Art historians familiar with Richard Wollheim’s early writing on art will recall his “Minimal Art” essay, first published in the January 1965 issue of Arts Magazine. Historians of 1960s art have attributed Wollheim with having coined the term “minimal,” now widely used to identify a nonunified field of 1960s art making: minimalism, minimalist, literalist, or specific object. The fact that Wollheim’s essay addressed none of the artworks or artists that have since become identified with minimalism (etcetera) is an acknowledged peculiarity. What has gone virtually unnoticed in the literature on 1960s art, however, is that minimal art for Wollheim designates the point where painting (the medium to which Wollheim has devoted attention), regardless of its historical or stylistic affiliations, is almost not an art. According to Wollheim, a radically minimal art like Ad Reinhardt’s near-monochrome paintings (1961–63) clearly demonstrates the least adequate qualities of artworks in general and of paintings in particular. Although Reinhardt’s paintings thoroughly dismantle any semblance of image, composition, and gesture, Wollheim considered the inherent system of negation in them—the just barely discernible push-pull of the foreground vertical and horizontal bands against the background—to be nonetheless an “identifiable feature or aspect” of their minimal artness. Because of this aspect Wollheim has maintained that Reinhardt’s near-monochromes are the most minimal material objects capable of being seen as art, underscoring what others have come to view as the conceptual character of minimalism and other contemporary arts.

The idea that a correspondence of material form and meaning is essential to artistic representation, ostensibly challenged by the putative minimality of 1960s art, has long engaged Wollheim. This is the central problem in his philosophical aesthetics. It was not, however, until the publication of Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) that he began to work this out into a full-fledged theory of art. Wollheim proposed that “art and its objects”—artifacts and concepts—are bound together in complex cognitive structures intrinsic to art making in general and to painting in particular. The negative impulse of what Wollheim had taken to be acceptably minimal in art was further broadened in Art and Its Objects to include artifact and concept as art’s vital components. This broadening constituted the ground zero not only of art making, but also of its viewing and interpretation. Further elaborations appear in Wollheim’s addition of supplementary essays to the second edition of Art and Its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), especially “Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation,” which is further expanded in Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), and in several essays included in The Mind and its Depths (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Richard Wollheim and the Art of Painting is the combination of a three-day conference devoted to Wollheim’s aesthetics held in Utrecht, Netherlands, May 1–3, 1997, and a symposium published in the summer 1998 issue of Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. The book, edited by Rob van Gerwen, is comprised of eighteen papers, two of which are authored by Wollheim himself and bracket the book’s content. (In the second of these, Wollheim responds to the ideas set forth in the other essays.) Three sections divide the book into ongoing themes in Wollheim’s philosophical aesthetics: “Representation,” “Expression,” and “The Internal Spectator.” These organizing themes encapsulate, as van Gerwen states, “the most important concepts that Richard Wollheim has contributed to our aesthetic understanding of the evaluative and descriptive appreciation of the art of painting” (6). Wollheim’s “seeing-in”—a spectator’s two-fold perceptual capacity to attend to both the surface of and the subject of a painting—is taken up and challenged under the section on representation. The second section deals with Wollheim’s conception of expression as a correspondence between projective capacity and personal history. The final section of the book attends to the role of internal spectatorship—where a painting denies the perceptual working of a spectator’s seeing-in and expressive projection but accommodates (however awkwardly) imaginative viewing.

The best papers take Wollheim’s theories beyond the kind of thought-experiments that tend to dominate philosophical writing. For example, art historians Michael Podro, Svetlana Alpers, and Michael Baxandall present Wollheim’s “painting as an art” as a challenge to acknowledge instances when painting becomes comprehensible as an art in its representational and expressive potentialities. In contrast to the book’s title (Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting), a weak inversion of Wollheim’s “painting as an art,” these papers vigorously address pictorial representation as being the intricate interplay of the material and the perceptual. Podro underscores this in his “The Artistry of Depiction,” zeroing in on the interrelatedness of three aspects of depiction: the depictive impact of pictures, the complex unity of pictures, and the experience of a picture’s expressive properties. According to Podro, “Depiction occupies a transitional space between literal presence and what is imagined in it” (119). Alpers’s “Viewing Making Painting” claims that, among other things, the world “gets into paintings” via a projection of the artist’s mental life, of the artist’s feelings, emotions, intentions, and convictions (176). Her example is Rembrandt’s Bathsheba with King David’s Letter (1606–69), in which Bathsheba and Hendrickje, Rembrandt’s model, simultaneously resist and invite such a projection. It is this dual tension that precipitates the grounds that constitute, for Alpers, our engagement with (and to) artworks. Baxandall’s “A Word on Behalf of ‘the Merely Visual’” attempts to come to grips with how it is that paintings invite “expressive perception and projection” and are therefore decidedly not merely visual. Baxandall puzzles over points of “access” and criteria from which to gauge adequate affective responses: Paintings perform human qualities pictured in them and thereby prompt a corresponding imaginative performance that is further enhanced by a spectator’s personal experience. (Baxandall’s point is shared by Graham McFee, who in his essay “Wollheim on Expression (and Representation)” quotes Wollheim: “‘Art presupposes a common human nature, and…pictorial meaning works through it’” (152).)

If anything, a shortcoming of this book is that it fails to provide an adequate overview of the paintings that have long held Wollheim in their grip. I am thinking of examples drawn from the philosopher’s ongoing art criticism for the British art magazine, Modern Painters. Aesthetics comes alive when Wollheim works through the available evidence of painters engaged with paint and canvas: Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Leon Kossoff, Hans Hofmann, and David Hockney, to name a few. As a critic, Wollheim asks such questions as: What is the meaning of such evidence apart from a spectator knowing that marks were made on canvas? What is the nature of this knowledge? Are marks necessarily expressive? What does the spectator gain from apprehending such information? That a painting-event was performed and an object-painting remains as a result? Or that the object-painting expresses a state attributable to the artist as he or she worked? Wollheim has indeed paid careful attention to the constituitive relationship between the material and the conceptual aspects of painting, attributes that distinguish his philosophical aesthetics in that they are exemplified by particular painters.

In “On Expression and Expressionism,” published in 1965 in the American poet John Ashbery’s journal Art and Literature, Wollheim wrote: “On an impure view the mark left behind by an expressive activity may be regarded as expressive, but only indirectly or obliquely so: in that by looking at the mark we are able to reconstruct the activity” (184). When looking at a painting, early marks may obscure later marks, but in no way are early marks abrogated since all marks are present as a palimpsest. In fact, an object-painting is the composite form of the painting-event, the material sediment of a chain of actions performed in front of and on the canvas. Nevertheless, since the spectator is not able to unravel the chain of actions so that he or she can ascertain which marks are linked to which significant actions, Wollheim’s concern lay with whether a spectator might apprehend the “transmission of expressiveness from activity to trace” (184).

In the case of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I, a work to which Wollheim has paid considerable attention, the philosopher-critic observes that where layers of paint come undone is where the painting comes together as a work of art. This is what Wollheim, in Painting as an Art, has referred to as “metaphorical painting” whereby “the painting is a metaphor for the body” (339). Wollheim does not mean that painting resorts to a metaphor for the body. Rather, metaphorical painting is an instance of “pictorial metaphor” where a “corporeal thing is metaphorized” (305). Metaphor “is induced almost exclusively by what we might now, following Walter Pater’s hint, call the Venetian mode: or the mode to which Titian resorted when he tipped sounds into his pictures. Except that de Kooning […] tips into the picture a great deal more, and all of it more primitive” (305).

To my mind, Wollheim’s seeing-in is activated at Woman I‘s generous margin. (Thomas Hess observed that de Kooning often used oversized canvas and covered the not-to-be painted edges—the area that would eventually stretch around the frame bars.) Woman I’s right-hand margin shows signs of over-painting where the underlayer fades into top layer, suggesting that de Kooning incorporated the outer area of his canvas into the final composition. The marks found at the right-hand margin were the result of de Kooning’s deliberate shift of the canvas during the stretching process. De Kooning’s transition from painting to margin fragments the work, and as such is a metaphor for the body in that a body can, and does, transition from one state to another.

The contributors to Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting (including Wollheim himself), in his or her turn, interrogate the nature of representation, of expression, and of internal spectatorship to the extent to which each, either individually or in combination, contributes to the condition of painting as an art. But, overall, not enough attention is paid to the particulars of sensible qualities and semantic properties that, at minimum, produce a painting’s aesthetic value. After all, Wollheim’s keen interest in painting does point to the foundation of his theory. So what is it about painting in particular, as opposed to sculpture or conceptual art, that can form the basis for the production (and possibly the destruction) of a theory of art? For starters, we might look at the paintings that Wollheim has looked at. Then we might get a strong sense of what he has been on about since “Minimal Art.”