, Goodman also departs from Gombrich in allowing an intimate relation
between expression and exemplification in depiction.
This now calls for some adjustment to the proposed theory, where depiction is
already taken as a mode of exemplification. It requires a further distinction between
the exemplification of two-dimensionality and three, or what shall now be termed
material exemplification. In Chapter Two it was noted that in exemplifying twodimensionality
a surface was distinctively reconfigured or marked so as to effectively
display the sample, and that the material or three-dimensional aspects to this
reconfiguration in turn may offer additional or attendant sample. Sampling becomes
two-faced or double-edged in this way. It is this distinction between material
exemplification and depiction that now corresponds to Goodman’s discussion of
expression for exemplification and depiction. Material exemplification may offer
literal or metaphorical sample to accompany depiction, which in turn may offer
literal or metaphorical realms, in allegory or realism and blends. However,
Goodman’s emphasis is upon transfer of material samples in expression, such as the
literally grey picture that is metaphorically - expressively - bleak or lonely, (in as
much as it claims a novel but effective realm).
67 Goodman, 1976, pp. 68-84.
68 Ibid. p.76.

47
But the point is also that depiction is often accompanied by the sampling of literal
material properties for themselves, not just of colour or line but also of facture or
technique, size, scale or detail, expense or rarity of materials, framing and even
location (for murals) amongst others, and that any or some contribute to the
meaning of a picture, to how and what a picture samples. Yet to say that a picture
expresses say, a roughness or whiteness, is also to suggest perhaps that it is not itself,
or literally, rough or white. For this reason expression is reserved for transfers of
material samples. Transfers however are not necessarily to emotional realms, to
sadness or joy, say, but as often and also to synaesthetic realms indicated above, to
sounds or tastes, to qualities like slipperiness or bulkiness, even for the literally
small, dry and solid picture. Finally, Goodman has less to say about metaphor within
depiction, of allegorical or personified pictures for example, and whether these
necessarily count as expressive. Although it is clear from the conditions for effective
transfer that where the realm is obvious or familiar, such as in an illustration to The
Pilgrim’s Progress, or of a woman as justice or liberty, that expression and transfer
are less prominent than mere statement. So expression requires prominence or
exemplification of novel transfer, rather than just instantiation, and this holds for
transfer in material exemplification as well, although perhaps less rigorously.
Expression thus expands upon depictive meaning through metaphor and the
proposed distinction here between depictive and material exemplification explains
how meaning is variously combined and subtly interacts. In Chapter One criticism
of Goodman’s example of a picture of a wave by Hokusai corresponding to a
finance graph drew attention to the difference between literal depiction and
expressive qualities attributed to the outline. The relation between them is now clear
and preserves Goodman’s distinctions between meanings, for taking a stricter view
of depiction.
Meaning arises along roughly three routes, through structure, of literal materials,
through sentiment, of metaphor or expressive transfer, and through statement, of
depiction. All and only such reference is taken to constitute stylistic features for a
picture, to locate it according to typical occurrence of such features for a source, as
artist, time, place, school, trend, region, nation or period. Source need not be
supplied by every category for a style and every category need not share a scale for

48
time or place. A source may be as broad as the pre-historic period or as narrow as
the artist’s blue period, as sweeping as western; or European style, through to
national, regional and more local styles.
Furthermore the style or combination of reference features for one source is rarely
the same as those for another, so that for example, school or regional style may
favour structure over statement; or the artist’s individual style favour sentiment over
statement, or various weighting and combinations. Goodman’s views on style are
expanded in Ways of Worldmaking, where style and stylistics are seen as an
indispensable tool to understanding depiction. 69 Art history and criticism are seen as
exchanging ends for means in regard to style. The historian attributes a picture to a
style through document and research while the critic appraises what the picture’s
inclusion means to the style, and the style to the picture, drawing on broader
considerations of biography, politics, geography, economics, psychology, and other
disciplines. Beyond this, interesting and unexpected features are frequently
discovered through mixing styles, even jumbling pictures with other objects and
reference, but this is only to contrast with established styles. Again Goodman urges
that no definitive list of features need be drawn up for a style to be effective; that is
something simply to be worked at and usually grasped without fully analysing its
elements. As with the issue of fiction, the test is rather in our sureness and
understanding of pictures, in our ability to maintain subtle distinctions between
them. We profit from the challenge and find the complex and elusive style
rewarding, the quick and simple mere mannerism. Appreciation of style is an
integral aspect of our sensitivity and understanding of depiction and anticipates the
issue of art.
It is instructive at this point to compare Goodman’s views with those of Gombrich
and Wollheim. Goodman pointedly contrasts his rejection of intention and
synonymy for example, with Gombrich’s views while Wollheim’s later formulations
are equally explicit in their rejection of Goodman. 70 Gombrich takes expression to
be depictive reference to the non-visual senses, or the invisible, to ideas and
69 Goodman, 1978, pp. 23-40.
70 Ibid. 23. The footnote to this page identifies a Gombrich entry in International Encyclopaedia
of the Social Sciences, Vol. 15, p. 353, but the account offered in Gombrich, 1960, pp. 304-329,
serves as the source for discussion here. See also Wollheim, 1987, pp. 25-40.

49
sentiments. It extends his position on depiction in tracing a smooth progression of
‘equivalences’ or a synonymous translation between pictorial features and such nonvisible
objects. But there can be no appeal to an illusion, or a natural perception
with such expression. Instead Gombrich turns to elementary polarities, to Roman
Jakobson’s game of ‘ping’ and ‘pong’ as well as Charles E. Osgood’s semantic
experiments to propose a structure through which to establish synonymy. 71 Such
schema - or schemata - allow a tradition of the plain Doric column contrasted with
the ornate Corinthian column, for example, to express modesty opposed to
extravagance, and later variations to build expression through related motifs, so that
they may then express say, rustic purity versus worldly compromise.
Hence expression in Gombrich’s theory, while similarly suggesting metaphor, is
essentially concerned with allegory and versions of schema, and largely ignores
material exemplification. Expression is again linked to style, in the schema
preserving these traditional polarities and by synonymy of styles. Synonymy takes
styles as versions of a shared object or theme, or draws a hard line between how
and what, manner and matter. Synonymy allows expression to deal with metaphoric
variation to such shared objects or themes, but the formulation is not so much
misguided as stunted. Gombrich’s example of the individual style of John Constable
is telling in this respect. Constable is seen as achieving stylistic distinction in the
pastoral genre, of introducing a certain atmosphere –‘ lights, dews, breezes’ –
previously unavailable, but inserted through a shrewd mixture of rebellion and
compromise. 72 On the one hand it discovers a new perceptual truth, on the other it
no more than refines colour schema for tradition. But the account then struggles
with the success enjoyed by Constable’s sketches, and an argument is made for the
superiority of the finished works, on the basis of their greater adherence to
tradition. Preference for the sketches is dismissed as a superficial indulgence of ‘the
beholder’s share’ or of pandering to mere suggestiveness in perception and
pictures. 73 Yet Gombrich’s whole theory of depiction as illusion rests on just such
suggestiveness. The real issue here is the inability to accept facture or the handling
of materials as expressive features. In fact preference for the sketches rests mainly
71 Osgood et al., The Measurement of Meaning, Urbana, 1957.
72 Gombrich, 1960, pp. 325-326.
73 Earlier, in the chapter ‘The Image in the Clouds’, Gombrich similarly parades his prejudice
against the ‘manieroso’ in painting, finding such suggestiveness only for the informed – “It is
always flattering to feel ‘in the know”, Gombrich, 1960, pp. 166-167.

50
on the perceived expressiveness of the looser handling. Matters as general and
transitory as a breezy atmosphere are not to be caught in a close attention to foliage
or texture, or the careful polish of tonalities, but in a more global impression, and
not just in terms of objects depicted, but also of formal properties of facture and
viscosity of paint, of literal or material sampling. Breeziness in Constable’s manner
of painting helps him sketch breeziness in nature.
The example underlines the problem of style taken as synonymy. Gombrich is
reluctant to accept the sketch because it abandons detail and finish in the interest of
wholistic features, and more generally allows that the objects might have properties
or appearances particular to a style. This weakens the synonymy of pictures to
objects, styles to pictures, expression to styles. The same holds for the view that
Constable’s landscapes restate the pastoral tradition, which in turn restates classical
sentiments of modesty and rustic truth. It is to take a somewhat static view of the
matter. Accepting Constable as part of the pastoral tradition means revising some of
the things that style identifies, so a plea for Constable’s conformity in matters of
finish rather pre-empts the issue, if accommodation is to be a two-way affair.
Gombrich similarly berates Romanticism for its concentration upon novelty and
invention at the expense of tradition, but his stern historian’s focus upon the
constancy of tradition is just as much a mistake. 74 Tradition is traditionally open to
negotiation. The fact is, manner affects matter, how a picture is made affects what a
picture makes, and vice versa. Strict synonymy sells style and expression short.
Expression is not simply what a metaphor transfers from the depicted object, or to
where, nor the right schema for a remote realm, but also in the material sampled
along with depiction, transfers to and from it.
In Painting as an Art, Wollheim proposed not only a theory of pictorial meaning, but
also its development within painting and its status as art. He offered a model of
pictorial meaning developed through a process of ‘thematisation’. 75 This concerns
the agent’s awareness of accidental, unintended, overlooked or ignored aspects
within a pictorial tradition or style and of their referential possibilities. 76 The agent’s
74 . Gombrich, 1960, p. 322.
75 Wollheim, 1987, pp. 19-25.
76 The term agent rather than artist is maintained here as in Wollheim, in deference to his
distinction between artists and other makers of pictures.

51
efforts to harness or incorporate them are termed the thematisation of pictorial
features. This is also taken as a model for the development of individual or personal
style. A personal style is taken as a necessary condition of art. Wollheim’s focus
upon the individual is of a piece with his psychological approach and the role of
intention in establishing pictorial meaning. It is also of a piece with idealism, as shall
be demonstrated.
The familiar objections to intention are met here firstly where the intention is not
taken narrowly, as an explicit statement, but rather as all the thoughts, memories
and feelings that occur during production of a picture, and that ‘cause’ the agent to
depict in a certain way. 77 Secondly, intention is only fulfilled if the spectator is able
to derive this from the experience of looking at the picture – it is not enough, in
other words, to know about the intentions and just to associate them with the
picture. It must be visible in the picture, in a way acceptable to the spectator. The
question is, having met these requirements, are we are still talking about intention?
An intention that is so attenuated as to embrace all thoughts, memories and feelings
that influence or cause the agent to depict in a certain way looks uncomfortably like
mere consciousness. Attempting to demarcate which mental events actually made
and did not make a difference to the picture only begs the question what sort of
difference counts? Different when? How? If the picture looks different as the agent
anticipates dinner, has this advanced the picture? The only way to tell is from the
finished picture, and all that can be told from the finished picture is all that led to its
being finished. There is no separating some moments from the rest in the causal
chain.
Then there is the question of the fulfilment of the intentions, and whether it can,
strictly speaking, still be considered an intention after fulfilment; at which time we
have a deed. Wollheim refers to the fulfilled intention of the agent in a picture as
the description under which the picture is so taken, much as a deed might be taken
as the description under which the agent acted, or the agent’s own description of
the deed. The assumption is that each deed or object may be described in a variety
77 For the ‘formalist’ argument against mere intention see Monroe Beardsley and W.K Wimsatt,
‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review, 54, 1946, pp. 3-23. See also Monroe Beardsley and
Hubert M. Schueller (eds.) Aesthetic Inquiry: Essays in Art criticism and the Philosophy of Art,
Belmont/California, 1967.

52
of ways, and in fact must be further described in some way, to be intelligible, and
that the agent has in mind just the one comprehensive description. In other words
the deed or object in-itself is vague, ineffable or meaningless. Yet the deed or object
under a particular description has a way of extending that description all the way to
the describer, in the quest for further particularity. Ultimately matter is exchanged
for mind. This is the idealist basis to Wollheim’s views, and it underwrites his
commitment to psychology and personal style. Wollheim sees the fulfilled
intentions being modified, and tested by the agent through playing the role of the
spectator, imagining how the picture will be taken and whether the desired
description of the picture can be seen. But if there are roles for what can and cannot
be seen in the picture, then there are rules, and if there are rules then intention is
overruled. When what the agent means only matters when they play by the rules or
roles, then it is the rules we look to for meaning. Wollheim’s formulation is at best a
Pyrrhic victory for intention.
Wollheim’s view of expression, like his view of depiction, draws on the natural
inclinations of the spectator to project onto a suitable surface. His view of
expression is exclusively in terms of emotion, rejecting Gombrich’s examples of
synesthesia, and Goodman’s transfers of literal properties by metaphor. 78 Indeed he
considers at length an interesting objection to the view of expression as metaphor in
relation to emotion. 79 It concerns the transfer of an emotion such as sadness,
through metaphor, to a picture of a landscape, to take the simplest of examples.
The landscape expresses sadness, or is metaphorically a sad landscape. The
objection is that a landscape cannot be sad in the same way a person is sad, unless
the metaphor is of the landscape as a sad person, which is then a different matter.
The sadness must therefore be of an abstracted or idealized kind, in order to
‘double-up’ as Wollheim terms it, for both literal and metaphorical applications.
What is literally sad is a feeling, and what is metaphorically sad is a landscape, but
how is a landscape to be taken as sad, unless as a person? And if both feeling and
landscape are sad in the same sense, are they both then literal or metaphorical?
78 Wollheim, 1987,p. 80.
79 Ibid. pp. 84-85.

53
In reply one might start by citing Goodman’s description of a metaphor as ‘an affair
between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting’. 80 A
metaphor does not always apply smoothly and easily to its object. The idea is to find
or make a way in which they match or make new sense. To apply sadness to a
landscape is to take sadness as a place, for a person, or within a person. The
disjuncture is obvious, yet intriguing. To fret about it’s disembodied or idealistic
nature is to confuse its literal and metaphorical applications, or to look for one
application that holds for both literal and metaphorical instances. What is shared by
literal sadness and metaphorical sadness is not the ultimate in sadness, but a label
and a practice, in one instance applied literally, and in the other literally misapplied.
What rough and ready success this misapplication may have, no more establishes a
transcendent sadness than the strict compliance of further literal applications. A
metaphor makes up sadness, as much as it makes out sadness. It should also be
added that much of Wollheim’s attention to this issue is directed toward defending
the concept of expressive projection, by which a subject projects onto a suitable
scene certain uncomfortable feelings, and in so doing is rid of them. The subject
experiences the scene as sad, for example, although this does not make the subject
feel sad. Just what the subject’s response is to this sudden transformation in
surroundings or picture, coinciding as it does with an abrupt swing in mood, is
unclear, as is the nature of the place or picture prior to projection, and indeed of the
subject’s grasp of such matters.
Yet expressive projection also extends to literal or material properties for a
depiction in Panting as an Art, and may find bodily metaphors, as for example in the
abstract paintings of de Kooning and with at least a nod to the work of Rothko. 81
The theory thus offers a broader range to expression than that of Gombrich, while
at the same time narrowing the realm for metaphor. Apart from this however,
abstraction in Wollheim’s version is dismissed as decorative, and the literal materials
of the picture are denied a stylistic function shorn of psychological metaphor. He
can therefore offer neither a strictly musical metaphor to a painting by Piet
Mondrian for example, as Gombrich does; nor admit to the literal or formal
properties of a print by Josef Albers or Patrick Heron, as Goodman does. 82 Like
80 Goodman, 1976, p. 69.
81 Wollheim, 1987, pp. 348-352.
82 Gombrich, 1960, pp. 311-312, Goodman, 1978, p. 33.

54
Gombrich, his theory sells stylistics short, and is finally less useful in regard to
twentieth century art, a shortcoming noted elsewhere. 83 His account of style and the
concept of thematisation are interesting for the contrast to Gombrich’s version of
making and matching, - Wollheim’s version is pointedly ahistorical and deeply selfabsorbed,
a myth of ‘Ur-painting’ – while the parallels between thematisation and
exemplification are equally intriguing. Thematisation might well be seen as the
transfer of exemplification to a psychological realm.
The comparisons show how traditional concerns with synonymy and intention
variously shape expressive and other stylistic meaning, make for preference amongst
structure, sentiment and statement, priority to certain works and styles. Of course
other stylistic priorities may be derived from synonymy and intention and stylistic
priorities are not only to be derived from synonymy and intention, so the point is
firstly that stylistic resources are wider than allowed by Gombrich or Wollheim and
that other formulations tend to deny some part of stylistic features. It also shows
how a theory of depiction is carried over into issues of art history and criticism. In
laying aside synonymy and intention, Goodman’s theory allows all three levels to
style and so a broader range of meaning and more adequate stylistics, one that
reflects various practices of criticism and history and offers greater integration. 84
This gain however entails other commitments, although these need not be
addressed immediately. Goodman offers no sustained interpretation or history of
art, and it remains to be seen what difference an application of his stylistics makes,
but the theory is clearly drawn to art. Indeed all three theories draw art into
discussion of expression and style, as examples have indicated. Clearly pictures
alone do not constitute art, and expression and style are not sufficient condition,
although the sense is that they advance the cause considerably. The following
chapter duly addresses the issue of depiction and art.
83 Arthur Danto, ‘Art’s Infancy’ in London Review Of Books, 1993, April 22, pp. 17-18.
84 Goodman acknowledges that theory no more than keeps pace with practice in this respect.
Goodman, 1978, p.24.

55
Depiction and Art
Discussion of expression and style has shown how expression broadens meaning
and contributes to categories of style. Yet not all styles are of equal value, not all
pictures have as much or as interesting meaning. Some are claimed as art, most are
not. What further characteristic or condition of pictures qualifies as art? The
traditional answer is beauty or excellence. The picture well made, or the perfect
instance of its kind, squares with our everyday usage and intuitions. But since the
preceding discussion of style assures that pictures come in kinds, there are then as
many versions of beauty as there are styles for depiction. So beauty does not
sufficiently qualify art. The question then becomes which styles are excellent or
beautiful? Less traditionally, the answer is often that the property or predicate is
irreducible to a single or stable essence without compromising its application and
that beauty and excellence simply are what we make of the established collection in
the name of art. 85 The question, more profitably, is how is art used? Or how are
further pictures and styles added to it, and others ignored?
The answer here is sometimes given in terms of institutional influence, or according
to the powers and politics of relevant institutions. 86 Additionally, other answers
stress a vividness or impact upon underlying concerns, with visual perception for
example, as in Gombrich’s theory, or the psychology of personality, as in Wollheim,
85 A key strand to this argument derives from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of a family or
network of resemblances determining ‘essence’ or defining a concept, rather than a single or
unitary chain. See for example Morris Weitz, ‘Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics’ in Language and
Aesthetics, Benjamin R. Tilghman, (ed.) Lawrence, Kansas, 1973.
86 Institutional theories strictly admit all answers that allow art to be derived from its history. The
answer proposed here, takes institutions as those bodies constituting an ‘Artworld’ as variously
proposed by Arthur Danto. See Danto, ‘The Artworld’ in Journal of Philosophy, 61, 1964, p.
580, Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Cambridge, Mass./London, 1981, Danto,
‘The Artworld Revisited: Comedies of Similarity’ in Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in
Post-Historical Perspective, New York, 1992. See also George Dickie, ‘Defining Art’, in
American Philosophical Quarterly, July, 1969, p. 254, Dickie, Aesthetics: an introduction,
Indianapolis, 1971, Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, Ithaca/New York, 1974.

56
or with effective understanding, as in Goodman. Art is thus tethered to wider
issues, shapes and is shaped by them. We look back upon and organise the past with
styles to strengthen our grasp of an issue, as much as we are guided by styles, and
allow them to focus current issues. To say that we merely or meekly inherit styles is
as misleading as to say we reinvent them just as we please. We do both in part, and
art, excellence or beauty in depiction finally lies only in the persistence of the
practice, in more art. Similarly, it is pointless to look to art beyond such issues or in
ideal isolation. The point is rather to show in what ways art may be contrasted with
or distinguished from them. Since this study pursues Goodman’s theory, the aim is
now to show how the proposed theory of depiction distinguishes a mode of
understanding for art, how art maintains a dynamic or economy according to this
understanding, and how, like Gombrich’s theory, it accords a distinctive role to
history.
To begin, it is useful to compare the function of a picture with that of a word, or
between depiction and description. A picture in the proposed view exemplifies two
dimensions, resembles those of objects and their spatial relations. But a picture is
usually a freeze-frame, since schemes for establishing a passage of time within a
single picture are rarely used. A description on the other hand derives from speech
and retains a temporal dimension. Its reference to movement can even instantiate a
causal direction. The apple fell to the ground, follows just such a course and cause.
But this temporal structuring can also be over-selective and misleading. A picture is
worth a thousand words according to some rates of exchange, simply because
giving the right name to an object may in itself need a lot more explaining. For
some people it is quicker to ‘draw a picture’. A picture not only helps us to see a
situation more clearly, by providing more information, but may also provide
unexpected or overlooked aspects as well. In fact we can sometimes see things not
only more fully or clearly, but also quite differently.
In the example (Figure C) the little girl may be described as pointing to a word, a
sound, or a card, as being instructed or instructing. Her expression may be
described as intent, or anxious or bored. She either looks away as she points, or
after, or looks for direction before she points. She is an attentive six year old, the
subject of an experiment in literacy, left handed, a product of the 1960s, of feminine

57
Fig. C
diligence, of English eccentricity, of
winter gloom. All of these
descriptions are supported by the
depiction. What the little girl is
doing is not something ineffable
and beyond words, but rather is
illuminated by them, even as they
disagree 87 .
We understand the picture as
containing not only ambiguities, or
differences of emphasis, but
distinct and contradictory
descriptions: the girl points to the
word cat, or she does not point to
the word cat. But if we allow a description open contradiction, we also
forfeit its coherence, and its point. 88 Instead multiple descriptions or
interpretations allow us to understand what the girl does in relation to the depiction.
The fact that conflicting descriptions share the same picture points not so much to
their inadequacy as descriptions – as not capturing the whole truth – but to a
difference between pictures and words. No matter how elaborate a description
becomes, how many ambiguities it can allow while still avoiding contradiction, it
will still not amount to, or exhaust the meaning of the picture. Any description will
simply make room for others. Quite simply a description cannot contain a
depiction, nor can a depiction confine itself to a single description. This is not
because the visual is non-verbal, on the contrary, as we have seen, the visual may
contain any number of verbal labels, but rather because the visual belongs to a twodimensional
system, with four-directional extension but literally no time, and so no
one place to start or stop a description. Like the earlier example of a map permitting
endless routes between any two or more points, a picture’s names and descriptions
are no more than one route around the object. A depiction contains descriptions for
87 Figure C is reproduced courtesy of The Hulton Getty Picture Collection Limited.
88 This argument derives from Catherine Z. Elgin, ‘What Goodman Leaves Out’, Journal of
Aesthetic Education, Vol 25 No 1 Spring 1991, pp. 89-96. The argument there is for multiple
right interpretations against Wollheim’s proposed one right and deeply ambiguous interpretation.
See Wollheim, ‘The Core of Aesthetics’ in Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol 25 No 1 Spring,
1991, pp. 37-45.

58
the same reason that one direction is contained in four. Whatever label a picture
takes as a starting point, it can only make a map of it rather than a route.
Description is necessarily selective, and to describe a depiction it must offer a
sequence in place of contiguity or translate four directions into one. No matter how
extensive, a route can only run in one direction at a time, and no amount of
extension or detail, allow it to run in four directions at one time, or in one place.
This difference between depiction and description is not so much a source of
antipathy as partnership. There is no point in seeking a rigid demarcation or
pursuing a purely visual realm, in the interests of art or otherwise. Rather the task of
depiction involves co-operation on larger projects, to mutual advantage. The
overlapping and coincidence of description, as noted, are what give a picture its
richness or density of meaning. In this, the study accepts the general drift of
Goodman’s notational formulations. The ease with which a depiction
accommodates descriptions, also allows for the shift between literal and
metaphorical, or expressive meaning. In contrast with any one description, a
depiction offers a way to cluster descriptions, in a way that a simple compilation
into a bigger description cannot. A depiction achieves a fuller, but less focussed
meaning, more is said, but less is stressed. This allows a depiction to complement a
description, by indicating surrounding and non-obvious matters and versions, and
in turn allows a description to single out and give salience to a given depicted
object. This is what pictures are for, and their role suggests a definition for their
excellence, beauty or art.
Excellence lies in the development of more and other densities of meaning. This
arises through the specialisation of uses or diversification of pictures. Greater
degrees of density are achieved in pictures performing more open-ended tasks. The
emergence of such tasks is by and large the history of art, and such tasks are defined
in terms of our understanding or cognition. Here there is also agreement with
Goodman. 89 But understanding in Goodman is taken to be as much sensory and
emotive as considered and conceptual. Putting things into words is not always
possible or necessary, and description is not the only means of interpretation. What
is discovered through art is felt as much in nerves and muscles as minds. It
89 Goodman, 1976, pp. 252-265. See also Goodman, 1984, pp. 135-138.

59
nonetheless urges and thrives on description, and its use through comparison and
experiment with meanings furthers understanding. We have seen that pictures do
this in relation to words, and now it is proposed that art does this in relation to
understanding. The function has so far been identified in terms of the density of
meaning. More particularly, it is achieved through a kind of scouting or exploring of
a domain, a reconnaissance or circumspection. 90 When this function is given
sufficient latitude it permits deeper more circumspect meaning, and may well
become a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It need not be exclusively a matter of
realism or idealism, fact or fiction, impression or expression, the literal or
metaphorical. It is a function established in relation only to understanding and
achieves this end through different means. In description for example, literature
pursues fictive genres and poetic language as a way to expand upon the realms of
description, but may equally augment this with pictures, calligraphic or other design
aspects to text, music, performance, film or video.
Yet a circumspective function for depiction might seem to make classification of
style difficult, if not counter-productive; to only thin the desired density by thus
locating meaning more precisely. Circumspection obviously functions within
constraints in this respect, while at the same time stylistic identities are notoriously
labile and while style tethers meaning to a source, what is thus attributed is far less
clear than to where it is attributed. Meaning remains controversial even where
agreement exists about identity of source, for example to a Michelangelo or the
Italian Renaissance, to a Manet or French Impressionism. But circumspection
functions not only within stylistic constraints but also phases. Even the rough and
ready sortings of style at a certain point, and for some at least, are settled enough to
allow greater circumspection to others. Mostly, new or recent works receive the
bulk of criticism and rely upon older and traditional styles for reference, if not
conformity. Such attention reflects the attraction for beauty renewed or the
challenge of further circumspection. In fact criticism reinforces and to some extent
settles older styles in this way, by ostensibly forging new styles. Revision of older
styles also occurs however, in the recognition of a Vermeer for example in the
90 The term circumspection appeals in part for the role it plays in George A. Kelly’s theory of
psychology. See Kelly, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Vol 1. New York, 1955, pp. 514-
517.

60
nineteenth century, revising in a small way ideas about seventeenth century Dutch
genre painting, or again, in the introduction of Mannerism, revising the transition
from the Renaissance to Baroque. The point is simply that circumspection is
variously maintained by a cycle of focus and dilation, by shifting attention from
some styles or works to others and rebuilding them accordingly.
This is really only to amplify the position taken by Goodman in certain respects.
Goodman advocates cognitive efficiency as a distinctive feature of art, although
supplies only a list of typical symptoms for the requisite density or complexity of
denotation. 91 He also allows that works and styles enjoy a fluctuating standard of
beauty or excellence, or status within art. If cognitive efficiency no longer sounds
much like beauty, it is partly because Goodman applies cognition to far more than
thoughts and conceptual analysis, as indicated, and partly because beauty here is not
always distinct from the flavour of the month or a passing fancy. Goodman takes an
expanded view of cognition, if a somewhat deflated view of beauty. This reflects his
priorities. The emphasis in this aesthetic is less upon canons or rankings, than their
propagation, upon the wider process, and ‘beauty’ in all its phases. Where a work
offers fresh insight into the object and mode of reference used, we experience its
beauty, its tempting challenge to stylistic and other constructs. The challenge allows
us to sense value or potential in the whole of the work. We sense it is full of sense
for us. It is a bit like falling in love. But we tend to get over it. The more we learn
from or use the work, the more we take it for granted, apply it elsewhere and
discover shortcomings.
Goodman acknowledges just this dynamic, ‘A work may be successively offensive,
fascinating, comfortable and boring. These are the vicissitudes of the vehicles and
instruments of knowledge.’ 92 But the lessons learned are not entirely forgotten with
newer interests; rather the interests further the lessons. There is in this respect a
history or tradition to beauty and its persistence fuses the issues of canons and
cognition. In this Goodman perhaps underestimates the problem, when he argues:
To say that a work of art is good or even to say how good it is does not
after all provide much information, does not tell us whether the work is
91 Goodman, 1976, pp. 252-265. See also Goodman, 1984, pp. 135-138.
92 Goodman, 1976, pp. 259.

61
evocative, robust, vibrant, or exquisitely designed, still less what are its
salient specific qualities of colour, shape or sound, moreover, works of art
are not race-horses, and picking a winner is not the primary goal. 93
Granted, picking a winner is not the end of the matter, but picking a winner is
surely a step in the process. To rank a work thus is better seen as an exercise that
singles out the work initially, alerts us to issues or features that now tantalise in
some way. It is to respond to just the dense or circumspective nature of the work
that resists other than a crude pre-emptive judgement. It is quite simply the
experience of beauty at first sight. Yet to say what is good, typically involves
pointing to features in which the work excels. It is to be drawn gradually into saying
how it is good, to further comparisons and tests. It is perhaps to revise the
judgement in disappointment. But either way, what starts out as blind ranking, ends
up as a standard and style, just as what starts out as beauty ends up as a norm. In
short, how good a work is, is part of what the work is, and as such ranking cannot
be divorced from revelation. Yet ranking is plainly not enough, and to be fully
effective as an understanding it must be transformed with time and care into a
broader construction, applied to more works and styles, and assume a place in the
canon.
In characterising art as a mode of understanding or knowledge, Goodman also
undertakes a revision of the distinction between art and science. Both in Languages of
Art and Ways of Worldmaking he argues against the traditional distinctions – between
feeling and fact, intuition and inference, subjectivity and objectivity, truth and
beauty. None are found adequate as a demarcation, science guesses, fancies and
fudges the truth, finds the best fit by adjusting facts as well as framework. Art
arrives at its best fits in matters of composition and resolution through similar trial
and error and both appeal to broader, global considerations of ‘rightness’. 94 The
difference Goodman proposes is between domains of reference. Since
circumspection is here offered as characteristic of art, some further brief
characterisation for science is perhaps appropriate. The function identified here is
one of narrowed focus and sharpened frameworks. Let it be called concentration. If
art wanders and wonders, science seizes and settles. As with art, reference may by a
93 Ibid. pp. 261-262.
94 Goodman, 1976, pp. 261-262. See also Goodman, 1978, pp. 106-7, pp. 138-140.

62
variety of modes. Science too has its samples, imaging, jargon and journals. The
difference is the greater degree and integration of the system. Goodman identifies
digital, articulate and attenuated characteristics in his analysis of denotation, and his
discussion draws heavily upon notions of precision and measurement, and it is not
surprising and wholly convincing that descriptive notation in these terms is strongly
aligned with science. 95
Defining art in contrast with science leads Goodman to briefly reflect on the
historical dimension to art’s cognitive function. 96 Science is no more objective than
art since controversies and arguments rage within each; the prestige of science
theories is subject to fluctuations just as evaluations of art works are. Yet earlier
scientific theories may be rendered obsolete by later ones, and in so far as true, are
recoverable in reverse derivation. Older works of art on the other hand are not, and
are threatened by indifference rather than obsolescence. They continue to function
as art even if unpopular or overlooked, as such are sometimes the source of
inspiration for new works or unexpected departures. The reason for this difference
Goodman can find no space for, but it can be supplied partly in an appeal to the
nature of circumspection and the aim of dense meaning, which permits endless
interpretation, and partly in an appeal to the nature of concentration, and the
function of truth within science systems. Strict derivation itself requires a rigour of
system more available to scientific practice. Art has neither need nor means for it.
The historical dimension introduces a further issue. On the one hand beauty is seen
as transitory, the enthusiasm of the moment, subject to fashion and taste, while on
the other it persists in all works, is in a sense a joy forever. The problem is not just a
work’s shift in ranking, but more interestingly, that a work may shift in rank, but
retain its status as a work of art. A lowered ranking cannot be an expulsion. This is
more a matter of logic than legislation. A ranking is based upon a body of works, or
a canon, and to reduce this body would be to alter the basis upon which the ranking
is made. It would be like sawing off the branch on which one is sitting. So
acceptance as a work of art or inclusion in the canon is a one-way ticket, although
95
Goodman, 1976, pp. 148-164. See also Catherine Z. Elgin, With Reference to Reference,
Indianapolis, 1983, p 120, and Elgin, ‘Relocating Aesthetics: Goodman’s Epistemic Turn’, (pp
180-181), Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 47, 1993, pp. 171-186.
96 Goodman, 1978, pp. 138 – 140. See especially footnote on page 140.

63
seat allocation may vary from time to time. Then again new works are recognised
not only on the strength of novel rankings, but as often according to older ones,
and for this reason art unlike science does not get just better and better, only bigger
and bigger. Similarly, works rejected in such rankings hardly fail as pictures because
of it; rather function within narrower circumspective constraints. Yet rejections may
be reversed in a way acceptances cannot, as where a revision in ranking may allow a
new density to a hitherto rejected work, for example in the appreciation of nonwestern
works at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All this is only
to say that art digresses while science progresses. This difference serves to explain
not only the lack of obsolescence in art, and the transient nature of its beauties, but
its deep affiliation with history.
So far Goodman’s theory of depiction has been traced, amended and pursued to his
view of art. Art is taken as a function of cognitive effectiveness and amended here
with a circumspective role in depiction. The very general terms of cognitive
effectiveness also allow Goodman to consider the function apart from the standard
objects and institutions of art. This is captured in his framing of the question When
Is Art? 97 He resists an exclusively institutional view, and in fact proposes what he
terms the implementation of this cognitive function, above and beyond institutional
practices. 98 Yet as we have seen in matters of style and expression, and now
concerning ranking and canons, the weight of tradition is considerable upon
interpretation and understanding in depiction and art. Whether art’s density or
circumspective meaning is wholly a matter of history or vice versa need detain us no
further than questions of nature versus convention. The point is that this deepening
reliance upon history and its institutions now raises the question of just how this is
undertaken. 99 How is an historical perspective maintained, and what is entailed in a
history of art? The following chapter takes up this issue looking firstly to the
popular model provided by Gombrich.
97 Goodman, 1978,pp. 57-70.
98 Goodman, 1983, p. 145.
99 The question is pursued in Stephanie Ross, ‘On Goodman’s Query’ Southern Journal of
Philosophy, 19, 1981, pp. 375-87. She concludes Goodman’s theory needs an institutional basis,
although does not follow this to an historical method.

64
Art History
As noted, Gombrich’s The Story of Art all but exchanges art for history in excluding a
definition for art, only to introduce depiction and reference as the proper object of
study. It is appropriate to now look a little closer at this history. Treating art simply
as the history of pictures, unfortunately does not give us the whole story on art or
pictures. There are too many pictures for such a history, too much history for such
pictures. Nor can a history get by trading on common usage of art to refer to merely
pictures and at other times as beauty or excellence, and elsewhere as beauty and
excellence only in pictures. The confusion costs pictures. Fine art is a necessary
distinction, or art has a capital A for this reason. However in-keeping with current
practice of abbreviation, it is enough here to no more than register this deep and
mischievous ambiguity.
One does not abandon an essential unpredictability or loss of scope for art, in
appealing to some further concept or framework for definition. In fact there is no
real choice. Firstly, because history must be of something, the surprise and scope of
art are meaningless if unmeasured against something. The question is only to what to
appeal for a broader basis? Secondly, to assume that future works will in some way
surpass whatever concept or definition one cares to propose is in truth to no longer
be in the business of history or art, but prediction. Following Goodman, an appeal
to art’s cognitive efficiency is advocated, and questions of how and when styles
change and variously maintain this efficiency now call for a history and method. By
looking more closely to Gombrich’s example a model is gauged, modifications
suggested
The method to The Story of Art is actually presented in more detail in Art and Illusion,
where it is bound up with a set of principles for pictorial representation and visual

65
perception. 100 The cornerstone to the method is the axiom that ‘making precedes
matching’. This asserts that reference or symbolic relations follow from our
conception of the world, that we make entities, before matching them in tasks of
reference. 101 It may seem an obscure point of metaphysics, but as shall be shown, it
does not remain one. Gombrich is at pains to refute notions of a platonic form or
an a priori concept, guiding making, and argues instead for freely revised or elastic
concepts. He offers the example of building a snowman, in which a man is seen as
literally built of snow, rather than as an effigy or replica. His argument is that the
man of snow is an entity first, and an effigy second. Common sense would tell us
that what we have is firstly and really snow, in the form of a man, rather than firstly
and really, a man, currently taking the form of snow. Or, if we drop the matter of
snow and talk simply of making a human, then precedence of conception or
making, before the matching of parents, looks a little silly.
But since this point is crucial to Gombrich’s method, it is worth dwelling upon a
little. The argument fails because it proposes a resulting concept of a man of snow,
in precisely the same way as it denies a guiding concept of a man in general. The
argument is not strictly coherent. If there is no guiding concept in making, nor can
there be a resulting concept to be matched to anything. This is because an elastic
concept can only expand or contract in relation to some definition. To propose that
we need a man of snow before we can have a concept of a man (or indeed snow) is
to mistake man-ness for man. Some concept of a man, or man-ness, must be taken
as a guiding concept, but this concept need not, and cannot be the platonic form,
but nor need it imply only and always snow. Another way of putting this would be
that snow may improve or alter our concepts of a man, but snow alone does not
make a man. If the notion of replication is inconvenienced by notions of an
antecedent concept of a man and of snow, equally construction is inconvenienced
by the subsequent ‘form’ of the concepts - of a man and of snow. This is, as
Gombrich rightly states, the ‘real’ issue. 102 But Plato is not to be out-manoeuvred
quite so easily. For that we must perhaps trade a dualism of real and ideal or essence
and accident, for a pluralism of worlds and versions. For the moment however it
100 Both in the preface and the concluding ‘Retrospect’, of Art and Illusion, Gombrich declares
the essential unity of approach in the two books. See Gombrich, 1960, p. vii, pp. 330-332.
101 Ibid. p. 80-98.
102 Ibid. p. 85.

66
will suffice to point to the symmetry of the argument, and to conclude that making
does not precede matching. They are neither consecutive nor alternating, but
simultaneous and relative. It is a two-way process, and they are two ways of
describing the same thing. In making an individual we expand our universal, in
matching a universal, we detect an individual. It makes no sense to claim it as a onesided
affair, to insist on a priority, or that it can be wholly arbitrary. The process
cannot be absolute either; no entity is established wholly devoid of, or in complete
possession of, all of its properties, including relations. So there is always more at
stake than an isolated snowman.
The aim here is not simply to rehearse metaphysics however, but rather to reject
the argument Gombrich offers and more especially the ends it serves. These can be
summarised in three points. It is firstly an argument for the development of
reference from contingencies of concept, and their elastic use and custom. But the
priority given to conception is here rejected; and instead reference and conception
are taken to go hand in hand. Symbols are not second in the business of making the
world, but partners. There is no making without matching, nor distinction or
articulation without system and symbol. Even nothing has a name, or is a name for
something. Secondly it is an argument for the primacy of the individual before the
group. One can have some sympathy with Gombrich’s totalitarian anxieties on this
point, but they are unfounded. 103 Equally, one must deny the primacy of the group,
whether material or transcendent. Both identities are elastic, relative and revisable
and one cannot precede the other, or exist in isolation. In the matter of pictures and
styles, no picture precedes a style or exists in isolation. The very term picture already
places it as a certain type or style of artefact.
Thirdly, making and matching underlie Gombrich’s distinction between schema and
correction, and the belief that the artist and work can stand outside of tradition, in
order to identify and correct the rules of a schema, according to the way we ‘really’
see things. But the ‘correction’ a revised schema can make is equally the latitude a
tradition allows. Nor does it make a difference to claim that the ‘discovery’ is
accidental or unintended, or achieved through blind trial and error. If the result is
taken as more realistic or illusionistic, then a scale or set of rules is implied. The
103 Gombrich, 1960, pp. 16-17.

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mistake here is in assuming that even the details of a style – its schemas - present
themselves for scrutiny by the ambitious artist in such a way that would allow the
rules or the conventions to be grasped. For this the tradition must somehow be
frozen for a moment. But there are no such intervals in history. There are no static
schemas, no entire catalogue of instances for the artist to consult. Each instance
revises the nature of the schema, and at any time art has many, if any, competing
schemas and applications. A work’s ‘corrections’ are no more than its connections
to other and older works. Hence schemas do not precede works, anymore than they
proceed by correction. There is no realism for pictures outside of the tradition or
the consensus to which to appeal, and there is no single and fixed form of it within
the tradition, to be refined or distilled.
Gombrich’s historical method in fact provides a story of realism that underlies his
history of art. What is notable about the story is firstly the strength and optimism of
its opening, in which the concept of art (with a capital A) is breezily tossed aside, in
preference and deference to artists, and from where it can trade on art simply
equating with pictures, and the gradual accumulation of realistic features through
schema and correction. This is in stark contrast to the stalled and stumbling ending,
with its fears for the death of art (even in 1950) its grim list of eight factors detailing
where society has failed art, its scant and scattered handling of developments in the
second half of the twentieth century and its general lack of appreciation or
enthusiasm for the achievements there, its indifference now to the artists. It is in all
respects, a sad ending. But one cannot help but reflect on the merits of the
historical method, and to doubt the teller rather than the tale, when he can find no
space for mention or reproduction of a Francis Bacon, a Willem de Kooning, a
Mark Rothko, a Frank Stella, a Jasper Johns, a Robert Rauschenberg, a Andy
Warhol, a Roy Lichtenstein, a Chuck Close, a Larry Poons, a Brice Marden, a Phillip
Guston, a Sol Le Witt, a Gerhard Richter, a Anselm Kieffer, a Julian Schnabel, a
Francesco Clemente, a Jonathan Lasker, a Lari Pittman, anything of the world of
sculpture, of mixed and expanded media and installations, or even of Australian
aboriginal painting. 104 To have lost some through the exigencies of space may be
accepted as unfortunate, (although in a book running at over six hundred pages, one
104 This list is based upon the 16 th edition of The Story of Art, London, 1995, but grudging
acknowledgement of Rauschenburg is found in an earlier essay, see Gombrich, 1982, pp. 31-33.

68
wonders how much pressure can there have been on one or two more pages?) To
have lost most, may be regarded as regrettable, perhaps even rigorous, but to lose
all, as Lady Bracknell might say, rather looks careless. 105 For Gombrich of course
the selection is rigorous and merely excludes ‘specimens of taste and fashion’,
unfortunately it also amounts to a devastating critique of his own taste. 106
Yet Gombrich maintains his method is sound and it is art that has failed history.
But do we have poor art, or do we have a poor art history? The whole point of The
Story of Art is to allow an appreciation of art’s variety, to fail in an appreciation of
the present, is to fail not just art, but also its history, forty years of it, at least. If one
allows perhaps that the method succumbs in the end because there can be no shortterm
history, or a history of the present, and that history requires a longer
perspective, one confronts a different problem. Since Gombrich’s story proposes
that art simply is its history, then if history cannot pursue art to the present it is in
effect to say there is no such thing as contemporary art. If there is no contemporary
art, then can it be that art and its history are at an end? Yet if its history is finally at
an end, then it can at least be defined! This would be cold comfort for aspiring
artists, if it were true, but the fact is art can be defined without the necessity of an
end, and such a definition is precisely what is required to direct an historical enquiry
in the first place.
Gombrich’s story fails in the short term because he can no longer distinguish
between fashions, tastes and traditions, schemers and schemas. Art becomes
increasingly diverse and remote for the historian seeking the self-evident tradition
and the given schema in need of correction. Yet it is not so much that they are no
longer in use but rather that they never really were. Tradition on Gombrich’s terms
is the product of his historical method and story, and is actually as much a
historicist myth as the moods and spirits of the times he regards with some
scepticism. Instead of an idealist myth of grand historical forces, we have a realist
myth of minor and piecemeal insights of an absolute perception. But it too comes at
a price. Firstly it is realism at the cost of art, and secondly it is realism at the cost of
105 There are of course more comprehensive histories of late twentieth century art, although none
so directly concerned with the basis of depiction. Rival versions are considered in the closing
chapters.
106 Gombrich, 1995, p. 7.

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history. It starts as realism as a goal for the correction of schemas or tradition, and
then realism as the measure of expression in schemas. Gombrich allows that the
process is relative, that realism cannot escape a medium and a style, but since
corrections are the name of the game, sooner or later pictures will converge on
realism. The terms vary with the tasks of a time and place, but successive
corrections theoretically ought to accumulate into the one true realism.
Every generation discovered that there were still unsuspected “pockets of
resistance”; strongholds of conventions which made artists apply forms they
had learned rather than paint what they really saw. 107 (My italics)
The problem is not, as Gombrich concludes, that the Impressionists reached the
end of the road, in their translation of supposed light values into colour, but that
pictures keep ditching one schema in order to correct another. The one true realism
keeps cancelling itself out. We can have volume at the cost of movement, light at
the cost of depth, detail at the cost of simplicity, excitement at the cost of
proportion, sentimentality at the cost of sobriety. The relativism and realism of the
story are actually at odds. On the one hand Gombrich allows that there is no
progress in art, since all correction is relative, but on the other, that there are
genuine discoveries such as perspective or the localised colour values achieved by
Constable, and that they represent a real advance for depiction. Something has to
give. When art subsequently does without perspective or Constable’s localised
chromatics or a good deal more, Gombrich can only conclude that it is doing
without realism and that art is so much the worse for it.
Less realism is taken as a measure of more expression. For Gombrich this amounts
to an increasing subjectivity and the twentieth century’s retreat into introspection.
But expression’s correct schema, like realism’s, proves somewhat elusive and
chimerical. For Gombrich it is the quest for just this spectre that charts painting’s
dissolution throughout the twentieth century. 108 But while expression abandons
Expressionism, the more concrete in depiction, and even the standard materials and
techniques of painting, it also adopts geometric rigour, biomorphic forms, novel
and compelling facture or gesture. Reference is never quite abandoned; we never
107 Gombrich, 1995, p. 561 (quoting from Gombrich, 1960, p.330).
108 Much the same verdict is passed in Bell, 1999. Bell readily acknowledges the influence of
Gombrich.

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quite reach nothing, anymore than realism ever quite managed to accumulate
everything under its steady corrections, and for the same reason. Each ‘correction’
or change supplants content, or supplies its own, and the business of reference, of
resemblance – even of illusions - is actually maintained. But for Gombrich the
relativism this implies threatens to unravel the whole basis of the story. The
principle and the precedence of making before matching, of reality before reference,
would then be hopelessly compromised. It is easier in the end to dismiss the whole
period as decadent, superficial, neophyte and self-indulgent. 109
The problem of course is not simply with the ending of The Story of Art, but with the
story itself. To accept that the story is valid up until the twentieth century, for
example, is to merely paper over the cracks. 110 The method does not hold for the
twentieth century, not because the twentieth century is so utterly different, but
because the principle of recognising a tradition in its constituent schemas
disintegrates as it approaches the present, or once the historian is confronted with
precisely the situation proposed for the artist throughout history. If the historian
cannot detect it in the present, armed with a scrutiny of the past, why should one
believe the artist does? Or how is it therefore adequate or acceptable to reconstruct
such situations in the past? 111 The fact is the present has its artists, who are accepted
and recognised, and there is no clear and cataclysmic break between the twentieth
century and the preceding five thousand years or so. It is convenient to see the
twentieth century as utterly different, but it is inconsistent if one is also to claim that
art is an elastic concept, or only a matter of depiction and reference. The problem is
really one of a diminishing hindsight.
At this point one needs to consider how an historical method is to interpret the past
without tripping over its own terms. The problem is how a distinction is to be
109 Gombrich, 1995, pp. 612-618.
110 David Carrier takes this position in his critique of art history narratives. See Carrier,
Artwriting, Amherst/Penn., 1987 and Carrier, Principles Of Art History Writing, Philadelphia,
1991.
111 Gombrich acknowledges the dilemma, in considering the objections raised by Andre Malraux
in Voices Of Silence, (see Gombrich. 1960, p.54) and proposes to overcome it through ‘historical
imagination’ but does not explain how this can identify the differing mental sets, and styles for
pictorial notations, except in relation to their successors, that ‘confirm or deny’ their influence.
His criticism of Malraux’s reluctant historicism is pursued in a later review of Malraux’s The
Metamorphosis of the Gods, reprinted in Gombrich, Reflections on the history of Art, Richard
Woodfield (ed.) Berkeley/London, 1987, pp. 218-220.

71
maintained between method or interpretation and history. Confusion of the two is
considered the folly or fallacy of historicism, but history cannot do without
interpretation, obviously. There is no way to isolate just the facts, and only those
accepted as incontestable, are usually those of least interest. Method clearly makes
interpretation for a history, rather than simply accompanies it. Before proceeding to
an historical method consistent with Goodman’s philosophy, the following chapter
considers interpretation more generally.

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Interpretation
Attention to historical method encounters the problem of historicism, in separating
method from matter. Historicism concerns the circular nature of an interpretation
of the past in terms of the present, and the difficulty of drawing a line between the
two. The tendency is to ascribe to history laws or forces that are really instruments
of method rather than facts of the matter, and to unfairly extend the evidence in
this way. But how or where to draw the line between facts and opinion or theory is
notoriously difficult. It has lead some theorists to radically relax the distinction, to
propose that historical method need do no more than expand upon current social
and cultural concerns, by way of weaving a coherent story from accepted facts, and
to simply repeat the exercise when it no longer satisfies. In short it is a full and
frank admission of historicism, and proposes rather that everything is to be taken
historically or is open to reinterpretation in light of emerging or future facts and
interests. The problem now is not one of reconciling history to the present, but of
simply arguing for one story over another or of accepting multiple stories.
This is broadly speaking, the existential view, that gained currency in the work of
Martin Heidegger and inspired the hermeneutical method of Hans-Georg Gadamer
and others. 112 In hermeneutical interpretation there is no pretence that historical
interpretation establishes ‘the whole and nothing but’ the truth in regard to what
‘really’ happened, or what past intentions may have ‘really’ been. Truth is now taken
as relative to current concerns. The hermeneuticist rather constructs a persuasive
argument, or simply a good story in support of such concerns, through selection of
accepted facts or texts. Citation is then paramount, argument reduced to links from
one text to another. But links often struggle between extending one text and
inviting another, must seesaw between method and matter. Then there is the
112 Martin Heidegger, Being And Time, (1927) Oxford, 1962. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and
Method, London/ New York, 1975.

73
problem that the facts or texts themselves may still be disputed, that varying
interpretations can share nothing, but simply amount to further texts, all trading in
degrees of consensus. 113 For a theorist such as E. D. Hirsch Jnr for example,
intention is an indispensable part of interpretation, but is taken as almost a platonic
ideal, it guides a story, even as it recedes from it. 114
In contrast with the existential immersion in history, structuralism offers a kind of
isolation from it. For the structuralist, the problem is not one of drawing a line
between history and the present, but between history and the field of study. Briefly,
structuralism derives from Ferdinand de Saussure’s studies in linguistics, their
broader application to the social sciences, generally referred to as semiotics, and less
prominently, from group theory in mathematics, and its application to symbolic
studies in the work of Ernst Cassirer, and to physics in the work of Sir Arthur
Eddington. 115 Structuralist analysis is a closed or strict system of elements, uses
functions and rules to explain the production and permutation of an object or issue.
Typically structuralism emphasises synchronic relations between elements, at the
expense of diachronic or historical development. The rules of the system permit
certain changes and these changes simply amount to the object or topic, rather than
requiring history to explain how one arrives at the set of changes or elements. The
problem here is that relations are reductive and tend to subsume variations under a
general rule of change. Structures tend to overwhelm their objects and history.
Structuralism finds application in art history in the work of Louis Marin and Hubert
Damisch for example, and Gombrich’s emphasis upon schema and correction is
sometimes viewed as structuralist. 116 But structuralism is noted here mainly for its
sharp contrast with existential approaches.
Post-structuralist theorists reject the emphasis upon change as a given and the
reductive tendency that ultimately finds all structures an echo of the structure of the
113 For moderate hermeneutic approaches see Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests
Boston, 1971 and more recently, Joseph Margolis, Interpretation Radical but not Unruly,
Berkeley/London, 1995.
114 See for example, E. D. Hirsch Jnr, The Aims of Interpretation, Chicago, 1976.
115 For a general survey and history of structuralism see Peter Caws, Structuralism: The Art of the
Intelligible, Atlantic Highlands, N.J. 1988. Also, Goodman acknowledges the influence of
Cassirer in both Ways of Worldmaking and Languages of Art.
116 See for example, Mitchell, 1994, p. 342.

74
mind, as Claude Levi-Strauss famously speculated (somewhat after Kant). 117 They
draw upon Heidegger, and Nietzsche, and adopt a sweeping relativism of
metaphysics as well as Freudian notions of the Id and Libido in constructing
language and The Subject. For theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
Jean-Francois Lyotard, or Jean Baudrillard no one story or grand narrative will do,
interpretations cannot even argue for common ground, for they pursue knowledge
on different terms. 118 In other words, their relativism rules out any
commensurability or points of agreement between interpretations. Understanding
and knowledge are consequently taken as a matter of influence, of institutions and
power in some versions. 119 For Derrida, the text or work is to be ‘deconstructed’, by
playing upon the ambiguities or ‘differences’ in syntactic construction, and
generating ‘slippages’. Interpretation becomes a kind of whimsical improvisation on
the rules of grammar. Again the results tend to seesaw, now between poetry and
academic discourse. But the radical relativism adopted in many of these theories
draws grave objections concerning a lack of consistency or coherence.
A claim such as Gadamer’s “all knowledge is historically conditioned” is by
definition ahistorical or an open contradiction. 120 To place history outside the rest
of the body of knowledge is only to beg the question how such a statement can
then be claimed, or known? In the case of intention conceived ideally, the question
arises where does the interpreter draw the line? In what ways is the text or style real
or ideal? From where do we start to construct the notional, nominal author’s
intentions? The implied duality brings in its train a distinguished body of
philosophical debate. If grammatical construction is to provide a starting point, then
why are not its constructions also taken to orchestrate ambiguity, or slippage as
well? Poetry would seem to trade precisely in this aspect of language. Fitting
deconstruction to construction in this way begins to look a little too constructive.
Lyotard’s rejection of a ‘metanarrative’ tying together the world then leaves the
117 Levi-Strauss, ‘Reponse a quelques questions’, Esprit, n.s. 11, 1963, pp. 596-627.
118 See for example, Derrida Writing and Difference, (Paris, 1967) Chicago/London, 1978,
Lyotard, The Post Modern Condition, (Paris, 1979) Minnesota, 1984, and Baudrillard, The
Ecstasy of Communication, (Paris, 1984) New York, 1987.
119 For a seminal post-structuralist analysis of power and knowledge see Michel Foucault, The
Archaeology of Knowledge, (Paris, 1969) London, 1972. Foucault is often also taken as a
structuralist, particularly in France.
120 Gadamer, 1975, p. 483.

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constitution of narrative disturbing open; no narrative is then humble or small
enough not to contain others. Similar objections are levelled at Goodman’s
‘constructional’ philosophy, but while Goodman shares many of these convictions
for relativism and pluralism, one of the reasons for adopting his aesthetic is its
ability to meet such objections more successfully than has elsewhere been
demonstrated.
So far this aspect to Goodman’s theory has only been glimpsed in his rejection of
synonymy and intention concerning stylistics. This is a suitable point at which to
appreciate it more fully. Synonymy of styles amounts to versions of a shared
content or object, as ways of depicting the same thing. But reconciling versions thus
also reduces content – takes all differences as only a matter of style. In Goodman’s
view where versions share too little or reduce content too much for ease or
purpose, in finding the common denominator, we do better to treat versions not as
sharing a common content or world, but as simply making different content,
ultimately dealing in different worlds. Then again, when too many worlds make the
going confusing, we do better to find some shared versions and simplify matters.
This is Goodman’s pluralism and it is distinctive for its ‘irrealist’ attitude; that
switches back and forth between versions and worlds. Before considering an
historical method consistent with this view, some measure must be taken of
objections to irrealism. 121
The objection is mainly that two sets of rules or two levels of rule are confused or
inconsistent within the theory, on one level there are rules for relativism of all
terms, while on a second level there is the term of rightness as an absolute,
governing relativism, and holding for all worlds. On one level the theory claims an
incommensurability of worlds, while on a second, it tacitly acknowledges a
commensurate world-scale in rightness, by which worlds are organised and
navigated. If rightness is absolute, then the worlds made are according to one rule,
and amount to one world, if rightness is taken as relative on the other hand, then
there can be no rightness or rule for all worlds, nor reason to advocate them.
121
See for example, Harvey Siegel, Relativism Refuted: A Critique of Contemporary
Epistemological Relativism, Dordecht, 1987, pp. 153-154. See also interesting commentary in
James F. Harris, Against Relativity, La Salle, Illinois, 1992.

76
A short defence is that the objection itself makes the mistake of demanding an
absolute relativism of rightness and pluralism of worlds that makes no sense. To
assume there is rightness beyond worlds is to ask for rightness of nothing. To want
worlds not measured by worlds, or as worlds, is simply not to want worlds. A longer
defence is that Goodman allows that varieties of rightness arise supplementing
truth, in tests for truth, in categories necessary to truth but as often are indifferent
to it and beyond declaration or proposition (and so truth) to fair or right sampling
and depiction. 122 Controversially, Goodman claims that both truth and beauty are
subordinate to rightness or are only some of the ways or parts of rightness that go
to deciding what makes a world. So rightness assumes an unusual prominence in
Goodman’s philosophy, certainly.
The point is to appreciate that versions are right or wrong (even when not
necessarily true or false, beautiful or ugly) in establishing reference to a diverse
world or some world in a diverse universe. Whether one accepts diverse right
versions of a single world or diverse worlds is not that important to irrealism. The
one world common to all right versions reduces itself to nothing; all right worlds
only make some versions of others. Goodman wittily concludes that ‘the
philosopher, like the philanderer, is always finding himself stuck with none or too
many’. 123 The oscillation between versions and worlds equally rejects monism and
dualism. ‘The realist will resist the conclusion that there is no world; the idealist will
resist the conclusion that all conflicting versions describe different worlds.’ 124
Irrealist pluralism is thus effectively constrained by nihilism and requires no
conflicting or double standard.
To return to the issue of interpretation, it might seem the pluralist is content to
accept all interpretation as simply describing different works in different worlds,
that there can be no right or wrong interpretation. For the irrealist this is not the
case. Interpretations share an identified work or object, are right in so far as validly
derived from identification or the facts of the matter, are necessarily plural in
disputing implications for a given identity. In this regard pluralism of interpretation
is obviously less controversial than pluralism of worlds. It is commonplace, after all,
122 Goodman, 1978, pp. 109-140.
123 Ibid. p.119.
124 Ibid.

77
to accept that interpretations are necessarily various. Wrong interpretation may
incorrectly identify a work or object, or falsely derive implications. For example
Michelangelo’s David may be interpreted as a giant nudist bully, but the
interpretation is wrong because scale and the biblical character of David are
misidentified, and custom of undress does not follow from Old Testament Judah
and Israel. 125 If right, the interpretation is not of David, if of David, the
interpretation is wrong. In accepting that many interpretations may be right, the
irrealist does not accept that any and every interpretation is right, or that rightness
imposes no criteria for interpretation. Plural right interpretation also complements
the proposed theory of art, where circumspective meaning requires just this
diversity. To simply allow each interpretation a separate work, would defeat the
purpose of art; reduce interpretation to identification.
Yet plural right interpretation is not quite trivial either. Right interpretations trace
broader implications for work or object in a variety of directions, and if implications
are valid then are counted as right but do not necessarily agree with each other or
add up to the one big right interpretation. Michelangelo’s David may rightly be
interpreted as a) a personification of the civic spirit of Florence, b) a revival of
classical heroism, c) an ideal male physique, d) a subversion of Christian piety and
modesty, for example. Yet Florence is hardly personified by an ideal male physique
or subversion of Christian principles; a classical hero surely deserves an ideal
physique, but is uncomfortable personifying a devoutly Christian city, the ideal
physique is compromised by the tasks of a teenage shepherd and the skills of a
slingshot. Combined, all look variously wrong although are only one such
combination in any case, while each alone seems right up to a point. Some combine
certainly, might usefully simplify the clutch of interpretations, some compromise
may allow others combination, then again the cost of compromise may rob
interpretations of too much; mean less, if more consistently. So the irrealist, as
indicated, juggles too many against too few in preserving rightness.
125 Actually, the relevant Biblical text (1 Samuel 17) mentions David’s possession of a cloak and
pouch at least, in which he carries five smooth stones for his slingshot, after discarding the
armour and weapons offered by King Saul. The all-nude combat stance perhaps owes more to
Greek traditions, taken up below, but neither source sanctions codes of undress for casual
intimidation.

78
Also, plural right interpretation does more than maintain a singular identification at
its source. Identity is as much decided by rival interpretation as decides them. The
irrealist thus uses methods to make matter, adjusts each for rightness. Beyond this,
irrealism makes no conditions for any one right history. Still, the historian is
perhaps confronted with a different set of priorities for ‘what really happened’
where a) many versions are equally right but b) wrong versions are still to be
avoided and while c) better versions are still to be had, even though d) there is no
best version (or none is better than all). Not all or any right versions will do. Only
the most comprehensive or efficient are preferred, yet some right implications do
not easily combine with others, lessen effectiveness in so doing. The irrealist
historian is torn between methods, must balance improvement of past versions
against introduction of merely different versions. The irrealist historian’s method -
in as much as it allows just one – trades between better and different versions.
Art historical interpretation comes with more baggage. The artwork is not only
identified by a source but also style. Stylistics rests upon a theory of reference and
the irrealist art historian here appeals to a taxonomy of exemplification. Such
structure obviously suggests structuralism in its fixed or absolute terms yet the
structure here does not subsume too great a variety of features or applications
under a general rule, nor eliminates diachronic differences in favour of synchronic
ones. On the contrary, stylistics here has drawn further distinctions between the
expressive and the stated, the literal and metaphorical, depictive and material
exemplification. Breadth and nuance of meaning only gain from this stylistic
structure. Diachronic or historical change is gauged by variations on these routes of
reference, on what history does with them, rather than what it does to them. For, to
historicize them thus would be to rob art history of any stable measure or meaning,
to fall into an absolute historicism that, as indicated earlier, is not strictly coherent.
An art historical method thus emerges for irrealism. Contrasts with other radical
approaches to interpretation have pointed to dangers in too much relativism or the
folly of absolute relativism. The study now compares an irrealist approach with that
of a realist, in the following chapter looks at what story or stories of art an irrealist
might tell.

79
Realisms
In Chapter Six The Story of Art was considered as a realist history and to have
suffered in its account of later twentieth century art, largely as a consequence of its
method. This now provides a convenient comparison. Earlier, the exchange
between Gombrich and Goodman was noted, concerning the issue of nature versus
convention in which Goodman urged further relativism to Gombrich’s views. 126 In
fact Goodman’s approval of Gombrich’s work registers in a number of his
books. 127 The suggestion here is really to implement the kind of relativism
Goodman advocated and Gombrich tentatively supported, and from which an
account of later twentieth century art in particular may benefit.
The preceding chapter has shown how pluralism of interpretation is distinct from
metaphysical pluralism of worlds. Similarly, realism may be limited to matters of
style, taken as plural or realisms, without implying metaphysical pluralism. 128 For
Goodman, stylistic realisms arise in three ways, in ease of use, through habit or
preference, in novelty or revelation, and in the factual contrasted with the
fictional. 129 Realism is thus relative to scheme or style of depiction, to object and
system, rather than optics or illusion. Objections may run that the comfortable or
preferred are not always realistic. Standard line illustrations for scientific or
educational use tend to typify and simplify object, exclude the particular, incidental
and so some realism. Then again, photographs used for personal identification, on
files and passports for example, are almost never preferred by or comfortable for at
least the bearer, and remote and strange objects such as the surface of the moon or
Mars often prompt surprising scale and depth ambiguities, even in the most detailed
126 Gombrich, 1982, p.284.
127 Goodman 1976, Goodman, 1978, Goodman, 1984 and Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions In
Philosophy, London, 1988.
128 The distinction between metaphysical and stylistic realism adopted here is made in Elgin,
‘What Goodman Leaves Out’ Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 25, No 1, Spring, 1991, pp.
89-95.
129 Goodman, 1984, pp. 126-130.

80
and ‘realistic’ of photographs. But in any case, to claim novelty as immediately or
ultimately a matter of realism is also to succumb to the aesthetic of the realist.
The so-called realism of a Caravaggio or a Courbet for example, was greeted as a
revolt in standards of person and theme or iconography. It was not a revelation
how much more realistically persons were depicted, but that such flawed or humble
people were depicted in or with such controversial roles or attitudes. Such people
were hardly a revelation and realism is not to be confused with mere poverty or
modesty. The chiaroscuro of Caravaggio or the coarse facture of Courbet may gain
in expressive range for the exercise but neither contributes to nor originates from
mere realism or lowliness. Much the same holds for the reception of Impressionism,
which was no more understood immediately than as only a more realistic approach
to light values or Parisian pastimes, which were then hardly taken as more realistic
than other kinds. Equally, the contemporaneous adoption of ‘oriental’ spatial
schemes (oblique or parallel oblique projections) and striking asymmetrical framing
or composition, while refreshing, hardly replaced just perspectives, or just replaced
anything for very long. Even the work of Michelangelo remained deeply
controversial in his day, not because of newly acquired accuracy in musculature, but
because of his fixation on a supposed ideal nude at the expense of sacred themes
and sentiment. Realism and revelation had very little to do with it. Then again, the
striking realism of a Vermeer, in integration of tonal values for surface or texture in
perspective, and something akin to a photographic depth of focus, went unnoticed
in his lifetime and for some considerable time thereafter. Moreover, the proposed
theory of art as dense or circumspective meaning argues against just this easy
recognition or decisive revelation and is at least as much supported by history on
this score as realist accounts. So novelty has no more to do with realism than
idealism, as much to do with confusion and challenge as revelation.
Yet Goodman is surely right that either the old or new may be accorded more
realistic, the factual or fictional realistic or not and that the routes of realism are
many and varied. But in as much as realism is recognised as a relation of scheme to
object and system, some further explanation is perhaps owed. Derivation is
suggested. In Chapter Five the difference between art and science was touched
upon. Art organises works by styles and while older works cannot be conversely

81
derived from later ones in the way that improvement in scientific theories
accommodates – in so far as theories are true – nevertheless, some derivations for
schemes or styles, objects and themes are traced, often to distinguish new ones, and
amount in fact to the measures of realism. To the extent that a scheme or style
contains another, may conversely derive a lesser one from its elements, a scheme is
more realistic. Or, where a scheme contains others but is not contained by them, it
is realistic. The commonsense appeal to realism in depiction comes to just this.
A simple line illustration may be taken as less realistic than one equal in all other
respects but including tonal values (that is, values of light); greater range of tonal
values allows more realism, while colour in greater range improves on tone and line.
In as much as object permits this expansion of scheme or scheme admits this
expansion of object, the fuller colour scheme is the more realistic, allows converse
derivation of tone and line; cannot be derived from them. A similar argument may
be made for the converse derivation of projections from perspective, along the lines
indicated in chapter three, and thus for the greater realism of perspective. Where
successive schemes add to information of the same object, realism amounts to a
measure of greater information or accuracy for object. Gombrich argues against
truth assigned to depiction generally, only to concede that portraiture of person or
place is correct (or true) where scheme correctly understood provides ‘no false
information’. 130 Realism as a measure of accuracy is confidently rejected by
Goodman with the example of two pictures of supposed equal information, one of
reversed perspective and colour, the other normal and so more realistic by
familiarity or ease of information rather than accuracy. 131 But again, the hypothetical
comparison bears closer scrutiny.
To introduce a scheme of colour and perspective reversal is also to stress a new
alignment of the two. The reversal of one does not follow from the reversal of the
other. The scheme therefore draws attention to unusual alignments of shape and
distance to colour, is difficult to understand not just because of rarity of scheme,
but because other information to the normal scheme is ignored or concealed in the
reversal. For example treatment of surfaces, textures or contour (sharp or soft) even
130 Gombrich, 1960, p. 78.
131 Goodman, 1976, pp. 35-36.

82
tonal contrasts for a given part or object, are confused in colour and perspective
reversal and crucial symmetries and other alignments to vanishing points are
replaced. 132 So an appeal to the same information between schemes does not quite
hold, although information in the reversed scheme is nonetheless accurate, and in as
much as object is actual or factual, both schemes are realistic. In as much as aspects
revealed in the reversed scheme are at the expense of more or more useful aspects
in the normal scheme, the reversed scheme is less realistic. To argue that familiarity
with the reversed scheme can accommodate the lost or concealed information can
as easily argue that the normal scheme will no longer then offer this information
(would strictly, no longer be the normal scheme) but rather, an equally confusing
contrast, or for simply a reversal of information from respective schemes or of just
names for schemes. Difference between schemes maintains difference in
information.
However the illustration also shows that accuracy of object now depends on more
than one scheme, accuracy of scheme depend either on versions of object or
different objects. Realism of scheme cannot thus be measured along a single
derivation. Realism and derivation for scheme and object are multiple, allow
conflicting schemes for the same object, (as in the normal and reversed examples)
or versions of the same object for the same scheme (say, colour and perspective
alignment). In so far as derivation is maintained for scheme and object, realism
obtains. But as such, realism now becomes necessary yet antithetical to art; faces
science and stricter uses as easily as the more circumspect and looser organisation
of art. Realism, in so far as it is consistent in derivation, supplies the bottom line for
art. 133 Yet information preserved or extended between schemes or styles cannot be
complete anymore than synonymy may be absolute. Moreover, information derived
between styles still confronts the difference between fact and fiction, sense and
132 Similar if simpler reversals obtained either by mirrors or mere inversions of pictures are a
common source of comparison for painters, as a way of detecting subtle imbalances or
discrepancies to a painting, either in traditional genres, especially portraiture, as well as in
abstract work. The abstract works of De Kooning for example were made by working the
painting from all four sides and corners, usually when upright, in order to take into account just
these differences to the information or composition. The familiar practice of backing away,
squinting with tilted head is another way of making similar comparisons.
133 Under this formulation the line between science and art obviously blurs somewhat, according
to strictness and range of derivation for depiction, but does not disturb the basic distinction
between digression and progression, indeed better explains the shifts in status of say, antiquated
medical or engineering illustrations, where improvements to accuracy may allow new
appreciation of the (now less realistic) scheme.

83
nonsense and begs questions of the difference between fact and category. Pictures
of unicorns and Homer Simpson or any young woman and a typical tiger may be
realistic as pictures but not as information, as often are neither, or unrealistic as
pictures but realistic as information. Derivation to and from fictive and class terms
is thus also required of realism, and the irrealist here appeals to Goodman’s
nominalism. 134
Very briefly, class and fictive pictures do not depict universal and fictitious objects.
As indicated in Chapter Three, they actually depict only a sort of picture, and serve
to collect or sort pictures of actual objects, or individuals, so that any such
collection contains a unique ordering of individuals, is an ‘individual’ collection,
identified by just one and the same name. Goodman’s nominalist construction thus
builds only with individuals, only to individuals. Class and fictive pictures basically
point to such sortings. The difference between class and fictive pictures lies in the
truth or accuracy of the sorting. The typical tiger preserves just key features to all
pictures of (actual) tigers, is at least ‘nothing but the truth’ in sorting relevant
schemes and object. The unicorn on the other hand is literally false as a sorting of
schemes for horses and horns, although may highlight the realistic scheme in
interesting ways in so doing; offer striking (and true or right) metaphor for
mutation, anomaly or the unexpected. Sorts of pictures, factual and fictive, denoted
by hyphenation as ‘tiger-pictures’ or ‘unicorn-pictures’ for example, thus shape the
organisation of pictures, their objects and realism. Realism (and idealism) of scheme
is tested or tempered by the fictive, while effective factual sorting extends actual
object. Realism thus derives from both under this nominalist ontology, but again by
no single or fixed route.
Realism, in short, might be called a style with too many variations; conversely, a
style, variation with not enough realism. How many realisms to rightly allow among
styles, like how many styles to allow an art history, or indeed how much history to
allow styles or realisms, depends upon a theory of depiction, given styles and how
the history is focussed or framed. No history accommodates all styles; some styles
exclude others. Period styles do not apply everywhere nor regional or national styles
134 A full nominalist treatment for depiction, maintaining individuality to construction, is the
work of another study. For details see Goodman, 1976, pp. 21-26, and Goodman, 1984, pp. 48-
53.

84
hold for all periods, and while personal styles are more consistent in this respect,
subdivisions similarly compete for works, between an artist’s early, middle and late
styles, their Paris, Munich and Rome styles, their mad, bad and sad styles, for
example. Moreover, any history of a given style rarely includes its entire works, and
any given work is usually grasped by a variety of styles. So history must settle for
some styles, some works; trace realism between them to more or less, and to more
or less realism. Choice of historical frame may be as much determined by
prominence of styles or realisms, as determine them.
An irrealist duly allows multiple right art histories; may either improve upon some,
in right grasp of stylistics, accuracy of source, reach of styles, or diverge from them,
where other works and styles are rightly included, and so amount to a different
rather than better history. Either way, art history is served by a version that is right
in construction, true to facts for source. This mix and match of realism and style
also suggests a model for the procedure of the artist, in contrast with Gombrich’s
make and match. And in just this, the difference may not seem to amount to very
much: between the artist correcting a style and the artist connecting styles. One
corrects realism; the other connects versions. The difference however, is more
pronounced firstly in the attitude of this undertaking. For Gombrich, the activity is
a fairly clear cut case of problem solving, of preferably a commission, or at least an
intention, obvious and available schema, and test results gauged by potent illusion.
For Goodman, grasp of style is much less clear cut; is more a matter of practice and
feedback, as with the acquisition of language, the artist duly plays by feel, draws on
any number of schemas or features for the right circumspection.
The difference grows with the priority the problem solver must assign synonymy of
object or content. Style then becomes just ways of showing the same thing. The
same thing accurately added to or improved becomes the real thing and the
problem solver allows perspective, tonal and colour accuracies to make more
realism, to match principles of visual perception and cast rivals as mere versions, as
ideal or subjective, expressive or decorative. Yet what can be made or matched is
actually severely constrained by a single synonymy. Improvements in the ways of
showing the same thing have a way of turning into ways of showing different

85
things, or the expressive as subjective, emotive or decorative is soon overdone or
wrong. The problem solver cannot then quite find the problem much less solve it.
The player, by contrast, has more options. Styles need not share the same object or
content, depicted objects may be native to a style, so that style then starts from
mere ‘statement’. Expression is not necessarily sentiment or subjective, real or ideal,
while the literal structure of a depiction, the facture, texture and material sample
may be meaningful even though obviously not stating an object or expressing
anything other than itself. The player is interested in a right version rather than a
‘realistic’ one – in additional conditions to the realistic or idealistic, the expressive or
stated, objective or subjective, and these rest with the routes of reference rather
than the laws of optics. The difference is now considerable. Realism for the player is
really a function of the organisation of styles within routes of reference, and is duly
multiple and mobile. To re-phrase Gombrich - there really is no such thing as
realism; there are only realisms.
A useful contrast is suggested by Gombrich’s treatment of the work of Pollock.
Pollock’s distinctive abstractions are taken as ‘the sheer handling of paint regardless
of any ulterior motive or purpose’. 135 But this is decidedly at odds with the
interpretation of Pollock’s work at the time and since. In the case of the example
provided in the Story of Art, titled Number 31 (1950) such work is generally
understood as offering both literal and metaphorical meaning, of expressing
violence, freedom and improvisation, as well as being literally a uniform field,
sustained on an imposing scale, rigorously achieved through the novel technique of
dripping or flicking of industrial enamels. 136 As noted, Gombrich resists meaning to
materials and technique as augmentation of depiction, ostensibly as a consequence
of his commitment to principles of visual perception, even when here, clearly an
accepted interpretation. 137 But such literal sampling also constitutes realism, and
properties sampled in abstraction equally allow and rely upon derivation, upon
135 Gombrich, 1995, p. 602.
136 The work is lavishly reproduced in the sixteenth edition of The Story of Art, (1995) even by its
own impressive standards, in a double gatefold, all the more curious for the stark interpretation
that accompanies it. See Gombrich, 1995, p. 603.
137 For standard interpretation of Pollock, see Claude Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock: Meaning and
Significance, New York, 1992. William C. Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America
Cambridge/Mass./London, 1983, Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism: The Triumph of
American Painting, New York/London/Washington, 1970.

86
precedents and versions. Whether we accept that dripping sets new standards in
application of paint, or exemplifies a profound and ‘real’ quality of paint and
painting, depends how it is seen contributing to matters of field composition,
freedom, improvisation, scale and so forth. In other words it is a question of
rightness of mix in derived realisms.
Pollock’s dense, uniform compositions or ‘fields’ thus stand in comparison with
those of Mirō, Masson and Tobey for example, but reject biomorphic shapes,
intimacy of scale and a more unitary structure. His work equally compares with the
spontaneous and gestural approaches of early Kandinsky, later Klee and
contemporaries such as de Kooning, Still or Hoffman but rejects brushstroke and
drawing by standard or mere easel-scale means, and more discrete composition.
Further derivation arises among the characteristic large-scale work of the New York
School, and Pollock’s distinctive approach of an unstretched canvas laid upon the
floor, and worked from all four sides, contrasts with for example, the work at this
time of Newman, Rothko or Kline. Indeed even dripping has its precedents and
parallels but the point here is just that it is a mix and match of styles; that derivation
is necessarily in a variety of directions and not from any single version of
abstraction, or an obvious schema, and that as many are pursued as scope of study
allows.
It is Pollock’s work that connects these features, or in effect makes them into a
single schema. Without his work or preceding it, they share no compelling link.
They are not the only versions of abstraction available, nor are they necessarily the
most prominent or accepted. Abstraction therefore also comes in many, if any, right
versions. With Pollock’s work, meaning changes for such features by his
combination or connection. The work recasts surrounding styles of abstraction,
draws attention to surprising links, to realisms for materials as noted, and so places
itself at the centre of this arrangement for a moment; becomes its fullest expression
or the most complete of such works. Whether these derivations or influences are
the only or most accurate ones for Pollock is of course, a matter of interpretation.
But there is no way to admit all of Pollock’s influences; historical derivation is not
absolute. To insist that influences must only be direct for example or only those

87
that the artist acknowledged or demonstrably had knowledge of, is of course also to
limit the influence of remaining influences, to deny that some lead to others. The
‘direct’ influence rules out other than manifest replication by this route, and the
whole point of influence. Then again, not all influences are as interesting or
important as others. Derived features are interesting in proportion to their source,
to preceding and prevailing values within a stylistic framework, but the historian
cannot look for or find just any influence or derivation within a given framework.
Equally, the historian cannot accept any feature as somehow derived from an
accepted style or work, either. No style can be so porous as to absorb all and any
features of a work, nor so potent as to project all and any features to works.
Derivation must therefore balance the direct against the indirect, the meaningful, if
more far-fetched, against the less meaningful, but strictly measured. Practice
generally involves a two-way adjustment, some derivations reform style; others
adjust work or source. To the extent that works or sources enlarge the stylistic
framework while coherence is maintained, the exercise counts as successful.
All the same, there is a fundamental difference between the historian committed to
styles before works, and works before styles. The first allows style generous
extension, embraces works and a broader source by more indirect derivation, or
spirit. Interpretation is for a time or place, personality or people, culture, economy,
ideology or faith for example, and sorts works ‘top down’. The second allows style
much less latitude, demands more direct derivation and priority to material
differences for works, interprets by intrinsic or formal means, and builds styles
‘bottom up’. Of course it is rare to find an historian wholly committed to just one
or the other, but plain to see how easy it is to lean one way or the other, and why
Goodman’s irrealism, supported by a view of depiction as exemplification, might be
bracketed with Gombrich’s schema and correction. But the irrealist here is not
necessarily or only the formalist, and while the study argues for the replacement of
Gombrich’s schemas with sampling, irrealism equally supports spirits to styles, for
the idealist or ideologue, asks only that they identify consistent stylistic features,
although perhaps would only feel right allowing enough to cancel out each others’
magic. The point thus remains that one is never enough; that when or where
schemas or spirits are taken depends upon the stylistic frame.

88
To return to the example of Pollock, it is scarcely conceivable to offer a history of
abstraction in painting without granting Pollock prominence, and what margin for
interpretation this allows is all the more tantalising for this entrenchment. The more
versions offered on Pollock, the more latitude they gradually win. Pollock becomes
more entrenched, although his standing may yet be diminished in further versions.
For example, one might then accept that Pollock must be included in some way, if
not quite as big a way. But with this, Pollock then ceases to be such an enticing
target. Conversely, such proliferation of versions permits other work or styles to be
included. Distribution of versions thus gradually shifts the focus of art history, and
distribution and focus of versions may thus enter the irrealist’s calculations of
rightness here. The irrealist here acknowledges not only multiple right versions for
art history, but to some extent where they are too many or too few. In this, method
and story are again some distance from The Story of Art, schema and correction.
A story of art nevertheless emerges, grants that some styles gain prominence, are
influenced by preceding ones, variously influence others. An irrealist art history, as
the name suggests, does not quite ignore realism but rather allows that this collects
and connects styles, is traced in various directions and tailors numbers to the scope
or frame of a history. This historical method will presently be tested against painting
in the second half of the twentieth century. However painting and period present
special issues and attention must next be given to painting and the materials of
depiction. Just as irrealism allows realisms to styles, pluralism is also extended to
materials and the practices of painting.

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Painting
Discussion of depiction has encountered painting in relation to material
exemplification, and it should be clear at this point that material is not limited to
painting and that material sampled interacts with depiction and combines as
reference. What is not yet clear is why painting should enjoy such prominence as
depiction and prestige in art. Or, put another way, why depiction especially needs
painting? In addressing these questions, a number of preceding issues are drawn
together and lead to an extended critique of some formalist art criticism. The
chapter is somewhat longer for this, but sheds light on how versions of painting
influence the study of recent art history, and so ushers in the second part of the
study.
The proposed theory of depiction allows that two sampling schemes interact;
depiction classifies its object, or alerts us to two-dimensional properties of the
depicted object, the object classed in turn alerts us to other properties of the
material used in depiction. One scheme deals in two-dimensionality the other in
three. Where art is concerned, a premium is placed on the density or circumspection
of meaning. The emphasis is upon depiction that resists ready and regular classing
and pursues subtle and complex differences of scheme and object. Requirements of
materials in art are thus for an optimum versatility in engaging and transforming
schemes. 138 In one sense art establishes an innovative impetus, and materials must
be open-ended for experiment. In another sense the requirements must ensure a
stability or continuity of scheme. The objective after all, is to maintain
circumspection of meaning rather than dissolve it. The requirement thus balances
innovation against continuity.
138 Clearly this resembles Goodman’s symptom of repleteness of depictive syntax, although here
divorced from a notational framework, but affirmed as a distinctive symptom for depiction as art.
For repleteness see Goodman, 1976, pp. 225-232 and Goodman, 1984, pp. 135-138.

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But versatility also arises through variety of object, through fictive and class terms.
Where versions of object are no longer shared between schemes, but rather become
native to them or scheme-dependent, materials are also drawn into a radical
diversity. Not all schemes use the same qualities of paint in the same ways, its glazes
or thinning agents, its thickening agents, viscosity and body, range of colour, drying
times, permanence and finish, and related means of application, all variously allow
some schemes and deny others. Not all paint or process thus find or make the same
objects or for the same schemes. Pluralism is extended to materials and process in
this way. Yet painting is confidently regarded as the principal material for depiction
in art, is often taken as only a synonym for either or both. In what sense then does
painting meet these diverse requirements yet remain one and the same practice?
Painting in this respect is more usefully contrasted with printing. The distinction
firstly lies between the work of sole instance and the work of multiple instances. 139
The work that has only one instance obviously measures scheme or schemes against
other works rather than instances, conforms or deviates in an infinite grading of
ways. Such work might combine, size, location, surface and other properties that
resist efficient print duplication. A print measures scheme between instances or as
efficient duplication. But a painting or other work of sole instance must measure
only between works, and so engages a wider, more versatile scheme. 140 Scheme is
stretched by works of minimal instance to optimal diversity, stresses the subtle and
vital nature of style and promotes more circumspect meaning. In this sense the
work of sole instance is especially averse to realism and stricter derivation. This is
not to say that painting is incapable of realism of course, or that prints are
necessarily more realistic or of less value as art. Rather, it points only to the
advantage of the work of sole instance in this respect, and to the acknowledged preeminence
of painting over prints in art.
139 This distinction is observed in part by Goodman in a more general discussion of forgery, as
between the autographic, where identity is determined by history of production, and the
allographic, where identity is determined by system of notation. See Goodman, 1976, pp. 113-
122. But both painting and prints count as autographic on this score, and the distinction here is
more narrowly between schemes for sole and multiple instances of a work.
140 The painting that copies a painting clearly duplicates yet is not a print or instance of the
copied painting. The painted copy remains tied to a scheme of sole instance for a work; is usually
a dull, minor or irritating instance of the scheme and as such is generally disparaged. Forgeries
trade on a confusion of identity. More distinct variation in ‘copying’ is a traditional source of
inspiration.

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A print usually confines versatility to schemes of strict or efficient duplication,
measures them both against instances of a given work and works as other instances
of scheme, easing the task of each. Depictive scheme is more efficient for more
instances to a given work and so scheme, allows work more widespread use and
derivation. Again, this is not to say that a print of a unicorn is more realistic than a
painting of one, obviously, but that depictive scheme for the print is more
streamlined for dedication to duplication, delivers the same facts or fictions for
every instance and grants work and scheme a stricter derivation. Interestingly, where
prints are often more prized as art, is where qualities of material or process allow
greater variation to a given number, impression or edition of work, as in etchings,
engravings, wood or lino cuts, for example. On the other hand, advances in
photography, lithography or graphics software allow duplication in new and more
flexible ways but cannot equal or obviate the options available to the work of sole
instance. Duplication in terms of impressive densities of tone screen or pixels still
imposes a scheme for duplication, still extends instances for a work; tightens
scheme and derivation.
But the virtues of conformity and sheer quantity have their uses, indeed realisms.
They not only ensure facts for a world, but also may sample and express their
prominence in this. This is really to say only that the printed depiction often enjoys
the same prestige as the printed word, but allows at least to more accurately point to
the source of this authority or ‘aura’: to material exemplification. 141 Photographs in
particular are taken to be more realistic or authentic as depictions for being in this
way a stricter form of print, and whether the depicting surface is the glossy or
textured card of a family snapshot, or the crude tone screens used for newspapers
and pamphlets, such qualities often come to exemplify a conformity and integrity to
given schemes that prompt faith in further and familiar objects.
On the other hand photography’s profusion of applications and efficiency in
duplication sometimes makes for resistance to appreciation as art. The artistic purist
141 ‘Aura’ here alludes of course, to Walter Benjamin’s famous use of the term. See Benjamin,
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations, Frankfurt, 1955. But
the point here is that the print has an ‘aura’ of its own, rather than merely being denied that of the
work of sole instance. Benjamin’s general anxiety about the status and prospects of the work of
sole instance, and of art in general, rests upon a mistaken understanding of the distinction
between sole and multiple instances for works, of depiction and art.

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may find it the strictest and so most unrewarding of prints. And while the
photographer of even a black and white photograph is free to select a theme or
object, an angle or aspect, to choose a lens length, filter supplement, field of focus,
speed of film and shutter, to develop and fix the print with a variety of chemicals,
crop the print to a variety of shapes, to a variety of surfaces, still, the purist may feel
stymied. For even where the edition is limited to one, the scheme conforms to a
print. The steps taken, options exercised remain an insidious array of conditions for
duplication and scheme preservation. But in truth, such objections do not so much
hold for photography, but for art more generally. The work of sole instance must
also comply with some schemes, in order to experiment with others. For this reason
art’s experiments fall into traditions, their objects into genres, their schemes soon
rest upon standard techniques. And in this painting is reinforced in its prominence,
entrenched as a preference through its history. Painting thus does not necessarily
escape its schemes any more easily than photography, the difference is rather that
schemes here rest upon optimal conditions for versatility and permutation, and that
duplication is always secondary to this.
This is not to deny exceptions or grey areas to the distinction, to radical versions of
mono-print, photo-release and photo-collage for example, but only to show that it
holds for an easy majority of cases and explains a number of interesting aspects to
the respective practices. Nor is it to ignore that painting is hardly the sole instance
of a work of sole instance. Drawings (including pencils, lead and coloured, pastels,
crayons, chalks, charcoal and inks) collages, mosaics, tapestries and stained glass
equally or occasionally qualify but do not enjoy the same prominence or prestige as
painting. The distinction within works of sole instance firstly depends upon degree
of consolidation or entrenchment, as indicated. Painting maintains a momentum or
preference in versatility not simply by theme or object, but scale, mobility, speed or
time, materials and cost. Less competitive versions such as mosaics, tapestries and
stained glass must be content with more specialised roles. The distinction secondly
may paradoxically, depend upon scheme. Scheme need not always start from
materials; some features of scheme or style influence how materials are taken, rather
than the converse. The distinction between painting and drawing, for example,
holds for most older or traditional works, as between preliminary sketch and
finished work. Period and other styles determine this application. But in some more

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recent work, where drawing is pursued exclusively, or freely combined with painting
and collage, distinction between sketch and finished work clearly does not apply. Or
rather, does not apply in the same way. In fact the scheme now addresses rather
than is addressed by the distinction, and where effective, the relation of painting to
other materials and schemes is maintained as the object of the scheme, rather than
its means or materials. In such cases, drawing is effectively treated as ‘painting’.
Finally, while versions of painting are tied to various schemes, not all painting
amounts to such schemes, not all schemes are only for painting. What stops
drawing, collage, mosaics, tapestries, stained glass and so on being taken as just
versions of painting or vice versa, is also consolidation of schemes. All establish
ranges or constraints of versatility. What counts as painting amongst works of sole
instance, is a matter of dominance and range of schemes. They as much define
painting as painting defines them. So painting has prominence and preference in art,
but neither guarantees its effectiveness nor impedes the effectiveness of other
materials, but rather dictates competition.
Painting’s practices are necessarily partial or partisan, and painting needs conflicting
versions to sustain circumspection in art. The partiality of practices finds a ready ally
in criticism, particularly for contemporary work. An impartial critic is not simply a
figment in the dreams of unlucky artists, but a critic hardly worthy of the name. An
impartial criticism is merely to confine remarks to a consensus, or an exercise in
tact. The point is rather to contest the merit of a work by appealing to extension of
reference, to object or world depicted, to means and style. Sooner or later however
style involves a version of history. The critic is drawn into a trade-off, between
extolling the deserving and distinctive work and admitting it to an impressive yet
grateful tradition. The transition is essentially from saying how a good a work is, to
saying what kind of work it is, and the critic may be drawn into revising styles and
history in order to effect a reconciliation or to arguing for an underlying principle to
painting (although painting here might just as well be depiction or art) as the basis
of such revision. The contest is thus shuffled from criticism to history. The critic
tends to find the historian too long-sighted in matters of style to accurately
discriminate in such cases; the historian tends to suspect the critic too short sighted
to be entirely reliable.

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But the argument is really about where the conflict falls, rather than if there simply
ought to be one. Controversy abounds in art history, the boundaries of Classicism
and Romanticism, or Romanticism and Realism, or Realism and Impressionism
continue to fuel reappraisals. Some styles it seems are rarely settled, and are only to
be settled by appeals to others. Art history cannot do without criticism, and theories
of painting, depiction and art find their favourites. In the second half of the
twentieth century the most prominent controversy surrounds the definition and
extent of Modernism as a period style, elsewhere as just a movement or trend.
Often criticism and history are indistinguishable in writing on such a recent period,
since the assessment of works goes hand in hand with the development of a
generally accepted stylistic framework. A feature of some of the most influential
criticism of the period has been its appeal to the nature of painting in revising this
framework and promoting works. The arguments advanced are sometimes glossed
as formalism, since they appeal to intrinsic properties of painting, and sometimes as
historicism, since they appeal to a manifest progression in art history. It is
instructive to look to some notable examples to see how criticism and history settle
differences and urge versions of painting.
Foremost amongst such formalists is Clement Greenberg, an early champion of
Abstract Expressionism and an influential curator as well as critic throughout the
nineteen sixties. Greenberg’s position evolved during the late thirties writing for the
left wing journal Partisan Review, and drew on the work of earlier formalists such as
Alfred J. Barr, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, but is distinctive for its acute focus upon
depiction and painting, its attempt to reduce depiction to matters of naked material
and technique and strident ranking of works, as ‘the best’ or ‘most progressive’. 142
The account offered here draws largely on a later essay, Modernist Painting, which
142 Two key essays are Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in Partisan Review, vol. vi No 5
Fall 1939 pp. 34-39, reprinted in Greenberg, Art and Culture, Boston, 1961 and Greenberg,
‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ in Partisan Review, vol. vii No 4. July-August, 1940, pp. 296-310,
reprinted in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume One: Perceptions and
Judgements, 1939-1944, Chicago/London, 1986, pp. 23-38. Greenberg’s view of depiction is
notable for the shift from Alfred Barr’s mere ‘representation’ (sharply criticised by Meyer
Shapiro in ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’ in Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1 No 1 January 1937 pp. 77-
98) to one of ‘illusion’ with particular emphasis upon perspective. In this respect, it precedes and
is consonant with Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. Indeed, in a later publication, includes a footnote
to Art and Illusion in support of arguments. See Greenberg, 1961, p. 76.

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summarises many of these concerns. 143 Greenberg’s argument is firstly for the
identity of a Modernist period. He sketches a kind of intellectual crisis arising from
the enlightenment, in which excessive rationality threatens the status of religion and
art. The rigours of Kantian philosophy supposedly offer art the means of
redemption, through a delimiting of its field of inquiry, to something like immediate
experience, presentation or appearance. 144 But the essay skirts further philosophy
and at best the argument is that within the period, art’s branches begin to dedicate
themselves to constricting their respective fields.
It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each
art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task
of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and
every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of
any other art 145 .
Painting therefore scrutinises its role as depiction. Realistic and illusionistic
approaches are gradually rejected as ‘dissembling’ or concealing the true nature of
painting (and depiction). Exactly which medium realism and illusion are to belong
to remains unclear, or why these properties should then be considered alien to
painting, or what is to be depicted without them, is not pursued. For Greenberg it is
enough that painting from Manet onwards rejects the vivid illusion of threedimensional
space and advances on ‘the ineluctable flatness of the support that
remained most fundamental to the processes by which pictorial art criticised and
defined itself under Modernism’ 146 . Of course depiction is not limited to painting,
even in art, so strictly speaking, mere flatness will not suffice as a unique property of
painting, and any material or support is never just flat. But the history essentially
143 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ in Art and Literature No 4, Spring, 1965, pp. 193-
201, reprinted in Modern Art and Modernism, London, Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison,
(eds.), 1982, pp. 5-10 and Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume Four:
Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969 Chicago/London, 1993, pp. 85-93. Page numbers
herein refer to the reprinting in Modern Art and Modernism.
144 Kant’s position is more commonly regarded as Transcendental Idealism, Formal, or Critical
Idealism. In this light it is a curious regression for one of professed Marxist leanings, but explains
glossing of such criticism as formalism. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement is notable for the
priority it assigns to natural beauty, the distinction with the sublime and the function of pleasure.
These matters are surprisingly given scant attention by Greenberg and the historicist impetus he
assigns to self-awareness or self-criticism, suggests far more of a Hegelian orientation, a point
noted in Michael Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank
Stella. Cambridge, Mass. 1965, reprinted in Modern Art and Modernism, London, 1982, pp. 115-
121, (see especially p.118.)
145 Greenberg, 1965, pp. 5-6.
146 Ibid. p. 6

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establishes a premise from which abstract painting is seen to excel in flatness, or to
achieve the latest and best in flatness
There are four objections to be registered. An initial objection must surely run that
three-dimensional space was not eliminated quite so easily, in fact cannot be
eliminated without severely limiting the notion of depiction. Manet’s paintings for
example typically contain people and objects while forgoing standard perspectives
and settings, but this hardly eliminates the depiction of three-dimensions. Nor can
the argument be loosened to one of Modernism’s elimination of ‘the kind of space
that recognisable, three-dimensional objects can inhabit’ while retaining these same
or even distantly related objects 147 . To depict a three-dimensional object quite
simply is to depict a three-dimensional space, no matter which perspective or
projection scheme is adopted. Arguments for a distinct realm of the pictorial, or an
illusion of an otherworldly space, in so far as they are coherent, fail for the same
reason 148 . That is, to imagine walking, or simply looking around such a space is to
be guided by such worldly activities as walking and looking.
A second objection is that if painting is glossed as the principal means of depiction
in art, then depiction itself is weakly grasped. For depiction in Modernist painting is
characterised by ‘flatness’, even when recognising that more accurately the concept
ought to be two-dimensionality. 149 Flatness quite simply is a property of threedimensionality.
Flatness characterises a certain painted surface perhaps, that of a
van Eyck or an Ingres for example, with their smooth finish, but is not a property
of depiction or two-dimensionality. The confusion on Greenberg’s part over twodimensionality
generates further errors in the characterisation of the picture plane as
merely the surface of a painting, or the area of depiction 150 . The basis for a stylistic
analysis of abstraction is thus seriously skewed from the start. Beyond this lies an
objection to notions of a self-contained ‘visual experience’ and the idea that ‘visual
art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience’ or that
Modernist painting ought to translate its objects into ‘strictly optical, two-
147 Greenberg, 1965, p.8.
148 Ibid.
149 Ibid. pp. 6-7.
150 Ibid. p.8. Greenberg repeats this error in the analysis of cubist collage in terms of maintaining
a ‘picture plane’ as the supporting surface. See Greenberg, 1961, pp. 70-83. The picture plane is
dealt with more accurately here in Chapter Three, concerning the issue of depth.

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dimensional terms before becoming the subject of pictorial art’ 151 . But the visual
cannot be entirely isolated from other senses, anymore than the pictorial can be
isolated from its material support. There is no realm of the exclusively visual, no
absolute autonomy for a practice of depiction and painting. Similarly, an appeal to a
Kantian disinterested mind, like that to Ruskin’s innocent eye, rests upon a vacuum.
The historical perspective prompts a third objection. There is for example, the
confusing claim that the neo-classicist David sought to counter the flattening effect
of Rococo painting by the introduction of ‘sculptural’ values, while at the same time
insisting that this arose as part of a general trend in Western painting to ‘suppress
and dispel the sculptural’ 152 . David supposedly subordinated colour to tone for this
reason, yet in the very next line we are told that the strength of his pictures lies in
their colour! Ingres, we are told also subordinates colour to tone, or to ‘sculptural’
values, and yet his pictures ‘were among the flattest, least sculptural done in the
West by a sophisticated artist since the fourteenth century’ 153 . Just what ‘flattest’ can
mean in this context is puzzling, for literally, flatness is a three-dimensional and
hence sculptural property, while taken as a gloss for two-dimensionality, flattest can
only mean that Ingres’ pictures relinquish depiction for pattern or design, notations
or diagrams. Neither is a plausible much less compelling interpretation.
Definition of a Modernist period is weakened not only by attenuation of the trend
to as far back as the sixteenth century, but also by a vacillation within it, concerning
the reductive nature of this self-critical turn and the resultant flatness or twodimensionality.
This is the fourth objection. On the one hand Modernism in
painting is not so very different from the preceding four hundred years, in its efforts
to reject ‘sculptural’ values, and on the other, the resulting two-dimensionality
cannot be absolute or ‘utter’ 154 . But if two-dimensionality is not absolute or utter,
against what is a self-critical purification to be measured? Or, if painting does not
pursue a purity of means, does not continue to eliminate extrinsic properties, then
there is no point in appealing to its one true nature, no self-critical turn, no
Modernism as a consequence. Judgements of what is best or most progressive in
151 Greenberg, 1965, p .8.
152 Ibid. p. 7.
153 Ibid.
154 Ibid. p. 8

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painting fail unless committed to the essential and absolute in painting. A true
Kantian might, of course, grasp the experience offered as a ‘Form of Finality’, but
Greenberg equivocates, perhaps sensing that such idealism cannot drive the history
of painting very far. 155 The aim of the history is the acceptance and importance of
abstraction for painting, but it is difficult to make an historical case for a version of
painting when the version is unclear.
Confusion over an essential flatness is only compounded by closer stylistic analysis.
The treatment of Cubism crucially suffers from an approach unable to accurately
relate the picture plane to object, to appreciate distinctions between perspectival
and projective schemes, and that resorts to notions of illusion to explain differences
in treatment of depth. 156 It leads to nonsensical claims of illusions ‘in front of the
picture plane, (for a picture) or of three-dimensionality, or depth ‘minimized’,
without then allowing revision of object to scheme, or that object is schemedependent
or that abstraction actually entails object and so depth to scheme. 157
Then there is claim for a distinction between illusion and representation, taken as
depth without object or object without connotation, and following this indifference
to object and vacuity to depth, the reluctant though hardly surprising conclusion
that mere decoration ensues from ‘abstract literalness’. 158
The lack of rigour to such analysis is hardly confined to Greenberg of course, is
typical of early advocacy for abstraction. But the feeble grasp of Cubism and
depiction also dilates the style, allows it to sprawl into Analytical and Synthetic
phases and for Greenberg, eventually embraces all but favoured features of Abstract
Expressionism, in an amorphous notion of ‘Late Cubism’. But where Cubism
becomes the necessary step to abstraction, abstraction is then also haunted by
decoration, the decorous or ‘tasteful’. The essay ‘American-Type Painting’ illustrates
155 In Greenberg, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-69, Chicago/London, 1993. pp. 93-94, a
lengthy footnote to the version of the essay insists that he no more than describes ‘the very best’
in Modernism, does not necessarily approve of it, and that flatness and self-criticism are not
sufficient condition for such excellence, indeed are no more than ‘illusions’. But if purity in selfcriticism
and flatness are no more than illusions of excellence, then the explanation itself is dealt
a fatal blow. It does not then explain ‘the very best’ but only offers necessary conditions, and
offers no accuracy in this, but only ‘illusions’. Also, for a concise account of The Form of
Finality, and Kant’s aesthetic generally, see Mary A. McCloskey, Kant’s Aesthetic, London,
1987.
156 Greenberg, 1961, pp. 70-83.
157 Ibid. p. 75, p.77.
158 Ibid. p. 80.

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this stylistic over-reach. 159 It details advances made by the Abstract Expressionists,
but can only explain the striking large scale of works as an extension to flatness,
relations of shape, line and colour presumably extended simply by size or
number. 160 Yet such works are rarely conspicuous for simply more shapes, lines or
colours, indeed, more often display to the contrary.
Greenberg allowed a narrowed tonal range for works, although this is then
inconsistent with the claim for flatness and greater scale. 161 The tonal range ought
strictly to be widened, if greater scale is to extend flatness. He submitted extremely
uniform compositions or ‘fields’ and lack of finish as other features of the style. But
fields are as much native to Mirō’s Constellations of the forties, or Mondrian’s Pier and
Ocean series of 1914-16, and lack of finish to Mirō’s heterogeneous materials of the
thirties or to most of Picasso or Matisse. Neither is quite stylistically accurate, both
are hardly more so. And where lack of finish might more usefully be related to
greater scale, or fields to resulting finish, Greenberg is indifferent, instead shores up
a loose analysis with the ad hoc alternative of Late Cubism, to which de Kooning or
Gorky’s drawing and tonalities are attributed, as are Still’s facture or finish, as well
as Gottlieb and Motherwell’s less field-like compositions.
Late Cubism only conflates Synthetic Cubism with the work of Mondrian,
Malevich, Mirō and Klee, is as easily lumped together as French or European tastes;
is then as vague and indiscriminate as the style of abstraction under discussion and
indeed as the name ‘American-Type Painting’ suggests. Abstraction suffers. The
style is rightly sensed to be a sterile exercise when confined to an end in-itself.
Greenberg’s apprehension registers in the essay ‘Abstract, Representational and so
forth’ but can no more remedy the problem than revise flatness and depiction. 162
Stylistically, the problem is abstraction is sold short by flatness. It never quite
delivers the meaning advocates intuitively find in works, that rewards attention to
such works. Claiming that abstraction eliminates the object, rather than properly
abstracting the object, only cancels the very basis of depiction. Hence the prospect
is rapidly one of a dead end, of the vacuous or merely decorative. Greenberg’s is
159 Greenberg, 1961, pp.208-229.
160 Ibid. p. 219.
161 Ibid. p. 220.
162 Ibid. pp. 133-138.

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scarcely the only, much less best account of Abstract Expressionism, but his
stylistics demonstrates the problem for abstraction based upon painting as
depiction. 163 An historical impetus is set in train from without, but a stylistic paucity
resists from within. Negotiating this dilemma largely measures the course and
influence of such criticism, and is briefly traced here not through successive and
competing canons of abstract painting and their advocates, but through attempts to
reconcile a version strict enough to allow progression in flatness, but relaxed
enough to avoid completion.
A remedy to this reductionism was proposed by Michael Fried, also an eminent
critic and curator, and associate of Greenberg. Fried argued that the essence sought
by the Modernist need not be:
the irreducible essence of all painting, but rather that which, at the present
moment in painting’s history, is capable of convincing him (the critic) that it
can stand comparison with the painting of both the modernist and premodernist
past whose quality seems to him beyond question 164 .
Or, stated more baldly, that ‘the essence of painting is not something irreducible’ 165 .
But of course essence quite simply is what is irreducible. An essence that is yet
reducible is by definition not an essence. Nor does it help to appeal to an essence of
some version of painting, if that version is then to be ‘compared’ with others, for
this is just a long way around to claiming the same essence for all painting. 166 Fried’s
163 It should also be noted that advocates of abstraction at this time are not necessarily committed
to such idealism or wayward notions of the picture plane. Michel Seuphor for example, charts the
course of abstraction in painting with a great deal more historical and stylistic accuracy, but
offers less comprehensive appeal to a theory of painting. See for example, Seuphor, A Dictionary
of Abstract Painting, (Paris, 1957) London, 1958, and Seuphor, Abstract Painting, New York,
1964.
164 Fried, ‘Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings (1966)’ in New York Painting and
Sculpture, 1940-1970, New York, 1969, p.422. This text is quoted in Fried’s ‘How Modernism
Works: A Response to T. J. Clark’ in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, Francis Frascina
(ed.), London, 1985, pp. 65-79. For cited text see p. 69 of the reprinting.
165 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock (ed.)
New York, 1968, pp. 123-124. This text is also quoted in Fried, ‘How Modernism Works: A
Response to T. J. Clark’ Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, Francis Frascina (ed.) London,
1985, pp. 65-79.
166 The view purportedly derives from Wittgenstein, presumably in relation to rules for games or
for family-like trees of relations. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 1953,
item 67 p32 e . In which case, Fried fatally confuses membership with essence. More correctly,
Wittgenstein’s view runs that while each member, like fibres constituting a thread, overlaps for
some of the length of the thread, yet their overlapping or membership does not ‘run through the
whole thread’ or is not reducible to an essence for the thread. Nor does the essence or identity of

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formulation points starkly to the difficulties that arise for critical assessment of
works under a radically reductive view of painting. The basis of any comparison
must be shared qualities, but while one might usefully compare for example a
Pollock with other abstraction, on what basis might one compare a Pollock with a
still life or landscape, an Ingres or Delacroix, a Vermeer or Michelangelo? Implicit
in the formalist aesthetic is the insistence, as Fried indicates, on the
commensurability of all painting – Modernist and pre-Modernist, (or modernist and
pre-modernist) but stripped of all stylistic differences, the comparison comes to
nothing, because reductionism stops at nothing.
The example of another formalist critic and curator, William Rubin, in Jackson
Pollock and the Modern Tradition, shows how this reductive tendency firstly strips
down works of the past in order to accommodate a comparison with more recent
abstraction. 167 Rubin considers the late work of Monet as a precedent for ‘the big
scintillating picture’, and Impressionism in general as a development toward an ‘allover’
style, which Pollock carries forward in his famous dripped paintings. Those
Impressionist paintings displaying the most all-over technique, or the evenest
distribution of dabbings, are deemed ‘the most advanced’ and conversely, Pollock’s
paintings are seen as inheriting something of Impressionism’s cosmopolitan
attachment to the casual and accidental. 168 But this is really a sleight of hand.
Pollock cannot inherit the attitude without inheriting the same all-overness,
differences in the all-overness amount to differences in attitude as well.
Commensurate all-overness cannot take from one, only to give to the other. Like
flatness, all-overness strands itself in its own reductionism. A more extreme
example arises in Frank Stella’s Working Space. 169 Stella, a prominent painter of
abstractions and friend of Fried, looked for ways in which abstraction might equal
the emotional impact of pre-Modernist works such as Caravaggio’s David and
any single member or fibre constitute the essence of the thread. Neither essence nor reduction is
sanctioned by these views.
167 William Rubin ‘Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition’ (part I), Artforum, Feb-May 1967,
pp. 14-21, (part II), Artforum, June-July, 1967, pp. 28-37.
168 Ibid. pp. 29-30.
169 Stella, Working Space, Cambridge, Mass. 1980. It should also be noted that while Stella,
Rubin, Fried and Judd all propose versions of Modernism, they also argue for important
differences in a Modernist canon from that of Greenberg. For detailed analysis of the differences
between Greenberg and later canons of abstraction see Thierry de Duve, ‘The Monochrome and
the Blank Canvas’ in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945-64,
Serge Guilbaut (ed.) Cambridge, Mass./London, 1990 pp. 244-310.

102
Goliath, or Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas. But again the equation rests upon a
fundamental inconsistency and misconception. What abstraction reduces in
depicted objects cannot then be appealed to in the same way or for the same things.
While abstraction unquestionably makes an emotional impact in many cases, it
cannot expect to make the same or equal to that of more concrete depiction. It is a
futile exercise and in truth need make no such impact to still be effective.
Reduction and ranking are hardly to be denied of course, are necessary but not
sufficient steps to effective reference. The problem lies where flatness is accepted as
the absolute abstraction of depiction to painting. Then ranking with all and any
depiction follows as valid. Formalist judgements thus tend to the unqualified, ‘the
best’, ‘the most advanced’, ‘major’ ‘minor’ even ‘the provincial’ as opposed to the
‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘sophisticated’, all insist upon a ruthless ranking on one fixed and
final measure of painting. 170 But the more partisan the critic or critique, the more
pronounced the limitations. Both Greenberg and Fried notoriously disparage Dada
and Surrealism and work influenced by these movements as retrograde, or
superficial ‘avant-gardism’ that fails to engage with what ‘really matters’ 171 . It is in
effect dismissed as false or poor Modernism. Yet while no one would deny that
much art at any time is mediocre, one must surely admit to a variety of styles. What
separates the formalist’s ‘advanced taste’ from the avant-gardist’s ‘pseudoquestions’
is less a question of excellence, than sensitivity and styles 172 . The inability of
Greenberg or Fried to appreciate such work points not to its lack of merit but their
flawed grasp of depiction and painting, their failure as historians.
The formalist cannot remedy flaws in the advocacy of abstraction by simply ruling
out alternatives. The problem is only more starkly framed. On the one hand
170 The formalist obsession with ranking at the expense of stylistic distinction is pressed to the
point of parody in the early critical writings of Donald Judd, where a juvenile ‘ten best’ approach
to assessment is given full rein. See for example the opening paragraph and comic footnotes to
Judd, ‘Barnett Newman’ Studio International Feb 1970 pp. 67-69, also reprinted in Modern Art
and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, London, 1982, pp. 129-132.
171 Michael Fried ‘How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark’ in Pollock and After: The
Critical Debate, Francis Frascina (editor) London, 1985, pp. 72-73. See also Greenberg, ‘Avant-
Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties’ in The Collected Essays and Criticism Vol 4
‘Modernism with a Vengeance’1957 – 1969: Chicago/London, 1993 pp. 292-303 and Greenberg,
‘Counter Avant-Garde’ in Art International, 15 May 1971, pp. 16-19.
172 The terms in inverted commas here are drawn from Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde Attitudes: New
Art in the Sixties’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism Vol 4 ‘Modernism with a
Vengeance’1957 – 1969, Chicago/London, 1993 pp. 292-303.

103
abstraction is the most progressive or best in painting, and on the other it permits
only versions, has no limits. But the formalist cannot have it both ways, if
abstraction is better because it is reductive of all painting, or absolutely, then
reduction permits only one right version. Or, if reduction permits many right
versions, is not absolute, then it cannot be better or more progressive than variation
within more concrete depiction. The argument here in fact mirrors the earlier
rejection of a single realism. There it was argued that not all aspects of realism are
compatible or combinable in a master version of depiction, a full and final realism,
here it is argued that not all painting practices necessarily strip one another away to
reveal only the absolute material, its basis as depiction.
Ironically, it is the success of abstraction, the sheer variety it engenders that
ultimately renders the formalist’s arguments ineffective, grants abstraction ample
means to rank and style without appealing extravagantly for measure. But a stylistics
based on flatness is then quickly exposed as inadequate – flatness now has too many
versions for comfort, means too little in describing so many stylistic features, is in
any case discredited by such narrow historicism. The dissolution inevitably calls into
question Modernism. The whole reason for the period, after all, lay in the
acceptance of abstraction as a progression of self-analysis. If painting has no one
right version of flatness or two-dimensionality, there is no one right version of
abstraction, no basis for a single progression. But then what is one to make of
Modernism, indeed of depiction, painting and abstraction? Obviously a reappraisal
applies to all, is due to all. Preceding chapters on depiction and related issues and
initial discussion here of painting have laid the groundwork. In the second part of
this study a history of painting in the second half of the twentieth century proceeds
from the issues of abstraction and Modernism. But before embarking on this, a
summary of the theoretical issues covered and the contribution made so far follow
in the final chapter to part one.

104
Summary
A review of the controversy surrounding depiction was followed by a revision to
the theory of reference advanced by Nelson Goodman. Steady revisions then
followed for expression and style, art, its history, interpretation, realism and
painting, gradually drawing theory into matters of criticism and history.
Less summarily, Chapter One reviewed recent theories of depiction, their
implications and applications for art. It disclosed the controversy between depiction
taken as resemblance and reference. Discussion of resemblance centred on the
position taken by Gombrich as an illusion or a psychological disposition, discussion
of reference on the position taken by Goodman as a version of denotation. The
study rejected both views. However, in Chapter Two the general framework of
reference proposed by Goodman was adopted and a theory of depiction as
exemplification of two-dimensionality proposed. In Chapter Three the proposed
theory was shown to hold for five basic issues shared between prominent
competing theories. Issues of depth or three-dimensionality, caricature, fiction,
distortion and found or accidental depiction consolidated the proposed theory.
Chapter Four showed how reference is organised according to styles, and again
following Goodman, rejected synonymy and intention as the basis of style and
expression. It showed how meaning by two-dimensionality together with literal and
metaphorical sampling of materials, or more commonly, as statement, sentiment
and structure, are all variously taken into an account of how a picture means or
refers, and is classified according to source, to basically who, when and where.
Discussion of style and expression lead to discussion of art. Chapter Five replaced
Goodman’s symptoms of art, of density, repleteness and complexity, with
‘circumspection’ of depiction, as multidirectional reference. It maintained
Goodman’s view of beauty and excellence as cognitive effectiveness, and cognitive
understood as broader than standard notions and contrasted with knowledge and

105
science. Science progresses or improves, allows reverse derivation of earlier
theories, in so far as correct, art does not. Art is less strict in its organisation and
does not so much progress as digress. Emphasis upon its collection accordingly
places greater weight upon history. In Chapter Six Gombrich’s famous history, The
Story of Art was reviewed as a model of how a theory of depiction and art structure a
history or tell a story. Gombrich claimed that art is simply the sum of its history, its
works and artists, and that the concept of art is non-essential. Gombrich’s story is
of art’s gradual convergence upon the principles of illusion, through piecemeal
correction to a style’s formula or schema. The story is thus committed to realism,
but struggles to make sense of art of the later twentieth century, cannot comfortably
identify the schema and correction at work or illusions there. Either, the twentieth
century fails in art or the theory of schema and correction fails as history. The view
taken is that schema and correction confuse history with art and amount in fact to a
historicist myth, for the simplicity and singularity of traditional depiction and
realism.
The problem of interpretation was taken up in the Chapter Seven, of distinguishing
between facts and comment, matter and manner. The danger lies in confusing the
two and allowing history its own laws or logic. Several notable solutions are
considered, advocating radical relativism. The existential approach that originates
with Heidegger, takes all method to be historical, the distinction between matter
and manner then depends on the state of history. The hermeneutics of Gadamer,
Habermas and others takes the past as basically a convenient fiction for the present
and draws the line rather between conflicting current concerns. In contrast,
structuralism insulates itself from history, advocates fixed structures and reduces
changes to just these terms. Post-structural theorists (sometimes called postmodernists)
readmit history or relax structures, extend the hermeneuticist’s
relativism to the point where interpretation shares only language with other texts;
amounts to only a variety of texts, all arguing only for attention and influence.
Goodman’s irrealism shares much with this radical relativism and pluralism. But
irrealism distinguishes between right and wrong versions, constrains pluralism with
nihilism. Rightness rather than truth measures versions, but makes for too many or
none for just one world. Interpretation is rightly multiple, but multiple right

106
interpretations require a rightly identified object. The difference between an
interpretation and identification lies in the plurality of one and the singularity of the
other. Art historical interpretation for the irrealist here starts from a stylistics based
upon a theory of depiction and balances a better version of the same history shared
in rival versions, against simply a different but right version.
Chapter Eight compared an irrealist approach to art history with Gombrich’s realist
approach. The realist corrects a given schema and finds more realism; the irrealist
connects various schemas or styles, makes another realism. But realisms here are
only stylistic, the pluralism does not necessarily carry through to a metaphysical
pluralism of worlds. Realisms measure derivation of scheme and information
between styles. Ranges of styles and realisms depend upon scope of art history,
really amount to just such history. Stylistics for the irrealist here allows realism of
material, or formal or structural values for depiction, as well as realism of spirit or
transcendental values for a movement or period, culture or group, but insists that
both depend on rightness of scope.
Chapter Nine extended irrealism to painting, recognised many practices and
relativity of materials to depictive scheme and object. Yet while painting admits to
various practices, collectively painting is identified by its prominence as a work of
sole instance, in contrast with printing and the work of multiple instances. A work
of sole instance has an important advantage in versatility where circumspection of
meaning is concerned. Duplication on the other hand has an advantage where
derivation and realism are concerned. Conformity of scheme for duplication
reinforces rigour of shared information, often exemplifies an ‘aura’ in prints.
Painting is the dominant version of a work of sole instance firstly because of
feedback or momentum in schemes used and promoted. This consolidates the
preference for painting. Secondly, it is dominant because conversely, painting just
claims what is most versatile (or replete) in any work of sole instance. ‘Painting’ - in
terms of a strict definition of materials and technique - just is what most works of
sole instance do.
Versions of painting provide the means to revise styles and detect new ones. The
example of some prominent formalist criticism in support of abstract painting is

107
considered in this light. Greenberg’s criticism proposes an expansive period of
Modernism leading up to abstraction, and to some extent sustained by further
abstraction, but whether this is greater abstraction, or merely versions of the same
degree of abstraction remains moot. Indeed such criticism lapses with later
proliferation of versions of abstraction. As a consequence, Modernism as a period is
questioned. If abstraction is not absolute, offers no single course or progression for
painting, how might one redefine Modernism? These are matters on which part one
of the study concludes, and prepares the way for a history of painting in the second
half of the twentieth century.
Since Goodman’s theory has been both adopted and adapted, some measure of the
contribution made here should also be taken. Goodman offers no historical method
or explicit view of painting, so these additions are obvious enough, other
contributions may be summarised in three points. The study has firstly proposed
depiction as a mode of exemplification, accepting Goodman’s account of
exemplification as reference, but now distinguishing between exemplification of
two-dimensionality and three, between depiction and material sampling. In terms of
the weight given to denotation in Goodman’s theory, this is a radical revision. In
terms of Goodman’s views on expression and stylistics, it is comfortably
accommodated. The study accepts Goodman’s three-way scheme for stylistics, as
reference by statement, structure and sentiment, as well as the crucial rejection of
synonymy and intention. In this the study adheres to Goodman’s broader aesthetic,
or offers a version of irrealism. The phrases ‘irrealism here’ or ‘the irrealist here’ has
signalled this distinction throughout.
The study secondly departs from Goodman in distinguishing depiction from
notation in terms of multi versus single directionality, and from this proposes a
‘circumspective’ function to depiction and its refinement in art. This may seem
some distance from Goodman’s symptoms of density and repleteness for syntax
and semantics and of complex strings, although similarities are nonetheless noted.
‘Circumspection’ is comfortably accommodated under Goodman’s view of beauty
or excellence as cognitive efficiency. A related adjustment inverts traditional
assumptions, claiming that canons and evaluation actually precede further
identification; that we say how good a work is, on the way to saying in what ways,

108
and that revision of judgements is built into the process. Again, the study adheres to
the broader principles of Goodman’s aesthetic, revising only matters of depiction.
Whether the views advanced deserve the name of irrealism depends on how closely
the theories are compared.
The study thirdly augments Goodman’s terms for realism. He nominates novelty,
entrenchment and factual against fictional. The study adds derivation for scheme
and information. Since claims for novelty or revelation, ease or preference are
shown to be insufficient and since relativism and pluralism are maintained by
multiple derivations in stylistic practice, revision of realisms here no more than
strengthens irrealism. The study is thus able to meet objections to Goodman’s
theory considered in Chapter One while preserving crucial features of reference,
stylistics, understanding, interpretation and pluralism. It demonstrates that even
where emphasis on denotation is jettisoned, Goodman’s aesthetic remains not just
viable but valuable, especially for reconstruction of recent art history.

109
Contents for Part Two
HISTORY
Chapter Title Description
Reference:
Main Artists
11
Page
112
Modernism and
Abstraction
Review of the extent of
Modernism, and proposed
abbreviation (1912-1950).
Revision of concept of
abstraction in depiction.
Traced from the Orphists to
Art Informel and Abstract
Expressionism, to threedimensional
works, design and
sampled materials by the
middle of the century.
Kupka, Delaunay,
Kandinsky, Klee,
Mondrian, Malevich,
Masson, Pollock, Masson,
Tobey, Wols, Soulages,
Kline, Constructivism,
The Bauhaus, collage and
Duchamp.
12
Page
126
Modernism
1912-1950
‘Simultaneous and
Successive Depiction’
Revision of competing styles
to abstraction. Re-defines
Cubism, as pre-Modernism,
rejects label of ‘Synthetic
Cubism’ for ‘Overstyle’, and
redefines rival trend as
‘Rerealism’ (ignores
Surrealism). Traces relation to
abstraction, to the impasse of
biomorphic abstraction, and to
‘Rerealism’s dependence upon
three-dimensional geometry.
Picasso, Braque,
Malevich, Futurism, Dada
and Surrealism, Klee,
Kandinsky, Miro, De
Chirico, Chagall,
Duchamp, Schwitters,
Ernst, Dali, Magritte.
13
Page
138
Late Modernism
1950-60
‘Reciprocal Depiction’
The convergence of
abstraction, ‘Overstyle’ and
‘Rerealism’ results in a new
style -‘Reciprocal Depiction’,
with versions variously
stressing ‘layout’, ‘traction’
and ‘interruption’.
Giacometti, Dubuffet,
Fautrier, CoBrA Group,
Tapies, De Kooning,
Bacon, Rivers,
Rauschenberg, Johns,
Hamilton, Blake.
14
Pop Art and Post-
Modernism:
Painting Printing
1960-1970
The shift in ‘Reciprocal
Depiction’ to print sampling,
or Pop Art. Basic graphics and
text sources, link to expanded
materials.
Warhol, Lichtenstein,
Caulfield, Adami, Kitaj,
Hockney, Rosenquist,
Ruscha, Art and Language
Group, Kossuth.
Page
150

110
15
Page
164
Post-Modernism
Continued:
Painting Photography
1962-78
Painting of photography, and
sampling related print
processes. Photo-Realism and
exhaustion of sample by late
seventies.
Warhol, Rauschenberg,
Laing, Polke, Richter,
Close, Estes, McLean,
Goings, Raphael, Richter,
Morley,
16
Page
176
The End of Post-
Modernism:
1962-1985
‘Bad’ Painting, Neo-
Expressionism and New Image
Painting. Traced both from
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ and
print sampling, firstly in
Germany, then the U.S. to
dissipation in mid-eighties.
Polke, Penck, Immendorff,
Kiefer, Clemente, Salle,
Schnabel, Haring,
Basquiat, Jenney, Bartlett,
Lane, Green, True,
Zucker, Hurson,
Moscowitz, Rothenburg,
17
Page
189
Abstraction in Late
and Post-Modernism
Shows how the distinction
between Late and Post
Modernism holds for
abstraction. Traces structures
for colour, in scale, symmetry
and basic pattern to threedimensionality,
or material
exemplification, finally to
Pattern and Decoration,
pastiche and simulation.
Rothko, Newman, Still,
Albers, Noland, Gene
Davis, Stella, De Feo,
Olitski, Poons, Marden,
Mangold, Bell, Ronald
Davis, McCracken, Bell,
Kozloff, Kushner,
Zakanitch, Mullican,
Halley, Taaffe, Levine,
Bidlo
18
Page
204
Expanded Materials in
Late and Post-
Modernism.
Shows how the distinction
between Late and Post
Modernism holds for works of
‘expanded materials’.
The shift from kinetics and
performance in the fifties to
Conceptual Art. Sampling of
script and score, performance,
place, and recording, until the
mid eighties.
Smith, Kenneth and Mary
Martin, Tinguely,
Hamilton, Fontana, Cage,
Mathieu, The Gutai, Klein,
Rauschenburg, Kapprow,
Manzoni, Nauman, Gilbert
and George, Schneeman,
Christo, Bochner, Barry,
Beuys, Andre, Serra,
Morris, Kounellis, Fabro,
Heizer, Oppenheim,
Graham, Armajani,
Acconci, Piper, Oiticica,
Haacke, Boltanski,
Kruger, Holzer

111
19
Page
223
Globalism
1985 - 2000
All three strands, more
concrete depiction, abstraction,
and works of expanded
materials are now traced
within an open or incomplete
period up until 2000.
The shift from Conceptual Art
to institutional sampling in
expanded materials, the shift
from basic pattern to more
complex versions and layout in
abstraction, the shift from
Neo-Expressionism and
allegory to broader genres are
all shown to share crucial
synchrony, in Globalist
strategies or projects.
Koons, Steinbach, Lavier,
Mucha, Cady Noland,
Stockholder, Rhoades,
Hirst, Orozco, Shaw, La
Noue, Rae, Oehlen,
Ackermann, Odita,
Lasker, Aboriginal artists,
Oulton, Wojnarowitz,
Marshall, Occampo,
Ritchie, Murakami,
Pittman, Hume, Ritchie,
Ruyter, Marshall, Walker,
Tuymans, Doig, Neo
Rauch, Scheibitz
Currin, Peyton,
Yuskavage, Loeb, Glenn
Brown, Saville, Cecily
Brown,
20
Page
249
Conclusion
Reviews distinctive features,
compares prominent rival
versions and registers
unavoidable omissions.
Recent art histories by
Marco Livingstone,
Brandon Taylor, Edward
Lucie-Smith, Daniel
Wheeler, Jonathan
Fineberg, Michael Archer,
Hal Foster, David
Hopkins, Mathew
Collings, Kristine Stiles
and Peter Selz, Johanna
Drucker.
N.B. Figure numbers given in the following text relate to illustrations provided by
link to other web sites.
While every effort has been made to supply details of date, medium and
dimensions, to the Illustrations page, where these are unavailable the
abbreviation N.D.A. appears.

112
Modernism and Abstraction
Discussion so far has considered Modernism as a period dedicated to the
progression of abstraction in painting, but emphasis is rarely upon only formal or
stylistic developments of course, usually these are taken as an index to social,
political, economic and other factors. Then again, some versions recognise other
styles to the period, for example Futurism, Dada and Surrealism and so place less
emphasis upon abstraction, while equally looking to significant factors at their
historical source. 173 But however one augments the breadth of works to the period,
there remains a problem with its length and the problem starts from an
understanding of abstraction. As shown in Chapter Nine, the problem is firstly a
stylistic one, concerning the basis of depiction underlying an explanation of
abstraction. Unable to accurately, or even coherently explain abstraction, the
careless stretching of the period according to a supposed tendency to flatness then
makes problems for an historical analysis. Works share too little that is distinctive,
cover a period where too much is vital. To begin this revision of Modernism, the
chapter first outlines why source also suffers under inadequate stylistics.
173 The many advocates for Dada and Surrealism range from Andre Breton, Surrealism and
Painting, (Paris, 1928) London, 1966, to Sir Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Art, London, 1964,
to Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism, London, 1974, to Peter Bürger, Theory of The Avant-
Garde, (Frankfurt, 1980) Minneapolis 1984, to Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious,
Cambridge/Mass., 1993 and Hal Foster, Return of the real: the avant-garde at the end the
century, Cambridge/Mass./London, 1996, to offer only a brief cross-section. The movements are
variously taken in opposition or alliance with abstraction. Read, for example, urges an underlying
unity with abstraction and interesting parallels with Romanticism as an extreme version of the
sublime. Bürger argues for them in support of a favoured social practice – ‘the avant-garde’. In as
much as he concerns himself with painting, attribution rests on a meagre stylistic basis of collage
and Duchamp’s readymades. A dubious distinction is proposed for the Modernist work, as a selfcontained
or autonomous object, opposed to the ‘avant-garde’ work as integrated with ‘life’.
Some abstraction counts as ‘avant-garde’, such as Russian Constructivism, some counts as
Modernism, such as the works of Kandinsky. Krauss and Foster argue for the importance of Dada
and Surrealism as a response to intellectual trends of the time, such as psychoanalysis, (in Lacan
as much as Freud), structuralism, as advanced by Levi-Strauss (in ethnographic studies and the
appreciation of non-western depiction) and the criticism of Walter Benjamin, (especially on
photography). However no advocate proposes the exclusion of abstraction from Modernism, or
an end to Modernism with the appearance of Dada and Surrealism, and while mostly broadening
the constitution of Modernism, attention to styles other than abstraction does not in itself remedy
the inflated duration of Modernism at issue here.

113
The length of Modernism has interestingly tended to spread backwards, as art
historians throughout the twentieth century sought to integrate more recent
work. 174 From Alfred J. Barr Junior’s starting point with the Post Impressionists, in
his noted chart on the development of Abstract Art in 1936, the scope of
Modernism has been variously redrawn to embrace Manet and Impressionism,
Realism, Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, and as shown in Greenberg’s version, even
farther back. 175 Barr’s history ends in two branches of abstraction for twentieth
century painting by 1935, the geometric and non-geometric, while Greenberg’s
history ends in branches beyond traditional easel-scale and techniques by the
nineteen fifties. 176 Modernism thus not only embraces more of the twentieth
century with later versions but more of the past in order to do so. Modernism
becomes a period of at least two hundred years by this, if it is also to embrace most
of the twentieth century, as is generally accepted.
This far exceeds the length of any period since (and possibly including) the
Renaissance, and paradoxically confers a unity or stability on the period at odds
with preceding history and intuitions of accelerating change. Such intuitions are
captured not only in the succession of lesser movements, such as Realism,
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Fauvism, Cubism
and so forth but in the rapid transformation brought about by the industrial
revolution, greater energy resources, new forms of transportation, greater
democracy and education, the climax of colonialism, the spread of urbanisation,
174 Taking the later eighteenth century as the cradle of Modernism is pervasive in recent art
history. Michael Fried has pursued notions of Modernism in the eighteenth century in Fried,
Absorption and Theatricality, Berkley/London, 1980. T.J. Clark maintains Modernism emerged
in the mid-nineteenth century in Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet
and his Followers, London/New York, 1985, and extends Modernism from 1793 to 1989 in
Clark, Farewell to an Idea; episodes in a history to modernism, New Haven/ London, 1999.
Other eminent authors of similar persuasion include Robert Rosenblum, Thomas Crow and
Robert L. Herbert. By contrast, Richard R. Brettell, Modern Art 1851-1929 Oxford/New York,
1999, argues for a shorter version, straddling the turn of the century, while including previously
ignored work in eastern Europe and elsewhere.
175 Alfred H. Barr Junior, Cubism and Abstract Art, New York, 1936. Barr does not strictly use
the term Modernism however, and his chart tellingly ignores more concrete depiction of the
period, such as the work of Ernst, Dali, Chagall, De Chirico and others. Yet in Barr, Defining
Modern Art Irving Sandler and Amy Newman (eds.) New York, 1986, it is clear that Barr takes
abstraction as synonymous with ‘Modern Art’ or Modernism.
176 Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ offers no canon of contemporary works, however essays
such as ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’ (1948) and ‘American-Type Painting’ (1955-58) are
consistent with this position and urge such recent inclusions. See Greenberg, 1961.

114
patterns of emigration and so on. Modernism conceals more than it reveals in such
a sprawling version, strains the preceding structure of periods, or any single theme,
such as socialism or capitalism. A remedy may seek either to start Modernism later
than the eighteenth century, or to end it earlier in the twentieth century (or both). 177
As shown, earlier critics and historians were often intent upon demonstrating the
validity of abstraction in painting through a close integration with its precedents,
and as a result are caught up in a seamless transition backwards, from one precedent
to another. Hence the difficulty in finding a starting point for Modernism. But the
increasing lengths taken in history only alert us to a deep uneasiness with the
stylistics of abstraction, as discussed in Chapter Nine, and which ultimately the
length of Modernism can neither compensate, nor disguise. Stylistically, abstraction
has problems, and it makes problems for Modernism, historically.
A remedy for Modernism must therefore rethink abstraction. While it is easy
enough to point to where a complete or full abstraction first arises in painting, it is
more difficult to say in what way it is complete or full, or to explain its basis in
depiction. As shown in discussion of formalist criticism, the temptation is to
exchange the picture plane (poorly grasped, in any case) with the picture surface, to
assume a single, absolute picture plane for all objects depicted, all materials
depicting. As also shown, this position cannot be sustained historically or
stylistically. It fatally mistakes the basis of depiction and leads to a misguided
intolerance. The task is therefore to say in what way full abstraction remains relative
to depictive styles and to distinguish varieties of picture plane.
Of course none of this determines whether Modernism should be taken as the
period leading up to or away from the emergence of full abstraction - and the term
might usefully be adopted for the genre - but it will suffice to simply signal this
177 Bernard Smith, Modernism’s History, Sydney, 1998, introduces shorter divisions of period
and puzzlingly renames Modernism ‘The Formalesque’, (although the etymology of ‘form’ is
hardly less ambiguous or compromised than ‘modern’ ‘modernity’ or ‘modernism’) and actually
signals an indifference to the problem of formal analysis for depiction and painting in the period.
He is more concerned with introducing colonial and post-colonial contributions to accepted
styles, and is content to gloss Greenberg, Fried, Krauss and others for stylistics, to inherit and
compound the problems discussed in Chapter Nine. Other revisions to Modernism concerning
ethnic, sexual, national and regional factors are not considered here for similar reasons. They too
are concerned with tracing standard stylistics to such factors and often with thus extending
Modernism through additional works, but not with the fundamental problem with depiction
underlying the stylistics of abstraction. So, while the study addresses a popular topic in
Modernism, concern with stylistics here presents a radical reversal of prevailing trends.

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meaning for ‘abstraction’ here. Modernism in fact might as easily be divided into
low and high periods, as with the Renaissance, with the appearance of abstraction
marking the turning point. The merits of such an arrangement would then depend
upon relations or relevance to adjoining periods. However this falls beyond the
scope of even this broad study. What is needed here is a version of Modernism with
which to frame just developments in the second half of the twentieth century,
indeed this duration is chosen as a measure against such period frames, and so the
convenient choice is for a Modernism that starts with the appearance of (full)
abstraction and to leave questions of preceding periods to another study. Clearly the
emphasis for this history is firstly upon period style, even at the expense of national,
regional, school and individual styles, and the following account does no more than
outline Modernism.
Abstraction is generally taken to emerge around 1912 with certain works by
František Kupka (1871-57), Robert and Sonia Delaunay (1885–1941, 1885-1979),
Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973), and Morgan Russell (1886-1953) amongst
others, variously identified as Orphists and Synchronists. Less generally
acknowledged is that abstraction also coincides with striking developments in more
concrete depiction. It parallels the transition in the work of Pablo Picasso (1881-
1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) from so-called Analytic Cubism to Synthetic
Cubism, as well as a shift in the work of artists including Giorgio De Chirico (1888-
1978), Marc Chagall (1887-1985) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) toward a more
complex use of perspective and its objects. These developments establish crucial
relations with abstraction, channel its variety and restrict its influence, and together
set the course of Modernism. However given the priority of abstraction to
discussion thus far, this chapter is devoted to the revision of the concept.
Competing styles are taken up in the following chapter.
As noted, abstraction is usually understood as a withdrawal from depiction, a
dedication to schemes of non-depictive two-dimensionality, to formal or intrinsic
properties of the medium. Here it is understood to remain depiction, and to picture
only a sort of picture plane. 178 Abstraction to a lesser degree is familiar to depiction
178 As with other instances of self-reference so far considered, while some parts or properties are
sampled, others do the sampling. No paradox arises. The shape or sides of the picture plane are
sampled for only those properties engaged by the pattern or ordering of its area, and not, for

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in the sorts of objects and pictures discussed in chapter three under the issues of
caricature and fiction. A picture of a young woman or a typical tiger are basically
class terms or abstractions, and classing extends to fictive objects or null depiction
and more elaborate arrangements of objects, to events and their necessary points of
view, to their picture plane schemes, to genres and compositions. The object as a
composition may then be sorted for global or general qualities, of light, motion,
proportion or depth for example, so that the object then as light, motion, depth and
so on, may in turn be classed as a matter of colour, line, tone, and other properties
of depicting materials. In other words, the object is gradually assimilated to the
picture plane and reduced to only an organisation of its sides or shape, the picture
plane is as far or full as abstraction can go in depiction. Abstraction in depiction is
hardly an idle exercise, of course. Establishing such patterns enables new and more
complex or abstract reference, and prompts new directions in less abstract
depiction, as shall be shown in the following chapter. 179
But an effective ordering to this end is not easily accomplished. It must negotiate
constraints from established practices, within depiction and without. In Chapter
Two, non-depictive two-dimensionality was acknowledged as pattern. Symmetry,
repetition, alternation, progression, dispersal and so forth may be cultivated without
depiction. Similarly, basic shapes such as a square or a circle resist more concrete
depiction through entrenched use in a variety of practices, in fact may be considered
as two-dimensional objects. An outline of a circle is therefore not necessarily a
picture of a circle. Such practices suggest a way of avoiding depictive orderings but
risk also avoiding the picture plane. Patterns establish geometric relations for a
theme or motif that are theoretically boundless in extension. The framing of them is
example, their proportions to the width and height of the supporting wall, or their
accommodation as whole numbers under a metric rather than imperial measurement. Selfreference
is taken as always partial, and relative to reference scheme.
179 Analysis of depiction as abstraction, or vice versa, surprisingly has received scant attention.
Notable exceptions are Harold Osborne, Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth Century Art,
Oxford/New York, 1979, and Charles Harrison, ‘Abstraction’ in Primitivism, Cubism,
Abstraction, Harrison, Francis Frascina, Gill Perry, (eds.) New Haven/London, 1993, pp. 184-
262. Both offer rare precedents for the kind of study undertaken here. Osborne however does not
proceed from a theory of depiction, and his distinction between semantic abstraction, derived
from more concrete objects in depiction, and non-iconic abstraction, derived from a display of
materials and techniques, while raising important questions of merit and criticism, begs closer
attention to depiction (or the iconic), offers no clear history or engagement with more concrete
depiction coinciding with abstraction. Harrison approaches depiction under a framework of
intentional meaning, and of the concrete as mere resemblance, is more tied to a standard history
of Modernism, less inclined to thoroughgoing revision.

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therefore difficult to impose as a finite extension. Thus a square of polka dots is not
generally seen as a picture of a given number of dots, or as a display of square-ness
but rather as just a sample of the pattern. In such cases polka dots outweigh, or outproject
the square or picture plane. 180 But ‘full abstraction’ is interested in precisely
the picture of the pattern, or the pattern of the picture, and in a two-dimensionality
that points to the picture plane rather than through it. For this reason abstraction
does not initially adopt more obvious patterns, although later with its project more
secured, it accommodates more of them in certain ways.
To start with however, the sampling of abstraction must carefully balance pattern
against picture. Too little pattern may be too much picture or less than full
abstraction. Success lies in finding how the frame may order basic elements without
them amounting to an entrenched pattern, and what elements may be so ordered
without falling into an obvious picture. 181 It is not of course, without its grey areas
and controversies. For example the detection of a figure/ground relation is
sometimes held to offer a primitive scheme for depth and hence to amount to less
than ‘full abstraction’. But an appeal to precedence of figure/ground schemes must
also identify the object figured and its background. There is no depth without
objects, so ‘depth’ cannot argue a priori for objects. More generally, ‘full abstraction’
does not rest upon the elimination of any resemblance between a two-dimensional
ordering and a three-dimensional object, or of any version of depiction. Obviously
that is impossible. Rather, its identity rests only with avoiding prior and prominent
versions of depiction, using novel or unfamiliar versions of pattern. Works accepted
as such moreover project their own resemblance and so rule out some options for
less abstract depiction while attracting new versions of abstraction. No definitive list
of features need be maintained, the grouping includes as opportunity allows.
Thus abstraction in depiction is taken as a sampling practice relative to established
or entrenched pattern. If this view initially seems to trivialise or diminish the
importance of abstraction, it is an impression to be quickly dispelled. As shall now
180 Projection in this sense and projectability of predicates is dealt with extensively in Goodman’s
writings, in particular Goodman, 1972, 1978 and 1983.
181 Thus anxiety with the decorative, noted in Greenberg, is rightly recognised as a failing of
abstraction, but not as inevitable. On the contrary, the projection of abstraction steadily wins new
object and meaning from the decorative, progressively converts the decorative with additional
qualities of painting, or revised sampling. Threat of the decorative is not just allayed but
diminished in further abstraction.

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be shown, abstraction not only maintains most of its established meaning or
interpretation under this view, but also offers considerable enlargement upon it and
indeed promotes a greater respect and appreciation of pattern. Furthermore, this
now allows the varieties of abstraction to be traced stylistically, properly to trace the
projection of abstraction, without falling into the error of assuming there is the one
fixed and final picture plane or of ascribing wayward notions of ‘flatness’, a notional
depth or elemental material to it.
In outlining projection for abstraction, the crucial contest of styles is recognised.
Importantly, works may be excluded from abstraction where stylistic affinity or
projection outweighs even the seeming disintegration of object and depth. An
example such as Nude Woman (1910) by Picasso (Figure 1) shows how a stylistic
identity resists greater abstraction. Its use of line, tone and plane, favouring short
parallels, and a distinctive facture in modulation of tone, its adherence to a warm,
tertiary to grey palette, and a composition that directs detail or density to a central
area against a neutral or darkened ground, all identify the work with those grouped
as Analytical Cubism. Even though we may have difficulty accepting the depicted
object as a nude woman, (and surely the point is that we do) we have nevertheless
an object derived from a kind of disintegration of perspective, carrying in its wake a
fragmentation of volume and tone. For it is notable that most examples of the style
more or less maintain proportion, both anatomically, and between familiar objects,
and that this governs the dispersal of parts. Here, the head, the eyes and nose
remain especially proximate. The degree of disintegration while marked in this
example does not therefore threaten its stylistic identity or achieve ‘full abstraction’.
The Orphists and Synchronists on the other hand are conspicuous as much for the
way they depart from Cubism as achieve ‘full abstraction’. While they retain a
geometric basis and an emphatic facture of short parallel strokes, they introduce a
distinctly spectral palette, a more strictly two-dimensional geometry, generally to
resolved or integral planes, filled but not traced in outlines, and virtually excluding
tonal gradation. An example such as Kupka’s Disks of Newton variously dated 1911-
12 (Figure 2) offers an especially strong contrast, with its dedication to circles,
segments and ellipses, pointedly avoiding the straight lines of Cubism. The spectral
colour range and spare geometry suggest perhaps a hybrid of Fauvism and Cubism,

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but the combination cancels each other out here. Since Fauvism favours pure hues
as values of light and Cubism favours basic geometry as values of tone and volume,
when combined thus, colour strips geometry of its volume, geometry strips colour
of its light. We have not spheres in light or spherical lights but simply curves and
colour and since curves intersect and colours intersperse, colour comes in curves, or
curves in colour. 182
Yet notice that while colours here are spectral, their division offers no simple or
obvious geometric relation. The title Disks of Newton reminds us perhaps that it was
Isaac Newton’s formulation of a circular arrangement for the colour spectrum that
first accommodated white at the centre, equidistant from all colour definitions at
the circumference, and measuring chromatic intensity against a central luminosity,
or brightness against lightness. 183 The circle also allows for any number of
distinctions to be drawn around the circumference, to choose which hues are to be
taken as primary, or at what point to draw the line at blue for example, as opposed
to turquoise or purple. Kupka’s geometry does not draw its lines between colours in
quite a standard or predictable way. The example offers only the pinkest of purples,
yet shifts in lightness of blue, blue to black and red to yellow, but only to lightness
in yellow. Equally, circles, ellipses and intersections elude stricter system. A
chromatic and geometric ordering thus acquires a formidable complexity, and is
often interpreted in terms of the mystical, magical or musical. Ordering is furthered
in their size and position within the frame. The red circle and radial variations to the
upper right, and the black, white and grey variations to the lower left direct
brightness against lightness, the mauve and green bands to the upper left are echoed
by the pink and green bands to the lower right, while the simplicity of the left is
contrasted with the complexity of the right. 184 Furthermore the actual size of the
circles, bands and ellipses determines the degree of precision and facture to the
182 For standard interpretation of Orphism see Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Revolution of Nonfigurative
Painting in Paris, Oxford, 1979. Further footnotes indicating established interpretation
for an artist, style or work is simply prefaced by ‘On’.
183 Newton’s concern was of course with the additive mixing of colour in light, rather than the
subtractive mixing of colour in pigment. John Gage traces the contribution of Isaac Newton to
colour theory and to Kupka’s version of a Newtonian colour chart, featuring ten hues and three
levels of saturation, in Gage, Colour and Meaning, London/New York, 1999, pp. 134-153. He
offers many other insights into the role of colour in abstraction, in Gage, Colour and Culture,
London/New York, 1993.
184 On Kupka, see Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction, Jaroslav
Anděl and Dorothy Kosinski (eds.) Dallas/Stuttgart, 1998 and Serge Fauchereau, Kupka,
Barcelona, 1989.

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filling colours. Ordering is also in the casual and provisional quality of the filling,
lightness of touch, intimacy of colour to curve, all announce an attitude or spirit.
Ordering then extends not only to the shape of the picture but also to its size (49.5
X 65 cm, 19½ X 25¾”).
As indicated, concern with two-dimensionality and pattern promptly leads to
consideration of three-dimensionality, firstly to facture, or the texture created by
application of paint to the supporting surface, but increasingly to more sculptural
means. Alternatively, pattern may be measured against denotation, or onedirectional
two-dimensionality. Then again, two-dimensional geometry need not
remain basic, but offers more complex versions. This leads of course back to threedimensional
geometry, or to two-dimensional schemes for depth, and firstly to
works such as Contrast of Forms (1913) (Figure 3) by Ferdinand Leger (1881-1955), to
patterns of cylinders, segments and cubes, and beyond that obviously to more
concrete objects, which we shall leave for the moment. But more complex twodimensional
geometry may simply group irregular lines and shapes for more elusive
qualities. In this respect, the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) is of interest,
since he initially favours a complex repertory of lines and shapes derived from
figurative or concrete objects, but progressively transformed through a
redistribution of colour and tone and the adoption of an orthogonal or map-like
picture plane 185 .
Untitled - First abstract watercolour, (variously dated 1910-13) (Figure 4) offers a crude
but instructive example. A narrow range of colour is assigned to a variety of shapes,
with varying angles and curves and ranging from the more compact or lump-like, to
the elongated, and to mere lines of various lengths, curve and angularity. This
morphology in turn shares various relations or combinations, yet the distribution
typically approaches an all-over or field structure, and serves to highlight the
restricted range and distribution of colour. In this case red and blue are prominent,
and form a central elliptical area, and like many of the works of this period, this
185 Depiction contrasted with ‘full abstraction’ is often termed figurative or figuration and while
this serves to contrast the literal two-dimensionality of ‘full abstraction’, unfortunately it also
suggests a metaphoric relation for other depiction, which is misleading. Where a square depicts a
cube for example, it is not figuratively or metaphorically a cube. It is literally one side of a cube.
Figurative or metaphorical reference is better understood as expression. Since some such a term
is nevertheless useful, the term concrete depiction is adopted, with some reservations.

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ellipse assumes a subtle diagonal axis, from lower left to upper right. As with
Kupka, the basis of such colour ordering is not a simple or obvious matter and is
often interpreted as a metaphor for states of mind, reflected in the manner and
degree of resolution to the ordering or pattern. Yet this cumbersome morphology
also confined Kandinsky to works of an elaborate, even epic conception.
Significantly, he later adopted basic geometry and simpler compositions. 186
Kupka also pursued complex two-dimensional geometry in works of a crystalline
and botanical derivation, such as Irregular Forms – Creation (1911). Yet the degree of
abstraction is less certain here, and as with the more abstract works of Georgia
O’Keefe (1887-1986) such as Lake George – Abstraction (1918) works balance a use of
depth against scale of object, allow colour and shape striking latitude, to render
even motion or time, but also recall the increasing use of the photographic close-up
and so tend to appeal to the picture over pattern. But related biomorphic forms
devised by Surrealist artists such as Joan Mirō (1893-1983), Hans/Jean Arp (1886-
1966) and Andre Masson (1896-1987), can sometimes pick out only a family of
curves and shapes and identify the organic or living with merely a pattern. In works
such as Mirō’s Painting (1933) (Figure 5) and certain of his later Constellations series
(1941) a more effective version of Kandinsky’s field composition is formulated. The
narrowed family of lines and shapes, the restriction to flat or single colours, hard or
sharp edges and a uniformity in size enable a greater flexibility of composition, from
many elements, as in the Constellations series to fewer, as in Painting (1933). 187
The structure of pattern balances number of elements against variation. More
elements but less variation is accommodated in a field pattern, while less elements
but more variation allows for a ‘figure’ pattern, as in the works of mid-period
Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Interestingly, the monochrome
paintings of Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) such as White on White (1919) (Figure 6)
are figures rather than fields under this arrangement even though variation of colour
all but disappears, because variation between squares becomes not simply of scale
or size but also of angle to frame and of location within frame. Shape, in other
186 On Kandinsky, see Rose Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: the development of an abstract
style, Oxford/New York, 1980. Hans K. Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky, New York,
1979, Francois Le Targat, Kandinsky, New York, 1986/7
187 On Miro, see Roland Penrose, Miro, London, 1985.

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words, steers abstraction, asserts figure rather than field. The biomorphic field or
figure by no means exhausts the range of lines for a pattern of a picture. Examples
by Klee such as Table of Colour (in Grey Major) (1930) (Figure 7) or Green on Green
(1938) (Figure 8) find a subtle range of line and shape as much by technique and
materials as geometry. Here, rough hewn and casual qualities, as with the Kupka
example, add to the ordering or pattern and sample a stiffness or brittleness of the
material and techniques, or express a patience or tolerance in the attitude of
execution. 188 In later abstraction materials and technique take on more vigorous and
unusual forms, and further govern degree of field and figure in pattern.
The Abstract Expressionist, Tachiste and Informel groups all arrive at pattern
structures according to distinctive materials and techniques. 189 Jackson Pollock
(1912-56) and Bradley Walker Tomlin (1899-1953) for example arrive at fields
through contrasting techniques, while Clifford Still (1904-1980) and Mark Rothko
(1903-1970) maintain figure patterns, according to distinctive viscosities and
applications of paint. Equally Jean-Paul Riopelle (b.1923) and Jean Bazaine (b.1904)
develop fields according to conspicuous techniques, while Wols (1913-1951) arrives
at a figure structure in works such as Composition (1947) (Figure 9) where line and
plane now share no simple family of lines according to drawing, but result from
successive techniques of brushing, rubbing and scratching. Indeed the distinction
between line, plane and colours all but dissolves here. Yet a figure emerges upon a
pale ground, its parts discerned, proportions gauged. The work accordingly offers
metaphors for indecision or impatience, spontaneity or improvisation, or some
combination, and then again for the sobriety of red, the subtlety of brown, the
relativity of line and tone. Yet beyond the variety of techniques adopted, the figures
and fields developed, two-dimensionality also operates in notation, most obviously
in writing, but also with music, dance, mathematics and various sciences. Such
notation also holds a prospect for abstraction from pictures. Hieroglyphs and
pictograms occupy a kind of middle ground, but abstraction seeks not the substance
of notation or the sound of writing, but only the picture of the pattern.
188 On Klee, see Marcel Fransiscono, Paul Klee – his work and thought, Chicago, 1991, and
Gualtieri Di San Lazzaro, Klee, London, 1964.
189
On these and similar styles, see Michel Seuphor, Abstract Painting: fifty years of
accomplishment from Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock, New York, 1964, Marcel Brion, L’Art
abstrait, Paris, 1956, Anna Moszynska, Abstract Art, London, 1990.

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Notational abstraction occurs in a variety of Surrealist or Surrealist-inspired works.
Together with the impulsive, automatic or spontaneous approaches to technique,
abstract notation occurs prominently in the figure-like patterns of Jackson Pollock
in works such as Male and Female (1942) as well as later more fluent and fluid fields.
By contrast the intricate ‘calligraphy’ of Mark Tobey (1890-1976), offers notationlike
elements in more discrete and discreet fields, in works such as Universal Field
(1949). Since notation is one-directional, following sounds and sequence, notation is
necessarily linear, not strictly tonal or chromatic. An abstraction of fictive notation
however may toy with multi-directional fields, tonal or chromatic coding. Yet
notational abstraction is not drawn only to fields. Works by Wols, Hans Hartung
(1904-1989), Franz Kline (1910-1962), or Pierre Soulages (b.1919) with their
predominantly black and linear elements, look not so much to a textual structure
even with a textural approach, but to an alphabetical one, to figures rather than
fields, and the ‘big’ variations between elements of line and shape, or notationally,
between time and one-directionality. Yet the one-directional linear pattern cannot
be pursued by depiction any further. It is the end of the line for one branch of
abstraction. 190
As noted, scrutiny of two-dimensionality also directs attention to three-dimensional
qualities of a medium, firstly to texture, to novel applications and unusual materials,
then to greater spatial considerations. Hence the common merging of painting with
sculpture, in the painted bas-reliefs of Hans Arp (1886-1966) or Ben Nicholson
(1894-1982), the wall constructions of Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), Lazar El
Lissitzky (1890-1941), or Ivan Puni (alias Jean Pougny) (1894-1956), the mobiles of
Alexander Calder (1898-1976), many of the plane-like carvings of Barbara
Hepworth (1903-1975), the Perspex sheet constructions of Naum Gabo (1890-
1977) and the painted constructions of August Herbin (1882-1960) or Georges
Vantongerloo (1886-1965), for example. Discerning abstract two-dimensionality
becomes a way of appreciating the surrounding three-dimensionality, and vice versa.
Yet conventions of three-dimensionality do not deal only in picture planes and are
190 However it is a branch usefully retraced by the Paris-based Letteriste group and offshoots
throughout the fifties, where greater notation converges with poetry and the emphasis shifts to
printing and even textiles. This tendency also emerges in the ‘layouts’ in painting and collage by
the Situationist group. For a brief account of Letterisme and Situationism see Tony Godfrey,
Conceptual Art, London, 1998, pp.58-61 and pp. 75-79.

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not exemplified only by the exclusion of a dimension, obviously, but by attention to
the versatility of mass in materials and related presentational practices.
The painted wall-construction or bas-relief offers one way of testing such practices
but abstraction in sculpture also seeks distinctive qualities of a given material, firstly
a ‘truth to materials’ that resists the traditional demands of depiction, then forms
and arrangements held to be definitive of the material, then combined materials and
construction held to be definitive to an object or function, then to an arrangement
or construction held to telling to a situation or context. This broadening concern
finds two distinct strategies. On the one hand Modernist sculpture is drawn to
larger issues of design, to architecture, even engineering or industry. It integrates the
work within a larger context and abandons the pedestal, so to speak, on which to
place work. The Russian Constructivists, the Dutch de Stijl group and the German
Bauhaus, amongst others, pursue this tendency. 191 On the other hand Modernist
sculpture also isolates the overlooked material or construction, places it on a
pedestal, so to speak, in order to appreciate otherwise ignored qualities. This
tendency is pursued in Duchamp’s ready-mades, and in various collage or
assemblage practices.
So, one strategy integrates while the other isolates. The pedestal has either no role
or a bigger role in Modernist sculpture. But the two strategies also feed off one
another, some integrations make some isolations more interesting, and vice versa.
The fate of Modernist sculpture does not therefore lie in just the farther reaches of
civic planning or industrial design. ‘Pedestals’ find new applications and variety and
in general the flow between categories makes for more rather than less categories.
Similarly, abstraction in depiction and painting is strengthened rather than
weakened by the pull toward sculpture. Persistent fears for the demise of depiction
and painting mistake the dynamics of such developments, which conform
somewhat to Newton’s third law of dynamics, whereby for every action there is an
equal and opposite reaction. 192 Categories of painted sculpture, assemblage and
construction, refine rather than replace sculpture and painting and help to highlight
191 On Russian Constructivism, see Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922,
London, 1962, Nicholas H. Allison (ed.) Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914-1932, New
York, 1990. For De Stijl see Nancy Troy, The De Stijl Experiment, Cambridge, Mass. 1983. On
The Bauhaus, see Bauhaus, Jeanine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend (eds.) Cologne, 2000.
192 This is of course offered only as a simile, and as a ‘law’ for reference, rather than history.

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new or overlooked properties for non-sculptural painting and non-painted
sculpture. This development in part measures the course of Modernism. But to
understand this course more fully, the study must also look to how abstraction in
painting influences and responds to developments in more concrete depiction. This
is the task of the next chapter.
The task here has been to explain abstraction as the sampling of two-dimensionality
and the relation between depiction and pattern. It has provided an analysis of the
development of abstraction along four axes, firstly between basic and complex
geometry, secondly between field and figure structures, thirdly between notation
and pattern and fourthly between two and three-dimensionality, or materials. These
comprise the stylistic features of abstraction, and might suggest a realignment of
styles with established sources in a longer study. It is enough here to distinguish
these features from their standard interpretation and to show how abstraction
reconceived makes for a more comprehensive and comprehensible history.

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Modernism: 1912-1950
‘Simultaneous and Successive Depiction’
Modernism has been taken as a period that commences with the emergence of
abstraction around 1912 and abstraction has been taken as the sampling of twodimensionality
for depiction rather than by depiction. Abstraction here makes
patterns for pictures. But there is more to Modernism than abstraction. Competing
styles of depiction start from similar concerns with novel picture planes but arrive at
versions that defy abstraction and pattern. They sample conflicting objects and
multiple picture planes. Can a picture have more than one object? Can a depicted
object need more than one picture plane? Pictures of more than one object (as
opposed to simply many unitary parts) are familiar in the form of the rabbit/duck
ambiguous drawing, or in the compositions of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c.1527-1593).
Objects of more than one picture plane are less familiar, but still traditional in
games with scale and perspective such as those devised by William Hogarth (1697-
1764) for the etching False Perspective (1754) (Figure 10). In the first example the
picture may be viewed successively but not simultaneously, offer more than one
picture plane, but not at the same time, may be rabbit or duck, but not rabbit and
duck. In the second, location and scale of object depend upon competing systems
of perspective. The object belongs to any one system to the extent that the system
is consistent throughout the picture, but since none are wholly consistent, the
object properly belongs to conflicting and simultaneous picture planes.
‘Simultaneous and successive depiction’ arises in roughly three styles in Modernism.
Firstly it arises in an overlay and overlap of objects through multiple picture planes
and is here termed ‘Overstyle’. This style commences with the experiments in
collage by Picasso and Braque in 1912 and is pursued by artists such as Klee, Arp,
Miro and Max Ernst (1891-1976), ultimately to a convergence with biomorphic
abstraction. Secondly it leads more narrowly, to a play of styles within a single
picture plane, to blends or hybrids, pastiche and parody. Here this is termed

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‘Interstyle’. This arises as a conservative and compromised tendency, but receives
decisive support from Picasso in his games with neo-classicist figures and
proportions, as part of his demonstrations of stylistic versatility. 193 The third style
starts from works such as Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912) (Figure 11) by Marcel
Duchamp, I and the Village (1911) (Figure 12) by Marc Chagall (1887-1985) and The
Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) (Figure 13) by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). It
concerns conflicts within systems of perspective, and between objects and realism
of style. This tendency culminates in the ‘dream pictures’ of Ernst, Salvador Dali
(1904-1989), Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) and others, as well as the pictorial
conundrums of Rene Magritte (1898-1967) and is here termed ‘Rerealism’. The term
is introduced since, while much ‘Rerealism’ is the product of Surrealists, (that is,
members of the Paris-based organisation of that name) not all ‘Rerealism’ is
Surrealist. Duchamp, Chagall and de Chirico for example were not members.
Equally, not all Surrealists painted ‘Rerealism’. Miro, Masson, Roberto Enchauren
Matta (b.1911-2003) and Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) did not, for example. Nor is all
‘Rerealism’ necessarily dream-like or especially oneiric – Magritte’s games with a
caption in The Treachery of Images (1939) (Figure 14) or Duchamp’s Passage from Virgin
to Bride (1912) for example surely engage pictorial or stylistic issues before dreams.
The Surrealists, while an important source of promotion and support for
‘Rerealism’ and ‘Overstyle’ are not exclusively the source of either. Finally,
‘Rerealism’ captures something of the multiple or circular nature of the picture
plane friction in such works. The introduction of the styles here perhaps also frees
works from more rigid interpretation.
‘Overstyle and ‘Rerealism’ share with abstraction the promotion of the magical,
mystical and musical and extend schemes of picture plane in more radical ways. Yet
the three styles compete and conflict in means. Abstraction pursues the object to a
193 ‘Interstyle’ is recognised under other descriptions. For example, variants such as the Neue
Sachlichkeit, Pittura Metafisica and Socialist Realism are similarly grouped in Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression’ October no 16 Spring, 1981, pp. 39-68.
Although Buchloh argues not just for a conservatism to the style, but for links to dangerous
political tendencies, for the style as a portent of these and for parallels with the rise of Neo-
Expressionism in the late seventies and early eighties. More recently, the style is reviewed in
relation to abstraction in Robert Storr, Modern art despite modernism, London/New York, 2000.
Although Storr’s grouping is somewhat wider, including ‘Rerealism’ (or much of Surrealism) but
excluding ‘Overstyle’ (or much of Picasso, Klee, Mirō and similar). As the title indicates, Storr
juggles a more general sense of modernism, as a concern with the avant-garde or forthright
progress, (and a common noun) with a tentative concession to period style, or Modernism, in
delineating its conservative tendency.

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pattern of the picture plane, takes the shape or frame as outermost and its patterns
as offering the requisite intangibility. ‘Overstyle’ and ‘Rerealism’ by contrast find
where the centre does not hold. Conflicting picture planes may share the same
object, up to a point. Conflicting objects may similarly share the same picture plane.
Abstraction is not the issue unless coherence is maintained. While each starts from a
distinct position, their courses soon converge, so that abstraction is outflanked by
multiple picture planes and conflicting objects, but undermines objects and the
concrete with new pattern. Pictures become patterns or patterns become pictures.
While ‘Rerealism’ is usually to be distinguished from ‘Overstyle’ by its reliance on
proportion and perspective, greater plays with and between other projections
occasionally blur the difference. This chapter traces the course of ‘Overstyle’ and
‘Rerealism up to the middle of the century and explains how Modernism absorbs
and expands upon these competing projects.
The experiments with collage by Picasso and Braque are firstly to be understood as
a decisive break with Cubism. In the discussion of Analytical Cubism in the
preceding chapter, the disintegration of perspective and object is shown to involve
isolation of tone and volume of parts, and further to planes, lines and facture of
points. Integration and a whole are a matter of density and detail. Analysing the
object into parts and simple volumes also allows for diversity of projection
(something inherited directly from Cezanne) and as a consequence allows
orthogonal or oblique projections for parts of the picture. Yet for certain objects,
volume is a slender issue. Text or notation of various kinds, wallpaper, postage
stamps, playing cards, faux marbling and wood grain, are all objects that
conspicuously lack volume. They are also often prints, but like patterns, they may
also be considered as two-dimensional objects. To depict such objects presents the
same problem as depicting a circle or square. Such objects function as both
presentation and representation, (when taken as an orthogonal projection of a
sphere or cube, for example). Where orthogonal projection operates in only part of
a picture or object, they strengthen the contrast from part to whole. These issues
arise for Picasso and Braque in the work preceding collage, and surely prompt the
exchange of painted text for actual or collaged text, for the introduction of other
two-dimensional objects, and for the introduction of sand and other thickening
agents to paint in parts of the picture, with which to strike contrasts with ‘presented’

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three-dimensional properties of the surface and their two-dimensional integration to
the whole. These features are elsewhere seen as a reflection of African practices. 194
The argument here is for their inclusion as simply a more explicit demonstration of
the two-dimensionality at issue.
An early example such as Picasso’s Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass (1912) (Figure
15) combines wallpaper, wood-graining, music and newspaper texts, as well as
coloured paper and a charcoal drawing of a wineglass on a separate sheet. The
vertical oblique projection of the wine glass casts the ‘background’ wallpaper as a
tabletop or horizontal surface, and lays guitar, newspaper and music sheet upon
them. The black saucer shape that overlaps the base of the wine glass may however
function as either a shadow or base of the guitar, or, in a horizontal oblique
projection, as a bowl, and contain or occlude the guitar. Such construction enables
Picasso and Braque to forgo integration and perspective through tone and volume
for alternation or oscillation between conflicting projections. The surface is
successively and contiguously read, not quite as in the rabbit/duck ambiguous
drawing, since objects do not fully coincide, but rather are partial and overlapping,
simultaneous and successive. Confusion in the pictures is however, regrettably
reflected in much commentary. The folly often lies in assuming changes of angle
between object and picture plane always accommodate the same object, or that
changes of angle are all that is involved. 195
Collage offers not only an intriguing supplement to painting, but also a potential
substitute. It begs many more questions of depiction than Picasso or Braque care to
address. For example, what happens when pictures themselves are collaged or represented?
Since pictures may also be prints and belong to the category of twodimensional
objects, their re-presentation ought to highlight their presentational
status through contrast and integration in some greater whole and representation.
194 This point is particularly argued for in Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model, Cambridge, Mass
and London, 1993, pp. 65-97. Following Kahnweiler, he argues that the practice derives from a
Grebo mask, and results in similar structures amongst Picasso and Braque’s paper sculptures. It
cannot however explain the acquisition of literal text, wood graining, and of their notably twodimensional
character in paintings. Conversely however, such two-dimensionality does explain
the planar and linear features of the sculptures.
195 On Picasso and Cubism, to offer only a few eminent examples from a broad spectrum, John
Golding, Cubism: a history and analysis, 1907-1914, London, 1959, Robert Rosenblum, Cubism
and Twentieth Century Art, New York/London, 1960, Yves-Alain Bois, Painting as Model,
Cambridge/ Mass./London, 1993, Neil Cox, Cubism, London, 2000.

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Photographs and other forms of printed depiction however are rarely used in the
collages of Picasso and Braque, but are eagerly taken up by Dada and Futurist
groups, and allied groups in Russia and Germany. An example such as Malevich’s
Composition with the Mona Lisa (1914) (Figure 16) uses a colour photograph or
postcard of Da Vinci’s painting as a ‘real’ or presentational part to a whole picture
of objects upon a blue triangular table, in a manner similar to Picasso and Braque.
But since all other objects are reduced to single colours and black lines, certain of
the photograph’s qualities are heightened. Its small, torn, hand-tinted (and now
faded) qualities become foremost, and modify our view of this icon, as do the
reproving red crosses drawn upon it. 196 This exemplification of materials coincides
with abstraction’s growing attention to three-dimensionality, and may draw it back
into depiction through the incorporation of such prints, or draw such depiction into
abstraction through greater fragmentation, as in the works of Kurt Schwitters
(1887-1948).
The use of only photographic prints, or photomontage, originates as a hobby in the
nineteenth century, where parts are more smoothly integrated into a bigger picture.
But where the structure of the whole is exchanged for a more abstract arrangement
or theme, as in the works of Raoul Haussman (1886-1971), Hannah Hoch/Hoech
(1889-1978), John Heartfield (1891-1968) and others, qualities of material as well as
underlying themes of objects are highlighted. These uses of photomontage, with
their conflicting objects and picture planes also reflect the influence of Chagall and
de Chirico, although range of material and more satirical themes do not. The use of
text on the other hand is certainly owed to Cubism, but their radically different
relation to depicted objects argues against them being taken as simply another
version of Cubism, as is sometimes claimed. As noted, Picasso and Braque generally
resist photomontage.
Yet, for that matter, it is difficult to see why the changes that collage brings to the
work of Picasso and Braque are generally labelled Synthetic Cubism. The
prominence of cubes, or basic volumes and their tones disappears in such work
with the growing emphasis upon flat or single colours and more complex curves
196 It also uncannily anticipates Duchamp’s more celebrated use of the Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q.
(1919).

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and textures. Nor does it make a great deal of difference to say that they are built up
from, rather than broken down into basic volumes - cubes, so to speak. For surely
whether an object is analysed in terms of cubes, or cubes are synthesised in terms of
an object, all things being equal, must come to the same thing? In fact the difference
rests not upon whether the pictures are built up from or broken down into cubes,
but rather in the variety of the breaks and builds. In short, the works from Picasso
and Braque’s collage period onward are neither synthetic nor Cubist. Cubism in
Picasso and Braque’s work ends with the experiments in collage. ‘Overstyle’ and
Modernism begin.
If one compares Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair (1910) (Figure 17) with Woman in
an Armchair (1913) (Figure 18) the difference is stark. It is not simply one of more
but smaller breaks, contrasted with fewer but bigger breaks, but of other qualities to
the breaks themselves. The breaks in the older work, with their use of straight lines
to register shape, and then volume and tone, are almost Impressionist in their
restrained resolution, a tonal equivalent of a late Monet. The breaks in the later
work are less concerned with any single quality of the object than with a game or
scheme of greater differences between parts. In the older work we have a complete
but vague person, in the later work a partial but clear person. As Gombrich noted,
such games with ambiguity only work where the objects are familiar, and one might
add few and simple. But Picasso excels at these games with proportions and parts,
and finds the familiar through contrasting and successive novelties, as much as
gauges invention according to nature.
In the later example, whole/part relations still resolve from centre to frame (and
later Picasso tends to sharpen this feature). Curves and texture to armchair are
sometimes shared with the woman as in the ‘horizontal’ hair to the right of the
inclined head, doubling as a headrest, the pink arms to the chair sharing the tucked
treatment to the half-slip to the lower centre. Orientation may start from whole or
parts. Surely the breasts in the centre of the picture alert us to the rib cage to the
right and the raised arm and armpit above, for example. The temptation is to say
that the ribs and armpit are more stylised, breasts more realistic, but this would be
stretching a point, so to speak. More accurately, it is a two-way adjustment – the
breasts gain resemblance given the stylistic games played by surrounding parts. But

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also breasts, like faces and hands (which the picture notably treats more radically)
hold a different priority from ribs and armpits. The game is hardly just an anatomy
lesson. For this reason the games with style are not arbitrary either, as is sometimes
concluded. The rule is not that anything goes, but rather that what goes depends on
from where and how far. Plainly, style and realism are relative to object depicted.
This relativity of style to object, of parts to whole, and the game of variations on
picture plane, remains the focus of Picasso and Braque’s later work.
But while the game of styles is not arbitrary, it nevertheless announces a daunting
variety. Picasso’s growing mastery and enthusiasm for such games quickly leads to a
number of parallel styles within his work. His so-called neo-classical or conservative
works such as The Painter and His Model (1914) (Figure 19) while starkly traditional in
comparison with either example of Woman in an Armchair, is unmistakably a product
of the twentieth century when compared with Ingres, for example. 197 More
accurately, such works play with the proportions and modelling of the figure, with
its canons and realism. Such games might result in Surreal or Rereal figures, if
contrasted with other aspects, such as detail in figure or scale in surroundings. But
no such contrasts arise here, and later, more concerted efforts in this direction are
content with much less, and conflate rather than confront proportion and
modelling with vigorous outline and bold brushwork. The result is a game of
superficial rules or mannerisms when compared with ‘Overstyle’.
‘Overstyle’ is gradually drawn to greater abstraction. The contrast of orthogonal and
oblique projections with and without perspective, bring with them not just other
versions of the object, but less concrete objects. The woman in an armchair
becomes a creature of multiple picture planes, the reassuring subject of endless
games as well as the ghostly, insubstantial vision of many styles. Artists such as Klee
and Mirō take the game further in this direction. Klee’s The Tightrope Walker or The
Equilibrist (1923) (Figure 20) shuffles perspectives and projections to turn the circus
performer into a metaphor for the Modernist, balancing styles and picture planes.
197 Comparisons with Ingres often arise in commentary on these works. The series of drawings,
including portraits of Max Jacob and Ambrose Vollard from the same period, for example, where
a smooth unbroken outline is maintained, and modelling and detail are centred on the face, are
often taken as attributes of Ingres, although properly these are no more than academic staples,
and can be traced back at least to Holbein and Botticelli, and more accurately reflect the use of
tracing.

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Mirō’s Head of a pipe-smoker (1925) (Figure 21) all but indecipherable without the
title, balances the simplest of profiles – through relation of eye to nose – against a
line that doubles as the smoker’s smile and its black leaf-like forms at the other end,
which serve as a pipe. The yellow plume of smoke echoes this profile while its
flame-like tip of red is in turn echoed in the lungs of the smoker. This comic
reduction now finds a creature of warring lines and colour, as transparent and
transient as smoke. Such figures in both artists work are often seen as aspiring to
the condition of signs, as converging upon notation. As noted, abstraction is also
drawn to notation, and both artists in turn are drawn to abstraction and text on
occasion, and introduce unusual techniques and materials. 198 A final step in this
convergence lies in ‘Overstyle’s’ use of the ‘biomorphic’ object, the metamorphic
core to this world of change. Klee’s The Twin’s Place (1929) (Figure 22) and Mirō’s
Painting on Masonite (1936) (Figure 23) each picture the biomorphic blob in all its
whimsical fluidity. The biomorphic object of ‘Overstyle’ and the biomorphic curve
of abstraction are of course, two sides to the same coin. And it is a coin that is
flipped with a certain impatience throughout the forties, by New York-based artists
such as Gorky, Matta, Motherwell, de Kooning and Pollock, as well as Copenhagenbased
artists such as Carl-Henning Pederson, (1913-1993) Svarvar Gudnason (1909-
1988) and Asger Jorn (1914-73). 199 Before pursuing the implications of this
convergence, one must first look to the other competing style to abstraction, to the
‘Rerealism’ of conflicting objects.
Where the play of pictures advances only in so far as the object is abstracted, the
play of objects advances only in so far as style accommodates certain of their
standard attributes, or attains realism. ‘Rerealism’ seldom bothers with Cubism’s
studio-based tableaux, prefers more fictive, often literary themes but is distinctive
for the spatial conflicts engineered between objects, and the resulting unease.
Examples by Duchamp, Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Chagall and de Chirico all
generate an equal confusion of scale, depth, movement and light. Duchamp does
away with Cubism’s broken facture and resolves lines and planes to volumes only to
198 On Mirō, see Roland Penrose, Mirō, London, 1985. On Klee, see Marcel Fransiscono, Paul
Klee – his work and thought, Chicago, 1991, Gualtieri Di San Lazzaro, Klee, London, 1964.
199 While these artists are more typically associated with the CoBrA publications and exhibitions
of the late forties, their earlier work exhibits greater attention to biomorphic features from in their
Höst exhibitions in Copenhagen from 1939. See Cobra, 40 Years After (catalogue) Chris van der
Heyden (ed.) Amsterdam, 1988.

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confront a daunting spatial and tonal complexity in The Passage from Virgin to Bride
(1912). We have a realistic picture of a Cubist construction, or a Cubist picture of
‘only’ volumes and planes. According to the title it depicts a model or plan for
sexual initiation and marriage, but comically, it can function as no more than an
abstruse or failed metaphor. 200 The construction of a spatial model for an extended
passage of movement is something pursued more cautiously by the Futurists. De
Chirico also cultivates models and plans, but includes classical sculpture as well as
less familiar constructions, and pictures within pictures to undermine the realism of
objects and style, and to point to the metaphysics of depiction. 201 Yet the pictures
are hardly a dry exercise in philosophy, for such confusion is as readily experienced
as anxiety or disorientation. In The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) it is felt in the
conflicts of perspective, scale, depth, between torso, bananas and the strangely tilted
colonnade. Nor are such experiences only the stuff of dreams, but may be just the
equivalent of staring at the spelling of a word until overcome with a similar
confusion. Stylistic integrity, like spelling, can sometimes be cut adrift. Chagall’s
equally dislocated composition in I and the Village (1911) is keyed to red and green
and inverts, displaces, compounds and superimposes objects, and is sometimes
thought to structure a narrative in this way, although more accurately, incidents and
folklore evoke successive and conflicting aspects of a time and place. For Chagall,
this is generally provincial life in Tsarist Russia. 202
As noted, conflicts between depicted objects lend themselves to photomontage, but
photomontage also heightens the conflicts, not simply through different qualities of
paper and printing, but through greater realism associated with their various
functions (as discussed in Chapter Nine). They also prompt different objects.
Among the first artists to fully exploit these possibilities is Ernst. He not only
transferred the technique back into painting with a new and potent approach to
fiction, in works such as The Elephant of Celebes (1921) but also applied
photomontage to the theme of models and plans, in works such as Stratified rock
nature’s gift composed of gneiss lava Icelandic moss 2 varieties of bladderwort 2 varieties of perineal
hernia cardiac vegetation (b) the same in polished casket, a little more expensive (1920) (Figure
200 On Duchamp, again from a vast array, see Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins, Marcel
Duchamp, London, 1999, for a concise overview.
201 The style of these pictures is sometimes termed Metaphysical, although metaphysics are
hardly confined to this style, of course.
202 On Chagall, see Jean Cassou, Chagall, London, 1965.

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24) As with the example by Duchamp, title and picture render an absurdity, but
equally, offer a metaphor for scientific analysis, and model-making as an end in
itself. Interestingly, such works plunder scientific and commercial sources curiously
ignored by Duchamp and Picabia. Ernst’s versatility of technique and materials also
carry his work into ‘Overstyle’ and abstraction. However, Magritte, Tanguy and
Dali, amongst others, take up the fictive potential of ‘Comrealism’ with greater
dedication.
Magritte also maintains the play with models, with pictures within pictures, and the
emphasis upon the role of reference or representation in the identity of objects. As
with Duchamp, things are always caught standing for other things, as part of being
themselves. For this reason Magritte’s work is also as much metaphysical as dreamlike
or surreal. Yet Magritte also presses realism in a way that neither Duchamp nor
de Chirico care for. Magritte’s objects often assume a conflicting texture or shape,
and offer for example birds made of stone, or stones shaped like birds, and each
may hover before their surroundings and argue identities or circumstances. The
greater the realism, the more concrete the object, the greater the conflict and
resulting ‘Rerealism’. In the case of Dali these conflicts of scale, texture and shape
culminate in the celebrated limp wristwatches of The Persistence of Memory (1931)
(Figure 25). Dali is equally noted for the use of successive picture planes, of the
rabbit/duck variety - his ‘paranoiac-critical’ method. In The Metamorphosis of Narcissus
(1937) (Figure 26) the repeated image of a hand holding an egg coincides on the left
with the image of a crouching youth, head resting on a raised knee. But where
‘Overstyle’ resists the coincidence of whole objects and picture planes in favour of
partial or overlapping versions, Dali’s ‘Rerealism’ is drawn to the challenge of
sustaining them. Unfortunately the pictures cannot sustain an endless kaleidoscope
of objects, but typically present one or two as a set piece amid a landscape. 203 As a
consequence, they seem as much hostages to ingenuity as features of the sublime or
subliminal. 204
203 Interestingly, it is during this period, in the late 1930s, that the prints of M.C. Escher attain
their distinctive perspectival and projective structures that sustain just these kinds of
multiplicities. See Escher, M.C. Escher, The Graphic Work, Cologne, 2001, p. 6.
204 On Magritte and Dali see William Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, London, 1969, Rene
Passeron, The Concise Encyclopaedia of Surrealism, London, 1984. Dawn Ades, Dada and
Surrealism, London, 1974.

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Yet two-dimensionality lurks behind such ambiguous objects as much as underlying
myths or primal drives. Indeed, a problem for ‘Rerealism’ lies with the consolidation
of its artist’s styles and the emergence of a distinctive iconography throughout the
forties. Neither Ernst’s novel techniques nor Magritte or Dali’s studied
academicisms deliver a realism beyond their range of objects, nor a range of objects
beyond their realism. There is no non-technique or neutral realism to which to
appeal. Nor is there an object so wild, spontaneous and disturbing that it does not
require a technique, or with repeated acquaintance, acquire one. In this light
‘Rerealism’ begins to acquire a default formalism, may even start to look a little like
a kind of ‘full abstraction’, displaying only a style of picture plane. A point
supported, if one returns for a moment to the project of abstraction and its appeal
to basic geometry in exemplifying the picture plane. As shown, if geometry is
pursued, it encounters three-dimensional geometry, and if one were an artist
committed to abstraction and wondering how three-dimensional geometry might
exemplify a picture plane, one might easily exploit just such paradoxes and conflicts
through perspective and proportion, just such appeals to realism.
As shown, ‘Overstyle’ converges with abstraction with its biomorphic objects, and
now one can see how ‘Rerealism’ is at least tentatively drawn to it. Conversely,
when abstraction acquires biomorphic curves, it cannot then resist their mechanical
or engineering counterparts in basic geometry. Even Mondrian’s work of the forties
uses titles like Place de la Concorde (1938-43) Trafalgar Square (1939-43) and New York
City 1 (1941-42) and while such titles offer at most a metaphor, abstraction
nevertheless obtains such versions while creeping toward the concrete. Since all
three styles emerge at the same time none can appeal to precedent of project or a
greater entrenchment. Expanding pattern meets expanding picture on equal terms,
and the result would seem to be a kind of stylistic stalemate.
But as with the convergence of painting and sculpture considered in the previous
chapter, the deadlock of styles does not quite eventuate. Firstly, many unambiguous
works continue to reinforce style identity, while intermediate works never command
sufficient bulk to seriously undermine the distinctions. Secondly, because
intermediate works can have no more than a foot in each camp, so to speak, their
impact upon the respective camps is progressively weakened, so that further

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integration becomes an exercise in diminishing returns. The stalemate thus never
quite arises. Mondrian’s architectural metaphors reinforce their distance from the
literal and concrete. The generic props of ‘Rerealism’ and the biomorphic objects of
‘Overstyle’ cannot quite become patterns without patterns becoming pictures. Yet
pressing the issue in this way has its uses, serves to direct and strengthen other lines
of enquiry. For abstraction, consolidation enables the adoption of greater, more
obvious pattern. For ‘Overstyle and ‘Rerealism’, further versions move beyond
‘simultaneous and successive’ depiction. A crucial juncture for Modernism thus
arises by the middle of the century and marks the start of a later phase. In the
following chapter, Late Modernism is traced from this point along a path that
departs from ‘simultaneous and successive’ depiction.

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Late Modernism 1950 – 1960
‘Reciprocal Depiction’
The study now turns to the second half of the twentieth century with a broad view
of the stylistics of Modernism in place. As shown, the middle of the century
represents a turning point for Modernism, where competing styles converge, then
take new directions. The change earns a new but brief period. Late Modernism
arises and so coincides with the lower end of the time frame for the study, but is no
more significant for that. The transition is no more precise than the start of
Modernism, which is to say it allows a margin of two or three years, but for
convenience may be taken as starting at 1950, just as Modernism here has been
rounded out to a starting point in 1912. Modernism gains a second period, as Late
Modernism, and its first period consequently becomes Early Modernism. Period
here also admits to a subtle shift of place. Where Early Modernism was more
centred on Western Europe, Late Modernism centres more on New York and
London, and marginalizes Eastern Europe, Germany and Spain. Late Modernism
also involves competing styles and a version of abstraction, but ‘Overstyle’ and
‘Rerealism’ undergo more radical change and attention is firstly devoted to this
departure.
The change in general terms is away from an affirmation of the magical, mystical
and musical and toward a more brooding acceptance of their inconstancy. Work
now stresses doubt, frustration, mistakes and revision. The disaffection is reflected
in the distrust and dilution of preceding styles. As noted, abstraction and
‘simultaneous and successive depiction’ converge in some ways. But where
‘simultaneous and successive depiction’ accommodates abstraction amongst its rival
picture planes or abstraction accommodates the ‘simultaneous and successive’ as a
pattern of pictures, the combination cancels itself out. The result is in some respects
more traditional in that objects are less abstract, the picture plane tending to the
singular, but in other respects more radical in that object and picture plane variously

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exhibit a new and puzzling incompleteness, an extreme supplementation of pigment
and medium and a multiplicity beyond the simultaneous or successive. In fact
construction now establishes a reciprocal relation between three-dimensionality and
two, the abstract and the concrete, pattern and picture. What is sampled is the
mutual dependence between materials and two-dimensionality, picture plane and
object. The style is here termed ‘Reciprocal Depiction’.
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ carries the rival projects of Early Modernism through to one
further and final stage or style. But ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ does not just explain
what becomes of the influence of Picasso, Klee and Miro on one hand, Ernst,
Magritte and Dali on the other. In assimilating them it also sets in place a more
complex sampling practice that rapidly suggests further projects for depiction and
painting. This, as much as developments in abstraction, sets the agenda for
subsequent periods to the century. However this chapter traces only the varieties of
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ for the period, while following chapters show how they
arrive at a further break of period, of Post Modernism. This is, of course, only to
delay considering the relation with abstraction in Late and Post-Modernism and a
fuller view of the periods. But this course enables firstly a stronger grasp of
‘Reciprocal Depiction’, of features rarely associated or properly considered in other
art histories.
To be clear on the terms, ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ is introduced as the name for a
style of painting that arises at this time, that deals in less than full abstraction, more
than traditional concrete depiction. It is not, as was the case with ‘simultaneous and
successive depiction’, merely the name given to a more general category of picture,
to which the historical variants of ‘Overstyle’ and ‘Rerealism’ can be assigned.
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ for just the period of Late Modernism, might aptly be called
‘Ambistyle’ or more pointedly perhaps, ‘Disillusion’, if discussion of the style in
subsequent periods arises. But the task is firstly to outline the main traits of
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ and to set in place sub-styles for period as need arises. Here
it is enough to appreciate its pervasive presence throughout the period, its influence.
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ arises in three ways. Firstly it uses an arrangement of discrete
pictures and sometimes notation within a larger map-like scheme to sample patterns

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between pictures and other elements. Or reciprocally, it samples pictures and other
elements for such larger schemes or patterns. This is here termed ‘layout’, in
contrast with traditional ‘composition’, understood as the organisation within a
single picture. Secondly, it uses radical supplements to pigment and medium that
require novel application or manipulation so that they sample qualities that resist
standard depiction and objects, and reciprocally, samples depiction that nevertheless
succeeds, that gains purchase or traction in such material. This is here termed
‘traction’. Thirdly, it uses a fragmentation of object and picture plane that samples a
kind of cross-section to the depictive process, an interrupted state in which
completion or revision rest upon a range of reciprocal adjustments to material,
picture plane and object. This is here termed ‘interruption’. ‘Interruption’ may
include ‘layout’ or ‘traction’ while also dealing in less complete or discrete pictures,
more typical materials and techniques. All or some of these ways may be used in
‘Reciprocal Depiction’.
The roots of ‘layout’ lie directly in certain works by Klee and Mirō where objects,
pictures or notation alternate between literal and metaphorical relations. There are
similar and stronger roots in Early Modernist photomontage, in works by
Schwitters, Hoch or Ernst for example, and this practice is pursued by a wide range
of artists in the fifties, from Englishmen, Eduardo Paolozzi (b.1924) and Richard
Hamilton (b.1922), to New York-based Americans, Ray Johnson (b.1927) and
Robert Rauschenberg (b.1925) to the West Coast-based, Bruce Connor (b.1923) for
example, where fragmentation of a given photograph is less prominent than its
entire inclusion within a greater whole. Roots are also found where ‘Overstyle’s
orthogonal picture planes introduce biomorphic objects, their organic or cellular
organisation and are augmented by pictograms and notational elements. These are
prominent in the work of Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Motherwell and Adolph
Gottlieb (1903-1974) throughout the forties. ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ arises where
‘layout’ is given added emphasis, by the self-contained or framed photograph in a
larger arrangement, in painting by simpler and singular picture planes and broader
range of objects depicted.
The paintings of the Cobra (or CoBrA) group (1949-51) frequently offer this range,
favouring Klee-like masks or heads, figures, suns, buildings, boats and mythical

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beasts, but generally reducing the more elaborate games of ‘Overstyle’, settling for
the isolation of object and picture in primitive orthogonal projections (where the
edge of the object strictly becomes the edge of a picture plane). 205 CoBrA work
becomes in this way more insistently about ‘layout’. Works thus take on the quality
of a chaotic board game or chart in their placement of object or pictures. Yet these
works do not simply alternate depiction with denotation, the concrete with the
abstract, but are often blended, spontaneously or intuitively mapping objects and
relations, even as the map is made, as in Fantasia II (1944) (Figure 27) an early work
by Dane, Carl-Henning Pedersen. 206 Means shift accordingly from the smooth linear
approaches of earlier work to heavier, peremptory brushstroke and muddled colour.
The attraction lies in the promise of a reconciliation of depiction and denotation, a
recurrent desire and source of potent metaphors. Indeed it is an attraction that
persists throughout the rest of century, even as the concern with more abstract or
fictive notation and esoteric symbols is replaced with more sustained picture planes,
more standard text. The influence of CoBrA is widespread and felt in the work of
Englishman, Alan Davie (b.1920) Frenchman, Gaston Chaissac (1910-64) German,
Horst Antes (b.1936) Australian, John Olsen (b.1928) amongst many others. The
attraction to notation also converges with abstraction of notation, discussed in
Chapter Eleven and much CoBrA work dissipates in this convergence.
‘Layout’ involving picture planes other than the orthogonal is less popular in
painting at this time, although a tentative acceptance is found in the work of
Rauschenberg. His use of photography in assemblages from the mid-fifties, such as
Small Rebus (1956) (Figure 28) show one way in which this ‘layout’ or ‘flat-bed’
composition stretches the literal and metaphoric, embraces a range of picture
planes. 207 Here, a range of exertions for the person is mapped against colour,
textural and linear grades, measuring performance for a multitude of factors,
205 On the CoBrA or Cobra group, see Jean-Clarence Lambert, Cobra, New York, 1984. Also
note useful website http://www.cobraart.dk (2003-4).
206
CoBrA artists such as Asger Jorn (1914-73) and Constant (a.k.a. Constant Anton
Nieuwenhuys) (1920-2005) later pursue layout in the detournements of Situationism in the late
nineteen fifties, literally mapping texts onto maps and other pictures.
207 The term ‘flatbed’ arises in Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, New York/ Oxford, 1972, pp. 55-
92. The famous essay there of the same title, an extensive review of Modernism, concludes with
a survey of Rauschenberg’s work throughout the fifties, and his various uses of the ‘flatbed’
picture. The term has since become a staple in discussions of the artist’s work, although does not
quite capture crucial orientations or ‘layout’ for elements within the flatbed. Steinberg also
attributes the flatbed picture to a Post-Modernist period that significantly begins with the fifties.

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reciprocally mapping grades against a variety of exertions and emotions. His
illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, (1959-60) such as The Thirty First Canto (Figure 29)
using a form of photo-transfer, are significant not only in their forthright alignment
to a classic text, but for their use of approximate sequences of images, from left to
right, top to bottom, yet resisting a stricter storyboard or comic strip scheme 208 . The
use of contemporary and topical photographs from the popular press reinforces the
metaphorical role assigned Dante and depiction.
‘Traction’ generally resists the more forthright sculptural tendencies of Modernism.
The precedents for ‘traction’ lie firstly with Picasso and Braque’s Cubist works,
where attention is given to the mixing of sand and other materials with paint, to
highlight three-dimensional properties for parts of a picture. However ‘traction’
gains greater prominence in the work of Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) and Jean
Fautrier (1898-1964) particularly in the late forties, where the medium variously
incorporates plaster, glues, shellac, shoe polish and varnishes with more familiar
pigments, and against which a notably basic picture plane is not so much drawn as
modelled, carved or engraved. Matters of line and colour are often inseparable from
accident and chemistry in these ‘high pastes’, or else so detached as to present
almost a second layer. Yet it is also clear in such works that the latitude granted
basic picture planes determines what it is that we appreciate about the expanded
mediums, just as much as the medium underlines certain properties of the picture
planes. Accordingly, both artists press objects and picture planes to greater
abstraction where surface and texture suggest some potent metaphor. Fautrier’s
series of Hostages (1944-5) (Figure 30) are essentially a blindfolded or hooded head
in stark profile or orthogonal projection, yet all but surrender their resemblance in
the interests of the striking equivocation of colour, line and texture, expressing a
stifled identity. Similarly Dubuffet’s series Texturologies, from the mid to late fifties,
offer literal grounds of intricate brown spatterings and complex texture, yet also
208 It is notable that Rauschenberg’s approval of Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno
rested on the view that Botticelli had “treated it like a combination road map and cartoon”,
quoted in Calvin Tompkins, Off The Wall Harmondsworth/UK/New York, 1980, p. 157. For
detailed commentary on Rauschenberg’s illustrations and comparison with Botticelli, see
William S. Lieberman, ‘Die Illustrationen zu Dantes Inferno’ in Robert Rauschenberg: Werke
1950-1980, (catalogue) Dieter Ruckhaberle (ed.) Berlin, 1980, pp. 118-255.

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depict soil microscopically, a barren landscape or even a distant galaxy,
macroscopically, and express this fundamental constancy or paucity. 209
It is conspicuous however that neither of these artists is drawn to the more
elaborate ‘layout’ strategies considered above. For all the graffiti-like qualities of
Dubuffet’s work, text or script rarely plays a part, and where it does, as in ‘Still Life
with Passport (1953) (Figure 31) it remains firmly embedded in a single picture plane
– an opened passport upon a table. 210 ‘Traction’ is pursued in the work of artists
such as Antoni Tapies (b.1923) with stucco-like surfaces, ‘wall-fittings’ and casual
notations, but also approaches greater abstraction and collage, as in the work of
Alberto Burri (1915-1995) with stained and distressed burlap, and later welded steel
and molten plastic assemblages 211 . ‘Traction’, like ‘layout’ resists other than an
orthogonal picture plane. Rauschenberg also promotes ‘traction’, firstly through the
series Black Paintings, in which a ground of crumpled and shredded newspaper is
immersed in black paint, to varying degrees of transparency. The irregularity of the
surface is thus asserted against its uniformity of colour, as resulting shadows and
highlights vary blackness, although strictly offers no ‘Reciprocal Depiction’. But
Rauschenberg, like many a Modernist, quickly grasps that such expansion need not
rest with texture, the absorbency of support or transparency of pigment, and in a
following series of works, titled Red Paintings, extends the painted surface to a variety
of supports, including newsprint and comic strip fragments, printed fabrics, found
wooden and metal panels. These works culminate in the linked screens of Minutiae
(1954) (Figure 32). What is distinctive is the inclusiveness, which maintains photocollage
while annexing an impressive array of materials. But ‘layout’ and ‘traction’
do not always apply, or maintain ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ here. In the same year for
example, he also produced works consisting entirely of a literal ground of earth
sown with grass seeds, that in time and with care became ‘grass paintings’.
209 On Dubuffet, see Peter Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, (catalogue) New York, 1962, and
Max Loreau, Dubuffet: stratégie de création, Paris, 1973. For Fautrier, see Yves Peyré, Jean
Fautrier ou Les Outrages de L'Impossible, Paris, 1990.
210 An interesting exception is the Messages series (1944) where casual notes for meetings or
directions are jotted across newsprint, variously deleted or amended. See Yve-Alain Bois and
Rosalind Krauss, Formless: a User’s Guide, New York, 1997, pp. 178-179.
211 On Burri see also Currentartpics 71.

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Rauschenberg’s further contributions are taken up in Chapter Fifteen. 212 The work
of his close colleague at this time, Jasper Johns (b.1930) also deals in ‘traction’ and
‘layout’ but not quite ‘Reciprocal Depiction’. Johns also uses shredded newsprint,
but immersed in an encaustic that similarly allows for a degree of transparency,
while coating it in a thick paste. His paintings adopt a repertoire of stencilled
alphabets and numbers, concentric circles, usually titled targets, and most famously,
the design of the American flag, in lieu of a picture plane, such as Flag above White
with Collage (1955) (Figure 33). As noted in Chapter Twelve, such objects are not
strictly depicted, but rather presented. They are also, of course, the kind of ‘twodimensional
objects’ that attracted Picasso and Braque and initially prompted
‘Overstyle’. But here they serve quite the opposite purpose. For Picasso and Braque,
any two-dimensionality may have more than one three-dimensional identity and vice
versa, hence they pursue multiple and overlapping picture planes, where text and
wood-grain for example, also depict or resemble other objects.
For Johns however, two-dimensionality is never quite so isolated, or spoilt for
choice of identity. Rather, two-dimensionality is merely readjusted with each threedimensional
instance, or through attention to accompanying materials. Hence his
two-dimensional objects are at once mere designs or templates, against which to
display painting and three-dimensionality, yet are also gently modified by the
exercise of his short and broad, patient but firm brushstrokes. The object emerges
both transcendent and malleable, absorbing variations of line and colour while at
the same time imposing a level of precision upon the brushwork. The exercise may
seem variously meek in its conformity and narrow variation, or arrogant in its
choice of such fundamental objects and idle treatment. 213
The interplay between object and painting obviously functions similarly to
‘Reciprocal Depiction’. Indeed it demonstrates the reciprocal nature of twodimensionality
and three more thoroughly than any picture plane might. Yet it pays
212 On Rauschenberg’s work of this period, see Andrew Forge, Rauschenberg, New York, 1969,
Calvin Tompkins, Off The Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, New
York, 1980, Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenburg: Art and Life, New York, 1990.
213 On Johns, again only to indicate an extensive range: Jill Johnston, Jasper Johns: Privileged
Information, London, New York, 1997, Michael Crichton. Jasper Johns. New York, 1994, Fred
Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns. Cambridge/Mass./London, 1994. Richard Francis, Jasper Johns,
New York, 1984, and Max Kozloff, Jasper Johns, New York, 1974 and finally, Currentartpics
74.

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a heavy price as a sustained practice, with the restricted range of such twodimensional
objects, and the template-like approach to painting. John’s subsequent
work relaxes both the arrangement of the templates and the degree of conformity
for painting, in works such as the series of maps of The United States such as Map
(1962) (Figure 34) which also acquire a picture plane and so ‘Reciprocal Depiction’,
but it is the artists that follow his example that extract more surprising and potent
direction from his work. These are considered in the following chapter.
Finally, ‘interruption’ arises where depiction maintains a concern with perspective
and spatial conflicts between objects. It thus succeeds ‘Rerealism’ more so than
‘Overstyle’. ‘Interruption’ is a demonstration of the unmaking and remaking of the
picture plane and object, of a marked incompleteness. ‘Interruption’ samples the
stages passed through, the trials and revisions explored, accidents exploited, in
moving toward an identifiable style and a completed painting. It offers a kind of
cross-section, from material to technique, technique to line, plane, object and so to
more complex issues of constitution and resolution of sample. ‘Interruption’
brackets the paintings of Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) from the late forties with de
Kooning’s series of paintings titled Woman, beginning with Woman 1 (1950-52) the
work of Francis Bacon (1909-92) from the early fifties such as Study after Velasquez’s
Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) the work of Larry Rivers (b.1923) commencing with
his version of Washington Crossing The Delaware (1953) the works of Peter Blake
(b.1932) commencing with On The Balcony (1955-57) and of Richard Hamilton
(b.1922) commencing with his twin series of paintings and collages, Hommage à
Chrysler Corp (1957) and Hers is a Lush Situation (1957) amongst the more prominent
examples of the style.
The diversity of this grouping may seem surprising, since standard histories often
urge national or regional interests as a priority, or favour alignments to preceding
styles such as Abstract Expressionism or Surrealism. Here attention is drawn to
other stylistic consistencies, while also allowing that the very resistance to
completion and conformity addressed by ‘interruption’ grants a divergence, an
emphasis upon the individual, the instance, even the existential. Indeed, Late
Modernism in this respect is a period notable for its lack of self-proclaimed groups
or organisations (CoBrA being a short-lived exception) and ‘interruption’ is

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essentially a short-tern strategy. It hovers defiantly between tradition, the
conservative and current competing practices, depends upon a certain amount of
Modernism even as it rejects the rest. ‘Interruption’ then can at most keep pace with
rival trends, and while the study looks to the following works in chronological
order, it surveys as much the shifting strategy of ‘interruption’.
For Giacometti, painting is restricted to line or drawing, while depiction maintains a
single perspective and much proportion. His paintings typically approach
monochrome, and acquire volume and tone through a loose accumulation of line
and ‘interruption’. The effect is somewhat like a Cezanne, but indifferent to colour,
impatient with light and suspicious of volume. Interestingly, works also pursue a
radical linearity in their emphasis upon the perpendicular, preserving bodily
proportions vertically, while collapsing lateral proportions to a compelling
minimum. This practice also occurs in his sculpture, and occasionally they coincide,
as in Three Plaster Heads (1947) (Figure 35). 214 A different kind of one-dimensionality
is approached here from that of the notational and introduces a strongly directional
‘interruption’. De Kooning on the other hand looks to compound line, colour and
tone through broad and clamorous brushstroke and other application, yet maintains
perspective and proportion in Woman I (Figure 36) with the foreshortening in the
right foot and knee, as well as modelling or shading to the midriff, chin and right
side of the face. At the same time the improbable or competing proportions of the
facial features, breasts and shoulders, and the unresolved extensions to the arms
that arise through countless erasures and revisions, underline not so much multiple
competing versions as momentary and serendipitous ones. 215 Later De Kooning
retreats to greater abstraction, retaining a vigorous sense of ‘interruption’ and multivalence
for formal elements of line, colour, tone, scale, etc. Again, the ease with
which he shifts between the abstract and the concrete, underlines a conviction in
the ‘reciprocal’.
Bacon’s painting at this time also concentrates on the single figure, but
‘interruption’ here occurs rather in striking relations of highlight and shadow. It is
214 On Giacometti, see Yves Bonnefoy, Giacometti, New York, 1991, David Sylvester, Looking
at Giacometti, London, 1994, and Peter Selz, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1965.
215 On De Kooning, see Harry F. Gaugh, De Kooning, New York, 1983, Harold Rosenberg, De
Kooning, New York, 1974.

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drawn to depiction of textures, sometimes with ‘tractable’ textures, but more
importantly to unusual configurations of tone for the figure, and most particularly
facial expression. These are often inspired by the tonal severity in certain black and
white photography and cinema. The uncertainties to resemblance here are matched
with equally unusual or ambiguous surroundings and the balance is carried over into
the use of heavier and broader brushstrokes and unusual wipes and smears that
suggest movement, so that object and style not only share a traditional ‘shorthand’
of technique, but an intervening mystery to identity of objects, spatial relations and
situations. Thus, in Study After Velasquez’s Pope Innocent X (1953) (Figure 37) Bacon
adopts a renowned composition only to confuse it in abrupt reworking, the upper
half of the picture appears to dissolve the Pope in a mysterious pattern of vertical
strokes, neither quite a transparent curtain surrounding him, nor simply behind him,
while the foreground’s perfunctory purple strokes upon unprimed canvas engulf the
base of the chair and surrounding railings, as possibly part drapery, part
floorboards 216 .
Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware (Figure 38) by contrast is relatively
straightforward, also adopting a familiar theme against which to display a scattered
irresolution or ‘interruption’. Rivers’ ‘interruption’ does not rest with just line,
brushstroke, tonality or texture however, and if anything is too all-encompassing or
diffuse to successfully impose a sample of interruption; perhaps looks a little too
much like an unfinished painting, rather than a painting about being unfinished.
Where it is successful is in the scattering of various points of interest developed up
to a stage and then petering out to primed canvas, awaiting developments
elsewhere. The structure is pursued more successfully in later works such as The
Studio (1956), and in other works adopts ‘layout’ and notation, and is later drawn to
more forthright sculptural extension rather than ‘traction’. 217
216 Another interpretation of these vertical strokes might be as reference to certain common film
projector malfunctions, whereby the image fails to register in the projector gate correctly, often
due to torn sprockets, resulting in a shower of vertical streaks to the projected image, usually
preceding a rupture of the print, and thus expressing its own crisis for depiction. Bacon’s most
celebrated cinematic reference however remains the close-up of the screaming nurse with skewed
pince-nez from The Battleship Potemkin, an image that is used in a number of works from the
late forties and early fifties, including some of the series of The Pope, such as Pope II (1951) and
the example above. For standard interpretation of Bacon see David Sylvester, Looking Back at
Francis Bacon, London, 2000, John Russell, Francis Bacon, (revised ed.) London, 1993.
217 On Rivers, see Helen A. Harrison, Larry Rivers, New York, 1984, Sam Hunter, Rivers New
York, 1971.

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The use of blank ground or underdeveloped areas of the painting against which
disparate objects and techniques hover, is also prominent in Hamilton’s Hommage à
Chrysler Corp (1957) (Figure 39). Here they function, not so much to scatter attention
to interrupted developments, as to herd them into the lower left corner. The
‘interruption’ cuts across contemporary car body parts, a kind of biomorphic
abstraction, a collaged metallic shape and more familiar facture. 218 The car shares in
a vaguely sensuous set of curves. The central headlight, cowling, bumper and grill
urge a perspective while surrounding elements such as the teardrop-shaped tail light
to the left argue for a more orthogonal arrangement. The upper area to the picture,
with its lateral black bar and small plus sign beneath, contrasts with the curves and
declare a notational design and ‘layout’. Subsequent works by Hamilton often
include more of a ‘layout’ in which objects share metaphorical rather than literal
spatial relations, as in the series titled $he (1958-61). 219
Blake’s On the Balcony (1956-57) (Figure 40) adopts a familiar ‘Rerealist’ structure of
pictures within pictures, but crucially varies style between them and reverses the
expected order of realism, so that the four largest figures surrounded by their
collection of pictures and mementos are rendered in a faux-naïf style, that may serve
as a metaphor for the devout fan’s unformed and vulnerable personality, or the
unrealness of a personality embracing quite this range of paraphernalia 220 .
‘Interruption’ here is not simply a collection or collage of brand allegiances but a
corresponding emptying-out or stripping down of the bigger picture in which to
contain them. The hands of the girl in the red dress for example are barely indicated
218 The technique here owes as much to the orthodoxy of The Slade School of Art of the day,
where Hamilton was briefly a student, as to contemporary abstraction, such as the work of Sam
Francis and Paul Jenkins, noted in Richard Morphet, ‘Girl and Machine’ in Richard Hamilton,
(catalogue) London, 1970, p. 33.
219 On Hamilton, see Morphet, Richard Hamilton (catalogue) London, 1970, Morphet, Richard
Hamilton: The Longer View, (catalogue) London, 1992, and A. Seymour and D. Sylvester,
Richard Hamilton, (catalogue) London, 1992.
2
This is not to deny that Blake’s painting also derives from Honoré Sharrer’s Workers and
Pictures, (1943/4) as discussed in Robert Melville, ‘The Durable Expendables of Peter Blake’ in
Peter Blake, (catalogue) Michael Compton (ed.) London, 1983, pp.36-37. But the use of pictures
within pictures receives different treatment here, points more especially to certain stylistic issues
absent from Sharrer. The work of de Chirico, Magritte, Dali and similar establish these, are the
salient influence. Sharrer’s work however is notable for the bare, uneven quality of the borders
and suggests perhaps a modest ‘interruption’. The work is reproduced in Robert Storr, Modern
art despite modernism, New York, 2000. Compton’s catalogue together with Natalie Rudd, Peter
Blake, London, 2003, provide standard interpretation of Blake.

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holding the long photograph of the royal family, while the other end of the
photograph is merely occluded by the boy in blue jeans, whose face in turn is
replaced by a copy of Life magazine. Above this, items amass as if on a green baize
pin-board, as is often noted. The result is that more memorabilia is accommodated
only as less of the picture is available to organise them. The collection in fact
overwhelms the fans and their setting at points to become that of the painting. The
picture ‘interrupts’ itself through grades of accommodation, never merely the brand
on any scale or at any place, but neither always and only at home in the fans’
display, or a whole picture plane. Subsequently, Blake dispenses with this intricate
construction to concentrate on ‘interruption’ within the figure, remaking pin-up
idols as tantalisingly half achieved and blank, as equally naïve and knowing as their
fans. Such works also incorporate elaborate titles, framing and even additional
figurines and occasionally autographs, stressing ‘layout’ rather than ‘interruption’.
This completes the survey of features to ‘Reciprocal Depiction’. The first involves a
‘layout’ stressing metaphorical relations between various depiction and notation.
The second concerns ‘traction’ gained between unusual materials and basic picture
planes, while the third emphasises ‘interruption’ and a mutual remaking of depiction
and painting. All reject the certainties and strictures of Early Modernism; spread
pictures in a pattern or pattern between pictures, reform materials only to ‘traction’
for a robust picture plane or at a given ‘interruption’. Yet the disaffection of spirit
and the dissolution of means are maintained only with a widening of scope for
depiction and painting. Around 1961 this results in a more radical departure, called
Pop Art. In the following chapter the change is traced from a reciprocal sample
between depiction and painting, to one between painting and printing.

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Post-Modernism and Pop Art
Painting Printing 1960-70
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ is understood as the mutual sampling of the abstract and the
concrete and as a rival style to full abstraction in Late Modernism. But as
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ is pursued, the sample undergoes a crucial change. Where
work adopts certain themes or objects as a measure of ‘traction’ in materials, or
‘interruption’ of completeness, what is reciprocated is not so much the abstract
against the concrete, but painting against printing. This change is usually identified
with the movement Pop Art and is here part of a more sweeping change, to a
period of Post-Modernism. In the case of key figures such as Americans Roy
Lichtenstein (1923-1997) and Andy Warhol (1928-87) this change is relatively easy
to trace and familiar to accounts of Pop Art. Lichtenstein initially proceeds under
the influence of de Kooning and perhaps Rivers, and deals in ‘interruption’ or
incompleteness, set against stock themes or objects. Yet Lichtenstein raises the
stakes by combining a spontaneous and gestural approach with the comic strip
characters of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. De Kooning had dealt with an
archetypal woman; Rivers with a famous historical episode and studio tableaux,
both had shown how ‘interruption’ can bring new insight to painting and a new
equivocation to clichés, be at once abstract and concrete: a ‘Reciprocal Depiction’.
Yet what would happen if the object were as humble or as trivial as a comic strip
character? Would ‘interruption’ be mocked, or Mickey Mouse accorded new
dignity?
By turning to print for a more familiar theme or a bigger cliché, painting is tested
somewhat differently. The gap perhaps ultimately proved too great, or technically,
the exercise eluded Lichtenstein, in any case the artist soon became dissatisfied with
the unlikely confrontation and out of idle curiosity decided to paint a ‘straight’

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version of a single comic strip frame. The result revealed an unsuspected expressive
dimension to painting devoid of ‘interruption’, of its doubts, mistakes and
confusion. Quite the opposite attitudes were now suggested. In fact, set against a
comic strip character, such as Popeye (1961) (Figure 41) the ‘straight’ treatment
assumes a kind of deadpan reserve, with a distinctly passive/aggressive undertone,
akin to the Flaneur’s insolence, or the hipster’s cool. Nor was the comic strip frame
merely transcribed in the exercise, or a completely ‘straight’ version in any case.
Rather, its isolation as a single frame and dramatic enlargement magnified the
comic’s narrative ‘layout’ into absurd and amusing oversimplifications. It abstracted
the comic strip up to a point, highlighted ‘formal’ values, but cheapened or
trivialised these into the bargain.
Warhol on the other hand was initially drawn to the work of Johns, and to his use
of conspicuously modified material matched to template-like objects. But Warhol
chose standard line illustrations to similarly confine or channel ‘traction’ in material
and technique. His insight lay in realising the picture plane need not be restricted to
the orthogonal or to ‘two-dimensional objects’ in order to function as such a
template. A suitably simple and familiar style of depiction would suffice. He too
thus adopts comic strip characters such as Superman and Popeye, while applying
not so much a distinctive paste, but a much-diluted pigment, encouraging
transparency to colour and tone and frequent drips and dribbles. But he too was
soon dissatisfied with the results and experimented with a ‘straight’ version,
concentrating on framing of the illustration and with standard consistency of paint.
In fact we can compare two versions of Storm Window (1960 Figure 42a on the left,
and 1961 Figure 42b on the right) to see how a simple line illustration for a window
fitting is transformed through framing and the elimination of surrounding text, and
a little of how it too acquires a more unsettling attitude through the absence of
‘painterly’ display.
Both artists thus arrive at virtually the same style at the same time, but from slightly
different directions. 221 What emerges is a version of ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ in which
221 The account of Lichtenstein’s development is based on John Coplans, ‘An Interview with Roy
Lichtenstein’, Artforum 2. No 4 October 1963, reprinted in Roy Lichtenstein, New York, John
Coplans (ed.) 1972, pp. 51-52. The account of Warhol’s change is based on Andy Warhol and
Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol ‘60s, New York, 1980, and essays by Kynaston McShine,

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painting now starkly defines itself in relation to depictive styles of printing. Painting
cannot of course strictly sample printing as for example a collage might, but rather,
where confined to only those stylistic features often and easily associated with
printing, highlights crucial differences between painting and printing. Printing grants
painting this new and critical role, painting’s means, such as ‘layout’, ‘traction’ and
‘interruption’ now determine which properties of printing may be sampled and how.
The sample reciprocally sorts styles for painting and printing. Painting does not, to
be sure, immediately look to etchings or woodcuts or to the forms of printing
traditionally pursued in art, quite the contrary. It looks to the commonest and
cheapest forms of line and tone illustration. The objective is not so much the
popular, the revered or preferred, but the pedestrian and mundane, against which to
measure overlooked or unexpected properties of printing through painting and vice
versa. 222
So painting gains a new deadpan reserve in this sampling while the re-framing and
selection of formal elements give even printing’s most prosaic illustrations a new
dignity and rigour. The printing style ‘reciprocally’ points to unexpected and potent
properties for painting. This arises because even if painting were to do no more
than merely enlarge a print, (which it cannot do, without begging the question of its
context or framing) the enlargement does not preserve all the properties of the
print, such as the resolution of the inking or the texture, colour or ageing of the
paper and inks, much less possible accidents such as staining, creasing and other
distress to a given instance, although conceivably it might. In fact it isolates just the
lines and colours, even the Benday dots (a kind of half-tone screen), in the case of
Lichtenstein’s work, as a seemingly disembodied design for a given printing process.
The absence of these other properties then serves to point to the supporting canvas
Benjamin Buchloh and Marco Livingstone in Andy Warhol: a Retrospective, Kynaston McShine
(editor) New York/Boston, 1989. For Lichtenstein see also Diane Waldeman, Roy Lichtenstein,
(catalogue) New York, 1993 and Currentartpics 89. While not denying that preceding
commercial designs for wrapping paper using rubber stamps, such as Bow Pattern (1959) -
reproduced in Andreas Brown, Andy Warhol: his Early Works 1947-59 (catalogue) New York,
1971, p.72 - already set in place many of the features of his mature work, the account here offers
a rationale for his adoption of the loosely brushed approach to single motifs, and the Johns-like
short hatching strokes of pencil that often demarcate edges in works of this period.
222 On Pop Art, see Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A continuing history, London, 1990, John
Russell and Suzi Gablik (eds.) Pop Art Redefined, London, 1969, Sylvia Harrison, Pop Art and
the origins of post-modernism, Cambridge/ New York, 2001. For broader iconological treatment,
see Sidra Stich, Made In U.S.A. The Americanisation in Modern Art, the 50s and 60s,
Berkeley/London, 1987.

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in a special way, emphasising its weight, scale or size of weave in relation to the
immaculate lines and single colours, just as the absence of brushwork to the lines
and colours also sample a certain kind of self-effacement or reticence on the part of
painting, a literal flatness to its three-dimensionality or material presence, an
expressive or metaphoric wryness.
Such work is often still greeted with a mixture of amusement and disappointment,
since painting seems at once denuded or debased in the encounter, while modest
printing sources are absurdly elevated or exalted. Similarly, the work is commonly
misunderstood as impersonal, mechanical; even industrial. Warhol in particular is
quick to encourage this sentiment through the use of silkscreens in works such as
One Dollar Bills (1962) and Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962) that press the definition for
a work of sole instance - and painting - still harder. 223 It is a smaller move to then
adopt photo-silkscreens, on which he settles 224 . Yet his work remains highly
distinctive or personal, with his own approach to photography and silkscreen
printing technique, and no more mechanical or industrial than in the traditional
supervision of studio assistants. Much the same can be said for Lichtenstein, who is
largely content to adopt and give increasing prominence to Benday tone patterns.
The use of photography as a further sampling of printing by painting is taken up in
the following chapter.
Here the study concentrates on how basic linear or graphic styles for printing
provide the core of Pop Art, for it is the power and elegance of this initial print
sampling by painting that effectively displaces Late Modernism. 225 Following work
pursues the print sample to more diffuse sources, or more diffusely samples the
223 These silk-screened enlargements of common designs also lead to sculptures, such as the
collections of Brillo Boxes, Kellogg’s Cornflake packets and Mott’s Apple Juice cartons of 1964
in which packaging design is printed upon smooth wooden cubes or solids. The Brillo Boxes in
particular are famously held to be ‘indiscernible’ from their referent by the philosopher and art
critic Arthur Danto. See Danto, ‘The Artworld’ in The Journal of Philosophy LXI 1964, pp. 571-
584, (reprinted in Philosophy Looks At The Arts, Joseph Margolis (editor) Philadelphia, 1987, pp.
155-167). However, the absence of folds or a double thickness to the upper edges of each box
indicating a lid to the top or sides, alert the careful observer, indeed the more discerning or
supermarket-savvy critic, to crucial differences either from cardboard packaging or wooden
crates used in wholesale marketing. The sculptures properly echo just those concerns found in
preceding and accompanying painting by Warhol, rather than ‘indiscernible’ identity.
224 Regrettably the scope of this study must forego consideration of Warhol’s additional activities
as graphic designer, photographer, filmmaker, journalist and publisher.
225 Print sampling here and henceforth is understood only as those features of printing available
to sampling in painting, rather than a stricter view of sampling.

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print source. Either way, contributes to a dissipation of the coolness of attitude, of
the disturbing meagreness of source and of the subversion of traditional painterly
values. Eventually such variation exhausts Pop Art. This is now traced along three
paths, firstly in work that samples less obvious or potent styles for printing,
secondly in work that samples ‘layouts’ less exclusively related to printing and
thirdly in work that samples printing strictly in matters of text.
Along the first path we first encounter work such as that of Englishman, Patrick
Caulfield (b.1936). He too initially adopts the black and white of basic graphics in
works such as Engagement Ring (1963) (Figure 43). While the ring itself conforms to
standard illustrative style, the background grid gives it a further, less obvious or
necessary setting. Caulfield quickly focuses on the use of a black outline of uniform
width (initially quite thin) in perspectival picture planes and a restricted range of flat
or single colours, often rich in hue. Such outlines recall a range of printing styles,
from advertising and amusements to basic instructional and scientific illustration,
yet the choice of objects and allocation of colour is decidedly at odds with these
styles. The result is consequently a more muted uneasiness as well as cool. In an
example like View of the Rooftops (1965) (Figure 44) colour relations are played off
against the linear simplification and perspective of the four chimneys. The chimneys
acquire a stark, somewhat comic dignity in the emphasis upon their basic volumes
and configuration, while colour relations are at once reduced to an exercise in
colouring-in, even as mere colouring-in assumes some of the scope and rigour of
Modernism’s pure or formal colour relations. A red sky for example unavoidably
offers a sunset or sunrise, even as it urges a more abstract harmony. 226
Similarly, the work of Italian Valerio Adami (b.1935) and New York-based John
Wesley (b.1928) falls within the projection of Pop Art through flatness or evenness
of colour, strictness of outline, even though print style is again more general or
weaker in sample. Adami’s work of the period such as Gil omosessuali – Privacy (1966)
(Figure 45) preserves single colours and black outlines, sometimes of a modulated
width, recalling brush-formed line, but here enlarged to improbable scale. The work
226 On Caulfield, see Christopher Finch, Patrick Caulfield,
Harmondsworth/Middlesex/Baltimore/Maryland/Ringwood/Australia, 1971, Marco Livingstone,
Patrick Caulfield, (catalogue) London, 1981.

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also fragments perspective and proportion, creating a kind of graphic designer’s
version of Picasso or Klee. Printing here samples and is sampled by a demure
version of Overstyle. The effect is surprisingly inoffensive, given that a central tenet
of Modernism is reduced to a slick mannerism, perhaps because the ingenuity of the
drawing still gives the painting and its immaculate surface, a certain impressive
presence, lost in printing. Wesley uses objects often with comic and erotic themes
isolated against a single colour ground at this time. Objects are also presented as
symmetrical and repeating motifs that recall textiles, wallpaper or wrapping paper,
but the style of line, its thin, even, spare and somewhat clumsy articulation, and
choice of object resist closer identification with a printing style, and consequently
the ‘flatness’ (literal and metaphorical) sampled is less compelling. 227
The comic strip, as a sequence or storyboard is also sampled as a print style in
painting. Experiments in the fifties such as the collages of San Francisco-based Jess
Collins (b.1923) and the drawings of Swede Oyvind Fahlström (1929-76) variously
draw upon comic strips and ‘layout’, but the project of print sampling for painting
redirects attention to comic strips by the mid sixties 228 . Unlike Lichtenstein or
Warhol, subsequent work uses familiar characters and settings more freely, as in the
work of Paris-based Haitian Hervé Télémaque (b.1937) such as Pastorale (1964) and
the strident satire of San Francisco-based Peter Saul (b.1934). Saul later adopts
radical contortions of the figure and thinner, multi-coloured outlines that influence
the work of the Chicago-based group, The Hairy Who (1966-1969). 229 Their work
also features frames in ambiguous sequence and a merging with text or calligraphy,
227 On Adami, see Hubert Damisch and Henry Martin, adami, Paris, 1974. On Wesley, see
Alanna Heiss, John Wesley, New York, 2000.
228 Fahlström’s work is more commonly associated with the sixties, because of his presence in
New York at that time, however his earlier work produced in various parts of Europe, such as the
enormous Opera (1952-53) and Feast on MAD (1957-59) have more recently been
acknowledged. See Raphael Rubinstein ‘Fahlström Afresh’ Art in America, July 2001, pp. 61-69
and p. 113.
229 On Saul, see Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, (2 nd ed.) London, pp.
270-272. Also note The Hairy Who (1966-68) comprised James Falconer (b.1943), Art Green
(b.1941), Gladys Nilsson (b.1940), Jim Nutt (b.1938), Suellen Rocca (b.1943) and Karl Wirsum
(b.1939). On The Hairy Who, see Franz Shultze, Fantastic Images: Chicago Art since 1945,
Chicago 1972, Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, (2 nd ed.) New
York/London, 2000, pp. 272-276, there, also detailing less strictly print sampled work of Chicago
New Imagists.

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as does the work of Frenchman Bernard Rancillac (b.1931) at this time, while
similarly preserving flat colours and uniform outlines. 230
The drift from standard comic strips and printing styles also projects to other sorts
of ‘layout’, and brings us to the second path for Pop Art. As noted, ‘layouts’ in Late
Modernism often include problematic sequence or storyboard, as in Rauschenberg’s
illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, or contrasting depictive styles and materials, as in his
Rebus (1956). Post-Modernist or Pop ‘layouts’ tend to narrow the range of materials
and styles, so that ‘layouts’ – as the name suggests – draw more heavily upon
printing styles. This path is traced in both London and New York. In London it
passes through the work of Hamilton and Blake, to a group of younger artists at
The Royal College of Art between 1959 and 1962. 231 Derek Boshier (b.1937),
Pauline Boty (1938-66), Patrick Caulfield (b.1936), David Hockney (b.1937), Allen
Jones (b.1937), R.B. Kitaj (b.1932), and Peter Phillips (b.1939) all pursue ‘layout’
that variously combines depiction with text or notation. Yet such ‘layouts’ typically
avoid any single or obvious print source. Hamilton’s work does not look especially
like an advertisement for example, devoid as it is of brand names or a single
prominent product, and even where advertising elements are detected, their use
points as much to shared stylistic features with ‘Overstyle’. Similarly, Blake’s
Holbein-like precision of line and characteristic modelling do not derive from pinups
or amusement arcade decoration, but rather are set off in a particular way by his
choice of such objects. In fact works sample printing and fairground sources by
more complex means and for more complex ends. The cool attitude here ignores
any one style of printing or painting, urges only degrees and provides a porous
periphery to Pop Art.
The works of Hockney and Kitaj from this time are key examples. Hockney’s work
initially would seem to stress ‘interruption’, with its accretion of graffiti-like texts
230 On Rancillac, see Serge Fauchereau, Bernard Rancillac, Paris, 1991. On Telémaque, see
Marco Livingstone et al., Herve Telémaque, Des Modes Et Travaux 1959-1999, Tanlay, 1999.
Also see Livingstone, Pop Art: a continuing history, London 1990, pp. 55-59, 141-146, for links
with various collage in the work of Martial Raysse (b.1936), the torn posters of Mimmo Rotella
(b.1918) Raymond Hains (b.1926) and Jacques de la Villegle (b.1926). But while explicitly
sampling prints, often including photographs, sampling is less by painting, than by literal sample
of practices of public defacement.
231 The exception to this group is Patrick Caulfield, a student in the following year of the course
at the R.C.A. (1960-63) yet his work at this time conforms to the features of ‘layout’ discussed
here.

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over stricter background designs and casual foreground figures, in works such as
The Most Beautiful Boy In The World (1961) (Figure 46a) 232 . However, the familiar
theme or object that channels de Kooning’s Woman I or Rivers’ Studio here takes on
a more freewheeling quality, leaving the emphasis less on ‘interruption’ than on
contrasting or conflicting styles, the cool rigidity of the Alka Seltzer box against the
floppiness of the valentine and phallic protuberance in the face of the vague, rather
coy male below. But the contrast between parts or pictures gradually diminishes, as
‘layout’ gives way to a single picture plane in Hockney’s work. Flight into Italy – Swiss
Landscape (1962) (Figure 47) and The Second Marriage (1963) show how such contrasts
may tentatively share a picture plane. Unlike ‘Rerealism’, the objects not only argue
over location and scale, light, colour and volume, but also about line, facture and
technique. The contrast is still between objects and styles, but now styles are
rendered fumbling and fickle. Indeed Hockney’s idle line and cursory handling
acquire an appealing insouciance. Yet it proves difficult or tiresome to maintain
such contrasts, and by the end of the decade Hockney’s work all but forsakes
them. 233
Kitaj’s work follows a more measured trajectory and around 1963 settles on a
distinctive linear assembly of persons by parts, and into larger more dispersed
groupings and settings through the use of single colours for shapes that surrender
perspective to basic geometry and orthogonal projections. In The Ohio Gang (1964)
(Figure 48) ‘layout’ juggles degrees of pictorial continuity, so that outlines maintain a
standard realism in places, such as the nude woman to the centre of the painting,
while around her, line slides into more problematic depiction, as in the gesture of
the woman to her right, and the blue figure to her left, and compiles a figure
through a contiguity rather than a continuity of parts, in the manner of ‘Overstyle’.
Print styles, along with realism play their part without acquiring particular
232 Scrutiny of certain reproductions of this work reveals significant changes or stages to it, or
possibly confused versions. The former would seem more likely, on the basis of the artist’s
methods. The work is reproduced in Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History, London,
2000 and in Mark Glazebrook, David Hockney: Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960-1970,
(catalogue) London, 1970 as well in David Hockney and Nikos Stangos, Pictures by David
Hockney, London, 1977. The latter two reveal more and starker text in the upper left portion of
the picture, a ladder linking the two small figures above the valentine to the lower left of the
picture, and firmer outline to the transparent skirt worn by the figure, amongst other changes.
This version, reproduced here as Figure 46b, probably represents an earlier stage, documented,
but subsequently reworked prior to exhibition and sale, rather than the artist’s revision since.
These curious differences are hitherto unacknowledged in publication.
233 On Hockney, see Marco Livingstone, David Hockney, London, 1983.

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prominence. 234 The passivity of the central figure to her captors is paralleled by the
smaller nude in a pram to the lower right, yet her vulnerability here begins to seem
more like a burden to her insubstantial nurse. Here too continuity gives way to
‘layout’ and metaphor, for the scale of the figures and light area to the right also
depart from the four larger figures and the darkened office setting. That the work is
about sex and power is obvious enough, where the power actually lies, is less
certain. ‘Layout’ here does not simply marshal the figures within a familiar
Modernist geometry, for the geometry is also part of the settings, so that figures and
costume in effect sample the geometry and grant it a distinctly seedy décor. But like
Hockney, Kitaj gradually concedes ‘layout’ to a more sustained picture plane and by
the late seventies his work too lapses into more familiar depiction. 235
Turning to the path in New York, Pop Art radiates to the ‘layouts’ of Jim Dine
(b.1935) Tom Wesselmann (b.1931) and James Rosenquist (b.1933). Dine’s sub-
Johnsian attention to ‘traction’ and three-dimensionality are farthest from print
sampling, and weakest in projection. Wesselmann’s collage of photography and
extended materials is in many ways closer to the spirit of British work, and also
resists closer sampling of printing by painting (as pigment). Rosenquist emerged
with a striking commitment to ‘layout’, in his first solo show in 1962. However, his
starting point, some years earlier, was not, as one might suppose, a Magritte-like
interest in unsettling juxtapositions of objects, but rather abstraction, “a cross
between Mark Tobey and Bradley Walker Tomlin” and a response to the work of
Johns and Rauschenberg. 236 At some point he then realised that abstraction, and the
materials of painting need not start from point, line, plane, volume and so forth, but
from bigger bites, so to speak, from common styles of depiction in fact, and then
build a bigger and more abstract ‘layout’ through sustained contrasts. Chapter
234 An interesting and generally overlooked feature of Kitaj’s work at this time is the dry-brush
scrubbing or rubbing of colour as in Juan de la Cruz (1967) for example, which strikingly recalls
the mottled effects of aging and wear on cheap publications, particularly the covers of
paperbacks. In this respect, it converts a common if overlooked print property to a stylistic one.
235
On Kitaj, see John Ashbery et al., Kitaj, Paintings, Drawings and Pastels,
London/Washington/Dusseldorf, 1983 and Richard Morphett (ed.) R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective,
(catalogue) London/Los Angeles/ New York, 1994 and Currentartpics 61.
236 Very few of the artist’s works from this period survive. This description is quoted in Judith
Goldman, Rosenquist, Denver/New York, 1985, pp. 26-27. Also in this passage, the artist
describes his development thus: “Everyone was searching to get down to absolute zero, to just
colour and form in their abstract pictures. So I thought I wanted to get below zero, and the only
way I knew to do that was to start using imagery again”. He also attests to the influence of Johns
and Rauschenberg in this.

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Twelve has shown how this strategy also becomes available to the ‘Rerealist’ such as
Magritte or Dali by the middle of the century, and it is not therefore surprising that
initial critical response to Rosenquist’s work often dismisses it for its derivative
Surrealism 237 . But Rosenquist’s version does not focus on conflicting objects within
a single picture plane so much as a smooth progression to multiple pictures, and it is
in their stark assembly within a painting, in their sampling of a certain style of
billboard depiction that they qualify as Pop Art and Post-Modernism.
While Rosenquist’s ‘layouts’ are usually based upon a photo-collage, photographic
properties are less prominent than the style of billboard illustration of the era. Then
again, the general absence of brand names and accompanying copy, and the general
presence of radical fragmentation make them seem less like a billboard than a
collage of only certain properties of billboard illustration, or a billboard illustration
of only certain properties of collage. In other words, properties of billboard and
collage are mutually sampled. Yet ‘collage’ here does not assemble disparate
materials, since all parts are painted, all sources are printed, but rather aggressively
frames or crops pictures within and beside other pictures. Works, while often very
large, rarely rise to the scale of actual billboards at this time, and as noted, mostly
ignore text, to concentrate on impressive enlargement of standard scale of object, its
isolation against a background of little or no distance, and emphasis upon linear and
textural properties. The sample is not only a kind of close-up of billboard
illustration, but reciprocally, of some of painting’s materials and technique, and early
works often include additional attachments of actual objects, somewhat after the
manner of Rauschenberg, to underscore the attendant three-dimensionality to such
an approach.
But it is the smooth, broad-brushed, de-saturated modelling, the blending of
colours and tones that more effectively declare crucial properties of painting here. It
is not so much a ‘flatness’ to painting, as a smoothness even blandness to technique
that is highlighted, and while its sheer economy has a softening, soothing quality, its
pervasiveness also alerts us to qualities omitted or hidden. As when someone
continually tries to reassure us, so that our suspicions cannot help but be aroused,
the smoothness of the fragments lead us to inspect the ‘layout’ for some further
237 See Goldman, Rosenquist, Denver/New York, 1985, p. 13.

160
insight, and occasionally these are forthcoming, as in I WILL LOVE WITH MY
FORD (1962) (Figure 49) yet such works also seem somewhat obvious and
disappointing. Mostly our suspicions remain unallayed as works set a blandness of
depiction against an edge - literal and figurative - of ‘layout’. This spawns any
number of interesting contrasts between objects and pictures or edges and frames,
ranging from matters of line, colour and scale to fashion, period and prestige.
Typically, there are too many or none and the blandness is reinforced by a
vagueness of ‘layout’. In this way Rosenquist’s work displays an unsettling
detachment or passivity, and something of the cool of a Lichtenstein or Warhol.
Similarly, he resists greater variety of facture in order to make such blandness itself
an expressive quality. Yet unlike the elegance of their sampling of printed depiction,
Rosenquist’s sample is more complex, even messy. For the reference is not simply
to billboards, nor a standard practice of collage. Rather it straddles, and not always
comfortably, the stylistic boundaries between object and edge or frame of picture.
While Rosenquist sustains his practice more successfully than Hockney or Kitaj, he
can neither expand the stylistic parameters as impressively to those of early
Hockney, nor reduce them - equally effectively - to those of early Kitaj, without
compromising the desired blandness, or similarly falling back into a single picture
plane.
These examples show more complex ways of arranging contrasting pictures, how
differing ‘layouts’ bring out different qualities for styles, and generally dissipate the
issue of print sampling for painting. There are of course more straightforward
‘layouts’, such as grid-like arrangements, and exponents of these also range from the
Englishman JoeTilson (b.1928) and Englishwoman Pauline Boty to Americans
Rosalyn Drexler (b.1926) and Allan D’Arcangelo (b.1930) but such ‘layouts’ neither
sample specific printing styles in this way nor are sampled by them. Nor do these
varieties exhaust the diffusion of Pop Art, but hopefully this path is now clear and
attention may be turned to the sampling of printing as ‘text-only’. Painting as ‘textonly’
traditionally arises as calligraphy, and is abstracted in Modernism to qualities
of line, and annexed in Late Modernism to ‘layouts’. It arises in the work of Johns,
where the use of alphabet stencils deal firstly in letters, and later single words, such
as Tennyson (1958). But while Johns remains more interested in a template for
painting and stencils for this purpose, the use of standard and familiar typefaces and

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layouts as a more elaborate kind of stencil, is pursued with impressive dedication in
the work of Los Angeles-based Edward Ruscha (b.1937).
Of course typefaces and layouts alone do not deliver a print sample by painting, but
only of sign-writing. Yet where a distinctive typeface is coupled with a distinctive
word or text, as in Ruscha’s Annie (1962) (Figure 50) the sign then refers to the title
of the comic strip Little Orphan Annie, in the manner of a logo, and so to a print
source. Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962) adopts the perspective and setting
of the Twentieth Century Fox film studios logo, and although a filmic print
incorporates text within a perspectival picture plane, something Ruscha explores in
a variety of works, where text seldom refers to a common print source. While
choice of word or text together with typeface and layout, allows painting to point to
established printing, reciprocally, such choices also allow ‘text-only’ to point to
certain properties of painting, although ‘text-only’ need not be print-based to do
this. Strictly speaking, this is now ‘Reciprocal Denotation’, where unusual choices of
text, typeface and layout highlight paint application and support, and contrast with
standard sign writing as well as printing. In works such as Chemical (1966) (Figure
51) the word’s stretched spacing and exact bisection of the canvas give its shape and
surface a measured precision, perhaps echoing the scientific connotation of the
word, just as the shaded green background accordingly takes on a certain synthetic
hue. At the same time there is some uneasiness at this ‘cool’ annexation of graphics
to painting’s formal properties, much as we find with Lichtenstein and Warhol.
Ruscha later expands words to phrases, even whole sentences, and also adopts
silkscreens, but in contrast to Johns’ templates, they supply only backgrounds to the
blanked letters, in a variety of unusual pigments, including gunpowder, Pepto-
Bismol, spinach, carrot and onion stalk extracts 238 .
Ruscha also pursues the sampling of printing conventions beyond painting,
pigments and even ‘text-only’, to book formats, such as his Twentysix Gasoline Stations
(1963) where text is replaced by a collection of photographs, while later books
introduce sequences to the photographs such as Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966)
and even notional events and narrative as in The Royal Road Test (1967) and Crackers
1969). Here books are sampled as the collection and conformity of photography,
238 See Edward Ruscha, Guacamole Airlines and Other Drawings, New York, 1980.

162
with and without sequence, by the omission of text. 239 Other artists such as Los
Angeles-based John Baldessari (b.1931) pursued painting as ‘text-only’ in this
period, but where ‘text-only’ is extended beyond a single simple sentence, generally
sampling abandons painting. Los Angeles-based Lawrence Weiner (b.1940) for
example exhibited a publication or print of instructions or descriptions of a work,
while New York-based Joseph Kosuth (b.1945) used enlarged and ground-reversed
photocopies of dictionary definitions in works such as The First Investigation, Titled
(Art as Idea as Idea)(meaning) (1967). Significantly, the work adopts a similar square
composition to Ruscha’s Chemical (1966) and samples, in other words, not all and
only the layout of the dictionary, but also ‘text-only’ works as photocopy and
picture. The work of the British group Art and Language Press, comprising of Terry
Atkinson (b.1939) Michael Baldwin (b.1945) and Mel Ramsden (b.1944) pursued
‘text-only’ work in a different direction, and published a journal titled Art-Language
that used self-referential texts to sample certain formats of the Art world’s more
academic publications. 240
‘Text-only’ works are taken up again in Chapter Eighteen. Here it is enough to see
how ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ and the period of Late Modernism give way to a new
emphasis upon print sampling by painting and the period of Post-Modernism. It
has shown how this leads firstly to a concern with styles of depiction closely
associated with printing, with common line illustrations for example, and to the
style called Pop Art. Further print sampling follows on the momentum or
projection of this style, to the sampling of photography most notably, as well as to
‘text only’ works. But this spread at a certain point stretches the label of Pop Art,
deals in less common or familiar prints, more familiar or milder qualities of painting.
A principal strength to the analysis in terms of print sampling lies in the ability to
explain the potency of print sampling for painting, according to the view of painting
adopted earlier, as the main means for a work of sole instance, in direct contrast
with printing. Print sampling also serves to integrate Pop Art with later variations or
239
On Ruscha, see Elbrig de Groot, (catalogue) Edward Ruscha: Paintings,
Rotterdam/London/Los Angeles, 1991, Siri Engberg and Clive Phillpot, Edward Ruscha Editions
1959-1999, Minneapolis, 1999 and Currentartpics 67.
240 On ‘text-only’ works under other descriptions, see Joseph Kosuth, ‘Art After Philosophy’,
Studio International, October 1969, p.135, Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language, Oxford,
1991, Michael Newman and Jon Bird (eds.) Rewriting Conceptual Art (Critical Views),
Oxford/New York, 1999 and Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical
Anthology, New York/Boston, 1999.

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styles, such as ‘text only’ works and to give the period greater coherence. The
following chapter traces the sampling of photography by painting to the style
(strictly, sub-style) of Photo-Realism, and shows how print sampling remains crucial
to the period of Post-Modernism after Pop Art.

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Post-Modernism Continued
Painting Photography 1962–1978
As noted, the project of print sampling by painting looks to photography quite
promptly. It again seeks firstly the commonest and meanest of uses and in this is
consistent with the basic line illustrations adopted by Lichtenstein and Warhol.
What is sampled is the kind of photography and objects firstly associated with wide
publication. The initial interest is therefore with the extended printing process for
photography used in mass or popular publications, and in particular the half-tone
screens used to translate a photograph to a simple inking matrix. However, even in
sampling this, a variety of objects and emphases arise and as the project gains
momentum, other objects and aspects to photography are sampled, steadily diluting
a simple Pop Art label.
The point is not so much to endorse a preferred or pure practice for Pop Art, but
rather to trace a sequence – indeed history – of print sampling by painting through
selected aspects of photography. This leads nonetheless to a dilution of obvious and
sample-able aspects to photography and roughly parallels the dilution of print
illustration styles traced in the preceding chapter and to the dissipation of Pop Art
as a movement. But as shall be shown, it also leads here to a dilution of painting at a
more fundamental level. This chapter is therefore less concerned with a
demarcation between Pop Art and the following style of Photo-realism than with
the persistence of print sampling by painting and of the varieties established. To
resume this history we return to the pivotal work of Warhol.
In 1962 Warhol made the switch from graphic silkscreens to photo-silkscreens in
his work. Shortly after, Rauschenburg made the switch from photo-collage and
photo-transfers to photo-silkscreens in his work 241 . Both artists not only make the
printing process a prominent part of what is nominally painting, but also adopt
241 See Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol ’60, New York, 1980, pp. 22-23.

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distinctive ‘layouts’ in which to accommodate multiple prints, and reciprocally,
sample other aspects of painting. The respective ‘layouts’ however sample different
kinds of photographs for different aspects. Initially Warhol’s choice of
photographs, like his choice of illustrations, tend to point to standard and familiar
formats or styles, yet unlike his illustrations, the photo-silkscreens concentrate on
entertainment celebrities of the time, such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe,
Elizabeth Taylor and Troy Donahue. In this respect Warhol’s work deals not just in
the popular but the glamorous and topical. Against this glamour he employs a
systematic coarsening or degradation of the depiction, firstly through the
enlargement of the published photograph, that similarly to Lichtenstein, stresses the
half-tone screen, its ‘dot gain’, and compressed tonal range, secondly through the
uneven inking of the silkscreen, its match to the weave of canvas, and often to the
broadly allotted areas of single colour upon which the screen is placed, and thirdly
through the repetition of the silkscreen print upon the canvas, so that the depiction,
usually only of a head or bust, is virtually reduced to a motif in the simplest of
repeating patterns – again a common print style used in textiles, wallpaper,
wrapping paper and so forth. 242
Yet the identity of the stars is not just preserved but strengthened by these
challenges, so that their depictions emerge somewhat as icons, acquiring a kind of
shorthand resemblance through fewer but starker features. The stars thus extend
their resemblance through re-printing to ‘layout’ patterns and painting, while
conversely, painting extends its patterns to re-printing and the depiction of stars.
Whether such works are properly paintings or merely monotypes remains a moot
point, but crucially, ‘layout’ determines unique placement for screens within the work
or as only part of the area of the painting, and the unorthodox inking of the screen,
and its erratic placement and colouring, even in repetition or grid-form, argue for
the materials and technique to be now taken as a work of sole instance, and
properly, painting.
Warhol is not content with just the stars of the day however, and soon broadens his
selection to include photographs of the Mona Lisa, the mourning Jackie Kennedy,
242 Information on printing process throughout this chapter and subsequently is drawn from
Helmut Kipphan (ed.) Handbook of Printed Media, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York, 2001.

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the thirteen most wanted men from police files, spectacular car crashes, race riots,
suicides and an electric chair, amongst others. The Mona Lisa trades upon familiarity
obviously, and if anything its identity as a painting points more emphatically to the
coarse monochrome re-printing adopted by Warhol, and the process by which it
acquires a further iconic status, even as it surrenders much detail. Other selections
however pursue quite the opposite pole and trade in the disturbing and violent. Yet
the striking nature of these images is preserved, even as their photographic details
are lost. Morbid curiosity also earns its icons. Warhol also begins to vary ‘layout’ or
pattern in four ways, firstly through more irregular placements upon the canvas, as
in Mona Lisa (1963) (Figure 52) including overlapping, secondly through combining
different silkscreens of the same object upon the one canvas, this can also be seen
in the lower row of Mona Lisa (1963) but is more prominent in 16 Jackies (1964) and
Red Race Riot (1963) thirdly through the use of the same silkscreen with different
inks, as in Elvis I and II ((1964) and fourthly through a reduction in the number of
silkscreens to a canvas, where the blank canvas or coloured ground now frame the
silkscreen printing, and emphasise ‘layout’ in relation to the whole of the painting,
as in Orange Disaster (1963) (Figure 53).
In accommodating the photo-silkscreen within painting in this way Warhol
obviously forfeits other means to painting and depiction, although his later work
pursues some of these with limited success. There is, for example, work which
introduces bold and vigorous brushwork to grounds, somewhat after the manner of
de Kooning, such as the Mao series (1972) yet the gulf between painted ground and
silkscreen negates any more engaging role for the gestures – unlike de Kooning. The
same holds for lines introduced which trace features over the surface of the
photograph but which lack the stylistic reference or resonance of say, an Adami or
Caulfield and of integration of line within the photograph. Exercises with standard
symbols such as Skull (1976) and Hammer and Sickle (1977) curiously lack the
extended settings against which earlier work forged its icons, while attempts at
abstraction such as the Oxidation series (1978) the Rorschach series (1984) and the
Camouflage series (1986) all pursue familiar designs or fields, mostly in a by now

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familiar strategy, but their massive enlargements do not so much embarrass painting
with mundane sources as now embarrass sources with mundane painting. 243
Rauschenberg’s photo-silkscreens embrace a broader range of photographs, and
more complex ‘layouts’. While his choice of photographs overlaps with Warhol’s in
the use of topical figures such as President Kennedy (while Warhol adopts The First
Lady) sporting events, the Statue of Liberty, and reproductions of the old masters,
Rauschenberg also includes photographs of technical diagrams, ornithological
charts, the NASA space programme, military craft, close-ups of mosquitoes, heavy
seas, a key ring, a glass of milk and his own photographs of the New York
landscape. His ‘layouts’ share with Warhol the repeated silkscreen, overlaps, changes
of colour of ink to the one screen within a painting, and a rough and ready inking
technique, but also introduce colour separations and close registration for certain
screens, segments and objects carefully and roughly painted around and over in the
same and other colours. The contrast is between properties sampled. While both
exploit a coarsened version of photo-silk-screening, for Warhol the process subtly
transforms familiar and compelling sources, for Rauschenberg diverse sources
subtly transform the process. Warhol’s samples are icons of glamour and gloom.
Rauschenberg’s samples are the grades in between, are therefore less tethered to
Pop Art, while no less committed to print sampling. Here, icons blend into indexes,
sources with technique 244 . This gives his work an especially elusive, discursive
quality.
Consider the example of Estate (1963) (Figure 54). Here ‘layout’ finds firstly an
obvious metaphor in the prominent street sign with its various directions and the
buildings to its right. The buildings are not literally located by the sign from the
corner of Nassau and Pine of course, but extend the metaphor of ‘layout’ to
location and orientation. Equally, a second, sloping version of the high-rise building
in turn builds the metaphor into one of multiple orientations while the abutting
silkscreen of a building site and the colour version of the interior of the Sistine
243 On Warhol, see Kynaston McShine (ed.) Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, New York/ Boston,
1989.
244 Talk of icons and indexes drifts into Peircean terminology a little here, but is another way of
saying that competing samples trade object for material, or two-dimensionality for three.
Incidentally, the application of Peirce’s Semiology to photography and cinema is profitably
explored in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, London, 1972.

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Chapel beneath, serves as a projection and heritage to the orientation, to the
building of buildings, in a sense. At the same time the signpost is itself realigned
through the painting over of its background and base, so that directions and
orientation also stop at its stop sign, and give way to a flurry of red paint that links
colour and sign while contrasting with the grey geometry and detail of the buildings.
A second orientation is found in the dial face superimposed upon the Sistine Chapel
interior. The Sistine Chapel of course, offers an especially loaded model for
painting. Yet in aligning the dial face with the vault of the ceiling and the radiating
perspective lines of the walls, the dial points both to the centrality of the model and
its outward projection. The bright colours and painting that bracket its top, bottom
and left side, announce three ‘directions’ painting may sample the print and pursue
the model, while a third version of the high-rise building to its lower left, now on its
side or at ‘three o’clock’ supplies a further re-orientation. In the lower left corner an
almost full colour print of the Statue of Liberty featuring a blue sky and clouds, is
placed beside a red print of a NASA rocket. The statue builds on a location, then a
nation and space programme. Above these, a broadly brushed, tapering column of
red and yellow complements the colours below and carries their sentiment into the
broad and easy brushstrokes that link them to the birds to the left, also directed
skyward, and back to the stop sign, for redirection. 245
‘Layout’ then orders the silkscreens according to colour, density or detail, geometry
and less formal properties of the object depicted, so that some or all are present at
any one placement within the ‘layout’. Again, painting and ‘layout’ meet printing and
depiction, and for Rauschenberg also the scheme entails certain omissions. For
while painting may trace around and blot out certain objects and sections of a print
– it does not draw upon the kind of stylistic resources available to, for example a
Rosenquist, a Kitaj or a Hockney. For Rauschenberg painting remains tethered to
the broad and bold gestures he inherits from de Kooning and Late Modernism. By
the same token, his photo-silkscreens also observe certain surprising constraints,
and no use of Modernist master reproductions is made for example, or indeed of
245 On Estate, see Sidra Stich, Made in U.S.A: The Americanisation in Modern Art, the 50s and
60s, Berkeley/London, 1987, p. 52, Marco Livingstone, Pop Art, A Continuing History, London,
1990, p. 116. For standard interpretation of similar works, see Andrew Forge, Rauschenberg,
New York, 1968, pp. 92-111. For resistance to iconography in interpretation of Rauschenberg,
see Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde,
Cambridge/ Mass./London, 2004 and Robert S. Mathison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking
Boundaries, New Haven/ London, 2004. See also Currentartpics 73.

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Modernist photography, although later works to some extent redress this through
the incorporation of his own, abstracting photography, as in Exotic Trail (1988)
(Figure 55).
Yet the extended printing process for photography may be sampled without
silkscreens, or ‘layout’ in painting. The work of Frenchman Alain Jacquet (b. 1939)
used silkscreens without ‘layout’ to sample colour separation angles in half-tone
screens, yet in substituting ‘layouts’ for traditional composition as in Dejeuner sur
l’herbe (1964) (Figure 56) rather weakens the potency by dividing the composition
into theme and modern setting variation, and the distinction between painting and
print into the bargain. The work of Englishman Gerald Laing (b. 1936) on the other
hand uses ‘layouts’ without silkscreens to sample half tone dots, by ‘hand painting’
works such as Deceleration No 3 (1964-9) (Figure 57) but again the sample is
weakened by the restricted role assigned to the dots, with its perfunctory motor too
easily preserved by the too-small dots. German, Sigmar Polke (b. 1941) pursues a
more promising line in works such as Tennis-player (1964) (Figure 58) where dots are
hand-painted to a scale that makes a feature of screen faults merging with the
artist’s own faltering diligence. The result transforms the depiction, much like a
close-up of a Warhol, but here no icon emerges, rather, as in a Rauschenberg, the
tennis player becomes an index to the anonymity of the dot printing/painting
degeneration. The focus of Polke’s work however soon shifts from half-tone
screens and photography to include other forms of print and is pursued in Chapter
Sixteen 246 .
Just as ‘layouts’ and silkscreens are not necessary to sample some aspects of the half
-tone process in photographic printing, the half-tone process is not necessary to
sample other aspects of photography. Yet this distinction perhaps marks a
convenient demarcation for Pop Art. The work of German Gerhard Richter
(b.1932) is notable for his sampling of blurring in photography, in works such as
Administration Building (1964) (Figure 59). At first this would seem an attribute of
camera process, as loss of focus, or a slow shutter speed’s registration of movement,
as if the building were glimpsed from a speeding vantage point. Yet in subsequent
246 On Polke, see Martin Hentschel, et al., Sigmar Polke, The Three Lies of Painting, (catalogue),
Munich, 1997 and Currentartpics 99.

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paintings the blurring becomes more ambiguous, static objects such as Kitchen Chair
(1965) (Figure 60) neither register the directional sweep of movement, nor a
consistent depth of field for focus. Equally publication formats such as postcards -
The Sphinx at Ghiza (1964) wildlife close-ups Tiger (1965) pornography Student (1967)
and the obligatory old master reproduction, The Annunciation, After Titian (1973)
grant the blurring a degraded or coarsening quality of printing, a kind of summary
of lowered half-tone screen rulings, without going into ‘dot gain’. Moreover the
blurring can in cases be aggressively painterly, so that the dragged brushstrokes are
also recorded in the blurring, as in Tiger (1965). Blurred brushing is rarely taken
further, into brushy blurring so to speak, perhaps because this technique lapses into
something too akin to traditional facture. Yet this is tested, against the notably
photographic formats of aerial views of mountains and cities in the late sixties, such
as Cityscape Madrid (1968) (Figure 61).
Richter also pursues blurring to abstraction in parallel works throughout most of his
career, firstly overworking colours into masses of writhing brushstrokes in works
such as Triptychon (Inpainting – Grey) (Richter No 326/1-3 1972) then to their
exhaustion in fields of grey, such as Grey (Richter No 361/1 1974) secondly,
through seemingly soft focus close-ups of brushstrokes, as in Abstract Painting
(Richter No 418 1977) to their eclipse by the massively loaded deposits and
removals of paint in the eighties and nineties, such as Courbet (Richter No 616)
(1986) (Figure 62). What starts as blurring and photography thus ends as dragging,
abstraction and painting. Equally and elegantly, what is sampled throughout all of
these works is not just loss of focus, movement or printing degeneration in
photography, nor their combinations, but reciprocally, the way they also constitute a
version of painting. Accordingly, Courbet retains vestiges of depiction in the dragging
of colours into one another. While a later work such as Skull (Richter No 548/1
1983) (Figure 63) resists resolution as focus, tremor or print. Yet Richter also
addresses abstraction as single colours and their relations in grids or charts, and so
maintains a print format, although not photography. Pointedly, no blurring or
mixing occurs here, but rather the random ordering of colours is spread across
saturation and luminosity to a formidable range, inevitably rendered imperceptible
by complementary contrasts, and accommodated only by diminishing size of
sample, as in 4096 Colours (Richter No 359 1974) (Figure 64). Abstraction is thus

171
rendered relative in grids as well as in blurring or dragging. The scope and power of
Richter’s approach thus does not rest with only extended printing or camera
processes to photography. It largely ignores ‘layout’ for parallel series of works and
encompasses geometry and grids as well as gesture, striking techniques or ‘traction’.
Yet Richter’s system and samples nonetheless make sacrifices. While dragging can
accommodate shifts in direction, tool and colour, blurring cannot accommodate line
or drawing, nor the styles and ‘layout’ available there. In this respect Richter remains
a hostage to the photograph, and the single depiction models of early Warhol and
Lichtenstein. 247
The work of American Chuck Close (b.1940) initially samples camera process more
narrowly, and concentrates on focus and depth. His paintings do not deal with great
depth, but rather just the depth of facial features, generally viewed from the front,
and enlarged to an overwhelming scale, often 108 X 84 ins or 274 X 213 cm, and
treated with a radically narrowed depth of field for focus. Yet, as with Lichtenstein’s
magnifications, certain properties are also excluded in the process, such as texture
of paper, grain size of film or colour separation incident. In Mark (1978-9) (Figure
65) we can see how this gives a spectacular clarity even to individual skin pores or
strands of hair, and an intensified depth to the softening of focus at the shoulders
and back of the head. It is this exaggeration that enables Close to exemplify depth
of field 248 . The effect is unsettling but curiously unreal, and after a short time the
heads come to seem more like superior waxwork dummies, because the enormous
detail and precision give them an unnatural stillness 249 . Our perception of faces and
portraits resists the kind of scrutiny Close engineers, to be able to focus upon a
single strand of hair or skin pore, the sharpness of the pupils, and yet take in the
whole of the head, gives it an utterly frozen, even dead quality. Close is able to ‘put
247 On Richter, see Roald Nasgaard and Terry Neff (eds.) Gerhard Richter: Paintings, Toronto
Chicago and London, 1988, Robert Storr and Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of
Painting, New York, 2002 and Currentartpics 87.
248 A fact Close concedes, but not quite for the real reasons. “My paintings always transcended
the photograph, even from the beginning. The paintings looked more like the people than the
photographs did. I always ended up putting more into the painting. Unconsciously I was trying
not to. I was trying to be very flat-footed, and effect this translation and not editorialise and not
crank anything up for greater effect. But unconsciously I couldn’t help but do it.” See Chuck
Close: Recent Work, (catalogue) New York, 1986, reprinted in Jochen Poetter and Helmut
Friedel, Chuck Close, Ostfildern-Ruit and New York, 1994, pp 65-66.
249 As is customary in discussions of photo-based painting, a disclaimer is lodged against the
special limitations of reproduction for such work, since many of the crucial features are
necessarily lost by the return to a photograph.

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more into them’ than the photograph, but standards of realism make this into
something other than ‘life’. And this is not a shortcoming in the paintings, but
rather their insight. Again, as with Lichtenstein, the divorce of the picture from
matters of paper texture and printing at this level of magnification, also create a
certain interest in the supporting surface and painting. Close’s airbrushed and
methodical glazings deal in the thinnest of paint surfaces. The scrupulous sampling
of depth of field thus reciprocally serves to demonstrate a literal flatness for
painting, a fastidious rigour to depiction. Later developments however tend to
retreat both from this degree of focus and flatness, with the prominence of a grid
and looser interpretation of its co-ordinated tones, in works such as Francesco II
(1988) (Figure 66). The grid in fact now preserves liveliness, even as focus and
realism recede. The sources remain photographs, but the sample is now of printing
and colour separation, albeit granted a latitude not available to Close with depth of
field.
However the strategy of eliminating film grain, print dots and supporting surface
from massive enlargement does not render the sample only of camera process.
Close’s use of depth of focus, or indeed of print process, is allied to the portrait as a
single head and shoulders or bust for example, and this are also part of what is
sampled. 250 Yet the sample need not always rest upon such basic or traditional
formats, nor always point to a flatness in painting. It may sample styles as common
and overlooked as the travel brochure illustration, for example. In On Deck (1966)
by Englishman Malcolm Morley (b.1931) (Figure 67) colour saturation, wide-angle
distortion, and ‘art direction’ in furniture and costumes are picked out as salient
features of the polished and published photograph. While in African Lady (1971) and
Lizard’s Head (1971) (Figure 68) by American Joseph Raphael (b 1933) the
categories of wildlife and ethnographic photography are sampled for long lens
close-ups, absence of scale or setting, hard light and ambiguous colours and
textures. Morley paints with a smoothness and flatness of handling that accents the
stiffness of print deprived of actual process, and gives the cruise holiday an amusing
formality. Raphael favours a more broken facture and even greater enlargement,
where highlights are treated in bead-like strings, akin to the ‘circles of confusion’
250 On Close, see Robert Storr, Chuck Close, New York, 1998, Jochen Poetter and Helmut
Friedel, Chuck Close, (catalogue) Munich/ New York, 1994 and Currentartpics 35.

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that arise beyond photographic focus. But here they blend with a version of
painting as an incremental accretion, and give even science’s specimens a slight
mystique. 251
Other samples do not exploit enlargement to the same extent, although dealing with
more elaborate objects and scenes. They also ignore obvious print process,
publication categories and lens character to concentrate on more testing samples.
For, the line between painting and photography is not always clear-cut, and
properties sampled cannot always be easily or usefully attributed to one or the
other. For example, perspective and an extended depth of field are not exclusively
photographic, scrutiny of the contemporary landscape and the particulars of
everyday life are not the exclusive domain of painting. A sample may be too minor
or banal to be worth sampling, or too vague or elusive to be effectively sampled.
Work that flirts with and often succumbs to these dangers is often described as
Photo-realism. Because photography may be smoothly integrated with painting and
tradition in this way, the approach attracts many proponents at this time,
particularly in the United States, where they include Charles Bell (b. 1935), Robert
Cottingham (b. 1935), Richard Estes (b. 1936), Audrey Flack (b. 1931) and Ralph
Goings (b. 1928). Because the work can so easily fail to sample enough of
photography or with enough of painting, many critics dismiss the project as flawed
or futile. The paintings are either too much like photographs or not enough. And
the failings are undeniable. Where painting offers no more than routine technique,
and photography’s composition is too close to traditional styles of painting, what is
sampled is no more than massive diligence at the service of meagre ambition.
Where photography offers complex and elusive properties of object and
composition, and painting technique fails to display consistency, the result is overambition
married to inadequacy. Yet as slippery as the samples may be, Photorealism
cannot finally be avoided. Painting must have its depiction if it is to sample
more of photography, and the sample, when effective, is all the more rewarding for
this acuity. 252
251 On Raphael and Morley as Photo-realists, see Gregory Battcock (ed.) Super Realism: a
critical anthology, New York, 1975.
252 On Photo-realism, see Gregory Battcock (ed) Super Realism: a critical anthology, New York,
1975, Louis K. Meisel, Photo-realism, New York, 1989 and Edward Lucie-Smith, Artoday,
London, 1995, pp. 204-227.

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As shown, where sample eliminates print process, the depiction is not simply left
pristine, but subtly transformed. For to ‘copy’ the depiction and ignore these factors
is nevertheless to inscribe it with a new instrument, and regardless of degree of
enlargement, focus and depth of field, the picture introduces the subtlest of
outlines. The sample starts here for painting and stops here for photography. In
Dick’s Union General (1971) (Figure 69a) by Goings we can see how this linear quality
is carefully accented and creates an attendant smoothness to surfaces, an evenness
to gradings. It favours the curves, modelling and detail to the pick-up for example,
in a way that leaves the stains to the forecourt lacking in a further texture or
resolution. It favours the linearity of signage, even to a very small scale, such as the
parking sign to the rear of the pick-up, where we can still read the word ‘limit’
beneath the bumper, but which leaves the adjacent shrubbery looking more cursory
for it (see Figure 69b). Inspection of such detail, even in reproduction, confirms
how even the faithful copy must traduce the source, when excluding film grain and
print surface.
Yet Going’s linearity can then subtly excel in the planes of the architecture, the crisp
shadows and the complex layers of reflectance and transparency of windows, and
gives truck and building, shadow and depth an additional cohesion, less prominent
in a photograph. The composition does not simply balance the diagonals of the
shadow to the upper left with that of the roof to the right, the blue of the truck with
the blue and tan discs affixed to the side of the roof, or rhyme the period, style and
social status of the building with that of the pick-up, but aligns their lines, draws
them into drawing, and casts a design across depth and shadow, colour and light. It
carries the signage on the pick-up’s door, with its cartoon graphic and orange
border to the curves of the pick-up’s body, as one design, then to the brown frames
of the building windows and roof, as one design, and then to the blue and tan disks
above and the lights and wheels of the pick-up below, as one design. And that
design rests on the line where photograph meets printing and printing meets
painting. 253
253 On Goings, see Gregory Battcock (ed.) Super Realism: a critical anthology, New York, 1975,
and Linda Chase and Ralph Goings, Ralph Goings, an Interview, New York, 1988.

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Yet to carry drawing into the photograph or to carry the photograph into drawing,
builds a dilemma for Photo-realism. To go further into the photograph for line and
drawing is to abandon painting and sample with the photograph rather than of it. To
go further from the photograph in assimilating line is to confront ‘layout’ and the
kind of issues engaged by Rauschenberg or Rosenquist. Photo-realism is finally
stranded betwixt and between, and stalls by the late seventies. Photography on the
other hand, attains new momentum with firstly renewed interest in wide-angle deep
focus depiction and something of the all-embracing composition outlined, in for
example the work of Germans Bernd and Hilla Becher (b.1931 and 1934)
Americans Stephan Shore (b.1947) and Robert Adams (b.1937) and others.
Secondly it pursues ‘layout ‘and sequence in the work of Frenchman, Christian
Boltanski (b.1944) American Duane Michaels (b.1932), Englishman and German,
Gilbert and George (b.1943, b.1942) and others. Thirdly it returns to studio-based
tableau, and greater graphic or printing aspects, with the work of Americans Jan
Groover (b.1942), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89) Cindy Sherman (b.1954), and
others. Fourthly it leads to photography’s own sampling of further print properties
in the ‘re-photographing’ strategies of Americans Richard Prince (b.1949), Sherrie
Levine (b.1947) and others. Sadly space does not allow this study to pursue
photography any further, although it is touched upon again in Chapter Eighteen 254 .
Finally, while the late seventies largely exhaust Photo-realism and print sampling,
this does not quite exhaust Post-Modernism. Although print sampling dominates
more concrete depiction up until this point and signals most clearly the abrupt
departure from earlier Late Modernism, there are rival styles that gradually arise,
persist and gain ascendance by this time. The following chapter traces these other
strands.
254 On Richard Prince, see Currentartpics 80, on Cindy Sherman see Currentartpics 12.

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The End of Post-Modernism
Neo-Expressionism, ‘Bad’ Painting and New
Image Painting
1962–1985
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ does not lead to just print sampling in Post-Modernism. It
also leads to a more radical compression of ‘layout’, ‘traction’ and ‘interruption’ and
to an emphasis upon allegory that samples (reciprocally) poor or ‘bad’ depiction.
This style is known as Neo-Expressionism. Initially it offers a less decisive break
with ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ of Late Modernism, struggles for recognition against
the pervasive cool of print sampling but gains impetus as print sampling fades and
later similarly dissipates in the mid eighties as it draws Post-Modernism to a close.
There is the temptation to label this phase Late Post-Modernism since it flourishes
as print sampling fades, but it is rejected since both styles also share a considerable
overlap in practice and chronology. This chapter concentrates upon this competing
and closing style to Post-Modernism, which starts in Germany, and so also signals a
shift in place for the period and contrasts it with brief parallel styles in New York,
in ‘Bad’ Painting and New Image Painting.
It is useful to firstly note Neo-Expressionism’s relation to print sampling and for
this we return to the work of Polke. In Chapter Fifteen his sampling of
photographic printing in works such as The Tennis Player (1967) (Figure 58) was
noted. But Polke’s range of print samples extends beyond photography, indeed
beyond painting. For he also incorporates printed fabrics, usually as a support to
painting or as a substitute for canvas and the fabrics offer either fully abstract
patterns such as Bohnen (1965) (Figure 70), or patterns of pictures, such as
Negerplastik (1968) (Figure 71). Elsewhere in his work the print may only be a tone
screen of an architect’s basic line drawing as in Haüserfront (1967) or, foregoing tone
screens, adopts mere tracings such as Tibersprung (1971) and spray stencils, as in
Lucky Luke (1971-5). Then again, works may combine printed fabrics and tracings,

177
as in Alice in Wonderland (1970) (Figure 72) featuring its loose white lined projectortracing
of Tenniel’s noted etching, while later works sample older and more familiar
sources, such as the etchings of Goya and the woodcuts of Dürer, and more
complex combinations, such as a tone screen of an antique etching, as in Jeux
d’enfants (1985) (Figure 73) as well as including more unusual materials as pigment
and support.
Polke’s print samples thus arrive at a ‘layout’ of pictures as well as a diffusion of
sample, through tracing and stencils to less certain derivations. Indeed it is a feature
of his work that it progressively includes rather than simply exchanges these
variations. Yet as the samples back away from prints, so to speak, they also back
into painting and Modernism. For the more remote the print sample, the more
pressing the stylistic questions for painting become. The quality of the outline to the
tracing or stencil immediately present options; the width and uniformity of the line
– to take only two of its most obvious properties – determining the fidelity to or
simplification of the source. Source and style of line in turn suggest further
categories of painting, further conditions to the picture plane. For Polke, the source
in some cases dwindles to no more than the decorative cliché of a pair of heron, as
in the series of Reiherbild (1969) where the treatment swells to an exuberant set of
outlines and fills, as in Reiherbild IV (1969) (Figure 74). Yet such works by necessity
resist projection to fuller abstraction and ‘simultaneous and successive’ depiction;
instead teeter on the cusp of Modernism, in a kind of parody or Neo-
Expressionism 255 . Polke’s work incorporates this feature but is rarely dominated by
it (even in Reiherbild IV, printed fabric features as the support). 256 However for
other artists at this time Neo-Expressionism arises for quite the opposite reason,
not because they back away from print sampling in painting, but because they back
away from Late Modernism.
For some artists and works, metaphors prompted by ‘layout’ in ‘Reciprocal
Depiction’ are fused into a single picture, and properly amount to allegory.
‘Interruption’, as a cross section and incompleteness of style, is there compressed
255 However works such as Polke’s Sonnenuntergang mit Reihern (1969) certainly press for a
fuller abstraction, but are perhaps less successful for it.
256 On Polke, see Martin Hentschel, et al., Sigmar Polke, the Three Lies of Painting, (catalogue),
Munich, 1997 and Currentartpics 99.

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into a single, awkward hybrid of styles and ‘traction’ in materials deals in just these
constraints. The result is not quite as drastic in revision of attitude as print
sampling, but distinctive nonetheless. Work now exhibits a reckless disregard for
technique, a seeming indifference to style and a conspicuous preference for allegory.
Allegory obtains where what is depicted serves as a metaphor for typically, more
abstract objects and/or non-spatial relations. For example a river or a door may
stand for Life or Death, a ladder or stairs for Experience or Knowledge, a dove for
The Soul, and apt personifications for various virtues or vices. Metaphor in
depiction, or allegory, is to be distinguished from metaphor in materials, or material
exemplification as expression, which of course may accompany allegory. Allegory
channels the depiction of the literal in certain ways and alerts us to a transfer to a
remote but receptive realm. Where the metaphorical realm is familiar, greater liberty
is often extended to the literal, and vice versa.
What is striking in much of Neo-Expressionism is the way allegory becomes just
such a way of nailing down its literal objects in the face of lax or conflicting stylistic
features and of using just this untidiness as a way of highlighting or sampling
allegory and enabling bolder or novel realms for transfer. Hence Neo-
Expressionism is rarely simply a stylistic revival. The pictures are generally too wild
or inconsistent, too poor or ‘bad’ for that. 257 The effect more often is of a riotous or
punk amalgam of styles. Nor is it comfortably accommodated as a hybrid, in the
manner of ‘Interstyle’ works, discussed in Chapter Twelve. The work ‘backs away’
from Late Modernism, seeking ever-murkier hybrids, but can go no further than the
cusp of Modernism, without embracing a greater conservatism, and so teeters there,
between styles. It counts as Post-Modernism because it cuts right across Modernism
in this way.
What is ‘bad’ in such work is strictly speaking, its ineffectiveness as sample. The bad
sample may be only the cliché, that tells us nothing new, or the muddled or
confused sample that does not tell us enough. No qualities or properties are clearly
257 The name ‘Bad’ Painting was first given to a slightly different trend in American painting in
an exhibition at the New Museum of Art in New York in 1978. It is often bracketed with Neo-
Expressionism for its contemporary, provocative spirit. See New Museum of Art (Marcia
Tucker) Bad Painting (catalogue) New York, 1978.

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exemplified over others in ‘bad’ work or usefully exemplified for our categories of
style. It is a badness of sample as much as a sample of badness. Yet in Neo-
Expressionism some badness is all to the good. The badness of the depiction here
serves as a way of pointing to an allegoric function, while picking out the necessary
and nugatory literalness of objects. The impression is often of the pictures dashed
off ‘any old how’ preserving only a stark metaphoric scheme. And the effect is not
always comic or derisory, as one might suppose, on the contrary, it often adds
poignancy. For example, in the work of A. R. Penck, alias Rolf Winkler (b.1939)
one of the earliest of the Neo-Expressionists, the allegory to Systembild (1963)
(Figure 75) is easily grasped: ‘the system’ of deception practised upon the little
worker with his barrow. But the work is rarely taken as an amusing travesty of
Socialist Realism and Modernism, a farcical marriage of say, late Paul Klee and
Agitprop, but rather as a more sincere version of both, the clumsiness of the stick
figures reinforcing the brutal simplification of the allegorical ‘system’. 258
Penck’s work does not always rely upon such obvious allegories, but rarely strays far
or long from the stick figures and silhouettes of his Modernist heritage. The work
of his colleague from this time, Jörg Immendorff (b.1945) however, ventures farther
a field. Like Penck, Immendorff is drawn to socialist issues, even to Socialist
Realism, although his mastery or commitment remains at arm’s length. But neither
does he engage more fully in the standard Expressionism of say a Ernst-Ludwig
Kirchner (1880-1938) or Georg Grosz (1893-1959) much less a CoBrA artist, so
that the results are left closer to the average newspaper cartoon or protest poster,
for example Selbstbildnis im Atelier (Self-portrait in Studio)(1974) or Kan man damit
etwas verändern? (Can one change anything with these?) (1972), that is, as a typical
print ‘layout’. Yet the perfunctory means of the political cartoon receive a different
scrutiny when used thus in painting. The results generally appear weak or ‘bad’,
given the extended resources of painting, yet this badness can be curiously effective
where some allegory is concerned. Immendorff’s work culminates in a series of
elaborate allegories titled Café Deutschland, commencing in 1977 with Café Deutschland
I (Figure 76). Here the lumbering composition hardly adds to the gravity of the
scene. Rather, it adds to the fun and serves to ridicule. Accordingly, the metaphor
258 On Penck, see Lucius Grisebach, (ed.) A R Penck, Berlin/Munich, 1988, John Yau, A R Penck,
New York, 1993.

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acquires a certain half-hearted and indulgent quality. Germany, as one big crazy
nightclub, appropriately struggles as an allegory. 259
The work of Anselm Kiefer (b.1945) by contrast deals in more obscure literary,
historical, mythical and theological metaphors. But Kiefer too relies upon a ‘bad’ or
messy version of depiction, derived not directly from ‘layout’ and Late Modernism,
but via the ritualistic diagrams and drawings of Joseph Beuys (1921-86). Beuys is
considered more fully in Chapter Eighteen. Kiefer’s pictures typically feature an
unpopulated setting, either landscape or architecture, in perspective and offering a
grand recession of plane. Captions, diagrams and objects are arranged in and against
this, sometimes unlikely, obscure or fictive, or else familiar to traditional allegory. In
any case, metaphor is prompted by the contrast between a literal location and a
‘layout’ of text upon or within it. Kiefer’s style is also distinctive for its expanded
materials and techniques, for ‘traction’ for the picture plane. 260 Here the ‘bad’
sample extends to material exemplification and gives expression a troubling
ambiguity; the work is at once expansive and adventurous, yet sloppy and dithering,
offers shambolic grandeur as well as comic pretension 261 . The materials cannot
really be brought into focus as a sample because their depiction and twodimensionality
are equally evasive. This expressive diffusion is matched by the
radical nature of many of the allegories.
Initially his works locate lofty matters literally in a loft or attic, as in Quaternity (1973)
(Figure 77) where a snake and three small fires form a neat diamond upon the
hatch, a mystic relation often interpreted as the confrontation of sin or evil with the
holy trinity (hence the clumsy portmanteau in the title) 262 . It would be merely obtuse
to allow the snake and fires are there on a more quotidian basis. But since so much
of the picture is devoted to the setting, the point is also, perhaps firstly, for the
259 On Immendorff, see Carl Haelein et al., Jorg Immendorff: Bilder und Zeichnungen - Paintings
and Drawings, Hanover, 2000, Jörg Immendorff, Immendorff’s Handbuch der Akademie für
Adler, Cologne, 1989, Thomas Krens et al. (eds.) Refigured Painting: The German Image 1960-
88, (catalogue) New York/ Munich, 1988 and Currentartpics 40.
260 Predictably, Kiefer’s work also includes sculpture and installations, as well as books and
photographs, initially included performance.
261 For contrasting views on the tone of Kiefer’s work see Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Our Kiefer’ in Art in
America, March 1988 pp. 116-126, Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer London/ New York, 2001 and
Currentartpics 26.
262 Details to this interpretation, and those of following works by Kiefer, draw on the footnotes by
Jürgen Harten in Rudi Fuchs et al., Anselm Kiefer (catalogue) Düsseldorf/ Paris, 1984.

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location of these mystic issues. The relentlessly linear treatment of the room, where
the ‘bad’ or clumsy wood-grain all but confuses the perspective (particularly in the
foreground) and competes with the quartet, finally stresses the bare and prosaic
nature of attic and picture, their sturdy if modest virtues. Giving some clean, spare
little space over to fundamental issues of metaphysics or faith becomes the issue, in
more ways than one. Finding space for such issues, or perhaps issues for such
space, possibly indicates a national trait, surely grants space and issues a striking
extension, or transfer of domain.
But in later pictures no event is staged, rather captions or text are arranged or
plotted throughout a setting, and re-order the space, into a kind of threedimensional
model or ‘layout’, such as Varus (1976)) (Figure 78) or Deutschland’s
Geisteshelden (1973) (Germany’s Spiritual Heroes) the literal spaces are now a
darkened forest, and a great wooden hallway, respectively. But texts not only turn
such bland locations into mythic and historic metaphors, often the metaphor is
mixed, as in Nero Paints (1974) or text no more than a pat phrase, such as Märkische
Heide (March Heath) (1974) (Figure 79) possibly summoning certain nineteenth
century Prussian attitudes, otherwise merely imposed upon a rugged open field. The
accumulative effect is that allegory and the transferred domain all but evaporate
under such diffusion. Then again some later pictures assume a greater abstraction,
such as Die Meistersinger (1982) (Figure 80) where text confronts vigorous materials
over little more than a diagram of lighted tapers, so that the expressive and
allegorical converge, and the text, never more than an indifferent handwriting,
strikes metaphors for its own idle line and ‘layout’.
Yet to doggedly track the various quotations, allusions and their permutations is
perhaps to risk losing sight of the underlying strategy – of the picture anchored in
allegory, even to its materials, and of text drawn into depictive and material
metaphors. The increasing variation and complexity to the work may also be seen as
a way of drawing out just this common thread. However for other and later
German Neo-Expressionists, allegory is less conspicuous if not absent – in the
Berlin and Hamburg groups for example, and the style accordingly looks closer to

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an ironic revival, a pastiche or parody. 263 While Kiefer’s work concentrates on
settings and texts for his allegories, the work of a group of Italian Neo-
Expressionists, emerging later in the seventies focus upon the figure and gesture,
often in absence of a setting. 264 This group includes Francesco Clemente (b.1952)
Enzo Cucchi (b.1950) Sandro Chia (b.1946) and Mimmo Paladino (b.1948).
Clemente is perhaps the most prominent. His work is notable at this time for a
versatility of media rather than expansion or invention, for the clumsy or ‘bad’
drawing of the person, their emphasis upon a compelling sensory engagement,
particularly for the body’s orifices and their frequent self-portraiture. Metaphor here
is prompted by the absence or indifference of setting, as well as the irresolute
drawing and often, schematic nature of poses and related objects in works such as
He teaches emotions with feelings (1980) (Figure 81).
Yet what is pointed to in this way is perhaps less metaphor than metonym. For
while the pictures isolate and exaggerate the bodily and sensate of experience –
especially the tactile – experience is not strictly remote or removed from the body,
but usually regarded as a continuum to and traditionally a duality with it. So
reference, while clearly not only to the literal, is more accurately by metonymy,
where part stands for whole 265 . It allows the artist to remind us of the surprising and
sensual as well as alarming aspects to physical engagement with other objects (and
persons) how such experiences interact with our identity and ‘self’ portrayals. It
grants the bizarre unions and transformations in Clemente’s pictures such as Selfportrait
with bird (1980) (Figure 82) something like the function of hyperbole,
stretching the literal but maintaining metonymy. 266
Concentration upon the figure rather than the setting, and the use of ‘bad’ or Neo-
Expressionist depiction are pursued differently in the work of the American David
263 On the varieties of German Neo-Expressionism see Wolfgang Max Faust and Gerd de Vries,
Hunger Nach Bilden: deutche malerei der gegenwart, Cologne, 1982.
264 In the interests of space, this account omits less influential versions arising elsewhere at this
time.
265 Part to whole figures of speech are usually taken as synecdoche rather than metonymy –
metonymy allowing for a wider range of parts or properties of an object (including adjuncts,
causes and effects) but only from part to whole, while synecdoche takes a narrower view of parts
but allows for reference either way, from whole to part (as in Australia beat England by twelve
runs) as well as from part to whole (as in bat dominated ball in the Fifth Test).
266 On Clemente, see Lisa Dennison (organiser) Clemente (catalogue), New York, 2000 and
Currentartpics 44.

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Salle (b.1952). Salle’s work at this time is drawn to ‘layout’ rather than allegory and
like Polke, to a loose derivation from photographs, a weak or ‘bad’ sampling of
print styles. He similarly employs additional printed fabric in works such as His
Brain (1984) (Figure 83), elements of text and even occasional items of furniture, as
in King Kong (1983) (Figure 84) and other areas of pattern or abstraction as in The
Burning Bush (1982) (Figure 85). Salle’s figures, in contrast with Clemente’s are
generally female and their poses the sexually explicit clichés of pornography.
Distinctive to his work is the way ‘layout’ and ‘bad’ depiction are combined to make
such work ‘about’ pornography rather than merely pornographic. Nevertheless such
work stands or falls on the value given pornography. Here sexual allure at its most
narrowly anatomical is sampled and sorted by overlapping and superimposed
pictures and the casual exercises in line and tone that slow or halt prompt
recognition. The analogy, if not the allegory, is between ‘bad’ sexuality and ‘bad’
depiction. The cheap thrill of pornography is here extended to the lax tracing and
modelling derived from photography, the entrenched allure and recognition of the
object permitting, even encouraging a waywardness of depiction.
By the same token, surrounding and contrasting pictures and objects offer less or
no such easy recognition, and rather underline the limits of such depiction and
allure. In as much as depiction survives in these cases, as in the houseboat in His
Brain or the sketch in white of (perhaps) looting soldiers in The Burning Bush, there
are grounds for allegory, but often even this much is obscured in the emphatically
dilatory depiction. ‘Layout’ here not only sorts porn with ‘bad’ depiction, but with
patterned fabric, as in His Brain, and the furniture and text of King Kong. Neither
patterns nor furniture gain much, in the way of an erotic charge from the
association. But nor are the female figures reduced to little more than decorative
motifs by it. Rather porn pulls depiction one way, pattern and furniture pull it
another, and the result is both comic and desolate in its severe truncation.
Significantly, Salle’s later work gradually discards its Neo-Expressionist traits,
acquires a smoother more consistent style as his themes and objects soften or
broaden. He retains a commitment to ‘layout’, monochromes and lax print sampling
that is resolutely Post-Modernist, and remains more adventurous in his selection if

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not treatment of these, than similar approaches by Robert Longo (b.1953) Troy
Brauntuch (b.1954) David Wojnarowicz (1954-92) and others. 267
The work of Julian Schnabel (b.1952) concentrates upon novel materials and
techniques, and their resistance or ‘traction’ for depiction that ranges from allegory
to ‘layouts’ and abstraction. As with Kiefer, ‘bad’ depiction is carried through to
‘bad’ materials, struggles to express a coherent metaphor and results in a deeply
ambiguous tone. But where Kiefer at least retains an allegorical structure for various
locations or settings, Schnabel uses figures, portraits, still lives and landscapes, as
well as text and other notation to variously draw the surface into twodimensionality,
occasionally to allegory, even as novel materials resist ‘good’ or a
recognised depictive style.
Schnabel’s best-known innovation in materials consists of shattered china plates,
glued to the bare or painted support and usually painted over. The fragments are
generally arranged in approximate order to their wholes, stressing their derivation
and disintegration. While china rarely finds a serviceable metaphor in the objects
depicted or the style of depiction, they nevertheless express a fragility and
destructiveness to materials, indeed a certain wanton abandon to the process of resorting.
It is a process that literally labours the picture painted across or between
them. Then again, the picture is adjusted to rugged surface, radical pigment or
application, vast expanse, weathering or other distress, to duly draw the surface into
depiction, if only ‘badly’. But while china serves to stress fragility, even
extravagance, it does so clumsily. Glass or Styrofoam might equally serve, or better,
some combination. For the ‘china-ness’ side to the sample remains stubbornly
obvious, and confuses or weakens the sample’s ‘fragility and extravagance’. Yet such
dissipation is also to the point. ‘Bad’ materials here reciprocate ‘bad’ depiction.
Schnabel’s flexibility in adjusting (or misadjusting) means to ends is demonstrated in
the swift progression from works such as The Patients and the Doctors (1978) (Figure
86) that balance the beds of shattered china against casual outlines of blade-like
shapes, to the pictogram-like ‘layout’ of Portrait of God (1981) (Figure 87) wrought in
267 On Salle, see Janet Kardon, David Salle, (catalogue) Philadelphia, 1986, Lisa Phillips, David
Salle, New York, 1987, Peter Schjeldahl, Salle (an interview with David Salle), New
York/Toronto, 1987 and Currentartpics 97.

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bold gesture across an imposing scale, to the dense layers of imagery in Prehistory:
Glory, Honour, Privilege, Poverty (1981) (Figure 88) entangled with actual deer antlers
mounted upon pony skin, to the jagged and vaguely botanical forms of A.D.
(Wreath for Tennessee Williams) (1983) (Figure 89) rendered upon a massive tarpaulin
with oil paint and fibreglass. Indeed this flexibility often threatens to descend into
‘anything goes’; where ‘badness’ is no longer held in check and the balancing act
between materials and picture (much less allegory) simply collapses. The work is not
necessarily more daring for embracing this dissolution either. Actually risk
disappears as options proliferate, and more accurately, the work that dilates in this
way also stalls in indifference. At this time Schnabel increasingly favours found
surfaces, not so much the printed fabrics of Polke or Salle, as discarded theatre
backdrops, animal hides and black velvet. Accordingly, depiction often takes on a
superimposed, graffiti-like quality, something also stressed by the use of spray cans
in works such as Resurrection: Albert Finney meets Malcolm Lowry (1984) (Figure 90) as
well as the scrawled and partly deleted inscriptions. Indeed graffiti looms as an
obvious progression for such projects although rather than embrace installation or
site-specific works to this end, Schnabel subsequently devotes more of his career to
writing and film directing. 268
The graffiti option is pursued however in the early work of the Mülheimer Freitheit
group in Cologne, and by American artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88)
Keith Haring (1958-90) and Kenny Scharf (b.1958). 269 To the extent that such work
survives, it essentially betrays the spirit of graffiti, and to the extent that various
styles of graffiti are sampled upon standard supports for painting, the works betray
the material of graffiti. And while such work is never quite true to graffiti, nor does
it remain quite true to ‘bad’ depiction or Neo-Expressionism, since its stylistic
identity is streamlined or narrowed in the process, and loses some of its unruly
‘badness’ in adopting the recognisable means of graffiti. Such work finally exhausts
Neo-Expressionism. The expanding means of Neo-Expressionism enable greater
appreciation of certain peripheral work, such as the later work of Phillip Guston
268 On Schnabel, see Nicholas Serota and Joanna Skipworth (eds.) Julian Schnabel, Paintings,
1976-86 (catalogue) London, 1986, Stuart Morgan, ‘Julian Schnabel interviewed by Stuart
Morgan’, Artscribe, No 44, December 1983, pp. 15-21 and Currentartpics 56.
269 A record of the activities of the Mülheimer Freitheit group from this time is provided in an
interview with several of its members in Cordelia Oliver, ‘The Second Bombing: The Mülheimer
Freitheit Group’ Artscribe, No 44, December 1983, pp. 22-26.

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(1913-80) the racial satires of Robert Colescott (b.1925) and the nudist anecdotes of
Eric Fischl (b.1948), but it also consolidates ‘badness’ as a category, and with that
reduces its effectiveness and interest. 270 But rather than look to these fringe
benefits, or parallel developments elsewhere, the study turns to developments in
New York, signalled by the exhibitions ‘Bad’ Painting and New Image Painting.
Both shows appeared in 1978, and detect shifts in painting as print sampling
dissipates and more painterly means are adopted for less ‘printerly’ ends – much like
discussion on sampling effectiveness toward the end of Chapter Fifteen. In the
earlier of the two shows, ‘Bad’ Painting, organised by Marcia Tucker at her New
Museum of Art, the work of James Albertson (b.1943), Joan Brown (1938-1990),
Eduardo Carrillo (1938-1998), William Copley (Cply) (1919-1996) Charles
Garabedian (b.1923) Robert Chambless Hendon (N.D.A) Joseph Hilton (N.D.A.)
Neil Jenney (b.1945), Judith Linhares (b.1940) P. Walter Siler (N.D.A.), Earl Staley
(b.1938) Shari Urquhart (b.1941) and William Wegman (b.1943) concentrates on
how comic-like graphics, occasionally traditional motifs or pattern, yield to
expressive and Expressionist handling, while themes or iconography similarly reflect
a more remote derivation, a mixture of irreverence and idiosyncrasy, that as
discussed, is in some ways unavoidable in seeking to further the project. This is the
‘Bad’ to painting, but it carries much less emphasis upon allegory and text than
German variants, much less interest in strict drawing or abstraction than New
Image Painting. Indeed, the division between ‘Bad’ Painting and New Image
Painting, between anecdote and stylisation, to some extent splits the impact of Neo-
Expressionism on American painting. But while ‘Bad’ Painting unquestionably
detects a change, it lacks the focus of New Image Painting, the vigour and breadth
of Neo-Expressionism.
New Image Painting was the title of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New
York in December 1978 curated by Richard Marshall. It consisted of work by
Nicholas Africano (b. 1948) Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941) Australian Denise Green
(b.1946) Michael Hurson (b.1941) Neil Jenney (b.1945) Lois Lane (b.1948) Robert
Moscowitz (b. 1935) Susan Rothenberg (b. 1945) David True (b.1942) and Joe
270 For standard interpretation of such work see Tony Godfrey, The New Image: Painting in the
1980s, New York, 1986.

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Zucker (b.1941). It highlighted a course to painting distinct from print sampling or
preceding styles of concrete depiction. 271 Like Neo-Expressionism, it gains
momentum as print sampling falters. Central to most of the work is the model set
by the early work of Johns, with its use of a design or template-like image within a
vigorously worked ground. But where Early Johns largely resists the use of familiar
depiction to function thus, and where early Warhol imports standard graphics to
this end, the New Imagists forge new or unfamiliar icons. Typically they build an
orthogonal picture plane restricted to a spare outline and ‘fill’ of colour and facture.
The model set by Johns inflects a design such as the American flag or a stencil
alphabet with an intermittent or approximate compliance, through an opposing
rigour of technique and novel materials. The model is not concerned with the literal
and allegorical in depiction but the parameters of recognition and identity. This is
the first part of the contrast with Neo-Expressionism.
In New Image Painting however, the objects depicted in basic silhouettes and/or
isolated within a surrounding ground never quite carry the rigour of a template or
design. Instead, the images declare their drawing as invention and undermine the
function of the surrounding ‘fill’ or worked grounds. The tension between the two
slackens once drawing becomes an issue. Often they amount to no more than a
curious contrast of techniques, a strict outline against a broadly worked ‘fill’. In the
case of early Jenney and Rothenberg, facture is especially reminiscent of Johns in
works such as Rothenberg’s Butterfly (1976) (Figure 91) while the more subdued
techniques of Africano, Green, Lane and Moscowitz nevertheless sample facture
against outline, often with a single or flat colour. Of the group, only Zucker is
drawn, like Johns, to novel materials, with cotton swabs and rhomplex augmenting
acrylic paint in Merlyn’s Lab (1977). 272 Only True and Zucker extend drawing beyond
the isolated icon, and all but surrender to something like minor cartoon and
illustration styles, while only Bartlett and Hurson are drawn to ‘layout’ and multiple
pictures within it. But neither Bartlett’s grids nor Hurson’s sequences can quite
ground outline and ‘fill’ more firmly either. Bartlett’s Rhapsody (1975-6) and
Hurson’s Palm Springs No 2 (1971) offer deft variations but ultimately outline and
271 Marshall does not quite couch his selection in these terms of course, although gropes for
something along these lines. See Marshall, New Image Painting, (catalogue) New York, 1978,
pp. 7-13.
272 On this score Bartlett’s ceramic tiles are an alternative rather than an addition to painting.

188
‘fill’ here engage only the more obvious and less interesting stylistic features for
their objects.
The problem is that the terms themselves – outline and ‘fill’ – are too cosy and
entrenched by Johns to now offer means of testing recognition and identity more
fully, or without falling into greater abstraction. 273 In this respect New Image
Painting is too ‘good’, or demure. It samples too conservatively. This is the second
contrast with Neo-Expressionism. Where Neo-Expressionism embraces the ‘bad’
and backs away from Modernism to teeter at its cusp, renew allegory and extended
reference, New Image Painting clings to the territory between Late Modernism and
print sampling, only to find the crucial testing of recognition and identity now
eludes mere outline and ‘fill’. On one path we test allegory and reject Modernism,
on the other we preserve Modernism, but test too little and literally. Both are
necessary, if troubling experiences. Both flag an end to Post-Modernism.
Before embarking upon the last period to the twentieth century it is appropriate to
consolidate the distinction drawn here between Late and Post Modernism. So far
this break has been based solely upon developments in more concrete depiction. It
now needs to be shown how the distinction holds for abstraction, what changes the
proposed periods bring to abstraction. Then, given abstraction’s intimate relation to
three-dimensional work and the ‘expanded materials’ indicated in Chapter Eleven, it
also needs to be shown how the break holds for works beyond painting and mere
sculpture and what changes occur there. The following chapter duly traces the
course of abstraction across Late and Post Modernism and Chapter Eighteen does
the same for works of ‘expanded materials’. Here the task has been to show how
Post-Modernism contains a rival style to print sampling and how it briefly succeeds
Photo-realism before concluding, along with the period, in the mid-eighties. The
period is thus seen to abandon more comprehensively the tenets of Modernism
(Early and Late).
273 The option of pressing for greater abstraction is explored in the work of Elizabeth Murray
(b.1940) a colleague of some of the New Imagists. Her work retains an outline and ‘fill’ method,
where outline adopts the radical undulations of a comic strip in its depiction of inanimate objects,
and dispenses with grounds for elaborate shaped canvases. The result is a little like an unwilling
mix of Peter Saul and Ellsworth Kelly.

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Abstraction
In Late and Post-Modernism
Late Modernism has been characterised by the emergence of ‘Reciprocal Depiction’,
and ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ has been characterised by mutual sampling of the
abstract with the concrete. But this accommodation of the abstract can hardly do
justice to the project of abstraction as a whole. In fact the compromise prompts
bolder projection to pattern for abstraction. In Late Modernism bolder pattern
arises in stricter symmetry and is claimed mainly where work uses issues of colour
and tone for materials and techniques on a greater scale, or beyond the ‘easel scale’
painting. Later, where symmetry becomes foremost, or projects to novel materials,
scale, shape and colour, rather than is projected from them, Late Modernism
becomes Post-Modernism. Post-Modernist abstraction pursues symmetry to more
elaborate and established patterns, but where such pattern then arrives at repeating
pictures or even the single motif, style and period draw to a close.
This chapter can only briefly trace this arc, but hopefully with sufficient detail and
persuasion to strengthen the distinctions drawn between Late and Post-Modernism.
It looks firstly at how scale is used so distinctively in the fifties, particularly by the
Abstract Expressionists in New York. In Modernist works such as Kupka’s Disks of
Newton (1911-12) (Figure 2) and Klee’s Table of Colour (in Grey Major) (1930) (Figure
7) scale and facture have been shown to be intimately linked, the small scale of the
work grants the size of the brushstroke and paint viscosity an intimacy and
spontaneity, and they in turn convey to colour a certain precarious character. The
size of such works is thus an integral part of what is sampled. Clearly the same
materials or technique function differently in larger works, often stressing quite the
opposite qualities, so that a large work by Kupka such as Amorphia: Fugue in Two
Colours (1912) (211 X 210 cm.) (Figure 92) with its short, chiselled brushwork and

190
thick paint, give the work a strangely cautious, fussy quality, somewhat at odds with
its sweeping curves and bold colour, although perhaps apt as a metaphor for the
contrapuntal structure of a fugue. Similarly, large works by Sonia Delaunay, such as
Electric Prisms (1914) (250 X 250cm.) or Kandinsky, such as Composition VI (1913)
(195 X 300cm.) use no more than standard brushstrokes and often the short parallel
strokes that derive from Cubism and Cezanne, to urge a more traditional grandeur
of scale.
But with the work of the Abstract Expressionists, large works exploit a new range
of materials and techniques. 274 The most obvious example is Pollock’s dripping of
enamels, but equally radical is the use of large sign-writing brushes by de Kooning,
in works such as Woman I (1950-52) (Figure 36) that extend the range of facture -
together with massive wipes, smears, scrapings, and allow the work to maintain an
intimacy and spontaneity even when this is no longer an entirely comfortable
experience. Scale provides de Kooning with the space to display this range of
activity and its ‘interrupted’ object. This new space for techniques or techniques for
space, bring other, less obvious modulations of line, tone and colour (roughly,
through scumbling or mottling) that are framed in the distinctive formats adopted
by Rothko, Barnett Newman (1905-70) and Ad Reinhardt (1913-67). 275 In their
works qualities of colour or tone are inseparable from issues of scale and facture.
This striking integration provides a certain mystique, even sublime but also
expresses some of the equivocation found in ‘Reciprocal Depiction’. One mottled
colour, or toned mottle, with exquisite subtlety gauges another, combines in a
further, grander harmony. Yet this sampled integration needs an equally impressive
means of sampling, a striking frame or isolation to set it off and this is provided by
greater, more recognisable pattern. 276
1
The point here is that large scale alone is not the decisive factor in this shift, as is often assumed
in accounts of the style. See for example Robert Motherwell’s summary in Max Kozloff, ‘An
interview with Robert Motherwell’ Artforum 4. No.1 September 1965, p. 37, “The large format at
one blow, destroyed the century-long tendency of the French to domesticize modern painting, to
make it intimate.” This is also quoted in Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism: Triumph of
American Painting, London/New York/Washington, 1970, p.156 and elsewhere.
275 Given the dominance of American artists in this field and period, all artists henceforth
introduced in this and following essays are taken as American and New York-based, unless
otherwise indicated.
276 On Abstract Expressionism, see Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism: Triumph of American
Painting, London/New York/Washington, 1970, David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism, London,
1990, Michael Auping, Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, Buffalo, New York,
1987 and concerning its broader social history, Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole The Idea

191
In works such as Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-1) (Figure 93) or Rothko’s
White, Yellow Red on Yellow (1953) (Figure 94) it is notable that colour identity and
attendant distinctions are wrought within conspicuous symmetry. 277 In Newman’s
work this is established by parallel vertical bands, which is to say, the symmetry here
runs laterally, across the middle of the picture, while in the Rothko essentially the
same kind of bands typically run laterally, allowing a vertical symmetry. Reinhardt’s
work usually adheres to a one or both of these. In other words, the symmetry or
pattern channels colour, facture and scale distinctions along axes, laterally in most
of Newman’s work, vertically in Rothko’s. 278 This is not to disregard the actual
height of the Newman, or the width of the Rothko, rather to underline the fixity
conferred upon them by these formats. Such works thus establish compelling new
qualities for colour, tone, scale and facture by edging pictures closer to obvious
pattern. 279
In Late Modernism the effectiveness of greater symmetry also enables work that
stretches and relaxes it. Artists such as Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928) and Morris
Louis (1912-62) deal in a similar integration of colour, facture and scale but now
adopt an extremely diluted acrylic paint and novel pourings or stainings onto an
unstretched bare canvas to determine the shape and other features of a colour – the
colour and other features of a shape. Yet without the rigour of a sampling
symmetry, usually such techniques seem no more than prompted or projected by
the shape and colour properties obtained. Elsewhere works concentrate upon a
Modern Art, Chicago, 1983 and Francis Frascina (ed.) Pollock and After: The critical debate,
London, 1985.
277 It must be acknowledged that such small reproductions of such large works, inevitably loose
the distinctive modulations under consideration. This is particularly true in Newman’s case.
278 The importance of symmetry to this work, while often acknowledged as often fails to
accurately locate the axes. See for example discussion of symmetry in Newman’s work in Yves-
Alain Bois, Painting as Model Cambridge/Mass./London, 1993 pp. 187-213, and more briefly in
Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940 (2 nd edition), New York/London, 2000, pp. 100-102. The
complementary formats of Rothko and Newman, if not quite the symmetry, are noted in
Greenberg, ‘American-Type Painting’ in Art and Culture, Boston, 1961, p.225.
279 In this regard the Suprematist works of Malevich, such as Black Square (1913 or 23) and
Black Cross (1923) offer interesting comparison, since they employ biaxial symmetry, upon a
square canvas, but separate colour or tone from shape – so that the strict masking of the outline,
while pointedly rarely quite straight or uniform, strictly avoids the involvement of colour or
facture. The results are ‘a picture’ of a square or cross, approximately in shape, and in which
blackness and facture are then only incidental properties. Possibly, this stresses the further
intangible nature of the true or ideal square or cross. At any rate, it distinguishes such work from
Late Modernism both because it resists a greater integration of colour, facture and shape and
because it remains committed to traditional scale for these issues.

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single colour or tone in order to exploit facture more fully, as in Rauschenberg’s
successive white and black series. In some works by Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923) at
this time, such as White Plaque: Bridge Arch and Reflection (1951-55) colour is equated
with shape, not so much through facture, which here amounts to little more than a
smooth coat of white paint, as with the actual shape of the support, here wood,
although this feature is generally called a shaped canvas. 280 Monochrome works
obviously possess symmetry, although do not necessarily display it, as is the case of
the Rauschenbergs. However Kelly’s shaped paintings and collages from this time
are often notably symmetrical (even while, as with this example, also offering a
more concrete depiction). Yet since the pattern is stressed through the frame shape,
as much as its smooth and single colour, it balances pattern and shape against
picture and painting, providing a more complex formula.
More obvious pattern is pursued along two paths. One abandons the elaborate
systems of a Kupka or Mondrian, even the loose grids of Klee, for simpler patterns
easily discernible over and above their colour content (or vice versa). The contained
variations on a square by Josef Albers (1888-1976) such as Hommage to the Square:
Ascending (1953) (Figure 95) and the uniform stripes of various lengths by Swiss
Richard Paul Lohse (1902-88) such as Rhythmic Progression (1952-59) (Figure 96) inch
forward in this direction, although still provide a sliding scale of lengths in Lohse’s
example and like variation of width to height of square in Albers’ example. Yet
Albers’ work also establishes a clear vertical symmetry that crucially reinforces its
pattern and although neither artist’s work acquires the scale of the Abstract
Expressionists, their structures anticipate the work of later artists such as Kenneth
Noland (b.1924) and Gene Davis (1920-85) where greater scale is unquestionably at
issue. Noland initially adopts concentric circles of varying widths rather than
squares; Davis adopts stripes of uniform length as well as width.
The second and lesser path at this time engages pattern less in the interests of
colour, than depth. The convergence of perspective (and ‘Rerealism’) with
abstraction occurs in the work of Vierra da Silva (1908-) for example Library (1949)
(Figure 97-x) and Matta, for example, The Onyx of Electra (1944) and is taken further
280 Monochrome abstraction continues to attract proponents following those mentioned, variously
establishing equations between colour, shape and facture. Of note are the French artist, Yves
Klein (1928-62) and Robert Ryman (b.1930)

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into pattern in work such as Rolleboise (1955) (Figure 97) by the Dane Richard
Mortensen (1910-93) Belle Isle (1947) (Figure 98) by the Rumanian Victor Vasarely
(1908-97) and also, surprisingly, in the prints of Albers, such as the Structural
Constellation series produced in the early fifties (Figure 99). 281 Such work exploits the
angles of perspective and projections (in Vasarely’s case, without resorting to
straight lines) to generate patterns that deal in the approximate symmetry of the
Vasarely as well as the more complex reversals and inversions of the Albers. This
approach asserts a complexity of pattern distinct from that of Kupka or Mondrian,
and in contrast to the symmetry of stripes and squares. Both paths obviously place
certain constraints upon technique and colour. As works acquire an impressive
scale, simple pattern offers vital latitude in technique while complex pattern would
seem initially to give or gain little. Colour relations in both kinds of work, duly
marshalled into Newtonian complementaries and other harmonies, are nevertheless
reductive. Once isolated within the strict shapes of pattern and single luminances
and intensities of a given hue, colour is not so much demonstrated within a neutral
format as conforms to and demonstrates the format. 282
Essentially the shift is in what is sampled in the work. Initially symmetry or pattern
is at the service of colour and tonal relations with facture and scale. Yet as colour,
tone, facture and scale are marshalled more strictly, pattern or geometric format
becomes foremost. At a certain point colour, tone, facture and scale are now at the
service of more obvious pattern, in fact reinforce the identity of pattern through
their variation, and now properly sample the projection of pattern to painting. This
step occurs most forcefully in the work of Frank Stella (b.1936) at the end of the
fifties, and initiates a Post-Modernist period for abstraction.
Stella’s key works here are the ‘Black’ or ‘Pinstripe’ series, produced between 1958
and 1960, in which the picture is divided into a number of stripes of fairly even
width, and which initially remain parallel to the sides of the picture, as in Tomlinson
Court Park (1959) (Figure 100). A crucial determinant of width of stripe (and hence
281 This untitled example is taken from Joseph Albers and Francois Bucher, Despite Straight
Lines, New Haven and London, 1961, but supplies no details of size or medium.
282 John Gage arrives at a similar conclusion in considering the accuracy and identity of colour
sampled in such work. See Gage, Colour and Culture, London, 1993, pp. 247-268. Colour
‘harmonies’ have more recently been treated in terms of ‘equiluminance’ in neurobiological
studies and the result of centre/surround distribution of colour receptors in the retina. See
Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, New York, 2002.

194
of number and relations) is to be found in the unpainted canvas intervals between
stripes (the pinstripes), where the casual brushwork avoids a sharp or hard edge and
‘scrubs’ or ‘feathers’ a more approximate edge. The intervals and brushing are broad
enough to ensure that they are taken as more than some minor shortcoming in
execution, and also broad enough in relation to the width of the stripe to call into
question the precise shape of the stripe. One does not hesitate in taking the stripes
to be more or less straight, and yet the unevenness is of a nagging tolerance. 283 Like
Johns’ adherence to the design of the American flag or a stencilled alphabet, the
unevenness in Stella’s stripes establishes a curious degree of tolerance or
compliance, not so much relative to the familiarity of the design, as with Johns, but
here more to the scale of the stripes and their relation to the frame. Stella’s work
nonetheless may be taken as a response to Johns, and to parallel the response of
Warhol, although slightly preceding it. Abstraction here is of a piece with the shift
to print sampling and Post-Modernism, and shares the provocatively cool attitude.
Discussion of the links between pattern and print is deferred for the moment. The
immediate task is to trace which patterns are used, and in what ways they are
extended or projected in painting.
Where Post-Modernist abstraction initially dwells on stripes, or reasserts grids and
concentrates upon interval and scale, this fundamentalist tendency is called
Minimalism. It is not however drawn to stricter or more minimal ordering, to mere
points at uniform intervals, to a single line or indeed a single point. However, there
is one suitably singular work that illustrates just this reduction of two-dimensionality
at this time. The work is The Rose (1958-64) (Figure 101) by San Francisco-based Jay
DeFeo (1929-89). It also straddles the issues of monochrome and tonal constraint,
materials and techniques and painting versus sculpture, and surely deserves a place
in the foundation of Minimalism. 284 Almost as pointed, in more ways than one, is
the later work of the Italian Argentinean Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) where line
occurs as an actual incision upon a primed canvas, in works such as Spatial Concept -
283 On Stella, including a puzzling denial of any relations within the stripes in works, see Michael
Fried, Three American Painters, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella,
Cambridge/Mass, 1965 William Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, Robert Rosenblum,
Frank Stella, London, 1971.
284 On De Feo, see Jay De Feo, Jay De Feo, Selected Works: 1952-89, (catalogue) Philadelphia,
1996, Donald Goddard, ‘Selected Works by Jay De Feo’, www.newyorkartworld.com (2004)

195
Attese (1958). 285 But Minimalist painting generally restricts the issue of materials and
technique to a certain leeway in stripe rigour. For example it finds and makes stripes
in the later (Post-Modernist) works of Louis, such as Alpha Pi (1960) (Figure 102)
where width, angle and symmetry of the ‘unfurled’ stripes are gained through the
radical expanse of unpainted canvas in the centre of the painting. Area and sheer
size determines proportion and then identity of stripe and symmetry. 286 This
accommodation of novel materials and technique is sometimes referred to as the
‘Process’ branch of Minimalism, whereby the physical and chemical processes of the
materials are prominent in the degree of geometric rigour, or pattern attained.
Process nevertheless leads to three-dimensional works, by artists such as Richard
Serra (b.1939) and Eva Hesse (1936-70. Allied to Process, is ‘Systems’ Minimalism,
which stresses a series of consecutive or overlaid patterns or systems, whose
combination generates further and surprising pattern, such as the drawings of Sol
Le Witt (b.1928) or the paintings from the late sixties of the Los Angles-based Ed
Moses (b.1926). Artists such as Robert Morris (b.1931) and Barry Le Va (b.1941)
apply Systems to three-dimensional work. 287
Apart from Minimalism, Post-Modernist abstraction exploits the more complex
geometry noted in Late Modernism. What starts as plays with conflicting
projections and perspectives of colour planes, develops firstly into conflicting
functions of line, in works such as Vasarely’s Markab (1956) (Figure 103) where
complexity is now a matter of the density and alternation of high contrast line used
to indicate volume or depth, and then to greater density in works such as Fall (1963)
(Figure 104) by Englishwoman, Bridget Riley (b.1931) where complexity now
generates the distinctive retinal effects of motion and depth called Op Art. 288 Such
effects are not restricted to the linear, but also exploit colour equiluminance and
intensity in works such as Han-San Cadence, (1963) (Figure 105) by Larry Poons
(b.1937). Yet these effects, if not the exact patterns, while undeniably engaging, are
285 On Fontana, see B. Ceysson et al., Lucio Fontana, (catalogue) Paris, 1987.
286 On Louis, see John Elderfield, Morris Louis, (catalogue) New York, 1987, Michael Fried, Art
and Objecthood: essays and reviews, Chicago, 1998.
287 On Minimalism see Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective. Seattle, 1990,
David Batchelor, Minimalism Cambridge, 1997, Gregory Battcock (ed.) Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology, New York, 1968.
288 More detailed analysis of these effects is found in Gombrich, The Sense of Order: a study in
the psychology of decorative art London, 1979 pp. 117-148, Gregory (ed.) The Artful Eye,
Oxford and New York, 1995 and Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, New York,
2002. On Op Art, see Cyril Barret, An Introduction to Optical Art, London/ New York, 1971.

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hardly novel. 289 Indeed it is the recycling of patterns familiar to the psychology of
visual perception that crucially allows them to be used somewhat differently in
painting. The effects while still compelling, are as often surrendered to the restless
or mobile viewer, indeed to the various incidental distractions of the painting’s
location, so that the singularity of the ‘retinal’ pattern competes and draws attention
to other qualities of the painting, to its more relaxed and various receptions, to the
perceptions of the pattern that actually fall short of or avoid its optical spell (such as
very close or distant inspection). In other words the patterns of Op Art now extend
painting to certain particulars of the viewing situation, to matters of scale and
context, and as much for a print as a painting, but for more than a pattern.
Consequently, while the pattern of the Op Art painting is easily reproduced in a
photograph, to reproduce it as a painting is almost impossible.
In noting the varieties of pattern used in Post-Modernist abstraction we have been
drawn into noting ways in which they extend and are extended by painting. This is
now considered more fully by returning to Stella’s work following the Black series.
Here monochrome is maintained as well as the unpainted intervals between stripes,
although the unevenness is reduced to a cleaner edge and the brushstroke now
highlighted by refraction from metallic particles in the industrial enamels used. The
straight lines to the stripes now conform to distinctly symmetrically shaped
canvases, so that stripe and interval link shape and colour in a way unavailable to
Kelly, and which in turn prompt more elaborate symmetries, inversions and
reversals. Works now extend in enormous T-Shapes, U-shapes Star-shapes and
various zigzags. Colour variation is later introduced, together with fluorescent paints
so that ordering across stripes now assumes some of the complex system noted in
Kupka (Figure2) as well as the colour effects found in Op Art, and largely replaces
the uneven edge as a regulator of stripe width or edge. The introduction of irregular
polyhedrons and curves to the shaped canvases stretch pattern beyond just stripes,
in works such as Effingham I (1967) (Figure 106) and Agbatana III (1968) (Figure
107) so that pattern does not just project to canvas shape, facture and colour, but is
also projected by them, and builds stripes and remaining shapes or ‘fill’ to the
289 An interesting precedent occurs in The Independent Group’s display This is Tomorrow at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1956, where Hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker’s
contribution, (as Group 2) included standard perceptual test graphics printed on large wallmounted
cards, supplying familiar ‘optical effects’. See Richard Morphett, Richard Hamilton,
(catalogue) London, 1970, pp. 28-30, Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties, London, 1996, p. 46.

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canvas into more diffuse pattern. In other works stripe and colour create
intersecting and ‘interweaving’ pattern, as in Saskatoon I (1968) (Figure 108) so that
pattern now acquires a basic depth, as stripes are projected by textile and basketry
motifs.
Stella’s work thus undergoes a steady progression. Painting as shape of canvas and
industrial paints prompts more elaborate pattern. Stripes duly acquire colour ranges,
curves and additional enclosed shapes or fill, and even the ‘depth’ of interweaving
planes or bands. Further pattern surely urges more familiar motifs, more concrete
depiction. Yet Stella resists this and instead presses painting further into bas-relief
constructions and more freestanding sculpture. The result is a greater sense of
relaxation and yet disappointment. This is firstly because the rigour established
between pattern and painting cannot be sustained in three dimensions – three
dimensions require more of a pattern than a set of curves or planes as painted
surfaces. It literally requires another dimension to the governing principles of
construction. 290 Secondly, it is because much in painting and sculpture at this time
render Stella’s version of both decidedly pedestrian.
This brings us to other ways painting is extended by pattern at this time. Stripes
abandon canvas for temporary murals upon various architectural features, interior
and exterior, in the work of Frenchman Daniel Buren (b.1938). Le Witt converted
stripes to lines and grids, and more elaborate geometric figures, devised formulae
(or perhaps scores) governing their execution as murals, sometimes without his
presence. 291 Gene Davis applied his signature striped colour harmonies temporarily
to roads and parking lots, such as Franklin’s Footpath (1972) a vast expanse (414’ X
76’) in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Artists of the Surface/Support
Group in France in the late sixties, such as Claude Viallat (b.1936) favoured loose
hanging rather than stretched supports and adopted various printed fabrics over
which were painted striped and gridded motifs; often installed outdoors. 292
290 Ironically, this is close to the criticism Stella directs at Minimalist sculpture at the time. See
Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, pp. 68-70. On later Stella, see Currentartpics 47
291 Interesting precedent for Le Witt’s systems arises in Francois Morellet’s ‘Op’ drawings, see
for example Four Superimposed Webs (1959) in Barret, An Introduction to Optical Art, London/
New York, 1971, p. 31. On LeWitt see also Currentartpics 33.
292 On the Surface/ Support Group and similar, see, Philip Armstrong et al., (eds.) As Painting:
Division and Displacement, Columbus/ Ohio/Cambridge/ Mass. 2001-2 and Raphael Rubenstein,
‘Opening The Field’ Art in America, October 2001, pp. 57-61.

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Looking to the materials of pigment rather than of support, it has been noted how
pattern is relaxed by process (and scale) in works such as Louis’ Alpha Pi (1960)
(Figure 102). Similarly, in Noland’s Beginning (1958) (Figure 109) staining now
reciprocates pattern with process. But where pursued, process steadily relaxes or
dissolves pattern. Works such as those of Jules Olitski (b.1922) at this time initially
offer simply more irregular circles and pattern through staining, but as technique
expands with various pouring, spraying and spattering, in works such as Seventh
Loosha (1970) (Figure 110) pattern recedes to no more than a Rothko-like framing
of edge to centre. Pattern or symmetry is now radically relaxed, in a way unavailable
to Rothko, even Frankenthaler or early Louis. It hovers at a compelling minimum,
orders colour, tone, facture and scale accordingly. This style is called Lyrical
Abstraction and also attracts the work of Poons. The pour-ability stakes are raised
with the pigmented latex or polyurethane adopted by Linda Benglis (b.1941) in
works such as Odalisque - hey hey Frankenthauer (1969) (Figure 111). Here, the quicksetting
foam assumes a three-dimensionality that once more broaches sculpture.
Later work by Olitski and Poons literally rises to the challenge. 293
These examples obviously trace the extremes for the way pattern extends painting,
is extended by it. On the one hand pattern stretches painting in embracing
architecture and the wider environment, and on the other, painting stretches pattern
in embracing further versions of pigment and support. This leaves the course of
more elaborate pattern and its extension in painting. But before turning to this,
mention should to be made of several moderate developments. The work of Brice
Marden (b.1938) at this time broadens stripes or narrows monochromes to sets of
discrete panels, such as After The Marchioness of Solana (1969) (Figure 112) where a
distinctive combination of oil and wax are used in generous modulations, more
tactile than Newman perhaps, but now strengthening symmetry and identifying
colour by discrete panel rather than shift in technique or width of stripe. Also
drawn to combined monochrome panels, Robert Mangold (b.1937) from the mid
sixties onward combines them with irregular shaped canvases measured not by
stripes, but typically an outline of an ellipse, also often irregular, the edge of which
293 On Olitski and Poons see Fried, Art and Objecthood: essays and Reviews, Chicago, 1998.
Also on Olitski see Currentartpics 52.

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meets the frame of the canvas at one or more points, offering a ‘pattern’ between
outline and canvas shape. 294 The shaped canvas is pursued with tinted fibreglass and
polyester resin moulds in the work of the Los Angeles-based Ronald Davis (b.1937)
where shape now aligns with three-dimensional projections for irregular volumes,
offering a further step toward more concrete depiction. 295 Finally, the work of
similar ‘Fetish/Finish’ artists in Los Angeles, including John McCracken (b 1934)
and Larry Bell (b.1939) adopts not simply industrial materials but industrial
standards of finish (hence the name). In such works pattern while immaculately
presented, is hardly immaculate pattern, but rather samples just such presentation.
In some ways these works recall the convergence with industrial design found in
certain Bauhaus works, such as Albers’ sandblasted glass designs. Equally, this
attention to industrial process and standards extends concerns explored in the
commission and fabrication of works for, rather than by artists, an issue taken up in
Chapter Nineteen.
Departing from the interweaving stripes of Stella, artists such as Sean Scully
(b.1945) in the early seventies and later Los Angeles-based Don Sorenson (1949-86)
and Valerie Jaudon (b.1945) developing more elaborate – even maximised - patterns
of interweaving, often preserving the pale edges or intervals to the stripes, if not
Stella’s more relaxed facture 296 . Although Sorenson’s later work places greater
emphasis upon process, and in general the use of poured and spattered grounds
confined by masking tape to stricter geometries, is commonplace throughout the
decade. 297 However the paintings of Joyce Kozloff (b.1942) from around the middle
of the decade, order stripes less through interweaving than the symmetries of
Native American pattern, as in works such as Notions of Finish – Frieze III (1974)
where stripes are in turn broken down into grids with intricate variations on colour
294 On Mangold, see Richard Schiff et al, Robert Mangold, London, 2000.
295 On Davis, see Charles Kessler, Ronald Davis, paintings, 1962-1976 (catalogue) San
Francisco, 1976.
296 On Jaudon see also Currentartpics 81.
297 On Scully, although only briefly dealing with the early work cited here, see David Carrier,
The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the
1980s, Philadelphia, 1994, pp. 243-267. On the rather forgotten Sorenson, see Sandy Ballatore,
‘Don Sorenson at Copley and Wilder’, (review) Art in America, September-October 1976, p. 115,
Christopher Knight, ‘Don Sorenson – Nicholas Wilder Gallery’, (review) Artforum, December
1979, p. 80. On Jaudon, see John Perreault, ‘Issues in Pattern Painting’ Artforum, November
1977, pp. 32-36.

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and facture. 298 More forthright concern with traditional patterns is also
accompanied by concern with their traditional mediums, with weaving, textile
printing and ceramic tiling, for example. These present a formidable counter-project
to painting. However, certain sampling of textiles may yet be considered as
depiction and painting. For example the elaborate collages of various printed and
dyed fabrics by Miriam Shapiro (b.1923) or Lucas Samaras (b.1936) such as his
Reconstruction #19 (1977) (Figure 113) sample textile prints by stripes, independent
of textile pattern, overlaid rather than interweaved, and closer in system and scale to
a Sorenson or a Moses than a quilt or embroidery. These works function as pictures
and even painting, when painting now projects such pattern and technique.
Interest in more traditional pattern and mediums – particularly printed textiles - is
the basis of the mainly New York-based Pattern and Decoration Movement at this
time. 299 It obviously converges with other print sampling in painting, even with
other textile sampling, such as that of Viallat, Polke or Rauschenberg. Yet Pattern
and Decoration artists are not always and only concerned with printing and textiles,
artists such as Robert Kushner (b.1949) and Robert Zakanitch (b.1935) also use
quite standard painting to sample much less standard properties of pattern. For
Kushner, loosely drawn - not quite Neo-Expressionist - figures, are painted over
and around a ground of various printed textiles, as in Aida (1979) (Figure 114)
introducing casual variations to the dancing figures as a repeating motif, as well as
using printed patterns as sheer areas of colour and tone in the background.
Elsewhere Kushner expands this use of printed pattern as shading to figures, much
the way Lichtenstein’s Benday dots are used to indicate tone and colour. Zakanitch
also paints common repeating patterns, generally floral and drawn not only from
textiles, but to which vigorous brushwork introduces greater variation within the
298 The use of non-western patterns at this time is also anticipated in the titles of many of Stella’s
works from the late sixties, such as Agbatana III, that take their names from ancient Babylonian
and Moroccan sites, alluding to exotic and ancient foundations and Islamic pattern. The tendency
throughout the seventies is thus to annex peripheral or exotic pattern, as abstraction steadily
advances on more familiar, current and western pattern.
299 On the Pattern and Decoration Movement (or P&D) see Amy Goldin, ‘The ‘New’ Whitney
Biennial: Pattern Emerging?’ in Art in America, May-June, 1975, pp. 72-73, Carrie Rickey, ‘Art
of the Whole Cloth’ in Art in America, November, 1979, pp. 73-83, Jeff Perrone, ‘The
Decorative Impulse’ in Artforum, November, 1979, pp. 80-81, Corinne Robins, The Pluralist
Era, American Art 1968-1981, New York, 1984, pp. 131-154, Irving Sandler, Art of the
Postmodern Era: From the late 1960s to the Early 1990s, New York, 1996, pp. 141-63 and
Christopher Miles, ‘Tracking Patterns’ in Art in America, February, 2004, pp. 77-81.

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motif. As with Johns or Stella, the pattern is stretched by such variation, while
constrained by such version of painting. 300
In both cases pattern now acquires pictures, and Post-Modernist abstraction gently
draws to a close. Floral patterns are not pursued to the murals of a Le Witt or the
exterior installations of a Viallat, nor to the foams and pigment cocktails of a
Benglis or Poons. But pattern in repeating pictures tempts the single, central motif,
even as it trades in vigorous brushwork and drawing. In this respect it converges
with New Image Painting, and ‘outline and fill’ designs. But where brushwork is
traded for single flat colours, where drawing and object conform to the simple
silhouettes of commercial and civic icons, and where support is no more than loose
fabrics or sheets of paper, pattern finds one further extension for depiction and
painting. The installation by Mat Mullican (b.1951) at the Mary Boone Gallery in
New York (1980) accomplishes this (Figure 115). Mullican’s work soon moves away
from the central and standard icon, but it is pursued in the work of Peter Halley
(b.1953) such as Prison with Conduit (1981) (Figure 116) where the title points to the
small square of five black vertical stripes depicting bars on a window, and perhaps a
prison, while the black horizontal stripes below it form the conduit, and suggest
both an electrical circuit (with another kind of cell) and a concealed access to the
prison. Where Mullican counts on the loose hanging banner to draw an icon into a
more decorative medium and pattern, Halley adopts the texture of a coarse paint
roller to sample the strictness of the lines and stripes and the evenness of colour – a
pattern of Minimalism in fact. Process and System are gently mocked in other
words, more so where they allow more concrete depiction. For the prison and
electrical motif, while not initially obvious, offers potent metaphor for the larger
Minimalist project.
Other works at this time similarly find Minimalist motifs for pictures, or vice versa.
Those of Ross Bleckner (b.1940) use soft or blurred vertical stripes offset by a
collage of small birds, the stripes thus rendered as a cage. Yet stripes as a cage or
prison bars still allow us to recognise the Minimalist pattern, to project it to picture
and object, by a delicate balance. This balance is also present in the work of Philip
300 On Kushner, see Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, Robert Kushner: gardens of earthly delight,
New York, 1997 and Janet Kardon, Robert Kushner, Philadelphia, 1987.

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Taaffe (b.1955) from this time where pattern maintains a distinctive facture even as
it surrenders outline to stencils and silk-screens. Patterns here neatly sample print
and painting, and in examples such as South Ferry (1985-6) (Figure 117) find a
mooring rope depicted in the simple diagonal motif contained within the gently
asymmetrical silhouette, recalling earlier New York abstraction, such as that of
Kelly, Al Held (b.1928) or Myron Stout (1908-87). The use of Bridget Riley’s
patterns in some of Taaffe’s work at this time also accompanies a brief interest in
how far such borrowings - as ‘appropriation’ or ‘simulation’ - may be taken before
charges of plagiarism arise. The work of Sherry Levine (b.1947) and Mike Bidlo
(b.1953) at this time variously duplicate particular, well-known works, usually
Modernist, photography as well as painting, to plumb where the useful sample and
sampling become too obscure or specialised. The project of abstraction strictly
would seem to end by the mid-eighties and to underline the closure of Post-
Modernism generally. 301
Crucial changes in abstraction thus coincide with distinctions drawn here for the
periods of Late and Post-Modernism. Late Modernist abstraction converges upon
established pattern with basic symmetry and reduction of simple volumes in
perspective and projection schemes to linear and tonal ambiguity. It uses pattern to
sample fine distinctions between facture, scale, colour and tone and these inspire
use of greater, more emphatic pattern and in turn greater latitude to facture, scale,
colour and tone relations. But where pattern then becomes paramount, Post-
Modernism arises and this reversal closely coincides with the arrival of Pop Art.
Post-Modernist abstraction samples the projection of pattern to painting and
depiction. This too inspires greater latitude to scale and materials, but when pattern
is pursued to repeating pictures, to the single concrete motif, style and period are
exhausted. The course of abstraction thus strengthens the claim for the periods as
proposed, and grasp of stylistics. More will be made of the co-ordination in the
concluding chapter. Here grasp of period is furthered by looking next to
developments outside of depiction and painting. The outward projection to material
sampling that arises with abstraction was noted in Chapter Eleven. In the following
301 For standard interpretation of many of the artists mentioned above, at this time, see Hal
Foster, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, in Art in America June, 1986, pp. 80-91, p.139. Also useful
interviews are included in Lilly Wei, ‘Talking Abstract: Part Two’ in Art in America, December,
1987, for Levine, p. 114, for Halley, pp. 120-21, p. 171, for Taaffe, p. 122, p. 171. Also on Taaffe
see Currentartpics 24.

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chapter this is traced against the periods as proposed, under the description of
‘expanded materials’.

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‘Expanded Materials’
In Late and Post Modernism
Works of ‘expanded materials’ arise where material exemplification is pursued
beyond depiction and the usual categories of the plastic arts. Works firstly isolate
novel properties or material, as collage, or aspects to an object, as in Duchamp’s
readymades. Other works integrate painting and sculpture, architecture and applied
arts or design so that they sample larger categories, such as the plastic arts or civic
functions. These projects also interact with each other. Isolations then shift in
materials and aspects, integrations shift in range. In Late Modernism the change is
away from industrial design, of furniture, textiles, costume, tableware and so forth,
toward a closer integration with the performing arts. Isolation becomes of industrial
and mechanical components for motion, or kinetics. In some cases the line between
integration and isolation blurs, but by around 1960 performance is stripped to a
stark minimum; motion is engineered to a standstill. Post Modernism measures a
further shift in expanded materials, where integration now embraces minimal
performance, literature and other recording, while isolation samples the minimal
and mechanical in construction and aspects to just time or place, as a work.
Even in a longer chapter, this trajectory can only be traced in summary. 302 However
it will suffice where it demonstrates how these changes coincide with the distinction
drawn between Late and Post Modernism, when it covers vital works of the period
and shows how changes reflect and parallel those in painting. To begin, the
emphasis upon motion and machinery in sculpture is traced. Motion of course, is
hardly a novelty to sculpture by the middle of the century. Prominent precedents
include Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913 - reconstituted 1964) the mobiles of
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) from the early thirties onwards, as well as moving
302 Since this chapter sketches developments beyond painting, to speed and simplify matters, no
illustrations are provided.

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parts in the works of others, such as Giacometti’s Suspended Sphere (1930). However,
where obvious machine parts are recombined, motion may be notable by its
absence or irregularity. Or where regular, motion may result from novel or irregular
use of parts. Motion and mechanics then are sampled for novel and multiple links,
for just those properties obscured by earlier works. Late Modernism pursues the
sample in two ways, the recycled and the geometric. The ‘junk’ sculpture of David
Smith (1906-65) and Richard Stankiewicz (1922-83) for example, remake standard
steel mouldings and machine parts through any number of ingenious combinations
and distress. On the other hand, precision machining and pristine finishes are
exploited in geometric structures in the work of the British ‘Constructionists’, such
as Kenneth Martin (1905-84) and wife, Mary (1907-67). Neither tendency initially
adopts motion, but the promptings of machine parts, indeed the functioning
motors of ‘junk’ or the dynamics of geometry, quickly prove irresistible to some.
The work of Jean Tinguely (1925-91) introduces erratic motion through remade
machinery, and in later work it generates paintings onto rolls or sheets of paper or
cloth, periodic horns and other sounds, foul aromas, coloured smoke, and finally
self-destruction, as in Hommage to New York (1960). The progressive integration of
motion, sound, smell and even two-dimensionality, and the explicit singularity of
motion here mark the climax of junk sculpture. 303 The geometric tendency on the
other hand finds artists such as Paris-based Venezuelan Jesus-Rafael Soto (b.1923)
Israeli Yaacov Agam (b.1928) and Frenchman Francois Morellet (b.1926)
introducing motion to their stricter geometric constructions, and participating
(along with Tinguely) in a noted exhibition at the Galerie Denise René in Paris in
1955, aptly titled Le Mouvement. While such works often acquire the complexity of
Op Art, rigours of geometry and motion quickly prove a sterile partnership. Neither
motion nor geometry advances very far by motor or mobile of stricter materials. A
more expansive approach, sharing interest in shifting patterns of reflectance or light
and new rather than recycled materials, arises with architectural displays such as
those of Hamilton and the Independent Group at the institute of Contemporary
303 On Tinguely, see Heide E. Violand-Hobi, Jean Tinguely: Life and Work, Munich/New York,
1995, Calvin Tompkins, The Bride and the Batchelor: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde.
Middlesex/UK/ Ringwood/Australia/New York, 1968.

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Art in London around the middle of the century, and the lighting fixtures of
Fontana at the Milan Triennale (1951)
Hamilton’s display Growth and Form (1951) dealt in micro and macroscopic scientific
depiction, freely mixed in scale, origin, and technology, so that various light
projections (slide, film and strobe) to various surfaces (floor, ceiling and wall, clear
and occupied) interrupt and overlap and inevitably involve the shadows and motion
of spectators. 304 Fontana’s work wrapped over two hundred metres of neon tubing
throughout the stairwell at Milan, not only providing practical illumination but a
massive and complex sculpture, even drawing, that also involved the passage of
spectators and their shadows. 305 Both works draw upon the readymade, the
electrical, mobile and illuminated; sample a space or place more than a sculpture and
its temporary or temporal dimension. Architecture, in a sense, is permitted to spill
into sculpture or painting on a short-term basis, or sculpture acquires such radical
dimensions by isolating architecture, briefly. Yet such work is also constrained by
occasion and novelty of technology. Where materials are without obvious or
entrenched application, display dwindles to no more than gimmickry. Where
occasion allows greater novelty of material, display no more than meets norms. 306
The challenge in other words, quickly becomes for other places and occasions,
other means or motion.
Other motion may be provided by performance. Integration of performance with
the plastic arts continues the Modernist project of groups such as the Bauhaus and
Constructivists, but now does not rely upon greater prominence for traditional
categories of set and costume design, rather looks for a more formative role, a
closer integration. Performance is now expanded by more radical notions of script
or score, as in the famous Theatre Piece No 1 (or The Event) (1952) by composer John
304 The term display is used here to distinguish the work from exhibitions of Hamilton’s work. By
later standards, the work would surely be classified as an installation. This account of Growth
and Form draws from Richard Morphet, Richard Hamilton (catalogue) London, 1970, pp. 20-26.
305 On Fontana, see Sarah Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, Berkeley, 1999.
306 Neon lighting however is later used in smaller, less mobile works, for example in the
notational sculptures of the Greek-born woman Chryssa (b.1933) from the early sixties and in
later works by artists such as Robert Morris, Dan Flavin (1933-96) Keith Sonnier (b.1941) and
Bruce Nauman (b.1941), but shadow and motion are largely ignored or reduced to at most,
flashing. Neon lighting is also used in the late sixties by the Los Angeles- based Robert Irwin
(b.1946) and James Turrell (b.1943) to create colour and spatial illusions to architectural settings,
but these works too ignore or resist motion.

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Cage (1912-92) performed at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Or the
plastic arts is now expanded by radical notions of the temporal, as in the staged or
enacted paintings of Frenchman Georges Mathieu (b.1921) from the early fifties,
progressively involving (standard) musical accompaniment, outdoor settings, and
even television coverage. 307 Cage offers simultaneous and overlapping texts,
delivered with a certain stoic restraint, together with various music, live and
recorded, dance and more casual activity (including a wandering dog). 308 Mathieu
matches standard music and setting, amusingly, to the production of a large-scale
calligraphic abstraction, with extravagant theme and showmanship (in one
performance he is costumed in a knight’s armour, for example). 309 The first shifts
the emphasis from starting point in script or score to arrive at a less sequential or
more spatial ‘performance’, while the second shifts emphasis from end point or
product, to arrive at a more sequential or less spatial painting. However, greater
integration also surrenders its origin and mooring. Work gradually strips script and
performance, painting and process to a sterile end to the period in the early sixties.
Cage’s influence extends firstly through collaboration with dancer and
choreographer Merce Cunningham (b.1919) and Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg’s
work such as Minutiae (1954) (figure 34) occasionally serves as props for a
Cunningham dance but works also become more conspicuously freestanding, such
as the stuffed goat in Monogram (1959) and even mobile, as in the wheels to the base
307 Links between The Black Mountain College and the Bauhaus are well documented. See Paul
Betts ‘Black Mountain College N.C.’ in Bauhaus, Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend (eds.)
Cologne, 1999, pp. 62-65. Mathieu’s stagings derive more directly from Surrealist events and
tableaux, such as those at The International Surrealist Exhibition (1938) at the Galerie de Beaux
Arts in Paris. The Independent Group and Hamilton share a strong architectural and design
background that also reflects the Modernist convergence. Growth and Form was opened by noted
French architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) for example, while Fontana’s interest in light and
electrical activity as sculptural material is anticipated in the work of Bauhaus artist László
Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) as well as the earlier proposals by Futurist Luigi Russolo (1885-
1947).
308 On Cage, see Paul Griffiths, Cage, London/New York/Melbourne, 1981, Michael Nyman,
Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, London, 1974, Richard Kostelanetz (ed.) John Cage: an
anthology, New York, 1991.
309 Mathieu’s reputation warrants defence, since it has often suffered because of his theatrical
approach. The shift from ‘action’ painting to ‘acting’ painting is unfairly felt to impoverish the
results. The point is surely that differences made by performance to painting are no more than
latitude granted to notational means within painting. On Mathieu, see Daniel Abadie et al.,
Georges Mathieu: A Retrospective Exhibition (catalogue) Paris/Milan, 2003.

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of Gift For Apollo (1959). 310 Rauschenberg also contributes a small machine that
throws money to Tinguely’s Hommage to New York (1960) and retains an interest in
kinetics even as later practice relies more upon gimmicks. A later student of Cage,
Allan Kaprow (b.1921) dispenses with musicians and dancers in his staged
‘happenings’ in which he and a small cast perform basic tasks of painting, wrapping
or unwrapping, eating or drinking, and arranging signage or text in various discrete
segments often synchronised to tapes of sound effects and more familiar music. 311
Like Cage, Kaprow favours simultaneous features or attractions, an uncertain
interaction with the audience and a deadpan attitude. But significantly, Kaprow’s
happenings at this time, together with those of Robert Whitman (b.1935) generally
occur in art galleries, and the range of activity, in avoiding standard music, dance
and drama, unavoidably becomes ‘about’ sculpture and painting, an extension to the
plastic artist’s laconic or non-verbal interaction with materials. The happenings of
Claes Oldenburg, (b.1929) Jim Dine (b.1935) and Red Grooms (b.1937) at the
Judson Gallery in New York in 1959 and 1960 briefly further this tendency; but
essentially signal the exhaustion of such performance.
Mathieu’s influence surprisingly extends to Japan and the Gutai group in Tokyo and
Osaka, who emerge in 1957 and pursue painting and sculpture as a performance to
the point where they dispense with the completed or preserved work, and instead
set themselves various comic interactions with materials treated purely as props,
such as Challenging Mud (1955) in which Kazuo Shiraga (b.1924) crawls upon a
mound of very soft mud, shaping it with his flailing legs and arms. Yet these
activities do not strictly replace painting and sculpture for the group but rather serve
to publicise them and the Gutai shortly return the emphasis to product over
performance. The work of Frenchman Yves Klein (1928-62) similarly maintains
both production and performance and wholly embraces the showmanship of
Mathieu, with a distinctive costume for himself and none for his young female
assistants. Klein’s performed paintings such as the Anthropometries series (1960)
reduce the artist to a mobile commander while his nude assistants obediently coat
themselves in his signature blue paint and imprint themselves against a canvas. The
310 Interestingly, Rauschenberg’s expansion stops short of the sculpted figure or person, just as
the figure and extended setting (or ‘environment’) in the work of George Segal (b.1924) or
Edward Kienholz (1927-94) at this time stop short of greater mobility or duration.
311 Details for this and following works draw from Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings,
London, 1974.

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artist becomes more remote, the end product stresses anatomy over standard skills.
Both artist and painting isolate or sample performance as utterance and anatomy,
the performer now less an artist than a mere person or persons. 312 This radical
reduction signals another end to Late Modernism, another start to Post-Modernism.
The Late Modernist phase of expanded materials thus stresses motion and duration,
and counterpoints painting of the period in certain ways. The emphasis upon time
and motion drives a new contrast between one-directional and multi-directional
reference. ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ gives this directionality added weight through
emphasis on ‘interruption’, and shifts between the abstract and the concrete, while
abstraction of the period often stresses a two-way directionality through greater
symmetry. Depiction and painting thus exploit certain properties relinquished by
the work committed to motion and duration. A similar synchrony holds for Post-
Modernism. Painting samples printing and pattern for sole and multiple instances,
for variation and material to identity of a work. Works of expanded materials stress
other grades to identity for a work. Yet because such works now tend to resist more
obvious performance, motion and place and an end product of any permanence,
work is often taken as ‘de-materialised’ or purely a matter of concept and so is
commonly called Conceptualism or Conceptual Art. 313 This is a little misleading.
More accurately, identity for a work projected beyond the plastic arts encounters
other issues. Some works are identified not with number of instances, variation and
material but by compliance with rules of a language, as in literature, or notation, as
in the performing arts. A poem, whether handwritten, typed or published remains
the same work, as long as it complies with the rules of the language of the first
instance. A music score remains the same work when performed as long as the
performance and instruments comply with notation and other directions of the
score. Equally, the script or score constitutes a work, even when unperformed or
unperformable, unpublished or unpublishable. The difference between literature
312 On Klein, see Sidra Stich, Yves Klein, Stuttgart, 1994, Pierre Restany, Yves Klein, New York,
1982.
313 On Conceptual Art, see Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, London, 1998, Alexander Alberro,
Blake Stimson (eds.) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Boston, 1999, Peter Osborne,
Conceptual Art, London, 2002, Michael Newman, Jon Bird (eds.) Rewriting Conceptual Art
(critical views), Oxford/New York, 1999, Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialisation of
the art object from 1966 to 1972, London, 1973, Gregory Battcock (ed.) Idea Art, New York,
1973.

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and performances on the one hand and painting and printing on the other, also
means that paintings and prints may be forged in a way that performances and
copies cannot. 314 The recording of a performance by means other than script or
score, by photo and electrical means, presents a similar but more recent extension
of identity for a work. Recordings in this sense are rarely of a single or
uninterrupted performance, but typically comply with a score or script, or where
this is absent, for example in improvised or folk music or tales, with such
performing and recording practices in most other respects. A copy of a recording
may contravene copyright but where standards of recording are sufficiently
maintained, so too is identity of performance and script or score. It is a pirate or
bootleg recording, but not a forgery of the work. 315 Identity for a work outside of
the plastic arts is thus a graded or attenuated affair, from only script or score, to all
copies that comply with original language or notation of script or score, to all
compliant performances, or those from which a single script or score may be
derived, to all recordings complying with script, score, performance or recording
practices, and various combinations thereof. Furthermore, translations,
transcriptions, adaptations and transmissions or broadcasts, by radio, television and
the Internet disperse identity still further, although hardly arrive at anything as
vacuous as a work of pure concept.
Expanding the materials of painting and sculpture to include motion and
performance hardly exhausts these options, of course. Rather, it invites greater and
more diverse engagement with them. And works are no more conceptual or
dematerialised for attending to issues of script or score and recording than to sole
or multiple instances, patterns or printing. ‘Expanded materials’ here contrast with
painting in offering grades or stages to the identity of a work where printing and
pattern deal in other issues of instantiation. As with the treatment of Pop Art in
Chapter Fourteen, the aim here is not so much to replace or discredit the label of
Conceptual Art, as to show how it is integrated within a larger project and period.
The term nevertheless is stripped of loose talk of pure concepts and a
314 See Goodman, Languages of Art, Indianapolis 1976, pp. 112-123, pp. 194-198.
315 However the artwork and packaging – that is, design and printed elements – may be a forgery,
or the impersonation of an alleged performer, may constitute an equivalent of a forgery, but
neither of these then directly threaten the identity of the script or score.

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‘dematerialised’ work, and clad instead in radical sampling of, not just script and
score, performance and recording, but also duration and place.
For the Post-Modernist work of ‘expanded materials’ may also be a sampled place
for a given duration, devoid of performance or motion. Sampling larger objects or
places outside of a single building, effectively involves a fixed or short-term
duration, indeed sample may be as much of duration (say a famous holiday) as place.
So against attenuation of identity through script, score, performance and recording,
the Post-Modernist work also allows performance to be graded to duration and
place, and these four options are taken to comprise ‘expanded materials’ in Post-
Modernism, or Conceptual Art, re-defined. Artists committed to the project, as in
preceding periods, typically combine and switch between branches. As with the
introduction of full abstraction to depiction, the results need hardly remain a dry or
academic exercise. Conceptual Art extends the reach and sensitivity of sampling
practices and allows a new complexity to object and sample. It may result in taking
some practices as objects, such as scripts or ‘text-only’ works or as documentation
or recording and elsewhere in renewed appreciation of ignored or concealed aspects
to established practices, such as demarcation of place and duration.
The four branches are now traced separately, taking script or score, performance,
place, and recording in turn. Script or score not surprisingly arises firstly with the
work of writers and composers, particularly influenced by Cage. The publication
Compositions (1960) by the Californian composer La Monte Young (b.1935) largely
avoids Cage’s more diagrammatic or multi-directional experiments with score, to
introduce elaborate direction or script, including the use of butterflies, the drawing
of lines and accidental or chance options for performers and audience. The works
distance performance, without quite excluding it. There are similar developments in
dance notation at this time. Young’s subsequent collaboration with George
Maciunas (1931-78) leads to the formation of the Fluxus group in 1963, an umbrella
for similar publications and events. Another Fluxus member and student of Cage,
composer George Brecht (b.1925) allows score to become simply script, and offers
only the simplest directions for a performer, related only to the most general of

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situations, such as a sign indicating direction of travel, to be followed or not. 316 The
work still allows performance, but on such general terms as to render it underdetermined
and effectively redundant. More prominently, it equivocates between
rudimentary drama, dance and even music, as well as standing alone or as other
literature and even admits to a plastic dimension in the use of a direction sign, as
architecture and design. 317 So it offers all arts a part, but only of a radically
diminished whole. Perhaps surprisingly, such work remains more of a concern to
the plastic arts than to literature or performance, but crucially this is because the
plastic arts are the sampler rather than the sampled.
Clearly the script in such cases, given further elaboration, draws closer to traditional
literature. To avoid this unwelcome assimilation the work is constrained to a literary
and literal minimalism, and at the same time looks to other means of presentation,
apart from mere copy or publication. The work accordingly adopts exhibition and
like more musical or dance orientated works at this time, uses presence in a gallery
and so a projection to the plastic arts as a way of countering a narrower identity. Yet
the script or score, treated as a ‘text-only’ work (as in Chapter Fourteen) encounters
a formidable contest of emphasis in sample. 318 For print sampling in painting offers
a counter project at this time to text and ‘layout’, that obscures or sacrifices just
those qualities of script preserved in copy, while copy urges indifference to such
matters of print and ‘layout’. Consequently such works are doubly difficult, and
reward or fail where difference between text and script are not maintained. Equally,
works such as those of the Art and Language Group, Kossuth and Weiner may be
taken to project ‘text-only’ sampling in the other direction, beyond painting and the
art gallery, to publication for example.
Notable works of script and ‘text-only’ include the exhibition Working Drawings and
Other Visible Things on Paper, Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966)‘curated’
by Mel Bochner (b.1940) at the New York School of Visual Arts. Bochner collected
316 On Fluxus, see Ken Friedman (editor) Fluxus Reader, Chichester/ UK, 1998, Thomas Kellein,
Fluxus, London, 1995.
317 Since Cage in an earlier work allows silence as a musical duration - and since the script does
not exclude sound - incidental sound or silence may be taken as a ‘musical’ feature of such
works.
318 The distinction here between script and text is that text refers only to familiar print or
publishing formats, while script includes these within a larger category, roughly synonymous
with writing.

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and photo-copied scripts, scores, sketches, drafts, plans and sundry calculations to
demonstrate a familiar grading of script or notation to depiction in loose-leaf
folders placed upon plinths through the gallery. 319 Of course where copies involve
more than script, they are no longer strictly instances of the script and depiction,
but text, print, and records, and Bochner’s role more than mere curator. Curiously,
this strategy draws little subsequent interest. Whereas script as mere gallery notice,
exploited by Robert Barry (b.1936) in his noted exhibition at the Art and Project
Gallery in Amsterdam in 1969, in which the work appeared upon the closed doors
of the gallery, informing the public that ‘during the exhibition the gallery will be
closed’ does not invite further variation, even from Barry. 320
Similarly, performance is drawn to the plastic arts in the course of expanding
materials, as much as the plastic arts are drawn to performance. Yet each tends to
cancel the other, so that Klein’s performances reduce painting to utterance and
anatomy (male and female) and performance to mere presence of a person. More
forthright are the performances and products of Piero Manzoni (1933-63) that
follow in 1961, where the artist’s breath is collected in balloons, his thumbprints
recorded upon them or freshly boiled eggs (later distributed and eaten by the
audience) or, more notoriously, his excrement collected in sealed cans (mercifully,
not as a performance). And where means are relaxed as far as to allow a felt-tip pen,
he signs – significantly – the bared limbs of willing members of the audience, as
conspicuously temporary products. 321 Performance stripped of the artist’s skills and
sampled by only scant particulars of anatomy, obviously samples only the stark or
minimal person. Performance parallels the Minimalism of painting and sculpture in
this respect. 322 Likewise, the course of Post-Modernist performance is one of
cautious expansion of means against ends, but concludes where means revert to
distinct categories of music, dance and drama, or where the increasing availability
and sophistication of video offers another art.
319 On Bochner, see Richard S. Field, (ed.) Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966-73
(catalogue) New Haven, 1995.
320 The work also recalls Duchamp’s ‘dance score’ Relache (1924), consisting of a notice of
cancellation at the door of the theatre.
321 On Manzoni, see Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni, Milan, 1998 and Piero Manzoni, Piero
Manzoni (catalogue) Paintings, Reliefs, and Objects, London, 1974.
322 On performance, see Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas (eds.) The Art of Performance: a
critical anthology, New York, 1984 and Nick Kaye, Site-specific art: performance, place and
documentation, London, 2000.

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But to begin with, the minimal person is sampled by the minimal performance. The
performer’s actions are not pretence or acting, but actual and tend to focus upon
automatic or involuntary responses to a variously challenging situation or task.
Tasks and responses range from the traumatic, as in the bloody crucifixions of
Austrian Herman Nitsch (b.1938) such as First Action (1962) to the trivial, as in the
simple tasks performed by Nauman such as Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966-7) where
the artist squirts water from his mouth 323 . Tasks may also elicit emotional responses
as well as simple motor co-ordination skills. Yet since the ‘performances’ are usually
self-imposed, the emotions elicited are not quite clear-cut, the more elaborate and
onerous the task performed and emotion generated - or even the more frivolous –
only serves to underline the performer’s ‘real’ motives and emotions to the
undertaking. Does the audience witness mere distress or masochism, deft coordination
or vanity? It is this uneasy blend between what is and is not a
performance, and what exactly is sampled and expressed that stimulates much Post-
Modernist performance.
More elaborate tasks and responses follow. The importance of props and even place
involved in the task become more prominent. Even the minimal performance
requires props, if anything, places greater emphasis upon them, since the
performer’s use of them is often extremely intimate. Squirted water, shed clothing, a
scuffed floor or wall, even the echo of a hall or gallery, all carry some of the
performer’s response to tasks or situations, and are an important part of the
physical and emotional expression. Yet where the performance absorbs the props in
this way, the performance also loses definition to some extent. The minimal person
cannot do without props, but cannot really compete with them either. Exploiting
this tendency with peculiar dedication, the early performances of Joseph Beuys such
as The Chief – Fluxus Chants (1963-4) literally smother the performer in props. 324 The
nine-hour performance involved the performer (Beuys) wrapped inside a roll of felt
upon the floor and virtually inert throughout, a dead hare protruding from either
end of the roll, edges of the floor and walls sealed with fat, while he broadcast a
series of low squeals or groans through a microphone to speakers in the gallery and
323 On Nauman, see Currentartpics 22.
324 On Beuys, see Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, London, 1979, and Germano Celant, The
European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today, New York, 1985.

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outside, interspersed with tapes of popular music. Here the performance is literally
absorbed into the surrounding material, and while muffled in one respect, is yet
transmitted to the gallery and beyond. The audio transmission stands as at least a
metaphor for a more thoroughgoing one. From the performer’s emotional state to
the chain of surrounding materials, organic and inorganic, across various seals and
insulation and back – his disturbing and inchoate cries finally make the minimal
person only the most vocal of props.
Yet the minimal person, as a kind of psychic conduit to surroundings, is not always
so lost for words. Beuy’s later performances tend to stress the verbal, indeed
become informal lectures on a range of topical issues, complete with blackboards
filled with successive summary diagrams. The minimal performance as a lecture is a
less certain project in other respects. Neither distinctive costume, persona nor
location quite ‘out-project’ mere lecturing. In general, Post-Modernist performance
gradually allows greater verbal response in a work, concedes to the scripted and
scriptable. It resists additional performers, although often invites audience
participation of some kind. The partnership of London-based Gilbert and George
(German Gilbert Proesch b. 1943, Englishman George Passmore b. 1942) is a
notable exception, ignores interaction and literally doubles their act, as in the
choreographed miming in The Singing Sculpture (1969-71). In this respect they too
concede to dance, makeup and costume. All of which are present in a contrasting
work, Interior Scroll (1975) by Carolee Schneeman (b.1939) where the performance
pointedly ranges from the intimately bodily to an amusingly dry reading. 325 Each
step, of course, expands upon the minimal person and performance, while reducing
the pull of the plastic arts. Post-Modernist performance gradually dissipates by the
end of the nineteen seventies, not just because the plastic arts have less to offer, or
fail to project any further, but because dance, music and drama now offer more.
The dance of Meredith Monk (b.1943) or German Pina Bausch (b.1940), the drama
of Robert Wilson (b.1941), and the music of Laurie Anderson (b.1947) for example,
all draw performance into other, more promising hybrids. 326
325 On Gilbert and George, see Wolf Jahn, The Art of Gilbert and George or an aesthetic of
existence, London, 1989 and Currentartpics 29. For Interior Scroll, see Carolee Schneeman and
Bruce McPherson (eds.) More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works & Selected
Writings, New York, 1979.
326 These developments are usefully summarised in Marvin Carlson, Performance: a critical
introduction, London/ New York, 1996, pp. 101-120.

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Indeed as dance and drama explore ‘site-specific’ performances, admit
improvisation, mime, acrobatics and other skills, the cautious concessions to the
minimal performance look increasingly forlorn, even inept. A common criticism in
the late seventies is that it falls too often and easily into poor or ‘bad’ drama, dance
or music, (and scripts equally into ‘bad’ poetry or prose, even criticism) in
comparison with traditional projects. An obvious parallel arises then with
developments in ‘bad’ painting at this time. Yet this holds more for script and
performance than for place or recording, which equally confront competing
projects. Performance of the minimal person persists in video recording, although
here too increasingly elaborate production would seem to draw it into the project of
film and television. But film and television is also the most recent and complex of
the arts, and its own controversies effectively weaken projection to or from it. 327
Unfortunately constraints of length prevent tracing this direction. The shift from
minimal performance to ‘bad’ performance leads in turn to fewer but more
elaborate variations in the mid eighties, but these are part of a larger periodic shift.
The experiments with place likewise bring the work of ‘expanded materials’ into
competition with civic custom and architecture. But resulting work is rarely seen as
‘bad’ architecture or civic planning; on the contrary, over the course of Post-
Modernism such works are steadily absorbed or accommodated by architecture and
civic custom.
It is easy enough to track the emergence of place in this sense, and to match it
roughly with the start of Post- Modernism. But it is more difficult to find its course
coinciding with Post-Modernism as proposed here. However, to begin with there is
the greater prominence of the gallery itself as a space or place. Klein’s Le Vide
(1958) strips the gallery of its fittings, repaints the walls white, Le Plein (1960) by
Frenchman Arman (Armand Fernandez b.1928) completely fills the same gallery
(Galerie Iris Clert in Paris) with debris and various discarded materials. Both sample
a containment of architecture for a duration – or an ‘installation’ – notably without
327 A key example of this division from the time is Peter Wollen ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’ in
Studio International, December 1975, pp. 171-175 (reprinted in Peter Wollen, Readings and
Writings London, 1982, pp. 92-104). Significantly the debate initially occurs in an art rather than
film journal.

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the motion or technology of Hamilton or Fontana’s displays. Similarly, the
conflation of shop and gallery in Oldenburg’s The Store (1961) give the work a
specific place and time (of lease). The spread to less likely places, materials and
durations extends from The Dockside Packages at Cologne (1961) by French couple,
Christo (Christo Javacheff b.1935) and wife, Jeanne-Claude (b.1935) to the
earthworks of Oldenburg, Michael Heizer (b.1944) and Dennis Oppenheim
(b.1938) in 1967 and to larger-scale ‘Land Art’ and even ‘Sky Art’ works by the end
of the decade. 328 At the same time the use of less solid or stable materials within a
gallery and installation amplify duration in other ways, from the less manageable
‘spill’ and ‘scatter’ works of Carl Andre (b.1935), Serra, Le Va and Morris to the
noisier, smellier, even tastier installations of Beuys, Jannis Kounellis (b.1936) Lucio
Fabro (b.1936) and others, featuring among carved and moulded fat, dead hares and
prepared meat, live macaws and horses, pot plants and vegetables, lit candles and
gas flames, playing radios, television and tapes. 329 Later installation also tends to
blur the distinction with exhibition, to include stand-alone and long-term works
with more temporary elements, as in the installations of Jonathan Borofsky (b.1942)
or combine painting with installed materials as in the work of Judy Pfaff (b.1946) in
the late seventies.
But where work samples place on a longer term, as in the Land Art works of
Heizer, Walter de Maria (b.1935) or Robert Smithson (1938-73) duration is not
necessarily the prominent issue. Where works use industrial earthmoving equipment
to create something closer to landscape gardening, works are drawn irresistibly to
architecture and engineering. Short-term works persist through the seventies, such
as the more restrained Land Art works of Englishmen Richard Long (b.1943) and
Hamish Fulton (b.1946) the more expansive projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude,
the installations of Italian Eugenio Carmi (b.1920) of Viallat and the Surface and
Support group in France, and the sledge hammer and chain-saw ‘carvings’ in
derelict and condemned buildings by Gordon Matta-Clark (1945-78). But familiarity
now specialises the emphasis in such works. Duration here comes to stress either
328 On these American artists, see Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (eds.) Recording
Conceptual Art, London/Los Angeles, 2001. On Kounellis, see Gloria Moure (ed) Jannis
Kounellis: works, writings 1958-2000, New York, 2000
329 Something of this attention to a wider sensory sample is captured in the term Arte Povera, and
often used to distinguish between European and American installations. See Germano Celant,
Arte Povera, New York, 1969, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, (ed.) Arte Povera, London, 1999.

218
increasing civic co-operation, or in the case of many British and American works, a
recalcitrant isolation, in the case of Matta-Clark, often a naked demolition or
vandalism.
But while duration and place for Conceptual Art do not strictly last the course of
Post-Modernism as proposed, two tendencies that follow from works of place do
climax in the mid-eighties, and so correspond to the sought end of Post-
Modernism. The first of these follows from the architectural strain to Land Art, and
leads firstly to sculpture of basic buildings, such as Low Building with Dirt Roof (for
Mary) (1973) by Alice Aycock (b.1946) and then to larger, more industrial
structures, such as her series titled How to Catch and Manufacture Ghost Stories from the
Workhouse (1979-80) with their sprawling and kinetic elements (including
performance) industrial materials and imposing scale. 330 Similar features are found
in the work of Oppenheim, Dan Graham (b.1942), Vito Acconci (b.1940) Siah
Armajani (b.1939) and others at this time. But the play with industrial architecture
leads not only to more playground-like works but also to increasing use of
commercial fabrication of components, to the artist as more of a designer or
architect and to the work’s integration within broader architectural projects, such as
the gardens and walkways designed by Mary Miss (b.1944) at Laumeier Park (1985)
in St Louis. 331 On the one hand the pursuit of place and duration ends in the subbranches
of architecture, on the other, the increasing reliance upon standard
fabrication shifts the emphasis to another kind of integration. This announces an
end of Post-Modernism.
The second tendency follows from the increasing co-operation available for works
of place. It feeds and feeds off a widespread growth in funding and administration
of such events throughout the seventies, largely throughout the western world.
Public art programmes, arts festivals, artists-in-residence schemes and further
venues and facilities all use and shape the short-term work of place in this period.
Either institutional opportunity promotes a greater boldness, even extravagance to
330 On such work, see Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Sculpture in The Expanded Field’ in The Originality
of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge/Mass./ London, 1986, pp. 277-290
331 Attention to industrial architecture is prompted possibly by the preceding engagement with
large-scale earth-moving equipment in the Land Art works of Smithson or Heizer, by questions
of scale and materials, similar to those found in Late Modernism, and by the growing popularity
for the photographic catalogues of industrial architecture by Bernd and Hilla Becher.

219
site-specific works, or places are negotiated with their constituents or community.
The split is between what the work can do with a place as community, and what the
community can do with a work as place. Place now becomes less a matter of remote
or open spaces than of distinctive urban functions. Certain buildings for example
are offered to mural projects whose themes increasingly reflect local concerns, so
that physical structure, space and duration are less an issue than community
projection of a collective identity. Obviously the artist interested in material issues
in unlikely to be the same one to respond to community needs, but at the same time
to work further with a place, is to work with its community and to exchange
means. 332 Moreover, the work is increasingly a collective, and often urgently political
and educational task. Groups such as Collaborative Projects (Colab) and Group
Material in New York in the late seventies typify this trend. 333 Finally community
concerns are also directed back to other varieties of the plastic and applied arts, and
to their grouping in exhibitions and collections as Identity Art. The identity is of a
community or sub-culture, variously constructed according to place, history,
religion, race, economic status, ability, age or sexuality. 334 Where performance
begins as the minimal person, place here ends as the social stereotype. This
transition culminates in the mid eighties and marks another end to Post-Modernism.
Finally, there is recording in Conceptual Art, and since we forego film and video,
and audio recordings form only a small part of the style, recording of performance
and place by photography, is briefly traced. As noted, recording may also influence
how a performance or event is constructed. While many Conceptual Art works
employ photography to document or record events, much as painting or sculpture
332 The issue of how place or site is defined in relation to community remains controversial. For
example the removal of Serra’s ‘site-specific’ sculpture Tilted Arc (1981) from Federal Plaza in
New York City in March 1989, was contested on the grounds of spatial or architectural integrity
of the work as well as contractual obligation, notably ignoring the adverse response from the
surrounding buildings’ occupants, and users of the space. See Robert Storr, ‘Tilted Arc: Enemy
of the People?’ in Art in America, September 1985, pp. 90-97, Harriet F. Senie, The Tilted Arc
Controversy: Dangerous Precedent, Minneapolis, 2001.
333 On Group Material, see Brian Wallis (ed.), Democracy: A Project by Group Material, Seattle,
1990, Suzi Gablik, ‘Report from New York: The Graffiti Question’ in Art in America, October
1982, p.37, and William Oleander, ‘Material World’, in Art in America, October 1989, p. 124.
3 On Identity Art, see Lucy Lippard, Get The Message? A Decade Of Social Change: New York.
1984, Hal Foster: ‘Artist as Ethnographer’ in Return of the real: the avant-garde at the end of the
century, Cambridge/Mass./London, 1996, W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.) Art and the Public Sphere,
Chicago, 1992, Robert Storr ‘Identity’ in Art 21: Art in the Twenty First Century, New York,
2001.

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are regularly documented, photography is also quickly seized upon as a more
formative feature to the work of performance, duration or place. It allows for
example, for fictive works, such as Klein’s Leap into The Void (1960) where the artist
appears to be caught mid-dive, from on high onto the bare pavement of a quiet
street in Paris, and its novel presentation in a print format (in a small newspaper,
‘for one day’, devoted solely to the artist’s activities). It allows for more mobile and
in a sense, private performances, and for tacit ‘visual’ elements not easily devised or
recorded in a script, score or plan, such as in the documented ‘actions’ of Acconci,
Nauman, Oppenheim, Adrian Piper (b.1948) Ana Mendieta (1948-85) and
Brazilians Helio Oiticica (1937-80) and Lygia Clark (1920-88), as well as striking
points of view, such as the aerial photography used by Smithson or Oppenheim for
certain Land Art works, the angles and architectural details to Matta-Clark’s
demolitions and the distant views of remote Land Art works adopted by Long and
Fulton.
Yet photographs as records also require captions and ‘layout’ to properly point to
events, and these too are distinctive in Conceptual Art. While recording here
converges with other interests in script or score, ‘layout’ and print, recording is
initially stressed in the prosaic nature of the photography and ‘layout’. Yet even as
the recording of the work as an event or place is urged, ‘layout’ and caption build a
second work, around the work. ‘Layout’ of photographs and captions is often
amusingly strained in such works for sequence and salience. Captions are often terse
or vague. Photographs are often uninformative or misleading. 335 The work as a
record, often points to the vagaries of events and recording practices. The work
here is thus one of divided identity, between record, event and even script or score,
in a way striking to the plastic arts, although quite the norm in filmmaking or music
recording. But the ‘real’ event does not elude such recording, anymore than such
recording eludes preceding practices, in a phantom concept. Rather, event and
record find and make other kinds of events and practices.
335 See for example Acconci’s ‘layout’ of photographs for Security Zone (1971) where persons
are largely rendered in distant silhouette hence of uncertain identity or attitude, matters
supposedly sampled by the performance, and equally uncertain sequence. On Acconci, see Vito
Acconci and Kate Linker, Vito Acconci, New York, 1994.

221
Indeed the wider practices of photography and caption become the focus of further
Conceptual works throughout the seventies, just as performance and place also
change, and just as painting tires of them, as print samples. Works by Graham, Bill
Beckley (b.1946) German Hans Haacke (b.1936) Englishman Victor Burgin
(b.1941) French Christian Boltanski (b.1944) and others pursue standard typefaces,
script or copy, photographic techniques and often found or acquired photographs,
to factual and fictive objects in often strange or disturbing contexts. Practices may
be pursued to publication, to their inclusion in popular magazines, or to billboards
or posters. Graham’s pioneering ‘Figurative’ in Harper’s Bazaar (March 1968)
supplies an enlarged supermarket receipt, disturbs the overall layout of advertising
and urges a blunt financial dimension to the usual claims for personal hygiene and
attraction. 336 Practice is thus tested and adjusted in a small way by fully participating
in such publication, and yet unavoidably also functions as just an advertisement for
the artist (his name and the title of the work are included beside the list) and the
enlightened acceptance of the publication. Challenge thus extends no further than
the nature of the advertisement, indeed reflects perhaps more favourably on
surrounding products than the artist. 337
‘Layout’ practices are also pursued to the gallery or exhibition, for captions or wallplaques,
catalogue and attribution texts. The work of Haacke at this time elicits
various social and economic statistics for gallery or exhibition, more controversially,
offers copious provenance or history not only for works, but collections, collectors,
patrons, administrators and prevailing financial arrangements. The challenge here is
not simply one of propriety, but whether the practice is not out-projected by, or
more efficiently pursued as journalism. 338 Other work ranges between such practices
and publication. At a certain point in Conceptual Art, events and place are less
important than the recording, and at a certain point recording is less important than
its ‘layout’ and influence, and by the eighties the cooperation and access to such
practices becomes a more prominent sample in such work than either recording or
336 Later such placements target more specialised publications, notably art journals such as Art
Forum, Studio International and Flash Art, in the seventies and early eighties.
337 On Graham, see Alexander Alberro and Patricia Novell, (eds.) Recording Conceptual Art, Los
Angeles and London, 2001 and Alexander Alberro (ed.) Two-way Mirror Power: Selected
writings by Dan Graham on his art, Cambridge/Mass./ London, 1999.
338
On Haacke, see Brian Wallis (ed.) Hans Haacke Unfinished business, Cambridge/
Mass./London, 1986, Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason’ in
Art in America, February, 1988, pp. 96-109.

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‘layout’, for example in the publication and distribution of works by Barbara Kruger
(b.1945) and Jenny Holzer (b.1950). 339
Thus works of ‘expanded materials’ mostly gain in organisation under the proposed
periods of Late and Post-Modernism. Importantly, they synchronise with
fundamental concerns in painting, and correct and co-ordinate misleading notions
of Conceptual Art. A larger, clearer picture of the periods emerges, perhaps
prompts a more revealing name than Post Modernism, and so helps to frame the
following chapter on the closing period to the century.
339 On Kruger, see Kate Linker, Love for Sale: The words and pictures of Barbara Kruger, New
York, 1990. On Holzer, see David Joselit, Jenny Holzer: (All Works and Artist's Writings)
London/ New York, 1998.

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‘Globalism’
1985 - 2000
Post-Modernism is rarely seen as ending in the twentieth century. It is variously
seen as beginning in the middle of the century, at the start of the sixties, seventies
and eighties, as perhaps best started with a decade, and as the name suggests, is
usually defined only by its departure from Modernism. 340 To end Post-Modernism
in the mid eighties is not therefore so very different from offering yet another
starting point to the period. Indeed, while this study arrives at an additional period
to the century, dates nevertheless correspond to at least some versions of Post-
Modernism, and to key or representative works. In which case, differences lie in
label and aspects otherwise discerned, in subtlety of grasp, efficiency of links.
Conceivably one might coin ‘Middle’ or ‘High Modernism’ for the fifties and
maintain Late and Post-Modernism for the following periods, but the turning point
in the early sixties seems greater or more decisive than merely the amplifications
340 The early fifties are favoured as pivotal by Steinberg, as noted, the mid fifties by David
Hopkins, After Modern Art, Oxford/New York, 2000. The sixties are preferred in Foster (ed.),
The Anti-Aesthetic; essays on Post-Modern culture, New York, 1983, and Foster, Return of the
real: the avant-garde at the end of the century, Cambridge/Mass./London, 1996. Brandon Taylor,
Modernism, post-modernism, realism: a critical perspective for art, Winchester, 1987, finds
Post-Modernism begins with Warhol in the sixties. Sylvia Harrison, Pop art and the origins of
post-modernism, Cambridge/New York, 2001, agrees. The early seventies are claimed in Smith,
Modernism’s History: a study in twentieth century art and ideas. Sydney, 1998, following
Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’ in October: The First Decade,
Cambridge/Mass./London, 1987. Rubin agrees in Lawrence Alloway and John Coplans, ‘Talking
with William Rubin: The Museum Concept is not Infinitely Expandable’ in Artforum, October
1974 p.52. So does Fineberg, Art since 1940: Strategies of Being, London/ New York, 2000.
Gombrich takes his cue from architecture, accepts the mid seventies in Gombrich, The Story of
Art, (16 th ed) 1995. Greenberg implicitly accepts the late seventies or early eighties in Greenberg,
‘Modern and Post Modern’ Arts 54. No 5, February 1980. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New,
(2 nd ed) London, 1991, agrees. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of
Regression’ in October No. 16, Spring, 1981, pp. 39-68, agrees. So does Robert Storr, Modern
art despite modernism, London/ New York, 2000. Donald Kuspit plumps for the early eighties in
Kuspit, ‘Flak from the “Radicals”: The American Case against Current German Painting’ in Jack
Cowart (ed.) Expressions: New Art from Germany, St Louis/Munich 1983, pp 43-55. Peter
Schjeldahl, ‘A Visit to The Salon of Autumn 1986’ Art in America, December 1986, pp. 15-21,
bids for mid decade. Tomkins, Post to Neo: The Artworld of the Eighties, New
York/London/Melbourne, 1988, agrees. T.J. Clark opts for October 1989 and the fall of The
Berlin Wall as marking the end of Modernism in Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes in the
history of Modernism, New Haven/London, 1999.

224
and diminutions taken here as Late Modernism. The period that follows is more
accurately defined as Post-Modernism and in any case a ‘Middle Modernism’ is no
more familiar to other versions of art history than a period subsequent to Post-
Modernism.
So the study advances a period named ‘Globalism’. The name captures something
of the wider project to the period, to the greater economic and cultural integration
that occurs at this time, much as Modernism (and modernism) celebrates an earlier
commitment to progress in social and technological issues. It also registers a radical
widening of place to the period. ‘Globalism’ can also be taken to contrast with
localised or centralised issues, to indicate a more overall, holistic or ‘global’
approach to certain issues that arise in Post-Modernism. Then again, like
Modernism, ‘Globalism’ may stand for just those stylistic issues it makes.
‘Globalism’, while apt enough, stands to be denoted by as much as to denote a
period style. In any case, the period is an open one. ‘Globalism’ does not end with
the century, but rather the project is maintained at least up until the year 2000.
Certain developments are discerned, but do not suggest a decisive break. Because it
deals with an open period, a more compact approach is adopted, although again, a
somewhat longer chapter results. The style is traced by considering parallels
between ‘expanded materials’, abstract and concrete depiction in painting, as in the
two preceding chapters, but here compressed into one. Here also sequence is
reversed, considering firstly ‘expanded materials’ then abstraction and finally more
concrete depiction.
‘Expanded materials’ enter a ‘Globalist’ phase when the plastic art’s projection to
literature and the performing arts becomes more entrenched, and concern is
deflected to supporting and adjacent institutions. The shift is basically from samples
of basic events to wider institutional practices. In Chapter Eighteen this shift is
traced in a number of ways, through the growing attention to local community over
mere architecture or place, through Identity Art and collective works, through
delegated or commissioned components to a work, and through ‘layout’ and other
presentational practices used in exhibition and display. The work is increasingly
about its institutional support, about its contribution to and dependence upon an
aggressive infrastructure. Obviously the formidable logistics required of the works

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of Christo and Jeanne-Claude also use such support, as do the publications and
billboards of Graham or Kossuth, or the television and video equipment in the
work of Nam June Paik (b.1932) to offer only a few Post-Modernist examples. The
difference is that the support is not made explicit or exemplified in Post-Modernist
work. There, projection and sample are still to issues of duration and text. 341 The
‘Globalist’ work, by contrast, can now afford to stress its institutional support, and
in fact to extend it through conspicuous patronage, sponsorship, leasing, loans,
commission and similar co-operation with other institutions. Work duly acquires a
rather academic acceptance. Support invested and displayed urges and reassures
other branches of the art world, builds a certain bullish impetus even as it traduces
acceptance. This push outward, or institutional networking, becomes the project
and artists committed to it again freely switch between branches. Script or score,
performance, place and recording are all pursued in this way, but the study now
focuses only on ‘Globalism’s’ more distinctive and discrete objects.
The turning point is taken to be where work samples the products and presentation
of retail display, in works such as Supremely Black (1985) (Figure 118) by Haim
Steinbach (b.1944) and New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Red, Brown, New Shelton,
Wet/Dry 10, Gallon Displaced, Doubledecker (1981-87) (Figure 119) by Jeff Koons
(b.1955). This is because presentation here so directly engages basic exhibition
practice, for gallery, museum or private collection. The work at once draws setting
into presentation and selling into appreciation in a manner unnerving for both art
and commerce, novel to the readymade. While visual merchandising is particularly
telling to art exhibition practice, the work concerned with only several household
products and common brand names is still a relatively easy or safe
accommodation. 342 Where works deal in larger, more expensive items, such as a
refrigerator and a safe, as in Brandt/Ficht Bauche (1984) by Frenchman Bertrand
Lavier (b.1949) or in the variously stacked and juggled office furniture and fittings
in the work of German Reinhard Mucha (b.1950) from this time, the effect is
341 Indeed this practice must be so, for the institutional support cannot be sampled until the work
has the means with which to sample it, and this arises only when the sampling of events through
expanded materials becomes more routine, or when it acquires a sufficient body of preceding
examples. Then, sampled may become sampler, as variations on the form or theme eventually
offer new forms or themes.
342 On Koons, see Klaus Kertess, ‘Bad’, Parkett, no.19, 1989, pp 30-36, Jean-Christophe
Ammann, ‘Der Fall Koons’, Parkett, no.19, 1989, pp 53-56 and Currentartpics 49. On Steinbach,
see Germano Celant et al., Haim Steinbach: Recent works, Bordeaux, 1988.

226
somewhat the reverse. The work flaunts a range and value to material but resists
naked marketing strategies for something closer to the modules of Minimalist
sculpture, such as those of Donald Judd (1928-94) or Carl Andre (b.1935). Yet now
standard or modular items suggest various non-obvious assemblies.
Generally, where ‘Globalism’ looks to readymade objects for its materials, the
tendency is to the kind of quantities, size and price that sample not just an unusual
or difficult source, but one with a certain influence or prestige. Samples tend to
industrial, scientific and commercial institutions, rather than say, the stable of
motley horses adopted by Kounellis in Cavalli (1969) and assembly is less along
sculptural models, still evident in the examples of Lavier and Mucha, than to more
expansive, site specific models, or to some more cunning variation upon their
standard function. Works such as the Untitled Installation (1989) in Topanga,
California by Nancy Rubins (b.1952) involving a mass of used aircraft parts
arranged upon a grove of trees, or the various installations by Scotsman David
Mach (b.1956) using thousands of excess copies or back issues of magazines stacked
in patterns and sometimes shaped into concrete depiction, from around this time,
illustrate this access to an unusual industrial product, and its enterprising
negotiation. 343 More complex arrangements of objects, their acquisition and
sampled institutions, follow in the work of Cady Noland (b.1956) Jessica
Stockholder (b.1959) and later Jason Rhoades (b.1965) amongst others. 344 Rhoades
installations in particular assemble a massive array of objects and technology, such
as A Few Free Years (1998) at the Kunsthalle Bremen, featuring eighteen amusement
arcade machines, video monitors and players, and masses of his signature polished
aluminium scaffolding. The sample now literally makes a game of its entrepreneurial
ambit. These brief institutional games also revive some of the scope of Modernist
343 On Rubins, see Lane Relyea, ‘Art of the Living Dead’ in Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 90s,
(catalogue) Catherine Gudis (ed.) Los Angeles, 1992, pp. 33-43, Peter Kosenko, ‘Putting Disgust
on Display: Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the '90s at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles’ In These Times 1-7 April 1992, pp. 20-21. On Mach, see Marco Livingstone, David
Mach: towards a Landscape, (catalogue) Oxford, 1985 and Tom Bendhem, David Mach: Master
Builder (catalogue) Rotterdam, 1982.
344 On Stockholder, see Barry Schwabsky et al., Jessica Stockholder, London, 1995. On Noland,
see Lane Relyea, ‘Holy Crusade’, Parkett, no.46 1996, pp. 72-76 and Relyea, ‘Hi-Yo Silver –
Cady Noland’s America’ in Artforum, January 1993, pp. 50-54. On Rhoades, see Nancy
Princenthal, ‘Jason Rhoades: Pipe Dreams’, in Art in America, January, 2001, pp. 98-100, p.141,
Uta Grosenick and Burkhard Riemenschneider, Art Now, Cologne, 2002, pp. 424-27 and
Currentartpics 7.

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integration of the applied arts, although now the various branches of design offer
multiple but temporary integration.
The bulk or wholesale readymade however is really the simplest of ‘Globalist’
strategies. Work samples institutions by also participating more fully in their
procedures, by looking not to the readymade product or by-product, but to the
customised or commissioned version; the ‘readily-made’, and less often, to the
collected or curated work, to what amounts in fact to a work of other and lesser
works, where distinctions between the readymade, the ‘readily-made’ and the plain
made collapse. On the one hand, the artist assumes the role of exclusively an ideas
person, a designer or commissioner, on the other of simply a curator or collector.
Here too, expansion encompasses other institutional roles. The ‘readily-made’ is
distinct from traditional studio delegation and process in the production of a work,
whereby for example, the details of casting a sculpture are rarely the exclusive
province of the sculptor, or where an artist assigns preliminary or peripheral tasks to
assistants in the process. The ‘readily-made’ is in many respects the reverse. The
process is paramount, and the artist’s contribution almost preliminary or peripheral.
The concept or idea for the work is really no more than such variations as
demonstrate the efficiency of the process. ‘Readily-made’ works often have the feel
of a prototype or a trial run in this respect.
Koon’s stainless steel castings of readymade objects such as Rabbit (1986) (Figure
120) achieve new prominence for the ‘readily-made’. 345 The work not only
transforms a child’s inflatable toy into an eerie futuristic idol, a comic folly, and a
massive ornament, amongst other things, but the familiar readymade source also
gives the casting process itself an unusual prominence. Indeed the expense and
difficulty of casting in stainless steel, a material more usually associated with
industrial and trade applications, alerts us to a more general aspect to the process, to
its autonomous nature, its prompt accommodation of the artist’s commission (at a
price) and equally, of the artist’s accommodation of this autonomy, also at a price.
Art, one might say, becomes a little more industrial for making industry a little more
artistic. Both institutions are thus urged to a broader network. The ‘readily-made’
345 Also of note at this time is the work of Alan McCollum (b.1944), which features both bulk
quantity and industrial casting.

228
does not rest with mere casting however. Koons replaces the readymade object as a
source with photographs in later works and commissions more elaborate ‘readilymades’,
such as the gilded life-size portrait of pop star Michael Jackson reclining
with his pet monkey in matching costumes, in Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988)
(Figure 121) a large painted porcelain work in an edition of three. Again the contrast
between the material and product is prominent. While merchandising for a pop star
might conceivably stretch to small and cheap figurines of some kind, a life-size and
gilded porcelain product line is unlikely, to say the least. By the same token, while
porcelain figures look to popular and traditional persons for their iconography, to
adopt a contemporary figure from the world of pop music, or to work on this
impressive scale is equally unlikely. So the work is not so much about
merchandising excess or porcelain’s cautious iconography as the unlikely and
hitherto unwanted area in between. In fact the work demonstrates the production
process for just where the respective markets or institutions abandon it and in doing
finds an outrageously up-market niche, ‘readily-made’ for art.
The ‘readily-made’ is applied in the work of Charles Ray (b.1953) Englishmen
Damien Hirst (b.1965) and partners Jake (b.1965) and Dinos (b.1962) Chapman, as
well as Mexican, Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962) amongst others. Ray’s best-known work,
Firetruck (1993) enlarged a child’s toy to full scale, while other works offer unusual
variations on fibreglass mannequins, generally associated with retail, museum or
educational display. Hirst’s preserved animal specimens in imposing vitrines also
return to the issue of exhibition display while sampling scientific and educational
practice. The Chapmans offer even more extreme variations on mannequins while
Orozco’s LA.D.S. (1993) (Figure 122) customises a Citroen to a pointedly narrow
purpose. 346 The ‘readily-made’ also encompasses the kinetic and unlikely
commissions in engineering. In the latter half of the nineties the work of Fleming
Wim Delvoye (b.1965) and Roxy Paine (b.1966) for example feature machines of
standard components and principles harnessed to striking ends. 347 Lastly, the
346 On Hirst and The Chapmans, see Brooks Adams et al., Sensation: Young British Artists from
the Saatchi Collection (catalogue) London, 1997, pp. 92-99 and pp. 68-69 respectively, Sarah
Kent, Shark infested waters: the Saatchi collection of British art in the 90s, London, 1994,
Currentartpics 25 and 91. On Ray, see Jefferey Deitch, Young Americans: New American Art in
the Saatchi Collection, (catalogue) London, 1996.
347 On Delvoye, see Wim Delvoye et al., Wim Delvoye, New York, 1998 and Dan Cameron et al,
Wim Delvoye: Cloaca, new and improved, New York, 2002 and website www.cloaca.be (2003-
4). On Paine see Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, New York/London,

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‘readily-made’ is not always the result of the artist commissioning industry, but can
also be the result of the artist’s own product serving both art and industry. The
work of film and television special effects and model makers, such as London-based
Australian Ron Mueck (b.1958) and Julian La Verdiere (b.1971) apply the same
skills and materials to more unlikely projects for art, although this very promiscuity
also tends to weaken the sample. The work is then about too minor an industry or
samples too little of it. 348
Where works forgo the bulk readymade and extravagant ‘readily-made’ for a wider
mix of materials, variously assembled along the lines of a film or stage set, trade
stand or science exhibit, complete with laboratory tests, demonstrations or
performances, they also confront a dilution of sample. Materials here comprise the
artefacts of a lifestyle, stereotype, topical or historical issue, and here too must look
progressively further a field in order to avoid the trivial or predictable. Works
combine and conflate issues, but also are drawn to the more diffuse and peripheral,
so that at some point they also begin to reflect art’s own presentation and practices.
For example an installation may in fact include or comprise of a collection of ready
or ‘readily-made’ paintings, as in the work of collective Group Material, Americana
(1985) created for the Whitney Museum’s Biennial survey of that year, and
somewhat later, the exhibition of Thrift Store Paintings (1990) by Jim Shaw
(b.1952). 349 In both cases the collections deal with ‘bad’ or generally rejected works,
in uneasy contrast with preceding Neo-Expressionist works, but this also allows the
work to sample collecting or curatorial practice over the usual stylistic issues. The
role of the artist here converges with that of the collector or curator, and while it is
common enough for artists to act as collectors or curators, just as they often act as
critics, it is quite another thing to take such work as works of art 350 . The work of the
curator and the artist now shape toward an interesting conflict.
2000, pp. 496-499, and Anne Hammond, ‘Roxy Paine at James Cohan’ (review) in Art in
America, October 2001, p. 156.
348 On Mueck, see Brooks Adams et al, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi
Collection, (catalogue) London, 1997, pp. 126-128. On La Verdiere see Marcia E. Vetrocq,
‘Julian La Verdiere’s Imperial Designs’ in Art in America, July 2001, pp. 98-103.
349 See Jim Shaw, Thrift Store Paintings: paintings found in thrift stores, Hollywood/California,
1990.
350 The curatorial works of Kosuth from this time, such as The Play of the Unmentionable (1990)
at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, are sometimes accorded this double status.

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This convergence of projects also occurs where installations increasingly deal in
issues of décor and interior design, for example in the work from the nineties of
Cuban Jorge Pardo (b.1963) Andrea Zittel (b.1965) Austrian Franz West (b.1947)
German Tobias Rehberger (b.1966) and Fleming Carsten Höller (b. 1961) amongst
others 351 . Such works favour the co-ordination of furniture and fittings not so much
along standard stylistic lines or customary applications, as more unusual alignments
of materials, colour, lighting and function, and while recalling the Modernist project
to design, resist the inclusion of established works of painting or sculpture for
example, at least until the end of the century. Yet attention to items of décor,
nevertheless approaches collection and museum practices, and has a striking
counterpart in the renewed attention to such contextual issues in art museum
presentation at this time. 352
Furthermore, the increasing scope for curators in this period mirrors the
convergence of the work as a collection, with the work in a collection. It is
significant for example that regular international surveys of contemporary art,
generally on a bi-annual or tri-annual basis, not only proliferate at this time but also
are initiated in regional centres, non-western and third world countries, for example
in Havana, Cuba (1984) Istanbul, Turkey and Mercosur, Brazil (1987) Lyon, France
(1991) Dakar, Senegal (1992) Sharjah, U.A.E. (1993) Kwangui, South Korea, and
Johannesburg, South Africa (1995) Shanghai, China and Manifesta, held at shifting
locations in central Europe (1996) Mexico City, and Berlin, Germany, (1998)
Liverpool, U.K. (1999) and followed by Tokamachi and Echigo Tsumari, Japan,
Melbourne, Australia (2000) and Yokahama, Japan, Barcelona, Spain, Tirana
Albania, and Busan (renaming Pusan) South Korea (2001). The international scope
of these exhibitions generally calls upon an equally international team of curators, so
that the activities of the curator are globalised in a more familiar sense of the word.
Yet they also provide opportunities to broaden the range of issues necessary to
351 On Pardo see Currentartpics 100, on Zittel, Currentartpics 93 and on Rehberger,
Currentartpics 8.
352 The year 2000 for example brings a radical revision in the hanging practises of prestigious
museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate’s new Museum, (Tate
Modern) in London, not only asserting greater co-ordination in décor and objects, in the interest
of a thematic rather than chronological ordering, but generally granting the curator a more active
and ‘creative’ role. For commentary, see Charles Stuckey, ‘Modern Starts: Raising The Barr?’ in
Art in America, May 2000, pp. 51-57, Eleanor Heartney, ‘Chronology Dethroned’ in Art in
America, May 2001, pp. 55-63.

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works of expanded materials and to the institutional co-operation noted, and indeed
particularly foster just such works. The curator in other words, continues the
project of expanded materials in this way. But to appreciate this prospect more
fully, the course of ‘Globalist’ painting must now also be considered.
The course of abstraction in painting has been traced through projection to more
obvious pattern, up to and including repeating pictures and even the single central
motif or icon, while materials and techniques are pushed to three-dimensionality in
experiments with the chemistry of pigments. Summarised thus, it is difficult to see
where abstraction in painting might go from Post Modernism, since it would seem
to have come full circle, and to confront only more concrete depiction.
Understandably, some advocates of abstraction around this time pronounce the
death of painting. 353 But while it unquestionably marks a turning point, in retrospect
the change is not quite so drastic. Where Late Modernism toyed with more obvious
pattern, and Post-Modernism wholeheartedly embraced it, ‘Globalism’ can now
afford to ignore it. The emphasis shifts back to complexity and diffuseness of
pattern, and pattern is less directly tied to textiles or familiar printing. Yet the move
away from obvious pattern unavoidably resembles the move toward it under
Modernism. ‘Globalist’ abstraction returns to or coincides with Modernism (Early
and Late) to some extent and while this only confirms the gloomiest of forecasts,
the reversal does not amount to a simple retreat.
This is because Post-Modernist abstraction has projected to even the simplest, most
traditional or familiar of patterns, so that painting now possesses patterns or
pictures them with greater authority and means. To re-engage Modernist pattern or
abstraction at this time is not therefore simply to re-trace the road to more concrete
depiction, but rather to trace a road to more obscure pattern. Hence there is a
reversal in the way depiction and painting first use pattern for abstraction and then
are used by it. Those qualities to Modernist abstract that resisted easy or accepted
pattern now seem too pattern-like and invite more elusive measures. The price for
projection from depiction and painting to pattern is this subsequent dilation of
pattern. The ‘Globalist’ project for abstraction is about this furthering of pattern. It
353 See for example, Douglas Crimp, ‘The End of Painting’, October 16, 1981, pp. 69-86.
Significantly, the essay is concerned mainly with abstraction.

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is not enough to simply repeat Modernist abstraction of course, or to build mere
variation upon them. To sample furthering of pattern, rather than further
patterning, the ‘Globalist’ work must offer more radical variation. Properties
sampled must undermine or overload current or established pattern. The project
may be divided into roughly two strategies, the pattern colliding with competing
pattern, or the pattern collapsed under internal variation. We look first to the
collision of patterns.
The work of Terence La Noue (b.1941) at this time is among the most inclusive and
impressive of competing pattern. La Noue’s work arises not so much from Pattern
and Decoration but rather from a steady accretion upon minimalist process and
system throughout the late seventies. Works maintain an unstretched and
elaborately shaped canvas, discard single and central motifs for layers of gestural
amendments, include smaller patterns of flat colours and strict geometry, vigorous
scrapings, glazes and sundry distress. This ‘maximising’ culminates in works such as
Varieties of Coral – Zen Deliverance (1984) (Figure 123). Here the work offers virtually
a ‘layout’ or anthology of Modernism, in the tiny Klee-like colour grids, the column
of (Miro-like?) dark lateral shapes to the left of centre with their vaguely notational
alignment to the vertical stripe to the left, (and repeated on a smaller scale to the
lower left) the Kandinsky-like red compound of arcs to the right, the dense, Wolslike
reworking beneath, and the rugged and ravaged grounds that recall a Tapies or
Fautrier. Yet for all that, the work never quite falls into mere eclecticism, rather
finds tenuous but tenacious links between them in matters of line or colour, shape
or scale, insidiously unravels and re-ravels. The title also points to a ‘layout’ of
kinds, to the classing of nature, or problems in the nature of classing and mystical
resolution. 354 La Noue’s work is notable for the breadth of pattern and patient
facture, but much work at this time tends to a narrower, less effective range.
Later work shifts focus, jettisons heavy and patiently worked grounds and the
impression of a ravaged relic, for lighter, brighter, more brushstroke-driven pattern.
Work from the late eighties and early nineties by Englishwoman Fiona Rae (b.1963)
such as Untitled (one in brown) (1989) (Figure 124), German Albert Oehlen (b.1954)
such as Untitled (1993) (Figure 125) and Lydia Dona (b.1955) all cultivate striking
354 On La Noue, see Dore Ashton, Terence La Noue, New York, 1992.

233
dissonance of pattern and arrive at a sprawling array, although works here tend to
look to other developments, to the example of Polke and Richter in places, more
than the maximising of Minimalism. Pattern here also falls into parts or lesser
patterns. Rae and Oehlen for example adopt various stripes, flat colours and hard
edges, against a range of facture, embracing biomorphic, more concrete and
notational elements. 355 ‘Globalist’ abstraction thus arrives at certain parallels to
simultaneous and successive depiction, to ‘bad’ depiction and the poor sample, but
also serves as a metaphor and map for perhaps the psychology of painful and partial
sortings, of conflicting cares, and personal globalising strategies. Maintaining the
momentum of furthering pattern inevitably draws work back toward expanded
materials. Amongst the most inclusive in this respect is the work of U.S.-based
Argentinean Fabian Marcaccio (b.1963) in the later nineties, where work stretches
from more concrete depiction to print sources and means, to novel pigmented
solutions and sculptural additions including the ‘readily-made’ and to an
architectural scale that converges with the concerns of a Stockholder, for
example. 356
Equally, the momentum drives work on to more concrete depiction, to print and
‘layout’ samples, and to a direction presently to be examined more closely. Other
opportunity for furthering pattern arises in works exploiting the transformation
available in computer-based styles of depiction and design at this time. Computer
assisted design prompts its own abstraction and coincides with print-based sampling
in painting in some ways. Artists such as Germans Franz Ackermann (b.1967) in
works like Untitled or Mental Map: Evasion III (1996) (Figure 126) and Frank Nitsche
(b.1964) in works likes GLP-26-2001 (2001) (Figure 127) London-based Sarah
Morris (b.1967) in works like Federal Reserve (Capital) (2001) (Figure 128) and Miamibased
Nigerian Odile Donald Odita (b.1970) in works like Descent (2001) (Figure
129), all press pattern against such new depiction at the end of the century. Pattern
is projected to the graded angles of perspective (in Odita, matched to lateral,
perhaps Kenneth Noland-like stripes, in Morris, to the lines and right angles of
355 On Rae, see Brooks Adams et al, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,
(catalogue) London, 1990, pp. 150-155 and Currentartpics 10. On Oehlen, see Uta Grosenick and
Burkhard Riemenschneider, Art Now, Cologne, 2001, pp. 352-355 and Currentartpics 79.
356 On Marcaccio, see Nancy Princenthal, ‘Fabian Marcaccio: Paintant’s Progress’ in Art in
America, January 2002, pp. 62-65, p.119 and Gregory Volk, ‘Fabian Marcaccio at Gorney Borwn
+ Lee’, (review) in Art in America, April 2000, p. 150.

234
perhaps a Mondrian) to the curves of industrial design (in Nitsche) and to the
recycled floral motifs and ‘layout’ (in Ackermann) exploiting the distinctive
flexibilities of 3-D computer modelling. 357
By contrast, the collapse of pattern deals in the softer, looser, more permeable or
permissible in pattern. It is sampled for just those ambiguous features where sorting
or styling stalls. This is the path less travelled, or perhaps less noticed in ‘Globalist’
abstraction, but is forged with striking enterprise in the work of Jonathan Lasker
(b.1948). Lasker’s work derives from Pattern and Decoration and New Image
Painting, in initial silhouette-like motifs, but print patterns sampled here are in turn
clearly derived from painting and biomorphic abstraction, so that sample is of a
degraded or banal quality to design and affords ambiguity with painting. It is ‘bad’
sampling of ‘bad’ pattern. But while this furthers Pattern and Decoration, pattern
properly has been little furthered. However, around 1985 Lasker introduces a new
economy of means in works such as Spring Training (1985) (Figure 130). Elements
here are still notably perfunctory, a range of casually drawn circles in maroon, set
against areas of coarsely hatched lines of the same colour, both distributed over a
central ochre trapezium surrounded by green. But variety of line between circles and
hatches is not only between smooth and idle against impasto and peremptory, but
more unusually, between outline against ‘fill’.
Where line can now function as outline or ‘fill’, pattern is radically furthered.
Orderings within circles and hatches and across them are central to Spring Training,
but greater linear integration dominates Lasker’s subsequent work. An Object of Love
(1991) (Figure 131) and The Value of Pictures (1993) (Figure 132) stretch line from
outline to ‘fill’, and with width of line to shape or colour, so that line and pattern
collapse in myriad variation. Yet works also maintain a certain dry detachment, less
a matter of the ‘bad’ or bland pattern, than of a necessary distance from standard
patterning. The work has the feeling of a classroom or textbook demonstration in
357 On Ackermann and Morris, see Uta Grosenick and Burkhard Riemenschneider, Art Now,
Cologne, 2002, pp. 12-15, pp. 308-311, respectively and Currentartpics 2 and 28, respectively.
On Nitsche, see Melissa Kuntz, ‘Frank Nitsche at Leo Koenig’ (review) in Art in America, July
2002, pp. 95-96, Anna Moszynska, Eberhard Haverkost, Frank Nitsche, Thomas Scheibitz,
Goldener, der Springer, Das Kalte Herz, (catalogue) London, 2000 and Currentartpics 70. On
Odita, see Gregory Volk, ‘Odili Donald Odita at Florence Lynch ‘Riva’, in Art in America, May
2002, pp. 147-148, Gean Moreno, ‘Odili Donald Odita, Miami Art Museum’ in Flash Art,
October 2002, p. 104 and Currentartpics 14.

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this way, in the simple generic shapes and crisp composition, the even and
continuous line of curves, perhaps sampling felt-tip or ballpoint pen. Work may
seem flippant and ironic, bored or grim, or blithely optimistic in the way that the
confident yet remote lesson can seem. Work thus achieves a furthering of pattern at
the cost of nearing the instructional diagram. 358
Lasker’s lessons in line are applied with equal imagination in the work of L.A-based
Monique Prieto (b.1962) German Günther Förg (b.1952) and Frenchman Bernard
Frize (b.1954) amongst others in the nineties 359 . The later work of Marden reengages
line in the early eighties and increasingly attends to fields of short curves
and angles, culminating in the Cold Mountain series (1988-91). But while Marden’s
work clearly departs from Post-Modernism, it is less clear that it arrives at
‘Globalism’. Cold Mountain 2 (1988-91) (Figure 133) reaches its field through
distinctive brush weight or paint loadings that recall Modernist notational work,
such as that of Tobey or Hartung, yet hardly collapses pattern by this. Where
pattern is challenged is in the relative simplification of field, not quite to a figure
range, but in which something of a map or ‘layout’ emerges. The title encourages
this.
But if Marden’s patterns seem peripheral to ‘Globalist’ abstraction in painting, taken
together with certain surrounding work they assume a more assured furthering. For
example, growing appreciation of contemporary Australian Aboriginal paintings at
this time, such as Ceremonial Ground at Kulkuta (1981) (Figure 134) by Anatjari
Tjanpitjinpa (n.d.a.) or Wakiripiri Jukurrpa (1985) (Figure 135) by Liddy Napanangka
Walker, Topsy Napanangka and Judy Nampijinpa Granites (N.D.A..) with their
modified ‘dreaming’ maps, urges just this. 360 Similarly, the work of Englishwoman
358 On Lasker, see Hans-Michael Herzog (ed.) Jonathan Lasker: paintings 1977-97, Ostfildern-
Ruit/Germany/New York, 1997, Rainer Crone and David Moos, Jonathan Lasker: Telling the
Tales of Painting, Stuttgart, 1993, David Carrier, ‘Painting into Depth: Jonathan Lasker’s Recent
Art’ in The Aesthete in The City; The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in
the 1980s, Philadelphia, 1994, pp. 181-189 and Currentartpics 32.
359 On Frize, see also Currentartpics 62.
360 This kind of contemporary Aboriginal painting is usually taken to commence in the early
seventies, at the desert settlement of Papunya, see for example Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art,
London, Thames and Hudson 1993. However, its wider appreciation occurs in the eighties,
particularly the later eighties, at international surveys such as the controversial Magicians Of The
Earth exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1989, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin. It thus
also represents Globalism in the more usual sense. For interesting discussion of Magicians of the
Earth, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘The Whole Earth Show, an interview with Jean-Hubert

236
Therese Oulton (b. 1953) at this time, such as Deposition (1989) (Figure 136) samples
an accretion of field, although by less linear means, and convincingly maps cellular,
crystalline or even pattern of weaving or crochet. 361 Combined with Lasker, such
work argues for Marden’s work as pattern furthered into a more abstract mapping
or ‘layout’, as something like intuitive assembly from one to multi-directional
reference, and a mapping of the achieved equilibrium, at ‘mountain-sized’
intervals. 362 Finally, while such mapping holds for the biomorphic, it is less
persuasive for stricter geometry. For example the work of Scully such as Remember
(1986) (Figure 137) for all its variation of stripe by colour, length, width, direction,
edge and facture, stubbornly project stripe over ‘layout’ or mapping, and so remain
further pattern rather than furthered, Post-Modernist rather than ‘Globalist’. 363
Since pattern is again traced to ‘layout’ for abstraction, it is a suitable point at which
to consider the other side of the coin. ‘Globalism’ similarly redirects more concrete
depiction. Having sampled prints and the ‘bad’ in Modernism, interest gradually
shifts to styles for depiction more generally and so to their content; to how current
or traditional genres are sampled or extended, not so much by sole or multiple
instances, but rather rare or novel instance. Works look to a wider economy of
pictorial usage, and to its subtle reshaping by painting’s participation. ‘Bad’ or Neo-
Expressionist painting only adds to the impetus as growing acceptance sharpens its
stylistic identity and bluntens its impact. Concrete depiction can hardly return to
Modernism from here, since pattern and print sampling have now permanently
altered the project for depiction and painting. Instead the task for painting becomes
the sorting of pictures by bigger formal bites, so to speak. It essentially reconstructs
genres. The difference now is the radically widened ambit granted genres.
The merging of pattern and picture in repeating pictures and ‘layout’ is an important
feature to ‘Globalist’ painting, but when advocates at this time insist that the
distinction no longer holds or is unimportant, they assert at best a half truth. For
Martin’, in Art in America, May 1989, pp. 150-58, 211 and 213, and Eleanor Heartney, ‘The
Whole Earth Show Part II’, in Art in America, July 1989, pp. 91-96.
361 On Oulton, see Sarak Kent ‘Therese Oulton’ (interview) in Flash Art, April, 1986, pp. 40-44.
362 On Marden, see Klaus Kertess, Brice Marden, paintings and drawings, New York, 1992 and
Currentartpics 18.
363 On Scully, see David Carrier, ‘Colour in the recent Work of Sean Scully’ in The Aesthete in
the City, The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s, Philadelphia,
1994, pp. 245-253.

237
they fail to explain what is now sampled in such works that allows the distinction
between the abstract and the concrete to be thus downplayed or ignored. Actually
pattern and picture no longer matter to painting only when their adherence to
broader categories of pattern or genre becomes paramount as a sample. The sample
is properly to the work of rare instance for such styles, to its conformity to and
confusion of these, to its small but sure contribution to the maintenance of genre. It
is as true to say that painting or printing is no longer quite the issue for depiction
here. Such work is surveyed looking firstly to the convergence of pattern and
‘layout’, secondly to the divergence of ‘bad’ painting and allegory to ‘Globalist’
genres.
Pattern and print are paired with particular piquancy in the pivotal work of Los
Angles-based Lari Pittman (b.1952). Pittman mines a rich seam of ornamental
motifs from décor stencilling to standard icons drawn from common graphics and
signage by the mid eighties. Again such sources also reflect growing computerbased
practice, and exploit deft superimposition or transparency, inversions,
reversals and variation of scale for a given image. Indeed precision and complexity
achieved thus can make the work seem hardly like a painting at all. Moreover, work
tends to flat colours and hard edges, strengthening the sense of a print sample, as in
the slightly later example, Regenerative and Needy (1991) (Figure 138). Yet rampant
variation often threatens to overwhelm underlying pattern or ‘layout’. Work at this
time is typically structured around a distinct if wavering asymmetry, here; the offkilter
black tree trunk flanked by personified houses at its base, and inset black and
white interiors across the top. Linking embellishments, such as the ‘69’- encased
butterflies or flowers, and the white mice on their straight paths, further undermine
and underline teetering symmetry. ‘Layout’ consequently reflects the latitude granted
variation, and its uneasy accommodation. Latitude of variation is often carried
through to themes of sexuality, to physical endurance or distress, and to natural
transformations or cycles. Yet the sense, here and for most ‘Globalist layouts’, is
often of a common and prosaic print style exploited to private or obscure ends, or
the converse. Either way, painting now adds a rare instance to a general or global
style, by testing variation. 364
364 On Pittman, see Howard Fox, (organiser) Lari Pittman (catalogue with essays by Dave Hickey
and Paul Schimmel) Los Angeles, 1996. Paul Bayley, (ed.) Lari Pittman: Paintings 1992-98
(catalogue) Manchester, 1998 and Currentartpics 53.

238
The use of stereotypical silhouettes, such as the mice, cat or tree in the above
example, are prominent in Pittman’s work of the late eighties, and silhouettes are
pursued more exclusively in the nineties, in the work of artists such as Englishman
Gary Hume (b.1962) Lisa Ruyter (b.1968) Kara Walker (b.1969) and German
Thomas Scheibitz (b.1968) 365 . Silhouettes here are less a sample of printing
technique than a shorthand derivation for convenient icons. Tracing a photograph
or standard picture to outline and filled by colour codes for advertising, instruction
or other co-ordinating schemes, is obviously a pervasive practice. Pictures are
streamlined, and such streamlining may be sampled. Where colours and silhouettes
are applied in other schemes and to other objects, such easy icon-making itself is
stretched, so that colours and silhouettes are re-mapped, as they re-map.
Controversial issues or objects are often the occasion of similar re-mapping,
although ‘layout’ and depiction are not always served in this way. The work of
David Wojnarowicz (1954-92) in the mid eighties for example addresses explicit
homoeroticism in works such as Water (1987) (Figure 139) and coupled with themes
of pervasive spawning, imprisonment and destruction, builds a metaphor – on a
‘layout’ – for implicit contagion (this at the height of the AIDS epidemic, which was
to claim the artist). Yet such work may also be censured for a certain ‘literary’ or
illustrational tendency, since style of depiction here never quite focuses on a
distinctive wider practice, (such as silhouettes) but rather is timidly painterly or
weakly print-sourced. Consequently, pictures serve the issue but are not served by it,
and resulting ‘layout’ reflects this weakness. 366 Pressing social issues are more
successfully aligned in later work by artists such as Chicago-based Kerry James
Marshall (b.1955) in The Lost Boys (1993) (Figure 140) and L.A.-based Filipino
Manuel Ocampo (b.1965) in Once Again, First in thee World (1993) (Figure 141). Here
‘layout’, metaphor and allegory are less tied to printing than to the tired emblems
and banners of community activism. Marshall’s work addresses the death of Afro-
American youth through crime (the joyride car and pistol) and police enforcement
(the blue, bullet-blossoming tree) but also makes painting a bigger window for and
365 On Hume, see Currentartpics 59, on Ruyter, Currentartpics 13, on Walker, Currentartpics 64
and on Scheibitz, Currentartpics 70.
366 On Wojnarowicz, see Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, New York/London, 2000,
pp. 459-463.

239
by this lamentation. 367 Likewise, Ocampo’s work deals in conspiracy and colonial
oppression, but in also sampling these debased styles, complete with spurious
ageing and defacement, participates in stretching and subverting a wider practice. 368
‘Globalist layout’ also deals in the overlapping and stretching of comic strip and
painting styles, as in the delirious ‘art-comics’ of west coast artists such as Robert
Williams (b.1943) Gary Panter (b.1950) or Raymond Pettibon (b.1957) – each
happily interchanging publication, exhibition or installation as means as well as
extending matters of text and iconography. Throughout the nineties controversy
tends to become more mixed or obscure as ‘layouts’ project more ambitiously. By
the end of the century ‘Globalist layouts’ range from the flow charts for economic
and political conspiracies by Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) to the psychedelic collages
of Fred Tomaselli (b. 1956) the cartoon-inspired charts and myths for sub-genetic
or sub-atomic events in the work of Mathew Ritchie (b.1964) the more abstract
cartoon figures of Japanese Takashi Murakami (b.1962) or Inka Essenhigh (b.1969)
and even to some of the caprices of L.A.-based Laura Owens (b.1970) 369 . Ritchie’s
work such as Parents and Children (2000) (Figure 142) in fact converges with the
concerns of a Franz Ackermann in its complex geometry and 3-D modelling, as well
as in literal projection to gallery walls for temporary mural or installation works.
Painting here follows not only Le Witt and score or script for painting, but
integration to computer-based design and mapping practices. 370
Looking away from ‘layout’, to the course of the single integral picture, the move
away from ‘bad’ painting and allegory is now tracked to a more general engagement
with genre. As noted, the acceptance and greater adoption of ‘bad’ painting tends to
cancel its effectiveness. A remedy is not to be found in backing further away from
Modernism either, or in looking to a ‘badder’ sample by including more traditional
styles, although this tendency is nonetheless widely pursued in the early eighties. But
367 On Marshall, see Kerry James Marshall et al., Kerry James Marshall, New York, 2000, David
Pagel, ‘Kerry James Marshall’ in 43 rd Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting,
(catalogue) Christopher C. French (ed.) Washington D.C. 1994, pp. 68-9 and Currentartpics 95.
368 On Ocampo, see Pilar Perez et al., Manuel Ocampo – Heridas de LA lengua: selected works,
Santa Monica, 1997 and David Pagel, ‘Manuel Ocampo’ in 43 rd Biennial Exhibition of
Contemporary American Painting, (catalogue) Christopher C. French (ed.) Washington D. C.
1994, pp. 72-3.
369 On Murakami see Currentartpics 49, on Essenhigh, Currentartpics 85.
370 On Ritchie, see Nancy Princenthal, ‘The Laws of Pandemonium’ in Art in America, May,
2001, pp. 144-149 and Currentartpics 19.

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a broader ‘badness’ by this route tends to become too diffuse or elusive and really
amounts to no more than the conservativism described in Chapter Twelve as
‘Interstyle’. However where work focuses on only certain features of continuity or
metonymy for depiction, for example in matters of lighting or weather, elegant
simplification or exaggeration of proportion, even caricature, and significantly draws
upon much older styles, from Romanticism and Neo-Classicism – the result does
not so much avoid conservatism and cliché as exceed them. Works are now hyperclichéd,
or perhaps camp, and sample this blend of object and picture, or genre,
albeit often in a crude or ‘bad’ sorting. Allegory may remain, but is no longer the
focus of sampling. Sample now is of cosy or creepy little pictorial worlds of the
past, and by rank cliché or associated ‘badness’.
Amongst the more concerted efforts in this are the work of the ‘New Image
Glasgow’ painters in Scotland, including Steven Campbell (b. 1953) Ken Currie
(b.1960) Peter Howson (b.1958) and Adrian Wisniewski (b. 1958), the
‘Hypermannerism’ of Italian artists such as Stefano Di Stasio (b. 1948) Ubaldo
Bartolini (b.1944) and Omar Galliani (b.1954) grouped in the book of that title by
Italo Tomassoni from 1986 and the German ‘Berlin-Braunschweig Group’
exhibitions of this time, including Peter Chevalier (b. 1953) Stephanus Heidarker
(b.1959) Herman Albert (b.1937) Andreas Weishaupt (b.1957) and Thomas
Schindler (b.1959). 371 While settings range from the pastoral and idyllic (in the work
of the Italians) to the urban and strife-torn (in the work of the Scots) and persons
depicted range from Neo-Classical models to Romantic grotesque, and broad even
comic stereotypes, works are surprisingly consistent in feel. Stressing ‘genre-ness’
gives them a curious detachment, at once amusing, in treating weighty or difficult
themes in a playful, simplistic manner, yet equally, excluding greater involvement
and perhaps registering an alarming isolation. Indeed, a recurrent persona in such
work is the dreamy, unworldly youth, personifying just this detachment.
Having sampled such cliché, to further the sample or refine genre then risks diluting
effectiveness and lapsing into mediocrity. Because the hyper-cliché is so precarious
371 On New Image Glasgow painting, see Keith Harlty et al., The Vigorous Imagination,
(catalogue) Edinburgh, 1987 and William Hardie, Scottish Painting 1837 to the Present, (2 nd ed.)
London, 1990. On Hypermannerism, see Italo Tomassoni, Hypermannerism (2 nd ed.) Rome,
1992. On Berlin-Braunschweig Group, see Berhard Schulz, ‘The Return of Things’ Flash Art,
May-June 1986, pp. 51-53.

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to maintain in this way; and because ‘genre-ness’ prompts more versions, the style
quickly stalls or stagnates. Such work is often overlooked or dismissed for this
reason. The lesser stereotype or stock setting, pursued for example in the work of
Scotsman Stephan Conroy (b.1964) in the late nineteen eighties and early nineties,
offers only a diminishing return on painting’s genres. 372 By the same token, other
work at this time offers striking variation on person, setting and painting, only to
elude any easy genre rather than fall into too many, such as the work of Hollandbased
South African Marlene Dumas (b.1953) Englishman Tony Bevan (b.1951)
and L.A.-based Kim Dingle (b.1951) 373 . Such work rather constitutes too rare an
instance, and so also remains at arm’s length from ‘Globalism’ and stronger
projection.
But where painting’s genres fail, those of printing and other depiction suggest more
promising avenues. The work of Belgian Luc Tuymans (b.1958) by the late nineteen
eighties proceeds not from the clichés of traditional genres but from a kind of failed
or ‘bad’ photo sampling. Indeed some work can initially seem like a careless or inept
imitation of Richter. But where the looser brushstrokes and drawing of a Tuymans
all but lose any sample of photography (especially in comparison with Richter) other
features emerge. Framing or composition, an oblique or ‘long lens’ projection of
picture plane for such objects and a sharpened tonal contrast survive, but are hardly
more prominent than painting qualities of cursory detail and casual colouring. Also,
a return to a more modest or ‘easel’ scale – a feature of much work of rare instance
in the 90s – serves to distinguish instance. Combined, such qualities in fact now
treat the object with a certain indifference, even contempt, whether the breast
prepared for medical inspection in der diagnostische Blick VIII – the diagnostic view
(1992) (Figure 143) or the poolside greeting in Suspended (1989) (Figure 144). The
object is thus revised slightly, and equally its pictures or genre enlarged by a rare but
valid instance. Painting thus builds or projects to a larger genre. Tuymans’ work
draws on various photographic sources, including film and television in fostering his
louche detachment, even pursues them to pattern or abstraction, but is generally
strongest in his treatment of everyday objects and architecture at this time. 374
372 On Conroy, see Gerard Haggerty, ‘Stephen Conroy’ (review) in Art News, Oct. 1995, p.148,
Natasha Edwards, ‘Stephen Conroy’ (review) in Art Forum, October 1989, pp. 190-191.
373 On Dumas see also Currentartpics 45, on Bevan, Currentartpics 9.
374 On Tuymans, see Ulrich Loock et al., Luc Tuymans, London, 1996 and Currentartpics 43.

242
Similar approaches are later adopted in the work of Elizabeth Peyton (b.1965) and
Karen Kilimnik (b.1962) where the person is more of a priority. Peyton
concentrates on male teenage idols with an appropriately adolescent wavering of
diligence in execution, such as Jarvis (1996) (Figure 145) while Kilimnik tends to
more pre-teen idols, such as ballerinas, but with a similar attention to depiction by
and for adolescent or child 375 . Work accordingly stretches the genre with rare and
more knowing instances. Other approaches to the person at this time combine
more diverse sources and build broader genres. The work of John Currin (b.1962)
begins with simple portraits that recall a passport or formal photograph, but blurs
the format, often quite literally, with simplified and painterly features, rendering
person and picture curiously caricatured, as Mary O’Connel (1989) (Figure 146). Rare
instance here projects the portrait at just that point where photography and painting
are least certain or likely, and participates thus in building a bigger genre. Currin
further dilates portrait and person by drawing upon by-gone fashion photography
and other illustration as well as the gaucherie of the primitive painter, much like
Shaw’s thrift store specimens, in works such as The Never-Ending Story (1993) (Figure
147). Persons and portrait are now poised between the amusing and pathetic, naïve
and sophisticated, clichéd and eccentric, and threaten to diffuse and defuse their
acute sample. Indeed rare instance here grants painting precisely the latitude sought
by but unavailable to works of the hyper-cliché, in the extravagant stereotypes now
augmented by theatrical pose or gesture, dated costume, make up and hairstyle,
clumsy faces and romantic setting. 376 The difference between a Conroy and a Currin
lies less in appetite for parody or pastiche than in willingness to extend genre to
more photographic and mundane practices and to revel in the promiscuity. The
difference between a Tuymans and a Currin, on the other hand, lies less in appetite
for photographic and prosaic practices than in willingness to extend them to further
painting and to revel in parody and pastiche.
Currin’s mixture of sources is similarly found in the work of Lisa Yuskavage
(b.1962) where the child-like, or doll-like persona is wedded to the poses and props
375 On Kilimnik see also Currentartpics 55.
376
On Currin, see Frédéric Paul and Keith Seward, John Currin: Works: 1989-1995,
Limoges/France/New York, 1995, Robert Rosenblum, John Currin, New York, 2003 and
Currentartpics 11.

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of pin-ups and soft porn, as in Faucet (1995) (Figure 148). Here the token role of
one disarms the rigid persona of the other. 377 Similar strategies are explored in the
work of New York-based Hungarian Rita Ackermann (b.1967) such as Now I’m
Gonna Take A Vacation (1994) (Figure 149) Englishwoman Nicky Hoberman
(b.1967) and Robin Lowe (b.1959) amongst others in the mid nineties. 378 The
person depicted as token or doll, often coincides with depiction of the child, in
comics and cartoons, advertising, instruction and entertainment, so that work
applying the token person to sensitive or difficult issues, particularly of sexuality or
violence, runs the double risk of confusing child with token and of trivialising rather
than clarifying issues. Either fault may provoke outrage, but generally the rewards
warrant the risk. The child as token person is pervasive, from counselling in matters
of household hygiene and dietary adequacy, assembling and operating new
equipment, and fictively conducting open hostilities against relentless rivals, forces
of nature or noisy neighbours, we are generally comfortable with a cute little person
of uncertain maturity, frankly improbable proportions and questionable species.
Little wonder the genre prompts curiosity on other issues, comfortably extends to
painting.
But while this genre is widespread, genres in the ‘Globalist’ sense tend to be more
scattered and fleeting. Indeed, the rare instance where effective or successful
necessarily ceases to be quite so rare and so contains an in-built obsolescence. The
‘return to genres’ is thus hardly a return to the stricter or more stable formulations
of the eighteenth century; much less a hierarchy headed by history painting.
‘Globalist’ genres are built upon wider and shifting practices and must settle for a
looser more precarious existence. For example Chinese Socialist Realism provides
an opportunity for works of rare instance, such as those by Wang Ziwei (b.1963) or
Yu Youhan (b.1943) in the early nineties, as a result of political and economic
developments in China leading up to this point, and such instances rapidly exhaust
or transform the genre. It follows that the project of rare instance itself, given
sufficient practice, must in turn bear revision. It would seem to be fated to chase
the diminishing genre with the ‘rarer’ instance. Yet to detect this at the time of
377 On Yuskavage, see Claudia Gould (curator) Lisa Yuskavage, Philadelphia, 2001, Carey
Lovelace, ‘Lisa Yuskavage: Fleshed Out’, in Art in America, July 2001, pp. 80-85 and
Currentartpics 5.
378 On Ackermann, see Anna Burns, ‘Children and Sexuality in the Visual Arts’ in Contemporary
Visual Arts, issue 18, 1998, pp. 38-43.

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writing presents peculiar difficulties, for the later or ‘rarer’ instance may at this point
be indistinguishable from the earlier or ‘too rare’ genre. But since a ‘Globalist’ genre
for the portrait has been traced with some confidence to the token person and
attendant roles, parallels and extensions suggest a starting point for new genres of
landscape and still life.
The token setting or landscape for example arises in models or gardens, centres
mainly on architectural or urban planning and finds more elaborate versions in
computer practice at this time. The work of Germans Dirk Skreber (b.1961) and
Eberhard Haverkost (b.1967) and Dutchwoman Carla Klein (b.1970) towards the
end of the century focus on similar models for urban space and ambiguous scale
with surprising painterly latitude, as in Skreber’s Untitled (beyond Taxes) (1999) (Figure
150) 379 . Such models also lend themselves to more abstract treatments, and
converge with the patterns of 3-D modelling discussed earlier. 380 Tangential to this
architectural landscape is the work of German Neo Rauch (b. 1960) the foremost
artist of The New Leipzig School whose numbers are, significantly, often graduates
of Der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and draw explicitly upon
standard illustration 381 . Rauch’s work at this time, such as Kühlraum (2002) (Figure
151) and Hatz (2002) (Figure 152) takes up themes of costume or uniform, of
collective or corporate activities and implements but continues them to coordinated
livery and décor for surrounding architecture. Work also notably deals in
bizarre production or cultivation, often slipshod or awry, and a ‘layout’ of picture
that extends such failings, as in Tabu (2001) (Figure 153). Yet Rauch’s work is barely
a rare instance of comics or instructional illustration in this, owes perhaps as much
to Kitaj or Ernst, and teeters between rarer genre and too rare instance. 382
Landscape arises differently in the work of London-based Canadian Peter Doig
(b.1959) from the early nineties. Here the genre is the family recreational snapshot,
the casually framed record of ‘The Ski Resort Holiday’, ‘The Sports Stadium
379 On Haverkost see also Currentartpics 30.
380 On Skreber, see Uta Grosenick, Burkhard Riemenschneider, Art Now, Cologne, 2002, pp.
464-67.
381 On The New Leipzig School see Gregory Volk, ’Figuring the New Germany’ in Art in
America, June/July 2005 and related exhibition -
http://www.centralpt.com/pageview.aspx?id=16256.
382 On Rauch, see Alexander Von Gravenstein et al, Neo Rauch (catalogue)
Maastricht/Netherlands/Ostfildern-Ruit/Germany/New York, 2002 and Currentartpics 15.

245
Forecourt’, ‘Fishing on the lake’ and similar occasions. Rare instance is derived from
casual tracings of the projected photograph with surprising washes of pallid but
pristine colour against qualities not unlike those of a Tuymans, in general symmetry
of framing, high contrast tonality and uncertain picture plane projection (or lens
length), as in Telemarker (Pas des Chevres) (1996) (Figure 154). The effect however is
quite the reverse of a Tuymans, in that outline and objects take on a brittle or frail
quality, the picture now literally awash with ‘sympathetic’ colour, and metaphorically
with sentiment. Yet the sentiment is for picture as well as object, or for genre. 383
Less concerned with landscape, but also exploiting photographic genres are works
by Damien Loeb (b.1971) and Delia Brown (b.1966) in the late nineties. Loeb deals
in photomontage of cinematic spectacle and related illustration in works such as
Anything Else (1998) (Figure 155) but genre here is perhaps too obvious or narrow,
or instance not rare enough for the project at this point. In contrast Brown’s
watercolours deal in glamorous parties by swimming pools and in mansions; feature
the costumes and etiquette of the chic or social elite, and to an extent the framing
and lens values of its typical photography. The genre clearly permeates television,
cinema, advertising and gossip columns, yet instance here would seem to struggle
for a firmer sample, since Brown’s drawing has neither the limp tracing of a Doig,
the terse reduction of a Tuymans, nor the deft pastiche of a Currin. Does projection
now allow or refuse such work? Similarly, the work of Englishman Glenn Brown
(b.1966) throughout the nineties ranges across a number of broader genres, not
exclusively photographic, such as science fiction illustration (and remotely a matter
of landscape, perhaps) but here means of painting remains surprisingly close or
common to the genre and as a result instance would seem less rare, or genre less
interesting. Elsewhere in his work, traditional painting styles and works are sampled
with Richter-like soft focus or blurring, in a virtuoso demonstration of technique,
blending painting and photography in a telling rare instance, albeit of obvious
genre 384 . Englishman Richard Patterson (b.1963) adopts a similar strategy at this
time, in ‘layouts’ for, significantly, toy soldiers and urban landscapes.
383 On Doig, see Terry T. Myers et al, Peter Doig blizzard seventy- seven, (catalogue),
Kiel/Nürnberg/London, 1998 and Currentartpics 51.
384 On Glenn Brown see also Currentartpics 37.

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Landscape here is traced back to the person or figure and is an opportunity to
consider further projection for the person or portrait. Works by Englishwomen
Jenny Saville (b. 1970) and New York-based Cecily Brown (b.1969) achieve
prominence at the end of the century and provide telling contrast. Saville’s work is
interesting for the way the work of rare instance now projects back upon painting.
Her monumental studies in nude female obesity stand in stark contrast to the token
and child-like dolls that elsewhere deal in female nudity, and while they share with
more conservative painting, such as that of Lucien Freud (b.1922) an interest in the
extreme specimens of human anatomy, Saville’s work is distinctive for its intimate
or claustrophobic framing of the figure, together with imposing scale and dogged
facture. These qualities now give her painting the quality of a retreat, or denial of
the more social roles of the token or doll-like nude, as well as traditional studies of
character, and project a more extreme privacy, and its attendant anxiety. They
sample a ‘personal space’ genre - a vacuum really – and what can be made of the
naked self there is distressingly, never quite enough. In works such as the towering
Hem (1999) (Figure 156) the woman virtually smothers the picture plane, is caked in
paint, as if in cosmetic, while closed eyes, limp limbs, sundry scars and mutilations
extort an uneasy pathos. Nude and painting in fact now embody and express the
bloated self-indulgence and indolence that ensue in vicious cycle with such massive
insecurity and isolation. It is the flipside to the perky waifs and pro-active roles of a
Yuskavage or Ackermann, and devastates a traditional genre for painting in forging
a new one. 385
By contrast, Cecily Brown’s work does not quite build a new genre, nor invigorate
an old one but rather finds instances of a diminished one. In works such as One
Touch Of Venus (1999) (Figure 157) the abstract and the concrete once more join in
vigorous and intimate contest, but here with heavy hints of torsos, heads and limbs
matched against an impressive array of painting technique, recalling De Kooning,
and assuming an obvious sexual metaphor. Yet maintaining this balance and
avoiding the ever-present biomorphic compromise comes at a cost, of a hectic and
hectoring control. Works thus tend to the fussy and technical, the cautious and thin,
in comparison with the facture of a De Kooning (such as Figure 36) or a Gorky, the
385 On Saville, see Brooks Adams et al, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi
Collection (catalogue) London, 1994, pp. 158-163, Linda Nochlin, ‘Floating in Gender Nirvana’
in Art in America, March, 2000, pp. 94-97 and Currentartpics 23.

247
drawing of a Picasso (such as Figure 15) or Miro (such as Figure 18). Rare instance
here, while more relaxed and gregarious than a Saville, and worked into a tizzy in
ways denied a Saville, does not as yet project as far or well. 386
Given the range of Pop and Photo-realist works devoted to the discrete
arrangement of modest objects, still life finds surprisingly little use in the work of
rare instance. Still lives occur in the work of Tuymans, where they generally sample
the cinematic or photographic close-up in framing, lighting and picture plane
projection and with rare contempt, as discussed. The work of London-based
Canadian Lisa Milroy (b.1959) from the later eighties offers catalogues of objects in
‘layout’, such as Light Bulbs (1987) (Figure 158). Painting here resists both
photographic derivation and greater abstraction, while assembled objects often
wittily recall Minimalist pattern and the earlier still lives of Wayne Thiebaud
(b.1920). 387 The work of Will Cotton (b.1965) toward the end of the nineties
samples a more obvious genre in panoramic studies of molten chocolate and other
confectionary, such as the immense Devil’s Fudge Falls (1999) (Figure 159) recalling
the emphasis on chocolate’s plastic qualities and extreme close-ups often found in
advertising.
This concludes the survey of the work of rare instance and the revival of genre.
There now remains only to briefly consider the period as a whole. A certain mood
or attitude may be discerned for example, at once lighter and more whimsical than
that of Post-Modernism, as works patiently and playfully contribute to ‘Globalist’
projects. Indeed by contrast, Post-Modernist work may seem heavy handed and
obvious to the ‘Globalist’ sensibility, while equally the ‘Globalist’ work may seem
frivolous and academic to the passionate Post-Modernist. Then again the ‘Globalist’
work never quite aspires to the Modernist’s magical and musical extension, nor
encounters the frustration and confusion of the Late Modernist, and while
confident, and to a degree cool, like the Post-Modernist, is much less antagonistic
386 On Brown, see Martin Maloney, ‘Cecily Brown’ (review) in Modern Painters, Summer 1999,
p.98, Odili Donald Odita, ‘Cecily Brown, Goya, Vogue and the Politics of Abstraction’
(interview) in Flash Art, November-December, 2000, pp. 70-74.
387 On Milroy, see Alistair Hicks, New British Art in the Saatchi Collection, London, 1990, pp.
72-79. On Cotton, see Edward Leffingwell, ‘Will Cotton at Mary Boone’, (review) in Art in
America, May 2000, p.149.

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or aggressive to traditions or institutions. For the ‘Globalist’ life lies in the
sensitivity to further institutions.
The chapter began by considering the course of ‘expanded materials’ in the period
and traced how readymade works engage wider institutional co-operation and
reference; give way to the ‘readily-made’, to the sampling of institutional support of
various kinds, and to the seeming convergence between the roles of artist and
curator. It then considered painting for the period along three courses, abstraction,
‘layout’ and more concrete depiction, and how they acquire ‘Globalist’ projects to
wider pattern and genre. This now allows an appreciation of how painting and
‘expanded materials’ complement each other, and constitute a larger project. The
crisis anticipated in the convergence of the roles of curator and artist for identity of
work and in the diminution of genre and instance in depiction importantly shares a
common factor in excessive devotion. Curation and artistry here are only threatened
where focus becomes exclusive. Genre and instance, installation and network,
exhaust themselves only if pursued continuously. Competition between projects
thus allows curator and artist a necessary equilibrium, slows if not stalls convergence
and diminution. This is not to say that ‘Globalism’ is perpetual or impervious to
outside influence, but only that this balance serves to characterise ‘Globalism’ as an
‘open’ style, or in lieu of saying what comes next. This concludes the history of
depiction and painting between 1950 and 2000. In the final chapter a review of
distinctive features and comparison with other versions complete the study. 388
388 Studies in more recent trends and individual styles by the author may be found at
http://currentartpics.blogspot.com .

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Conclusion
The preceding history now affords review and comparison. Contribution to theory
and adherence to Goodman’s irrealism have been assessed in Chapter Ten. Here its
application to art history is considered. Firstly, the application proceeds against
objections by Elkins and Bell that the theory is too difficult, abstruse, glib, suave or
otherwise flawed. It persists against objections by Gombrich and Bell that the
period represents only the failure of depiction, a disillusion for history. It perseveres
against hermeneutic, deconstructionist and post-structuralist criticism that such a
period defies analysis or that such analysis can still be worthwhile. The study finds
to the contrary. A history of depiction and painting based upon modes of
exemplification not only handles the full range of painting for the period and
integrates it closely with other plastic arts, but also delivers more precise analysis of
depictive features and more flexible style sources for group, place and period. The
job can be done, is worth doing and is done by irrealism here.
The method rests upon a theory of depiction and painting that discards absolute
stylistic realism, primacy of intention, and priority of the abstract or concrete.
Method begins from a more comprehensive stylistics and also allows that history
has many right versions, can improve upon some; provide a novel or different
version to others. It does this through matching traditional or established sources to
right stylistics, new sources to traditional stylistics or simply new sources for new
stylistics. Where traditional sources are secured by improved stylistics or traditional
stylistics more accurately aligned with new sources, history is improved. Where new
styles rival old ones or new sources replace old ones, an equally valid or right
interpretation emerges and adds to rather than improves upon versions.
Care taken in matters of theory now rewards history with stricter demarcation and
greater breadth or diversity within periods. But method also promotes a more
adventurous attitude to construction. It accepts that not all lesser styles may be

250
needed or enough for a period; that others may be found or made where stylistic
features for a work or source allow telling distinction, or others omitted where work
or source offers less interest. Here, for example, ‘Overstyle’ ‘Rerealism’ and
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ are introduced as more accurate and useful groupings for
understanding Modernism. More generally, the point is that art history need not
always start from individual works or styles and ascend to larger groupings, but can
equally start from period to detect lesser styles, to prompt research of individual
works and styles. Art history does not ascend to a ‘meta’ level in dealing with
period, is not exclusively or preferably a matter of individual works or styles (unless
under a nominalist construction, of course). 389
But while adventure is encouraged, constraints apply. Only if it maintains the rules
of style, by accurate and consistent reference features for work and of the facts of
source, only where it offers greater construction, makes more sense of surrounding
periods, or thus conforms with more or longer history, only when it gives new
direction to historical inquiry, or focuses attention anew, can art history be thus
extended. So while irrealism here takes a more proactive stance toward style,
reconstruction remains within severe limits. Whether better or different, versions
follow the same rules.
Revision of styles here starts with the troubled notion of abstraction. Depiction as
exemplification of two-dimensionality for a three-dimensional object, firstly clarifies
issues of the picture plane and distinction with pattern. Projection and influence of
style explains the course of ‘a pattern of a picture plane’ (or vice versa). While
abstraction here is held to be full or absolute where it asserts pattern, no one picture
plane or pattern is held to dominate practice for each. On the contrary, abstraction
for depiction arises just as diversity of picture planes allows ‘simultaneous and
successive’ depiction new and greater play, and this synchrony is taken to signal the
start of Modernism. The arrangement more accurately locates abstraction in
depiction, adheres to accepted chronology and identity of works but now allows
abstraction to be seen within a larger framework. The arrangement is better for
389 The positivist zeal that ‘starts’ from particulars, takes the unpublished document or
unrecognised work as primary, encourages the attitude that works precede styles, that the
particulars of time and place come first in advancing art history. But categories or styles do not
take care of themselves; much less accept any and every such detail. There are no works before
or without styles, no art history without stylistics, which is as valid for period as personal style.

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explaining more works more concisely, is different rather than worse for resisting
extension of source, since source rapidly splinters into factors or factions for the
social, psychological, national, political, economic and so forth. To pursue source
thus is the task of a different rather than better history.
So Cubism and Expressionism in this view are not Modernist, nor lead to just
abstraction, as is often supposed, but rather branch to opposing projects or styles,
to ‘Overstyle’ and ‘Rerealism’ and their three-way competition largely measures the
course of Early Modernism. ‘Overstyle’ and ‘Rerealism’ are introduced not as
substitutes for Surrealism and Synthetic Cubism but because they actually pick out
slightly different groups of works, stress differences in picture plane construction
and crucial relations with abstraction. The change of styles also frees member works
from narrower interpretation. Sampling two-dimensionality depends on a
recognised three-dimensionality, and abstraction is often pursued or projected to
sculpture and three-dimensional works by this, and further outward to architecture
and applied design in this period. The shift from Early Modernism to Late
Modernism is marked by a loss of impetus to such projection, and a convergence of
competing styles of depiction around the middle of the century.
Late Modernism is also a matter of competing styles. But now a compound of
abstraction, ‘Overstyle’ and ‘Rerealism’ arises as ‘Reciprocal Depiction’, where the
abstract counterbalances the concrete, material with picture plane and object.
‘Reciprocal Depiction’, while a novel and perhaps clumsy term, nonetheless
identifies qualities to accepted works otherwise ignored or denied. For the history
dedicated to the advance of abstraction, such work is no more than a compromise,
a slide toward the conservative and traditional. Yet this view cannot then explain
why tradition is not more fully embraced, nor Modernism more convincingly
abandoned. The view remains simply insensitive to finer stylistic features and
ultimately robs abstraction of valuable relations. Equally crude is the history that
can only recognise such works in light of later developments, especially Pop Art,
finds much of the work forerunners or pioneers, yet cannot then explain why they
remain tentative, or what it is that prevents them from being more wholeheartedly
Pop Art. Again the view obscures important links and finer distinction, and while it
easily traces roots to Early Modernist collage for example, as often fails to note key

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differences to picture plane scheme and so ultimately robs Pop Art of valuable
relations. ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ may seem to cluster a disparate group of works at
first, but can point more convincingly to stylistic precedent, to related strategies of
‘layout’ ‘traction’ and ‘interruption’, to a formal rigour equal to that of abstraction, a
shared mood or attitude and how they variously arrive at Pop Art and Post-
Modernism. It is a radical proposal, but consistent with treatment of preceding and
subsequent periods.
Against ‘Reciprocal Depiction’, abstraction projects more confidently to greater
symmetry and scale, and distinctions here in value of scale to materials, and of
location of symmetrical axes to key works particularly for New York-based
abstraction, differ from standard accounts, as noted. Against painting and the plastic
arts; works of ‘expanded materials’ extend to time and motion, kinetics and
performance. Competing projects again share a crucial synchrony. Depiction and
pattern are mutually extended in painting, and impetus is carried through to works
of ‘expanded materials’. Yet Late Modernism is a relatively brief period, lasts around
ten years, and is succeeded around 1960 by Post-Modernism. Projects in Late
Modernism do not so much converge or stall in transition as diverge and sprawl.
‘Reciprocal Depiction’ in its Late Modernist form gives way firstly to print sampling
by painting, usually called Pop Art, and here the account draws upon the theory of
painting as the work of sole instance, in re-defining the style. ‘Reciprocal Depiction’
less promptly contracts to a radical ‘badness’ or Neo-Expressionism, and the
sampling of style against allegory.
Greater pattern in abstraction at a certain point reverses its sample; is not so much
by pattern of greater scale and linked materials, but by such properties, of pattern.
Abstraction then enters a Post-Modernist period. Such painting becomes the
striking instance or extension to even the most basic patterns and is generally called
Minimalism. Sampling of motion, duration and performance in works of ‘expanded
materials’ also arises, extends fine art to literature, to script or score for
performance or duration and place, and to other recording practices. It is usually
called Conceptual Art, but the name here is stripped of misleading notions of a
work of pure concept or seeming dematerialisation. It is sensibly redressed by
Goodman’s theory of sampling and a modicum of common sense. Pop Art,

253
Minimalism and Conceptual Art now constitute initial competing projects for Post-
Modernism. The proposed theory of depiction, of exemplification and of painting
as work of sole instance thus allows vital reconstruction of styles and period. 390 If
anything the name for the period is the most disappointing aspect, although at least
points to a more radical juncture than that between Early and Late Modernism. The
name is as often applied to a later period. But Post-Modernism here continues until
the mid eighties when it is succeeded by the last period to the century, now named
‘Globalism’.
The name suggests not only the growing economic integration of the period, but
also an emphasis upon holistic strategies, variously pursued in competing styles. The
transition now offers both greater divergence for works of ‘expanded materials’, and
convergence between pattern, print and depiction in painting. For works of
‘expanded materials’, sampling of performance, literature and other recording, leads
to greater institutional support and ultimately to sampling of institutional prestige.
For abstraction and entrenched pattern, the shift leads from repeating pictures and
even the single motif to ‘layouts’ of printing and more rare or diffuse pattern. Print
sampling by painting on the other hand leads firstly back to ‘traction’, to minor
sampling, either to Neo-Expressionism, ‘Bad’ Painting or New Image Painting. It is
an end to Post-Modernism. Neo-Expressionism then leads to the clichés of Pre-
Modernist traditions or genres, and to genre more widely conceived, to those
depictive worlds shared by both print and painting, or globally.
390 Attention to a single style such as Pop Art has for some time been content with the
iconography and culture of the times rather than a more precise account of stylistic features. For
example Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A continuing history, London, 1990, p. 9, labours under
the definition ‘the use of existing imagery, from mass culture already processed into two
dimensions, preferably borrowed from advertising, photography, comic strips and other mass
media sources’ unable to quite put his finger on print sampling, to see the forest for the trees or to
acknowledge that all depiction uses ‘existing imagery’. As a consequence the book is unable to
quite see either what is central and peripheral to the movement, properly its derivation or relation
to Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Similarly, claims for the start of Post-Modernism with Pop
Art often compound the error. For example in Brandon Taylor, Modernism, post-modernism,
realism: a critical perspective for art, Winchester, 1987, p. 8, the claim is that ‘Andy Warhol
became Post-Modern at the point where he stopped making images about the world and began
making images about images’ Implicit in both views is the idea that there is some more direct
way for depiction to be about the world than ‘existing imagery’ or that ‘existing imagery’ is not
then about the world. This is really to appeal to a naive copying in depiction, thoroughly
discredited since Gombrich, at least. All depiction builds on older versions – is ‘about images’ –
belongs to and builds worlds – is ‘about the world’. Of course Taylor is hardly alone in this glib
view of Post-Modernism, no more than falls in step with Livingstone’s Pop Art. More precisely,
however, Warhol began making paintings about printing, sampled just this difference in
depiction, and with it engaged those objects depicted, their world and ways of depicting, rather
than merely ‘images about images’ or ‘existing imagery’.

254
Interestingly, labels for competing projects in this period fail to gain wider currency.
Where this period is termed Post-Modernism, the more radical print sampling of
say, a Pittman or a Pettibon are often lumped in with Pop Art, or the ‘readilymades’
of a Hirst or Orozco casually ceded to Conceptual Art. But there is little
gained by such attenuation. Equally, claims for a Post-Modernist period at this point
often amount to no more than a declaration of rampant pluralism, or paradoxically,
an end to art history. 391 Obviously the two reinforce one another and discourage
greater discrimination. ‘Globalism’ on the other hand acknowledges only an open
period; one that does not end with the century, but is only measured against
preceding periods and synchrony of projects. Admittedly, the period is at best half a
description by this and theory here offers no direct support for such construction,
but care taken in preceding periods and projects nevertheless carries construction
further than rival versions, points to crucial integration of projects for period, to
distinctions with preceding periods and works, to new distinctions within period.
‘Globalism’ is not just the works labelled Post-Modernism in accounts by Michael
Archer, Mathew Collings, Jonathan Fineberg, Hal Foster, David Hopkins, Edward
Lucie-Smith, Brandon Taylor, or Daniel Wheeler, for example. 392 It differs in both
the variety of work considered and train of development, or in both synchronic and
diachronic changes. It introduces distinctions between the readymade and the
‘readily-made’ for example, as well as between a Pittman and a Marshall, a Lasker
and a Lombardi, a Ritchie and a Marden, a Currin and a Tuymans, a Saville and a
Cecily Brown, and indeed variously between any of the above all in demonstrating
the further reaches of print sampling, genre, ‘layout’ and pattern in ‘Globalism’. 393
But rather than trace realisms between styles, art history here has been content to
391 For strong advocacy of this termination, see Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of
Art. New York/Guildford/Surrey, 1986, and Danto, Encounters And Reflections: Art In The
Historical Present, Berkeley/London, 1986.
392 Archer, Art since 1960, London, 1997, Collings, This is modern art, New York, 2000,
Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, (2 nd ed.) London /New York, 2000, Foster, Return
of the real: the avant-garde at the end of the century, Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1996,
Hopkins, After Modern Art: 1945-2000, Oxford/New York, 2000, Lucie Smith, Artoday, London,
1995, Taylor, Modernism, post-modernism, realism: a critical perspective for art, Winchester,
1987, Taylor, Avant-Garde and after: rethinking art now, New York, 1995, Wheeler, Art Since
Mid Century, New York, 1991.
393 Incidentally, emphasis upon a return to genre in ‘Globalism’ also suggests further research to
the pre-Modernist period here, as the dismantling of genre.

255
demonstrate benefits to historical derivation. At its simplest, it promotes a filing
system. The history organises works and styles often ignored or dismissed along
with regular favourites and so extends sensitivities, builds tolerance and curiosity.
The priority has thus been with construction, with rightness of category, or fit,
before realisms. This is not to say that works and styles included are exhaustive or
the best, only that it provides a history that is right in several ways, better than
some, different to others.
Attention to such systematic rigour inevitably suggests structuralism. The typical
concerns with holism, change and self-regulation to structuralist analysis are indeed
shared with irrealism here. Differences lie in scope allowed historical or diachronic
change as well as reference relations. Reference is not limited to exemplification;
exemplification is not limited to depiction and painting. History here deals only with
some of the range of reference, only for some periods, and only in some of the
ways those periods follow each other. Reference is not locked into just this history.
Standard objections to the rigidity or sterility of structuralism thus do not arise.
Objections to a betrayal of pluralism in supporting a holism of history or reference
are likewise avoided.
But this is only to review the impact of theoretical resources on art history. As
important as assets of clarity, scope, rigour and sensitivity, are advantages gained in
looking beyond art history. Here the argument is obviously and overwhelmingly for
the value of depiction and painting, for their continued vigour in reference. But the
case is not just that depiction and painting remain central to fine arts, on the
contrary, the case is that their contribution is only to be measured against the full
spectrum of arts, that the synchrony - even symbiosis – between arts ensures that
there is no one line of progress, avant-garde or prime plastic art; that multiple
interactions ensure that there are many, if any. Consequently, art history must juggle
too many for progress against too few for persuasion or practice. History holds no
suspicious self-regulation in this regard, only gauges that of reference and concerns
itself with as much as is of interest to the plastic arts at a given point.
As important are links made or found between arts and periods, other practices and
reference. The study points to an appreciation of surrounding practices, not only to

256
curatorial practice and collection, co-operation and co-opting, but also to more and
other ‘Globalisms’ of genre, pattern or publication. It points to the world beyond
the works that help make it. Then again the study points to greater scope for works
and study, and against, for example, prevailing practice of the massive and
misguided survey of contemporary art, not so much to curb mounting curatorial
power as to redirect and disperse its resources. Practices of display clearly have a
part to play in art and its history, but curatorial practice serves neither by relentless
conformity, frequency or expansion. More shows are only to the good so long as
they are of different things in different ways. Some things and ways may even
require fewer shows. But practice here cannot do justice to history or works where
curatorial practice gives priority to ‘expanded materials’ for example, or assumes
that hybrids succeed in competition with single arts, or that history is made only
with recent works. The study in this respect urges that the task of the collector,
curator or critic now lies in reconsidering how, when and where works are shown as
much as what is shown, and that meaning resides as much in such practices as a
narrow and neurotic historicism. In this, the argument is hardly unique perhaps, but
hopefully lends new weight.
An adequate review must also acknowledge certain omissions. Many of these are
registered at suitable points in the study; some find no point before this. The study
has conspicuously avoided social history in advancing routes of reference for
example, and so avoids perhaps ‘too much history’ for its art. But circumstances
and background to sources are more commonly available, so that rather than unduly
extend study in this, study here readily cedes the task to rival versions, to Artoday for
its many subcultures and regional differences, to After Modern Art 1945-2000 for its
ideological, if uneven insights, to Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being for its detail of
personality and lifestyle, to Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art for its patient
catalogue of artist’s interpretations, to Return of the real for sensitivity to
philosophical fashions and post-colonial interests, and Theorizing Modernism, for
psychoanalytic speculations. 394 No art history can do everything, nor need try where
some versions enable or assist others. A more troubling omission concerns
treatment of architecture, sculpture and printing, due both to constraints of space
394 Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, (eds) Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, a
Sourcebook of Artist’s Writings, Berkley/London, 1995, Johanna Drucker, Theorizing
Modernism, Visual Art and the Critical Tradition, New York, 1994.

257
and concentration upon painting. 395 But here the study must be content with
indicating issues of sampling and projection for three-dimensionality and other arts.
Also, what initially seemed a useful contrast or counter to Gombrich’s version of
Modernism, in which architecture and the applied arts influence pattern in
depiction, on reflection, now perhaps overstates the reverse influence, from
depiction and painting to pattern and other arts. A more accurate view allows a twoway
exchange.
A less troubling omission concerns the middle ground or the more conservative in
painting for the period. Such work registers as ‘Interstyle’ in the account of Early
Modernism here, but strictly is less distinguished or indicative of period. Works by
artists such as Frenchmen Henri Matisse (1869-1954) Georges Rouault (1871-1958)
and Balthus, a.k.a. Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908-2001) Russian Chaim
Soutine (1893-1943) Italian Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) Germans Max
Beckmann (1884-1950) and Otto Dix (1891-1969) and comparable figures in the
United States and elsewhere, neither quite remain primitivist or Expressionist,
accept greater abstraction or ‘simultaneous and successive’ depiction. Instead they
pursue variation where it falls between projects, amount to the more traditional in
Modernism, the more Modernist of tradition. In a longer study more would be
made of the way such work teases tradition and period. For example, the middle
ground may sometimes gauge where projects tire or tradition triumphs and in other
ways may offer fresh starting points.
In Late Modernism significantly, the middle ground widens. ‘Reciprocal Depiction’
partially returns to single picture planes and objects against which to sample ‘layout’,
‘traction’ and ‘interruption’. It relies upon tradition in this, but tradition now is not
easily isolated or sampled on these terms, as noted, must contend with a middle
ground and diminishing projection. In fact ‘Reciprocal Depiction’ more easily
allows milder versions, or becomes an ‘Interstyle’, and uncomfortably inflates the
middle ground. Works here range from the lean and linear ‘Miserablism’ of
Frenchmen Bernard Buffet (1928-99) or Francois Gruber (1912-48) to the laboured
plotting of Englishmen Euan Uglow (1932-2000) or Michael Andrews (1928-95) to
395 The author takes up individual sculptors, photographers and Conceptual artists in the blog
Currentartpics.

258
the brittle bodily disproportions of Englishman Lucien Freud (b.1922) which find
echoes in work by Philip Pearlstein (b.1924) and Alfred Leslie (b.1927) to the terse
anecdotes and close-ups of Alex Katz (b.1927) the mythical and literary figures
married to novel gesture and techniques in the work of Leon Golub (b.1922) Irving
Petlin (b.1934) or Australian Sir Sidney Nolan (1917-92) as well as other, again
comparable figures elsewhere. 396
The impact of print sampling and end of period owe something to this diffusion.
Post Modernism in turn, measures ‘Bad’ painting or Neo-Expressionism against just
such compromise, settles for the cusp of Modernism as a starting point. Globalism’s
revival of genre also negotiates a middle ground; must find instance not too rare
and non-traditional and such practice not only revises views of earlier work such as
a Katz or Buffet, but also generates its own milder instances and rarer genres. A
middle ground also arises for abstraction as styles and periods allow greater
differentiation and compromise, and again there are many works and artists typical
of this that a longer study would comfortably accommodate. However, having
indicated enough of how they fit with this history, why such omissions are made,
and having reviewed distinctive features to the history, compared them with rival
versions, noted further advantages and insights, a conclusion now awaits only the
reader’s judgement.
396 For interesting revision of such work see Storr, Modern art despite modernism, New York,
2000.

259
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