conclusion

Chapter 2
This chapter has defined theory and made a case for its
importance in contemporary art his tory. The definition ofthe- The analysis of
ory proposed here is utilitarian, a working definition that can form, symbol, and sign
help you engage with these ideas. When writing this chapter, I
looked at a number of theory handbooks and websites to see
how they defined theory (I'U admit that I was struggling to
come up with a clear, concise definition). Interestingly
enough, a number of sources I consulted plunged right into
the discussion of theory without defining it first, as ifassum-
ing readers knew this already. That didn't seem right to me,
The heart of this chapter deals with iconography, along with
and so in this chapter I've tried to supplya basic discussion of
iconology-a closely associated theory of interpretation-
theory as a common starting point for all readers. Where you,
and semiotics. Both iconography and semiotics address the
the readers, will end up is, ofcourse, an open question.
meaning of works of art: what they mean and how they pro-
du ce those meanings. Within the discipline, art historians
A place to start developed iconography as a distinctive mode ofinquiry first,
The guides listed below will help you get a broad understanding ofthe history of critical but semiotics is actually older as a philosophy of meaning: its
theory as it relates to the arts and culture. The readers provide helpful overviews of
. roots go back to ancient times.
movements and authors, but, more importantly, they also include excerpts of primary
theoretical texts. As an introduction to these ideas, PU briefly review some
Guides theories of formalism, an approach to works of art that
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983, and emphasizes the viewer's engagementwith their physical and
Minneapolis: UniversityofMinnesota Press, 1996; 2nd edition, 1996. visual characteristics, rather than contextual analysis or the
Harris, Jonathan. The New Art History: ACriticallntroduction. london and New Vork:
Routledge, 2001. search for meaning. Keep in mind that the methodology of
Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary ofCriticalTheory. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000, formal analysis, as you practice it in your art-history courses,
and New Vork: Penguin, 2002. is distinct from the theory of formalism. The chapter closes
Sturken, Marita and Usa Cartwright. Practices oflooking: An Introduction to Visual Culture.
Oxford and New Vork: Oxford University Press, 2001. with a short discussion of "word and image" and the some-
Tyson, lois. Critical Theory Today: AUser-Friendly Guide. New Vork: Garland, 1999. times knotty relationship between images and texts in art
Readers historical practice.
Fernie, Eric, ed. Art History and Its Methods: ACritical Anthology. london: Phaidon, 1995.
Hall, Stuart and Jessica Evans, eds. Visual Culture: The Reader. london: Sage, 1999. Formalism in art history
Mirzoe, Nicholas, ed. The Visual Culture Reader. london and New Vork: Routledge, 1998. Art is signjficant diformity.
Preziosi, Donald, ed. The Art ofArt History: ACritical Anthology. Oxford and New Vork:
Oxford University Press, 1998. Roger Fry quoted in Virginia Woolf,
Richter, David H., ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2nd Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)
edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1998.
Formalists argue that all issues of context or meaning must be set
aside in favor ofa pure and direct engagement with the work of art.
The artwork should be enjoyed far its formal qualities (e.g.

16/ CHAPTER 1 THINKING ABOUTTHEORY

17/ CHAPTER 2 THE ANALYSIS OF FORM, SYMBOL, AND SIGN
 composltJ.on, material, shape, line, color) rather than its he organized an influential exhibition of Post-Impressionist
representation of a figure, story, nature, or idea. Although this painting in England, and his catalogue essay explains his vision:
perspective runs counter to the direction ofmuch contemporary art "These artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale
history, the idea that worles of art have a unique presence, and reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new
impact on us, is hard to dismiss. 1 In fact, it's an idea with a lang and definite reaIity. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create
history: the German philosoph er Immanuel Kant (17 2 4-18°4), for form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life ... In fact,
example, famously argued for the special character of aesthetic theyaim not at illusion but at reality." 5
experience. He wrote that the poet seeks "to go beyond the limits of Henri Focillon (I881-1943), an art historian who worked in
experience and to present them to sense with a completeness of France and the United States, developed a widely debated theory of
which there is no example in nature" for "as their proper office, formalism; the 1992 reprint of one ofhis most famaus works, The
[the arts] enliven the mind by opening Out to it the prospect into an Llfe ofForms in Art (1934), has renewed interestin his work. Focillon
illimitable field ofkindred representations."2 saw artistic farms as living entities that evolved and changed aver
In art history, the theories of form and style proposed by the time according to the nature of their materials and their spatial
Swiss scholar Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) were highly influen- setting. He argued that political, social, and economic conditions
tial during the first two-thirds ofthe twentieth century. Writing at a were largely irrelevant in determining artistic form, and, like Fry,
time when sciences and social sciences were uncovering seemingly he emphasized the importance of the viewer's physical con-
immutable laws of nature and human behavior, Wölfflin argued frontation with the work ofart. In TheArt ofthe West in the MiddleAges
that a similarly unchanging principle governed artistic style: the (I938), Focillon traced the development of Romanesque and
cyclical repetition ofearly, classic, and baroque phases. He likened Gothic style in sculpture and architecture, emphasizing the
the functioning of this "law" to a stone that, in rolling down a primacy of technique in determining artistic form. (Of course,
mountainside, "can assurne quite different motions according to from a different perspective, political, social, and economic con-
the gradient of the slope, the hardness or softness of the ground, ditions could be seen as primary factors in determining the
etc., but all these possibilities are subject to one and the same law availability ofmaterials and the development oftechnology, both of
ofgravity."3 According to Wölfflin, the way to explore this dynamic which shape techniquej see the discussion ofMichael Baxandall in
was through rigorous formal analysis based on pairs of opposing Chapter 3.) For hirn, the key to understanding Gothic art was the
principles (e.g.linearvs. painterly, open vs. closed form, planarvs. rib vault, which "proceeded, bya sequence of strictIy logical steps,
recessive form).
to call into existence the various accessories and techniques which
Wölfflin focused primarily on Renaissance and Baroque art, but it required in order to generate its own architecture and style. This
with the rise ofmodern art, formalism found another champion in evolution was as beautiful in its reasoning as tI1e proof of a
Roger Fry (1866-I934), an English painter, critic, and curator, and theorem ... from being a mere strengthening device, it became
part of the Bloomsbury Group of artists and intellectuals. Fry held the progenitor ofan entire style." 6
that artwork is irreducible to context: for hirn, the power of art Even after the death ofRoger Fry, modern art continued to have
cannot be "explained away" by talking about iconography, or its formalist defenders. Perhaps chief among these was Clement
patronage, or the artist's biography. Fry's personal and intellectual Greenberg (I909-1994), a prolific and controversial American art
resistance to the growing field of psychoanalysis-which very critic who championed Abstract Expressionism. His first major
directIy addresses the relationship between form and content, piece of criticism, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), appeared in
whether in dreams or works of art-may have influenced his the Partisan Review, a Trotskyist Marxist journal; in it he claims that
opposition to the discussion of content in art. 4 Unlike psycho- avant-garde art, unlike the kitschy popular art promoted by Stalin's
analysts, or some earlier art historians such as Alois Riegl (1858- regime, presented the only true road to revolutionary change. This
I905), Fry argued that artworks have no real connection either to was soon followed by "Towards a Newer Laocoön" (r940) , in
their creators or to the cultures in which they're produced. In 1912 which he argued tI1at the most important modernist painting had

1
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18 J CHAPTER 2 THE ANALYSIS OF FORM, SYMBOL, AND SIGN
19 J CHAPTER 2 THE ANALYSIS OF FORM, SYMBOL, AND SIGN
 renounced ilIusionism and no longer sought to replicate three-
dimensional space. Each art form had to develop, and be critiqued, topknot and elongated earlobes represents the Buddha. Sometimes
according to criteria developed in response to its particular inter- iconographers focus on a particular element within an image, such
nal forms. In "Modernist Painting" (19 61 ), Greenberg developed as a human figure who is part of a larger crowd scene, or a flower
these ideas further, contending that the subject ofart was art itself, motif used to decorate a capital; at other times, they focus on the
the forms and processes of art-making: modern art focused on image as a whole, such as the Last Supper. The process of identifi-
"the effects exdusive to itself" and "exhibit[ed] not only that cation may not be all that simple: it often requires extensive
which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that knowledge ofa culture and its processes ofimage-making.
which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. "7 Abstract Although the terms "iconography" and "iconology" are often
Expressionist painting, with its focus on abstraction, the picture used interchangeably, they actually refer to two distinct pro ces ses
plane, and the brush stroke, was ideally suited to this perspective, ofinterpretation. Iconology, in a way, picks up where iconography
although Greenberg took pains to emphasize that modernism was leaves off. It takes the identifications achieved through icono-
not a radical break from the past but part ofthe continuous sweep graphic analysis and attempts to explain how and why
of the his tory ofart. 8 imagery was chosen in terms of the broader cultural background
Early in her career, the American art theorist and critic Rosalind of the image. The idea is to explain why we can see these images as
Krauss was an associate ofGreenberg's, but she broke with hirn in "symptomatic" or characteristic of a particular culture. So, for
the early 1970S to deveIop her own very distinctive vision of mod- example, once you've determined that astatue represents St.
ernism. Her work often stresses formalist concerns, though Catherine, then you may want to ask why St. Catherine was
through post-structuralist semiotic and psychoanalytic perspec- depicted in this particular place and time by this particular artist.
tives (see "Semiotics" later in this chapter, and Chapter 4). Her Unlike some of the theoretical approaches discussed in this
essay "In the Name ofPicasso", first delivered as a lecture in 19 book, which developed in other disciplines and have been adapted
80 by art historians, iconography and iconology were developed first
at the Museum ofModern Art, is a prime example. In it, she argues
against using biographicalor contextual information to interpret by art historians specifically far the analysis of art. In asense,
Picasso's Cubist wor!es, especially the collages, precisely because iconography, as the identification ofimages, has a long history: the
the wor!es themseIves reject the task of representing the world (or Roman scholar Pliny (AD 23-79), for example, in his Natural
mimesis). According to Krauss, Picasso's collages engage in Histol'!:J, took care to discuss the subject matter of the images he
"material philosophy," that is, through their form and materials was discussing. Iconography became more systematized in the
they assert that representation is fundamentally about the absence sixteenth century, when iconographic handbooks that explained
of actual presence. 9 Krauss criticizes the practice of interpreting different themes and allegorical personifications were published
artwor!es primarily in terms ofartists' biographies, a phenomenon for the use of artists and connoisseurs. Somewhat later, the Italian
that she witheringly labels "Autobiographical Picasso."l0 She fur- art connoisseur and intellectual Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1615-
ther challenges the way that art history ignores "all that is 1696), in his Lives ofthe Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1672),
transpersonal in his tory-s tyle, social and economic context, combined elements of his predessor Giorgio Vasari's influential
archive, structure" and as an alternative emphasizes the potential biographical approach with iconographic analysis, as he tried to
ofsemiotics as a concept ofrepresentation. l1 explaill the literary sources of images. In the eighteenth century,
the German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann (r7q-q68)
lconography and iconology laid the foundation for the modern, systematic approach to
Iconography means, literaIly, "the study of images." At its simplest iconography in his studies of subject matter in anciellt art. 12
level, the practice of iconography means identitying motifs and
Panofsky's icol1ography arid icol1ology
images in Wor!es of art: a woman with a wheel in her hand repre-
sents St. Catherine, a figure sitting cross-Iegged with hair in a Working in England, the Austrian art historian Aby Warburg
(1866-1929) and his students developed modern iconographic

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21 I CHAPTER 2 THE ANALYSIS OF FORM, SYMBOL, AND SIGN