Learning to see

Ten characters

The Tang poet Wang Wei (王维, about 699–761) has a poem called 山居秋暝, “Autumn Evening in the Mountains.” Its third couplet reads 竹喧归浣女，莲动下渔舟. In the 1929 translation of Witter Bynner and Jiang Kanghu, which is in the public domain: “Bamboos whisper of washer-girls bound home, / Lotus-leaves yield before a fisher-boat.” Ten characters, two scenes. The lecture asks what makes them good, and its answer is the first of the five methods: sensibility, which it breaks into four habits. The first it calls, with a pun that does not translate, a “small eye”: a small, careful way of looking.

The reading goes like this. The poem gives the effect first and the cause second. First the bamboo rustles, and the lotus leaves stir, and only then do we learn why: women who wash clothes by the water are coming home, and a boat is going down the stream. Chinese commentators often note this order, and it fits the lecture’s point that a still list of images becomes a stretch of time. (The lecture adds some suspense, a listener wondering whether a wild animal is in the bamboo; that is its own dramatization, and not in the poem or its commentary.) What the lecture asks of us is the opposite of a grand view. If a guide in the Louvre says “this is Impressionism, a great movement,” the lecture says, the label drops on us like a hat that is too big, and we feel nothing. What works is the particular: this rustle, then these women.

Wang Wei’s poem has another side the lecture’s reading leaves out. It begins with an empty mountain after rain (空山新雨后) and ends with the speaker deciding to stay. A “small eye” is one good way to read it, and a modern teacher’s way; it is not the only one, and it does not replace the emptiness at the start.

The path nobody drew

The lecture’s second example is a painting, Guo Xi’s Early Spring (早春图). It is dated 1072 by its inscription, a hanging scroll in ink and light colors on silk, 158.3 by 108.1 centimeters, and it is in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. It is mostly mountain: pines, mist, and rock rising in layers. But low in the picture, tiny figures give the scale. Chinese reference works describe a woman on the bank carrying an infant and leading a child, a man behind her with a load on a shoulder pole, and two men by a boat at the water’s edge. The lecture’s point is that we can tell people live here, though the painter drew no road. A line across the mountain would have spoiled it. The figures hint that the way is there.

Guo Xi’s own text says what he was after. The Linquan Gaozhi (林泉高致), written down by his son Guo Si, opens with a received view that there are landscapes you can walk through, gaze at, roam in, and live in (可行、可望、可游、可居). Then it ranks them. Walking and gazing, it says, are worth less than being able to roam and live, because in real mountains only three or four places in ten are fit for roaming or living, and a painter should choose those. The lecture drops the ranking, but its point stands: a picture that invites the viewer in is a picture the viewer can feel.

A third example is a line of Du Fu, 早行石上水，暮宿天边烟. The lecture takes it for a flight from the An Lushan rebellion with children, through mountains with no path. The line is from a long poem, 彭衙行 (“Song of Pengya”), written about 757 and remembering the family’s flight in 756. The poem has the details: a small daughter who bit him in hunger and had to be hushed against his chest for fear of tigers and wolves, and a small son who begged for bitter plums. The standard annotation reads the couplet plainly. In the morning they walked on water-slick stones; at night they slept in mist at the edge of the sky. The lecture’s own gloss, that the family waded up a creek bed to find a path and that a sunset had gone black as smoke, is the lecturer’s and not the usual reading, but the poem gives enough to make the ten characters carry a journey.

The last example is Jan van Eyck’s portrait of 1434 in the National Gallery in London (NG186; oil on oak, 82.2 by 60 centimeters). The lecture reads its details: a small dog, fruit on the window sill, and a round mirror on the back wall in which the painter himself appears. Some of that has to be corrected. The Gallery says the fruit is oranges, an expensive fruit in Bruges, not apples. It says the couple are husband and wife and that for many years the painting was read as a marriage ceremony, “though not anymore.” (The old identification of the sitters as Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami has also failed on archive evidence, and scholars disagree about what the picture is.) Van Eyck did not invent oil painting, which was in use for centuries before him, and he did not invent Italian linear perspective; the lines of his room do not meet in a single point. What survives is the lesson. The wall above the mirror carries his signature, “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic,” “Jan van Eyck was here.” The convex mirror shows the room from behind, and two men in the doorway. Ten tiny scenes of the Passion run round its frame. In the lecture’s words the painter went to a great deal of trouble to let us see more, and a person who rushes past sees a couple and a dog.

The sofa nobody dusted

The second habit is the one the lecture calls a strange eye. It begins with an entry in Leo Tolstoy’s diary, dated March 1, 1897. Tolstoy wrote that he was dusting a room, came round to the sofa, and could not remember whether he had dusted it. The act was so habitual that it had not been noticed. The Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky put the entry at the center of an essay, “Art as Device” (1917; some translations call it “Art as Technique”). Habit, he wrote (in the Lemon and Reis translation of 1965), “devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war,” and art exists “to make the stone stony,” to give the sensation of a thing as seen and not merely recognized. Shklovsky’s name for the method, ostranenie, is usually translated “defamiliarization” or “making strange.” (Shklovsky’s own date is “29 February 1897,” which cannot be right, since 1897 was not a leap year; the entry is March 1.)

The lecture runs the idea in a direction Shklovsky did not. It reads estrangement as taking a familiar object out of its familiar place, and it brings in modern art. In April 1917, the year of Shklovsky’s essay, a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” was submitted to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. It was refused, in effect: it was kept out of view. Alfred Stieglitz photographed it, and the photograph, with a short defense, appeared in the magazine The Blind Man. The original is lost; later replicas stand in museums. Some historians argue that Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, not Marcel Duchamp, should be credited; that is disputed, and what we know is that the signed object was sent in and that its removal started an argument. In the lecture’s reading, a urinal turns into Fountain by leaving the lavatory.

The lecture’s other examples come from Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Outside the Denver Art Museum stands Big Sweep (2006), a broom and a dustpan about 9.5 meters high, painted, with crumpled scraps of paper (the lecture says “two dirty tissues”; the museum’s catalog does not). At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–88) is a spoon about 15.7 meters long. The lecture says everyday objects are enlarged “a thousand times”; the spoon is closer to eighty times the length of a real one, by our arithmetic. In Philadelphia a 45-foot steel clothespin (1976) stands in Centre Square. Everyday things become monuments, which was the artists’ own phrase. In the lecture’s words, they make us look at what we use without seeing, “the monument of daily life.”

A Chinese text gives the other side of the coin. In the Zhuangzi (chapter 19, 达生), 忘足，屦之适也；忘要，带之适也: when you forget your foot, the shoe fits; when you forget your waist, the belt fits. James Legge, in 1891: “To be unthought of by the foot that wears it is the fitness of a shoe.” The lecture borrows the line to say that we do not notice what is comfortable. Zhuangzi means something slightly different, since for him the unnoticed fit is a mark of ease and is good. The two are compatible. A thing that fits does not announce itself, and a taste that wants more than that has to learn to notice it again.

A disappointment worth having

The third habit sounds odd: be willing to be disappointed. The lecture’s example is television. We root for the hero to reach home, and if the next episode simply delivers it we lose interest. So writers hold things back. The lecture then borrows an idea from the German literary scholar Hans Robert Jauss. In his inaugural lecture at Konstanz, on April 13, 1967, Jauss argued that readers come to a book with a “horizon of expectations,” and that a work’s value depends on whether it shifts that horizon. A work that meets every expectation reads as light entertainment, while one that changes the horizon becomes a classic. The lecture simplifies this to “the greater the distance, the higher the art,” and then immediately qualifies it: not the farther the better, since there has to be a limit. That qualification is closer to Jauss than the slogan. (The exact passage could not be checked against the English text, so this course paraphrases and quotes nothing.) The TV series the lecture has in mind, Prison Break, ran on Fox from 2005 to 2009, four seasons and 79 episodes, before a short fifth season in 2017.

From there the lecture slides into an overstatement: great works are all tragedies, the hero must die badly, and lovers must not marry. Aristotle does not say so. In the Poetics he thinks the best plot moves from good fortune to bad (chapter 13), but in chapter 14 he ranks highest a deed that is stopped just in time by recognition, as when a mother is about to kill her son and learns who he is. Great works that are not tragedies are easy to find: Homer’s Odyssey, which Aristotle discusses, Dante’s Commedia, Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion (1598), Mozart’s Figaro (1786), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). The lecture’s example from Dream of the Red Chamber is better. Lin Daiyu dies in chapter 97 while the wedding that excludes her goes on (the novel’s last forty chapters, in the 120-chapter edition that Gao E and Cheng Weiyuan printed in 1791, are usually credited to Gao E, though the point is disputed). The book does seem to refuse the happy ending its readers want. The honest version of the lecture’s claim is that a work which gives you exactly what you expect is unlikely to change you, and that a moment of disappointment is a signal to look more closely, not to leave.

Here and now

The fourth habit is presence. The lecture says that aesthetic experience is a matter of the present moment, of this time and this place, and does not depend on what a book or a teacher has said. It cites the German philosopher Martin Seel, whose Ästhetik des Erscheinens (2000; Aesthetics of Appearing, translated by John Farrell, 2005) argues that aesthetic attention is attention to how things appear. This course says no more about Seel than that, because the details of his argument could not be checked. The lecture’s own examples are better than its theory. Music flows and cannot be held in a single instant. A painting does not flow, but the light on it changes by the hour, and the eye has to move. A leaf has more detail than a novelist could describe.

The Chinese example is a garden. In the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou, founded about 1513 and on UNESCO’s list since 1997, two halls honor the sound of rain. The Hall of Listening to the Rain (听雨轩) is named for the sound of rain on banana leaves. Another, 留听阁, is said to be named for a line of Li Shangyin’s: 秋阴不散霜飞晚，留得枯荷听雨声, “the autumn cloud does not clear and the frost comes late; keep the withered lotus to hear the rain.” In chapter 40 of Dream of the Red Chamber Lin Daiyu says she dislikes Li Shangyin’s poems except for this one line, and that nobody keeps the withered lotus any more. Baoyu replies that they will stop having it pulled up. (The lecture merges the two halls, and Daiyu’s version of the line has 残荷 where the Tang poem has 枯荷.) The rain will never fall exactly the same way twice. Hume said something like it for books: a work should be gone through “more than once,” and in “different lights.” What the lecture adds is that the pleasure is in giving up the wish for a fixed result.

Echoes

The second of the five methods, a sense of form, is the one the lecture treats most concretely. Form, in this sense, is the way the parts of a thing relate. Two eighteenth-century British writers set the terms. Francis Hutcheson wrote in 1725 that the figures that excite the idea of beauty “seem to be those in which there is Uniformity amidst Variety.” (The common paraphrase, “unity in variety,” is not his wording.) William Hogarth, in The Analysis of Beauty (1753), wrote of “composed variety,” as against variety “uncomposed, and without design,” which he called “confusion and deformity.” He also argued against plain uniformity, and his “line of beauty” is a wavering curve of two contrasted bends.

The lecture lists three kinds of form. The first is symmetry: the Forbidden City, built 1406–1420, lies on Beijing’s central north–south axis, and the gardens of Versailles, which André Le Nôtre began to lay out in 1661, are arranged on an axis too. The second is proportion, as in a hand or foot, which are not symmetrical but whose parts relate. The third is what the lecture calls 呼应, “echo”: not symmetry, not balance, but a part answering a part elsewhere. The usual English words in art writing are repetition and variation, rhythm, and rhyme.

The lecture’s showpiece is a Chinese scroll. “Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk” (捣练图) in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession 12.886) is not a Tang original, as the lecture says, but an early twelfth-century Song copy, attributed to Emperor Huizong, of a lost work by the Tang painter Zhang Xuan, who was active about 713 to 755. It is a handscroll about 37 centimeters high and 1.45 meters long, painted in ink, color, and gold on silk, and it came to the museum in 1912. It has three groups: four women pound silk with long wooden pestles, two sit winding thread and sewing, and two more stretch and iron the cloth while girls run about. The lecture’s analysis of the first group is its own. It sees the four heads as dark points forming a parallelogram, and the faces turned at different angles, like phases of the moon. It sees the eye grouping the first two figures by nearness and the last two by nearness, but grouping figures two and three, who lift their pestles, against one and four, who prepare. The painting’s clothes echo each other, it says, across the whole scroll. No museum text or scholarly source we could reach says this. It is one way to read the scroll. A well-known piece of psychology supports the principle behind it: Max Wertheimer described in 1923 how the eye groups things by nearness and by likeness, and the activity below lets you feel the effect.

The scroll also has another life that the lecture does not use. In 2014 the museum’s exhibition “Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls?” pointed out that poems of the period link the pounding of silk with longing for an absent man. If the picture is about desire as well as work, then the lecture’s remark that there is “nothing to see” in the content is too quick. The form and the subject are not rivals. They are two ways of looking at the same thing.

The lecture’s second example is Edouard Manet’s The Spanish Singer (1860; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 49.58.2; 147.3 by 114.3 centimeters), a seated guitarist with a jug at his feet. It won an honorable mention at the Salon of 1861. The lecture finds an X in the guitar and the body, whites at the kerchief, the shirt, the sleeve, and the waist, and colors that echo between guitar, face, and jar. The museum’s text does not discuss the picture in those terms and the geometry could not be checked, but the habit the lecture recommends is sound: ask where the whites fall. The ground is a brown, not a black, and the painting is dark in general, so the small whites do a great deal of work.

Does the form-sense come from training? The lecture says yes, and says it is lost again at the moment of making: Zhang Xu, the “Sage of Cursive,” is said to have written best when drunk, but the drinking came after long training. The sources give the training. Du Fu, in a poem of the 740s, has “Zhang Xu, three cups, and he is a sage of cursive; cap off before princes and lords, brush on paper, a cloud of mist.” A Tang writer, Li Zhao, reports that Zhang Xu said he understood the method of the brush after seeing a princess’s porters quarrel over the road and Lady Gongsun dance with swords. And Su Shi, writing in 1079 of the painter Wen Tong, said that to paint bamboo “you must first have the whole bamboo in your chest,” and then confessed that he understood this without being able to do it, which he put down to “not having studied.” The lecture’s “bamboo in the chest” (胸有成竹) is a later idiom built from his sentence. Zheng Banqiao added a twist in the eighteenth century: the bamboo in the eye, the bamboo in the chest, and the bamboo in the hand are three different bamboos.

Studies of expert eyes agree in part. Vogt and Magnussen (2007) had nine artists and nine laypeople view sixteen pictures freely. The laypeople spent more time on people and objects, the artists on structure, and the artists remembered more of the picture’s features. The groups are tiny, and the study does not show that training caused the difference. It does fit the lecture’s claim that form is something one can learn to see. What the lecture adds is the useful warning that form is a key to feeling and not an end in itself.