RECONNAISSANCE À
WOLLHEIM
Richard
Wollheim: 1923-2003
An essay in
tribute by M. Stone-Richards
R.B.Kitaj
Richard Wollheim-Study for Three Philosophers (detail) 1976
Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd
To me, then, it
is as though my body consists of nought but ciphers which give me
the key to everything; or as if we could enter into a new and hopeful
relationship with the whole of existence if only we began to think
with the heart.
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
"The Letter of Lord Chandos"
Le seul paradis
c'est le paradis perdu.
- Marcel Proust
Socialist. Aesthete.
We can scarce bear that our loves, our various and varying loves, should
not be able, always and fully, to tolerate each other - and so it is
that the child continues to live with the adult - and yet, such is the
demand placed upon any self, any being that would aspire to wholeness
as a person. Hilary Robinson, the aesthete of economically modest background,
is the means by which Henry James, in The Princess Casamassima,
dramatised such claims upon wholeness: if, at one point, the point of
acculturation, of social acceptance and passage into the privilege of
ease, art is adornment, soon, the space of breathing provided by ease,
makes of art an attainment and one that is irreversible, and being so
its claims upon oneself intransigent. How, then, must the aesthete
Hilary Robinson - since he must he must - reconcile the attainment of
beauty and its claims upon full consciousness with the social, ethical
and political claims of conscience, equally intransigent, and, unlike
the ease of art, without the auroras of seductions? As is well known,
the dilemmas, feints, velleities and losses entailed in the tensions
lead the anarchist and aesthete that was Hilary Robinson to self-slaughter
- but the tensions dramatised in James' novel, published in 1886 - year
of Symbolism, vers libre, anarchist attentats - have never
gone away, indeed, they are the politico-existential core of modernist
and avant-garde sensibility, wheter in an Eliot or a Debord.
It is unlikely
that the claims of "art for art's sake" - let us say, as outlined
in the preface to $Mademoiselle de Maupin - are redeemable, unlikely,
that is, because its language, or more specifically, its idiom,
has long since acquired the fragrance, the essence of period flavour,
and the stories through which it might be evoked no longer command the
attention. The Dandy has made something of a return, but one cannot
imagine that Baudelaire, still less Brummell or the fastidious Pater,
would recognise any of these $revendications - and no genetic testing
has yet been devised for affairs of the spirit; and though aestheticism,
too, has undergone some re-habilitation in recent times, one cannot
avoid the sensation that it is, as with so much else in what is fondly
called $the art-world, something of a ready-to-wear kind.
The French language
has two forms for the English word power: pouvoir - let that
be brute power - and puissance - let this be more than influence,
yet no where near the urgency of power, in the way in which once upon
a time one might have have spoken of a puissant sovereign. The philosopher
Richard Wollheim, who died at dawn in his London home on 4 November
2003, is amongst those whose power had nothing whatsoever to do with
the politics of the art-world, and everything to do with presence, elegance,
insight and the experience of truth - indeed, with love, the only means
by which criticism of art can exist - and all, strangely, even at times,
disconcertingly, conveyed in the manners of imperturbability.
To have met him,
even only once as I had the good fortune with my former wife and our
elder daughter Sophie-Thérèse joining in at our Chicago
home in May 2003, is to realise that Wollheim's was the manner of thought
and superb conversation - fortunately or no, good conversation is not
democratic - and in this he resembled his friend and mentor the late
Isaiah Berlin. The ideal was never writing - the use of numbered sections
or paragraphs in his books is a way of not imposing specious unity,
and nearly all is books grew out of lectures - for the ideal was of
conversation, all the while recognising a place for writing as meditative
practice (and surely it is this that is captured in his wife Mary Day's
portrait of him at work?). It is an ideal, a pose, even, that allows
for the balance of seriousness and play, cutting wit and necessary distance:
the reality of this ideal made Wollheim, like Berlin, utterly beyond
the dangers of provincial Englishness, and open as only a cosmopolitain
can be.
The seriousness
of art in his life and thinking, following on from his mentor Adrian
Stokes, could hardly be said to be "typically English" - here
one is reminded of how Kenneth Clark, an admirer of the earliest Stokes,
dropped him after Stokes had discovered Melanie Klein not only as his
analyst but also for his art criticism - and yet everything about the
manner bespoke a very particular generation and class of Englishman
for whom questions of justice, power and art were never negligible.
(Amongst the continued damage done by the temporary triumph of Stalinist
Communism - which André Breton so brilliantly described as a
form of moral extermination - is the continued difficulty of
hearing this form of socialism.)
At the centre of
his thinking throughout his life - and here I would include his early
study of F.H. Bradley (1959), a figure of more than passing interest
to T.S. Eliot and Adrian Stokes - were questions concerning the nature,
extent and power of artistic $experience in the inner life. As a disciple
of Adrian Stokes and Melanie Klein, the term $inner life was not only
in part synonym for the older Romantic imagination, but was the
means by which, through the larger architecture of psycho-analysis,
the study of art could be retrieved from an aetiolated aestheticism
and a descriptively impoverished professional philosophy of art and
placed at the heart of understanding human cognition, motivation and
value, and in so doing recover the radical (psychological and epistemological)
claims of nineteenth-century aestheticism. (It is this that differentiates
Wollheim from such respected predecessors such as R.G. Collingwood and
Suzanne K. Langer.) Where many of the dominant philosophers of his generation
- I do not include here the incomparable Stuart Hampshire or the late
Bernard Williams - studied the philosophy of mind either through science
or neo-Wittgensteinian language-games, all the better to emphasise the
sociality of behaviour - for there is nothing hidden, no innerness -
Wollheim, drawing upon Klein and Stokes (from his 1969 book $Art and
Its Objects to his Mellon Lectures Painting as an Art, 1987) studied
the art-object as a way of addressing the question of what it means
to know another mind, and he did so by subtly adapting and extending
for philosophy of mind the mechanisms of introjection and projection
as not only psychological but social because historical structures in
the development and growth of human identity and modes of relating to
a distinctively human environment.
From this Wollheim
could emphasise, with Merleau-Ponty with whom his work is in fundamental
agreement, the central rôle of intention broadly conceived (what
Merleau-Ponty called operant rather than act intentionality) to encompass
desires, wishes, feelings, etc. in the process of mark-making by the
artist and the consonant, but not identical, capacity to recognise,
see-in the marks made significance.
There are, I think,
two central aspects of what Wollheim called complex perception involved
in artistic experience: first, and in this he follows Stokes, that the
canvas - and painting, it has to be accepted, was Wollheim's model of
art - functions as a body: Stokes would say that "behind"
the canvas is an imago, hence, for Wollheim as well as Stokes, all art,
including abstraction, is an art of embodiment; second, and this aspect
of Wollheim's theory of art is underappreciated even by those who work
with Wollheim's conception of the internal spectator, that the artist
is not only the first viewer of a work, but must necessarily adopt two
different and distinct postures in the creation of the work,
namely as maker and as viewer. (No doubt one could if
one wished address this in terms of the performative.) This entails
a certain but necessary imperception on the part of the artist and means,
furthermore, that the artist performs a role comparable to that of any
viewer - indeed, is it not obvious that artists sit and stare longer
at their works than most viewers could conceive? - and thereby the artist's
own relation to the created work poses for the maker - "For she
was the maker of the song she sang" - the same claims of knowledge
or ignorance as that to be found with any viewer of the work - "Whose
spirit is this? we said." This means of addressing the question
of the emergence and definition of a work, which is materially comparable
to the emergence and coming into definition of an emotion, eschews the
central fear of much contemporary art-talk, namely, the so-called intentional
fallacy and the correlative fear of the artist's point of view.
One might, then,
say of a Wollheimian account of artistic experience - by which
I mean much more and something else than a theory of art whose technical
concern is but to clear the ground - that it identifies a certain kind
of object capable of bearing sustained and inter-subjective acts of
attention; it is an object whose modes of depiction - textured mark-making
on a flat surface - are distinctive but not unique to it, hence, in
his appreciation of De Kooning in Painting as an Art (1987),
Wollheim is able to see-in the work the re-activation and embodiment
of primitive actions of infantile experience: sucking, excreting, wetting,
gouging, etc; it is both a material object and an object-medium of phantasy;
the possible richness of such an object is implicitly linked to the
possible richness of an interior life, a life whose richness is in part
historical,and it must indentify a particular kind of experience, one
marked by passivity - there is indeed, as Wollheim said, a question
of passivity of the interior life. Though worked out in relation
to painting such a conception of artistic experience is clearly not
limited to painting and can - and should - be extended to other media
(say, the performance work of Marina Abramovic, certain of the films
of Chantal Akerman, the installation work of Susan Hiller, or the pottery
and installation of Edmund de Waal).
Clearly such an
account is expressivist, concerned with the movement and economy of
affect - Wollheim has long refuted Gombrich's conventionalism and had
no sympathy for semiotic accounts which are but variant forms of conventionalism
which presuppose what needs to be explained, namely, the power of art,
and all the more so if the aim is to expose the ideological dimension
of art, for it is still to be understood why something so fragile should
bear such weight, all the more so after repeated exposures. There can
be no doubt that a socially impoverished existence - violent, mean,
ungenerous in every way - would not be compatible with the conditions
required for the appreciation of the art admired by Wollheim: above
all Poussin, Bellini, Manet, Hofmann - though this is not quite the
Eden of Auden's "Vespers" where it is written that "In
my Eden a person who dislikes Bellini has the good manners not to get
born" - but Wollheim's bravery, his courage - and I shall never
forget the cataleptic force with which this realisation struck and disoriented
me - is the recognition that there is no logical connexion between a
given art and a given politics.
I recall reading
André Breton, the magnificent Breton of the mid-1930s when the
fundamental principles and insights of Surrealism are being organised
and understood as capable of intense philosophical range, asking, as
a way of recognising, one infers, that Surrealism may well be a victim
of its own success, that there be established - $it would be desirable,
he says - a very precise line of demarcation between what is and is
not surréaliste. $$There then ensues a long paragraph where Breton
wonders what signs, tickets, $marks there might be to indicate not merely
that such and such an object is surréaliste, a mark inimitable
and indelible but, even more tellingly, that it is the product of
a surréaliste state of mind. Breton's eventual realisation
is almost Wittgensteinian: of course there is no (Cartesian) distinctive
external sign that would irrefragably demarcate an object and correlative
state of mind as surréaliste. Instead, there is a way of being,
of living - a form of life - that is capable of being surréaliste
and in the affective economy of which certain objects - works of art
or no - fulfill and play certain rôles. It might even be said
that in his own way - and here Breton and Surrealism stand in for the
profoundest aspect of avant-garde sensibility - Breton and the ablest
of his generation from Bataille to Blanchot discover something that
Wollheim and his peers, in part under the influence of Isaiah Berlin
and in decidely less agonistic terms, came to realise: to seek any political
function for art as art is one with totalitarianism. Practise politics
because one is a citizen, the artist knows no more than any one else
given sufficient leisure and means; seek justice since injustice is
manifestly ugly and destructive of the person.
What, in the diction
of Continental thought would be referred to as aporias (ontological,
epistemological and otherwise), in the Anglo-American tradition of Wollheim,
Stanley Cavell (and here I would inlcude Martha Nussbaum whose reading
of James impressed Wollheim) would simply be a recognition of the non-foundationalist
nature of all thought. (The ironic Hume who de-constructed the concept
of causality before returning to his game of billiards is the pre-figured
hero, here - something with which Jean Wahl and Ferdinand Alquié,
teachers of Gilles Deleuze, would agree - as well as the author, in
Wollheim's view, of the finest essay on art in English letters.) Cavell's
account of scepticism in art and modern thought certainly recovers some
of the agonism of Continental philosophy, whilst Wollheim may be seen,
in a profound sense as Aristotelian - hence the balance, the poise -
in that he accepts the regressive and recursive nature of all thinking,
but he also compreheds, relatedly, that there is a distinctive form
of knowledge in emotional experience - Aristotle being the basis of
all cognitive accounts of the emotions - of which art becomes a public
type. Aestheticism is but the historico-psychological recognition of
this mode of thinking in a period of political and social transformation;
prior to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries it went under various
guises of stoicism - as even the slightest acquaintance with Pater's
Marius would show.
Adrian Stokes Still
Life: Last Eleven (no.7) 1972
oil on canvas, 14 x 18 inches
Collection Ann Stokes Angus
I am still coming
to terms with Wollheim's last book On the Emotions (1999) and
so cannot yet say whether it fulfills the promise of what is implied
in such beautiful essays from The Thread of Life (1984) as "From
Voices to Values: The Growth of the Moral Sense," "Cutting
the Thread: Death, Madness, and the Loss of Friendship" (after
reading which, at the time of a sustained study of Artaud's portraiture,
Artaud's experience took on for me a new depth and relief), and "The
Good Self and the Bad Self: The Moral Psychology of British Idealism
and the English School of Psychoanalysis Compared" from The
Mind and Its Depths (1993), in other words, a genetic, which is
to say, historical account of moral sensibility and imagination, a non-Kantian
exposition, to be sure, that is, that can account for human responsibility
and responsiveness as constitutive possibilities of what it is to be
a person without, however, falling into prescriptionism. Once more -
and here the comparison to be pursued would be with Bernard Williams'
Shame and Necessity (1993) - artistic experience becomes the
model and mediation, as though after the growth of creativity crystallising
into an art-object capable of generating and supporting insight, it
is as though presented with a gift one can refuse it. (At the limit,
for Wollheim, one sees a work of art as one sees a person, namely, as
an end and not a means.) That is the playfulness - or wantonness of
the matter.
When there is talk
of ethics and aesthetics being one - as was the case in the absolutist
Wittgenstein of the Tractatus period - it is not in terms of
values, that this should be understood, but in terms of the play of
imagination. For here is Wollheim's greatness - his discomfiture - where,
in a profound sense, his sensibility rejoins the Continental tradition,
where, though an aesthete, he avoids the banalities of preciosity, for
Wollheim takes it as a "general truth about morality, that it cannot
be demarcated from nonmorality, along with what I take to be its two
consequences - the complexity of moral reasoning and the pathological
aspect of morality." (Richard Wollheim, responding to Nussbaum's
reading of James, in "Flawed Crystals: James's The Golden Bowl
and the Plausibility of Literature as Moral Philosophy," New
Literary History, vol. 15, no.1, Autumn 1983, p.190). This is, of
course, Klein - and even Bion and Frances Tustin - but substitute "politics"
for "morality" and the full force of the claim - and insight
- is ineluctable: the pathological aspect of politics is precisely what
has driven the generation of the inter-war years down to the their philosophical
heirs through the line of Bataille. - But no, I should not wish to make
Wollheim one such - closer to home, Bernard Williams has explored such
questions in Shame and Necessity whilst Stuart Hampshire has
written $Justice is Conflict (2000). Wollheim was the heir of Hume and
he preferred $that mode of scepticism. I recall when I picked up my
copy of On the Emotions being both thrilled and not at all surprised:
it was the fulfillment of a life which, having abandoned pacifism and
risked itself, became centred on the things that matter: love, friendship,
art and social justice, as would be ethically required to be finely
aware and richly responsible. It was a life well lived.
Richard Arthur Wollheim, b. May 1923, London and died London, 4
November 2003, was educated at Westminster School and Bailliol College,
Oxford (History and Philosophy, Politics and Economic). After serving
as a Captain in the British Army - and briefly held as a prisoner of
war in France - from 1949 he taught as a lecturer and then as the Grote
Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and of Logic at the University College,
London until 1982 when he joined the department of philosophy at Columbia
University leaving in 1985 to join the department of philosophy at Berkeley.
From 1996 he split his time between Berkeley and Davis, with many visiting
positions around the world, always finding the time to live part of
the year in the United States and part of the year in London. He was
the author of many books, beginning with a study of F.H. Bradley in
1959, one novel, A Family Romance (1969), many studies on Freud:
A Collection of Critical Essays (1974), Sigmund Freud (1981),
Freud (1991) and innumerable essays in the philosophy of mind:
On Art and the Mind (1974), The Thread of Life (1984),
The Mind and Its Depths (1993) and, his last book, On the
Emotions (1999). He edited an important anthology that was influential
in introducing Adrian Stokes to a wider audience, The Image in Form:
Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes (1972). He was also the author
of two influential books on art and aesthetics, Art and Its Objects
(1969, with six supplementary essays, 1980) and, from his Andrew
Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington (1984) published
as Painting as an Art 1987. In addition Wollheim published essays
on contemporary art in many journals throughout his life - in 1965 coining
the term minimal art content which would morph into Minimalism - but
most recently and fully in the London-based Modern Painters.
Michael STONE-RICHARDS
is Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature
at Stonehill College. He has published widely in French and English
on Stokes, Hofmann, Picasso and the intellectual history of avant-garde
thought. He is presently working on issues in contemporary art of time,
aggression and affect.
