Abstract
Robert Sokolowski writes in his essay on ‘Ticturing”1 that a cardinal thing we human beings do is to let things appear. This achievement of letting things appear takes many forms, and one of these is picturing.
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Notes
Robert Sokolowski, “Picturing,” The Review of Metaphysics 31 (1977).
Reprinted in Robert Sokolowski, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). Page references will be to the essay as it appears in The Review ojMetaphysics.
Augustine, Confessions, tr. F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943), Book Eleven, XIV, 271.
Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, ed. E. Marbach, Husserliana XXIII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980), 22.
Ibid.
Sokolowski, “Picturing,” 4.
Ibid., 5.
Husserl, Phantasie, Bildhewusstsein, Erinnerung, 19.
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)
Sokolowski, “Picturing,” 21.
Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 21.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 62.
Ibid.
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The New Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 103.
Ibid., 104.
Cited in Irving Sandler, American Art of the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)
Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism,” from The Non-Objective World, in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 342.
Ibid., 343.
Ibid., 346.
Kermit Swiler Champa, Mondrian Studies (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 12.
Frank Elgar, Mondrian (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 24.
Champa, Mondrian Studies, 12.
James Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice- Hall; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 120.
Barbara G. Lane, The Altar and the Altarpiece (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 42.
Carel Blotkamp, “Annuciation of the New Mysticism: Dutch Symbolism and Early Abstraction,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, 100.
Ibid.
Sokolowski, “Picturing,” 21.
Ibid., 24.
Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, 155.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Sokolowski, “Picturing,” 24.
Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, 147.
Ibid., 159.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 144.
Ibid., 161, note 6.
Ibid., 142.
Ibid.
Sokolowski, “Picturing,” p. 23, note 13.
Ibid.
Carra Ferguson O’Meara, ‘“In the Hearth of the Virginal Womb’: The Iconography of the Holocaust in Late Medieval Art,” The Art Bulletin 63 (1981).
For a brief discussion of Delville’s painting, see Robert P. Welsh, “Sacred Geometry: French Symbolism and Early Abstraction,” The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, 78.
Professor Crowell made this point in discussion during the symposium honoring Robert Sokolowski at which this paper was originally presented. I have spoken of “knowledge” rather than faith, belief, or conviction, as the ground—perhaps one could say necessary condition—of what I have called mediated seeing-in. Thus one would not have to be convinced of the truth of theosophy or be a Christian believer to be capable of a certain level of mediated seeing-in of spiritual content. One would, however, have to have a degree of knowledge of theosophy or of Christian doctrine. In his essay on Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross, a work that will be discussed at the end of this paper, Thomas Hess remarks: “…You don’t have to know much about Mme. Blavatsky and Theosophy to comprehend certain Kandinskys—but it helps; on the other hand, if you don’t know the New Testament, you can’t even see the Eisenheim Altarpiece.” Thomas B. Hess, “Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross—Lemi Sabachthani” in E. A. Carmean, Jr., and Eliza E Rathbone with Thomas B. Hess, American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1978), 187. Hess’s comment, which is rich in implications as well as difficulties, catches nicely the connection between knowledge and the seeing of spiritual content in a picture. The necessity of this connection, of course, does not at all preclude the possibility that one who actually has Christian faith and not simply knowledge of Christian doctrine may have a much more profound and meaningful experience of a work that pictures the spiritual than one who does not.
Welsh, “Sacred Geometry,” 78.
Sokolowski, “Picturing,” p. 23, note 13.
Malevich, cited in Anne C. Chave, Mark Rothko (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 191
Ibid.
Malevich, “Suprematism” in Theories of Modem Art, 343.
John Walker, The National Gallery of Art Washington (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.), 144.
Cf. Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, 476.
See Thomas Hess’s comment concerning Grunewald’s Eisenheim Altarpiece in note 45 of this essay.
Walker, National Gallery of Art Washington, 144.
Lawrence Alloway, “Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross and the Subjects of the Artist,” in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, ed. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 337.
Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 241
Ibid., 190.
Ibid., 277.
Ibid., 190.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Alloway, Abstract Expressionism, 341.
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Brough, J.B. (1996). Picturing Revisited: Picturing the Spiritual. In: Drummond, J.J., Hart, J.G. (eds) The Truthful and the Good. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1724-8_4
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