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ART AND THE PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD

BY DR. ALLAN C. ORATE
Department of Humanities and Philosophy
College of Arts and Sciences, University of the East-Manila
(From UE Today, February 2000, Vol. 12, No. 2., pp. 7-8 & 14)

There is of course more wisdom concerning life that one gets out of The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-
Exupery than an insight into the theory of art; nevertheless, it is an insight, and deserves recognition. We are
told in this novel that the pilot, as a little boy, used to show his drawing to the adults, and asked them what it
is. “It’s a hat,” they replied. But for the boy, it was a boa constrictor having shallowed an elephant!

Consider another drawing of the same kind, we refer to this design:

There are many ways of looking at this. These are just five of them: (1) a square
suspended in a frame, (2) a lampshade seen from above, (3) a lampshade seen
from below, (4) a tunnel, and (5) an aerial view of a truncated pyramid. What
accounts for the changing visual “aspects”? For psychologists, it is a revelation of
personality, like in inkblot experiments. But for the philosophers of art, it is what
constitutes the aesthetic perception!

Most of us see a painting as what it is about—the subject. We see, in Sandro

Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, a beautiful, golden-haired woman coming out of a shell. We observe bloody,
dead gladiators being dragged out of the stadium into the dungeon, amidst the curious glances of Roman
spectators, in the Spoliarium by Juan Luna. Even in the fragmented, geometrical shapes of Picasso’s Three
Musicians, we notice a man with a flute and another one with an accordion or guitar. And when looking at
Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, we ask: “Who is that?” as if being confronted with a real
person.

The fact of our experience is that we often fail to see a painting as a design—shapes and lines of different
colors and values stumped upon a canvass. And we tend to categorize it to the level of things far removed
from what it actually is made of. Yet, the design and the medium visually constitute a painting. If there is more
to painting than being visual, it is because we are talking of a different kind of “seeing,” that is “seeing
through.” We see through the design, so to speak, in the same way as the boy in The Little Prince saw a huge
snake, and as we see a lampshade or a tunnel in the design above. This is our unique experience of art.

But should we necessarily “see through” the design in order to ascend to the subject level of a painting in our
aesthetic experience of it?

A woman looking at a painting by Henry Matisse was noted to have commented: I have never seen a woman
like that!” The painter, who happened to hear the woman, sarcastically responded, “Madame, that is not a
woman, that’s a painting!” In the standard of Matisse then, if one sees the painting as its subject, one commits
some kind of mistake. But seeing a painting not as a representation is a very difficult thing to do. “Man is
possessed by an urge to objectivate,” says Herchell Chipp, “he wants to see something in the work of art, and
he is sure this represents something.” Some students who for the first time saw van Gogh’s Landscape with
Cypresses, protested that nature never looked like that. It took them some times to realize that is was all but a
painting, and they exclaimed: “Ah, van Gogh’s Landscape with Cypresses.”

Of course, there is a great deal of difference, like anything else, between a woman and a painting of a woman
in the ontological level, but in the level of sight, these differences disappear. Painting reaching trompe l oeil
have so defied vision. An anecdote about Zeuxis and Apollodorus would bring this point to the fore:

As the most famous artists of their time, the rivals held a competition. Zeuxis was
said to have painted such a life-like bunch of grapes that the birds came to peck
at them. His skill was such that even birds were deceive. Apollodorus, in turn,
invited Zeuxis to unveil his painting as was the custom. But as Zeuxis moved to

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draw the veil, he suddenly realized to his chagrin that the veil itself was the
painting. Thus Apollodorus won the competition because his painting, in its
verisimilitude, fooled not only the birds but a human being.

The true-to-nature approach to painting may be observed in the miniaturismo of the Filipino portrait painters of
the 19th century, and in the style called magic realism which might have been influenced by pictures derived
from modern photography.

Given that painting is representational, it may be asked: “What of the world does a painting represent?” By
way of answering this question, we shall consider the style of rendering the human form in the Renaissance
and cubist paintings.

Portraits were representational and highly realistic during the Renaissance period. The human figure is in the
position of rest, either standing or sitting. The face is always in frontal view; it is highly emphasized because
the direction of the light and arrangement of objects around are made to focus towards it. The background
suggests an illusion of depth which brings the figure affront the eye of the viewer. Leonardo da Vinci’s The
Mona Lisa is such a case. If many figures are shown, like in the Last Supper again by da Vinci, they are
arranged in a perfectly symmetrical balance achieved by their relative positions in the picture-plane, as
determined by the application of linear perspective with its single vanishing point at the center and in the eye
level of the observer.

The faithful treatment of figures was abandoned by the cubists during the second decade of 20th century.
They brutally distorted it. In Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, is composed of various facet of five
female bodies seen from different angles. The facial features of the two women are radically simplified by
combining the front and side views. The figures are almost entirely flattened, producing an effect which makes
them look immersed on the surface level together with the objects around them. An analytic cubism the
human image is still distinguishable as it is formed by various fragmented, monochromatic, geometrical
shapes, like in the Daniel-Henry Kahweiler again by Picasso.

Close consideration of the nature of Renaissance art and cubism as two different styles of figuration indicates
that these had developed out of the artists’ different ways of looking at the world. J. W. Sanders observed:

About 1500, the artists of the Renaissance invented the perspective we are still
accustomed to: the artists sat down on his chair, looked at the scene from one
definite angle, and tried to fix it on his panel accordingly. Now after four hundred
years, the painter rises from his chair. Starts moving around his object, and tries
to render the totality. He changes his point of view.

The world the Renaissance saw was static; their paintings captured reality for just one moment, in one view.
The cubist turned and wiggle their sight to see many movements, many appearances which resulted in a
multi-view, multi-perspective, assorted rendering of thing in artistic forms. This sense of dynamism is one of
the most penetrating aspects in the theory of modern art.

The nature, evolution and appreciation of representational art can therefore be understood in the context of
the artists’ vision of the world. The relation between art and the world is not that art mirrors nature, as the
ancient cliché claimed, but the world as seen by the artists determines the way art becomes. This view, in the
final analysis, is the idealist philosophy applied to the theory of art—that we never have a direct contact with
the world; we only have an experience of our own, subjective impulses.

Reference:
Orate, A. (2000). Art and perception of the world, in UE Today, Vol. 12, No. 2., pp. 7-8 & 14. University of
the East-Manila.

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