Abstract
I am intrigued and greatly impressed by Patrick Heelan’s analyses of van Gogh’s “Bedroom at Arles” (1888: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, de la Faille 482).1 Heelan has surely unearthed a most important finding. The questions that occurred to me in reading his account arose in the spirit of wanting a fuller statement of his analysis of pictorial perspective. The paramount issue for me was this: Is the analysis meant to provide a correct “reading” of this particular painting (possibly, of others very much like it, the Chicago Art Institute’s version for instance); or is it meant to sketch a paradigm of “task-oriented” (phenomenological) space, hence normative constraints drawn from the lived-world that govern (or should guide) its “correct” pictorial representation?
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Notes
I have seen drafts of two closely-related papers of Heelan’s: one titled “Visual Space as Variable and Task-Oriented: A Study of Van Gogh’s Modem’ Use of Scientific Perspective”; the other, “Van Gogh’s ‘Modem’ Use of Perspective.” Both are as yet unpublished. The second emphasizes van Gogh’s discovery of a scientific, non-Euclidean “task-oriented” perception of physical space (which is usually characterized in terms of Euclidean perspective); hence, Heelan’s purpose is primarily to correct the record about van Gogh’s representational intention. He is bent on exploring the possibility of a general theory of phenomenological perception in task-oriented space, perhaps also on certain normative constraints on the right depiction of such a space. What Heelan offers in this regard accords with the general lines of the argument in Patrick Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 ).
See John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space,3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), Ch. 8.
See White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space,Ch. 2.
See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 130–131; and Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, vol. 1 ( New York: Harper and Row, 1971 ), 7.
See Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Recovery of Linear Perspective ( New York: Harper and Row, 1976 ), 26–29.
See J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979 ), Pt. IV.
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Margolis, J. (2002). Patrick Heelan’s Interpretation of van Gogh’s “Bedroom at Arles”. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 225. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_19
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