Richard Wollheim

Paintings do not instantly disclose their meanings; and Wollheim has left us an amusing description of his own method of looking at paintings: "I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at."

Though he disclaimed any intention of psychoanalysing works of art, many of the remarkable interpretations in Painting As An Art seem to presuppose psychoanalytical ideas. In a virtuoso reading of a painting by Willem de Kooning, for example, he wrote: "The sensations that de Kooning cultivates are the most fundamental in our repertoire. They are those sensations which give us our first access to the external world, and they also, as they repeat themselves, bind us for ever to the elementary forms of pleasure into which they initiated us - sucking, touching, biting, excreting, retaining, smearing, sniffing, swallowing, gurgling, stroking, wetting."

The three threads of Wollheim's life and thought unite in this description: painting, philosophy and psychoanalysis. He argued that if painting presupposes a universal human nature, then "it must be absurd to bring to the understanding of art a conception of human nature less rich than what is required elsewhere." And he nails this thought down with the profound observation that "many art historians, in their scholarly work, make do with a psychology that, if they tried to live their lives by it, would leave them at the end of an ordinary day without lovers, friends, or any insight into how this came about."

from Richard Wollheim's obituary in The Guardian. Another item here.