Art theory refers to the development of concepts that are applicable to a number of art works so as to explain them rather than to the examination of a particular artwork, even though the concept may be drawn from a particular work of art and then becomes generally applicable, as is the case with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, which is drawn from “Oedipus Rex”, but has become applied ubiquitously. Art theory is therefore different from the trivial arguments about whether a Duchamp's toilet is or is not truly an art work or whether art is a matter of line and color or subject matter. These are fruitless philosophical arguments while the real work of art theory is to increase the body of concepts that can be used to analyze art.
A good example of art theory is Gottfried Lessing’s “Laocoon”, an Eighteenth Century work where the author considers that the sculpture under examination captures the moment before the monster devours its prey, not the moment when that happens or the moment after it. This insight is very productive. It leads one to consider whether sculpture has an inherently different point of view than other forms of art, such as painting or film. It also spurs reflection on the other moments that might be captured by a work of art. Poussin in his “The Parting of the Red Sea” portrays a time just past when the waters of the Red Sea covered over the Egyptians, as if the actual miracle was just too stupendous to capture. Homer captures the moment when the fact that this is Odysseus occurs to his old nurse when she sees the scar on his leg and prompts a wealth of memories. Genesis is particularly good at capturing the ironies inherent in portraying moments that follow dramatic events, as when Cain lamely and defensively asks God whether he is his brother’s keeper, the moment of the first murder past. So the drama of the moment portrayed is an important part of the aesthetic experience.
A recent work of art theory that is worth discussing but also shows just how hard it is to do art theory is Catherine Soussloff’s “The Subject in Art” (2006). The author sets up quite well the inevitable intellectual problem about the nature of portraiture that she will address. On the one hand, a portrait is a representation of what a particular person looks like, and that is true whether one is dealing with a passport photo or a Holbein. On the other hand, a portrait is also supposed to capture the spiritual nature of the person, the person’s internality, whether or not that is also what the person looks like. But how can you do that? The internality is invisible while the facial features are not and people are not the moles on their faces or their wrinkles or even whether they look gaunt, but something else that can be inferred rather than observed. So, given the radical opposition between the two, how can they be brought together? It is all well and good to say that in Christian art the icon stood for the presence of spirituality within the visible, but what the author wants to know is how the bridge between the internal and the external is bridged in the secular art that followed the Christian Age. It happens, she believes, because the artist imposes his consciousness on the object of scrutiny, which is to say what the author means to say when, using Hegalian language, she says the artist becomes the master of what had previously been merely an object that is reflected more or less accurately and instead becomes the subject of a portrait.
That, I am afraid, is the point at which Soussloff runs out of steam. She cannot find any useful purpose or additional insight into art for her insight. She claims that it sheds light on the social meaning of art, but all she means by that is that group portraits are references to the collective rather than the individual, and even there her observation is not founded in any evidence from pictures. She refers to Dirck Jacobsz’ “A Company of the Civic Guard” (1529)” as showing the corporate nature of life because the people are part of an organization when in fact even the greatest of those paintings of groups of people, Rembrandt’s “The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild” (1662), shows how individual are the people collected together for a corporate activity, each of their faces distinct and penetrating in their looks and demeanor. This picture is a tribute to the independence of the bourgeois soul.
Even the author’s favorite portraitist, the Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, engulfed as he is in the Vieneese art culture where the author finds her own inspiration, does not exemplify what she has claimed the portraitist does.Soussloff’s point is that the disjointed limbs and the colors in Kokoschka show that there is a give and take between the portraitist and his subject and that, in the case of his “Portrait of Baron Viktor Von Dirsztay” (1911), allows the artist to show that his aristocratic subject is just the same as any other human being. This does not make much sense because one can hardly doubt that Rembrandt, the most bourgeois of painters, is also able to establish equality between his subjects by rendering them all with the same humanity, the same combination of dignity and pathos, that is bestowed on so many of his subjects. There is nothing particularly humanizing in the artistic liberties Kokoschka takes with color and shape. It does not infuse the portrait with individuality or the presence of society; it merely is in the new, Modernist style that allows us to see figures differently but not with some special kind of selfhood that has been bestowed by the artist turning his object into a subject. Soussloff attributes to portraiture what is true of all painting of the period.
Soussloff’s mistake is to be too invested in the philosophical tradition. That means she is concerned with categorical oppositions, such as free will and determinism, morality and nature, consciousness and extension. She points out that interiority is an imposition on the externalities of a person and leaves it at that without also turning her distinction into a principle or a variable that can be applied to make comparisons between pictures other than that the imposition of internality is clearer in one picture than another, while Lessing had introduced time as a variable and Poussin had turned the horizontal panels of his pictures into a representation of the hierarchy of the social classes, the upper classes above the lower ones, that idea still with us.
So let us look at the conventional pleasures associated with looking at a rather conventional portrait: Francis Bicknel Carpenter’s “Lucy Tappan Bower”. Carpenter is better known for his painting of Abraham Lincoln reading aloud the Emancipation Proclamation, but this portrait shows why portraits can be enjoyable even when not especially distinguished. First of all, it is a pleasure to look at the model’s face. She seems animated and in good spirits. While not beautiful, she is engaging, what with her too round face and pudgy cheeks and large eyes. It is a portrait of someone loved within her family. That meets Soussloff’s standard for a photograph rather than for an artwork, but what is wrong with that? People like to look at other people even if of short or no acquaintance. It is called “people watching” and we all do it all the time. Second of all, there is some interest in her costume which gives away her class pretensions: the lace on her dress, the Civil War era appropriateness of her hairdo, the flowers in her hand, as if that is what young women should have to be fully presentable. Then there are the conventions which dress up the picture: the fountain and the column in the background which are there perhaps to suggest that this is a person of some stature, or at least enough to be put in a proper pictorial setting. There is no redefinition of convention in the picture, no moving on to a new understanding of portraiture. Rather, we are caught up in what is more an entertainment than in art. We are pleased to be exposed to a usual and familiar representation of a person so that we can say that it is a good likeness and sense that it looks like what a respectable portrait looks like. No profundity here, nor, I dare say, in most portraits, which capture a spirit in that the likeness has the spirit of the person represented.
So, in sum, Soussloff is after too much in that she wants to explain why modern portraits are profound, which is indeed what Twentieth Century portraiture was up to, but is not true of the history of the portrait. Don’t expect too much of portraits. They are not philosophy, even the best of them. They are likenesses well enough done and abiding by the conventions of the time so that the viewer knows what is being looked at: a picture of a person. Samuel Johnson was right when he said that the purpose of criticism was to explain why a work of literature supplied pleasure. That can be contrasted to an understanding of literature wherein its purpose is to explain how a work supplies meaning or profundity. The same distinction holds for art criticism. Don’t go overboard so as to make more of portraiture or any other art form than what it is.