Salutations, bibliophiles.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.William writes the fascinating
, where he writes about art, aesthetics, and artistic interpretation.In his wide-ranging pieces, William’s knowledge of art and criticism really comes through, and that’s why it’s such a delight to host this piece about the book that first drew him into the subject. Enjoy!
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I come from a very large and very artsy family. My mother studied art in college; my father is an avid music connoisseur; and my siblings and I have all, to varying degrees, involved ourselves in the worlds of music, literature, painting, and movies. We mostly relate to these disciplines as critics—discussing and analyzing works of art with the gleeful obsessiveness of amateurs or dilletantes. It’s not surprising, then, that as I entered adulthood, I became more and more interested in understanding how paintings were able to communicate. What was it about pictures—these silent, wordless rectangles of colors and shapes—that gave us such profound feelings of happiness, joy, sadness, or unease? I wanted to understand the answers to these questions, and also to understand why modern art was sometimes so difficult to comprehend. Had the artists forgotten how to speak? Or was there something else going on?
During my teen years I frequently hung out at a secondhand store called The Antiquarium—one of those sprawling, disordered, beautifully unpredictable places that flourished before eBay snuffed the life out of the antiques trade. It occupied three floors of an old brick building in downtown Omaha; the basement was a music shop, the ground floor was a bookstore, and there were more books and an art gallery upstairs. The building continued even higher, turning into studio apartments once the books stopped, but I never went up there. It was at The Antiquarium’s gallery that I first encountered modern art unmediated by anyone else’s opinions. The creations of local artists would be displayed with little or no accompanying commentary, and although I found these artworks curious and interesting I was often puzzled by them. Sometimes it seemed the artists were trying to make a statement with their art; other times it seemed as though they were speaking an arcane language which I didn’t know how to learn.
It was at The Antiquarium that I found James Elkins’ book Why Are our Pictures Puzzles? The subtitle— “On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity”—immediately resonated with me. What really got me hooked, though, were the illustrations. Flipping through the book at the shop I found there were very few sections which don’t have at least one picture for every six or eight pages of text. Sometimes there are two or three images next to each other—and what a variety of images there are! All manner of paintings, from the Renaissance to the present day, are illustrated, as well as diagrams and overlays explaining various theorists’ ideas about pictures. Flipping through the book was like looking at National Geographic; each image was very intriguing, and they enticed me to read the text to find out what Elkins had to say about them.
I bought the book and read it right away. It was the first work of academic art criticism I had ever read. Reading it, I felt like I finally had an answer to some of the problems that had been nagging at me regarding why pictures could be so hard to understand, and I also felt like I was prepared to read other works, by other scholars, and ready to engage intellectually with the entire discipline of art history and aesthetic criticism. Elkins gave me the assurance that art history was not a closed shop; his careful explication of his own discipline was certainly meant to be understood by amateurs like myself.
From my own experience, I could see the truth of the book’s fundamental thesis: pictures used to be easy to understand, and landscapes, portraits, or religious scenes would offer themselves up to the viewer forthrightly, with no bluster, obscurity, or obtuseness. What changed? Not only in the Antiquarium gallery, but throughout the world, there were paintings of drips and splotches of color which bore inexplicable titles like “Red No. 1” or “Untitled (Black Square)”; there were bizarrely distorted and mutilated forms and shapes which bore no relation to the real world. What was happening? When my family talked about modern art, we were usually quite dismissive. Was not the purpose of art to communicate or to be beautiful? If so, why all these strange modern pictures? As far as my family was concerned, good paintings had ceased to be made once the Impressionists were done.
But Elkins seemed to offer an explanation for what was happening. In his telling the fault was not in the paintings but in the critical reaction to them. Not only the modern pictures, but the old ones as well, were being treated as puzzles to be solved, as riddles to be interpreted, and even the smallest details of the paintings were scrutinized for clues to the painting’s meaning. With shock I read in Elkins that some of the paintings of the Italian Renaissance had incited the writing of multiple books and hundreds of scholarly articles. According to Elkins, the discourse surrounding the careers of some artists had gotten so big that it would not be possible for even a specialist to comprehend it. It seemed the critics and historians themselves were having a moment of crisis, in which they ceased to be able to account for pictures anymore and had lost control of their own discipline.
Right away, I felt drawn into the discussion. Elkins writes like a well-read friend who wants to share his knowledge: he doesn’t fall into any of the clichés of academic writing, his prose is very clear and lucid, and his descriptions and explanations of pictures are authoritative without being condescending or preachy. He is not afraid to critique his own discipline—he calls the convoluted theories of some critics “hallucinations” and he describes the entire bloated mess of academic art criticism as an open wound which can’t heal because the scab is continually being picked off. After reading all this, my immediate reaction was “I feel like I understand pictures rather well; why don’t I start writing?” It seemed to me that the professionals were at an impasse. Maybe an outsider was needed to provide a fresh perspective.
Perhaps it is egotistical to think that I, an unlearned amateur, can write about art and aesthetic theory with all the sureness of the professionals and experts. But Elkins’ unique stance of skepticism toward the critical establishment is what inspired me to write about art with equal sureness of my own approach. I still believe that understanding how pictures communicate is of prime importance; people sometimes have a hard time appreciating and accepting modern art, but there is often so much of value just under the surface. If I can accomplish anything with my own writing, it will be to help people see the richness that can be found even in difficult art of the modern era.
It has been nearly twenty years since I first read Elkins’ book. Since then, I have not limited myself to thinking and writing about pictures; the same aesthetic principles can be applied to music and films, architecture and poetry, and every other kind of human artistic expression. Art does not have to be a puzzle. It can be understood by non-specialists like myself, and it was Elkins’ excellent and wonderful Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? that first gave me the confidence to believe that to be so.
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I can understand where you are coming from more than I can say.
I spent much of my youth sitting in Galleries trying to absorb all the detail of renaissance and romantic paintings; then got mesmerized by the expressionists and the surrealists.
but I never thought that I have to understand them, or god forbid, even verbalize that understanding. At some point I got into a debate with a prominent Hungarian painter that was printed in an émigré magazine in Paris. maybe I should translate and post it here on my Substack
I really enjoyed this article. I particularly liked ‘Art does not have to be a puzzle. It can be understood by non-specialists like myself’