Preface

Baxandall, Michael

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Preface

Michael Baxandall

Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures

THIS BOOK is a revised version of a series of Una’s Lectures in the Humanities — lectures endowed in memory of Una Smith Ross — given at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 1982. My draft for the lectures was longer than would have been decent actually to deliver in the lecture-room: I have restored here a number of sections which I then cut, but I have not tried to modify or disguise the informality of the spoken argument.

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00091.001

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13412

Preface

This book is a revised version of a series of Una’s Lectures in the Humanities — lectures endowed in memory of Una Smith Ross — given at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 1982. My draft for the lectures was longer than would have been decent actually to deliver in the lecture-room: I have restored here a number of sections which I then cut, but I have not tried to modify or disguise the informality of the spoken argument.The lectures addressed a question: If we offer a statement about the causes of a picture, what is the nature and basis of the statement? More particularly, if we think or speak of a picture as, among other things, the product of situated volition or intention, what is it that we are doing? So the question is, within limits, one about the historical explanation of pictures, though I more often speak of ‘inferential criticism’ of pictures because this corresponds better with the balance of my interest in the activity.The Introduction sketches three characteristics of language that set preliminary conditions for the criticism and explanation of pictures. The problem here is the interposition of words and concepts between explanation and object of explanation. This interests me more than it seems to interest other people and many readers may wish to skip it and start at Chapter I, though I would prefer they glance at least at the short summary in section 5 of the Introduction.Chapter I is an attempt to place the sort of thinking we do when we think in an everyday way about the causes of a complex artefact being as it is. To postpone and also accent some of the special problems of pictures, the object examined is not a picture but a bridge. A simple pattern of explanation is sketched and then the question is put of what, in the interest of a picture, this pattern most fails to accommodate.Chapter II goes on to tackle the special problems of explaining pictures by adapting and elaborating the pattern that emerged ~from Chapter I to accommodate the case of Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler ‘as it is presented in the standard accounts’. I do not attempt a close or novel account of this picture; the point is to take an example from an episode in art history, early Cubism, familiar to most people. Topics successively touched on include how we describe the painter’s aims, how we consider for critical purposes his relation to his culture, how we deal with his relation to other painters, and whether we can accommodate within our account the element of process or progressive self-revision involved in painting a picture.Chapter III, an enquiry into the relation of eighteenth-century theory of visual perception to Chardin’s A Lady Taking Tea, has several functions in the argument of the book. One is to broach the difficult problem, skated over in II, of the relation of pictures to the systematic ideas of their time. Another is to lay out a detailed piece of explanation in such a form that it is open to the reader’s questioning. The detailed texture and close focus are therefore different from the rest of the book.Chapter IV, which works to Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, addresses two outstanding issues. The first is the issue of our relation to intentional movements of mind in another culture or period: what are we doing when we think about the intention of a picture by Piero della Francesca, a man whose mind thought with the equipment of a culture different from ours? The second is the issue of what self-critical criteria we use for assessing the relative validity of explanatory or inferential criticism.The book, I must insist, does not urge causal explanation as the course for art criticism or art history. It seems to me absurd to claim that there is a proper way to look at pictures. Rather, the book supposes that one of a number of unforced and, as it happens, unavoidable ways in which we think of pictures is as products of purposeful activity, and therefore caused. (I do not feel it necessary to argue the point that such causal thinking about pictures is unforced and unavoidable; if I did feel it necessary to do so, one of the grounds I would start from comes up in section 3 of the Introduction.) However, once we start inferring causes and intention in a picture we are doing something that is obviously very precarious indeed, and the reflective inferrer is likely to worry about the status of his inferences. In short, we are going to do it anyway, but what is it that we will be doing?~As soon as one starts thinking about that, one finds oneself awkwardly or at least tangentially aligned in relation to a number of sophisticated running debates. The most obvious and threatening of these is the debate, conducted mainly in the context of literature, about whether reconstruction of the maker’s intention is a proper part of interpretation of a work of art. If one believes one cannot exclude causal inference from one’s thinking anyway, the issue is inconveniently framed and is not, as an issue, pressing. I have tried to keep a little distance between myself and this debate: in particular, in II.1 I try briefly to differentiate between the postulating of purposefulness that concerns me and the Intentionalists’ ‘authorial intention’. In general I have preferred the universe of historical explanation to that of literary hermeneutics as a medium for these reflections: if I do not speak of ‘meaning’ in pictures that is deliberate. But mass attracts, and the proportions of the Intention debate are bound to perturb my course. For one thing, I have learned from the arguments and this is registered in references I give. For another, I am aware that any book called Patterns of Intention — a title in which the multiple puns (I count three or four) are important to me — will be placed in a relation to the debate. I would quite like to pre-empt this placing and label my position as one of naïve but sceptical intentionalism.The scepticism, like the naïvety, is fundamental and programmatic: its basis is most explicit in the Introduction, in I.5, in II.8 and in IV.2 and 5. However, I would claim that it is also an affirming and cheerful scepticism: it is the impossibility of firm knowledge that gives inferential criticism its edge and point. I try to suggest this, finally, in IV.9.But to the extent that the book carries an argument, it is an argument from the pressure of sustained examples rather than from sustained ratiocination, for which I am not equipped. The fact that I intermittently try to steal fragments of ideas from rigorous thinkers should not obscure this: that is opportunist and the ideas are discrete. The useful role for historians bent on reflection seems to me not to offer loose prescriptive generalisation under the description of ‘theory’ but rather to test quite simple positions against cases as complex as time and energy permit. The role is not imitative of the methodologists but complementary.So what this book is primarily concerned with is criticism, which I take in the unclassical sense of thinking and saying about particular ~pictures things apt to sharpen our legitimate satisfactions in them. And it is concerned with just one element in criticism, the cause-inferring strain inherent in our thinking about pictures as about other things. Other strains (Introduction 3) are real too. There are therefore a whole lot of things the book is not about and one of these is the sociology of art: I am here concerned to situate pictures socially only to the extent that the critical ambition immediately demands. So, for instance, in II.4 I use the simple model of exchange I call troc for the relation of the painter to his culture rather than any of the more structured models offered by various versions of Ideology because that, I feel, is all the critic needs — and so (IV.5 and 9) can validate. If I were concerned here with the dynamics of culture, troc would be inadequate because, in that frame of reference, too indeterminate as a causal structure. But let me say now that when I am told that the book is inadequate as a sociology of art I shall be unmoved. Among other things the book does not address is the question of what art is, and what makes one work better than another.Una’s lectures in the humanities are normally published by the University of California Press. The problems of book-making when thousands of miles separate publisher and author argued against this in the present case. I am grateful to Edward Hunter Ross, the Trustees of Una’s Lectures, and the University of California Press for agreeing to the book being published in London.I am grateful to the museums and libraries which supplied me with photographs and gave me permission for the reproduction of objects in their possession. I am also grateful to Eric de Maré for his photographs of the Forth Bridge, reproduced as figures 3–8. The Photographic Collection and Studio of the Warburg Institute were particularly helpful in providing me with elusive illustrations.Shorter versions of the book were exposed in 1982 both as lectures at the University of California at Berkeley and as seminars at Cornell University, and I had the benefit of much sharp comment. Points made by Paul Alpers, Mark Ashton, Charles Burroughs, James Cahill, Esther Gordon Dotson, Joel Fineman, ~Stephen Greenblatt, Neil Hertz, Walter Michaels and Randolph Starn have particularly lodged in my mind, but many others also helped my thinking. Among those elsewhere with whom I remember discussing specific matters touched on here are Ivan Gaskell, Carlo Ginzburg, Ernst Gombrich, Charles Hope, Martin Kemp, Peter Mack, Jean-Michel Massing, John Nash, Thomas Puttfarken and Martin Warnke. But the book is intermittently about very general issues and I cannot hope to acknowledge all who have affected my thinking about those.Svetlana Alpers read and criticized my text, and in response to her comments I made a number of changes. Michael Podro read it twice, in successive states, exposing errors of argument and taste. I owe much to his scrutiny, but also to previous discussions of the issues with him.Finally, I am grateful to Gillian Malpass and John Nicoll of the Yale University Press for their skill and care in designing and publishing the book. It is only fair to them to state that it is at my instance that there is no index of names.

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