What Is a Painting?

Author(s): MICHAEL POLANYI

Source: The American Scholar , Autumn, 1970, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Autumn, 1970), pp. 655-
669
Published by: The Phi Beta Kappa Society

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 What Is a Painting?
MICHAEL POLANYI

There is a strange painting, covering the vault of the

of Saint Ignazio in Rome. It is the work of the Jesuit A
Pozzo, done about the turn of the seventeenth century. Th
ing shows, among a number of figures, a set of columns that
to continue the pilasters supporting the vault. But these subje
the painting can be seen in their normal shape only if the
stands in the center of the aisle. If he moves away from that
even by a few yards, the columns appear to be curved an
down at an angle to the structure of the church. If you walk
the center of the aisle, the painted columns keep moving
always lying down away from your position.
In a paper published in Journal de Psychologie norm
pathologique in 1963, Mr. M. H. Pirenne offered an inter
explanation of these facts, and in a book entitled Optics, P
and Photography, recently published by the Cambridge Un
Press, he has extended this argument further. I think his ide
important consequences.
At first sight the Pozzo phenomenon may seem to pres
problem to speak of. We know that a perspectivai painting
sents its subject from one central position; hence, when vi
an angle to this direction, the painting must appear di
Pozzo himself gave this as the reason that his painting is d
when seen at an angle to its perspectivai axis.
But this explanation settles Pozzo's case at the cost of
a much wider question. For it follows from it that all pers
paintings must be distorted to a similar degree when view
angle to their perspectivai axis. And this does not happ
can walk past a painting, for example, in a picture gallery

O MICHAEL POLANYI's books include The Logic of Liberty, The Study

Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension and Knowing and Being.
Copyright © 1970 by Michael Polanyi.

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

out the painting's being distorted as Pozzo's painting is

the distortion should be much greater there than in th
case, since the deviations from the line of perspective
passing a picture must be greater than those evident when
the vault of a church from a few yards away from the cen
aisle.

This problem is, of course, well known in a general w

fact that perspectivai design continues to be seen virtu
changed from directions at wide angles to its axis has b
quently noted. But the treatment of this problem seem
been rather cursory, perhaps because no estimates were
the size of the distortion to be expected.
However that may be - and I shall return to it - t
case confronts us with the full measure of this problem
us to look for a powerful factor that protects ordinary
from being distorted, and this must be a factor that is abs
Pozzo painting, thus leaving it defenseless against distort
viewed at an angle. Pirenne suggests that the factor tha
ordinary perspectivai paintings from distortion by angu
consists in our subsidiary awareness of the fact that pain
mostly based on a flat canvas. Our awareness of the canvas
in Pirenne 's view, the depth of a painting's perspectiv
and thus protects the painting against the distorting effect
viewed at an angle. According to this theory, the Pozzo p
subject to distortion, because its perspective is not coun
by an awareness of the ground on which it is painted.
But if this is so, we would expect the Pozzo painting
different from an ordinary painting, even when both a
correctly along the axis of their perspectives. They do,
look different, and different in a way that Pirenne's th
dicts. When viewed from its perspectivai center, the Poz
is deceptive; its columns appear to be a real continuatio
church's architecture: the picture is seen as fully three-dim
Ordinary pictures look different. They are not deceptive, n
three-dimensional. We do not mistake a still life by Cé
real fruits and vegetables placed in a recess of the exhibitio
nor do we see Manet's Déjeuner sur V Herbe as two u

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

women sitting in company of their fully dressed male co

on grassy grounds in a passage open to the air.
According to Pirenne, our subsidiary awareness of the
combines with the perspectivai appearance and thus pro
normal painting, which does not show any illusory presence
objects represented by it. The liability of a painting's b
torted by angular vision is thus linked to its deceptivene
sidiary awareness of the canvas being responsible both for p
ing a painting against angular distortion and for preve
from producing a deception. In other words, the Poz
shows angular distortion plus deceptive power owing to
that we are not aware of its ground, while in the case of
painting, our awareness of its canvas both protects it again
lar distortion and deprives it of deceptive powers. This is P
theory.
But are we not relying here too heavily on the evidence of
a single painting, the vault of Pozzo, with its peculiar hemi-
cylindrical shape? Pirenne answers this by additional evidence
from the case of anaglyphs. Anaglyphs combine two stereoscopic
images with different colors, which, when viewed through a cor-
responding pair of colored glasses, present a fully three-dimen-
sional image. When viewed from different angles, such a deceptive
image shows strong deformation - just as is to be expected in
Pirenne's theory.
We have actually independent evidence also for another ele-
ment of this theory. There is evidence that, seen from an angle,
the perspectivai design of an ordinary painting is distorted if the
distortion is not counteracted by the perception of the painting's
flatness. We find that the photograph of a painting taken from an
angle is heavily distorted, because the camera does not pick up the
presence of the canvas, which otherwise would counteract dis-
tortion.

But let me return to the current explanations of the fact that

the appearance of a painting is undisturbed by viewing it at an
angle. E. H. Gombrich mentions the problem in his Art and
Illusion (1962, pp. 234-253) several times and classes it with other
cases in which we see a painting in a particular way because it thus

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 WHAT IS A PAINTING?

makes sense to us. Such a tendency is said to be akin to the way we

see an object constantly, although it is presented to us at different
distances, angles and illuminations. One can try to regard Pirenne's
theory in this light as affirming that a painting's appearance re-
mains constant, when viewed at an angle, provided its perception
includes the subsidiary awareness of its canvas, while otherwise
it is distorted by viewing it sideways. We could thus link deceptive-
ness to angular distortion, while connecting lack of deceptiveness
to angular stability. And so Pirenne's theory could be expressed
in terms that were already current before, if in a vague manner.

But at this juncture, just when all seems neatly settled, new
problems arise owing to the modern rejection of the traditional
conception of painting. Remember the kind of statements that in-
augurated modern painting toward the end of the last century?
Whistler described his own paintings as the arrangement of colors
and tones on canvas. In France, Maurice Denis declared some
years later that a painting is "essentially a plane surface covered
with paint in a certain arrangement. " The twentieth century
opened with a series of novel works in Italy and Switzerland, in
France, Germany and Russia, all showing paintings that radically
rejected any aim of resembling nature. Pirenne's theory affirming
that we are invariably aware of the canvas might appear to side
with this modern movement, which would identify all painting
with brushstrokes on a canvas.

But this is not so. Pirenne speaks of our subsidiary awareness

of the canvas and does so with reference to my writings, in which I
sharply distinguish between subsidiary awareness and focal aware-
ness of an object. This distinction - the distinction between a sub-
sidiary and a focal awareness - changes the situation.
I shall demonstrate this by recalling Sir Kenneth Clark's ex-
periment, made about twelve years ago, in viewing Las Meninas
by Velazquez. Owing to its rough structure, Las Meninas must be
viewed from a distance. Clark wanted to observe how, by approach-
ing it from a distance to a closer point, one sees the painting dis-
solving into fragments. He hoped to see a gradual transition - but
there was none. He wrote:

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

"I would start from as far away as I could, when the illusion w
plete, and come gradually nearer, until suddenly, what had
hand, and a ribbon, and a piece of velvet dissolved into a frica
beautiful brushstrokes. "*

Now if we are asked two questions: 1) which view showed a

canvas plus brushstrokes? and 2) which view showed the paint-
ing? the answer would be that the view at close quarters showed a
canvas plus brushstrokes and the view from a distance showed the
painting. We can see only one or the other of these two sights,
never the two at the same time. And this is indeed what Gom-
brich concludes from this kind of observation. He says that we
see either a canvas and blobs or a painting, never the two at the
same time {Art and Illusion, p. 237).
But the situation changes if we admit two different ways of
seeing an object. Gestalt psychology has long since observed that
to look at the several parts of a whole can destroy our view of
the whole. Let me recall a case of this kind that resembles the ex-
periences of Sir Kenneth Clark. When flying first started, pilots
discovered the traces of ancient sites over which people had walked
for centuries without noticing them. Back on the ground, the flyers
themselves lost track of the ancient sites.
It would be nonsense to say that when, by moving away some
distance, we come to see a collection of parts as one whole, we
no longer see the parts. What happens is that we see the parts now
in a new way, namely, as parts of a whole. To introduce my own
terms, let me say that to look at the parts separately is to see them
focally, while to see them together forming a whole is to be aware
of them subsidiarily. And this is the structure that Pirenne ascribes
to a normal representative painting. This is said to include a sub-
sidiary awareness of the canvas. And this subsidiary awareness
distinguishes the normal painting both from a focal awareness of
the canvas plus brushstrokes, in which the painting falls apart, and
from a total unawareness of the canvas, which produces a deceptive
painting like the Pozzo ceiling.
We can illustrate this in a diagram.

* Sir Kenneth Clark, "Six Great Pictures," The Sunday Times (London), June 2, 1957.
This quotation was drawn to my attention by E. H. Gombrich in Art and Illusion.

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 WHAT IS A PAINTING?

focal awareness of: subsidiary no awarene88 of. Focally ' seen results:
awareness of: '

paint blobs canvas Illusion

canvas -f paint _ Normal representative

blobs painting

canvas -f paint _ _ Meaningless

blobs fragments*

1) Starting from belo

focally. Viewed close
strokes and canvas -
2) Passing on to the
ceptive painting, li
meaning, indeed ov
paint viewed subsid
the canvas or of any
its capacity to deceiv
suffers also from be
view.

3) Between these tw
ing, and the upper
meaning - we find th
subsidiary awarenes
quality of these two.
We can now see wha
nature of a painting
plus brushstrokes" i
these two, but right i
To say (with Gombr
a painting misses the
blobs but subsidiarily,
perspectivai depth of
two contradictories b
• Canvas plus paint seen fo
representative painting to ab
part of flatness in the painti

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

deed the quality that is characteristic of a normal pa

quality is perspectivai, but its perspective is restrain
fusion of flatness. And it is this quality of depth-citra-
keeps a normal painting from being deceptive an
against distortion when viewed from the side.

These observations broadly answer the question

painting? But a closer look reveals an incongruity. W
that a painting's fragments, into which it is decom
seen at close quarters, are united into a coherent ima
viewer recedes to a distance, and I have compared th
way an ancient 'site is discovered by rising above it in
I said that gestalt psychology accounts for this tran
when parts are united to form a whole. Rudolf Arn
veloped this relation throughout his Art and Visual
(1954) by explaining the coherence of a painting in term
psychology. But there is something peculiar - not m
Arnheim - in the way gestalt formation takes place wh
a painting. This union is not a fusion of complement
a whole, but a fusion of contradictory features. The
canvas is combined with a perspectivai depth, which
opposite of flatness.
Such integration of incompatibles is not unkno
chology. Binocular vision is based on the fusion of in
This action works even more strikingly in the use of
photography. Stereoscopic pictures are taken about
apart. At a glance they look much the same, but act
differ at every point. When we view them jointly, u
for each, they are fused into a single image, uniting
patible features into one strikingly novel sight. A d
dimensional appearance is produced by fusing two confl
nesses.

This fusion produces a radical extension of our eyes

the integration of canvas with perspectivai design
further in its radical innovation. Binocular integration
derfully to our powers of perceiving what is there, bu
gration of incompatibles in a painting reveals to us so

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 WHAT IS A PAINTING?

beyond all that exists in nature or human affairs: for what we see
is a flat surface having a deep perspective. This quality of flat
depth, which is the hallmark of a normal painting, may be said to
be transnatural.

It has been frequently npticed that the colors and tones avail-
able to the painter cannot equal the variety we meet in nature;
but to possess a flat depth goes far beyond nature. We are facing
here no mere deficiency of a painting, which reduces its imitation
of nature, but its possession of a peculiar quality that is altogether
lacking in nature. And thus we realize that the painter must aim
from the very start at producing an image essentially different
from nature.

This capacity to fuse incompatible features of an artifact into

radically novel qualities has been expanded by modern painting.
I have mentioned before the view, repeatedly expressed since the
end of the last century, that a painting was essentially a canvas
with brushstrokes arranged on it. This view was mistaken, but
it did express the urge of the time for going always to rock bottom.
In painting this was done by reducing simulation and increasing
thereby the part played by flatness. Cubism and expressionism,
for example, went a long way toward flatness by reducing simu-
lation, and abstractionism achieved total flatness by foregoing all
representation. My theory of the integration of incompatibles ad-
mits of all such variations, which have opened the way to modern
art throughout its various branches.

But before developing further these ideas of the transnatural,

let me enlarge the basis of my argument by including other kinds
of representative art. We shall see that evidence from poetry and
drama will support my conception of painting. Take drama first.
The actor on the stage resembles the painter in trying to simulate
something, while this simulation is kept firmly short of deception.
In playing Hamlet, the actor must simulate killing Polonius and
being killed by Laertes, but if any of these actions were to give
the impression that someone had been actually killed on the stage,
this would disrupt the play.
The actor's simulation is kept from turning into a deception by

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

an opposing force that is intrinsic to his art. Opposition to

lation, which in the case of a painting consists in its flatness,
sists in a play in the apparatus of stagecraft. The playwrig
director, the designers and the actors producing a play jo
restrain the range of simulation. A painting's self-contrad
flat depth has its counterpart here in equally paradoxical
murders and other such stage scenes. Art appears to consis
painting as for drama, in representing a subject within an
cial framework that contradicts its representative aspects
think we find the same structure in all representative arts.
This view of representative art was anticipated by
Richards -with respect to poetry. In Principles of Literary Cr
(1924), he wrote this of the meter in poetry:
Through its very appearance of artificiality meter produces in the
est degree the "frame0 effect, isolating the poetic experience
the accidents and irrelevancies of everyday experience.
But meter is only one artificiality of a poem among many
Rhyme, expressive sounds and distinctive grammatical con
tion, strange connotation of words and, above all, metaph
other fixtures of the poetic frame. They all function as su
aries, which, together with such content of the poem as
put into prose, form the meaning of the poem. Take Shake
Sonnet XVIII ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
poem of supreme power says little more in prose than: "Y
beautiful, but you will fade and die except that you will
membered in my immortal verse." The power and beauty
poem lies in a subsidiary framework embracing a simple
We can then define representative art as comprising im
actions or statements within an incompatible artificial framew
Paintings representing objects are thus placed firmly in th
class as plays representing action and poems making state
They all are works of art, which, by the fusion of their c
with an incompatible frame, have a quality wholly detache
from nature and from man's personal affairs.
There seems then nothing tangible left that a work of art
tell us. And this is not far from the truth. The factual infor
content of art is slight, its main purpose being to evoke ou

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 WHAT IS A PAINTING?

ticipation in its utterance. And again, it is for poetry that this action
of the arts has been first identified. I. A. Richards has contrasted
the vagueness and incoherence of our own experiences with the
severely circumscribed statements of a poem. And T. S. Eliot
spoke likewise of the ordering powers of poetry: ". . . the ordinary
man's experience/' he wrote, "is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.
The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences
have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the type*
writer or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these ex-
periences are already forming new wholes."*
From our lives ever meandering, and from things we pass by,
poems and plays and paintings call up vague memories and cast
them into structures firmly woven and well organized. And as the
artist draws on his own rambling experience for subjects to be
shaped by his art, so do we, his public, turn to his works in order
that their aspect may make sense of our own fugitive experiences.
By means of its artificial framework, which is sharply incom-
patible with its subject, a work of art takes us into an expérience
beyond the realm both of nature and of practical affairs, and our
understanding and acceptance of art consists in letting it thus carry
us into its own transnatural domain. Art does not inform us about
its subject, but makes us live in it, as its maker first lived in it -
sometimes many centuries before.

This kind of participation, however, does not explain the pas-

sion, the breathtaking effect that a poem, a play or a painting can
evoke. Some responses occurring in other domains may suggest
an explanation. Closest would be the comparison with music, but
this would lead us away from the representative arts to the ab-
stract kinds of art, which are off my subject. Let us take rather
the triumph of scientific discovery. Announcing his discovery that
the square of planetary orbital periods was proportional to the
cube of the corresponding solar distances, Johannes Kepler wrote
in 1619:

So now, since eighteen months ago the dawn, three months ago the
proper light of day, and indeed a very few days ago the most marvellous
# Quoted by Philip Wheelright in Metaphor and Reality (1963).

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

contemplation has shone forth - nothing holds me; I will i

sacred fury. . . .

This passion resembles that evoked by a great work of

there is a difference: the emotions of discovery are not
ted to the student; the latter learns of the proportionality
and squares in the planetary system without being deep
by these matters.
The difference seems due to the fact that the feelin
by a work of art even in its viewer are existential rather
lectual. Kepler himself did undergo a triumphant trans
when his discovery changed the image of the universe
experience had to remain mainly his own. Perhaps it is
emotions that we might find an analogy to the way one
away by a work of art. Look how a patriotic citizen of a
or even one who merely feels at home in it - can be mo
unfurling of the nation's flag. All the incoherent and unsp
experiences that make up a person's national memories
bilized by the sight of a national flag unfurled to its s
large crowd. Thus, a closely circumscribed structure,
pattern of the flag, can draw from a man's diffuse li
intensely concentrated emotion. Replace the flag by a
representative art, and you see the same mechanism at wo
diffuse experiences of life the clear utterances of art d
sionate response. Art does this first in the mind of its
then in the mind of its public. *
One might think that to convey a matter drawn
perience is to transmit a factual communication; but t
so. Once an experience of ours is transfused into an inc
artifact - be it in a poem, in a play or in a painting
perience is turned into a matter unprecedented in nat
affairs of men. And, when such transnatural matters are
us by art, this event tells us nothing that can be true
does not convey a factual communication.

This does not mean that the effect of representativ

altogether outside our relation to nature or to hum
Works of art may imply certain facts, and these may a

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 WHAT IS A PAINTING?

vincing or misleading. Art may even deliberately express ideas,

and these may be true or false. But the truth of such ideas does
not qualify them as a true work of art, any more than their possible
falsity - although it may be objectionable - would disqualify their
utterance as a work of art.

All this may be fairly obvious in respect to poetry and drama,

but not quite so obvious for painting. So let me make it clear
once more that it does apply also to painting, even in all its tradi-
tional forms, which aimed at simulation. The normal painting
of all times belongs to the same class as poetry and drama, for it
possesses an artificial frame that contradicts its subject and yet is
so closely fused with this subject that the union of the two acquires
a quality of its own, a quality unexampled in nature and the af-
fairs of men. In this artificial estrangement of its subject lies the
power of all painting to represent matters drawn from experience
in terms that transcend all natural experience. And therein lies
equally the power of all representative art.

A few words about the imagination. Our imagination is mostly

icnown for roaming at random, but it is actually our principal
guide to reality. Perception works within our imagination, and
when there is a difficulty in making out what it is that we see, we
send out thrusts of our imagination to explore what that thing may
be. And, of course, as it is capable of finding truth, the imagination
is capable also of error: it can produce illusions. Most of the
time our imagination seems to work instantly, but its scanning
may take a long time. And so, as perception can work by stages,
so can illusion. There are grades of perception and grades of il-
lusion: stages of perception lead to the recognition of objects that
are really before us, while stages of illusion lead to the sight of
things that are not there.
Since the representative arts tell us of things that are not there,
such arts have been classed as illusions. And the illusions attributed
to such art were then graded according to degrees of illusion.
But this is a mistake. The arts do not exhibit things that could be
really there and yet are not there; they exhibit things of a kind
that cannot exist, either in nature or among men.

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

I have said that both perception and illusion are wor

imagination. The making of a painting, a play or a poe
a work of the imagination, but in a very different way
met with this difference before, when comparing the i
of parts to a whole, by which we recognize facts of na
the integration of incompatible elements, by which a n
unknown to nature, is brought into existence. The asse
pieces expected to belong naturally together produc
perception or an illusion, while the integration of a
ments designed to be incompatible produces transnatu
like paintings, plays and poetry. Such is the work of
imagination.
Modern art has extended the integration of incompatibles to
ever new kinds of art. The unlimited inventiveness of our tech-
nology is matched by the inventiveness of our arts. We have
learned also to see the coherence and value of arts from primeval
beginnings to the artistic experiments of today. Such is the work
of our modern imagination.
Once such powers of the artistic imagination are fully real-
ized, the widespread classing of paintings as illusions becomes
clearly misleading. A painting lacks a place on the scale of illusions,
in the same way as the square root of minus one lacks a place
among real numbers. The square root of minus one is called an
imaginary number and not an illusory number, because it does
not pretend to be something that it is not.
It follows that Dr. Johnson, who warned against succumbing
to the illusion of a play, and Coleridge, who advocated the sus-
pension of our disbelief in artistic illusion, were both mistaken.
Since no such illusion exists, teachings for dealing with it are
pointless.
Thus I agree with Professor Richard Wollheim when he ob-
jected to the way Gombrich spoke of illusions in normal paintings.
I would say that, when Gombrich writes about illusion, he should
be understood as referring to the imitative element in a painting
and not to a painting as a whole. Otherwise, the conceptual
framework used by Professor Wollheim in his several papers
differs so widely from the conceptions introduced by Pirenne and

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 WHAT IS A PAINTING?

developed by me, that I cannot tell whether Professor Wollheim

has anticipated any other of the ideas I have put forward and to
what extent I may be dissenting from his views.* I agree, of course,
also in substance with Mr. H. Osborne's rejection of a complete il-
lusion as being the perfect impression of a work of art,f but I
cannot accept his view that our contemplation of art should be
based on a limited illusion which he calls "near illusion/*
The "integration of incompatibles" is reminiscent of A. Koest-
ler's "bi-sociation." But I prefer to speak of integration, as this
links my remarks to my own analysis of intellectual achievements,
all the way back to 1 946.*
I think that the part illusion plays in painting was first
clarified by Pirenne in 1963, when he suggested that a painting's
imitative content is reduced by a fusion with a subsidiary aware-
ness of the canvas. To this theory I have now added the view
that works of art are generally formed through integration of two
incompatible elements, one of these being an attempted com-
munication and the other, an artistic structure that contradicts the
communication. The harmonious compound formed by these two
elements has qualities found neither in nature nor in human affairs,
and hence it can communicate no information about real facts.
But it can draw on our unorganized memories and embody them
in its own structure, evoking thereby deep emotions in us. The
passions that the artist has spent in creating his work thus generate
their counterpart in us who follow him.
This is how artistic structures, being essentially detached from
nature and human affairs, can grip us more firmly than our own
memories can do.

# Richard Wollheim, "Art and Illusion," The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 3,
No. 1, 1963; On Drawing an Object (1964); Art and Its Objects (1968).
t H. Osborne, "On Artistic Illusion," The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 9, Nos. 2
and 3, 1969.
t Science, Faith and Society (1946).

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