Richard Wollheim, Philosopher; NY Times obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Richard Wollheim, Philosopher, Dies at 80
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Richard Wollheim, a philosopher who synthesized analytic philosophy,
psychoanalysis and the study of painting to develop aesthetic insights that
are considered among the most profound of the postwar era, died on Tuesday
at his home in London. He was 80.
The cause was heart failure, said a statement released by the philosophy
department of the University of California at Berkeley; Professor Wollheim
was the department's chairman from 1998 to 2002.
His intellectual dexterity, at times almost playfulness, was suggested by
works ranging from a widely respected biography of Freud to a well-received
novel to an examination of human emotions that some reviewers saw as the
basis for a general theory of a subject largely ignored by philosophers.
But his greatest impact, also unusual for an analytic philosopher, was on
art. He coined the term Minimalism in his 1965 essay "Minimal Art."
It actually referred not to the new artists, soon to be called Minimalists,
who were then beginning to emerge, but to monochromatic paintings and Marcel
Duchamp's display of ordinary objects as art.
A larger and much heralded accomplishment was developing a new approach and
vocabulary for experiencing art. Mr. Wollheim, developing the ideas of
Wittgenstein and Freud, argued that art could be understood only within its
total context, from history to the nature of the surrounding community to
the viewers' and artists' emotional dispositions and physical and psychic
needs.
His idea was to begin viewing a painted surface in the same way that you
might try to find a face in the clouds or in the way that you might, as
Leonardo did, visualize landscapes in stains on a wall. Then he would try to
interpret the artist's intentions. Mr. Wollheim believed that unlocking the
meaning of a painting involved retrieving, or almost re-enacting, the
creative activity that produced it.
He asserted that this was possible because artists and viewers shared a
universal human nature. In "Painting as an Art: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in
the Fine Arts" (Princeton University Press, 1987), a collection of talks
originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1984,
he called such a communion "seeing in."
His personal method of "seeing in" became famously idiosyncratic. He said in
the lectures:
"I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming
and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognize 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 spent 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."
All that looking, however, seemed to bring rewards. Many reviewers remarked
on the insightfulness of the book's final chapter, in which Mr. Wollheim
contends that certain paintings by Titian, Bellini, Willem de Kooning and
others represent the painter's attempt to project his fantasies about the
human body onto his canvas.
He wrote that de Kooning cultivated "those senses that give us our first
access to the external world," through actions like sucking, excreting and
gurgling.
Reviewing the book in The Los Angeles Times, Daniel A. Herwitz said Mr.
Wollheim had "done no less than recover for psychology its obvious and
irresistible place in the explanation of what is most profound and subtle
about paintings."
Richard Arthur Wollheim was born in London on May 5, 1923. He graduated from
the Westminster School and received bachelor's and master's degrees from
Balliol College, Oxford. He served in the infantry in France during World
War II and was briefly captured by the Germans. He left the Army as a
captain.
From 1949 until 1982 Mr. Wollheim taught philosophy at University College,
London. He then taught in the United States, first at Columbia from 1982 to
1985, then at Berkeley until his retirement in 2002. From 1989 to 1996, he
split his time between Berkeley and the University of California at Davis.
His books received mixed reviews but were never ignored. For example,
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt suggested in The New York Times that Mr.
Wollheim's attention to detail in his biography, "Sigmund Freud" (Viking,
1971), had obscured his view of Freud's significance today.
Harold Bloom, the scholar and author, strongly disagreed with this view in
an article on Freud published in The Times Book Review in 1986. Professor
Bloom called Mr. Wollheim "the most impressive interpreter of Freud to
emerge from analytical philosophy" and praised his characterization of
Freud's work as "research into the deafness of the mind."
Mr. Wollheim's novel, "A Family Romance" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1969),
also drew on his insights into psychology. The Book Review described it as "
old-fashioned in a refreshing way - post-Freud, and prewar."
In The Los Angeles Times in 2000, Jonathan Ree praised "On the Emotions"
(Yale University Press), another of Mr. Wollheim's books, for treating
intricate issues with the care they deserved.
"But beneath a dense ground cover of details, he has laid the foundations of
a large general theory" of how emotions work, Mr. Ree wrote.
Mr. Wollheim is survived by his wife, Mary Dan Lanier, a potter; their
daughter, Emilia; and by two sons from his first marriage, Bruno and Rupert.