Complicating Complexity: Reflections on Writing about Pictures

Jerzy O. Jura

Foreign Languages and Literatures
Iowa State University
GeorgeOJ@aol.com

 

Review of: James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity.New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

 

The Tempest (La tempestad), a 1997 best-selling Spanish novel by Juan Manuel de Prada, not only borrows its title from the 1508 painting by Giorgione, but also places the masterpiece canvas at the center of a complex detective plot that involves art forgery, love, betrayal, and murder. Alejandro Ballesteros, the novel’s main character, is an art history student who, after years of intensive studies, comes to Venice to examine the famous painting, the topic of his doctoral dissertation. Although the novel’s opening page includes a color reproduction of the painting, and the first chapter briefly describes what art historians refer to as its basic sensus litteralis, the author devotes much of chapter eight to explaining the complexities of the daunting task his fictitious art history student faces: the need to reconcile into a coherent whole many, often contradictory, interpretations of the painting and his frustrating inability to unequivocally “fix” the meaning of even its most visually prominent characters and elements. In a reflection on the nature of this interpretive process, the young art historian Ballesteros compares his task to the process of assembling a complex jigsaw puzzle:

 

It takes a numismatic patience to arrange the pieces of a puzzle. One has to decide continually between an almost infinite number of possible combinations, and to try and match the bite-shaped pieces together. And although sometimes the connections between them are so subtle as to be almost evanescent, and our intuition tells us that a simple error of judgment could just as easily destroy the tenuous link, we chase this thought away, and we continue tenaciously…. It’s not enough to fit the pieces together, however, we also have to make sure that the resulting image is plausible. (Prada 185)

 

As it turns out, in his concerns regarding the complexity of pictorial images, and the extent of critical writings about them, the fictitious art historian from Prada’s novel is not alone: the reflection on the interpretive process that addresses images, such as Giorgione’s Tempest, as well as the picture-as-puzzle metaphor itself (inspired by Salvatore Setti’s book on Giorgione), are both also at the center of James Elkins’s metatheoretical 1999 inquiry into the mechanisms that underlie present-day art historical discourse, tellingly titled Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity.

 

Elkins’s point of departure, and the basic premise of his argument, a premise which he quickly and convincingly proves in the opening chapters, is that while “once upon a time, pictures were simple,” over the last century they have invariably grown more “difficult to explain,” “demanding,” and “puzzling” (xi). This opening statement is not quite accurate, since what concerns Elkins is the fact that academic approaches to pictures and, consequently, academic writing about them, not pictures themselves, have changed dramatically over the last century.

 

Following Wittgenstein’s maxim that “the first step in seeing a problem is seeing that it is a problem” (xi), Elkins endeavors to outline its nature and extent in both qualitative and quantitative terms. To outline the main direction of the trend, he examines a somewhat extreme, and therefore conveniently self-evident example of a monograph by Birger Carlström, who claims that many popular Impressionist paintings, usually taken to be expressions of the new, modern age aesthetic, are teeming with extensive, and often cryptically encoded political messages, hidden in the outlines, signatures, fabric folds, or even minute paint spots so small as to be discernible only under a magnifying glass. In several examples of pictorial exegesis run amok, Carlström reads Renoir’s political concerns about the Panama Canal project from his paintings, or rather into them, as Elkins, supported by extensive art-historical consensus, points out. Carlström claims to have identified messages such as “stop stupid England at Suez Canal,” allegedly engraved with a needle in one painting, or cartographic outlines of the canal in several of Renoir’s paintings generally considered to be charming, but otherwise conservatively bourgeois portraits. As Elkins notes, there is no existing additional evidence, such as correspondence or other written documents, to support or corroborate Carlström’s unusual interpretive claims.

 

The extent of the “complexity problem,” however, does not exclusively affect the isolated and contested margins of pictorial interpretation. Even in those mainstream art history texts which reflect wide consensus in the field, and where the enormous geographic and chronological scope limits the space devoted to each single art object to a minimum, as is the case in Janson’s popular and extensive History of Art, the complexity of interpretation is still evident to Elkins. He points out that the existence of extensive additional interpretive information, while not necessarily included explicitly in such texts, is clearly implied or acknowledged in them.

 

Having outlined the general nature of the problem in qualitative terms, Elkins also traces the chronological development of art-historical exegesis, and provides extensive textual support for the claim that traditional ekphrases, dating from antiquity to about a century ago, are generally short, and that their authors almost never ventured beyond the sketchy, verbal descriptions of the paintings’ most immediately visible content (sensus litteralis), their narrative foundations (fabula, or dramatic ekphrasis, in Elkins’s terms), or, in the case of religious paintings, their spiritual meaning (sensus spiritualis). Elkins sees the relatively recent explosion of interpretive complexity as an urgent theoretical issue that needs to be addressed, and observes that “as historians and viewers, we tend not to reflect on why we understand pictures the way we do” (35). Thus it would be hard not to notice that in a way the book and its author’s arguments are very fittingly inscribed within the postmodern debate on the mechanisms of legitimizing our knowledge, and in this case, the art historical discourse in particular.

 

The anatomy of pictorial complexity, however, and especially its genesis, is not very simple. Elkins hypothesizes that it is our present-day “aversion to mere description, or the apparently simpleminded praise of illusion” (39), that leads to endless bibliographies that have accumulated not only around certain paintings, but even around the meaning of specific individual objects depicted in them. The “buried mirror,” to use the term coined by Carlos Fuentes, in Velázquez’s Las Meninas is a perfect case in point. Understood for centuries as little more than just a reflection of the Spanish royal couple, with Michel Foucault’s essay the painting was “pressed into service as a reflection of fragmented Western epistemology” and treated ever since as “the representation, as it were of classical representation” (39). And while Elkins himself contributed an elaborate diagrammatic analysis of the painting’s complex perspective that accompanied Joel Snyder’s 1985 article on the emblematic meanings of the mirror in the Spanish masterpiece, he readily admits that the diagram’s analytic precision and the logical exactitude of the argument that it accompanied are distinctly “foreign to Velázquez’s contemporary reception” (40). So might be dozens of other present-day studies of the painting, whose authors see the mirror as a catalyst for “‘narcissistic’ reflections on self reflection” (Mieke Bal), as a “hypericon” and “metapicture”–i.e., a painting that represents picturing itself (W. J. T. Mitchell)–or even as “a representation of Lacan’s register of the Symbolic” (Pierre-Gilles Guéguen) (40).

 

Other examples of the objects whose presence in paintings has recently generated equally extensive and complex exegetic commentary include open doors, which formerly “seemed self-explanatory to generations of writers before the twentieth century” (42); shoes, a prominent point of reference in Jacques Derrida’s “Restitutions of the Truth in Painting”; and checkerboard floors, as well as the basic perspective box that underlies the construction of many pictorial spaces (43). Elkins is eager to stress that he does not believe those critical interpretive excursions are “inane or inherently wrong headed,” but rather that they constitute “the shape of pictures as we understand them today” (44), and that the increased interest in some paintings, or the critically underscored relevance of some objects in them, is a reflection of the importance of their commentators to the general intellectual tenor of our times, a point aptly made with a rhetorical question: “How interesting are Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes, outside Heidegger and Derrida?” (45). By contrast, Elkins also defines a category of paintings which fail to attract wider exegetic interest, and, since they are not compositionally engaging, “offer little purchase for an historian intent on locating intellectual content” (53). Since they seem to “call for a nonverbal, unanalyzed kind of contemplation” (54), they are usually excluded from verbal analyses. For Elkins, few art historians are aware of this exclusionary bias, even when it is patently visible in their own writing.

 

The emphasis on the intellectual content of paintings makes Salvatore Setti’s interpretive picture-as-puzzle metaphor (from his book on Giorgione) particularly attractive to Elkins. In fact, several central chapters of his book include extensive and copiously illustrated critical evaluations of existing taxonomies of puzzle types (both in the metaphoric and in the literal sense) and of different degrees, modes, and types of ambiguities.

 

While for present-day art historical discourse the potential for pictorial complexity and ambiguity seems to be a prized characteristic, too much of a good thing occasionally makes a critical evaluation of existing research impossible. This leads Elkins to describe one category of images as “monstrously ambiguous paintings” (123). Three prime examples of this category are Giorgione’s Tempesta, Botticelli’s Primavera, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, since in each case “so much has been said about each of them that the history of their reception can no longer be fully told” (124). The paintings that are thought to be intentionally ambiguous are especially good candidates for the category, and even more so if their primary subject and meanings are unclear and cannot be determined to be either self-evident or reasonably well deduced from existing historical sources. Giorgione’s Tempesta is a perfect example, exactly because there is no consensus on the painting’s primary meanings. To “evoke the tenor of the literature” (131), Elkins lists a long series of recently proposed interpretive solutions, ranging from very specific identifications of the painting’s characters with those of various literary, mythological, biblical, or hagiographic fabulae, to the claims that Tempesta indeed is, and always has been intended to evade unambiguous attributions of meaning, and that it really is a painting without a subject (130-37).

 

Picking up the line of thought about Carlström’s marginal exegeses from the introductory pages of the book, Elkins devotes an entire chapter to cryptomorphs–hidden images, in many cases arguably read into the pictures as a result of modern day, often anachronistic interpretations. And, as Elkins himself admits, while in some cases, such as Freud’s famous misreading of a vulture into Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St. Anne (205), errors can be easily explained away (a translation error, in this case). Other hypotheses, such as Meshberger’s claim of two brain views embedded in Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling (Elkins 209), can be argued against only tentatively, and the multiplicity and complexity of arguments that have to be brought to bear on this case, ironically, dilute the argument, instead of lending credibility to it.

 

Elkins’s tour-de-force journey through exegetic samples, whether of exemplary logical coherence, or marginal, bizarre, and non-corroborated interpretive claims, concludes with an envoi which contains a handy summary of his answers to the questions posed in the title of the book, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? Elkins’s own initial hypothesis that the increase in our knowledge, the growth of the discipline, and new insights are responsible for the complex ways we read pictures, is ultimately determined by him to be unsatisfactory. It is surprising to realize, however, that while Elkins considers a wide range of possible causes in his effort to account for the rise in the complexity of writing about pictures, he tends to leave out more mundane causes external to art history as a discipline. Ironically, the reason for this exclusion may be that those possible external causes are not as complex as the internal ones Elkins discusses at length, and therefore are of less interest to a scholar. Technological advances in art reproduction come to mind as a potentially powerful impulse for that type of change, an impulse not considered by Elkins. One could hypothesize that, since in the past the reading audience had limited access to the works of art in question, it was necessary to resort to frequent basic description, but in today’s world, where detailed color reproductions of thousands of paintings are easily available to the public, the reason for simple description has been eliminated, leaving a void to be filled with more complex arguments. Similarly, the academic pressure on many researchers to publish extensively and frequently has led many actively to seek out niche areas that have not yet been explored, especially if their work is concerned with periods and works that have already accumulated an extensive body of theoretical commentary.

 

Elkins’s book remains a valuable reflection on the mechanisms that set the directions of contemporary academic discourse, and while his specific concern here is art history, many of his observations clearly apply to other humanistic disciplines, as well–and in particular to literary studies.