Richard Wollheim; philosopher (terrific obit)
Hyfler/Rosner
Brilliant philosopher engaged with the interaction of art and psychoanalysis
Arthur Danto
Wednesday November 5, 2003
The Guardian
The philosopher Richard Wollheim, who has died aged 80, belonged in the top
echelon of thinkers who redefined the practice of his subject in Britain and
the United States after the second world war. In terms both of the clarity
of his writing and the acuity and ingenuity of his arguments, he embodied
the intellectual virtues of analytical philosophy. But in terms of what
engaged him as a philosopher, he stood far closer than any of his peers to
continental thought.
Wollheim had little interest in donnish preoccupations with linguistic
usage, or with the endlessly agonising issues of how language relates to
reality. But he freely adapted some of the strategies worked out in
addressing these issues to the problems that did engross him, which
typically derived less from what other philosophers said than from what was
central in his life.
As a philosopher, he was, for example, deeply engaged with issues that were
central to the visual arts. But art - and especially painting - was of the
greatest importance to him as a person, and his relationship to it was far
wider and more immediate than was typical of those relatively rare
philosophers of his stature who bothered with aesthetics and the philosophy
of art. The philosophy of mind, which also engaged him, was a far more
mainstream subject than aesthetics, and indeed has all but defined
mainstream philosophy in recent decades.
Wollheim's focus, however, was on psychoanalysis, which has largely been
marginal to philosophical psychology, and at best a target of critical
hostility by philosophers of science. He regarded it as exactly the right
kind of theory through which to understand human nature.
He wrote with authority on Freud, and on Freudianism in general; and in his
own philosophy of mind, in such books as On The Emotions (1999) and The Mind
And Its Depths (1993), as well as in some of the deeply original studies
collected in On Art And The Mind (1973), it is the mind as charted by
Freud - and especially by Freud's follower, Melanie Klein - that underwrites
his basic premises. Psychoanalysis was crucial to his personal outlook, and
played a fundamental role in defining his outlook on art. His thought, in
brief, was systematic, but the system itself derived from what defined him
as a man.
Wollheim published two major works in the philosophy of art: Art And Its
Objects (1968) and Painting As An Art (1987), the latter based on his series
of Andrew W Mellon lectures at the US national gallery in Washington, DC -
events normally presented by art historians, for whom it is the crowning
achievement of their careers.
Art And Its Objects contains what is widely regarded as Wollheim's major
philosophical contribution, which he designated "seeing in". We see an
object in the paint with which a surface is marked, rather than simply
seeing the marks. This he regarded as a primitive human ability; it is
exercised when we see faces in clouds, for example, or, as Leonardo noticed,
landscapes in the stains on a wall. But pictorial perception is a more
complex achievement, since what we see in a painting was intended by the
artist, who organised the surface in order that viewers should grasp what
was meant in putting it there.
In Painting As An Art, Wollheim cautions against taking the idea of
intention in too narrow or limited a way. "At least in the context of art,"
he writes, "intention must be taken to include desires, beliefs, emotions,
commitments, wishes." The viewer will infer the intention from the way the
painting looks, and this, Wollheim believed, "presupposes a universal human
nature in which artist and audience share".
This notwithstanding, paintings do not instantly disclose their meanings;
and Wollheim has left us an amusing description of his own method of looking
at paintings: "I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively
time consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognise 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 to spend 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."
Though he disclaimed any intention of psychoanalysing works of art, many of
the remarkable interpretations in Painting As An Art seem to presuppose
psychoanalytical ideas. In a virtuoso reading of a painting by Willem de
Kooning, for example, he wrote: "The sensations that de Kooning cultivates
are the most fundamental in our repertoire. They are those sensations which
give us our first access to the external world, and they also, as they
repeat themselves, bind us for ever to the elementary forms of pleasure into
which they initiated us - sucking, touching, biting, excreting, retaining,
smearing, sniffing, swallowing, gurgling, stroking, wetting."
The three threads of Wollheim's life and thought unite in this description:
painting, philosophy and psychoanalysis. He argued that if painting
presupposes a universal human nature, then "it must be absurd to bring to
the understanding of art a conception of human nature less rich than what is
required elsewhere." And he nails this thought down with the profound
observation that "many art historians, in their scholarly work, make do with
a psychology that, if they tried to live their lives by it, would leave them
at the end of an ordinary day without lovers, friends, or any insight into
how this came about."
But this would be as true of philosophers or psychologists as of art
historians, and whatever one may think of the detail in Wollheim's analyses
and interpretations of art, he took a brave stand against the reductionisms
that impoverish the way so many intellectuals have approached what are, in
effect, the highest achievements of the human spirit. We should relate to
art as we relate to one another. He felt that the views on human nature that
emerged in Painting As An Art made explicit "the common ground in which the
two deepest commitments of my life - the love of painting and devotion to
the cause of socialism - are rooted". The way in which painting and
socialism are, in his words, "locked together" was never entirely explained.
It is a striking feature of Wollheim's life that he was engaged in the life
of art as a critic and an enthusiast, as well as through being a
philosopher. He wrote widely and brilliantly about the artists he admired,
such as Poussin and Ingres, Manet and Bellini, as well as those artists
whose work best fitted the conception of painting that he evolved in
Painting As An Art - painters in whose work the universal human nature, in
which he believed, was palpably present.
Wollheim coined the term "minimalism" in the celebrated essay Minimal Art
(1965), in which he addressed monochrome painting and the "readymades" of
Marcel Duchamp, seeking examples that met the minimal criteria a work of art
must meet. This was, however, more a philosophical inquiry than a critical
investigation into an art to which he was particularly devoted. The
acceptance of these objects as works of art "gives rise to certain doubts
and anxieties, which a robust respect for fashion may suppress but cannot
effectively resolve".
In the end, Wollheim was prepared to admire some contemporary artists whose
work differed sharply from that in which he deeply believed. But he
suspected that history would "not forgive an age whose record cannot be set
straight without an excess of footnotes over text". He was too cosmopolitan
a figure to express the outrage of many conservative critics, but he was
convinced that "the scene is too overcrowded with figures who tried to get
into history without contributing to the art".
Born in London, Wollheim was educated at Westminster school and Balliol
College, Oxford. From 1942 to 1945, he served as an infantry officer in
France, a period interrupted in 1944, when he was briefly a prisoner-of-war
in Germany before escaping to rejoin his unit.
From 1949, he taught philosophy at University College London, becoming Grote
professor of mind and logic in 1963, a post from which he retired in 1982.
From then on, most of his teaching was in the United States: as professor of
philosophy at Columbia University, from 1982 to 1985, and at the University
of California, Berkeley, from 1985 until his death. He also held a chair in
philosophy and humanities at the University of California, Davis.
Wollheim delivered the William James lectures at Harvard in 1982; they were
published as The Thread Of Life (1984), a study of personal identity.
Similarly, his 1991 Cassirer lectures at Yale were developed as On The
Emotions. He was president of the Aristotelian Society (1967-68), the
British Society for Aesthetics (from 1993) and the Pacific division of the
American Philosophical Association (2002-03). He was an honorary affiliate
of the British Psychoanalytical Society (1982), and an honorary member of
the San Francisco Psychoanalytical Institute (1994). In 1991, he was given
an award for distinguished services to psychoanalysis by the International
Society for Psychoanalysis.
Wollheim's cosmopolitan personality enabled him to take an interest in
things that did not entirely live up to his philosophical demands, and it
guaranteed that he never needed to fear being left "at the end of an
ordinary day without friends or lovers". He was a profoundly engaging man,
and wonderful company. An animated conversationalist and a vivid raconteur,
his default state was one of amused detachment, though he sometimes took
positions on issues that others, to his amazement, found outrageous. He
tended to side with the underdog - to support rioting blacks in Detroit, or
Palestinians in the Middle East conflict, despite the fact that he was
Jewish through his father's side.
He was raised as a Christian, though he was entirely indifferent to
religious ideas. Since he often lightened his writing with personal
reminiscence, it is difficult to read him without getting a precise picture
of his character and personality. Nor is it difficult to recognise that he
is by no means identical with the narrator in his 1969 novel, A Family
Romance, which is far more a literary creation than a self-portrait. It is
the diary of a man who is reading Michel Butor's L'emploi du temps, and
commits a crime - poisoning his wife - rather than, as in Butor's book,
discovers one.
As with Wollheim's philosophy, there is no doubt that certain aspects of
life were carried over into his fiction - the narrator, for example,
confesses to a love of painting - and though it was widely rumoured that the
book was, in some degree, a roman à clef , it was, if that, also an
experimental narrative which questioned the extent to which even the most
intimate form of writing can capture the reality of life as lived.
A far better place than his novel to get a sense of what Wollheim was really
like is his essay, Fifty Years, in which he recalls his life as a soldier,
and particularly how he managed to escape after being taken prisoner by the
Germans. With a companion, he went to pee against a hedge, leapt through to
the road below, and ran away in freezing rain. The companion knew no French,
so Wollheim explained to an official that he was his idiot brother. "I knew
that my French might deceive an SS officer, but it required only one
Frenchman around us to denounce me."
He saw little in their conduct to give him a higher opinion of his comrades
than of his enemies, and concludes the memoir sardonically: "Stretch the
corpses I had seen since the Normandy beaches end to end, and what would
make the whole haphazard killing worthwhile? The fall of tyrannies, perhaps.
But it would have been better if there had been some change of heart."
The heart was really the focus of his thought, in life and in philosophy,
and it was the heart, above all, that he sought in the painting about which
he was so passionate. The heart has not been the favoured organ of
philosophical interest since perhaps Pascal, and it is this that set
Wollheim apart from his peers in a discipline to which he brought
originality and distinction.
He was twice married, first to Anne Powell in 1950, with whom he had twin
sons, Bruno and Rupert; after that marriage was dissolved in 1967, he
married Mary Day Lanier, a potter, with whom he had a daughter, Emilia.
· Richard Arthur Wollheim, philosopher, born May 5 1923; died November 4
2003