I dream of coining a term that has currency throughout the world. A word or phrase that spills from lips and organizes thoughts in minds. God bless Richard Wollheim, coiner of minimalism.
November 8, 2003
Richard Wollheim, Philosopher, Dies at 80
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Richard Wollheim, a philosopher who synthesized analytic philosophy, psychoanalysis and the study of painting to develop aesthetic insights that are considered among the most profound of the postwar era, died on Tuesday at his home in London. He was 80.
The cause was heart failure, said a statement released by the philosophy department of the University of California at Berkeley; Professor Wollheim was the department’s chairman from 1998 to 2002.
His intellectual dexterity, at times almost playfulness, was suggested by works ranging from a widely respected biography of Freud to a well-received novel to an examination of human emotions that some reviewers saw as the basis for a general theory of a subject largely ignored by philosophers.
But his greatest impact, also unusual for an analytic philosopher, was on art. He coined the term Minimalism in his 1965 essay “Minimal Art.”
It actually referred not to the new artists, soon to be called Minimalists, who were then beginning to emerge, but to monochromatic paintings and Marcel Duchamp‘s display of ordinary objects as art.
A larger and much heralded accomplishment was developing a new approach and vocabulary for experiencing art. Mr. Wollheim, developing the ideas of Wittgenstein and Freud, argued that art could be understood only within its total context, from history to the nature of the surrounding community to the viewers’ and artists’ emotional dispositions and physical and psychic needs.
His idea was to begin viewing a painted surface in the same way that you might try to find a face in the clouds or in the way that you might, as Leonardo did, visualize landscapes in stains on a wall. Then he would try to interpret the artist’s intentions. Mr. Wollheim believed that unlocking the meaning of a painting involved retrieving, or almost re-enacting, the creative activity that produced it.
He asserted that this was possible because artists and viewers shared a universal human nature. In “Painting as an Art: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts” (Princeton University Press, 1987), a collection of talks originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1984, he called such a communion “seeing in.”
His personal method of “seeing in” became famously idiosyncratic. He said in the lectures:
“I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognize 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 spent 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.”
All that looking, however, seemed to bring rewards. Many reviewers remarked on the insightfulness of the book’s final chapter, in which Mr. Wollheim contends that certain paintings by Titian, Bellini, Willem de Kooning and others represent the painter’s attempt to project his fantasies about the human body onto his canvas.
He wrote that de Kooning cultivated “those senses that give us our first access to the external world,” through actions like sucking, excreting and gurgling.
Reviewing the book in The Los Angeles Times, Daniel A. Herwitz said Mr. Wollheim had “done no less than recover for psychology its obvious and irresistible place in the explanation of what is most profound and subtle about paintings.”
Richard Arthur Wollheim was born in London on May 5, 1923. He graduated from the Westminster School and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Balliol College, Oxford. He served in the infantry in France during World War II and was briefly captured by the Germans. He left the Army as a captain.
From 1949 until 1982 Mr. Wollheim taught philosophy at University College, London. He then taught in the United States, first at Columbia from 1982 to 1985, then at Berkeley until his retirement in 2002. From 1989 to 1996, he split his time between Berkeley and the University of California at Davis.
His books received mixed reviews but were never ignored. For example, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt suggested in The New York Times that Mr. Wollheim’s attention to detail in his biography, “Sigmund Freud” (Viking, 1971), had obscured his view of Freud’s significance today.
Harold Bloom, the scholar and author, strongly disagreed with this view in an article on Freud published in The Times Book Review in 1986. Professor Bloom called Mr. Wollheim “the most impressive interpreter of Freud to emerge from analytical philosophy” and praised his characterization of Freud’s work as “research into the deafness of the mind.”
Mr. Wollheim’s novel, “A Family Romance” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1969), also drew on his insights into psychology. The Book Review described it as ” old-fashioned in a refreshing way [~] post-Freud, and prewar.”
In The Los Angeles Times in 2000, Jonathan Ree praised “On the Emotions” (Yale University Press), another of Mr. Wollheim’s books, for treating intricate issues with the care they deserved.
“But beneath a dense ground cover of details, he has laid the foundations of a large general theory” of how emotions work, Mr. Ree wrote.
Mr. Wollheim is survived by his wife, Mary Dan Lanier, a potter; their daughter, Emilia; and by two sons from his first marriage, Bruno and Rupert.