Obituary for Richard Wollheim, by Edward Winters.
Richard Wollheim
(1923-2003)
It was whilst studying painting at the Slade that I met Richard Wollheim. An essay I had written concerning the linguistic character of painting had found its way to the Philosophy Department and Richard kindly invited me for corrective tutorials.
I had been influenced by Ad Reinhardt's 'Black Paintings' and had started to work on systematic paintings using heavily muted colours. Richard's thoughts on intention and interpretation were difficult and absorbing; and quite unlike theoretical work pursued in art schools. I found his thought so deep as to be unfathomable; and so decided to embark upon a formal education in Philosophy. It might make my problem clear if I quote Richard:
' [T]here may... be surfaces which could not be the surfaces of paintings because... there could be no intention which would justify a painting having one of them as its surface. I am inclined to feel this about the black canvases of Ad Reinhardt: assuming these, that is, to belong to art, and not to art history'.
[1]
His most enduring contributions to aesthetics, I feel sure, will be the development of a theory of depiction which places such emphasis upon the worked surface; and his conception of expression as a relation between inner states and the marked canvas. The twofold thesis, as it is known, holds that our experience of pictures is distributed between these surface properties and the depicted content. This way of putting matters opens a space the artist can exploit in order to provide a special kind of complex experience - so that the spectator sees a surface as contrived by an artist in order to make representational content available to her. Reinhardt's paintings leave representational features out of the spectator's experience, and so neglect one of the folds of which Richard has written. (Arguably, conceptual art leaves the other fold unattended.)
We were re-acquainted at a conference on his work in Utrecht in 1997. Since then we had fairly regular contact and I last saw him at my most recent exhibition at the Slade in July 2003. He seemed happy to be in London and glad to be at the Slade. He liked the chaos and anarchy of art schools and the gaiety and Bohemia of artists. (He was amused at my membership of the Colony Room; as I was amused at his admission that he 'had wasted too many afternoons there in the fifties'.) In June he gave a paper to the Joint Session of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society in Belfast, in which he shored up the twofold thesis against new criticisms brought against it. We were in the Crown Saloon sipping Jamesons, where I was happy to tell him that West Dean College is to inaugurate a new postgraduate programme in painting based upon the vision put forward in
Painting As An Art.
In his novel,
A Family Romance, the narrator speaks of the demolition sites of London:
'Why does the destruction of London affect me so?.. I cannot bear to see houses broken open, their insides exposed to passers-by. The thing affects me like a murder: like the murder that it is. It penetrates me'
[2]
This sense of loss projected onto the changing city landscape provides intelligible shape which fits the narrator's mental state. The
British Society of Aesthetics website has posted obituaries which record the sense of loss those working in aesthetics feel at the changing of their landscape with Richard's death. It is some small consolation that his powers of influence in aesthetics, art criticism and in the practice of painting, survive him.
[1] Richard Wollheim, 'The Work of Art as Object' in his
On Art and the Mind, London: Allen Lane, 1973, p. 124.
[2] Richard Wollheim,
A Family Romance, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969, p.15.