book reviews

Painting as Model
ARTHUR C. DANTO

introduction. Damisch, along with Bois, is con- ing the operations of an imaging consciousness,
Yve-Alain Bois. Painting as Model. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1990. 358 pp.; 87 black-and-white
cerned withills.
"the formulation of a question raised an assessment of the artist's work by Damisch of
$39.95 by the work of art within a historically determined which Bois greatly approves; or interpret ideologi-
framework, and the search for a theoretical model cally a "new thickness" (p. 251), said by Damisch
he title of this combative book is a sort of to which one might compare the work's opera- to be derived from Jackson Pollock's drips, and
standard planted, a line drawn, a glove
tions and with which one might engage them" (p. that enable us to "rewrite a portion of the history
245).
flung down; it is the gesture of a dueler, of modern art" (p. 252)? Until we have a clue how
an art-historical hotspur, defined by what he is Damisch is pondering the possibility of what to do this, or why we should want to, I find such
for and what he is against. He sees his opponents
one might term purely pictorial thought, where claims a sort of bluster. The Bois-Damisch sword/
as "blackmailers," to whose threats he willthe
notproblems, perhaps historically given to the razor cuts deeply into the flesh of art, construed as
knuckle under. He will not succumb to theorizers artists, are given purely pictorial solutions. In brief, a more totally human undertaking than either is 95
(though he helps himself to a lot of theory in the Bois, and if he is right, Damisch, aspire to a kind of prepared officially to allow. In any case, to the
course of the book), to politicizers (though he autonomous Kunstwissenschaft, which is to say, general poststructuralist proclamation of the
thinks of himself as deeply political), to arbiters of an art history that is not an application of theories death of the author, Bois adds in this book an art-
artistic and intellectual fashion who declare what external to art. At this point the sword does service historical echo: the artist too is dead; or, all that
is pass4 or "in," to antiformalists who see in for- as a kind of razor, shaving off as insufficiently survives is the artist as artist, concerned with the
malism a kind of ideological sellout, or to symbol explanatory what does not pertain to the pictorial material genesis of the painting. Bois is political,
chasers and iconographers. He is vehemently essence of art. For example, Bois claims, "In order and, as we shall see, theoretical when it suits him
against belletristic art writing, taxonomical art his- to comprehend... the abandonment of all curves, in his various efforts at "rewriting" art history.
tory, journalistic art criticism. He sees positivism there is no need to get mixed up in the theosophi- The most ambitious and the most original of
and humanism as "trite disgraces" (p. xxx). cal nonsense with which [Piet Mondrian's] mind the book's chapters is "Matisse and 'Arche-
The introduction, "Resisting Blackmail," was momentarily encumbered" (pp. 247-48). drawing,"' in which a familiar Derridianism is ap-
shows the author, sword drawn and flashing, driv- Those who wrote on Mondrian before Damisch propriated and applied to the explication of what
ing back into the shadows what no one familiar showed a certain "blindness to the paintings' sub-
the author terms the "Matisse system" (p. 22).
with the scene of the humanities today will fail to tle games" (p. 247). I don't especially want to
This concept specifies a way of drawing, and a
acknowledge as monsters. And given the pressure argue with Damisch's explanation of why Mon-
somewhat analogous way of painting, both of
to theorize, politicize, iconologize when the theo- drian refused curved lines, though it strikes me aswhich exploit certain gestalt phenomena. Bois
ries are inflated, the politics fashionable, the ico- fairly haywire when he states that curved linesseeks to set up a distinction between line and color
nology hardly robust, it is initially difficult not to affect the "imaging consciousness" in such a way
that parallels Jacques Derrida's way of distinguish-
applaud the author as a champion of intellectual that the line cannot be considered in itself, ing between writing and speech. Derrida diag-
bon sens, even if the swordsmanship is accompa- whereas this is not the case with a straight line nosed an ancient prejudice in favor of speech-
nied by a certain grands 6coles swagger. Besides, (p. 248). I merely question whether we under- logocentrism-in which writing was regarded
he has written an immortal line, "In the USA poli- stand the art if we treat it as subtle painterly gamesmerely as transcriptive and, so to speak, steno-
tics pervades everything but politics per se" (p. xx). instead of as the sorts of spiritual exercisesgraphic. The analogous view in art would be that
What is Yve-Alain Bois for? He is for "the urge to Mondrian seems to have believed in. But Bois painting is just color added to drawings-a filling
take painting seriously, or any kind of art for that subscribes to what he terms a "materialist formal-
in of space with hue. The thought is that Henri
matter, and to understand it not as the illustration ism," by which reference is made to a painting's Matisse originally used cartoons, transferring the
of a theory but as a model, a theoretical model in mode of production in "its slightest detail" (p. xix).
drawing to the canvas and subsequently adding
itself" (p. xxx). His guide in this pursuit is the art I suppose he has in mind something like Clement
color to make the painting. Derrida also proposed
historian Hubert Damisch, his graduate adviser at Greenberg's claim that the masters of modernism the existence of what he called "arche-writing,"
the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. "derive their chief inspiration from the medium or "speech-in-writing," prior, I suppose, to the
If the introduction is a tribute to Damisch's exam- they work in,"'1 though Bois terms this "European
division between speech and writing. Bois follows
ple, the concluding chapter, which gives the book formalism" (p. xviii). Construed in terms of pro-suit by proposing "arche-drawing," drawings that
its title, is a somewhat defensive review of Dam- duction, "form is always ideological" (p. xxi), not
generate the impression of color, or at least chro-
isch's book Fen~tre jaune cadmium, published in necessarily thematically, nor in terms of political
matic differences. Bois evidently does not recog-
1984. In Damisch's book the question is raised, content, but rather, "if indeed art can fulfill nize
a that this phenomenon is reasonably familiar.
"What does it mean for a painter to think?"; and political demand it is at its own level, that is, an
A circle drawn on a sheet of white paper will
the tone of embattlement and polemic clings to ideological level, itself stratified" (p. xxiii). Bois
appear whiter than the surrounding paper even
Bois's review: Damisch "alone in France seems to does not himself seek to work at that level, and in
though there is no actual difference. Matisse
take [this question] seriously"; the book "stands truth it is not clear that he or anyone would know
observed that when two lines are drawn close to
alone in France"; it is "resolutely opposed" to how to do so. How, for example, should we de-
one another, the same thing is true of the white
more or less what Bois himself is opposed to in his code ideologically Mondrian's project of subvert-
space between them: it will look whiter than the

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space surrounding the lines, though, as psycho- styles. He writes, for example: "If the principal mark an eye because there is not that natural
physicists say, there is no difference in the distal rupture in this century's art was indeed that ofaffinity, any more than there is one with us be-
stimulus. This phenomenon has a name: cubism, this break was probably not made by thetween pupils and the conventional dot that serves
Eindringlichkeit, and it has been studied actively Demoiselles d'Avignon nor by analytical cubism as an eye in a "happy face." Bois seems to think
by psychologists since World War I. Perhaps typi- but in the collusion between the Grebo mask [an that because one may in an ethnographic mu-
cal of his generation and discipline, Bois is for all Ivory Coast mask Picasso acquired in 1912] andseum see cowries and nails and any number of
his bravado readier to cite a fashionable thinker the Guitar [his cardboard and string sculpture ofother things as eyes, then what the African uses as
like Derrida than to consult the empirical scientiststhat same year]" (p. 79). Bois juxtaposes full-page an eye is arbitrary. This is the point of view of the
who might help him understand what is after allillustrations of these two works, though the con-formalist museum goer: it is not the African's
an optical effect. In fairness, Derrida's distinctionnection between them is not at all obvious, as point of view. And the infuriating thing is, as with
doubtless stimulated Boiss thought and gave it athey do not show any particular morphological af- the chapter on Matisse, that Bois simply disre-
structure within which to work. But it explainsfinity. But Bois credits Picasso's dealer and apolo-gards the sort of information that might be helpful
nothing whatever. The virtual color of a drawing isgist Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler with having distin-and even corrective in favor of the half-baked
due in part to what is termed "lateral inhibition,"guished two modes of formal influence, theories that compose the avant-garde canon of
where exciting effects upon receptors are accom-morphological influence being only the more fa- the French intellectual, such as those of Derrida or
panied by inhibiting effects in lateral areas. Of miliar one. The other is structural. In terms of Ferdinand de Saussure.

course certain figure-ground structures andstructure, Bois-and before him Kahnweiler- Bois even laments that poor Kahnweiler did 97
something of depth perception are operating as claims the Grebo mask influenced Picasso not have the luck to know Saussure's work,
well (which explains why, in a passage cited bythrough showing that forms themselves can be the most casual readings of the passages
whereas
he cites from Kahnweiler show that he had an
Bois concerning Mondrian, Naum Gabo was cer- arbitrary so long as certain systematic constraints
tain Mondrian could paint forever and not achieve are respected. What Kahnweiler specifically pro-
altogether different notion of signs. Kahnweiler
perfect flatness-regardless of what Damisch saysposes the Grebo mask suggested to Picasso was
evidently believed that Impressionism, for exam-
about straight lines). that "art aims at the creation of signs," and hence
ple, was a system of writing that, though at first
However skillfully Matisse exploited thesethat modern art, like that of Africa, is a sort of
"illegible," bit by bit became transparent: "the
'writing,' which initially appeared strange, be-
optical structures in his drawing, a "colorized""script" (p. 74). From this discovery, Bois writes,
drawing is far from a painting (where it is after all"arose synthetic cubism, almost all this century's
comes a habit" (p. 95). If indeed Impressionism is a
still possible to think of actual color as somethingsculpture, and, to a great extent, the semiological
script, then nothing is being said that is distinctive
added). No drawing can generate the experienceinvestigation called abstraction" (p. 79). This boldCubism in regarding it as a script. Bois is in
about
some serious danger of distorting our perceptions
of the colors in, say, the Moroccan Caf, whateverthesis, he ventures, "requires, at least, a rewriting
havoc this wreaks for the Derridian parallel. Butof cubism's history (as well as a good part of
of African
the art, of Kahnweiler as critic, of the place
there is among hues a common phenomenon, subsequent history of this century's art)" (p. of Demoiselles
79). I in modern art, and finally, of our
reading of abstract art, which may not be espe-
about which Bois makes a great deal: as Matisseam very taken with this sort of historical audacity,
and others recognized, a lot of green can bebut I am not as convinced of this particular in- scriptive at all. The little paper guitar may
cially
"greener" than a little of the same green. This, like stance as Bois wants his readers to be. after all be seminal, but not for the reasons
the Eindringlichkeit in drawing, is the Matisse Bois's Derridian antennae vibrate to signals Bois insists.

system and has to do with the qualitative differ-that suggest I'6criture, and he immediately ap- This is a book at once rewarding and frustrat-
ences of quantities. The phenomenon is probablyplies to Kahnweiler's astute observation a Saus- ing. One appreciates Bois's historical daring, his
a further instance of lateral inhibition, but it wouldsurian gloss: signs are arbitrary; systems of signs learning, and his love of painting. There are essays

be unfair not to give Bois credit here for makingare systems of differences; there is nothing inter- on De Stijl; on Wladyslaw Strzemirski and Katar-
certain discoveries, not simply in how to think nal to a signifier that as such entails its meaning. zyna Kobro; on Mondrian; on Barnett Newman
about Matisse as a draftsman (and to a far lesserBut is African art as arbitrary as this? Bois states and Robert Ryman; and a penultimate chapter in
extent as a painter), but about how to think as aexplicitly that "the vocabulary [of African sculp- which, with a little help from his friends-Roland
critic about Matisse and how to think historicallyture] is arbitrary and, in consequence, extends to Barthes and Walter Benjamin, trusty canoneers
about him as well. For example, Bois thinks it wasinfinity because the sculptural elements no longer both-he sounds a note of hope despite the cur-
Divisionism far more than Fauvism that opened have need of any direct resemblance to their refer- rent mourning for painting as a done thing. One
fresh vistas for Matisse. For all the contentious- ent. A cowry can represent an eye, but a nail can learns a lot from this book, even if one has to work
ness and hostile muttering ("tawdry Aristotelian-fill the same function . . . A cowry can represent through much not especially useful theorizing in
ism" [p. 3] is a favorite), this is a valuable piece ofan eye but also a navel or a mouth" (pp. 83, 85). In order to extract these benefits. The author is in the

art scholarship, and Bois is entitled to a certain the same artistic tradition? Where is the end no less political, no less fashionable, no less
amount of crowing over what he finds central toanthropological evidence that cowries (only one
theory ridden than his blackmailers even. o
Matisse that is barely mentioned in the definitiveexample) are what Bois calls "metaphoric dis-
Note
studies of the artist, such as those of Alfred Barrplacements"(p. 83) for eyes, navels, mouths? How
1. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Clem-
and Pierre Schneider. I am less confident of his do we know that Ivory Coast artists did not entsub-
Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed.
review of Pablo Picasso's history or of his recon-scribe to a theory of "signatures," so that cowry
J. 0. OBrian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1:9.
struction of what he calls the "Picasso system"shells are natural eyes because they resemble
(p. 79), though I want to applaud, before criticiz-eyes? And what role do cowries play apartART
from
H U R C. DAN TO is Johnsonian Professor of
ing, his impressive sense for historical beginnings sculpture in magic and medicine in a given Philosophy,
tribe? Columbia University, and art critic for
and his real narratives of the rise and fall of artisticOn the other hand, in another tradition, a nail can
The Nation.

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