Richard Wollheim's classic reflection on art considers central questions regarding expression, representation, style, the significance of the artist's intention and the essentially historical nature of art. Presented in a fresh series livery for the twenty-first century, with a specially commissioned preface written by Richard Eldridge, illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, Art and its Objects continues to be a perceptive and engaging introduction to the questions and philosophical issues raised by works of art and (...) the part they play in our culture and society. Wollheim's insights into theories of art, criticism, perception and the nature of aesthetic value make this one of the most influential works on aesthetics of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim is one of the dominant figures in the philosophy of art, whose work has shown not only how paintings create their effects but why they remain important to us. His influential writings have focused on two core, interrelated questions: How do paintings depict? and how do they express feelings? In this collection of new essays a distinguished group of thinkers in the fields of art history and philosophical aesthetics offers a critical assessment of Wollheim's theory (...) of art. Among the themes under discussion are Wollheim's explanation of pictorial representation in terms of seeing-in, his views of artistic expression as a type of complex projection, and his notion of the internal spectator. In the final essay Wollheim himself responds to the contributors. This book will be eagerly sought out by all serious students of the theory of art, whether in departments of philosophy or art history. (shrink)

Explains the difference between pictorial and linguistic meaning, examines the works of Titian, Poussin, Ingres, Manet, Picasso, and de Kooning, and discusses art's psychological impact.

This book is based on the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1982. It offers a new approach to the philosophical understanding of a person, taking as fundamental the process of living as a person, and emphasising the continuity and development across time of an individual life.

Distinguished philosopher Richard Wollheim's rich and thought-provoking account of the emotions considers what emotions are, how they arise in our lives, and how standard and "moral" emotions differ.

What defines a work of art and determines the way in which we respond to it?

This book brings together Wollheim's broad and abiding concerns to illuminate human thought at its furthest reaches of introspection and expression.

What defines a work of art and determines the way in which we respond to it? This classic reflection was written with the belief that the nature of art has to be understood simultaneously from the artist's as well as the spectator's viewpoint.

I have told elsewhere the story of my first meeting with Freddie Ayer, but I shall re-tell it. It made a great impact on me, though, I believe, none on him. Certainly at no point in our friendship did he ever bring it up. It was mid or late 1946. I was an undergraduate at Balliol, having returned from three years in the army, and I was reading for Part II of the History Schools. Most of my friends, most of (...) my intellectual friends, were reading philosophy, and there was a necessity, which I already sensed, for my returning to Oxford once again to follow in their footsteps. This happened later in the autumn of 1947. Post-war Oxford was a very different place from the Firbankian hothouse of wartime Oxford, at least as I knew it. We were all said to be ‘more mature’, but within the confines of austerity, we were determined to enjoy ourselves. Oxford was not, in the famous words that Max Beerbohm put into the mouth of Mrs Humphrey Ward, ‘wholly serious’. (shrink)

Collected essays and lectures reflect the philosopher's belief in the relationship between art and the mind.

[Richard Wollheim] Any experiential view of pictorial meaning will assign to each painting an appropriate experience through which its mean can be recovered. When the meaning is representational, what is the nature of the appropriate experience? If there is agreement that the experience is to be described as seeing-in, disagreement breaks out about how seeing-in is to be understood. This paper challenges two recent interpretations: one in terms of perceived resemblance, the other in terms of imagining seeing. Neither (...) view gives a correct account of how the spectator distributes his attention between the marked surface and the represented object. /// [Robert Hopkins] I offer two, complementary, accounts of the visual nature of representational picturing. One, in terms of six features of depiction, sets an explanatory task. The other, in terms of the experience to which depiction gives rise, promises to meet that need. Elsewhere I have offered an account of this experience that allows this promise to be fulfilled. I sketch that view, and defend it against Wollheim's claim that it cannot meet certain demands on a satisfactory account. I then turn to Wollheim's own view, arguing that it suffers from crucial obscurities. These prevent it from meeting the explanatory commitments I describe, and are only exacerbated by the demands Wollheim himself imposes. (shrink)

I offer two, complementary, accounts of the visual nature of representational picturing. One, in terms of six features of depiction, sets an explanatory task. The other, in terms of the experience to which depiction gives rise, promises to meet that need. Elsewhere I have offered an account of this experience that allows this promise to be fulfilled. I sketch that view, and defend it against Wollheim's claim that it cannot meet certain demands on a satisfactory account. I then turn (...) to Wollheim's own view, arguing that it suffers from crucial obscurities. These prevent it from meeting the explanatory commitments I describe, and are only exacerbated by the demands Wollheim himself imposes. (shrink)

Philosophers are increasingly coming to recognize the importance of Freudian theory for the understanding of the mind. The picture Freud presents of the mind's growth and organization holds implications not just for such perennial questions as the relation of mind and body, the nature of memory and personal identity, the interplay of cognitive and affective processes in reasoning and acting, but also for the very way in which these questions are conceived and an interpretation of the mind is sought. This (...) volume of essays, by some of today's leading philosophers, explores all these topics, as well as the methods, results and status of the theory itself, while two 'classical' discussions by Wittgenstein and Sartre are also included. A number of the contributions – those by Donald Davidson, W. D. Hart, Jim Hopkins, Adam Morton, David Pears and Richard Wollheim – have not been published before, and a very useful bibliography is provided. It is an anthology that will be vital to anyone interested in Freudian theory and, more generally, in philosophical psychology. (shrink)

Whether the word ‘passion’, as indicating the suffering or affection from without of a soul, is by now no more than a dead metaphor, surviving from an antique conception of the mind; whether, indeed, there is any way open to us of determining the passivity or otherwise of our inner life, apart, that is, from how it strikes us, from how we are prompted to describe it, are not questions that I can take up this evening. It is enough for (...) my purpose that for much of the time our feelings, our emotions, our inclinations are as fluctuating or as imperious as if they were not totally under our control. We are elated: we are dejected: we get angry, and then our anger gives place to a feeling of absurdity: we remain in love with someone who is lost to us but whom we cannot renounce: we are interested in something, and suddenly we are bored, or frightened that we will be bored: we see a stranger, someone who is nothing to us, who is poor or crippled, and we feel guilt: someone does something wrong or foolish, and we are unaccountably transported by laughter, by ‘sudden glory’ as Hobbes called it, knowing what it was about, and then, as unaccountably, we are thrown down. Man is, in Montaigne's famous phrase, une chose ondoyante, a creature of inner change and fickleness. (shrink)

Whether the word ‘passion’, as indicating the suffering or affection from without of a soul, is by now no more than a dead metaphor, surviving from an antique conception of the mind; whether, indeed, there is any way open to us of determining the passivity or otherwise of our inner life, apart, that is, from how it strikes us, from how we are prompted to describe it, are not questions that I can take up this evening. It is enough for (...) my purpose that for much of the time our feelings, our emotions, our inclinations are as fluctuating or as imperious as if they were not totally under our control. We are elated: we are dejected: we get angry, and then our anger gives place to a feeling of absurdity: we remain in love with someone who is lost to us but whom we cannot renounce: we are interested in something, and suddenly we are bored, or frightened that we will be bored: we see a stranger, someone who is nothing to us, who is poor or crippled, and we feel guilt: someone does something wrong or foolish, and we are unaccountably transported by laughter, by ‘sudden glory’ as Hobbes called it, knowing what it was about, and then, as unaccountably, we are thrown down. Man is, in Montaigne's famous phrase, une chose ondoyante, a creature of inner change and fickleness. (shrink)

Armed with a theory of representation, or with answers to the two questions, What is a representation? and What is it to represent?, we might imagine ourselves approaching a putative representation and asking of it, Is it a representation?, and then, on the assumption that the answer is yes, going on to ask of it, What does it represent? Now, the answers that such questions receive might be called the applied answers of the theory that we are armed with. It (...) is in terms of this notion—that of the applied answers of a theory—that we may introduce the second way of classifying theories of representation. Theories of representation might be classified according to the degree of dependence or independence between the applied answers they provide in the case of any given representation. Richard Wollheim is Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic in the University of London and the author of F. H. Bradley, Socialism and Culture, Art and its Objects, Sigmund Freud, On Art and the Mind, and the novel, A Family Romance. He is currently working on a book dealing with pictorial style. In somewhat different form this paper was originally presented at the Annual Conference of the Developmental Section of the British Psychological Society, Surrey, 1976. The proceedings of that conference are published as The Child's Representation of the World, Plenum Press, 1977. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2002, given by Richard Wollheim, an British philosopher.

Richard Wollheim grew up lonely and sad in London's wealthy suburbs during the 1920s and 1930s, yet his was a childhood more interesting than most. He had an impresario father and a “Gaiety Girl” mother; together they attracted important guests (Diaghilev, Kurt Weill, Serge Lifar) to the grand houses and hotels that punctuated the landscape of Wollheim's early years. Germs is his account of that time, of the years he spent adoring his charming but distant father; of (...) his regret for loathing his beautiful, mindless mother. Told in prose that with hypnotic ease moves from deadpan comedy to poignant loneliness, Germs is already a classic work of memoir. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim; I—The Presidential Address: Thought and Passion, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 68, Issue 1, 1 June 1968, Pages 1–24, https:/.

It is a daunting task to tell the story of the lives emotions lead, how they are rooted in the deeper folds of the person’s psyche and wax and wane over a lifetime. Wollheim’s book is at times a daring attempt to cast an analytic philosopher in the role of narrator of this fascinating but hard to follow story. Two related story lines run through his book. One repeatedly criticizes contemporary philosophers for turning a blind eye to the psychological (...) reality and developmental nature of desire and emotion. The other, containing the book’s main project, develops an account of the characteristic history of an emotion from its origins in a satisfied or frustrated desire, to the formation of an attitude that lies at the core of an emotion, and finally to the fantasized critic in moral emotions such as shame and guilt. How we rate the success of the project depends in no small part on how we assess the relation between these two themes. (shrink)

Obscurity is not the worst failing, and it is philistinism to pretend that it is. In a series of brilliant essays written over the last fifteen years Stanley Cavell has consistently argued that more important than the question whether obscurity could have been avoided is whether it affects our confidence in the author. Confidence raises the issue of intention, and I would have thought that the primary commitment of a psychoanalytic writer was to pass on, and (if he can) to (...) refine while passing on, a particular way of exploring the mind. Indeed this is how Lacan himself proposes that his work should be judged. “The aim of my teaching,” he writes, “has been and still is the training of analysts.” For decades now Lacan has been insisting that the nature of this commitment has been systematically obscured, particularly in North America. Training has become “routinized”, and analysis itself has become distorted into a process of crude social adaptation. There is much here to agree with. Yet two questions must be raised. Has Lacan devised a more effective method of training analysts? And, would one expect this from his writings? Neither question gets a favourable answer. All reports of his training methods, over which he has now brought about three distinct secessions within the French psychoanalytic movement, are horrifying. 13 It is now, I am told, possible to become a Lacanian analyst after a very few months of Lacanian analysis. And what pedagogic contribution could we expect from a form of prose that has two salient characteristics: it exhibits the application of theory to particular cases as quite arbitrary, and it forces the adherents it gains into pastiche. 14 Lacan's ideas and Lacan's style, yoked in an indissoluble union, represent an invasive tyranny. And it is by a hideous irony that this tyranny should find its recruits among groups that have nothing in common except the sense that they lack a theory worthy of their cause or calling: feminists, cinéastes , professors of literature. Lacan himself offers several justifications for his obscurity, about which he has no false modesty. At times he says that he is the voice, the messenger, the porte-parole , of the unconscious itself. Lacan's claim stirs in my mind the retort Freud made to a similar assult upon his credulity and by someone who had learned from Lacan. “It is not the unconscious mind I look out for in your paintings,” Freud said to Salvador Dali, “it is the conscious.”. (shrink)