Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples 1895-98
Oil on
canvas; 68.8 x 92.7 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Schapiro clearly leans
toward holism not only at the level of the milieu, but also at the level of the
individual work: “a painting is…a concrete individual object; we grasp its parts
immediately and sometimes simultaneously, all together as a whole, as we do an
object in nature” (Schapiro, 1999:11-12). This may again reflect the influence of Gestalt
psychology, which, as it happens, is a distinctively successful example of a
holistic theory applied to an empirical and experimental science. Gestalt psychology assumes the concept of
the lebenswelt and focuses on the
perception of the living organism.
Perceptual life is structured by relations of field and ground whereby
organisms attend differentially to biologically relevant aspects of their
environment. The organism is not reduced
to the purely biotic processes within cells, tissues, and organs, like salt
diffusing across semi-permeable membranes.
Instead, Gestalt psychology takes the animal’s perceptual experience of
its environs as an irreducible dimension of explanation. Schapiro applied the concept of field-ground
relations in his 1969 discussion of the systematic unity of the artwork, where
he addresses special problems pertaining to the perception of artworks:
…we have learned often
enough how limited is our perception of such complex wholes as works of art…in
an object as complex as a novel, a building, a picture, a sonata, our
impression of the whole is a resultant or summation in which some elements can
be changed with little apparent difference to our sense of the whole;
perception of such complexities is rapid and tolerant, isolating certain
features and passing freely over others, and admitting much vagueness for the
sake of larger effects.[1]
[1]. Meyer Schapiro, “On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity
of Form and Content” in Theory and
Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (Selected Papers IV) George
Brazilier, 1994 p. 37
