Form and Theory: Meyer Schapiro's: Theory and Philosophy of Art Paul Mattick The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 55, No. 1. (Winter, 1997), pp. 16-18. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28199724%2955%3A1%3C16%3AFATMST%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism is currently published by The American Society for Aesthetics.
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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Paul Mattick Form and Theory: Meyer Schapiro's Theory and Philosophy of Art Despite what readers may expect from the title of the fourth volume of his selected papers, Meyer Schapiro does not present us with a "theory and philosophy of art."' We can understand why from his responses to the theories of others. In his classic essay, "Style," Schapiro observes that "the theoreticians" of stylistic development "have had relatively little influence on investigation of special problems, perhaps because they have provided no adequate bridge from the model to the unique historical style and its varied developments" (p. 74). This is the substance of the critique of Freud in "Freud and Leonardo: An Art Historical Study": "Freud's theory provides no bridge from the infantile experience and the mechanisms of psychic development to the style of Leonardo's art" ( p. 175). Schapiro's objection, made in "The Still Life as a Personal Object," to Heidegger's use of a van Gogh painting of shoes to illustrate his philosophical conceptions likewise stresses the gap between theory and the specificity of the object. Heidegger's concept of the metaphysical power of art remains here a theoretical idea. ... In his account of the picture he has overlooked the personal and physiognomic in the shoes that made them so ... absorbing a subject for the artist (not to speak of the intimate connection with the specific tones, forms, and brush-made surface of the picture as a painted work). (p. 139)
A theory of art, as Schapiro conceives it, would be a general explanation of how artworks have meaning. This would ultimately require, as he points out in "Style," a "unified theory of the processes of social life in which the practical means of life as well as emotional behavior are comprised" (p. 100). This we do not have, and perhaps could not have, given the range of phenomena, and the complex relations between them, evoked by such a conception. In its place, Schapiro speaks (in "On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content") of a mode of "critical seeing," which, "aware of the incompleteness of perception, is explorative and dwells on details as well as on the large aspects that we call the whole" (p. 49).
An example may be taken from Schapiro's analysis of CCzanne's The Bather, published in a 1952 picture book: This upper body is ascetic, angular, strictly symmetrical, and relatively flat; the lower body is more powerful, athletic, fleshy, modeled, and in motion-an open asymmetrical form. Two opposed themes are joined in one body, and this opposition appears also in the character of the sky and earth, one vaporous, the other more stable and solid. The drama of the self, the antagonism of the passions and the contemplative mind, of activity and the isolated passive self, are projected here.2
Note the ease with which Schapiro moves from such categories as "angular" and "flat" to "ascetic," from the structure of the composition to "the drama of the self." The danger with this sort of writing is idiosyncrasy (though this has its uses too) and arbitrariness. What controls it here is Schapiro's concern to be true to the evidence of the picture. The drama of the self emerges at the end of a description that has begun with the bather "completely absorbed in himself." Yet Schapiro is careful to say that the "complex quality of feeling" contained in the painting "is not easy to describe." The explication must be attempted, though, because CCzanne's picture, whose drawing was once a formal revelation, is not "a 'pure form,' an 'abstract construction."' Form involves meaning; the tracing of that meaning is the point of the analysis. Schapiro is not invoking some correspondence of "form" and "content," like the writers who find in form, as Schapiro puts it in the "Style" essay, "the objective vehicle of the subject matter or of its governing idea." First of all, as he observes, "The relationship of content and style is more complex than appears in this theory" (p. 83). Christian content was represented for centuries in the style of pagan art, while the Gothic style was applied indiscriminately to religious and secular works. Rethinking "content" as Weltanschauung does not help much, according to Schapiro. Leaving aside the difficulty of defining world views, "the content of a work of art often belongs to another region of experience than the one in which both the period style and the dominant mode of thinking have been formed" ( p. 85).
Symposium: Meyer Schapiro Mattick, Form and Theory Schapiro makes these points in a writing style so reasonable and grounded in examples that it is easy to miss what a break with convention he accomplishes-not so much with "formalism" as with the conception of "form," which has been central to art history and criticism since the nineteenth century as the "visual" or "aesthetic" aspect of art. A central difficulty with this conception, as David Summers has suggested, lies in the typical exclusion from "the visual" both of subject matter, filed under "content" though it typically is literally something seen, and of the work's relations to its spatial, social, and ideological contextse3Summers suggests an alternative approach to artworks that does not depend on "form" as a category of arrangement of elements (however defined) but begins with a description of as many aspects of a work as seem useful, from medium and size through subject matter to details of facture, and proceeds through an investigation of the work's production to the study of its uses. For anyone attracted by such an approach, Schapiro's article "Field and Vehicle in ImageSigns" must be of particular interest. His theme here is "the non-mimetic elements of the imagesign" (p. I), the very material of "form." Beginning with the rectangular field that we have come to take for granted, he discusses such matters as the frame around a picture; the differences between upper and lower, left and right areas of the field; size of image and sizes of its elements; and "the image-substance of inked or painted lines and spots" (p. 26). Schapiro follows the workings of convention in representation that allow elements nonmimetic in themselves (like the cross-hatching that refers to shadow) to function representationally in relation to other signs. He extends this account to nonrepresentational pictures, where "the elements applied in a non-mimetic, uninterpreted whole retain many of the qualities and formal relationships of the preceding mimetic art" (p. 31). This does not mean, however, a separation of form from content; instead, Schapiro has taken pains (notably in a brilliant essay on Mondrian4) to work out ways in which form signifies without representing. The possibility for this development can be seen already in the production of meaning by nonmimetic aspects of representational pictures. With respect to the last he demonstrates
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that "Distinctive for the picture-sign ... is the pervasiveness of the semantic function" (p. 27). Some signs draw on bodily experience to signify: thus, the qualities of upper and lower in the image field "are probably connected with our posture and relation to gravity and perhaps reinforced by our visual experience of earth and sky" (p. 12).A complex case, combining historical elements with relatively constant perceptual structures, is that of the Renaissance introduction of perspective, in contrast to the system of using relative sizes of depicted items to signify different degrees of importance, as when a king or a god towers over the other characters in a scene. The older form, while hardly given by nature, need not be taken to be a pure convention, Schapiro remarks with characteristic care: "The sizes of things in a picture express a conception that requires no knowledge of a rule for its understanding" and that is present in language in the metaphorical use of such terms as "greater" or "higher" (p. 23). At any rate, this method of indicating hierarchy is incompatible with perspective, which imposes a uniform scale on the magnitudes of depicted objects and people. Christ in the background will be smaller than soldiers in the foreground. Perspective representation, too, though conventional in the sense that it had to be invented, "is readily understood by the untrained spectator since it rests on the same cues that he responds to in dealing with his everyday visual world" (p. 26). The formal change draws on extra-artistic experience to accomplish change in meaning. To paint a religious picture with perspective is to figure God within the natural world of human experience, thus to embody a conception of reality in the observable character of the artwork itself. In such conceptions Schapiro's thinking is very close to his friend Nelson Goodman's characterization of art in terms of the "repleteness" of symbols, the fact that any of the physical features of an object can be relevant to its meaning (in Schapiro's words, "the pervasiveness of the semantic function").S Goodman and Schapiro share as well the related idea of "exemplification" (though Schapiro does not use the term) as a mode of reference, by which the elements of an artwork may be understood to refer to their own properties as categories, and through them to the chains of meanings these categories inv01ve.~One great merit of this concept is its rev-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism elation of a central semiotic means of nonrepresentational art, which clarifies how form can be, as Clive Bell put it, significant without invoking a mysterious world of meaning distinct from that to which we appeal in extra-aesthetic speech. It is this which allows Schapiro both to accept the idea of a strictly nonmimetic art and to insist that "there is no 'pure art,' unconditioned by experience; all fantasy and formal construction, even the random scribbling of the hand, are shaped by experience and by nonaesthetic concerns."7 On the other hand, Schapiro's questioning of the role of convention in the analysis of size difference and perspective as modes of pictorial organization might well be aimed at Goodman's theory of symbols, which insists on their (historically constrained) conventionality. Goodman shares with Freud and Heidegger an insufficient modulation of theory to do justice to the material reality of art, in his case due to what seems a wish to explain all of the mechanism of meaning in terms of a relatively small set of concepts. In Schapiro's eyes, the fact that artworks are made and received by people with complex bodily, psychological, social, and historical existences, which allows form to carry and produce manifold meaning, rules out such compact theorizing and requires that their understanding be "a collective and cooperative seeing," welcoming "comparison of different perceptions and judgments" (p. 49). This need not open the way to eclecticism; Schapiro takes for granted the virtues of empirical adequacy and conceptual consistency. A related matter is the question of Schapiro's Marxism. Certainly his political commitments altered during his life, and his art-critical writings reflect the changing times. But it bears remembering that Marx was the first to declare himself, to Engels, "not a MarxistH-not, that is, the representative of a general theory applicable to all subject matters. It was Marx's opinion, indeed, that such a theory of social life could only state "a few very simple characteristics, which
In parare hammered out into flat tautologie~."~ ticular, Marx also wrote, "to examine the connection between spiritual production and material production it is above all necessary to grasp the latter itself not as a general category but in definite historical form."9 Such a conception of theorizing is unlike the philosophical visions of a Freud or a Heidegger (and where Goodman departs from it, he violates his own constructive nominalism). It suits a subject like the uses of "form" we have come to identify as art. Those engaged in the vast project of studying this subject still have much to learn from Meyer Schapiro's work. PAUL MATTICK
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1. Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, Selected Papers, vol. 4 (New York: George Braziller, 1994). The essays discussed here, unless otherwise specified, are in this collection; citations will be given in parentheses in the text. 2. Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cizanne (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1952), p. 14. 3. See David Summers, "'Form,' Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description," Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 372-406. 4. See "Mondrian: Order and Randomness in Abstract Painting," in Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Selected Papers, vol. 2 (New York: George Braziller, 1978). 5. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), pp. 229 ff. 6. See ibid., pp. 52 ff. 7. Meyer Schapiro, "Nature of Abstract Art," in Modern Art, p. 196. 8. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 86. 9. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), p. 276. For a discussion, see my Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science (Armonk, NY: M . E. Sharpe, 1986), especially chap. 5.
