Paul Crowther’s Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) is quite useful in facilitating a cooperation between art history and aesthetics. The book expounds not just an aesthetic theory but one that seeks to enable art historians to compose a definitive art history. Crowther’s approach might be called the “phenomenological depth theory” in so far as “depth” is a word with which he appears fascinated. The main theoretical issues are addressed in the second chapter, whereas the first turns present-day art history into two phantom camps—the one defined as “reductionist” as against the other, Crowther’s, which focuses on a picture’s “intrinsic significance” and thus makes possible an all-comprising art history. There are eight chapters more, but I will mainly concentrate on the theoretical framework.

In spite of a desire to cut nature off from art, Crowther prefers to look through the formidable problems put to his pronouncements by a good number of theories that attempt to illuminate this relation both from a historical as well as a perceptual point of view (of which Ernst Gombrich’s is of paramount importance, if only because he tried, in distinguishing painting from ornament, to systematically relate them).

Crowther assumes that pictorial space is made up of figure, plane, and frame. In defining what is figure (i.e., subject) he argues for the “pictorial representation’s relative semantic autonomy”; from this “logical property” he jumps to its “correlated ontological feature . . . modal plasticity.” The reasoning runs as follows. Since pictures are “artefacts which, once made, exist outside the body, and almost always, independently of it” (37), they cannot be thought to involve “ordinary visual perception” but “interpretation,” which is more than just language. On the other hand, interpretation “operates between two complementary vectors—the schematic and the particular” (37). At one and the same time the “schematic content” functions as class marker and the “particular” as description of a particular that nevertheless would not allow for a figure’s recognition unless transformed into the “individual.” Technically speaking this process of interpretation is based on the employment of “solid shapes . . . two-dimensional geometric forms . . . and color-based media” (37).

Inasmuch as these elements of construction are not borrowed from reality and the individualization of them engages exclusively with the painter’s imagination, the picture, while it may denote something real, need not be created with this end in view. Crowther argues that according to the theory of interpretation as described, the picture possesses the logical property (i.e., picture qua meaning) of “semantic autonomy” for which the corresponding ontological one (i.e., picture qua being) is “modal plasticity.” Here systems, scales, and correspondences are assumed either as self-evident or already known by the reader/viewer, so the only thing to be done is to explain the ontological property. In doing so, Crowther falls inadvertently back on what he was affirming in relation to interpretation (hence, “semantic autonomy,” etc.). “Modal plasticity” refers to the fact that a picture, since it is constructed regardless of denotative reference, shows “visual possibilities.” If proof is needed, it is reported that “humans can be represented as having wings, flying over a landscape, or as being alive in the midst of a fiery furnace” (39). The conclusion here is compelling—the picture is independent of physical laws (and thus of reality!). And what is more, granted “modal plasticity,” “pictorial space allows the creator to symbolically reorganize and re-make visual reality itself” (40).

At this juncture the viewer enters, and with her or him, aesthetic disinterestedness. How? We have been repeatedly told that a picture is ontologically independent of reality. Instead, the point to be made is not so much this as that the viewer, being aware of the fact that the picture did refer to a reality no longer available to her or him (“individual’s appearance will change . . . the landscape may be built over time”) (41), is enthralled by such ambiguity. This should mean that it is the pictorial space itself that sends out not only what the viewer perceives as ambiguity but also her or his own disinterestedness; in this way Crowther is able to insert the ontology of the picture within its aesthetic component. This is the first part of the theoretical chapter. There are still another two more—concerning plane and frame—which Crowther employs to maintain the picture’s already achieved independence from reality.

Before discussing the frame, it will be helpful to examine one of the arguments about plane, perhaps the most ingenious. After having declared that the picture possesses “planar structures” (i.e., simple and plain three-dimensionality which is found there a priori rather than created by the artist) on which the artist fastens a figure/ground subject, presenting it “from an absolutely stationary frontal view-point” (43), Crowther proposes that the two-dimensionality of the picture’s surface joins the fixativeness of the “planar structures” in order to “separate the subject from the conditions under which it is normally perceived” (45) (somewhat overlooking the fact that he has already raised three-dimensionality to the status of a property inherent in the surface). But how to demonstrate that a picture’s two-dimensionality differs from nature’s? According to Crowther, since the “solidified liquids are the main natural manifestation of flat appearance” (45) and the flatness of a picture’s surface is “virtual” (and, accordingly, immutable), the latter is “manifestly not the flatness of a solidified liquid” (45).

As regards the frame, it “presents the subject in a way that is significantly different from the circumstances of ordinary perception” (53). As a counterbalance, Crowther might have considered Meyer Schapiro’s “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” a conspicuous essay of 1969, which would have provided a good introduction both to specific and general questions on the topic (it might also have been useful to address Gombrich’s discussion about the frame of Raffaello’s Madonna della Sedia because it would have entailed an engagement with Gombrich’s theory of ornamentation; after all, ornament is among the frame’s main features). Crowther then sets himself to explaining the preponderance of the rectangular format which he believes “suggests the virtual extendability of pictorial space left, right, and above the stationary viewer as well as in front of him and her” (54), perhaps overstating Heinrich Wölfflin’s case as expressed in the Grundbegriffe. For Wölfflin, neither the binary closeness/openness has any effect whatsoever on the frame’s limiting function nor is the Baroque’s open organization intended “as something to be continued, notionally, beyond” (52). Rather, for Wölfflin the relation is tektonische, that is, the Classic takes into consideration the frame in a way that the Baroque does not—the latter would look as a snapshot confined within a smooth rectangular frame as it were; Wölfflin, moreover, has addressed in his Gedanken the difference of right/left, while the Stimmungswert of a picture’s different parts also concerned Schapiro.

Crowther concludes Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) by offering a historical synthesis in which all the nagging problems of Art History are solved: “Such development would allow for a more balanced modus operandi in art history that allowed it to be enriched so as to avoid dangers of social and/or semiotic reductionism” (208). The reader is urged to consider whether or not this is a satisfactory resolution to the complex issues at hand.