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Howto Reada Paintin

ADVENTURES

ofthe MIND

By visual paradoxes the artist shocks the viewer into the

realization that there is more

to art than meets the eye.By E. H. GOMBRICH

Emst Hans Gombrich, director of the Warburg Institute ofIhc Umversily of Loi\clon and professor of the classical tradi-tion there, was born m Vienna, which he kfl in 1936 under theshadow of the Nazi terror. Professor Gonibrich has written ex-tensively on the history and theory of art. His latest book, pub-lished in this country by Pantheon Books, Inc.. is Art and Illusion,which he originally delivered as the A. W. Mellon Lecturer inFine Arts at the National Gallery in Washington in 1956. ProfessorGombnch. who has taught also at Oxford, Harvard and Oberlin,gave the !96I Spencer Trask Lectures al Princeton University.

N 'one of Molicrc's immortal witticisms is surer to get alaugh from a modern audience than the surprise ofhis Buurseuis Geulilhomine when he is told that he

has been ''talking prose" all his life. But was poor M. Jourdainall that silly? What he had discovered in his frantic efforts toclimb into the class of noblemen was, of course, not prose, butverse. The notion of prose as a special kind of speech couldnever have been thought of without the poet's truly surprisingways with language, so well described by the author of Alicein Wonderland:

For first you write a sentence^

And then you chop it small;

Then mix the bits., and sort Ihem out

Just as ihey chance to fall:

• The order of the phrases makes

No difference at all.

The corresponding ways with images practiced by twen-tieth-century artists have turned us all into M. Jourdains.They have shocked us into a fresh awareness of the prose ofpictorial representation.

If we had told an art lover of former days that a pictureneeded deciphering, he would have thought of symbols andemblems with some cryptic "hieroglyphic" content. Take the

21

Fip;. 1. Stdl L-U.Jan Simons^ Inrrfnlijs, scvcntrrnth

still life by the Dutch yc\'cntccnth-ccjitury painter Torretitius(Fig. 1). It seems clear enough as a representation, and forgood reasons: We know that the artist used an optical device,the camera obscura, to project the image of the motifs onto thecanvas where he traced it as one might trace a projeeted pho-tograph. What wonder that it seemed just as easy to recognizethe objects in the picture as it would be to recognize them onthe table. If deciphering eame in at all, it applied to a secondlevel of meaning, as it were—to the question of what these ob-jects might signify. To the learned gentilbomme they wouldsuggest more than a jug, a glass and a yoke, for he wouldrecognize in this curious assemblage the emblems or ''at-tributes" of the personification of Temperance, a lady with thelaudable habit of pouring water into her wine and a corre-sponding disposition meekly to accept the bridle and the yoke.

It was only when learned allusions of this kind went out offashion, and when everybody could reproduce the image ofobjects by means of his own photographic camera, that artistsbegan to question the simple assumptions underlying the still-life painter's craft. No sooner had they done so than the publicquestioned their competence. What itnpudence of the im-pressionists to demand of us to decipher their blots andsplashes! But this is easy, retorted the painter's champions. Juststep back and half-close your eyes, and the blots will fall intoplace. The magic worked, and the outcry subsided. What re-mained was the conviction that the artist knew more aboutseeing than the layman. Surprising as it may sound, the blotsmust be all we really see of a motif on the table. If we recognizethings more easily in life than on impressionist pictures, it isbecause we can touch and handle objects and thus acquireknowledge of properties which we have no right to ask theartist to paint.

No right? Why not? Should we not demand of the artistprecisely for this reason that he must somehow include in hispictures that indispensable information gained from touch,

those tactile \'aluc.s we need for recognition and participationin his world? If so, where should he stop? It Is not only touchthat gives us information. It is riioveinent, looking at objectsfrom several sides. Without such movement we would neverlearn to sort out the impressions received by our eyes.

.So the debate went on, and representation became .self-con.scious. The cubist revolution some fifty years ago estab-lished the painter's right to present his own commentaries tothe conundrum of vision. Instead of tracing the image of acamera obscura, the artist superimposes and telescopes frag-ments of representations which follow a mysterious order of

F i g , a . S l i t l h f r . P a b l o P i c a s s o . | . i i

their own (Fig. -2). No longer will a simple tiick suffice torecover the object on the table. Like the ghost of Hamlet'sfather, "It is here, it is there, it is gone."

There were and still are critics who claim that this tantaliz-ing method represents some higher order of reality than doesthe photographic picture. It may well be that Picasso andBraque, who invented the style, were inspired by echoes ofsimilar mystic beliefs. But the continent they found on theirvoyage of discovery was not the never-never land of the fourthdimension, but the fascinating reality of visual ambignjity. Weare in danger of missing this fascination through sheerfamiliarity with cubist methods which have long sincepenetrated into commercial art. The shock has worn off,and we no longer attempt to decipher the images that playliide-and-seek among the facets of ambiguous patterns. Andthus we are apt to miss the real problem posed by the first ofthe "modern" styles that broke resolutely w ith the "photo-graphic" rendering of CONTINUED ON PAGE 64

How to Read a Painting-reality: Ho« should evich in Ji\ idual formbe read? How arc the shapes related toeach oilier? Where is the key to the code .'

For first y<>u point on ohicel..Ind then yiru ehop il snuill.

Then nii.v ihc l>il.\. tintI sort them omJusl tiS lliey cintnce lo foil:

The order of I he a.spect.\ nmkesNo difference at all.

This strange and fascinating way ofjumbling the elements of representation isperhaps a no\cl kind ot \erse that makesus aware of the existence of prose. Forhow are the elements ordered in natural-istic pictures, ihat we should find it soeasy, by contrast, to read into them imagesof tangible things? The formulation maycause some shaking of heads. Surely wedo not re,ad the shape of a jug and a glassinio the Dutch still life; ^ e simply recog-nize it. Of course wo do. but where ex-actly is the borderline here between read-ing into and reading? We are all familiarwith the clouds, rocks or ink blots intowhich the fanciful can read pictures ofmonsters or masks. Some vague similarityto a face or body engages our attention,and we proceed to project the remainderinto the welter of forms searching forfeatures ihat f\X in with the first idea.

Psychologists and psychiatrists ha\ebecome interested in this game of theimagination, and ink-blot-reading tests,such as the Rorschach, arc supposed totell them much of the working of J per-son's mind. They are interested, in otherwords, in the different interpretations thatare given of the same blot It is those dif-ferences vve have in mind when we speakof "reading in." Where all normal peoplesee the same image, we call it reading.We all read the jug correctly because itlooks like a jug. But this simple formula-tion begs a good many questions whichhide the mystery of reading from us.

We come a little closer to its core withsome of the trick pictures in vvhich sur-realist artists conjured up the ambiguitiesof dreams. Tcbehtcbevv, for instance,turns a tree into the image of a handgrowing out of a foot (Fig. 3). He guidesour projection by assimilating the shape

Fig. 3. Tr/t Itdo Hand and Foot.Pavel Tcheliichcw, I'l.'Jf*.

ofthe tree lo other recognizjiblc forms.But such visual punning is still compara-tively simple. For here (not in his otherpictures) the artist has taken care ihal v.'cshould know where to look for the mean-ing. We cannot always take this forgranted. Indeed, our tendency to jump toconclusions here has been used by thedevisers of puzzle pictures and even by

1 ic, V. Royalist print from theI tench Revolution, cirai I7.'i'l.

propagandists to catch us off our guard.Figure 4 looks for all the VM>rld like tlu-representation of a classic urn set aniidsiwillovNs. It was circuijted during thuFrench Revolution as a clandestine tributeto the rovai family. For if we don't focuson the urn. but on the background, wediscover the profiles, facing each other, ofLOUIS XVI and Mane Antoinette and.guided by these cues, tv\'o further heads,presumably of the Dauphin and someother victim, made by the outline ofbranches and twigs.

The principle here exploited by a hum-ble draftsman has played J great role inthe discussions of tv».entieth-<..entury psy-cbologists^it IS the relation between"llgure" and "ground." As long as weregard the urn as the figure we are notaware of the shape of the ground. Here.therefore, is the simplest case of all whereour reading depends on our initial inter-pretation. We tend to regard the enclosedand articulated shape as the ligure and toignore the background against which itstands. But ihis interpretatioa itself isbased on an assumption v\hich the artistmay choose to knock away. It is then thatwe discover tbat there really is a phaseprior to the idonlihcation of the jug or theurn—tbe decision on our part which toregard as figure and which as ground.

This IS the moment to introduce a con-temporary artist whose prints are medi-tations on image reading. His name isM. C. Escher. and he lives in his nativeHolland, keeping more contact withmathematicians than with artists andcritics. It is indeed doubtful how muchthe critics would approve of his ingeniousexercises in applied geometry and psy-chology. But to tbe e.\plorer ofthe proseof representation, his nightmarish conun-drums are invaluable. His double imageof Day attd Nighi (Fig. 5) demands animperceptible switch from figure toground: The white birds flying acrossthe dark toward the black river comefrom another side of the world wherethere is still daylight and where blackbirds go the other way. And as we searchfor the dividing line between the iwohalves, we notice that there is none. It isthe interstices between the white birds—the ground—that gradually assume iheshape of the black birds, and thesecheckered patterns merge downward intothe fields of the countryside. Easy as it isto discover this transformation, it is impos-sible to keep both readings stable in one'smind.

The day reading drives out the nightfrom Ihe middle of the sheet, the nighlreading turns the black birds of the samearea into neutral ground. Which formswe isolate for identification depends onwhere we arrive from. Reading becomesalternative "reading into"; representationmerges with guided projection.

Fig. e. Solid atid Hollow. Lithograph. M. C. Escher, 1965.

Bul Escher has more tricks in his bagto undermine our confidence in the sim-plicity of representation. His print Solidand Hollow (Fig. 6) makes use of otherforms of ambiguity which had beenknown to artists and psychologists for along time, bul had never been explored andexploited with such single-mindedness.

Here it is not the relationship betweenfigure and ground that is reversed on theother side, bul the very shape and direc-tion of any part of the architecture. Starton the left wiih the black woman walkingover a curved bridge toward some stairs.As long as you stay on her side of thepicture you are presented with a weirdbul plausible view of an old town. Starlwith the man climbing a ladder on theopposite side and you will read the shapesas equally coherent forms representingan unfinished courtyard with a bridgevaulting over n. But once again eitherreading is contradicted when you readon toward the central axis. For whallooks like a pavilion seen from the out-side, if you approach it from the side ofthe black w oman on the bridge, is switchedinto a vaulted corner when seen fromthe other side. The switch is all llie morepuzzling as the identical shape nearbymusl surely be read as a solid pavilion.But soon we discover the same punningwith inside and outside all over tbe print.The floor on which a boy has fallenasleep is a ceiling nearby from which alamp dangles. Everywhere correspondingshapes must be read as hollow in onecontext and solid in another and. everytime, the meeting of both readings createsa stalemate. The assumption with whichwe have started breaks down, and we

have to begin all over again, only todiscover that here too we are led intoperplexity.

But even this probing of the mecha-nisms of image reading is not the mostdisconcerting of Escher's exercises. TheBelvedere tFig. 7). completed in 1958,may nol be very pleasing as a print, butas a demonstration piece it trumps theothers. For what looks at first like arather crude historical illustration is, infact, a brain teaser of no mean ingenuity.It would make an excellent test of thepowers of observation to time the mo-ment when it dawns on the beholder thathe is confronted wilh a self-contradictorystructure. Look at the ladder and tryto locate It in space. You will find that itleads from a first-floor terrace to a secondat right angles lo it. The man with theplumed hat on the lower terrace looksout into the landscape behind, the womanunder the corresponding arch of the floorabove looks sideways. Small wonder, foethe arcades of the lower terrace are nolcomposed of columns carrying ihe vaultabove them; they are interlaced, as itwere, shifting from back to front as wetrace their course.

Who can blame the poor imprisonedman in the cellar who looks with amaze-ment at the designer on the bench, forthe object he holds in his hands is asunrealizable as the building itself: a cubewith interweaving sides.

Whatever we may think of Escher'sartistic taste, his prints are worth a wholecourse in ihe psychology of perceptionand its relation to art. Their complexityis far from whimsical. It reveals the hid-den complexity of all picture reading.

Fig. fi. Day and NtglU. Woodcul. M. C. Esdier,

When we look al a normul reprcsenlii-lion, there is nothing lo prevent us fromrormiiig a hypothesis about ihe ligure-ground rclulionship or about the way theshapes add up to pictures orobjecis. Wellierefore believe thai we lake in ihe pic-ture more or less at one glance and rec-ognize the motif. Our experience withEscher's contradictions shows tlial iliisview is mistaken. We do read a picture,as we read a printed line, by picking upletters or cues anJ fitting them togethertill we feel that we look across ihe signson the page at the meaning behind them.And jusl as in reading ihc eye does noltravel along at an even pace gatheringup the meaning letter by letter and wordby word, so our glance sweeps across apicture scanning il for information.

Critics like to tell us how the artist"leads the eye" along the main lines ofhis composition. But our roving eyes willnot be thus led. The critic's phrase shouldhave become obsolete when eye move-ments could be filmed and fixation points

. 1I'ig. 7, Bctfied^f.

Lirhogrjph. M, C, Escher, \'AM.

ploited on pictures. These records confirmwhat Escher made us suspect; Readinga picture is a piecemeal affair that startswith random shots and gradually adjuststo the coherence of the work.

The first truth, which Esther's vis-ual paradoxes illuminate js this piece-meal character of piclurc reading. Thereis a clear limit to the visual mfor-maiion we can process through anygiven glance. This tits in well with theresults of scientists who have sludred thislimit in the severely practical context ofhow many pointers a pilot can read ata glance on an instrument panel. Hiscapacity will, of course, vary aecordingto training and experience, but the basicfact remains that the eye can take inmuch less at one glance than the laymanimagines. But what about the musicianwho can read an orchestral score withsurprising ease and at amazing speed?Does he nol have to take in informationat an uncanny rate,' Cert^iinly the feal isadmirable, but it is only possible be-cause the notes of the score, unlike thepointer readings, are not random signs.Music is an art that follows certain lawsor rules and enables ihe musician lo scanthe score with certain expectations.Though he cannot know whal to expectin Ihe next bar, he knows at leasl that

. many possibilities are ruled out. Indeed,if any of Ihose occurred he would prob-ably disregard them as a misprint.

In reading a familiar language, ofeourse. we proceed in a similar way, look-

ing ahead for cues to confirm our e,xpec-tations and lilling in the remainder moreor less from experience. The reading ofpictures must follow a similar pattern.But once we set ourselves to read the•"score," the need to revise our expecta-tions makes us aware of the part which as-sumptions play in the reading of images.

What, more precisely, are these assump-tions? Take any isolated part of Escher'sprint, the outside icrrace, for instance,with its clicckerboard floor and the lowwalls surrounding it. This is quite a nor-mal realistic representation of an archi-tectural feature and does not differ muchfrom a photograph or picture post card ofsuch a molif. How is it that we lake insuch a situation with such speed andease? Surely because we are m no doubton how to supplement the informationwith which the picture supplies us. Weassume that a pavement will mosl prob-ably be level and a wall upright, that theslabs of [he floor will be square and theseat oflhe bench rectangular. If the shapesrepresenting these objects are tapering andunequal in •^\ic. this will obviously be dueto foreshortening and perspective.

Assumptions of l\ws kind are so in-grained in us that it needs quite a jolt toprevent our interpretation from runningalong these convenient groove'^. Vet.after all, (here could be sueh things assloping floors wiih irregularly sized slabs,Uipering walls or rhomboid benches. Suchodd sh.ipesmigbtservea very good purposein ihc theater, near the back of an illusion-ist stage to give the impression of greaterdepth. Once we admit this possibility, ourassurance in reading the image collapses.We discover the hidden ambiguity in allrepresentalions of solid objects in theIliit, If the reader enjoys a whirlinghead he can now return to a fresh scrutinyof all the three Escher prints (Figs. 5-7)to discover that these leasing images are"ambiguous" only on the assumptionthat tloors or ceilings are horizontal,columns upright or the water of riversreasonably level so thai ihe bridge acrossit cannollead uphill. Drop this hypothesisof simplicity, and the neat ambiguity of amere double meaning sinks into chaos.

We return from this giddy switchbackride wilh one tormenting question inmind. If the prose of ordinary represen-tations hides such unsuspected ambigui-ties, what about ihe reliability of our eyesto lell us about the real world? We neednot worry too much, for here the answerIS more reassuring. To put the matterbriefly, pictures are infinitely ambiguousbecause they present a flat two-dimen-sional geometrical projection of a three-dimensional reality. To say of such aprojection that it "looks like reality"begs the question. It may, but it also lookslike an infinite number of unreal configu-rations. But this type of ambiguity willrarely trouble us in real life. After all,we experience the real world by movingabout it, and our eyes are eminently suitedto guide us.

The eyes alone can quickly resolve thequestion of the real shape of a terrace,for we have a built-in predictor thai tells ushow any given shape will change when seenfrom ditTerent angles If one moves straighttoward a door, its shape will remaineonstani, but its size will increase at a pre-dictable rate. The object near the fringe ofour vision, on the other hand, will be trans-formed m shape in a regular and predict-able sequence that we can study if wemove a film camera in the same direction.It is this melody of transformation thatwould be entirely different if we movedtoward a flat or shallow perspective stage.

The decisive part that movement musiplay in our visual orientation has onlyrecently been fully brought out by psy-chologists, notably by James J. Gibson,Here, too, a fresh alternative shocked us

into awareness of an old truth we hadlazily taken for granted. The problems ofvision in rapid Ilight or even in motoringrendered the old idea of static visionobsolete. Moreover, our engineers hadmeanwhile learned to simulate the func-tion of sense organs with the uncannygadgets of homing devices, used in thedeadly game of missile development.Cybernetics has taught us to look evenat the senses not as passive registrationdevices bul rather as receptors geared lothe receipt of a flow of information,which the nervous system is somehowprogramed to compare wiih expecta-tions Some psychologists think thatthe simplicity hypothesis, the idea that thefloor is 'probably" level, may be builtinto our receptor organ. But whetherthey are inborn or acquired, it is now clearthat every message sets up a set of expc>:ta-tions with which the incoming flow can bematched to conlirm correct assessmentsor to modify and knock out false guesses.

In looking at a picture we are deprivedof this dynamic aid for the weeding outof false inierpretations. All we have is aconsistency test that compares the mes-sages from various parts o\' the picture forcompatibility. Having done so. our mindmakes ready for further tests throughmovement, hut here il is frustrated. Thisfrustration has a curious side elTecl thatcan paradoxically increase the illusionand will never cease to lease our reason.It IS the illusion that objects pointing to-ward us from paintings will follow us aswe shift our position.

The most bored and footsore touristwill spring to auention when the guidedemonstrates the ancestral portrait thatfollows him with iLs eyes or the pointedgun that always aims at him wherever hestands in the hall. It is easy to dismiss thissurprise as naive, but less easy to exhaustthe implications of this little mystery. Onething IS sure: The mystery does not restin any particular skiil on the part of thepainter. The efTect is quite frequent andindeed inevitable. The only reason whywe need the guide's patter to enlist ourattention is that we are but rarely inter-ested in what happens to the appearanceof a painiing while we shift our position inihis way. If we were, we would see that theprincipal condition for the effect is a senseof depth combined with an unforeshort-ened portion of an object that appearsto lie quite close to the frontal plane.

The woodcut by the German Renais-sance artist Hans Baldung Grien (Fig, 8|,for instance, fulfills these conditions ad-mirably. It is known under the title "TheBewitched Stableboy" and it shows thevictim of some e\'il spell lying on hisback, the soles of his feei turned towardus. Critics have wondered \\hai the pic-ture signifies, but surely it is meant totease us with this magic trick. When wehave it in front of us. it works like anyordinary perspective. The strong fore-shortening is "read" as depth, and wefeel the three-dimensional character ofthe representation as a compelling illu-sion. It is consistent \Mth this reading thaiwe should look straight at the soles ofthe man's shoes and that they shouldhide from us his feet and ankles which weimagine to be there. But the more firmlywe project the image of the whole figureinto these marks on the paper, the morewill we instinctively expect it to respondto our usual reality tests, A real figurewould present ditTerent aspects to us ifwe moved sideways. But since what wehave in front of us is nol a three-dimen-sional tigure but only a flat piece of pa-per, the expected melody of transforma-tion fails to materialize.

What makes this experience remark-able in our context is the confirmation itprovides for our argument that the pic-lure becomes a picture only if the marks

on the paper are sorted out by the mindrnto a consistent and coherent message.Once this consistency is perceived and aninterpretation emerges, it takes a great ef-fort to dislodge It Easy though it is toknow intellectually that our poor stable-boy's head lies objectively in ihe sameplane as do his feet, we slill do not quiteseeil that way.

It is here, at last, thai these investiga-tions of ihe prose of representation leadback to the problems of artistic poeiry.For it is the strength of ihe forces of illu-sion that alone accounts for the violentreactions againsl these forces in twentieth-century art. At all times, of course, theaesthetics of picturemaking had more todo wilh composilion than wilh illusion,Artisls have always been poets, striving10 achieve a fine balance of shapes andcolors and lo devise a beautiful pattern lofill Ihe painting surface in a pleasing way,Bul these etTorts could easily be destroyedby the reading mind ihat rearrangedthese shapes in an imaginary depth.

Fig, 8. Ttu BnviUhfd Stableboy.Wijodcut, Hans Baldung Gricn. I5H-.

Critics wrote and still write as if wecould see both the surface and the repre-sentation, but artists knew belter. Their re-bellion against illusion came into the openmore than fifty years ago in those conun-drums of cubism which lead our eye afrustrating chase after guitars and bottles.teasing us with false clues only to entrapus in contradictions. It was by exploringthese paradoxes thai artists wanted todiscover new modes of organization.

It IS not only Escher who shows ustheir success. Even abstract art owessome of Its most interesting possibilitiesto the fascination of unresolved ambigui-ties (Fig, 9|. By presenting us with thesescrambled codes the artist shocks us intorealizing how much more there is in pic-tures than meets the eve, THE END