Elkins why are our pictures puzzles

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Save for Later. View all copies of this book. Shipping: Free Within U. About this title Synopsis: With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. I always strive to achieve best customer satisfaction and have always described book accurately.

I got lot of Out of Print and Rare books in my store and still adding lot of books. An interesting point of entry is provided by the everyday objects that have always been present in pictures. If this were a seventeenth-century text, the mention of paintings of tables, walls, and windows might conjure what are now called genre paintings, or perhaps rudimentary exercises in perspective.

To an audience of contemporary art historians, those universal objects have full bibliographies, and call to mind involved discussions of representation, realism, and pictorial space. Vasari is full of praise for well-painted streets, arcades, wells, towers, windows, chairs, and beds. In the twentieth century that practice is nearly extinct among art historians and critics, having been overtaken by more self-reflective and metaphorical observations.

Our aversion to mere description, or to the apparently simpleminded praise of illusion, shows itself in the unexpectedly large bibliographies that have grown up around some everyday objects. I do so to hint at the nature of their complexity: they have become dense with metaphorical meaning, even though very little has been said about what would once have been taken as their most obvious attractions—their technique or their powers of illusion.

Instead they have focused yet more attention on the mirror, making the painting into a central instance of what W. The picture became a special object of attention as soon as it was possible to see it as a scaffolding for analytic, spatial, epistemological, and perspectival paradoxes. Like mirrors, open doors seemed self-explanatory to generations of writers before the twentieth century. In the earlier literature the Golden Gate, the portals of heaven, and the inviting doors of Dutch interiors were among the few instances that occasioned comment.

The painting presents its figures as if they were in a large loggia, open on one side to a balcony, which in turn leads downward to a garden, and then up a few steps to a parapet.

In itself the arrangement is inviting and spatially clear. Of these rudiments of painting, perspective has by far the largest bibliography, partly because the same kinds of argument are made repeatedly. Since the fifteenth century, writers have been impelled to prove perspective, or to reduce it to first principles of geometry or optics.

The attempts continue, and in the last half-century they have grown steadily more complex, involving physiological optics, the neurobiology of perception, and sociology as well as geometry. It is a large subject, and The Poetics of Perspective is about the obsessive search for origins and proofs, and the delight in metaphorics, which continue to lead us away from the Renaissance interest in the techniques themselves.

That way of putting the question is very close to my purpose in this book, and I will return to his answers in the Envoi. I am not parading these readings of windows, tables, walls, mirrors, doors, checkerboard pavements, and shoes as if they were inane or inherently wrongheaded.

On the contrary, they are the shape of pictures as we understand them today. Any account of these objects that is unaware of the contours of the scholarship will be unable to find serious readers, and accounts that receive the most attention are likely to be those that carry the metaphorical and interdisciplinary meanings forward rather than tearing them down or returning to talk about illusion. In the end the very notion of forming a judgment against contemporary art history is incoherent, because it would entail taking some earlier literature as the standard.

The impossibility of any such willed anachronism has been forcefully argued many times. When we begin to look beyond what the statistics can reveal, we come to this kind of complexity, and to the strange tendency of art historical accounts to become unmanageably intricate no matter what they are arguing.

Our writing is extravagant, ruleless, and often fantastical where earlier work was restrained and decorous. We write intensively, with an aversion for plain meanings, technical mastery, and simple illusion; we are attracted to metaphors, and especially ones loaned by other disciplines; we love whatever can be made conceptually intricate. But eventually the blackout approaches, and engulfs the work—unless, that is, historians continue to write forcibly about works they consider important.

Complexity would be an especially powerful method for ensuring notice: the more meanings a work can be shown to harbor, the less likely it can be ignored in future scholarship. Even the exponential increase in writing might be accounted for by such a model, since the twentieth century is often spoken of as a time when historical continuity is especially threatened. Like the four previous explanations, this one has a measure of truth. I find the shortcomings of this fifth explanation derive mostly from the difference between the kind of eloquent writing that can propel a work into public view, and the inbred complexity that typifies the literature on objects such as doors and mirrors.

Only a few texts are both complex and eloquent, both ambiguous and impassioned. The writing on doors and mirrors suggests that often enough historians are interested in the arguments themselves, sometimes even more than the works. Do they really stand out above his paintings of beds and potatoes? HOW WILD WE ARE I have been looking at art history from a distant vantage, keeping away from the individual arguments and even from the content of contemporary writing, in order to suggest that some of our most important writing may be different in kind from what has gone before.

The quality of that difference is not easy to pin down; but it is not impossible, either. The first—logical convolution—is a property of argument itself: our reasons are never monotonic; rather they are heavily qualified, hedged and abetted, divided and subdivided. There is something more than untiring energy and enthusiasm in the historians I have just named: there is often enough a dedication that borders on fervor, and a palpable concentrated force of intellection.

These four traits are a good starting place for a description of current complexity, and it is possible to add several more. Contemporary art historians tend not to care for pictures with common themes, readily apparent or systematic symbolic programs, ordinary scenes and objects, or familiar stories—precisely the things that satisfied Baroque and Enlightenment viewers. We tend to be fascinated with the first instance of a given symbol or narrative, and we are attracted by oddities, mistakes, idiosyncrasies, anticipations, provincialisms, and unaccountable departures from the norm.

We love the dissolution of ideas, the deliquescence of categories, the ruin of canons. Conversely, we are less intrigued by the rote application of a symbol or a narrative device, and we are especially jaded by artists who are indifferent to the symbolic and narrative complexities of their craft. A hapax or hypax is a fascinating obscurity, a sudden failure of meaning, a lacuna, a stubborn darkness that calls out to be explained.

The same can be said of visual narratives, the stock-in-trade of premodern painting. For contemporary scholarship, the best narratives are tangled, incomplete, or arcane. Severe disruptions of iconographic conventions, as in surrealist paintings, attract some of the densest commentary; and conversely, docile repetitions of commonplace stories repel our attention, even if they take place in pictures that might be compelling for other reasons.

All this happens, or seems to happen, within the pictures themselves, as if we are merely discovering strange properties that had been overlooked or underinterpreted. But it also happens—or seems to happen—within theory, since contemporary visual theory is also historically anomalous in its intricacy. In a more rapid fashion any number of art historical texts find themselves drawn toward instances of reflexivity and self- reflexivity in painting.

Complexity can happen with or without it; and often enough complex argument is the soil from which self-awareness grows, rather than the other way around. What important art historical text of the last several decades is not of this kind? It is persuasive in thirty pages, but a gloss could easily run to three or four times that length. In each case the paintings are ready-made for intellectual and aesthetic interrogation: they are already almost advertisements for philosophic debate.

The works I have been naming are ambitious projects, very different from the simple things Vasari finds to say about Leonardo and Masaccio.

Vasari has time for any diversion; Fried has time for none. Yet it would be too quick to say that Vasari is simpleminded: this is not so much a claim about complexity as about a certain kind of complexity, and a show of complexity: the texts by Steinberg, Schmarsow, and Fried tend to possess overtly rational arguments and to prominently display their reasoning.

The antecedents, evidence, criteria, and conclusions are all anatomized in the texts themselves, so that readers can participate in the construction of argument—and presumably be better armed to engage in productive critiques. In contrast to a writer like Vasari, such texts are written under high pressure, so that claims and concepts jostle one another for breathing room.

Vasari is relaxed and expansive, and the complexity of the Lives of the Artists comes from sources other than connected argument. Why are our accounts of pictures intellectual games, instead of for example occasions for praise, wonder, and admiration? And can we say why Vasari did not experience pictures as intellectual challenges or philosophic dilemmas? I do not think we can, though it may be possible to describe why it is that we have no way to explain why Vasari did not see pictures as puzzles: it would be because our sense of pictures blinds us to other ways of experiencing them.

Certainly, if argument itself is at stake, the texts will be both longer and more dense. No problem that is visible to the writer will be allowed to pass by unexamined—no allusion, no nuance, no potential solecism will be permitted on the page without its cushioning introduction.

We watch our arguments as they unfold, and we move more warily, as if citing sources were like stepping over land mines. Everything is written out, nothing is merely cited. Ideally, our discursive rigor reaches even into footnotes and end matter. The long argumentative footnotes, excurses, and appendices in texts by Steinberg and Fried show the effects of the imperative that everything should be written out. Writing for him must have been as easy as ripping napkins, as John Berryman once said of Mozart.

Why do we think it is necessary to diligently construct as many qualifications and alternate meanings as occur to us? Vigilance, after all, does not entail prolixity. We not only spin out our arguments at length, we also write about the spinning. In other disciplines such things may go without saying. Perhaps there are two issues here, each linked to the other: if we could explain why we find it necessary to spell everything out, then we might also gain some insight into why Vasari did not think that he had to spell everything out.

To a substantial degree the new intensive writing is concentrated on a relatively small number of artworks. Something about those works, it appears, is conducive to specifically intellectual argument: they seem to invite, imply, or support the kinds of questions that depend on philosophical, anthropological, geometrical, political, and historiographic ideas to take examples from the literature on mirrors, doors, floors, and shoes —and more, they seem to demand extended argument, leading to spirals of ascending conceptual difficulty.

In the twentieth century, a picture of great interest tends to be difficult in ways that pictures rarely seemed to be, and conversely, pictures that are somewhat less engaging may appear so because they cannot engage the philosophic questions raised by the more central artworks.

It can be quite difficult to construct plausible art historical narratives around the religious narratives, landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes that constitute the vast majority of all marketable pictures. They are not mysterious, ambiguous or difficult, and even when they are works by accomplished artists—since I am not suggesting it is necessary to find something to say about every indifferent picture—they may not seem interesting.

Often the only comments that come to mind are stray thoughts about influence, since most minor paintings appear at first as works influenced by painters taken to be more interesting.

Plate 8 is a typical instance, taken nearly at random from a collection of catalogues from the s. Woods are back of the farmhouse, to right, and at left before it stretch wide green fields to further woods. Behind a fence at left a few small trees and a haystack. Pictures like this one fail on each of my four criteria of analytic complexity. It is not logically involved; in fact there is little point in talking about pictorial logic in an obviously informal farmyard scene.

If it follows pictorial rules, they are the rules of the picturesque, as it was developed at the turn of the nineteenth century and developed through mid-century: the slightly off-center composition, the objects half-obscured behind one another, the disheveled trees, the swampy pond, the bright hazy springtime sun, the scattered birds, the old fence, and even the haystack are all staffage that can be found in any number of picturesque scenes.

The problem for art history is that the uses of previous paintings and engravings is entirely obvious, and requires no professional attention.

He tended to paint simple views of the far corners and borders of empty fields, and the backs of lots where woods encroach on fallow land. Another painting, Gray December, is glossed in a catalogue as follows: Brownish fields with boulders and stacked logs, brightened by a gleaming pool and the white trunk of a birch; golden saplings border a hazy blue distance, partly screening a light wintry sky.

Signed and dated Painting like this is uninvolved with logic, and it offers little purchase for an historian intent on locating intellectual content. Because Crane was born in , the particular devices he uses here could be found in academic and popular illustrations starting in the s: the ducks and apple blossoms, for example show up in numerous popular magazines as well as in Salon paintings.

He merely uses them—a practice that makes him invisible to most art history. Nor would a polymathic critique have much to say here, since there is no need to invoke contemporaneous science, politics, or literature, beyond the relatively easy project of situating Crane among many other painters who retreated from each of those sources in order to spend their time immersed in a nature they took to be largely unreflective.

It is not that contemporary art historians might not sometimes enjoy such a state of mind: but the discipline of art history is geared toward intellectual challenges, and this—or so it appears—is not one of them. Its simplicity, nonchalance, disconnection from avant-garde work, lack of narrative, lack of interesting symbolic program, and lack of engagement with gender or social issues, all conspire to make it anathema to the discipline.

At the most, the painting might be of passing interest as an example of larger phenomena—say, the continuation of conservative academic painting into the twentieth century—but an art historian would be hard pressed to find an excuse to publish an essay on Springtime. We have little to say about painters such as Bruce Crane.

We prefer pictures that are analytically complex, conceptually challenging, full of symbols, hidden intentions, coded meanings. Our pictures play the game of painting with a full deck: they engage the issues of their day and push them forward, and they do so in concerted bursts of energy.

By comparison Crane is lazy and semi-retired. At the same time, I think we are largely unaware of this bias. The great majority of historians, I think, decline to engage the question in any extended fashion. If contemporary writing and visual theory are so fraught, then pictures must share the properties that the theories explain.

But this may be an insecure inference. If writing is an answer, then there must be a prior question, and it must seem to be posed by the pictures themselves. Hence the questions I want to put to the discipline: Why do pictures urge us to be so excessive?

What is it about pictures that makes us respond at such length, with such energy, and wit, and hysterical exactitude? What impels our spiraling complexity? What are pictures, that they drive us to such distraction? First on the list would probably be paradoxes.

Perhaps, then, something about pictures seems paradoxical, and art historical writing responds to that intuition in a hopeless attempt to salvage uncontradictory meaning.

In that model, art history would be like the philosophies of complementarity and indeterminacy that have arisen in the wake of the generative paradoxes of modern physics and mathematics: that is, art history would be an extended attempt to reframe discourse in the face of apparently intractable paradoxes. Another kind of problem that has generated huge and intricate critical literature is the perception that thinking has reached a critical impasse or dead end.

When it looks as though a subject is exhausted, and there is nothing further to say, a field may suddenly explode in a proliferation of ideas—a change in the conversation, as Richard Rorty says.

In such cases the profusion of writing is brought about more by an intense claustrophobia or boredom than by a single logical knot. Wittgenstein did something of the sort when he began to see the flaws in his early Tractatus, and the same might be said of the change that has taken place in biology from empirical and morphological inquiries to genetic and systematic ones.

Each historical moment produced surges of writing, replacing steady-state literature with flourishing growth. Here too there may be parallels in art history. Before the First World War, style analysis and connoisseurship were already experienced as limiting and unfruitful strategies, and between the wars they gave way to the social and iconographic readings that still proliferate today.

Impasses are too generic, and their synonyms too flexible, to say much about the particulars of historical responses to pictures. To my mind these scientific, logical, and philosophic parallels are suggestive but unfruitful. Happily there is another model that is much closer to pictures—so close, in fact, that it risks appearing as a reduction of pictures rather than a metaphor for them— and that is the puzzle.

In naming puzzles and in particular, picture or jigsaw puzzles as an optimal analogy I am aiming principally to be literal as possible about how meaning is experienced, and in that respect jigsaw puzzles are an enticingly close match, almost a copy, of assumptions that drive twentieth-century writing about pictures. For one thing, jigsaw or picture puzzles are put together piece by piece, beginning with small passages and working up to the whole picture. In the same way, art historians tend to work on parts of pictures, assembling meanings one by one, in such a fashion that it can seem the interpretation will be complete when each symbolic form—each piece of the puzzle— finds its place in the overall shape of the picture.

The first pieces often seem to link up by luck, and only later on does it become possible to get the hang of the puzzle—or the painting—and to see some of the principles of its organization. It does not matter for this model how the pieces correspond to passages in the paintings.

In iconographic research it may happen that a painting seems to come apart along the lines of its painted figures and symbols; but I intend this as a very general model, since it applies to any reading that understands a picture as a structure, something with internal differences that demand separate acts of attention.

And for the same reason, the model has no purchase when a picture is understood as an indissoluble whole. Such accounts are not common in art history, but they do happen; some of T. How to solve picture puzzles 47 Picture puzzles are also appropriate models because they can be completely assembled: the pleasure in completing a puzzle is to see every piece in its proper place, and to see how they form a single continuous unity.

That, I think, is the great unspoken desire in art historical interpretation: to be able to do justice to a picture, to say—at least for a certain audience, and in a certain context—what it means, to bring its essential significance onto the page intact and whole. No one ever claims as much, or even believes they have achieved it: but the idea is there, impelling the dogged gathering of scattered meanings.

In this model, ultimately a picture would be structurally equal to the sum of its meanings, just as a picture puzzle is physical sum of its pieces. The picture puzzle is a structural metaphor, but it expands into the psychology of process and the limits of self-awareness. A puzzle entices its would-be solver into a state of concentrated attention, exerts a particular pull on the imagination, and often demands a tiring intensity of thought.

The difference between an ekphrasis by Vasari and an analysis by Steinberg exemplifies the kind of ratiocinative distance I have in mind: both texts may be mesmerizing and evocative in their different ways, but I need a pencil in hand to follow what Steinberg has to say. We puzzle when we look, and we write in the same entranced, slightly anxious, and concentrated mood that we also fall into when we solve puzzles. The puzzle model also breaks its structuralist mold in the classical manner of poststructuralism, by raising the question of self-awareness.

With enough experience in puzzle-solving, it becomes impossible not to reflect on the limits of self-reflexivity. A mind that works on puzzles, and also works on its own working as any strategist will , is going to encounter the question of motivation. What is the purpose of completing a picture puzzle, if it is apparent from the beginning that the full puzzle is contained in the box?

The answer is in the pleasure of the construction—but how can that pleasure not be modified by the growing awareness that the process can only lead to its own repetition? The picture was once complete before it was cut in the press; it is complete at the moment it is solved; and it will be complete many more times in the future. Serious puzzle aficionados also send defective puzzles to restorers, and have the missing pieces fabricated in imitation of lost originals.

Where, then, is the puzzle-solver in the puzzle? What is the pleasure of pressing pieces together, and watching for perfect fits? What is the pleasure of watching as incomprehensible fragments of the image slowly accumulate into figures and faces?

Why does the pleasure continue, and not grow weaker with the awareness of its obliviousness? And why, finally, will some people give up picture puzzles, while others keep at them year after year?

These are questions that strike at the center of the discipline, since they address the day-to-day attractions of puzzling out paintings. It seems to me that the picture-puzzle metaphor can go a good way toward explaining some of the principal interpretive strategies in current art history, including not only the old-fashioned ones such as iconography which might seem most appropriate , but also the newest and most experimental, such as those driven by deconstruction, new historicism, and reader- response theory.

In what follows, then, I will set out five kinds of puzzles, always noticing both the picture-puzzle versions and their ostensibly more intellectual cousins in art history. The structure of the meanings would then be geometrically similar to the structure of the painting: each would consist of roughly equivalent, roughly uniform, strictly interlocking pieces. An interpretation would be a model of the original, related to it by simple laws of scale and detail: to each sign in the picture would correspond a meaning, and the meanings would join up like the signs themselves, leaving no gaps.

Even in picture puzzles that only happens in the simplest of cases. We do not need to be told why this is impossible: philosophically it is nearly incoherent to say that meanings dovetail just like cutouts, that they are evenly distributed like puzzle pieces, or that they are more or less the same size and shape like puzzle pieces.

At the very least, no historian would claim that such a reading exists for any painting. Still, art historians often behave as if they were at work on just such a puzzle. Keith Moxey notes as much in relation to Hieronymus Bosch in the epigraph to this chapter , and other historians explicitly endorse the idea that perfecting an interpretation is like solving a picture puzzle.

Occasionally an historian will even picture the entire of art history as a puzzle, as W. That is the moment, known to all fans of picture puzzles, when it seems as if the best thing to do is glue the puzzle down onto a board, varnish it, frame it, and put it on the wall as if it were a normal picture. But by the nature of picture puzzles, the snaking lines between the pieces only remind viewers of how different a puzzle is from the picture itself, and how difficult—and ultimately, how tedious—it must have been to construct the puzzle plate Often enough, art historians build meanings according to informal rules of connectedness and coherence that are not at all incommensurate with this picture-puzzle model, but they terminate analyses without saying how they know they have found and assembled all the pieces.

But there are many more potentially symbolic forms, down to the smallest namable tree, shaped cloud, generic house, and pebble. Many early jigsaw puzzles were not made of interlocking pieces, and in the period between and puzzles were especially precarious—the slightest shock, and all the pieces would slide out of place.

The same general arrangement is still used in paint-by-number sets, where the pieces correspond with some accuracy to the shapes of brushstrokes.

This is another way of dividing a picture, one that does not follow represented shapes as much as formal structure. On occasion, such a division might make sense for an art historical account: but the great majority of accounts could not find meanings for pieces like these. At the same time, much art historical writing would be hard-pressed to say why images do not divide into ever-smaller pieces. If so, Settis may not be naming a piece of the puzzle at all—but there is no discussion of such possibilities.

They are given, and they only need to be put together. Plate 12 Occasionally historians chafe when they recognize a puzzle, even though they do not subscribe to alternate models of meaning. The strategy is the heart of art historical practice: the overwhelming majority of texts offer to explain particular aspects of artworks, and when they are not accompanied by methodological reflection it is natural to assume that they might ideally be built into fuller accounts.

When an essay does not mention an example of full interpretation, or make a gesture in that direction, it may imply that a full assembly of meanings is impossible and therefore that the picture-puzzle metaphor is misguided ; but it may just as well imply that the author aspires to build an entire puzzle, but is constrained by time, space, ability, or the accidents of historical preservation.

Art historians are tolerant of incomplete interpretations because complete ones are so hard to come by; but we may not always remember that incomplete interpretations take a large measure of their persuasiveness from the unspoken assumption that they are parts of a larger whole. If an historian presents a partial interpretation and then also muses on the possibility that it may not fit into any larger sense of the picture, the interpretation suddenly loses its purchase and begins to seem a little wrong.

But for the most part writers avoid implying that larger solutions may not exist. Optimism or at least agnosticism about full solutions ensures that the picture-puzzle model is fully intact. Even if a completed picture puzzle does not appear in the text at hand, there are examples in other texts, and it is still a good idea to work on picture puzzles. The two kinds of incomplete interpretations they are my second and third kinds, after completed puzzles have important epistemological differences.

If a picture puzzle has been in use for a number of years, it will almost certainly have lost pieces, and so the project of assembling it cannot be aimed at creating a complete picture.

The purpose of assembling such a puzzle is really to exhaust the available pieces, and not to recreate an entire image. An historian who sets out incomplete readings in this sense is claiming, in effect, that no complete reading is possible.

Historians who write incomplete interpretations while also implying that full solutions exist are in a different situation. Their project is like working on a new picture puzzle, where all the pieces are available, but giving up partway through. In one case there is no such thing as a complete puzzle; in the other, the complete puzzle is uninteresting or unattainable.

Among the many puzzle-like games that have appeared in the last century and a half, an apposite example for the first case are the aptitude tests in the form of puzzles, manufactured around the time of the First World War. A typical art historical essay poses and solves a problem, or produces an ambiguity where none had been detected, or adds complexity to meanings that had, in retrospect, been too simple. The fundamental model for the academic paper or monograph is the presentation of a puzzle, followed by either a new solution, a meditation on its complexity, or an argument for its fundamental insolubility.