Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll 9781350009561, 9781350009585, 9781350009578

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Plates
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. What Is a Work of Art?
2. What Is a Painting?
3. The Art World
4. Lawrence Carroll Enters the Art World
5. Why Painting’s History Matters
6. An Art History Made for and by Artists
7. Interpreting Carroll’s Artworks
8. Why Lawrence Carroll’s Paintings Matter
Lawrence Carroll: Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions
Lawrence Carroll: Selected Public and Private Collections
References
Index

Citation preview

Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Series Editors: Tiziana Andina and David Carrier Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract terms. But the true significance of art for philosophy, and philosophy for art, can only be established through close analysis of specific examples. Art is increasingly being used to introduce and discuss problems in philosophy. And many works of art raise important philosophical issues of their own. But the resources available have been limited. Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the first series of its kind, will provide a productive context for that indispensable enterprise. The series promotes philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists, showcasing researches that exemplify cutting-edge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic rigor and insight of the contemporary world. Editorial Board: Alessandro Arbo (University of Strasbourg, Fr.), Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio), Leeza Chebotarev (Gagosian Gallery), Paolo D’Angelo (University of Roma Tre), Noël Carroll (CUNY), Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick), Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin), Cynthia Freeland (University of Houston), Peter Lamarque (University of York), Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY), Luca Illetterati (University of Padova), Gao Jianping (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Birte Kleemann (Michael Werner Gallery), Joachim Pissarro (CUNY), Sara Protasi (University of Puget Sound), Shen-yi Liao (University of Puget Sound), Ken-Ichi Sasaki (Nihon University), Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Uppsala), Vincenzo Trione (IULM, International University of Language and Communication, Milano). Forthcoming in the Series: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Martin Creed edited by Elisabeth Schellekens and Davide Dalsasso The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi edited by Tiziana Andina Visual Metaphor and Contemporary Art by Mark Stall Brandl

Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll David Carrier

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © David Carrier, 2019 David Carrier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. x–xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Lawrence Carroll All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carrier, David, 1944- author. Title: Aesthetic theory, abstract art and Lawrence Carroll / by David Carrier. Description: New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. | Series: Aesthetics and contemporary art | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018005061 (print) | LCCN 2018026054 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350009554 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350009578 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350009561 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Carroll, Lawrence, 1954—Criticism and interpretation. | Art—Philosophy . Classification: LCC N6537.C3447 (ebook) | LCC N6537.C3447C37 2018 (print) | DDC 759.13—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005061 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0956-1 PB: 978-1-3501-5524-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0957-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-0955-4 Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Marianne Novy (and our extended family) and Joachim Pissarro (and his extended family)

Contents List of Figures List of Plates Acknowledgments Introduction 1 What Is a Work of Art? 2 What Is a Painting? 3 The Art World 4 Lawrence Carroll Enters the Art World 5 Why Painting’s History Matters 6 An Art History Made for and by Artists 7 Interpreting Carroll’s Artworks 8 Why Lawrence Carroll’s Paintings Matter Lawrence Carroll: Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions Lawrence Carroll: Selected Public and Private Collections References Index

viii ix x 1 29 47 71 89 105 121 137 151 171 191 194 205

List of Figures All images courtesy Lawrence Carroll studio; Galerie Buchmann Berlin and Lugano; Gaerie Karsten Greve, Cologne, Paris, St. Moritz. Photo Credit: Antonio Maniscalco Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15 Figure 16

Figure 17

Figure 18 Figure 19 Figure 20

Untitled (1989–90), Entrance, MAMbo Installation shot, MAMbo, first gallery Untitled Floor Piece (1992–94), MAMbo Untitled (1998) Untitled (Freezing painting) (2013–14), MAMbo 4th Room, MAMbo Installation, Museo Vela, Ligornetto, room 13 Untitled, Insert Painting (1985) Permanent installation; Villa Panza, Varese, Italy Untitled-Flower Painting #1 (2007–12), in room 14 at Ligornetto Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013). Private Collection Untitled (2017), Museo Vela Ligornetto. Panza Collection Untitled (2014), MAMbo, private collection Untitled Table Painting (2006–14) As on cover, Untitled (1985). #9. Collection Museo Cantonale d’ Arte, Lugano Self-published Newspaper #7, Dublin City Museum the Hugh Lane exhibition, “In the World I Live,” November 9, 2012–February 10, 2013, Sketch, 2012; Marquette, MI Self-published Newspaper #7, Dublin City Museum the Hugh Lane exhibition, “In the World I Live” November 9, 2012–February 10, 2013, Sketch, August 22, 1985, NYC, Ball point pen Figment (1985), room 13, Museo Vela, Ligornetto. Collection Museo Jumex; Mexico City Guilt (1992), Ligornetto, room XV. Panza Collection Another Life (2009). Artist sketch; collection the artist

18 19 32 49 57 58 82 95 102 107 123 124 125 127 128

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140 145 152 155

List of Plates

Plate 1

Plate 2 Plate 3 Plate 4

Plate 5

Ghost House/MAMbo, 2016. Foreground Untitled (1998), courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve. Back wall at far right Center Untitled (1990), Untitled (2014), Collection of the Artist, Far right Untitled (1992-2000) Private collection Victory (2009–10), Private collection Untitled slip painting (2011), Collection of the Artist, courtesy Galerie Buchmann Ghost House/MAMbo, 2016. Fugitive”(for Mark) (1991–1993), I don’t have answers (1985-1986), Void (1985–1986). Collection Museum Cantonale de’Arte Lugano (CH) Panza Collection Gift 1994 Museo Vincenzo Vela, 2017. Far left, Figment (1985). Collection Museo Jumex, Mexico City. Center, Little Figment (1985). Collection the artist. Far right, Untitled (1985), Museo Cantonale d’ Arte, Lugano, Panza Collection. In foreground, Drop (1992), Panza Collection.

Acknowledgments First and foremost, I warmly thank Lawrence Carroll, and Lucy Jones Carroll for generously taking the time in Venice, Switzerland, Lake Bolsena, Berlin, and in New York, and, also, via e-mail, to patiently answer my many questions. And I thank Tiziana Andina for inviting my collaboration as co-editor of this series of monographs. A short description for the series of books will help to introduce my present analysis: Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract terms. But the true significance of art for philosophy, and philosophy for art, can only be established through close analysis of specific examples. Art is increasingly being used to introduce and discuss problems in philosophy. And many works of art raise important philosophical issues of their own. But the resources available have been limited. Analytic Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the first series of its kind, will provide a productive context for that indispensable enterprise. The series promotes philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists, showcasing researches that exemplify cutting-edge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic rigor and insight of the contemporary world.

This, then, is not an art historical study, but a philosophical commentary on a contemporary artist. I should acknowledge that I have often been influenced by two of Andina’s books Arthur Danto: Philosopher of Pop and The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories. And I thank Joseph Masheck for reading and commenting on my discussion of his publications in this book. Carroll has been fortunate to attract numerous highly sympathetic supporters—art writers and collectors. Two recent large-scale one-man retrospectives, “Ghost House” at  Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy, in 2015 and “I have longed to move away: Opere/Works 1985–2017” at Museo Vincenzo Vela, Ligornetto, Switzerland, in 2017, have provided me

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with instructive magnificent full displays, with catalogues, of his artworks. I have learned from visiting these two very different settings that revealed the amazing range of his art and, also, the strikingly diverse ways in which it functions in dramatically different installations. The essays in the Bologna catalogue by Angela Vettese and Gianfranco Maraniello, and in the Museo Vincenzo Vela catalogue by Gianna Mina, Lara Conte, and Petra GiloyHirtz, as well as the notes of Carroll’s conversation with Barbara Catoir, have been most helpful. I have learned, also, from the commentaries in his earlier exhibition catalogues by Gilles Altieri, Bruno Cora, Gerhard Finckh, Itzhak Goldberg, Marco Meneguzzo, Terry R. Myers, Robert Pincus-Witten, Concetto Pozzati, Maria Elena Ramos, Charles A. Reily, Laura Mattioli Rossi—whose biographical notes have been essential—Jerry Saltz, Dierk Stemmler, and John Yau. And most especially, I have learned from the long, very thorough essay by Richard Milazzo. I have found Carroll’s own comments, which will frequently be quoted, highly instructive. And I am indebted, also to the account found in Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s Memories of a Collector. Carroll is well known within the art world. He has frequent gallery exhibitions, numerous museum shows. And so he has received a certain large amount of intelligent commentary. He is not in any way an outsider. A sociable person, he is not a hermit. But his sensibility is oddly exotic within our contemporary art world. And so far as I can see, he has no followers—and, as yet, no imitators. I thank Colleen Coalter, Helen Saunders, and Leela Ulaganathan at Bloomsbury, and also an anonymous reader, who have provided patient, supportive editing. Gianna A. Mina, director of Museo Vincenzo Vela, Switzerland, kindly published my essay (2017), which introduced some themes developed in this book. At the Panza collection, in Varese, Italy, thanks to Rosa Giovanna Magnifico Panza, M. Giuseppina Caccia Dominioni Panza, Alessandro Panza, Francesca Guicciardi, Cristiana Caccia Dominioni  and Pietro Caccia Dominioni, I was able to see Carroll’s permanent installation, and participate in a Swiss TV movie devoted to his art. And, finally, I met Carroll many years ago at the Studio School, New York, my best host institution, when he and Sean Scully attended my lecture. Like many good things in my life, this book thus owes a real debt to Sean. Several years ago, when working on an earlier project—my book The Contemporary Art Gallery: Display, Power and Privilege, coauthored with

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Darren Jones—Phong Bui, editor at Brooklyn Rail, gave me a recommendation. I didn’t get the grants I applied for, but I got something that intellectually is of far greater value—an account of my career, in suggestive terms, which until then I had not thought through. Phong pointed out that my various books, Principles of Art History Writing (1991); Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (2006); A World Art History and Its Objects (2008); and The Contemporary Art Gallery: Display, Power and Privilege (2016), constitute a system, a systematic account of the nature of art and its presentation. I am therefore extremely grateful to him, for before this volume was written, he in effect suggested to me how to organize it. I learnt from his comments that a fully adequate, proper account of Carroll’s painting should draw upon my full intellectual resources, looking back to my graduate training in philosophy. Like all of my recent writings, this book has been much influenced by the two individuals who have for many years been the most important people in my life. A very long time ago I met Marianne Novy. And then, about a decade ago, at a time when I was deeply uncertain how or if my career as an art writer could proceed, I met my past and future coauthor Joachim Pissarro. These encounters look to me like sheer grace, for what had I done to deserve such amazing friends? Thanks are due to Marianne (and our family) and Joachim (and his extended family) who have provided me with life-giving support, for without them I, the author of this book, would hardly exist. I owe to Marianne special thanks for reading a penultimate draft. This book presents a view of aesthetic judgments developed in my forthcoming publication coauthored with Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins/ The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (2018). Some years ago an editor who generously supported the book that Joachim Pissarro and I wrote together, Wild Art, asked us to pitch other projects. As publisher of Ernst Gombrich’s famously successful The Story of Art, she was interested in a successor to that volume, a book that would carry the history further, toward the immediate present. We offered her a plan for a reverse art history. Instead of telling the story from early art to the present, with a narrative coming early/later/latest, we proposed rather to move from the present backwards toward the past. I write “we” because Pissarro and I developed this material together, but initially he proposed this marvelous idea, which here, with his permission and advice, I borrow and develop in Chapter 7. That complete book remains to be written, but here I offer its

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philosophical core, which is a suggestive original historiography. Pissarro, in turn, gives credit for this way of thinking to his friendship with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and to his study of the art and thinking of Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro, who was his great grandfather. When, long ago, I entered the philosophy world, I was lucky to have three marvelous teachers: Arthur Danto, Richard Kuhns, and Richard Wollheim. In art history, early on I met Ernst Gombrich, who encouraged me; and then I was nurtured by a variety of figures—Mark Roskill, Kermit Champa, and Paul Barolsky, to name three who mattered. And a meeting with Clement Greenberg late in his life gave me a vivid sense of his ideas. In the 1980s I met (and wrote about) a great many artists; I am especially thankful to Sharon Gold, Catherine Lee, Fabian Macaccio, Shirley Kaneda, Jonathan Lasker, Thomas Nozkowski, David Rabinowitch, David Reed, Joyce Robins, and Michael Venezia. In the 1990s I got to know Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, who talked to me at length about their art; I published accounts drawing upon these conversations. My art writing has been supported by numerous editors, including Jack Bankowsky, Richard Martin, Demetrio Paparoni Barry Schwabsky, and Richard Shone, and most especially, in recent years by Phong Bui and David Cohen. And the art dealer William O’Reilly has often enthusiastically supported this project. For some years Carroll has lived and worked a large part of the year in Italy. In obvious ways, living in that country can be a trap for a contemporary visual artist. The artistic tradition is so overwhelming that it’s not easy to escape feeling under the shadow of the past. “For modern Italian artists,” Kirk Varnedoe writes in his MoMA catalogue account devoted to Cy Twombly, “the sheer age of Italy and the weight of its classical past had often been deemed a suffocating burden, from which an engagement with the raw life of the street was escape and salvation” (1994: 29). Carroll’s escape has been different—engagement with the American traditions of abstraction has shown him how to productively use his visual experience of Italy and its artistic culture in his art. When I started this book, I was worried—did I have enough material to justify such an undertaking? By the time I finished, I felt that the activity of writing my commentary has just begun. There are sure to be many books devoted to Carroll’s art. This is just the first. Carroll is a very patient artist. Often, he reworks paintings for years.

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I work on many things at one time. I work on large paintings sometimes for a year or two years, and then they might change in their form completely; or I might start up with a very tall vertical painting and I might cut it in half and put it on top of each other, it might go on the floor, or I might turn it around or inside out, so the object from the beginning is explored, transformed until something about it feels O.K., it feels like this is what it is, so it’s often a surprise to me. (qtd Ramos: np)

A commentator can learn from him—patience is important, indeed it’s often essential for writers as for visual artists. My aim in this book is to integrate the presentation of aesthetic theory with discussion of Lawrence Carroll’s works of art. It is written in the faith that a philosophical analysis can contribute decisively to the study of contemporary art. I like to hope that the form of my commentary might inspire other authors. I have had the good fortune to view at leisure two recent large Carroll retrospectives: Carroll is not an installation artist; his works in both shows were painted over thirty years and assembled for the exhibitions. But he is an artist who takes an unusual interest in fine-tuning his exhibitions. And, it happens, these are dramatically different spaces, in ways that heavily influence how you see the artworks. The Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna is a classic white cube gallery, with very high white walls, overhead lighting and no views outside of the gallery. And so Carroll used the ten rooms to assemble a variety of his works. Here is the announcement: Ghost House is installed in the temporary exhibition galleries where, rather than following chronological criteria, it creates environments that the artist describes as “built on memory,” in which works from different periods are placed in dialogue with one another and with the museum context in the conviction that meaning can be found not only in the individual works but in their relationships, considered collectively and through time, like the narrative overlappings of a story. (Carroll 2014: np)

Since the museum in Bologna devoted to Giorgio Morandi was under repair, thirty-four of Morandi’s works are also on display in the museum. Because Carroll has a particular affinity with that artist, this was a particularly good site for his exhibition. And then in 2017 Carroll had an exhibition at the Museo Vincenzo Vela in Ligornetto. This museum in a country setting is devoted to Vincenzo Vela, the nineteenth-century Italian sculptor. It contains a large

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assemblage of the casts for his monumental public sculptures. A few of Carroll’s paintings are set on the ground floor amid this collection. The larger part of the exhibition, however, is upstairs in relatively small rooms with windows looking out on the landscape. Here in a very different setting his works look different. In Bologna, one focused on the body of Carroll’s artworks. Here the elective visual affinities of his characteristic color with that of Vela’s sculpture and the link to the landscape are important. Every book on a mid-career artist is necessarily incomplete, for it cannot describe what he still will achieve. This commentary describes Carroll’s art as I knew it through the summer of 2017, when the body of this text was composed and edited. Now, however, I look forward to seeing his just-opened one-man retrospective in the KunstMuseum Magdeburg, Germany, which presents a body of paintings that demand, and will surely receive, further interpretation. It’s exciting to know that his art is in progress, in ways that are sure to be challenging to me and his many other commentators. Pittsburgh January 1, 2018

Introduction

Boldly developing the central traditions of American modernist abstraction, Lawrence Carroll’s paintings engage with a fundamental issue of aesthetic theory—the nature of the medium of painting—in highly original, frequently extraordinarily successful ways. My goal is to explicate and defend this important claim. This book will explain how Carroll understands the medium of painting; show what his art says about the identity of painting as an art; discuss the place of his paintings in the development of abstraction; and, finally, offer an interpretation of his bold art. The true significance of Carroll’s works for philosophical aesthetics can only be established through close analysis of specific examples—that is the premise and promise of this book. Carroll makes objects that are patched together. He slices off sections of his paintings, which prompts us to look at the sides, the tops, and the bottoms, as well as their fronts. “In my early paintings, it was impossible to see the entire painting all at once. It was also a way to slow down the viewer, to quiet down the room” (qtd Milazzo 1998: 28). Carroll loves visual imperfection. Often his paintings are thick objects that extend some distance outward from the wall. Cutting into their surfaces is how he draws. As he says, “The edge becomes the drawing of the painting, especially when set against the other edge behind it. The edge is the way of drawing. It is the linear element in the painting” (qtd Reily 1994: 3). Carroll sometimes hangs his paintings on the wall, like traditional European artworks. But he also often puts them directly on the floor, places them as low hanging shelves, or orients them vertically, with one edge attached to the wall. Some of his paintings are as large as classic abstract expressionist works. Many, however, are relatively small. He’s not an installation artist, but he likes to construct temporary installations from groupings of his paintings, usually using works that he made some time ago. Identifying the elective affinities between diverse paintings and finding the best setting for groups of those works are very important for him.

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

This discussion of Carroll’s paintings uses his own eloquent and now extensive reflections to place them within the contemporary art world. I will tell how he understands his place within the history of recent art, and how he interprets his paintings. For thirty years, he has exhibited widely in American, European, and Japanese art galleries and museums. Much collected, he has long been internationally celebrated. This, the first monograph devoted to him, however, draws upon my experience of his art, upon his own published reflections and those of his commentators, and upon our many conversations and e-mail exchanges over the past few years. And it builds upon my long experience as an art critic. The book explains why his art is important, points out its distinctive qualities and identifies its legitimate place in the history of abstract painting, and within our larger contemporary visual culture. Carroll is a very immediate artist who thinks and paints in entirely intuitive ways. His works have no iconography and contain no hidden symbolism or obvious political content. Nor are they especially autobiographical. And although he is well traveled—he is a great frequenter of American and European museums—his art is not usually concerned to make direct allusion to prior works. (We will find some occasional exceptions to this generalization.) Nor do his abstractions convey any direct visual response to the varied cities and landscapes he is familiar with. Carroll is a great artist because his paintings provide seemingly effortlessly wide-ranging demonstrations of how an apparently limited physical format can yield a variety of results, and because he shows how the most banal artistic materials can be the basis for art that has genuinely far-ranging spiritually expressive resources. As he has said, “My work for the last 25 years has been exploring the possibility that ideas can have another life, that nothing is truly exhausted, and that ideas can unfold in time in the hands of the artist or later in the hands of another and new meaning can form” (Carroll 2011b: np). His painting thus changes how we understand older artworks, in ways that we will explain in some detail. The basic narrative frameworks of most books about contemporary painters are modeled on art history writing. Adapting the approaches of scholarship devoted to old master and modernist art, they describe present-day works, placing an artist or some group of artists in an historical perspective. It’s natural to narrate art’s history; thus, early, later, latest, that’s the almost universal form of such stories whether they cover an individual artist; a particular regional

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visual culture; or, as in some ambitious accounts, the world’s art history. This book, however, is something completely different, a philosophical analysis of Carroll’s art. My account is driven by a conceptual framework, which I will develop by stages. The best way to understand his paintings, I will argue, is through philosophical analysis. Such commentary is particularly well suited to Carroll’s painting, because it often poses questions about its identity as a painted artwork. Since such philosophical art writing is a relatively unfamiliar literary genre, which develops ways of thinking that are not well known to most readers of art history, it will be helpful at the start to explain something about the form of our analysis. The body of this book focuses on Carroll’s paintings. Here, however, in the Introduction I define and explain the nature of such a philosophical art writing. I do this in two stages: first I identify and describe this form of writing, which is based upon aesthetic theory, explaining how it functions and how it is organized by contrasting it to art historical writing and, also, to art criticism. Then I briefly say something about my career, because explaining how I moved from doing philosophy to writing about visual art will help motivate this account. For the aesthetic philosopher what matters is conceptual analysis; and so, our books move from the more basic concepts to those of subsequent significance. Thus this account will start by asking the most basic questions relating to Carroll’s art: “What is art?” and then, “What is a painting?”; it will continue to consider the nature of the contemporary art world in which such questions are posed; then it goes on to discuss his place in the history of painting and, more particularly, in the development of abstraction; and, finally, it will offer an interpretation of his art. Art historians usually are concerned to trace the development of art, explaining how what came earlier yields to what comes later. Taking for granted that the artifacts they describe are artworks, art historians place them within the history of art. For many of these writers, the history of old master and modernist art can be continued into the present. We philosophical art writers have somewhat different concerns. We are preoccupied with defining art, explaining why it has a history and telling how to identify its meaning. Pursuing that goal, my study of Carroll roams freely across art history—focused at some points on the story of old master painting and, also, sometimes on the history of modernism, but often looking

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also to contemporary art, in order to provide the fullest possible philosophical perspective on his work. To fully understand how the distinction between these two genres of writing, art history writing and philosophical art writing, originated, one needs to look into the sources of academic art history writing within German philosophy. Immanuel Kant (and some other German philosophers) developed very subtle accounts of the nature of art. Then, in his 1820s lectures on aesthetics, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel offered a recognizable anticipation of our present surveys of art history. And academic art history and what accompanies it, the public art museum, soon developed in Berlin and elsewhere. The story of that process, in which art from every visual culture and, starting in the early twentieth century, also contemporary art was written about and displayed in museums, has often been told (Carrier 2018). What’s significant for our present purposes is understanding that this distinction between philosophical art writing and art history writing developed because there was a division of labor between writers of abstract philosophical accounts, focused on identifying the nature of art, and the authors of art historical commentaries, which guide the practice of art museums. Art historians are trained to think historically. They place new works within the history of art—and understand the place of older painting within these traditions. To be an art historian, at least since the time of Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) (and his ways of thinking derive, in part, from Roman antiquity, from the writings of Pliny the Elder) and Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) involves thinking historically. Art changes, and so the historians’ goal is to understand each period in relation to its essential intrinsic nature. Frequently, then, art historians are historicists. Philosophers however, at least philosophers in my analytic tradition, are concerned with a basically timeless mode of analysis. We are fully aware, of course, that there are changes in the culture, and also, therefore, in visual art. But we understand these developments within a basically ahistorical framework of thinking—even philosophers like Giambattista Vico, Hegel, and Arthur Danto, who are attracted by historicism, think in these ways. Danto, as we will see, understands the essence of art in a basically ahistorical way. This means that our philosophical definitions of the nature of art describe its essence without reference to temporal change. And that is what this book will do in its account of Carroll’s painting. Michael Podro, whose account has influenced

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mine, speaks of German philosophical aesthetics as concerned “to explore particular works in the light of our conception of art—of those principles which governed art as a whole” (Podro 1982: xv). His analysis nicely identifies the contrast between straightforward art history writing and a philosophical analysis. In making this distinction, it’s not my intention to suggest that there is a rigid distinction in kind between philosophical art writing and art history writing. Philosophical writers need to describe the history of art—and often art historians tackle philosophical concerns. What is crucial, still, for our present purposes is the real distinction in the ways that these two distinctly different forms of writing about visual art are organized. Typically, the organization of philosophy books is conceptual—while the structure of art history writings usually is chronological. This difference reflects a real difference in the concerns of these disciplines. Philosophers critically present and analyze abstract arguments, while art historians aim to describe and interpret some body of artworks. In contrasting the usual art history writing and philosophical accounts of visual art in this way I do not mean to suggest that philosophers neglect the historical development of art. But historical analysis does not organize their entire commentary, as is the case in art history writing. Some books on aesthetic theory offer an entirely abstract account, with only occasional examples. Others, however, often intersperse examples into the discussion of theory, using particular case studies to propel forward the analysis: Hegel and Danto narrate in this fashion. And this book, too, adopts that second approach. You can clearly see this basic difference between aesthetic theory and art history writing by comparing the tables of contents of two distinguished books in these two very different fields. Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace has these chapters: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Works of Art and Mere Things Content and Causation Philosophy and Art Aesthetics and the Work of Art Interpretation and Identification Works of Art and Mere Representations Metaphor, Expression, and Style (1981)

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

The book offers a conceptual analysis. Danto distinguishes artworks from mere things and explains how this reflects a causal distinction; tells us why identifying art is a philosophical issue and offers the perspective of aesthetics; discusses interpretation of art, explains why artworks are not merely representations, and presents the concept of artistic expression. “Works of Art and Mere Things” opens with Danto’s central topic, a series of examples designed to show that visually indiscernible artifacts could be very different works of art. Danto gives philosophical reflections, relating the ideas of Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre to this claim. Then his second chapter, “Content and Causation,” deals with a literary example, a verbal work, which is akin to the earlier example of visually indiscernible artworks. This case study allows Danto to develop the claim implicit in his chapter title, that how a work of art is created—the causal analysis of its creation—determines its content. And that analysis leads to his argument directed against Nelson Goodman’s analysis of forgeries. In Danto’s commentary, we find examples of European art of many periods throughout the account, without historical analysis. It would be worthwhile to consider to what extent this particular ordering is logically necessary. I suspect that the chapters could be presented in a different order. But here, I should note, we are concerned merely with his exposition of the analysis, not with critical evaluation of the argument, a much larger task to be taken up later. Contrast this book with the well-known book by a Columbia University art historian, a colleague whom Danto admired greatly, Rudolf Wittkower’s Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750. That art historical commentary in this book is divided into three parts: Part One: The Period of Transition and the Early Baroque Circa 1600–Circa 1625 Part Two: The Age of the High Baroque Circa 1625–Circa 1675 Part Three: Late Baroque and Rococo Circa 1675–Circa 1750. (1973) Within those three historical divisions, the book is divided into accounts of major artists, artistic media (architecture, painting, sculpture), and places. Art and Architecture in Italy was one in a series of survey books devoted to regional and period art histories. S. J. Freedberg’s contribution was Painting in

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Italy 1500–1600 (1971) and John White’s, Art and Architecture in Italy 1250– 1400 (1990). What justified this format, but has recently become controversial among art historians, is the belief that there is enough unity in these narrative units to make such analysis convincing. In Wittkower’s account, the story is centered on Rome early on and then the end of his narrative moves to Venice (where there were major painters and architects) and Turin. Naples, another Italian city with a rich baroque artistic heritage, is harder to bring into Wittkower’s framework, with his focus on Italian art, for while Rome, Venice, and Turin were politically independent, Naples was ruled from Spain—and so the history of seventeenth-century Neapolitan art is often linked with the story of Spanish painting. Danto tells what art is and, in what follows therefrom, how it can be interpreted. Wittkower begins by explaining how the Sack of Rome, 1527, led to the period of transition into the early baroque; and concludes, 505 pages later, by explaining how the Venetian paintings of Francesco Guardi marked him as an artist anticipating impressionism: “When he died in the fourth year of the French Revolution, few may have known or cared that the reactionary backwater of Venice, the meeting place of the ghost-like society of the past, had harboured a great revolutionary of the brush” (1973: 505). There is some crossover in their interests. Danto, who develops a theory of art’s history, offers a conceptual analysis; Wittkower tells much about aesthetic theory— of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Baldacchino (1624–33), in St Peter’s, for example, he says, “The beholder finds himself in a world which he shares with saints and angels, and he feels magically drawn into the orbit of the work. What is image, what is reality? The very borderline between the one and the other seems to be obliterated” (Wittkower: 161). Some aesthetic theories say that art is defined by reference to the aesthetic distance between artwork and viewer. Here, however, the argument is that there is no aesthetic distance between Baldacchino and the spectator. But Wittkower’s book, which includes other such accounts of theory in passing, is organized historically. Aestheticians and art historians offer such differently structured narratives because their basic concerns are different. Numerous recent books are, at least in part, philosophical art writing: Anthony Blunt’s Nicolas Poussin: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1958 (1967); John Elderfield’s “Describing Matisse,” the long introduction to

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

his exhibition catalogue Henri Matisse: A Retrospective (1992) and, also, “Space to Paint,” his introduction to another exhibition catalogue, Willem de Kooning (2003); Joseph Masheck’s C’s Aesthetics: Philosophy in the Painting (2004); Thierry de Duve’s Kant After Duchamp (1994); the art criticism of Michael Fried from the 1960s, which is republished in his Art and Objecthood (1998) and some of the earlier writings of Rosalind Krauss (1978); Yve-Alain Bois’s account of Ellsworth Kelly’s early paintings (1992); and, most importantly for our purposes, Danto’s various commentaries on Andy Warhol: all are philosophical accounts of visual art. These are writers with very varied concerns. Most of them are not professional philosophers; and they present very varied uses of philosophy. What matters for our purposes is that all of these diverse commentaries foreground philosophical, rather than purely art historical themes. The particular aesthetic theory employed in this book derives from analytic philosophy. I will say nothing about the French philosophers—Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault—who became very influential in the 1980s art world. I paid considerable attention to them at the time when I became an art critic, in the 1980s, but I now offer a very different form of philosophical art writing. I’ve identified the distinction between philosophical art writing and art history writing. But there also is a third genre of writing about visual art that plays an important role in this book, and so it, too, needs to be introduced here: art criticism. While present-day art history writing is a byproduct of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosophy, art criticism, a form of journalism, originates with Denis Diderot and the other writers who respond to the public exhibitions in the Parisian Salons, beginning in the 1760s. The art critic offers a relatively brief news report of what is seen. Philosophical art writers, like art historians, are mostly academic writers, while art critics are self-trained. And while the unit of discourse of philosophical art writing and art history is, typically, the book, art criticism is essentially essayistic writing. An art critic visits an exhibition, gets the catalogue, and writes a short review. His or her editor expects to receive some description of the show, with brief notes on the artist’s visual and verbal sources; and, of course, and this is most important, a critical evaluation which develops naturally out of the critic’s description. The whole commentary, which needs to be written quickly,

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should be only a few hundred words long. Occasionally brief biographical information about the artist may be included, but the academic machinery of art history books, with their discussions of the literature, is really out of place. The focus, rather, is on capturing a sense of the occasion, writing so as to recreate as far as is possible the immediate experience of walking through the exhibition. This is why critics often write in the present tense, as if when reading their commentary we were seeing the artworks that are being described. Their art criticism can become an essential resource for art historians, because it provides an initial report on the reception of artworks. To explain the presentation of philosophical art writing in this book, it’s useful to briefly sketch my early academic career. For me, as a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University during the late 1960s the two most important living aesthetic philosophers were Goodman, whose treatise Languages of Art (1968) offered a systematic semiotic account, and Wollheim, whose Art and Its Objects (also published in 1968) presented an analysis focused on the concepts of representation and expression, and of the implications for defining art. Although both these philosophers had significant practical investments in visual art—Goodman as a collector, Wollheim as an aesthetically conservative art critic—in neither case was it easy to apply their philosophical discussions to the concerns of practicing art critics or historians. Art and Its Objects starts by asking, “What is art?” with reference to all of the arts. Wollheim discussed the claim that artworks are physical objects, and that leads him into accounts of representation and expression, and a discussion of the ways in which the various arts raise different issues—music has scores; novels, many copies; while paintings are unique; and so on. Then he turns to analysis of the aesthetic attitude, which may, he suggests, provide a way of defining art; and he deals with the differences between the artist and the spectator, and analogies between art and a language. Finally, he closes with an account of art’s historicity. As for Danto, who was my teacher at Columbia University, although he had published his seminal essay on Warhol, “The Artworld,” in 1964, he didn’t take up systematic writing about aesthetics until a later date; his treatise The Transfiguration of the Commonplace appeared in 1981. For me, then, in graduate school Ernst Gombrich was the model art historian; my PhD thesis, a portion of which was published, was, in part, about his writings (Carrier

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

1983b). That both Goodman and Wollheim commented on his analysis was very helpful, for they pointed to the ways that a philosopher might be engaged with Gombrich’s claims. When it came, however, to contemporary art, neither Gombrich nor these philosophers provided much guidance. And Danto didn’t start writing art criticism until much later, when I myself was already a published critic. I discovered the art writing devoted to contemporary work in the late 1970s on my own while teaching philosophy—by reading in the library. That experience was not at all unusual; art critics almost always are self-taught. When in the 1970s I started to take a serious interest in art criticism, I paid a great deal of attention to the writings of Clement Greenberg, which he collected in revised form in his book, Art and Culture (1961). And he had two important wayward followers, Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss, who were moving in very different directions. Greenberg, an unacademic essayist, had been inspired by his reading of Marx; Fried and Krauss, who are academics, drew upon close, eclectic readings in the literature of philosophy. Although I often found their claims problematic, and hard to match with the art they admired, I found (and still find) their intellectual seriousness inspiring. Their writings were a very important model for me—they showed that it was possible to do philosophically sophisticated art writing. No more recent art writer, not even Danto when he became an art critic, was as personally important for me as this group of figures. And then, within the art world my first personal role model was provided by another writer who will be discussed at length later in this book, Joseph Masheck. For a long time, my intellectual life has been divided into two more-or-less disjoint parts. As a tenured philosopher living in Pittsburgh, I wrote about aesthetics. (I had a particular interest in the methods of art history, and also in art museums—much-discussed academic topics.) And, as a self-trained art critic visiting New York, I published reviews of museum exhibitions and gallery shows. It may seem surprising to contrast so dramatically these two forms of writing since, after all, they both deal with visual art. Indeed, the leading American academic journal devoted to aesthetics is The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. But, in fact, the concerns of aestheticians and art critics are surprisingly different. And The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism doesn’t publish art criticism. I doubt that many philosophers seriously read art

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criticism—and I know that critics rarely take much notice of most academic writing on aesthetics. It must seem surprising that the practice and theory of visual aesthetics are distinct in this way. In theory, you might expect that the aesthetic theory dealing with visual art is a theory of the practice of contemporary art criticism. But in practice it doesn’t work out that way. In noting this, I don’t mean to criticize either critics or philosophers. What we’re dealing with here are institutional structures, which effectively constrain most writers. As a writer, I’ve lived in both of these worlds—the art world and the philosophy world. Writing as a professional philosopher, I have done books about aesthetic issues—the art museum, the methodology of art history, prospects for a world art history; and, writing as an art critic, I published a great many reviews, exhibition catalogues, a collection of my art criticism, and monographs on painters. But in noting this dramatic division I don’t mean to suggest that I was bothered or frustrated by this situation. In fact, I found it a real personal challenge to do two kinds of writing, which have different audiences and make very different demands. It was a little bit like driving on the left in England if you’re accustomed to driving on the right in the United States; so long as you remember where you are, you won’t have any problems! Art criticism, journalistic writing, typically has very limited bibliographical apparatus, for it has to be immediate and intuitive, and it is expected to be personal; while aesthetics usually is impersonal academic writing. In the academic world, if anyone troubled to look at my art criticism, I suspect that doing this writing would be regarded as a hobby, perhaps like growing roses, which certainly has no relationship to academic life. In general, the abstruse conceptual concerns of philosophers are distant from the focus on particular painters and paintings of art history writers. Philosophers are involved in defining art, describing the social system in which it is presented, understanding why it has a history and offering a theory about how to interpret it. They offer general accounts of aesthetic theory, often without focus on individual artworks. Art writers, on the other hand, are expert at close commentary on individual works. And they are accustomed to tracing out the larger historical picture of art’s development. But philosophical analysis is neither their strong suit nor, even, a usual subject of their expertise. My career has made me sensitive to these differences here between aesthetics

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

and art history. Trained as an academic philosopher, when I turned also to writing art criticism I became very aware of the differences between aesthetic theory and the practice of art writing. Art criticism involves a report on individual works, which are on view; it is an interpretation that makes critical judgments. Writings on aesthetics involve some very different concerns: in my publications, for example, the conceptual relationship between art writing and the art it describes; adjudicating the conflict of interpretations; and the role of art museums and art galleries, two essential parts of the art world system. Perhaps the most challenging task for us writers about contemporary art is making the transition from doing short journalistic reviews to organizing a book like this monograph. You can be a successful exhibition reviewer and yet not be willing, or even able, to compose books. The books of many critics, including some of the very greatest ones—Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, Roger Fry, and also Greenberg, are the most notable ones—are collections of essays. The problem is not just that a book is much longer than a review. The real difficulty, rather, is that a book requires a very different organization, it’s not simply a scaled-up review. Sometimes fiction can help resolve such intellectual dilemmas. In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time we learn of two ways, that is, two distinctly different paths in the countryside near Combray, where the young narrator summers with his family: Swann’s Way, which is on the lands belonging to Charles Swann, the very privileged middle-class man whose disastrous love life is chronicled in the first volume of the book, Swann’s Way; and the Guermantes Way, which is associated with the nobility, whose world Swann and, much later, the narrator enter. As Marcel explains: In the environs of Combray there are two “ways” which one could go for a walk, in such opposite directions that in fact we left our house by different doors when we wanted to go one way or the other: the . . . way . . . which . . . passed in front of M. Swann’s estate . . . and Guermantes’ way. (Proust 1913[2002]: 137)

They were, so he thought “unknowable by each other,” these two ways, “in the sealed and uncommunicating vessels of different afternoons” (1913 [2002]: 138), for they involved different walks in the countryside. When young, Marcel personally knows Swann, who regularly visits his family, but he only dreams

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about meeting the Duchess de Guermantes, whose grand world seems very far away. The two ways thus stand for very different ways of life—for dramatically distinct social worlds. Eventually, of course, Marcel realizes that these two ways are connected, as, more generally, are the worlds of prosperous bourgeois Frenchmen like Swann and himself and those of the hereditary nobility. He discovers this by himself entering the aristocratic society. Indeed, it could be said that the entire novel describes the movements and ultimate merging of one way, Swann’s, into the other, the way of the aristocratic Guermantes. And then what’s distant, and so seems magical to the boy, the world of the grand aristocrats, turns out to be, ultimately, as banal and as full of entirely petty people as his own bourgeois social order. In my experience, this is what intellectual life’s like sometimes—what is hopelessly distant seems entirely desirable and hopelessly exotic, at least until you yourself come close up to it. In my earlier life as a philosopher, I saw the art world in something of the terms in which the young Marcel imagines the Guermantes’ way. I believed the artists’ studios, and the galleries and museums where art is displayed to be as distant from my world of dusty philosophy libraries, seminar rooms, and lecture halls as, for the young Marcel, was the high society of the Duchesse de Guermantes when he sees her in the village church of Combray, where her remote ancestors are depicted in the stained glass windows. And then, to momentarily continue this parallel, which for me was instructive, just as Marcel becomes a close friend of the Duchesse, and, thanks to the skill at social climbing, learns by stages about her world, so I met artists, art dealers, and curators; made my way into many studios and a few homes of collectors; and became intimately familiar with numerous art galleries and museums. But whereas Marcel ultimately is totally disenchanted by his experience of the aristocratic social world that he originally had so ardently desired to enter, for me the art world has never ceased to be a magical place. Even after I entered it myself, I never lost my initial sense that it was an exciting, very exotic destination. Doubtlessly this shows that I am naï ve—as does my calling an often rough-minded business place “magical.” But knowing this history does help explain my reaction to Carroll’s art. Although the details of my present employment of Proust here are obviously personal, I don’t believe that this fantasy about the art world is at all unusual.

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

Indeed, some such viewpoint is integral to the aesthetic theorizing of so sober a philosopher of art as Danto. When he concludes his treatise on aesthetics by asserting that Warhol’s Brillo Box “does what works of art have always done— externalizing a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as a mirror to catch the conscience of our kings” (Danto 1981: 208), then, surely he toys with such a conception. As Danto explains, the title of his book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace—which derives from an imaginary treatise on aesthetics mentioned in Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)—deals, in a matter-of-fact way, with the duality essential, so he argues, to all art (Danto 1981: v). His book, we can infer, describes the philosophy of art as imagined by Spark, in light of her novel about a girl in Edinburgh who becomes a nun. Spark, it’s worth adding, was herself a Scot of Jewish origin who became Catholic. For Danto, too, then, there are two worlds: the everyday world containing things like Brillo boxes; and the art world in which artifacts like Brillo Box externalize a way of viewing the world. If aesthetic theory and art criticism normally are as far apart as Swann’s and the Guermantes’ ways seem to the young Marcel, still, just as in the novel Marcel learns that these two paths (and the ways of life associated with them) are interconnected, so it is possible to discover how these two forms of art writing can be combined. That, at any rate, was the original goal of this present book. I envisaged an account with all of the immediacy of art criticism, but combined with the intellectual seriousness of aesthetic theorizing. Such a book would need to explain in plain words why Carroll’s paintings are so deeply fascinating. To do that it would, I expected, have to make significant detours into historical analysis, for he has a real familiarity with art history. And it would, I believed, also have to deal at length with philosophical issues, for Carroll’s works raise significant questions about the very nature of art. But the analysis would need, also, to return frequently to immediate experience of his works. And my book might, I thought, compare Carroll with some of his most eminent peers, because doing that could ultimately lead to a fuller comprehension of his achievement. Here I speak in the past tense, describing what I aspired to do. But for a very long time I didn’t know how to realize that book. My thinking came to a halt—I wrote a great deal, but nothing I did seemed right. That, of course, is a

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very Proustian experience. It took me a long time to realize how odd Carroll’s paintings are—and how, then, to properly come to grips with that awareness, by describing their oddness in a way that was illuminating. When I started writing this book, I worried about whether I could legitimately devote so many words to Carroll’s art, as fascinating as it is. Now, however, as I finish, I realize that if anything this account is too short—it’s barely long enough to say what is needed. At the end of In Search of Lost Time we learn a lot about Marcel’s difficulties with writing, an account that gave me some solace. Here again, then, I found some aid in task from my reading of Proust. The goal of art writing, very often, is to write as if we were present before the art being described, as if we could see the works being described. Sometimes, then, this book will focus on individual Carroll paintings, but at other times it will take us into his group shows; and sometimes, also, it will walk us into displays of modernist or old master art, to offer comparative perspectives on the presentations of his artworks. Thanks to Google, it’s easily possible to compare works which are physically distant and view exhibitions which have been dismantled. Using many varied comparisons with contemporary and older artworks, the aim is to bring Carroll’s achievement into focus. Sometimes I will seek elective affinities, discussing art that has correspondences with his. Other times, however, it will be revealing to present oppositions, describing works, which are unlike his, for visual contrasts too can be instructive. Thus, in Chapter 7 a contrast of Carroll to Frank Stella will yield one view of his achievement, and in Chapter 8 comparison with Warhol, quite a different viewpoint. We will sometimes develop these contrasts by imagining walking through exhibitions held at various times, as if we were looking at the art displayed especially for us here and now. In his classic account of this humanistic literary tradition, Michael Baxandall writes: “From the beginning works of art had been a favoured subject for ekphrasis. . . . Ekphrasis is a device of epideictic, the rhetoric of praise or blame” (1971: 85, 87). There is no reason to think that all of the examples of these literary performances cited by Baxandall are descriptions of particular artworks; writing an ekphrasis was a skill just in itself. These humanists, he notes, were “re-inventing the art of art criticism as they went along. Every critic before Baudelaire owed much to these first stiff steps” (Baxandall 1971: 111, italics added). I would omit only his qualification: for

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even after Baudelaire, we art critics owe much to this tradition. Writing as if we were present immediately before the artwork obviously is a fiction, but it is an important fiction. It’s a way of making the artwork present to the reader. Baxandall, however, offers an interesting alternative to this procedure. Writing an ekphrasis in the past tense is valuable, he suggests, because such descriptions “tend to represent best . . . thought after seeing a picture” (Baxandall 1971: 4). Certainly, it’s good for readers to be sensitive to the choice of temporal tense of an art writer. “A society develops its distinctive skills and habits, which have a visual aspect,” Baxandall says in a later book, “and these visual skills and habits become part of the medium of the painter: correspondingly, a pictorial style gives access to the visual skills and habits and, through these to the distinctive social experience” (Baxandall 1988: 152). This general account applies almost word for word, I would argue, also to our present-day visual culture. Criticism is a written record of the critic’s experience of encountering a group of works. Often, especially when the artist is young, the ultimate value of these artworks displayed remains to be determined. And so, a review needs to be critical in its evaluation. That’s why we call such writers “art critics,” not “art historians.” Historians provide a record of significant past events, often seeking a neutral point of view. But because a book is a comparatively large investment both of time and money, publishing such an account of a living figure presupposes some received sense that the artist under discussion deserves such substantial attention. And while critics, as I have said, are journalists, philosophers tend, nowadays, to be professors, which means that their books have the usual academic apparatus—footnotes, and discussion of the literature. As this book does. Here then, at the very beginning of this treatise on Carroll, starting with a critical discussion of my review of one of his exhibitions provides a good way of launching this book. Several years ago I was fascinated enough by his art to make the long trip from Pittsburgh to central Italy, to see his large one-man exhibition Ghost House at the Kunsthalle, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo). I will look critically at my review, which is also available online (Carrier 2015a), and thus see by stages how its account can be developed into this book-length analysis. I set the stage by offering a brief, elliptical presentation of one key conceptual issue, the nature of painting.

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In the late 1970s, when I was making my way from academic aesthetics to writing art criticism, I was vastly influenced by the magnificently original series of “Iconicity” essays published in  Artforum by Joseph Masheck, who then was editor of that journal. Masheck argued that to properly understand contemporary abstraction, we need to revisit the entire history of Western art. According to Clement Greenberg’s account, which remained influential, abstract painting is the ultimate product of the flattening of the deep old master picture space. When there no longer is any room for figurative subjects, then art had to become abstract. Rejecting this analysis, Masheck rather drew attention to the ways in which the Byzantine sacred tradition was involved with literal uses of the stretcher and the picture surface. Guided also, perhaps, by some precedents in the revolutionary Soviet avantgarde circa 1917, some contemporary abstract art (what he called “hardcore painting”) embraced that seemingly forgotten tradition which was concerned with the literal properties of the medium.

These essays by Masheck are known to senior art world people, and so I offer just a brief description of them, without bibliographical apparatus, saying just enough to explain why they are relevant here to a commentary on Carroll’s show. Then my review continues: Masheck’s very imaginative commentary was not easy to follow. And, ironically, the contemporary figures he championed who now are most distinguished—Jonathan Lasker, Thomas Nozkowski and Sean Scully— have developed in ways that have little to do with his concerns. But history can sometimes be surprising, for Lawrence Carroll, who arrived in New York around 1984, has, apparently entirely unconsciously taken up Masheck’s concerns. This ambitious retrospective, in a former bread factory, presents  63  paintings, some of them very large. At the entrance, on the diptych Untitled (1989–90), are the words “I am alone.” Here is a box mounted on the wall, Untitled (1990); the Untitled floor piece (1992–94), the skin of a painting on the corner of the floor; and the Untitled, table painting (2006–2014) a construction on a pedestal which has a slight resemblance to Anthony Caro’s tabletop sculptures

At this point, since there was only one photograph originally accompanying this review, it was time, I knew, to describe more of Carroll’s works. Here, then, I give some sense of the variety of paintings in this large exhibition, in a brief description, which aims to show, admittedly in a tentative way, why

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

my discussion of the medium of painting provides a good way to understand this show. Scholars debate about the proper extension of our concept of “ekphrasis,” which originally just described classical Greco-Roman figurative art. Some apply it to writing about all forms of art—that’s my procedure. For my present purposes, then, that word can legitimately be used also to identify these descriptions of Carroll’s abstract art works. My aim, in this unavoidably schematic format of a review, was to suggest how my theoretical perspective offers a good way of understanding why Carroll’s work is significant—why, looking ahead now to the present context, it deserves this book-length commentary. To do that, I describe some of his paintings. As you walk through the 10 rooms, you can see Carroll taking painting apart in its components and reassembling it. Mostly his paintings are untitled; when there are titles, often they are descriptive. He inserts one panel into another, as in  Untitled, insert painting  (1986); constructs a vertical assemble of frames, in Untitled (1988); draws black bands across the surface in  Untitled  (1986); presents a box on the floor in  Yes (Floor Piece)  (2000) or, in  Untitled Yes bag  (2014) as a bag on the floor; installs the painting on the wall,  Untitled shelf painting  (1985) in one example or, as in  Untitled

Figure 1 Untitled (1989–90), Entrance, MAMbo

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Figure 2 Installation shot, MAMbo, first gallery

flower piece  (2014) leans it on the wall. Occasionally, as in  Untitled light painting  (2014) a light bulb is attached to the picture plane. Sometimes panels extend off of the wall, like Untitled hinge painting (2013) for example. One singular work,  Untitled No. 51  (1993) consists of canvas folded on the floor. And some of the pictures,  Untitled box painting  (2006–14) is one example, are wall-mounted boxes. These paintings are very varied.

In this paragraph, the present tense is important. I wanted to give the sense that I was writing as if present in the Bologna exhibition, as if I were still there, and, also, then, as if you, the reader of my review, also were present there with me. Of course, every reader knows that this is a twofold illusion: I was not there, but at home in Pittsburgh, when I wrote the review; and you were certainly not there in Italy when reading it—at least not now, for the show is closed. But this is an important illusion, for it gives a certain authority to my interpretations. You are seeing the show as if through my eyes. And so, it may take a moment’s reflection to realize that alternative ways of looking are possible. If you were looking at the show through some other artwriter’s eyes, someone who offered a different take on it, then you might judge the exhibition very differently. The

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philosopher Alexander Nehamas, whose detailed analysis of perspectivism inspired my understanding of this issue, says: Perspectivism does imply that no particular point of view is privileged in the sense that it affords those who occupy it a better picture of the world as it really is than all others. Some perspectives are, and can be shown to be, better than others. (1985: 49)

The rhetoric of art writing depends upon perspectivism, upon the momentary illusion that the critic’s particular viewpoint is the best possible viewpoint. Carroll is always a painter, never a sculptor, and that’s a statement compatible  with the fact that  he sometimes works in three dimensions. In the almost 30 years of work on display here, there’s no obvious sense of development. You sense that from the start he’s known how to proceed. He owes something to Carl Andre and Donald Judd, but unlike these Minimalists he always retains a personal touch and is not interested in repetition as such. And although he has some affinities with Robert Ryman, he is a more varied and, I think, a more sensuous painter. Upstairs on temporary display is the collection from Museo Morandi of a very different, very relevant figure, whom he admires greatly—Giorgio Morandi. Interested in the varied qualities of his medium, Carroll almost never is concerned with image appropriation. More, perhaps to the point, he speaks of his desire to anchor himself to the world. “I needed to find my own way with the materials I was using.”

Here I offer an historical perspective on Carroll’s career, again like my earlier analysis, quickly sketched. Working within recent tradition, so I argue, he develops a highly original approach to painting. Recently MoMA presented “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” a  much discussed exhibition. According to the curator, when now everything has been done, all that is left to artists is to recycle prior visual discoveries. “The obsession with recuperating aspects of the past,” Laura Hoptman writes, “in the condition of culture in our time.” When I started writing criticism, the same claim was presented: everything has been done, we were told, so artists are doomed to merely recycle. It’s hard not to see this as a very pessimistic worldview—who would care about visual art if genuine originality were in fact impossible? No doubt this is a very

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New York perspective, from a city in which there are so many competing young artists. But this vision of art is demonstrably false, for much remains to be done. In movies, black-and-white defines a flashback, taking us back to an earlier moment prior to the main narrative. Perhaps this is how we should understand Carroll’s lack of concern with being a colorist—he takes us back to the 1980s. He has said: “I wanted to paint my paintings the color of the canvas I was painting on, so I could always erase myself and start over. I always then had a way out and back into the painting.” Carroll is as good as anyone anywhere I know who is painting right now. Compared with him, almost all contemporary artists are noisy, lacking in trust for their medium. The happiest contemporary painter whose art I have had the pleasure of viewing recently, a very American artist, he’s not had a solo exhibition in New York for 15 years.

I suggest that Carroll’s paintings deserve more attention than the rival abstractions recently displayed at MoMA, New York’s Museum of Modern Art. That is a significant claim since MoMA is the most important museum devoted to contemporary art. And writing for a journal based in New York, this was an appropriate comparison. Now, as in the recent past, there are numerous revisionist exhibitions, which propose to rethink the canon. My review claims that Carroll’s Bologna show gave reason to think that he is a serious heir to the mainline modernist tradition. In the future, I suggest, he will belong in the canon. If that claim is correct, then he deserves this book. The task at hand is composing a book about Carroll. Instructed by this exhibition review, let us begin by organizing a list of questions, which need much further discussion. This book, which has a focus very unlike the review, is a sustained philosophical study, focused on the implications for aesthetic theory of his art. As we will see, that idiosyncratic focus very much guides the narrative form of my analysis. Let’s start with a very basic philosophical point, which provides a further way of unpacking the analysis in my review. Here, again, I appeal to the writings of Baxandall, for he was an unusual art historian, someone who discussed the methods of that discipline in philosophically sensitive ways. His Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures begins with two statements, both of which are very suggestive for our purposes:

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

“We do not explain pictures: we explain remarks about pictures—or rather, we explain pictures only in so far as we have considered them under some verbal description or specification” (Baxandall 1985: 1). Then, after some tentative remarks about a description of Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (1440–50), he adds: “Every evolved explanation of a picture includes or implies an elaborate description of that picture. There is a problem about quite what the description is of ” (1985: 1). To ask one relevant question here: are we describing Piero’s picture itself or its subject? The three paintings discussed in detail in Patterns of Intention are this Piero; a Chardin genre scene A Lady Taking Tea (1735); and Picasso’s Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910), a cubist portrait of Picasso’s dealer. These very different pictures are perfect examples for Baxandall’s purposes, and also ours, for they illustrate the dramatic development of European painting over the period, from 1450 to 1910. And so, it’s a real challenge to come up with a theory which plausibly describes the interpretation of all three. To mention just one obvious point, Baxandall needs to consider both Piero’s visual culture, where the patrons commissioned the artwork, and Picasso’s very different situation, in which it was up to the artist to set what Baxandall calls the brief, a useful verbal definition identifying the visual problems that his work solves. It’s obvious, Baxandall writes, that Piero’s brief differed drastically from Picasso’s: “the market was structurally different,” which, speaking in our philosopher’s vocabulary, is also to say that Piero and Picasso had very different concepts of art (1985: 105). Baxandall is not a philosopher, and so he’s not dealing directly with our present concern—defining art. But to rephrase his claims in our terms, obviously Piero, Chardin, and Picasso made very different kinds of artworks. For our present purposes, however, it’s most economical to begin by noting briefly the similarities between these three works of visual art, in order to contrast them with Carroll’s paintings. Baxandall makes a very useful (and familiar) distinction between participants’ and observers’ understanding of a culture. “The participant,” the person inside a culture, “understands and knows his culture with an immediacy and spontaneity the observer does not share. He can act within the culture’s standards and norms without rational self-consciousness” (Baxandall 1985: 109). In a later book he usefully discussed in more detail part of this story, analyzing what might be

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called in our contemporary terms, the art theory which provided the basis of Chardin’s visual culture. Patterns of Intention is concerned with reconstructing the historically distant visual cultures of Piero, Chardin, and cubist-era Picasso. Our different task, writing as participants in Carroll’s contemporary visual culture, is to reconstruct its standards and norms. And our starting point in that discussion is asking: What is a work of art? Baxandall describes three very different representations. We’re dealing with Carroll’s non-figurative paintings, artworks that pose quite different dilemmas. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Carroll, who is a very intuitive artist, was inspired or influenced by study of the bookish commentaries that we will analyze. Our aim, rather, to speak again in Baxandall’s useful terms, is to articulate verbally the standards and norms of Carroll’s culture. We need to find the right words to describe these abstract paintings. Carroll’s brief differs from those of Piero, Chardin, or Picasso. He is not working on commission for a public work, like Piero; nor, like Chardin or Picasso, is he painting some subject in a way that calls for his image to be matched with what it depicts. The brief of his 1980s New York art world may be spelled out thus: make a painting which shows your knowledge of the recent developments, in an original way that advances tradition. Needless to say, this brief, which in this elliptical account is hopelessly vague, was not given at the time by anyone in so many words. I am reconstructing Carroll’s situation three decades after the fact. And, of course, other artists responded to this brief in quite different ways. In Chardin’s culture and in Picasso’s the painter was expected to create a figurative work; that constraint was taken for granted, and so didn’t need to be spelled out in their brief. But in the 1980s doing figurative art was just one option. So far as I know, Baxandall never wrote about either contemporary art or abstract painting. And that means that he didn’t have to wrestle with some of our present concerns. Carroll’s paintings look very unlike the figurative works in Patterns of Intention, but because they all belong to the tradition of European painting, Baxandall’s analysis of descriptions of art raises what are just the right questions also for our purposes. In context, Baxandall is discussing three very different pictures—a sacred painting, a secular genre scene, and a modernist radical play with the conventions of representation. Now, however, when we

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

compare and consider the works in “Ghost House,” the common features of those earlier pictures become apparent. Because Baxandall’s examples all are figurative, it makes sense for him to compare looking at a picture and reading a description, and to ask: “Does or might a description of a picture reproduce the act of looking at a picture?” (Baxandall 1985: 3). One obvious reason that abstraction has always been extremely challenging to describe is that these very well-entrenched techniques of European art writers cease to be relevant, for there is no longer necessarily any distinction between the picture itself and its subject. Sean Scully offers a pithy account of the difference between figurative and abstract art, which is relevant here: I once watched a film of Cé zanne painting. . . . Back and forth in a triangular relationship between the painter, the subject and the painting. This Morandi did also, since [he] was painting his jars or the view. . . . Always in a triangle. When I paint, I look at the canvas on the wall, and I paint it. I move back and forth between my seat and the painting, in a straight line, between me and the work. The painting being the subject and the object, all in one. There is no triangle. Everything I need to make the painting is in me when I start. (Scully 2016: 173)

Since Scully’s abstractions are very much involved with art historical awareness, what follows is that he has internalized the history of modernist abstraction. How, then, should we describe Carroll’s paintings? What we seek right here at the start is an overview. Key philosophical issues will include: why they are paintings; what place they have in art’s history; and how to interpret them. A full account of abstract art would need to consider Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian; and then some figures from the era of abstract expressionism: Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, and Agnes Martin. Once we add, also, the near contemporaries of Carroll named in my review, it’s obvious that the works by this group of abstract painters are as varied as Piero’s, Chardin’s, and Picasso’s in his cubist moment. And so, finding some effective way of describing all of them is not easy. Fortunately, however, we don’t need to start from scratch—for there is a long tradition of art writing, which we will draw on, devoted to discussing abstraction. Baxandall’s analysis places his select examples of figurative works by Piero, Chardin, and Picasso in historical context. Similarly, the best way for us to begin, I think, is to set Carroll’s art in context by piecing together a

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general description of his sensibility. A slightly naï ve description is best for our immediate purposes—it’s most helpful at the start to focus on seeing how very surprising, how truly odd his paintings are. I’m always surprised that more viewers visiting art exhibitions don’t consider how very strange-looking some of the best contemporary art is. When they see Carroll’s paintings, most gallerygoers don’t even blink. Approaching them as a child, with a child’s sense of perplexity, might sometimes be a better, more instructive procedure. At least as a starting point. “A sculptured as much as a painted figure is conceived,” so David Sylvester writes in his account of Giacometti, “not as a self-contained entity but as inseparable from a spatial context” ( Sylvester 1994: 25). I believe that this description nicely applies also word for word to Carroll’s paintings. His paintings usually, but not always, are painted the color of the canvas itself, which is neutral off-white. That color gives a significant unity to groupings of his physically diverse works, as we see in the Bologna retrospective. And that’s why there is something oddly soothing about viewing his group shows. Not glamorous, his paintings don’t call attention to themselves. Carroll gives impoverished materials a sense of dignity. My account of Carroll’s exhibition describes artifacts with these banal physical qualities. How very different this commentary is from Baxandall’s discussion of Piero, Chardin, and the cubist Picasso! Traditional aesthetics explains why the very diverse works of Piero, Chardin, and Picasso all are paintings. Usually that was done by focusing on the nature of visual art as representation. Moving, then, to an analysis which also would include Carroll’s works, as we have just described them, is not easy. To take this point a step further, even if we had a secure understanding of why the works of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, and also Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Agnes Martin, were paintings, we might still wonder about Carroll’s works, which are very different from these earlier paintings. Here, then, we face a very simple, extremely important question, seemingly too simple, or too philosophical, perhaps, to be discussed in my exhibition review. In such journalistic writing, after all, the working assumption is that what’s on display in the art gallery are artworks. How, however, do we know that the artifacts that Carroll makes are paintings? One important working assumption of my review, implicit there, which deserves explicit consideration

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

here, is the claim that the artifacts Carroll makes are artworks—and, to refine that claim in an important way, that they are paintings. Arguing about that conclusion, which requires a serious philosophical analysis, is too elaborate a task for an exhibition review. But it’s a suitable starting point for this book, which is, as I have said, a study in the philosophy of art. Typically, art history writing devoted to contemporary artists focuses narrowly on the immediate present. It’s distracting and irrelevant, so we art critics are usually taught, to look too far afield for art historical precedents. Write, we are told, just about what you see on display. But for the philosopher, restricting the range of discussion in this way is unduly limiting, since satisfactory theories of the nature of art, of interpretation, and of the role of public art displays must be general. Any adequate answer to the questions “what is art?” or “how do we interpret this art?” must accommodate all art made anytime anywhere. When, however, in this book I speak of painting, I mean “European painting.” I have a great interest in art from elsewhere. Indeed, in another book I discussed other artistic traditions in considerable detail (Carrier 2008b); but here, with one brief exception, the account of the essence of painting in Chapter 2, my concerns will be culturally parochial, for Carroll’s art is almost entirely a product of European visual culture. The first four chapters of this book introduce some of the philosophical concerns which are essential for the understanding of Carroll’s art. I use a series of contrasts with works by other artists to focus on the distinctive qualities of his paintings. Then, the next four chapters present Carroll’s place in the history of contemporary art and offer an interpretation of his painting. The goal by the conclusion is to achieve a synthesis, demonstrating how our account of aesthetic theory brings his art into focus. Our culture has a great fascination with gossip—in part, I think, because gossip’s a way to make the concerns of otherwise exotic-seeming artists accessible. Like almost all of us, they have love affairs, emotional conflicts, good and bad days, and sometimesstormy personal lives. There is a long tradition of art writing that is concerned with gossip: you find it in Vasari and, also, in the literature of Chinese and Islamic art, as well as, of course, dominating very many commentaries on contemporary art. But the trouble with merely personal narratives is that they cannot explain what really matters—the creativity of artists and writers.

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It may seem paradoxical that Carroll’s completely intuitive art elicits my bookish analysis, which certainly builds upon his comments to very different effect. In fact, however, this result is not at all surprising. It’s relatively easy to write academic commentary on Poussin, for many of his subjects are essentially bookish—and so need to be explained in words, especially nowadays for a contemporary audience, since we have lost touch with classical literature. But in the case of Carroll, who doesn’t have such subjects, analysis needs to create a verbal equivalent to his intuitive procedures. In his essay on Chardin, Proust says: In the same way a gynaecologist might astonish a woman who has just given birth by explaining to her what had taken place in her body, by describing the physiological sequence of the act she has had the mysterious energy to carry out but of whose nature she knows nothing; acts of creation, in fact, proceed not from a knowledge of their laws but from an incomprehensible and obscure capacity which is not made any the stronger by enlightenment. (1953: 336)

I believe that the critic dealing with contemporary art should think in similar terms. My account, which builds closely upon Carroll’s statements, is quite different from what he says.

1

What Is a Work of Art?

What is a work of art? That is the most basic question for aesthetic theory. In order to understand why visual art has a history, learn how to interpret this art, and understand its significance, we must first of all be able to identify artworks. Thanks to the inspired writings of Arthur Danto, the most important recent philosophical discussions of this issue have focused on one striking example, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964). Joining that discussion here is a marvelously suggestive way to start this commentary since, in ways which will prove most instructive for our purposes, Lawrence Carroll’s art, so we will see, raises equally basic, but very different issues for aesthetic theory. The story of Danto’s response to Brillo Box has often been retold, by Danto himself and also by other commentators. And so here our account can be very brief. In truth, this story is almost stranger than fiction. In the 1950s Danto showed his artworks, which were woodcuts, in the New York galleries while pursuing his academic career as a philosopher (Carrier 2011). Then, after he dropped art making, like many intellectually aware New York intellectuals, he still enjoyed attending openings. And so it happened that in spring 1964 at the Stable Gallery, on the Upper East Side, he saw Warhol’s installation. At this time, Warhol was just about to become famous. As Danto recalled, “The gallery was on the lower floor of a duplex apartment. It contained several stacks of what looked like commercial shipping cartons, including the now famous Brillo Box. There was not a lot to look at” (2013: 231). At this time, Danto had no particular interest in the philosophy of art; his philosophical concerns lay elsewhere. But, by chance, just then the annual December professional meeting of the American Philosophical Association—the event where philosophers give lectures and job applicants circulate—had an opening in the schedule for the meeting held right after Christmas. And so he gave an invited lecture dealing with Warhol, which was published soon afterward in a

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

philosophy journal—“The Artworld” (1964). At the time, no one paid much attention, but eventually that article became very influential, and it was the first of Danto’s many publications discussing aesthetic theory. The question Brillo Box posed for Danto in 1964, then, was: why is this object a work of art? This is a very specifically philosophical query. Traditionally visual works of art have a special sort of appearance. Under the Old Regime, in Europe as in China, a world of art was a representation. When Kandinsky and his peers created abstractions, then, it was discovered that a visual work of art could be something non-representational which was expressive. But Brillo Box was a philosophical conundrum because it is basically visually indistinguishable from the Brillo boxes in the grocery story; it really is neither representation nor even expressive, at least in the way that Kandinsky’s abstractions are expressive. Why, then, should it be a work of art? The immediate paradox here comes in the fact that we naturally expect that the identity of a visual work of art be given by its appearance. After all, that’s why it’s called visual art. What Warhol showed, Danto argued, was that this intuitively plausible claim is in fact entirely mistaken. Brillo Box is a work of art, unlike the Brillo box in the store, which looks essentially similar. It is a work of art because it exemplifies and instantiates a theory of the nature of art. In a passage, which also deserves full quotation, Danto described Warhol’s visual culture: I have the most vivid recollection of standing at an intersection in some American city, waiting to be picked up. There were used-car lots on two corners, with swags of plastic pennants fluttering in the breeze and brash signs proclaiming unbeatable deals, crazy prices, insane bargains. There was a huge self-service gas station on a third corner, and a supermarket on the fourth, with signs in the window announcing sales of Del Monte, Cheerios, Land O Lakes butter, Long Island ducklings, Velveeta, Sealtest, Chicken of the Sea . . . . Heavy trucks roared past, with logos on their sides. Lights were flashing. The sound of raucous music flashed out of the windows of automobiles. I was educated to hate all this. I would have found it intolerably crass and tacky when I was growing up an aesthete. As late as my own times, beauty was, in the words of George Santayana, “a living presence, or an aching absence, day and night.” I think it still is that for someone like Clement Greenberg or Hilton Kramer. But I thought, Good heavens. This is just remarkable! (1998: 139–40)

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What we find expressed in Warhol’s art, Danto argues, is something like the worldview of this mercantile 1960s American economy, full of commercial artifacts, which to the tradition-minded aesthete seems so tawdry. So Brillo Box is expressive, after all, once we understand artistic expression in these terms. Here, then, is Danto’s definition of art: “to be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning” (Danto 1997: 197). So, Warhol’s Brillo Box is about American consumer culture, in the terms we have just specified; and by virtue of itself being a Brillo box, it embodies that meaning. By contrast, the banal Brillo box found in the contemporary grocery store is just a container for boxes of Brillo, and so it is not art. Like any merely utilitarian artifact, it is about nothing; it just is what it is. Danto’s definition aims to pick out all visual art: Poussin’s history paintings are about the events of classical and sacred culture, and embody them by virtue of depicting them; Picasso’s cubist portraits are about their subjects, and embody them by virtue of their style; and Robert Motherwell’s abstract paintings Elegies for the Spanish Republic are about that event, and embody that content by virtue of the interpretative context provided by the artist, which tells us how to read these abstractions as elegies. Danto’s account is an Hegelian definition of art, updated to take account of abstraction and, also, of Warholian readymades. And this demonstrates, Danto argues, that Warhol was a distinguished visual thinker, whose practice reveals a true philosopher of art. Later this book will come back to present a sustained critical discussion of this analysis. Then we will say something about Hegel’s aesthetics. Here, however, we need to understand the very different ways that Carroll challenges our received ideas of the nature of art. The objects that he makes are strangelooking things. When you’ve been attending to his art for some time, as I have, sometimes you forget how truly odd it is. One goal of this book is to restore a sense of that awareness. You can be familiar with a great deal of old master and modernist painting, and also a lot of contemporary art, and still find some of his works extremely puzzling—certainly I do. Let’s look at some of them. It’s 2015 and we’re visiting the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, or MAMbo, to use the acronym naming this Italian KunstHalle, which has devoted its exhibition gallery to Carroll’s retrospective. In this first gallery

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

Figure 3 Untitled Floor Piece (1992–94), MAMbo.

on the right-hand wall, Untitled (1990), which is made of oil, wax, canvas on wood and metal mesh, is mounted low on the wall, parallel to the floor, as if it were a very thick bookshelf, which, however, contains no books. And on the opposite side, in the far corner is Untitled Floor Piece (1992–94), a low-lying panel of oil and wax on canvas construction set directly on the floor. To its left is Untitled Cut Painting (1985) with five parallel cut lines. Made of oil, wax, canvas, collage, and masking tape on wood, it may initially seem less radical than the other works we have described. It, after all, is a painting hung on the wall, a work with some affinities with much 1960s minimalist art. But what, then, is meant by calling it a cut painting?—how do we understand the lines running across its surface? In Chapter 3 we will consider the shared features of this body of artworks. Here, however, to develop our comparison with Brillo Box let’s consider just one of these paintings by Carroll, Untitled Floor Piece. Set in the gallery corner, placed directly on the floor, this large roughly rectangular unstretched canvas has a cut parallel to one edge. At first the painting looks like a bit of discarded

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building materials, something you might pass by without notice were it to be found outside of a construction site. Taken just by itself, in isolation, it’s almost just nothing. The problem posed for aesthetic theory by Brillo Box is that, as we’ve said, it’s essentially identical with a utilitarian container; and a Brillo box certainly isn’t an artwork. The different problem raised by Untitled Floor Piece is that it’s such a very slight thing, unlike most familiar artworks, either traditional or contemporary. Probably we wouldn’t pay any attention to it were it not on display in an art gallery. Danto analyzes Brillo Box by developing the aesthetic theory we have sketched. Here, however, we approach Untitled Floor Piece by employing a different strategy. To do that, we need to take another excursion into art history. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades were the important precedent for Brillo Box—and Fountain (1917) is the most famous one. Just as Warhol presented a replica of a utilitarian container as an artwork, so Duchamp displayed a banal plumbing fixture in the art gallery—hence the name readymade, something already made which the artist appropriated. Danto and other commentators have described the differences between the readymades and Brillo Box. For our present purposes, however, what matters are their obvious similarities. Fountain and Duchamp’s other readymades are obviously radically untraditional artworks, and so explaining why they are art is a most serious challenge. At the time of their creation, these works were thought to be of marginal significance—they weren’t much discussed. But Duchamp, who became a New York resident, was long-lived (1887–1968), and in the 1960s a great many artists took up his concerns, which became (and have remained) immensely influential. Indeed, Warhol collected Duchamp’s works and met that artist at the time of his first museum show, in Los Angeles in 1964, on the occasion, so it happened, of his own first major gallery exhibition. It’s no accident, then, that Fountain and Brillo Box raise similar challenges for aesthetic theory. By now, a great deal of aesthetic theory is devoted to them. For the purpose of our analysis, focusing on Carroll, it’s best to start by taking up that now long tradition of theorizing in mid-course, as it were, looking at one philosopher’s account, which will prove to be most suggestive for our purposes. Then in later chapters, we’ll fill in the rest of the relevant earlier philosophical history.

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Why are the readymades art? A great deal of contemporary aesthetic theory offers varied challenging answers to that simple-seeming question. In his essay “Minimal Art,” (1965), which gave the name to that movement, Richard Wollheim observed that over . . . the last fifty years, we find that increasingly acceptance has been afforded to a class of objects which, though disparate in many ways—in looks, in intention, in moral impact—have also an identifiable feature or aspect in common . . . they have a minimal art-content: in that either they are to an extreme degree undifferentiated in themselves and therefore possess very low content of any kind, or else the differentiation that they do exhibit . . . comes not from the artist but from a nonartistic source, like nature or the factory. (1973: 101)

Like Danto’s “The Artworld,” but in very different terms, Wollheim’s essay responds with theorizing to contemporary art, which became very influential in the 1960s. Traditionally, Wollheim notes, an artist made a painting by slowly applying pigments to a canvas. And then we respond, concentrating on that object because it deserves close, prolonged attention. His example is paintings by Nicolas Poussin, who was his favorite artist: “By differentiating the work of art to a high degree, the artist made its claim to individuality intuitively more acceptable” (1973: 111). Duchamp, however, merely selected his readymades. Minimal art is challenging, for it is, in relation to this tradition, minimally art. Because so little physical work was done by the artist to make these works, they are barely art. One question it then poses is whether the artist can go too far. Is it possible that the artist may simply do too little to make anything deserving of our attention—or, indeed, do so little so as to not create an artwork at all? Elsewhere Wollheim described the theorizing which accompanies contemporary art as an envelope. Just as a letter is enclosed for sending in a mailing envelope, so—this metaphor suggests—art arrives for its viewer accompanied by theorizing. In his treatise on aesthetics Art and Its Objects (1968) Wollheim argued that “art and its objects come indissolubly linked.” By art he means the artwork, as distinguished from the mere object, which is its physical manifestation. We need, he said, “to understand this envelope in which works of art invariably arrive.” What he calls an envelope is what

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Baxandall, in his art historian’s language, calls a brief, or an aesthetic theory. The envelope encloses the art, for it is a theory giving it its identity as art. Carroll’s Untitled Floor Piece (1992–94) in MAMbo is an example of the sort of minimal art that Wollheim is discussing. You can be intimately familiar with a great deal of old master and modernist painting and still find the identity of this work as art challenging. No doubt Carroll builds here upon the minimalist tradition. As we will see in Chapter 4, in the 1980s he studied minimalist art with close care. But this painting is visually unlike any minimalist work that I know. To mention one obvious, important difference, typically minimalist artworks are polished manufactured artifacts, while there is always a roughness to Carroll’s paintings. Carl Andre’s minimalist floor pieces, for example, are composed of neat metal squares, arranged in a grid. Describing the origin of his art, he says that a Mark Di Suvero exhibition of 1960 “broke open sculptural scale.” It was post-studio art, assembled right in the gallery. “Sculpture for me . . . was still confined to, if not an actual pedestal, a phantom pedestal. . . . Even the phantom pedestal was gone. The floor itself was the support” (Andre: 89). Sometimes, but not always, gallery visitors are allowed to walk on his sculptures. Walking on an Andre is like being on floor tiles, just slightly elevated, as if the whole sculpture were a pedestal. But you probably wouldn’t want to walk on Untitled Floor Piece even if you found it in the street. It looks too frail. Donald Judd, another influential 1960s minimalist, made metal boxes, which were installed on the floor or hung on the wall. Some of Carroll’s paintings at MAMbo also are boxlike constructions, Untitled (1990) is one, and they also are displayed on the floor or the wall. But they look very different from Judd’s minimalist works. Carroll wants, so the critic Richard Milazzo rightly writes, “to address as equal all the sides of his paintings, and to ‘fill his own boxes’ with meaning, metaphor, personal experience. In short, all that would have made Donald Judd’s boxes imperfect, he wanted these very things to become a vital part of his art” (Milazzo 1998: 53). The artist seeks imperfections and impurities “to overwhelm his work—to take it over, to become the work— indeed, to let these imperfections and impurities become the heart and soul of his work.” More recent art critics give the procedures identified by Wollheim a useful label, “deskilling”: this involves the

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Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll

persistent effort to eliminate artisanal competence and other forms of manual virtuosity from the horizon of both artistic production and aesthetic evaluation. Deskilling appears for the first time in the late nineteenth century in the work of the Impressionists and of Georges Seurat, where the traditional emphasis on virtuoso draftsmanship and painterly finish was displaced by a breakdown of the application of pigment into visibly separate brush-strokes, displacing the smooth surfaces of academic painting with the marks of manual labor in an almost mechanically executed and serially deployed arrangement of pigment. (Foster: II, 531)

Such an analysis provides a good way of unpacking the implications of “Minimal Art,” and seeing its implications for Carroll’s painting, because Untitled Floor Piece carries deskilling to an extreme. Let’s look here briefly at the relevant background history. In her treatise The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, published in 1958, Hannah Arendt describes the work process that creates traditional artworks: The reification which occurs in .  .  . painting an image, modeling a figure . . . is of course related to the thought which preceded it, but what actually makes the thought a reality and fabricates things of thought is the same workmanship which, through the primordial instrument of human hands, builds the other durable things of the human artifice. (Arendt 1958: 148)

The very literal sense of the word “artwork” is significant for this account: an artwork is a work made by skillful artful fabrication. Arendt’s view of work is, as the first three words of her book title signals, entirely ahistorical: for her, writing as a traditional-minded philosopher, work is part of the unchanging human condition. Deskilling deconstructs that process, because it links art making to untraditional contemporary industrial labor practices. Wollheim’s examples of minimalists are Robert Rauschenberg, for his combines; Duchamp, because of his readymades; and Ad Reinhardt’s black, near-monochromes. Untitled Floor Piece also belongs to this tradition. So too does Warhol’s Brillo Box. The critical philosophical question, then, is how appeal to Wollheim’s notion of minimal art-content or the art critics’ account of deskilling allows us to understand the implications of these procedures. That question, we will see, naturally divides into two: Why are these minimalist

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artifacts works of art? And, if they are artworks, why do we value them? Untitled Floor Piece certainly poses challenging questions for aesthetic theory. It may be useful to note, briefly, that these queries are not entirely new, but have arisen in part at least when faced with very different old master paintings. Let’s look back briefly to the Roman art world of Caravaggio and Poussin, for its disputes about the nature of painting are relevant here. According to a muchquoted statement, in response to looking at Caravaggio’s Divine Love, which was then in the possession of a Roman collector, Poussin said that Caravaggio was born to destroy painting (Hibbard: 308). A great deal of attention has been devoted to understanding what exactly he meant. Indeed, the French semiotician Louis Marin devoted an entire book, To Destroy Painting, to this very question. Could Poussin only be saying, in a very dramatic way, that he really disliked Caravaggio’s painting? Perhaps! But possibly he had something more interesting in mind. An early commentator on Poussin reporting this critical judgment, André Fé libien, goes on to say: “His aversion for Caravaggio is not surprising. For whereas Poussin sought to foreground the nobility of his subjects, Caravaggio allowed himself to be carried away by the truth of nature as it appeared to him. Their approaches were thus diametrically opposed to one another” (Marin 1977 [qtd 1995]: 12). Here, then, we can find a faint anticipation of the concerns raised by deskilling and so, also, by Carroll’s Untitled Floor Piece. Poussin’s complaint, spelled out, is that Caravaggio does not compose his compositions or idealize his figures, but just depicts what he sees. This, indeed, was an echo of the familiar criticism of many commentators. And, I should add, also by some sympathetic modern scholars. Consider, for example, this very recent art historian’s account: “Because Caravaggio desired to convey real rather than artificially graceful gestures, his works seemed hard to read, contradictory and ambiguous. . . . It is not always easy to sense the motivation, feelings or intentions of the human figures in his dramas because of their apparently uncompromising realism” (Thomas: 11). Caravaggio, it was often said, works directly from the model, in a fashion anticipating Gustave Courbet, who said that he could not paint angels because he had never seen them. I am not saying that this account of Caravaggio is correct. But in historical context, it is a plausible way of describing Poussin’s point of view. By refusing to idealize, Caravaggio destroyed painting. Carroll, too, to extend

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this argument in a natural way, might also be said to destroy painting. But by now, of course, there is a long history of advancing painting by destroying it. As Picasso famously said, describing his own art: “a picture is a sum of destructions” (Picasso 2000: np). At the conclusion of “Minimal Art,” Wollheim offers a brief explanation about why minimal art works are artworks. While conceptual thinking requires that we generalize, “in the visual arts . . . we escape, or are prised away from, this preoccupation with generality, and we are called upon to concentrate our attention upon individual bits of the world: this canvas, that bit of stone or bronze, some particular sheet of paper scored like this or like that” (1973: 110– 01). The resulting artwork is therefore experienced not merely quantitatively but also qualitatively in ways distinctly unlike other objects. Tools merely serve utilitarian functions—any screwdriver of the right size will serve its practical purpose, loosening a screw. Paintings as such, when seen aesthetically, serve no purpose, but are only contemplated. They thus are essentially unlike tools. Think how we usually scrutinize a painting by Poussin, looking closely because it is a distinctively individual object. Connoisseurship takes this familiar process to an extreme, demanding that we search for small differences as when we compare a picture and a copy (or forgery). With minimal art, where the kind of artistic labor practiced by Poussin ceases to be important, the artwork commands our attention merely because it is a numerically distinct object. But if this process is taken too far, then no longer do we have a work of art. The critical question, then, for a painter like Carroll is when to stop. How far can deskilling legitimately go? Someone might admire minimalist works by Andre and Judd and still fear that Untitled Floor Piece goes too far. After all, to mention just one point, Andre and Judd compose their sculptures on a grid—like those found in the perspectival constructions of old master art. But Carroll does not. And so someone might legitimately worry that his Untitled Floor Piece is just too slight to be an artwork. Here it is helpful to consider also what Wollheim might obviously say, but does not say. One familiar line of argument claims that while some contemporary art involves less concern with physical working than a Poussin painting, still considerable labor has been involved: more exactly, manual labor is replaced now with mental activity. Thus Rauschenberg, Duchamp, and Warhol are concerned with intellectual working—with thinking about

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the nature of art. Their labor is a mental activity—these artists are doing physically by selecting artifacts, so they claim, something like what Poussin did in painting his canvases. Perhaps Untitled Floor Piece can be understood in those terms as a historically and critically informed commentary on the nature and recent history of painting. If considered in that way, maybe it too inspires intellectual contemplation as, for example, we find in my present account. Here, then, I would add an important proviso to this discussion of the implications of Wollheim’s analysis. There are two distinctly diverse modes of paying attention to an artwork. When scrutinizing a painterly picture, a work by Poussin or Chardin, we may focus on the results of the physical working involved in creating that object. Consider, for example, this observation by Denis Mahon, the doyen of Poussin connoisseurs, looking at The Death of Germanicus (1628), a painting which describes such an experience: The bold massing together of the figures into closely-knit groups, with a stronger accent emerging here and there aided and abetted by the relatively sharp fall of light form one side, is quite the reverse of “classic.” . . . Another evident characteristic . . . the broad and powerful handling, which is never in any sense delicate or elegant and sometimes satisfies itself with a rather approximate rendering of the forms. (1962: 22)

But in viewing an artwork by Duchamp, or one of his very numerous contemporary followers, you probably are primarily attending to the conceptual analysis, the thought process, suggested by the artifact. Fountain or Brillo Box don’t particularly reward visual contemplation. Being vehicles for that intellectual activity is what gives these objects the status of artworks. In critical commentary on Danto’s aesthetics, Wollheim, who was deeply skeptical about the value of most much-admired contemporary art, extended his argument about minimalism, in a way that’s relevant here: “Duchamp’s readymades . . . have exercised an influence over contemporary aesthetics that seems to me quite out of proportion to their interest or significance. . . . Duchamp has been sadly misunderstood by those who thought of him and what he did and what he refrained from doing as examples to follow” (Wollheim 2012: 36). “Art’s demand that we should look at single objects for and in themselves,” to quote Wollheim a little further, is not satisfied by these intellectual concerns, because for him works of visual art are essentially sensuous objects. This claim certainly speaks to Carroll’s thinking, for unlike readymades or Brillo Box, most

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of his deskilled paintings, so I will argue, are sensuous objects. To legitimately be visual artworks, Wollheim is saying, the objects made by the artist almost necessarily must be accompanied by some theory, a verbal articulation of their significance. Since the now distant time when I studied philosophy with him in graduate school, I have become skeptical about many of Wollheim’s claims; my ways of thinking about aesthetics now are quite unlike his. But his account of minimalism seems to me of lasting value: it certainly is relevant to Carroll’s art, I will demonstrate, perhaps in ways that Wollheim himself could not have envisaged. Sometimes Carroll’s artworks consist of just a bare stretcher. More exactly, to look further in MAMbo, Untitled (1998) consists of five stretchers, without attached canvases, mounted vertically, one above the next. And occasionally he mounts a painting plus stretcher on the wall parallel to the floor—Untitled Shelf Painting (1985) is one such picture. But often, also, he mounts stretcher with canvas on the wall, as in “normal” monochrome painting. We are familiar, certainly, with sculptures without pedestals like David Smith’s works, or Anne Truitt’s 1960s proto-minimalist boxlike constructions, which sit directly on the floor. And for a longer time, at least since the Russian avant-garde of Kazimir Malevich and Aleksandr Rodchenko, circa 1917, monochrome paintings have been in our art galleries. These Russians, the MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe writes, “wanted to .  .  . strip away everything until only the fundamental, elemental basics of art remained” (2006: 60). Indeed, had their paintings been better known in the West in the 1960s, the history of our art in this period would certainly have been different, because these Russian works anticipate many developments of minimalism. There are lots of precedents for some aspects of Carroll’s paintings—many of his ways of working employed in Untitled Floor Piece have a familiar history. Robert Ryman’s classic white paintings, minimally worked surfaces usually are supported vertically on the wall with fasteners. Occasionally, however, he sites his panels on supports parallel to the floor—Pace (1984) is one example. The five vertically mounted frames comprising Carroll’s Untitled (1998) may remind us of Martin Puryear’s much taller Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996). But that work is a sculpture, while Carroll’s Untitled is a painting. And, finally, a number of painters—the senior African American abstractionist Sam

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Gilliam and the veteran political figurative artist Leon Golub—have mounted stretcherless painted canvases on gallery walls. This last group of precedents come from American art. But in terms of his sensibility, Carroll is closer in some ways to Arte Povera, the 1960s Italian movement, than to any of the American minimalists. These Italian artists were interested in process and (as the name of their movement signals) very involved in using ordinary materials. It took some time for them to be shown seriously in America. And so in the 1980s, when he was living in New York, Carroll didn’t know about them; he only encountered their work later when he moved to Italy, at a time when his own artistic worldview was already formed. And Arte Povera artists were essentially sculptors, with very little concern for painting; but Carroll, as we will see, always was a painter. It might be said that Carroll’s art is what Arte Povera would have been had any of those artists painted. In fairness, it should be added, they adopted a very Italian Marxist political agenda, a brief, which was not his concern: The term “Arte Povera” .  .  . initially referred .  .  . to the concept of “impoverishing” each person’s experience of the world; this implies gradually freeing one’s consciousness from layers of ideological and theoretical preconceptions as well as from the norms and rules of the language of representation and fiction. It was these preconceptions that were perceived as obstacles between the self and a meaningful, essential experience of the world. (Christov-Bakargiev: 25)

This way of thinking is alien to Carroll, who comes from a different generation and country, and so has a different visual and political worldview. By the time that he moved to Italy, this 1960s culture had effectively vanished. And so, as we will see later in this book, his art offers a quite different political perspective. Carroll did, however, respond early on to some other more historically distant works from outside of the contemporary New York artworld. His more surprising, and revealing interests include the fragmented antique sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the 1980s, he explains, “I was spending a lot of time . . . looking at the Roman and Greek statues, which were broken, and often fragmented, missing fingers and arms, a nose. But yet in some way you could understand the entire sculpture although it was not all there. This object of imperfection was very interesting to me” (qtd Mina 2017: np). Look, for example, at the marble Fragmentary Marble Head of a Helmeted Soldier

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(69–79 BC), in which only a portion of the helmet and face is preserved. Or consider Marble Statue of a Young Satyr Turning to Look at His Tail (first or second century AD). Of course, the fragmentation of these figurative works is a product of historical accidents. Still, they appeal to a modern viewer in part because they are reminiscent of many recent intentionally fragmented works—like some of Rodin’s sculptures. Consider, also, the many fictional and critical literary masterpieces which are composed of collections of fragments. The demand that ideally a text or a sculpture must be a complete organic whole may seem falsifying when so often the most challenging works, which frequently seem more authentic, are fragments. Ludwig Wittgenstein was unable to finish his late masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations (1953), which is published as a collection of fragments; Walter Benjamin’s great social history of Paris, The Arcades Project (1940), is an unsynthesized assemblage of materials, which consist mainly of his reading notes; and August Rodin’s Gates of Hell (1917) is a perhaps unresolved assemblage of his sculptures. These works, which are most likely unknown to Carroll, formed the climate of opinion in which he worked in the 1980s. Nowadays there is something deeply authentic and aesthetically satisfying about such collections of fragments. Untitled Floor Piece belongs self-evidently to this tradition, even though it is intended to be a complete painting. And yet, while these precedents for the uses of fragments gives a context for Carroll’s work, it doesn’t make it any less ultimately puzzling. Untitled Floor Piece really is a strange artwork. In his marvelously full commentary Andrew Forge points to the way that Robert Rauschenberg, a key figure for Carroll, modified this traditional ideal of the importance of artistic fragments. Ever since the fifteenth century artists have worked with a concept of wholeness. It has been at the center of almost every definition of art. . . . The white paintings which Rauschenberg exhibited in 1953 announced a radical alternative. In a sense they were whole from the outset—they had been white canvases all along—and this wholeness could hardly have been modified by what was added. Painting them was an almost invisible affirmation of what was already there. . . . Paradoxically, nothing was excluded from them, because nothing was included. (Forge: 17–18)

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And let’s look one last time at Duchamp. His commentators have explained elaborately why the intellectual activity manifested in his readymades deserves our attention. Consider, for example, an interview with Pierre Cabanne: “Cabanne: What determined your choice of readymades? Duchamp: . . . The choice of readymades is always based upon visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste” (48). Needless to say, in our determinedly loquacious art world even this seemingly final statement has not prevented numerous other commentators from supplementing, arguing with or flatly rejecting Duchamp’s claims about his readymades. Carroll, it should be noted, is not the sort of artist to be engaged in extended discussions of bookish art theory; nor, I should add, is he especially interested in Duchamp. But of course that isn’t to say that his paintings are transparently meaningful. Like Poussin and Duchamp, he provides some suggestive statements about his art: “Painting for me is always a place where I am looking for things to anchor me in this world. Painting allows me a place to be, and a place to find what I need and what I wish to understand” (Carroll 2011: np). This comment reveals a lot without telling how to answer these queries about the nature of artworks. In the Introduction to his renowned survey The Story of Art E. H. Gombrich writes: There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Once these were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today some buy their paints, and design posters for hoardings; they did and do many other things. There is no harm in calling all these activities art so long as we keep in mind that such a word may mean very different things in different times and places, and so long as we realize that Art with a capital A has no existence. (1995: 15)

Art has changed a great deal historically, and so to use the same word to identify cave painting and modernist works is to describe very different things, which may have few if any interesting qualities in common. Art has no essence—Art “with a capital A” does not exist. Here Gombrich alludes to a long-standing philosophical tradition. Some philosophers believe that some things are defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, what we call essences. Other philosophers, nominalists, deny the existence of essences, arguing that there are only individuals. Gombrich is a nominalist—at least as far as art goes. In the next chapter, we will discuss the claim that painting has an essence at length.

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Sometimes it is suggested that it was inconsistent for Gombrich to make this statement and then to write a book called The Story of Art. After all, we find the word Art with a capital A in his title. But this may not necessarily be a problem. What Gombrich shows in the course of his book is that the nature of art, along with its social role, has changed very dramatically over history. Perhaps, then, there is no interesting way to define its nature in a way that includes everything in his book, and excludes all the non-art, which he does not discuss. Suppose that cave painting has artistic qualities a, b, and c; and Egyptian painting qualities b, c, and d. Then when we get to David Hockney, who appears in the last chapter of The Story of Art, maybe the art work has artistic qualities x, y, and z. If art develops in this way, then in fact cave painting and Hockney’s art have no artistic qualities in common. (It is true that representation making, which is Gombrich’s subject, has a history. But not all representations are artworks—and not all artworks are representations.) In short, Art does not exist—art has no essential nature. Gombrich was not a philosopher—and so it’s not surprising that he does not pursue this issue. From the art historian’s point of view, this argument about whether or not art has an essence may not be especially important. Telling the story of art requires presenting a plausible narrative including the most significant figures. And it’s not clear that doing that requires determining whether all of the artworks discussed share some significant qualities—which taken together constitute art’s essence. However, when we get to Carroll’s art, this debate about whether art has an essential nature becomes a real issue. In The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things the art historian George Kubler says: “Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art” (1962: 1). He doesn’t offer any philosophical argument for his claim that any and every man-made thing is art, though he does discuss the consequences of this claim for the writing of art history. Some artists took an interest in The Shape of Time but, so far as I know, philosophers haven’t responded to its argument. That is not surprising, because Kubler wasn’t interested in philosophical concerns. As he wrote: “aestheticians learn little from art, being concerned more with philosophical questions than with artistic ones” (Kubler:

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67). Nor, in truth, does his own book consistently build upon this radical idea. Indeed, later he says: “We are concerned mainly with works of art rather than with tools” (Kubler: 38). As I have indicated, Carroll’s Untitled Floor Piece is deeply puzzling. My concern is to find the best, and the most tactful way of understanding his artworks. The first stage is to deal in a philosophically responsible way with this question: What is art? A proper answer to that question requires philosophical analysis. To answer it, we need to understand the metaphysics of essences. We need to understand, to speak in this philosophical jargon, the essence of art— what, that is, makes an artwork an artwork. And we need to say something about the medium of painting. That will be the task of the next chapter.

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What Is a Painting?

The previous chapter introduced our account of aesthetic theory. We asked: What is art? Now we need to take that philosophical analysis further, in ways which focus more closely and differently on Carroll’s paintings. What is art? That’s the question, which, as we have seen, preoccupies aesthetic philosophers. What is painting? That’s an issue that more typically concerns art critics. And so let’s turn now to discuss it. Logically speaking, “What is art?” is the broader question: Art is visual art or music or literature or architecture, and visual art includes painting, sculpture, some conceptual art, installations, and many performances. So if we can define visual art and music and literature and all of these other art forms, then presumably we would know what art is. But in practice this logical way of categorizing these questions isn’t particularly helpful. When critics ask, “What is painting?” they’re really asking, “What is the medium of painting?” In particular, recently they’re interested in knowing whether the traditional divisions between painting and sculpture, between two- and three-dimensional visual artworks, might break down. In his very recent book Your Everyday Art World the theoretician Lane Relyea says that when he started teaching art courses in the early 1980s, he dealt with “topics like the difference between modernist medium specificity and conceptualism’s art in general” (Reylea: 5). Nowadays, he adds, students talk in different ways. Perhaps; for our purposes, however, what’s most useful here for understanding Carroll’s ways of thinking, which date to the 1980s? For us, then, with reference to his art it’s most useful to answer this question: What is a painting? Carroll often constructs three-dimensional artifacts—objects extending from the wall or mounted on the floor. And so it would be natural to think that some of these works, at least, are sculptures. After all, many distinguished painters also make sculpture. But in fact, and almost all of his commentators

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agree about this, he is a painter—and he always says that all of his works are paintings. As Robert Pincus-Witten puts it in a nicely enigmatic sentence: “Carroll’s paintings are much like sculpture yet his work is one with painting and instinct with the primacy of touch” (1988: np). And so what’s needed here is some clear analysis of what constitutes a painting. We have seen why Carroll’s Untitled Floor Piece (1992–94) is a challenging artwork, one which certainly belongs to the recent tradition of what Wollheim baptizes as minimalist art. Now, however, we need to focus in more closely on the distinctive qualities of his works as paintings. What, indeed, is painting? As we will see, some recent painting has pressed forward this discussion in a most challenging way. In the previous chapter we contrasted Carroll’s works with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. Here, looking now at a modernist painting, let’s develop a very different contrast—let’s compare his art to Morris Louis’s Alpha Pi (1960), which is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And let’s bring another of Carroll’s paintings into this discussion. Most of the artworks in his MAMbo show are made of pigment on frames. However eccentric the placement of their surfaces, they are recognizable variations on that familiar format. However, a few of these works are harder to place. Untitled Light Painting (2014) has a light fixture with a lit bulb, mounted in the upper-left-hand corner and electric corner. Untitled (2014) is a canvas on wood construction which contains a pair of shoes. And Untitled Freezing Painting (2013–14) (Figure 5), which is made of oil, wax, canvas on wood and steel, contains a freezing unit and the ice produced by that unit. Describing a related earlier work, a reviewer noted: Untitled (Freezing Shoes), 2006, Carroll’s own shoes are placed on a plinth and covered in ice. Here, making art is a way of holding fleeting emotion and memory, of stopping time, even in its most banal moments. Citing Giorgio Morandi as a hero, Carroll creates art that rewards a slower, more meditative way of viewing, and given time, his are works that stay with you. (Tipton 2013: np)

As Carroll says, “I live life in search of evidence, to find out who I am, where I have been, and where I am going. It is not about the destination, it’s about the journey” (qtd Mina 2017: 23). Louis, too, was a process artist—but how very different are the results!

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It’s hard to imagine any modernist artist who is more different from Carroll than Morris Louis. Not surprisingly, then, neither he nor any of his commentators to the best of my knowledge ever mentions Louis. Where Carroll’s works are physically homely, “incredibly hand-made” as Jerry Saltz rightly says, Louis’s pictures are very beautiful in an impersonal way—they look as if not made by human hands (Saltz 1993: 15). (This, of course, is an aesthetic illusion: we have some good information about how he made them.) As Michael Fried observes, in a marvelously imaginative description, Louis’s

Figure 4 Untitled (1998)

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paintings “are wholly abstract embodiments or correlatives of human will or impulse—specifically, the will or impulse to draw, to make one’s mark, to take possession, in characteristic ways, of a plane surface” (Fried: 122). And he adds: “One’s experience of the unfurleds can be vertiginous. The banked rivulets . . . their vibrant, biting color is crucial—open up the picture plane more radically than ever before, as though seeing the first marking we are for the first time shown the void” (Fried: 119). Extending Clement Greenberg’s terse commentaries, Fried offers a brilliant, very fully developed discussion of how Louis builds upon the achievement of Jackson Pollock. That Louis’s work fitted so nicely into Greenberg’s view of modernism no doubt explains something of why he so admired the painter. And, looking back, I suspect that Louis’s status was soon downgraded in part because of that fact, for what was desired in the 1960s, and was provided by some of the most successful young artists, was a more radical revision of recent tradition. For a moment, however, Louis seemed a very major artist—the inevitable heir to the abstract expressionist tradition. Now, when his reputation has declined so dramatically much is to be learned, still, by considering Fried’s and Greenberg’s brilliantly suggestive histories, which were very influential in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Carroll has said, speaking of his own art: “I don’t think of the work as any more important than the person who looks at it. It is important that they have this vulnerability” (qtd Pincus-Witten: np). It’s hard to imagine Louis (or his champions) making such a statement about his colorfield paintings. In his essay “Abstract, Representational, and so forth” (1954) Greenberg offers a very suggestive view of visual art’s history which answers this basic question, what is painting? Since Greenberg’s analysis has been much discussed by various commentators, myself included, I will present here just a brief quotation, which provides a clear summary of his argument (Carrier 1987b: Ch. 1). From Giotto to Courbet, the painter’s first task had been to hollow out an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface. One looked through this surface as through a proscenium into a stage. Modernism has rendered this stage shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its curtain, which has now become all that the painter has left to work on. (Greenberg 1961b: 136)

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And Greenberg goes on to characterize this flattened modernist picture space, explaining why it is difficult for viewers used to the deeper spaces of old master painting to comprehend it. In “Modernist Painting” (1960) Greenberg further develops this account, arguing that it was the pursuit of self-criticism, the desire for painting to determine what was unique to its medium, which drove this history: The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors and were acknowledged openly. (1993: 86)

Obviously, paintings by—let us choose three major European artists—Giotto, Gustave Courbet, and Jackson Pollock look very different, and they served very different social functions. Still, understood in terms of this description, they are all said to be pursuing this common goal, the presentation of an illusionistic space: which is to say, here we have identified the essence of painting, the shared feature of these extremely diverse paintings. And according to Greenberg’s account, abstract painting is the ultimate product of the flattening of the deep old master picture space. When there no longer is any room for figurative subjects, then art had to become abstract. Louis just takes this long tradition one step further—he thus really is Pollock’s natural heir. Louis’s paintings fit nicely into Greenberg’s and Fried’s history of art. Looking back, it’s easy to see that though his paintings seen superficially may look different from the modernist masterpieces of É douard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Pollock, admired by these same critics, he belongs in their modernist tradition. “Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time,” Greenberg wrote in 1960, “than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is . . . continuity and unthinkable without it” (1993: 93). But Carroll’s paintings do not fit neatly into any such history. And while that doesn’t make them better or worse works of art, it certainly points to the challenges here. In some ways the distance from the painting of Willem de Kooning to Carroll’s feels at least as large as the distance from Nicolas Poussin to de Kooning. And so the idea that there is an ongoing activity called “painting” which is practiced by Poussin, de Kooning, and also by Carroll needs to be defended.

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Is Carroll a painter? To answer that question we need to ask another: What, indeed is the medium of painting? Long ago my attention was first drawn to this issue in part by a sequence of visionary, now too little known, essays published by Joseph Masheck in Artforum, in the late 1970s, when he was editor of that journal. His account, which is one major key to our present discussion of Carroll’s painting, dealt with issues that were, as we will see, much discussed in the art in the art world at that time. Masheck starts with a simple enough historical observation. “The stretched canvas supported by a wooden armature is only one of the conventional formats of Western painting” (1977: 56). Paintings also are made on other kinds of surfaces. And that leads him into a very full description of Cimbaue’s Crucifix (1290), in which Christ is represented on a rectangular panel, with rectangular protrusions, one extending most of the length of Christ’s body and the other out of his feet . . . bars that were of course made, like Christ’s cross itself, of wood. . . . These compartments were defined . . . by a complex but elegant system of narrow and wide bands which made one rectangle seem both connected with, and distinct from, another. But the entire painting was also completely surrounded by an unbroken, framelike molding that gave the unity of a single irregular shape to a cluster of disparate regular compartments. (1977: 56)

And then in his essay “Hard-core painting” Masheck writes: “Paintings involved with cruciformality can raise, and then transcend, the question of their being sculptural. Ultimately they affirm their affinities with painting by being shaped, space-displacing objects only to the same extent that other paintings are” (1978: 46). This analysis is obviously very interesting, but what, in the context of Artforum, a journal devoted to contemporary art, had it to do with present-day painting? Masheck presents a great many examples of contemporary art—we see how these varied artists, mostly abstract painters, made use of the picture surface and frame in ways which trope on the concerns of pre-Renaissance Christian art. Thus, we get a discussion of the shaped canvases of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, and of numerous, now lesser known, contemporary figures, along with some Soviet modernists; and the developments of what Masheck calls “hard-core painting,” painting which is on a panel, and so does not suggest a window opening onto an illusionistic picture space.

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What’s distinctive about such painting, he argues, is that it “reflects concern back from an only negligibly space-displaying esthetic territory into the observer’s world, whereas sculpture generally already substantially inhabits the space to which it refers or alludes” (1978: 46). And this leads him into an account of the properties of “the stretcher, both in its individual parts and as a whole.” Some contemporary abstractions, he notes, are “all stretcher,” which is to say that the stretcher is the surface. In “Pictures of Art” Masheck continues this discussion. What recent abstract painting has rediscovered, he argues, are “certain principles, above the relations between contained rectangular forms and their containing rectangle, that were first stated in the preabstract painting of the later nineteenth century, and that trace back further to fundamental organizing procedures in Western art” (1979a: 26). Finally, in “Nothing. Not Nothing. Something” he rounds out his discussion by looking at the ways that Sean Scully and other contemporary painters employ checkers and grids, building upon the achievement of Mondrian, as also does Louis (1979b). In thus linking the Byzantines with some early modernists and artists of the present day, Masheck offers a stunning sketch, with very numerous examples, but also with relatively underdeveloped theorizing, of a radical revisionist account of European art history. This discussion deserves to be supplemented by an essay that Masheck published elsewhere, a discussion of Leon Battista Alberti’s seminal early-Renaissance account of perspective and the identity of paintings as windows on the world. According to many commentators, Alberti describes illusionistic paintings as windows. Old master art develops a deep pictorial space, and then, in Greenberg’s history, modernism flattens it until in abstract painting only the surface of the window is visible. And so correctly identifying this origin for the entire tradition is important—it’s not merely of historical interest. In fact, Masheck argues, what Alberti actually says is “that if you draw a rectangle” on a surface, then “you may treat it—the drawn rectangle, that is, not the format—the surface as an open window” (1993: 17). The point emphasized by the italicized words is crucial. What Alberti says is not that the painting is a window, but that a drawn rectangle is like a window. By undercutting the usual view of the origin point of figurative art, Masheck thus destabilizes or deconstructs the usual historical account of the origin of painting, which has often been repeated in a cliché d fashion. Normally, of course, the discussion

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of Alberti is a specialist topic—far removed from analysis of contemporary art. Here, however, it becomes relevant, for the true target of Masheck’s radical revisionist commentary is the canonical account of someone never mentioned by name in his account, Greenberg. He didn’t need to, for within the art world, Greenberg’s theorizing was then extremely well known. Masheck drew attention to the ways in which the Byzantine sacred tradition was involved with literal uses of the stretcher and the picture surface, in ways that anticipate some concerns of modernist abstraction. Guided also, perhaps, by precedents in the revolutionary Soviet avant-garde circa 1917, some contemporary abstract art (what he calls “hard-core painting”) embraced that seemingly forgotten tradition, which was concerned with the literal properties of the medium. And as we saw in the Introduction, this concern with what might be called the deconstruction of the medium of painting is very relevant to Carroll’s art. Masheck doesn’t know Carroll’s paintings, and Carroll never read Masheck’s essays. What we are concerned with, then, is a revealing convergence of ideas. Masheck divined some important features of the contemporary art world that Carroll was about to enter. Greenberg’s account of the medium of painting offers an extremely suggestive historical guide, focused on the immediate present. His essay “Modernist Painting” suggests why Morris Louis and the other painters championed by Greenberg are major figures, heirs to the entire tradition of art. Of course, read differently, as the minimalists did, “Modernist Painting” offers a very dissimilar view of contemporary art. They believed that the essay implies that the history of painting had ended—so that sculpture had become the essential art form. And then by the 1980s, when entirely different views emerged, this whole debate about the medium of painting turned out to be, as we say, merely academic. Greenberg himself resisted or even flatly rejected making this link between his aesthetic judgments, his taste, and his theorizing. Still, it was this reading which linked them that was very influential, and justly so for it shows relationships between very different-looking objects. Like Masheck, Greenberg offers a very elliptical analysis, and one which, unlike Masheck’s, is presented with very few examples. Masheck’s essays are well-illustrated, in good Artforum style; Greenberg’s, which appeared in different sorts of journals, were not. (You can, it is true, fill in much of the relevant history by looking to Greenberg’s art criticism.) These two art

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critics are not philosophers—they don’t offer a developed historical analysis or consider counter-arguments. But this is not really a personal limitation. As I noted in the Introduction, in this discussion we’re really dealing with distinctive features of a genre of writing. Usually art critics publish only essays; typically, their books are collections of essays. It is easy to see some problems with Masheck’s brilliant analysis, which is driven by many examples, but without an explicit conceptual framework. Granting for the purposes of argument the similarities between Byzantine pictures, some Soviet revolutionary works, and the contemporary painting of interest to Masheck, it’s obvious that these were very different cultures with very different ways of thinking about visual art. Byzantine works were sacred; Soviet art, political; and contemporary abstract painting is destined for a secular museum culture. Since the artworks from these three cultures have very different uses, what exactly is at stake in connecting them in this way? Maybe knowing that Masheck is himself a Catholic believer is relevant here; that suggests why he made this connection, though of course it doesn’t show how to understand the link or, indeed, whether it is intrinsically plausible. I imagine that almost all of the contemporary abstractionists he cites were not themselves religious. Greenberg never critiqued this rival analysis; indeed, I don’t know that he even was aware of it. But he offered, in advance, two points, which can serve as the basis for such a critique. In “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” he noted: “The easel painting, the movable picture hung on a wall, is a unique product of the West, with no real counterpart elsewhere. Its form is determined by its social function, which is precisely to hang on a wall” (1961b: 154). Byzantine sacred works and Soviet revolutionary art served very different social functions, and so it’s not surprising that they are visually very different. And in a remarkable short essay “Byzantine Parallels,” after identifying the visual parallels between these traditions to which Masheck calls attention, Greenberg concludes: “The Byzantines dematerialized firsthand reality by invoking a transcendental one. We seem to be doing something similar. . . . A radically transcendental and a radically positivist exclusiveness both arrive at anti-illusionist, or rather counter-illusionist, art . . . extremes meet” (1961b: 169–70). In this Hegelian analysis, it’s the extreme opposition between the sacred Byzantine concerns and the secular modernist culture, as Greenberg understands it, which, thanks

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to the dialectic, yields this parallel. Greenberg never entirely abandoned his Marxist, dialectical ways of thinking. In his essay “Cruciformality,” Masheck offers a very valuable historical perspective on this debate about the nature of painting: “Pottery, plaster walls, the leaves of books, panes of glass set in real windows, and ‘panels’—those portable solid chunks of wood-work plastered over . . . all presented themselves to painting long before the light, resilient, easily transportable (and saleable) canvas as we know it settled in” (1977: 56). Here, again, we find a marvelous anticipation of Carroll’s 1980s painting. Indeed, once you look outside recent New York modernism, you find a great deal of art, which challenges parochial Greenbergian views of painting’s essence. That said, it’s not immediately obvious what the relationship between the cruciforms and icons discussed by Masheck and contemporary art is; these older sacred works come from a different world from the secular art found in our galleries. What’s at stake in making these contentious opposing claims about the essence of painting? If an issue of aesthetic theory is involved, it has to be something more than a disagreement about taste. Greenberg and the others are not merely telling us what art they admire—they are saying what is, and what is not art. Many of Carroll’s paintings in the Bologna exhibition employ a conventional format—they are rectangular wall-mounted pictures. Some, however, are more eccentric. Thus Untitled (1990) is set directly on the floor, apart from a small rectangle, which leans on the wall. Untitled (1998) is a ladder-like vertical, composed of five stretchers. Untitled Shelf Painting (1986) is a shelf hung low on the wall, parallel to the floor. Untitled No 51 (1993) is a pile of four folded canvases set directly onto the floor. And Untitled-Flower Piece (2014) is a rectangular panel leaning on the floor. Looking at these works, let us ask: what is a painting? To gain inspiration to answer that question, let’s do some more reading. Leo Steinberg, who published a frontal attack on this formalist view of history and, also, gave a constructive alternative account of what came next, what he influentially called postmodernism, provided the most effective critique of Greenberg ( Steinberg 1972: 65–77). Steinberg focused on Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and, especially, Andy Warhol, figures who, for better or worse, soon became much more influential than Masheck’s hardcore abstractionists. For our purposes, however, what is most liberating here

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is Masheck’s argument that we can and indeed should get away from thinking that a painting essentially is a surface on a frame. Opening up thinking about the history of art, he gave to art criticism a philosophical dimension, an intellectual seriousness, which is rare and so deserves commendation. It says something about the limitations of cliché d art critics’ writings that no one pursued his ideas. In his influential essay “Art and Objecthood” Michael Fried discusses the essence of painting. What is at stake in the critical debate, he says, is “whether the paintings or objects in question are experienced as paintings or as objects: and what decides their identity as painting is their confronting of the demand that they hold as shapes. Otherwise they are experienced as nothing more than objects” (1998: 120). How, it’s worth asking, can we distinguish between a mere pigmented object and a painting? I am not sure how to answer that question. Perhaps, as a recent account by Thierry de Duve describing a Robert Rauschenberg painting suggests, “the difference between a picture and a successful picture reveals itself to be undecidable” (32). Writing under the spell

Figure 5 Untitled (Freezing painting) (2013-14)

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Figure 6 4th Room, MAMbo.

of Fried’s criticism, the philosopher Stanley Cavell adds some most suggestive commentary: the flatness of modernist painting “together with its being of limited extent, means that it is totally there, wholly open to you, absolutely in front of your senses, of your eyes, as no other form of art is” (Cavell: 109). (His model of such modernist painting is Louis’s abstractions.) Cavell adds: works of art are objects of the sort that can only be known in sensing. It is not, as in the case of ordinary material objects, that I know because I see, or that seeing is how I know. . . . It is rather . . . that what I know is what I see; or even: seeing feels like knowing. (191)

And he goes on to say: “In such cases, knowing functions like an organ of sense.” If you look at the history presented by Greenberg, in which modernism is the product of the flattening of deep old master illusionistic space, then Carroll’s works will seem oddly beside the point: Greenberg’s theory of the medium offers no way of understanding Carroll’s paintings. We need to start afresh. Let’s return then to MAMbo and go into the fourth room of Carroll’s retrospective (Figure 6). Coming straight down the center axis from the entrance, we’re looking at three paintings in that small space. Yes (Floor Piece) (2000) 31 is a box on the

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floor, aligned parallel to the long gallery, so that it echoes the shape above. It could be a discarded container for a painting. But if, as its title suggests, it is an artwork, why is it displayed on the floor? Or it could be a painting, fallen face downward onto the floor? Usually, of course, paintings hang on walls; sometimes they decorate ceilings, as in baroque illusionism. But it’s hard to think of many paintings on the floor. (Sometimes one finds decorative tiles underfoot.) Then to our right in this gallery is Untitled Hinge Painting (2013). An oil and wax on canvas on wood construction, it has one edge mounted on the wall. Finally let’s look at the far-left-hand corner of the room, where we find Drinking the Rain (1994). An oil and wax on canvas on wood, it includes also an electric cord, light bulb, and ceramic light fixture. Sometimes you see older paintings displayed with a light attached to the top of the frame. In such works, of course that light isn’t part of the work itself. Here, however, the light is an essential element of the painting. The philosophical question is: How we know that these artworks by Carroll are paintings. Let’s suppose for the purposes of argument that we have a clear, well-developed concept of “painting.” We have no difficulty, that is, in understanding that the works of Giotto, of Raphael, of Poussin, and also of Picasso, Pollock, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Murray, and Agnes Martin, as well as those by Chinese scroll painters, artists doing Persian miniatures, and American folk artists— all of these artifacts are paintings. In his book The Double Screen. Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting, for example, the art historian Wu Hung gives an account of the handscroll: “A handscroll must exhibit four interrelated features, which distinguish it from all other types of painting formats .  .  . a horizontal composition, a limited height and a far greater length, the ‘scroll’ form, and the ‘unrolling’ process in executing and viewing a painting” (Hung: 59). Once you look outside of American late-modernism, determining the essence of painting is not easy. But right now we are worried just about some of the pictures made by Carroll. Our problem is simple: we understand a painting to be a marking on a stretcher mounted on a frame. However, it can be abstract or figurative. And it can be rectangular, a scroll, or on a shaped stretcher. It can have a figurative subject or be an abstraction. It can be made with brushstrokes using oils or acrylics; or with some other technique. Paintings are very varied. What worries us, still, is that some of Carroll’s works do not consist of pigmented surfaces on

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a stretcher. A few are just stretchers—and others just surfaces. How, then, do we decide if they are paintings? These artifacts have some features of familiar paintings. But, after do, so do other objects, which are not paintings. For example, the frames or the canvases in an art store are not paintings, but merely components of potential paintings. Carroll’s works are made by a painter. But he also makes many artifacts, which are not paintings. Carroll’s works are in an art gallery. But so, also, are many utilitarian fixtures, which certainly are not paintings—the stepladders brought in to change the lights at his shows, for example. Someone might allow that Carroll makes art, but deny that he makes paintings; or allow that he makes paintings, but deny that he makes good paintings. In the 1960s, there was a great deal of interest in artworks which didn’t fit the traditional categories—which were neither paintings nor sculptures. And, also, there was discussion of whether some radically original works might be art, but not good art. For help here let us look again at Greenberg’s theorizing. In his essay “After Abstract Expressionism” he wrote: Under the testing of modernism more and more of the conventions of the art of painting have shown themselves to be dispensable, unessential. By now it has been established, it would seem, that the irreducible essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness; and that the observance of merely these two norms is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a picture: thus a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture. (1993: 131)

As we have seen, many (but not all) of Carroll’s works in Bologna are not flat, delimited pictures hung on the wall. For example, Untitled Table Painting (2006–14); Untitled (1990); Untitled Floor Piece (1992–94) are not. Greenberg is explaining why the paintings of Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski— contemporary painters he admired—are works of art. What seems to follow, however, if we accept his analysis, is that maybe some at least of Carroll’s paintings are not works of art. In his commentary on this passage, Fried (who then was a friend and follower of Greenberg) quotes it and makes a suggestive modification in its definition of painting.

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Flatness and the delimitation of flatness ought not to be thought of as the “irreducible essence of pictorial art” but rather as something like the minimal conditions for something’s being seen as a painting. . . . This is not to say that painting has no essence; it is to claim that that essence—i.e., that which compels conviction—is largely determined by, and therefore changes continually in response to the vital work of the recent past. (123–24, n. 4)

Here, in trying to modify Greenberg’s definition, Fried actually undoes it. To say that painting has an essence, as philosophers understand “essence,” means that it has a fixed nature. To explain, however, that the essence of painting changes over time is, in honesty, to say that painting has no essence. As Fried indicates in a passage just beyond the one I have just quoted, what truly is at stake here are questions about what is good art. If something does not have the essential qualities of a painting, then obviously it cannot be a good painting. Fried went on to develop a complicated theory about the development of painting, taking the story from Caravaggio to the present. His account aims to show how the essence of European painting has changed. For our present purposes, what matters is that according to Fried it has changed. Louis, he says “was the last major painter who did not have to . . . confront the risk that his paintings might be seen as objects” (Fried: 128). More recently Fried has gone back over this discussion, providing an elaborate gloss on his prior commentary, with reference to some of the discussions by his critics. But when he speaks of his “attempt to historicize the concept of essence” by way of “Wittgenstein on essence and convention,” he only muddies the waters (Fried: 38). The same tree is first a small sapling, then a spreading oak. Essences are, by definition, fixed qualities—they cannot change, for they are what we employ to explain change. To say that the essence of painting has changed is, in honesty, to admit that it has no essence, only a changeable identity. And how, one might ask, can we know which account of the essence of painting is correct when Fried and his critics so strongly disagree? Fried does suggest how to productively extend this discussion. There are two related questions here: what is a painting? And, what is a good (or, if you will, an original, or a noteworthy) painting? Sometimes answers to these questions are related. In an art world like ours, which puts a premium on innovation, a good new painting has to be original. This, after all, is why we don’t give much

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value to imitations or belated versions of innovative paintings—and none at all to forgeries. The scholar who after Fried offered the most influential postmodernist analysis was Rosalind Krauss. In a dramatic way, she (and her colleagues at the journal October) changed the terms of debate, in ways, which meant that the arguments of Greenberg and Fried were no longer of central interest. And so we need to look here at her claims. In the Introduction to her book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths she presses this argument about the essence of painting a step further. “Profoundly historicist, Greenberg’s method conceives the field of art as at once timeless and in constant flux. That is to say that certain things, like art itself . . . are universal, transhistorical forms. But in the same breath it is to assert that the life of these forms is dependent upon constant renewal” (Krauss: 1). This is an accurate, clear summary of his claims. Greenberg thinks that painting has a fixed nature, an essence—and that over history that art form has changed dramatically. But what’s not correct is Krauss’s suggestion that there is some contradiction involved in claiming both that painting has an essence and that it has changed. In general, saying that something or someone has an essence is compatible with allowing that they change; a person, once a child, becomes an adolescent and then a mature adult (Wiggins 1980). The same person has changing qualities. We use appeals to essences to explain why a thing (or person) is the same thing (or person) after change. Later she says: Historicism works on the new and different to diminish newness and mitigate difference. It makes a place for change in our experience by evoking the model of evolution, so that the man who now is can be accepted as being different from the child he once was, by simultaneously being seen—through the unseeable action of the telos—as the same. (Krauss: 277)

This statement is misleading. The same person who once was a child now is a man: Persons change and so one aim of speaking of essences is to describe such changes. In Finding Time Again, the last volume of his novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust presents such an example: “To ‘recognize’ someone . . . to identify somebody after not being able to recognize them, is to think two contradictory things under a single heading, to admit that what was here, the individual one remembers, no longer exists, and that what is here is a being

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one did not formerly know” (2002: 248). His book is obsessed with physical and mental changes in persons. No paradox is involved in noting that the same person has become very different—that’s just why we use essences to describe such changes. Some questions about essences involve appeal to definitions: What is a table? Any native speaker can answer that question, which means that we don’t have interesting debates about this concept. Other concepts, however, involve complex philosophical debates. What is a person? The advances of artificial intelligence may change the answers we give to that question. Perhaps someday rather soon computers will become persons! Recently the philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that soon artificial intelligence may come to have, probably in a menacing way, the essential qualities of human intentionality (2016). And of course numerous science fiction authors have described in some detail nonhuman persons. Thanks to technological discoveries or to exploration of outer space, we may need to revise our accounts of the essences of persons. As for the analysis of justice, as Plato pointed out, it’s not at all clear that unreflective accounts are correct. We may believe, he reported, that justice involves giving back what is owed. But suppose, he argued, that we have been lent a sword by someone who has gone mad. Does justice then demand that we return it, knowing that this person might kill himself? The Harvard philosopher John Rawls developed an intricate theory of justice, based upon two principles: “First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (1971: 60). In a later publication Rawls explained: “The initial focus, then, of a political conception of justice is the framework of basic institutions and the principles, standards, and precepts that apply to it, as well as to how those norms are to be expressed in the character and attitudes of the members of society who realize its ideals” (1996: 11–12). But as critics pointed out, it’s not obvious that these seemingly plausible principles yield a clear, uncontroversial answer to the question: what is justice? Here then, we are not faced with some result of technological advancement, as in the case of persons, but simply with the real difficulty involved in thinking through the significance of our intuitions about concepts.

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Answers to the question “What is a painting?” have a really different quality than these queries about justice. When artifacts are presented in the contemporary art gallery, where originality is much desired, we very often expect that these displays will challenge our definition of art. Is it possible, then, that we would (or could) deny that such an installation was not a work of art? Looking at the recent history, it’s hard to think of any such examples. (It is easy to imagine cases where the novel artwork is judged dull or unoriginal— which happens all the time. But that is a different issue.) We might not understand Carroll’s Bologna exhibition—we might wonder about why he has made these objects, or what relation they have to earlier paintings, or what their significance is. But it’s hard to imagine what experience in the gallery could convince us that these artifacts are not art. Indeed, is it even possible to take that claim seriously? No additional information, either about Carroll’s works or about art at large, is likely to resolve this question. The presentation of objects or performances challenging our concept of art has become such a familiar ritual that I’m genuinely unsure if anything whatsoever could be ruled out. Recently, for example, when the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan presented America, his gold-plated toilet installed in a restroom at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, I didn’t need to see that lavatory or even read the press announcement to understand that it was an artwork. In fact, the press release says: “Cattelan’s toilet offers a wink to the excesses of the art market but also evokes the American dream of opportunity for all—its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity” (Guggenheim 2016). That Cattelan’s interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is an artwork is abundantly obvious. After all, Sherrie Levine, Mike Bidlo, and other artists have already created variations on this theme by Duchamp. A whole exhibition could be mounted of these works, Duchamp’s Fountain and its descendants. In a real sense, then, asking in the gallery, “Is this a painting?” is a ritual, because that situation is set up so as to guarantee that the answer to this question will always be “yes.” This, however, isn’t to say that the ritual is unimportant. Rather, it’s an important part of art world life to be able to ask and answer this question, and other questions, too, about the identity of what’s in the gallery. Doing that, we spell out our concept of art, indicating how novel works are challenging. In this way, I should add, in one crucial respect, art world life is

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entirely unlike life in the larger material world. When you look at a table and ask, “Is that a table?” that question is easy to answer unless, of course you are just learning the English language. Indeed, this book offers what is obviously a natural extension of this art world situation, an extended permanent record of the kind of discussion prompted by the situation in which puzzling artifacts are displayed. In the contemporary art world, the essence of art is up for grabs. This, it might be said, is a way to definite art. Contemporary art encourages, indeed demands, interpretation. Suppose that I am asked to give examples of just actions. Paying one’s debts is one; and the German government’s payment of reparations to victims of the Holocaust is another. A theory of justice explains what common feature these diverse actions have in common. Analogously, a theory of the essence of painting explains the common features of the very diverse works of old masters, modernists, and also Carroll. Suppose, for simplicity, in answering the question “What is painting?” we consider just three works: a Renaissance fresco by Giotto; a modernist picture by Courbet; and an allover abstraction by Jackson Pollock. Of course we can use an art historical narrative to get us, by stages, from one to the next. But that doesn’t in itself tell us what we want to understand—what interesting common feature, what essence, these three paintings possess. After all, they appear to be very different artifacts. The question we are asking, to speak in philosophical terms, is: What is the essence of painting? The Scottish philosopher David Hume was a skeptic about personal identity. We are, he claimed, “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux” (Hume: 252, 253, 254). The mind, then, “is a kind of theatre,” the imagined place where these perceptions appear. But “the comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.” And then he goes on to explain why we have this idea of personal identity. “We feign the continu’d existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation.” Hume explains both why we do not actually have a concept of self, and why we mistakenly believe that we do. His philosophy thus

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critiques common sense. A similar nominalist argument can be developed about art. We may speak as if there was some essence of art, as when we say that art is collected in museums and written about by art historians, but in fact there are only individual artworks, not something called art. YouTube presents a suggestive, vivid example of the importance of personal identity. The American song “House of the Rising Sun” was recorded in 1964 by an English pop group, the Animals, with the lead singer Eric Burden. And it was recorded again in 2006 by Burden, with a new backup band. In 1964 Burden was a young, slim man—by 2006, he was old, stout, and bald (Animals 2008 and 2006). And so his performance, as you can see, is very different. For one thing, in 1964, Burden kept moving while singing; but now he sits on a stool during part of the performance. The band has different musicians and the lead singer sounds different. But the same man recorded two different performances of the same song. There are two identities over time here, a man and a song, and both singer and his performance have both changed. In fairness, Krauss—who after all is not a philosopher—is not concerned with making metaphysical claims in a philosophically responsible way, but is offering a polemical account of some contemporary art history. Her real argument is not with Greenberg’s essentialism, but with his taste in contemporary art. The goal of the essay from which I took this quotation, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” is to argue that the new sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s was genuinely new, and not simply an unpacking of ways of visual thinking found in earlier art. That claim is interesting and, I think, correct, even if some of Krauss’s philosophical arguments used to arrive at it are mistaken or misleading. And here, I should also add, she moves from Greenberg’s (and Fried’s) concern, the essence of painting, to focusing on three-dimensional art. Part of what’s going on here, then, is a shift from Greenberg’s presentation of painting to Krauss’s concern with sculpture—or, more exactly, to innovative art in three dimensions. In tracing the postmodernist expansion of sculpture, “looking at historical process from the point of view of logical structure,” she denies that art has any essence (290). Her philosophical position is the same as Gombrich’s, though of course she presents it with reference to very different examples. She describes one sequence of transformations of sculpture, in a way, which leaves open the possibility that in the future these changes will continue. It may come

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about, eventually, that in the future some visual art will be very unlike any art known today. In the Introduction to The Originality of the Avant-Garde Krauss appeals to an example discussed, also, by analytic philosophers, the ship Argo, also known as the raft of Thesus. (And she notes that Roland Barthes also cites it.) Imagine a functioning raft, which is rebuilt stage by stage in a continuous process until no single plank of the original survives. What then is the raft: the rebuilt raft, or the reassembled planks of the original? Here there is an obvious conflict between judging according to identity of function or by physical identity. Both answers are true to the facts. And so, what is called for is a decision: is the same raft the same physical object or the functioning raft, which has been rebuilt piece by piece. Depending upon the context, either answer could make sense. Alluding to this example, the Harvard philosopher W. V. Quine, following the logical positivist Otto Neurath, “likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it” (Quine: 3). And in his autobiographical book Barthes by Barthes, without reference to analytic philosophy, Roland Barthes says that the Argo “affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions . . . substitution and nomination . . . Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form” (Barthes: 46). Neither Quine nor Barthes focuses on the immediate philosophical point. In order to answer the question, “What is Argo?” we need to decide: is identity given by the physical materials of the original or, rather, by the form of the continuously functioning raft? Both answers to the question have some prima facie plausibility. Krauss links the Argo into her discussion of the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism. Here, perhaps, she alludes to Barthes’s account, in which he jokes that his two studies, one in Paris, the other in his country house, have the same structure, paper, pens, etc., in the same arrangement: “This private phenomenon would suffice to shed some light on structuralism: the system prevails over the very being of objects.” Different objects constitute the same study as, when the planks of the Argo are gradually replaced, different planks constitute the same boat. And so the question “which is Barthes’ study?” leads to two different ways of thinking, both true to the facts: do you mean, the same structure? Or the same objects? It’s easy to think of cases in which we would go for one or the other answer.

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The same goes for the Argo. If we need to cross the river, we’re happy to take the same functional raft as last year, not caring that its planks have changed. If, however, we’re rather interested in an historical memorial, then we may want the original physical object. Krauss doesn’t take up this point, but this discussion is immediately relevant to one art historical issue, the preservation of older art. The question which frequently arises is: Should we preserve the original object or the appearance of the original object? On the first view, we may allow a five-hundred-yearold painting to appear old and visually different from when it was first made; or the second, we should intervene physically to preserve the original appearance of that old artwork. The Argo doesn’t carry by itself any particular philosophical weight for the practice of art history; this example doesn’t say anything about the relative merits of structuralism or post-structuralism, or about the philosophical concerns raised by the other explanatory issues cited by Krauss, as she seems to suggest. The Argo raises in a commonsensical way questions about identity, which need to be sorted out. But resolving those questions doesn’t tell us how to think about the seemingly exciting concerns Krauss poses. This recent debate about the nature of painting is too narrowly focused on a small group of contemporary American artists to immediately reveal much about Carroll’s paintings. Really what concerns Greenberg, Fried, and Krauss is not the whole history of art, as surveyed by Gombrich, but the then-recent late-modernist development of art in New York. They’re not interested in how to deal also with premodern art in China or in the Islamic world, to name two major other visual cultures. Greenberg, Fried, and Krauss use their claims about the essence of art to justify their different tastes in contemporary art. And, as I have said, because they are not philosophers, they assert but do not really argue for their different positions. Philosophers, on the other hand, though good at arguing, are unlikely to discuss individual works in ways that satisfy art critics. This discussion of the medium of painting opens up discussion of Carroll’s art in valuable ways. It’s most instructive to see how, exactly, he uses that medium in extremely innovative ways. But alone it doesn’t provide a satisfactory basis for a full account of his painting. In part, the problem is that the terms of discussion that we have presented have become radically dated. When Carroll

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entered the art world, circa 1984, Greenberg’s theorizing was passé ; Fried had gone on to focus on writing art history; and Krauss was developing her criticism in ambitious, unexpected ways. The terms of debate were changing radically, in ways that will be reflected, now, in our account. What’s most suggestive here is the link between discussion of the medium of painting and accounts of the history of this art form. As we have seen Greenberg’s account of the medium leads directly to such a history—and Fried’s modification of that analysis to a somewhat different such history. (The story of Krauss’s development is a different story, one which I have traced elsewhere (Carrier 2002a).) Guided by these results, the account will proceed in several stages. We need, first, to understand the nature of the art world that Carroll entered. That discussion will flesh out the account of the medium of painting, showing how it functions in art world discussion. Then we will consider how to write a post-Greenbergian history of abstraction, an account, which will place Carroll in a satisfactory way. And then, finally, we will be prepared to interpret his works.

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The Art World

In the last chapter we saw the problems with understanding the identity of Lawrence Carroll’s artworks as paintings. Given a full history of the medium of painting, it is certainly possible to identify precedents for most if not all of his works. But it’s not clear that doing this explains why these artifacts are paintings. Nor is it obvious that identifying the precedents explains why his art is interesting. And so that discussion remained inconclusive. Finding a satisfactory answer to our basic question “what is a painting?” proved to be surprisingly difficult. Sometimes, then, when a question is difficult, the best way to proceed is to change the subject and ask another, related question. Thus far I have focused on individual paintings by Carroll in relative isolation from their place within the body of his works. In posing the questions “what is an artwork?” and “what is a painting?” I have set a few of his paintings alongside works by other artists. Single artworks posed these philosophical dilemmas: you need only consider Fountain or a single Brillo Box to wonder why these are artworks; and you need only look at one painting by Morris Louis to seek to understand its relationship to earlier paintings. For the philosopher of art, one example thus sometimes suffices. He or she needs to explain why Fountain and the Brillo Boxes are art—and why a Louis painting is a painting. But of course, in practice, in exhibitions we usually encounter groups of Duchamp’s or Warhol’s works, as, also, we view ensembles of Louis’s and Carroll’s paintings. I implicitly recognized this point earlier when we looked at groups of Carroll’s paintings before focusing on individual works. In fact, the two retrospectives on which I have focused attention included large varied groups of his paintings. How does looking at ensembles of Carroll’s works add to our understanding of his art? In both MAMbo and Ligornetto we viewed varied paintings made over many years. Modernism focused on the model of the artwork as a moveable

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artifact, designed for no particular site. Displayed to the public in a gallery, the artwork is transferred to the home of a collector or, with luck, ideally, to a museum. Every artist seeks the best possible display presentation for his or her art. Successful museum curators and gallerists are expert at creating effective exhibitions. And, also, in response to this modernist situation, some contemporary art is installation art, work made specifically for some particular setting—in the same way that much old master art was created for a particular church setting. By creating an installation, the artist takes full control over the presentation of his or her work. As I have said, Carroll is not an installation artist, but he takes the displays of his paintings extremely seriously, devoting immense attention to these presentations of bodies of his work—and, also, to providing permanent records of these displays in his exhibition catalogues. How does a visual artist create bodies of work? Here, as earlier in our philosophical analysis, it’s useful to look at contrasting examples from a variety of historical periods. Like most old master artists, Nicolas Poussin underwent a complex history of development, assimilating earlier artistic styles for his purposes. And when he found his mature style, he painted various subjects— sacred Christian subjects; themes from the Old and New Testaments; and the self-portraits. (His doctrine of the modes claims that different subjects call for what might be called different stylistic treatments (Carrier 1993a).) A successful old master artist would naturally thus present many different subjects. Most abstract painters also take some time to find their mature style. But once they do, how and why do they continue? To understand why Carroll (and other artists) make a body of artworks, we need to identify the art world in which they were made. Many people—even people who know nothing about philosophy and very little about contemporary art—speak easily of “the art world.” But in fact properly analyzing this concept of the art world is philosophically interesting, and it is essential to the understanding of the paintings of Carroll. And so far as I can see, prior commentators have not properly discussed “the art world.” Why then does understanding what the art world is matter? Carroll himself has offered a most suggestive observation: “The meaning of my work, and the way in which I formed this meaning, could come not only from my own thoughts but from the thoughts and voices of others—indeed, at times, from an anonymous source, from anonymous others” (qtd Milazzo: 42). As we noted earlier, philosophers have spent a great

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deal of effort defining art. Relatively less attention has been given to defining the art world, perhaps because its identity may seem obvious; or because this particular issue has only relatively recently become pressing. In his account of Robert Rauschenberg’s career, Calvin Tomkins very neatly identifies the way in which an art world functions. Telling how first Roy Lichtenstein, then James Rosenquist, and also Andy Warhol were discovered by Ivan Carp and the important dealer he was working for, Leo Castelli, Tomkins notes: “What astonished Karp and Castelli was that none of these people knew what the others were doing. Out of the blue, it seemed, and simultaneously, they had broken with the whole modern abstract tradition and adopted a realistic subject matter of the most unexpected kind” (1980: 177). And, he then adds, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, Jim Dine, George Segal, and Claes Oldenburg were also pursuing the same concern. In this situation, it was natural to attribute a certain defining unity to the art world; these otherwise unconnected artists shared a sense of the Zeitgeist. Let us, then, focus on people, not objects in our definition of the art world. The art world consists of artists, obviously enough, and also of art writers, dealers, curators, and collectors. The art world is the place where art is made, shown, interpreted, and, also, sold to be displayed in private and public settings. For our present purposes, however, we will focus only on artists and art writers. “The art world”—what complications proper analysis of these three simpleseeming words reveals! What indeed is the art world? To start with, there are two very different ways to answer this question. The art world consists of the people who make, display, and interpret artworks. Or the art world consists of the objects made by artists and displayed by dealers and curators. These two ways of thinking are obviously connected: the people judging art determine what art is. But, as we will see, they have quite different significance. Carroll’s artworks are accepted as paintings by people in the art world—by critics, dealers, curators, and collectors. (Nobody has denied that they are artworks.) And since these people are experts, insiders to the art world, they must know what art is. So let’s ask a new question, “what is this art world?” If we can answer that question, then perhaps by considering how the art world works we can also figure out what art is. Let’s shift, in other words, from asking the abstract question “what is the essence of painting?” to considering in more concrete ways how art world people talk about art.

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Here is one answer to our questions about what a work of art is: art is what people in the art world say is art. As we have seen, defining art may be difficult. But since art world people know what art is “when they see it,” as the saying goes, why not trust them to judge? To be in the art world means, it would seem, that you therefore know what art is—or, at least, that you know how to talk coherently about this issue. Maybe Carroll’s art cannot readily be defined in so many words. Still, if art world people can identify it as art, then that tells us something important about its nature. And perhaps that is all that we need to know. Art world people may be able to sort out disputes about “what is art” even if they cannot spell out its definition in so many words. Instead of trying to define the objects, artworks, we rather need to analyze the social institutions within which it is made, displayed, and interpreted. Is this then a real conceptual gain? To answer this question, we need to consider the nature of the art world. Doing that is a productive strategy, for it emphasizes the social dimension of aesthetic knowledge. To speak, then, in a very matter-of-fact way, “the art world” consists of those people involved seriously with art, who therefore are knowledgeable about it. In a similar way, one might speak of the “Islamic carpet dealers’ world” or “the world of Shakespeareans” to identify those people with a serious interest in Islamic carpets or Shakespeare’s plays. Understood thus, “the art world” is an unassuming description, a mere exercise in descriptive sociology without philosophical pretensions. But, it turns out, there is more to it than that. In the 1970s the philosopher George Dickie developed a clear, influential account of the art world. The art world, as he understands that phrase, includes “artists . . . museum directors, museum-goers . . . critics for publications of all sorts, art historians, art theorists, philosophers of art, and others . . . every person who sees himself as a member of the artworld is thereby a member” (Dickie 1974: 35–56). And he says that these art world people have the power to say what is art. “The institutional theory of art may sound like saying, ‘A work of art is an object of which someone has said, “I christen this object a work of art.”’ And it is rather like that, although this does not mean that conferring of the status of art is a simple matter” (Dickie 1974: 49). The definition of art thus proceeds in two stages. First, we define the art world; then we explain how that world determines what is art. One correction should be made to Dickie’s analysis at the very start. Surely, it’s not right that if you think yourself a member of the art

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world, then you are. Being a member requires, minimally, some knowledge of and experience of art. In context, however, this is a minor objection. Dickie raises two questions: first, is there any reasoning behind these christenings—these decisions about what is art? Second, can this art world make a mistake? Compare legal institutions. When courts make their decisions, there is a body of law behind their choices. The judges give reasons for their decisions. Sometimes, however, their decisions are overruled and often they are revised. In the art world, arguably, the same thing happens. Think, if you will, of the vast literature about Duchamp’s readymades. Lots of reasoning has been devoted to explaining why these artifacts are artworks. Sometimes art world people initially failed to recognize art—Duchamp and also Warhol occasionally had this problem. But I cannot think of any case where something was first accepted as art by the art world, and then later rejected. (There are of course many cases where judgments of the value of art were changed; but that is a different story.) On the whole, the art world has expanded, but never, so far as I know, contracted. If what is art is defined merely by the art world community, without real reference to the actual qualities of the artworks, then it seems entirely arbitrary that something is art. That maybe seems to suggest, also, that art isn’t especially significant. Some commentators take this view, which applies particularly well to artifacts like Brillo Box or minimalist paintings, the creation of which involves only minimal, deskilled labor. Perhaps, on this view, only snobbery, some kind of social-status seeking, explains why some people pretend to take art seriously: for in fact, so the analysis claims, actually what’s art is entirely arbitrary. And perhaps it can arise, also, from a simplified misreading of Danto’s key argument about Brillo Box. If we say that anything can, in principle, be an artwork, then that could be taken to mean that there is no reason for calling something an artwork. Of course, that is a mistaken conclusion. For Danto, something can be an artwork only when it is accompanied by an interpretation. But maybe with a little effort almost anything can be interpreted. Experience of recent art suggests that nothing is too banal, too ordinary, or too dull not to be given interpretation as art. Suppose that you came upon one of Carroll’s paintings in the street or in a store. What would you make of it? When we see trash or discarded things in the street, we’re not likely to pay much attention to them. But if in a store we

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see some tool, we can recognize how it functions. As Martin Heidegger says: “The shoe which is to be produced is for wearing; the clock is manufactured for telling the time. The work which we chiefly encounter in our concernful dealings .  .  . has a usability which belongs to it essentially; in this usability it lets us encounter already the ‘towards-which’ for which it is unable” (1927 [Eng. Trans. 1962]: 99). The significance of this statement is clear, even if the jargon in which it is phrased is unwieldy. If an apparatus is unfamiliar-looking, we’re likely to puzzle over it. Furniture usually is not puzzling—tables, chairs, shelves, beds reveal their function to the eye. When you grasp a familiar tool, you take hold to use it—to turn a screw, hammer a nail, turn a bolt; or in cooking, use a knife to cut the food. And so when you see such artifacts, without need for any further explanation you have some conception of how they function. What distinguishes works of art is that they lack this quality of usability. They are “showstoppers”—they may force us to look in puzzlement. Carroll’s paintings serve no such functions. You wouldn’t stack books on his floor shelves or put your shoes on his floor pieces. In the street or in a store one of Carroll’s paintings would indeed be hard to understand. But when they are found in an art gallery, then we know that they are meant to be interpreted. And what makes you a member of the art world community is this desire and ability to interpret what you see in galleries. In a famous scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 movie about London, Blow Up, the hero, a trendy photographer, visits a rock performance (Antonioni 2014). When the guitarist smashes his guitar, and throws it into the audience, this photographer grabs it, scuffles with the other spectators and then takes it outside, where he drops it on the street. A passerby picks it up, and then discards it, for this instrument means nothing apart from its context. A work of art by Carroll is like that guitar. Remove it from its art world context and it loses its meaning entirely. This discussion assumes that innovative art like Carroll’s is significant. But such art may fail. In his commentary on Greenberg’s writings, Thierry de Duve touches on this point when, paraphrasing Greenberg’s views, he speaks of “the risk of seeing easel painting melt into the decorative function of wallpaper” (32). Of course, a nice decorative wallpaper has pleasures all of its own, but here identifying paintings with wallpapers is surely meant to be dismissive. If a painting is nothing more than a wallpaper, then it cannot be very significant.

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As Sean Scully says, “Art, especially abstraction: has to be a moral act. If not it’s likely to fall into bed with decoration” (2016: 273). This claim that at least some highly valued contemporary art may be valueless, has rarely been developed within the art world. We do, however, find it within Tom Wolfe’s famous nastily humorous commentary The Painted Word (1975); in Yasmina Reza’s play Art in which the characters debate the validity of a minimalist painting; and, in an attenuated version, in Pierre Bourdieu’s account of status seeking, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Bourdieu). When people say of an artwork, “my child could do it,” what follows, they are suggesting, is that such art isn’t worth taking seriously—it is simply silly. This kind of argument applies more readily to minimalist paintings than to pictures by Nicolas Poussin. It is like a reductive account of religion, which reduces belief in God or gods and sacred ceremonies to empty rituals, which may at least serve some social need. It’s one thing to observe, correctly, that much of the rhetoric of art writing, especially writing about contemporary art, is pretentious and vacuous. And quite another, however, to conclude that all (or a great deal) of contemporary art simply has no significance whatsoever— that it is art only because art world people say that it is, without being able to give good reasons for that claim. Richard Wollheim, whose essay “The Institutional theory of art” inspired a portion of my present analysis, offers a very strong “evolutionary argument” explaining why painting is important: “Painting would not go on, it would not have gone on, being practiced as an art, if it did not enjoy some of the success of art. . . . The survival of painting: the survival of painting as an art . . . gives meaning to, and claims intelligibility for, its products” (1987: 357). Painting, he concludes, appears in “societies in which a common human nature manifests itself.” Because Wollheim develops this argument only briefly, he doesn’t consider some obvious problems. In our society, many, indeed almost certainly most people take little interest in art world painting, although they may be interested in art from outside the art world. Perhaps, to appeal to Wollheim’s utopian socialism, in a better society there would be more interest in this visual art. But that merely is to offer an empty promissory note. In any event, it’s easy to think of alternate explanations of the survival of painting. In many cultures, for example, it serves religious rituals. And in our secular

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society, it serves social functions—art ownership often involves status seeking as Bourdieu argues. Perhaps, then, Wollheim’s evolutionary account is correct, but until it’s compared with competing views, which he doesn’t do, and which I am not prepared to do, it’s hard to think that it is convincing. When he speaks of “two of the commitments by which I steer: the love of painting, and loyalty to socialism” (1987: 357), it’s natural to worry about whether he’s not just universalizing his own values. Elsewhere when he speaks of the ways “by which art has been segregated from those for whom it was made and turned into a preserve of the rich and the arrogant,” his idealism is obvious (1973: 335). It would be great were the larger public interested in Carroll’s paintings— as fascinated by his works as they are by pop music and Hollywood films. But most people aren’t. Abstract painting in our culture is a relatively esoteric activity. But of course that says nothing about its significance. “The art world”: consider first the first reading of these words. The art world, speaking literally, is a place—or, more exactly, a whole group of interconnected dispersed places—artists’ studios, commercial galleries, homes of collectors, public art museums where art is made and displayed. The art world, speaking metaphorically, is the place where artists, critics, dealers, collectors, and curators live. Paintings are made, interpreted, displayed, and purchased by people in the art world. And so in order to understand art, we need to know what this art world is. More specifically, we have to understand how it is that artists and art writers enter it—and so become competent to make and to interpret art. Your entry point to the art world determines, to some real degree, how you make and understand art. Contemporary art has a dual character—it needs both makers and interpreters. This, so we will see, is why art writing matters. Often contemporary artists aspire to interpret their own art. And so we need to understand how to judge these interpretations. The artifacts that Carroll makes are artworks because the people in the art world—critics, collectors, curators, and also other artists—accept them as artworks. And as art these artifacts are understood in relation to the prior works already in the art world. There is no conflict inherent in the two ways of reading “the art world.” But, still, it is true that these two readings lead in very different directions. And that dramatic difference will focus our discussion. In Chapter 4 we will focus on identifying the relevant people in Carroll’s art

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world. Then, finally, after necessary discussion of some other philosophical issues, in Chapter 8 we will consider how his works relate to the rest of art. First, however, we need to say more about the concept of the art world. In his important early essay, which we have mentioned earlier, “The Art World,” his first commentary on aesthetics, Arthur Danto adapts the second interpretation of “the art world.” As he explains in his later comment on this account in After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History: “I meant by the expression . . . (an) ideal community. To be a work of art was to be a member of the art world, and to stand in different kinds of relationship to works of art than to any other kind of thing” (Danto 1997: 164). Here he refers to an ideal community of objects—that is artworks, not people. Danto originally got this idea, he explained, by teaching literature courses, where experience of the earlier books was often enriched by knowing later books. Reading James Joyce, Dante, the Bible, and Virgil gives a new perspective on Homer’s Odyssey, to use his example. This itself is not an original claim; T. S. Eliot proposed this idea, and it was a point also noted by the art historian George Kubler (35). But Danto uses it in a highly original way. In his account of literary canons Eliot says: The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (Eliot 5)

Following Eliot, Danto moves from the obvious, plausible claim that new art gets judged “for contrast and comparison” with older works to this more dramatic assertion. At each moment, the art world system is complete, and so, just as adding a new square to a geometric pattern would change our sense of the whole, so the addition of a really new work changes our experience of all prior art. Here, we will see in Chapter 8, is one key to understanding Carroll’s art. Danto calls this chart of all the options the style matrix. And this holistic view of the entire body of art is linked with the claim made later in his essay by Eliot, that “the emotion of art is impersonal” (Eliot: 11). One later work

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changes our sense of the whole history of art because it’s as if, at least for these purposes, the identity of the individual artists is irrelevant. The history of art consists in the development of a group of positions, like moves in a game of chess; and so who makes them is not so important. And to make one change in this system is to readjust the whole. How literally should we take this claim? It’s one thing to say some older works look different after we see new art, and another to assert, in this dramatic way, that everything older looks slightly different. So, for example, when in 1917 Malevich and other Russians made monochrome paintings, earlier works were then identified as non-monochromes. But did that enrich our experience of prior painting? Did we see Piero della Francesca’s frescoes differently by knowing that they were not monochromes? That claim needs to be considered critically. The reasoning leading to Danto’s view is not unfamiliar to art critics. After we have seen Willem de Kooning’s painterly paintings, our experience of Titian’s late pictures is enriched, for we see how this technique could be radicalized; and when we view Carl Andre’s metal plates, which sit directly on the floor, our experience of classical sculpture, which usually has a pedestal, becomes different. This claim can be generalized: modernism, Clement Greenberg wrote, “may have had something to do with the revival of the reputations of Uccello, Piero della Francesca, El Greco, Georges de la Tour, and even Vermeer; and Modernism certainly confirmed, if it did not start, the revival of Giotto’s reputation” (1993: 92). This maybe is a plausible critical cliché . Seeing recent art changes how we view what came earlier. In his late book Andy Warhol Danto characterizes the art world in the more familiar sense of the words—“a complex of dealers, writers, collectors, and, of course, other artists” (2009: 25–26). Indeed, in his essay “The Art World Visited,” a commentary on “The Art World,” he also speaks of the art world in this everyday sense. He abandoned that early view of what the art world is, he says, because he abandoned the style matrix (1998: 38). This matrix offers a timeless view of all the varieties of art, while Danto wants to offer an historical account of the creation of Brillo Box. That matrix displays visual artworks according to their appearance, but Danto’s thesis is that the identity of a work of art cannot be given just by its appearance. True enough, as we have just seen; but since, according to Danto, we are now living after the end of art’s history,

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why cannot we use this diagram to show all the possible options? The style matrix shows how Brillo Box, a banal artifact, visually indistinguishable from a Brillo box, fits into the world of artworks. And that is an illuminating claim. We need, this analysis suggests, to see how Carroll’s art fits into the style matrix. Here, then, we come back to Baxandall’s concept of an artist’s brief, the verbal definition of the visual problems that his artwork solves. It’s not enough, we are saying, to understand that Carroll’s paintings are artworks or to explain how they employ the medium of painting. We need to describe and so understand in more detail the visual culture in which they were created. Chapter 1 focused on a single work by Carroll, Untitled Floor Piece (1992–94) in MAMbo. Normally, of course, his art, like that of most other contemporary painters, is seen in exhibitions displaying many works of art—that’s how the art world encounters his paintings. And then sometimes questions raised by the nature of one work are answered when we can look nearby at other paintings. After all, normally art world people don’t see individual works in isolation, but in the context of gallery group shows. Art critics then must go home to reconstruct that experience, imagining being back in the gallery. Let’s do that right now. At MAMbo in the ten rooms, all very tall, one of them very long, with poured concrete floors and neutral white walls sixty-three of Carroll’s paintings, some of them very large are displayed. In the first room, facing the entrance on either side of the door to the second larger gallery, are Untitled (1989–90) and Untitled (1989–90), with the words “I am” on the left picture, and “alone” on the one on the right. There aren’t a lot of words in Carroll’s paintings. And so this written personal declaration is a strange beginning point to the presentation of art in a social setting. What is the artist telling us? Carroll published a marvelously laconic account of his situation at the time when he started to paint in the 1980s. I had no gallery No idea of what was ahead Just a dream The kind that most folks would Say is a pipe dream; I was looking everywhere— It was a time like no other

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For this was as good as it gets Without having much I had everything. (Carroll 2011b: np)

Young and with few connections in an unfamiliar city, Carroll felt vulnerable. Certainly I, too, felt vulnerable as a critic in New York in the 1980s, and I had a family and an excellent academic teaching job in Pittsburgh. At this moment Carroll, whose life was more insecure, found a marvelous freedom to look in the museums and galleries, and to develop at liberty. We have not yet looked at the other four works in the first gallery, where there are ten paintings in all. Nor, yet, have we looked at the very varied art in the nine other galleries (Figure 7). Already, however, there are many obvious unanswered questions. Why does Carroll call all of his works paintings when some of them are mounted not on the wall, but installed parallel to the floor, directly on the floor, or on a tripod? And, how are we to understand his use of color? What unifies his artworks, which have very varied sizes and orders, is not the traditional

Figure 7 Installation, Museo Vela, Ligornetto, room 13.

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painter’s repeated subjects, but the creamy ochre of almost all these pictures. What, finally, are we to make of his insertion of a panel into a painting? We are familiar with shaped canvases. But this seems a different procedure. Sometimes you learn decisive things about a painter by visiting a show of another artist. It happens, Lawrence Carroll and I were walking together through the Frank Stella retrospective at the Whitney Museum in spring 2016. Because Stella so regularly changed his style dramatically, moving from the black minimalist works at the start to his recent three-dimensional relief works, it’s hard to find unity in his development. His color is consistently high key and garish. How different are ensembles of Carroll’s paintings, which almost all are of one color, the color of the canvas, as if they had not been painted at all. He has explained his procedure: “I wanted to paint my paintings the color of the canvas I was painting on, so I could always erase myself and start over. I always then had a way out and back into the painting” (qtd Mina: 12). He thus unifies our visual experience of a group of physically very varied artworks, creating a harmony that relaxes the eye. How cacophonous, by contrast, is Stella’s exhibition. It’s hard to think of many other painters who use color in Carroll’s way. The most striking comparison is to Robert Ryman, who almost always uses white paint. But although he employs varied supports, and varied materials, always his paintings are rectangular, and almost always they are attached flat to the wall. And so the result of ensembles is quite different from these shows of Carroll’s paintings. My recent book The Contemporary Art Gallery: Display, Power and Privilege, coauthored with Darren Jones, is devoted to making the implicit rules of that important part of the art world system explicit (2016a). To be in the art world is to know how to behave in galleries—how to look at the art, and what to say about it. In our book, we compare galleries to fine restaurants. If you didn’t grow up privileged, when you first go to French restaurants you have to learn how to read the wine list and how to order food. Analogously, in galleries you need to know about the importance of openings, to learn to read the handout at the front desk and not to ask to use the bathroom—after all, you are not in an art museum. And, if you are inspired to understand and even to analyze this complex social system, then you need to consider the role of galleries in establishing the artistic value of emerging artists, and the conceptual place of the gallery between the artist’s studio, which is a private site, and the public

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space of the museum. And it’s useful, also, to have some historical perspective, and to be aware that the art gallery, like the art criticism, which accompanies it, is a creation of modernist culture. You cannot understand contemporary art without some awareness of this system. The individual works are significant because of their place within this art world system. When, as I have said, a work is displayed in the art world, we expect that it should be interpreted. And such reflections are developed systematically and written out in reviews, in essays, and in books such as this one. What the artist creates, it follows, is an artifact, which can be the source of fruitful art world discussion. And so we ask, “why is this an artwork?,” “what is its place in the history of art?,” and “how should we interpret it?” The institutions of the art world are organized to promote discussion of answers to questions like these. Knowing this much gives us a new perspective on our discussion of the essence of painting. Earlier we pretended that questions about the essence of painting could be asked and answered as if the artwork were an isolated artifact—as if we were dealing with a purely philosophical argument. But that is not possible, for we judge art in a communal public setting, even if no one else is present when we visit the gallery. Sø ren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling presents a case history, which is revealing for our present purposes. Abraham and his wife Sarah are promised a child, and in old age Isaac is born to them. And then Abraham is commended to take the child to the mountaintop and sacrifice him. Practically speaking, this command is absurd—and to speak in the terms of morality, it is murder. But as a knight of faith, to use Kierkegaard’s name for him, Abraham does not hesitate, but obeys God’s command, and of course at the last moment he instead finds a lamb for the sacrifice. “The one knight of faith can render no aid to the other. Either the individual becomes a knight of faith by assuming the burden of the paradox, or he never becomes one” (Kierkegaard 1941: 82). Faith, it follows, involves belief by virtue of the absurd. To put this dilemma into our terms from Chapter 1, any essentialist view of justice is here suspended. That’s the point about faith for Kierkegaard—it involves a singular judgment, which cannot be reduced to the rules of ethics. In one way, then, making aesthetic judgments involves being in a situation in some ways not unlike Abraham’s. (Here we accept Immanuel Kant’s basic philosophical point: aesthetic judgments are not rule governed.) In looking at

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art, Carroll’s or anyone’s, you need to judge for yourself. How you judge what you see; how you interpret it; even, I would add, if you are unsure whether it is art: in making these judgments, you can of course study the history of art or consult other people. But in the end, you must make your own judgment. Here, however, a further point of clarification should be noted. What on Kierkegaard’s account makes Abraham’s situation so difficult is that he cannot consult anyone. That’s the point about faith—you need to trust God. The art world, by contrast, is an inherently social situation; when we make aesthetic judgments, we attempt to persuade other people to agree with us, knowing always that however much we argue, they may still legitimately disagree with us. Joachim Pissarro has offered a suggestive, nicely condensed account of this modernist art world. Once the secular model inherited by the artistic tradition had collapsed – roughly since Cézanne – or as Bakhtin put it (Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1963), as quoted in Todorov: 78), once the domain of the “official, monolithically serious and somber; beholden to strict hierarchical order; filled with fear, dogmatism, devotion, and piety” started to break loose, it opened the way to a plurality of voices, where no one in particular could impose a univocal and exclusive model, and where every one was, as a result, necessarily open to both criticism and free communication. This became something like a “public space, free, full of ambivalent laughter, sacrileges, profanations of all things sacred, disparagement and unseemly behavior, familiar contact with everybody and everything” (Pissarro 2006: 8).

Under the Old Regime, art patronage functioned in a top-down fashion. Aesthetic judgments were believed to be objective because they were anchored in the very structure of reality. But then under modernism, once artists worked without commissions, seeking patrons in the marketplace, there was a need to establish the value of their artworks. What is the aesthetic value of a picture? The answer to that question depends upon the judgment of the public. Evaluation is the product of a critical consensus, which depended upon judgment of art on display in the public galleries. Art critics articulate in writing critical judgments, which then are tested in their readers’ responses. And, I should add, in a larger sense, we all are critics, even if we never write out an account of our experiences, when we judge art in the galleries. The critical consensus is a social product.

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We know that some paintings of Courbet, Manet, and the impressionists; Picasso and Braque’s cubism; and the major works of their successors are important works because of the consensus about the canon of modernism and whatever comes after. Of course, this is an ideal case—what’s required in practice is just enough agreement to make the art system function. Artworks are special sorts of objects—and this is why determining their essence is complicated. Their value is given not by knowledge of the facts alone, as in a scientific investigation, but by the critical consensus. To say, then, that the art world is where art is displayed is to allude, elliptically, to the institutions and their history, which I sketched earlier. And to talk about entering the art world is, to speak (literally and metaphorically), to engage with this system. The art world has changed a great deal since the era of the old masters. Now works of art are very different, art serves different functions, patronage has changed dramatically, and the displays of visual art are very different. Since Giotto lived in an art world very unlike that of Carroll, it’s impossible to imagine what Giotto would make of Carroll’s art. But he could understand that Carroll, too, like himself, has a workshop, patrons, and public presentations of his art to organize. One of the most useful concepts for understanding the art world is George Kubler’s notion of an entry point. This account, much discussed a generation ago by visual artists, recently has attracted less attention; it serves to be revived. To understand an artist, Kubler observed, it is useful to identify the visual tools available to that person when they entered the art world. And doing this requires reconstructing the visual culture. Some entry points are much more fruitful than others. To the usual coordinates fixing the individual’s position—his temperament and his training—there is also the moment of his entrance, this being the moment in the tradition—early, middle, or late—with which his biological opportunity coincides. . . . Without a good entrance, he is in danger of wasting his time as a copyist regardless of temperament and training. (Kubler: 6)

Thanks to Caravaggio and a few other outstanding artistic personalities, 1590s Rome was exciting in a way that that city had not been two decades earlier, and that it was not sixty years later. In the 1920s, New York was a relatively unpromising entry point, while in the 1940s it was a great place for a young artist (or art writer). What makes an entry point fruitful for a painter is the presence of important artists and, also, significant patronage. And what

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makes an entry point attractive for an art writer are other strong writers to respond to, or react against; interesting new art; and, of course, also publishing opportunities. Consider, for example, Richard Serra’s account of his entry point: By the time I arrived in New York, in the late 1960s, (Donald) Judd’s invention had already transformed the historical context. Judd’s break had been so startling and abrupt that within three years Abstract Expressionism was out, Minimalism was in. . . . We all acknowledged his importance by either coming up against him, going around him, or using his work in ways he could not have imagined or intended. (qtd. Meyer: 289)

When the art world was changing drastically in this way, entering it was exciting. You need to identify an artist’s entry point in order to understand his or her development. Of course an artist may learn from work of any prior period, and nowadays, thanks to our displays of art from any culture, from anywhere. But there is a big difference between looking primarily to art from your own time and place and being inspired by what is distant, spatially or temporally. If you are engaged with contemporary art of your own culture, then you are likely involved with an artistic community. But when you look to other places or times, then the mere fact that they are distant, spatially or temporally (or, perhaps, both) opens up the possibilities of creative challenges and misunderstandings. The next chapter will consider how Carroll did enter the 1980s art world. In some cases, we will see, the art, which inspired him came from distant visual cultures—in one case, from a very distant culture.

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The previous chapter characterized in a general way the art world, that community within which art is made and interpreted. Understanding this culture is needed, I argued, in order to understand artworks. And it’s especially important to understand an artist’s entry point into an art world. This chapter focuses on Carroll, describing his art world, discussing his entry point. And because the art world includes writers as well as artists, I will say something briefly also about my entry point into his art world. Chapter 6 will offer an historical analysis of this period, the 1980s, and, finally, in Chapter 8 we will give an interpretation of Carroll’s art. If you want to understand what’s involved in entering the art world, then you could do worse than consider Proust’s very full account of young Marcel’s studio visit with Elstir. In this scene, elaborately developed in about thirty pages of the volume titled In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel discovers that in Elstir’s pictures the seascapes have undergone a metamorphosis, after which things are represented not as we know them to be, but as they actually appear to an innocent eye. “Those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir’s work was made of ” (Proust 1919 [Eng. Trans. 2002]: 208). Proust’s ekphrasis on Elstir’s painting Harbor at Carquethuit, with allusions to impressionism, Turner’s seascapes, and also, it has been argued, Degas, Gustave Moreau, Whistler, Boudin, and John Ruskin’s drawings provide a very fine, highly detailed description of this imaginary seascape. That it is an imaginary painting means that we can know it only through this lengthy verbal description. Elstir is a late nineteenth-century artist, but in some ways his studio is not very unlike that of many seventeenth-century European painters. How different is Carroll’s studio. Elstir’s paintings depict the Norman seashore where Marcel is vacationing; Carroll’s works are pure abstractions. Elstir’s

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studio is a refined setting, as picturesque as the seaside suburb depicted in his paintings. By contrast, Carroll’s studios are workplaces, not entirely unlike shops dedicated to repair of household fixtures—no picturesque landscapes are to be found there. By the time of his death, 1922, Proust’s knowledge of the contemporary art world had become dated. And yet, he mentions Picasso, whom he met socially, and cubism. Under the pressure of the Great War, he discusses critically the claim that artworks should be socially redeeming. And the Russian Revolution of 1917 appears just on the margins of his narrative. In Search of Lost Time is about change—about the transition into modernist twenty-century social, political, and visual culture. Indeed, near the end of Proust’s novel we learn about the unhappy outcome of the Soviet Revolution when “the victims of Bolshevism,” at least “the ones who had managed to escape, suddenly reappeared” (Proust 1927 [Eng. Trans. 2002]: 162) in Paris. As I said earlier, my aim is to approach Carroll’s art indirectly, with the aid of Proust’s novel. Now allow me by stages to redeem that promise. Proust’s account of Harbor at Carquethuit offers a superlative account of two traditional aesthetic puzzles relating to visual art. He explains how Elstir’s subject, the French seashore, is represented, with full reference to art historical precedents—and he tells us why that subject, a rather ordinary beach town scene, is significant. Already, however, when Proust was writing, some very radical abstract art had appeared. Responding to Picasso’s cubist sculptures, which he saw in Paris just before the First World War, Vladimir Tatlin’s Counter-Corner Relief (1914) used the Russian icon “as a guide to an art no longer governed by resemblance” (Milner 1983: 126). Like many of his Soviet artist peers, Tatlin initially welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution, which, after a short period when it supported these revolutionary artists, turned decisively against them. Counter-Corner Relief comes from a different art world from Harbor at Carquethuit. Abolishing the frame which usually isolates artworks like Elstir’s figurative seascape from their surroundings, Tatlin uses “real materials in real space” (Gray 1986: 180). In Russia icons are displayed in the corner of a room. Similarly, spanning the corner of the gallery, Counter-Corner Relief uses its materials—wood, rope, iron, steel wire, and pulleys—in a literal way. Using these real materials in this way was part and parcel of a revolutionary rejection of the culture of the Old Regime. When I saw it in a Saint Petersburg museum,

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I was stunned. It really could be a 1960s American minimalist work—certainly it anticipates the sensibility of that period, for Counter-Corner Relief is a materialist political artwork. As Sean Scully notes: Abstraction was invented to accompany the Russian revolution: though it was, ironically, unacceptable to the non-democratic forces that were in place after this event, it was invented to replace in part, the church: and offer a new open international form of spiritual art, that is more or less its agenda today. (2016: 83)

Tatlin’s three-dimensional sculptural construction doesn’t look at all like Carroll’s paintings. But like Carroll, these bold Russian artists employed everyday materials for aesthetic ends. The obvious conceptual problem posed by abstractions is that, by definition, they contain no represented subject. How, then, can abstract works also be significant—and how can they be as expressive as Elstir’s seascapes? What’s needed in order to fully answer that question is a two-part analysis: we need a theory to explain the origin and development of abstract painting; and, then, we need also to understand why such visual art with no depicted subjects can be significant. Proust’s very suggestive sketch of Elstir’s place in art history tells something of the development of seascapes. Abstract art like Counter-Corner Relief obviously demands a very different analysis. We art writers are very familiar with the situation in which a young artist comes to the capital of the art world, shows some early work and then acquires critical champions and serious patrons; and so, after some years of struggle, has a good career. This is what has happened for a very long time: it’s what happened when Caravaggio came to Rome from Milan in the 1590s, and what took place three decades later when Nicolas Poussin moved to Rome from Northern France. An artist moves to the center of the art world, surveys the options, and finds himself. (All of these are male figures, but the same general pattern holds, so I believe, also for female artists.) A similar story could be told about our modernist heroes who came to Paris in the nineteenth century or to New York in the mid- or late twentieth century. This is what happened to Picasso in Paris; to Marcel Duchamp in New York; and also to the various abstract expressionists.

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Carroll studied illustration at a Pasadena school, Art Center of Design, 1976–80. A design major, not an art student, he wasn’t involved with or interested in the bookish commentaries of theorists, nor with the academic commentary of art historians. And at that point, there wasn’t a great deal of contemporary art to be seen in Southern California. Then in 1981, when he was working in the storage room of an apartment complex he managed, he placed some drawings from a sketchbook on the wall, sat back in his chair, and wrote in his book, “Here I go.” It was a private and modest declaration that he wanted to be a painter, even though he had no idea about how to do that. Then in 1984, he moved with his family from Los Angeles to New York. This was a brave decision for someone who had no training in art making. Carroll didn’t know anyone in the East—he really was on his own. My first studio in NYC, 503 Broadway, 1985 on the 5th floor, with an elevator. . . . No windows but a great skylight. . . . I am grateful that I did not know much when I arrived in NYC. I was free, like I was as a youth growing up in Southern California an hour north of LA with no real history that would rule me. We were part of the tribe of the suburban sprawl that spread out over a rancher and farmer landscape. Surrounded by the faded yellow hills of So Cal in an August light. Tumbleweed and barbed wire, open space with no limits for a kid’s imagination. That is how I grew up. Everyone came from somewhere else, There was no sense of class at that time in 1960. (personal communication)

Earning his living as an illustrator, Carroll discovered the artistic riches of New York. Because he wasn’t trained as a painter, he had to learn everything from scratch. Initially he really was alone, but he was not, I think, especially lonely, because he soon found plenty of artistic company in the works he encountered in the galleries and museums. In order to be an original artist, you need to see what options are available. That requires being at the center of the art world and networking. And it takes a few years, at least, to sort out these visual possibilities. All of the successful abstract painters whom I met in the 1980s followed this pattern. But Carroll did not. The story of his early career reads like a fairy tale. He came to the city not knowing anyone, didn’t have (and wasn’t eligible for) an academic post, and wasn’t particularly good at networking. Nor did he have a backlog of work from Los Angeles: he really was starting his career from square zero. But, it

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happened, quickly he found support, with his first show at Stux Gallery, a good Manhattan gallery, in 1988; and then he met curators and European patrons, and so by the late 1980s he was in major exhibitions. Soon enough, then, he moved to Italy. Carroll was unusually talented and, also, very lucky in his entry point. He came to Manhattan at a time when an impecunious artist could rent a studio—and when a booming art market meant that a gifted young painter would, with luck, attract serious commercial support. In the 1980s New York art world there opened an entry point which made Carroll’s painting possible. At least that’s apparent now, looking back. It’s impossible to imagine that his artworks could be made at any earlier time. Not, obviously, in the era of cubism, but also, certainly not in the classical period of abstract expressionism or even a little later when Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns entered the art world. But describing Carroll’s situation in that way doesn’t properly identify his personal creative role. After all, no one else entered that space with him and only now, in retrospect, is his place in this period clear. And as we will see, the other abstract artists who entered the art world at this time were making very different works. The year 1984 was a good time to enter the New York art world, for there was a great variety of new art to see. There were the neo-expressionists (Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and their Italian peers); the Pictures artists, who had had an influential group exhibition in 1977, included Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, three figures who soon became massively successful. And there were many young American abstract painters. This was the time when I met Sharon Gold, Jonathan Lasker, Catherine Lee, Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, and Sean Scully—to name just six younger figures whose art I admired and wrote about. And of course, there were also a great many mid-career and senior artists, as well as the modernists on display in Manhattan’s art museums. Thanks to the booming art market, there was a great deal to look at. Indeed, I curated a group exhibition, at a small Soho Gallery. Recently a number of shows have looked back at this decade. A recent show at the Whitney Museum, Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s (from January 27 to May 14, 2017) gave a picture of this period. Another exhibition organized by the critic Raphael Rubinstein, Reinventing Abstraction. New York Painting in the 1980s at Cheim & Read, a distinguished New York gallery, in 2013, gave another, very different picture of the younger painters. The 1980s

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art world was a big place—neither of these exhibitions showed the artists who mattered to Carroll. Often the art writer stands at an historic distance from the art being discussed. When, for example, some twenty years ago I wrote my book about Poussin, I had to reconstruct his seventeenth-century French and Roman culture from reading (Carrier 1993a). That was difficult, both because the information was incomplete and because that art world was in many ways very unlike ours. But the 1980s New York art world is a period I knew. Philosophers make a basic distinction between what is known by description, from indirect bookish knowledge, and what we know by acquaintance, that is, directly (Pears 1967). I know about Poussin’s historically distant art world only by description, but Carroll’s I knew by acquaintance—for I was there. That there were so many options visible in the 1980s was, in some obvious ways, great: there was a lot of stimulating contemporary art to see. But this also made life complicated for young emerging artists and also, such was my experience, for art writers. Life involves choices: you cannot do everything, nor write about everything. An artist needs to decide how to use recent traditions to create distinctive art. And the art writer has to determine which artists to focus on. Looking back, it’s easy to identify the winning choices, at least if we look at the art market. Clement Greenberg was right to focus on the abstract expressionists—and Leo Steinberg was wise to pay most attention to Johns, Rauschenberg, and Warhol. In the 1940s and the 1960s there were numerous other interesting artists in New York who, for whatever reason, didn’t turn out to be as important. It’s striking how different the 1980s situation was from that of the abstract expressionists. The visual concerns were very different. And of course the art market was very different. I should add: not every contemporary artist who successfully shows in the art world enters that art world. Forrest Bess (1911–77), a painter from Texas who showed in New York in the 1970s (he was admired and collected by Meyer Schapiro), and has recently attracted some attention, is one such example. His interest in Jungian alchemical symbols is the sort of concern we find within the art world. But he lived in isolation in Texas, ending up institutionalized. Some art world artists I met had strange aesthetic theories. None was as odd as Bess’s, whose desire to sell paintings in order to pay for a gender-changing operation that would allow

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him to understand female sexuality, and employ that experience in his art, made him too eccentric to be anything but an outsider (Reed 1984). Let us understand Carroll’s entry point into New York by comparing four very different abstract paintings, all readily accessible online, by other emerging abstract artists working in New York during the period 1975–85: David Reed’s #73 (1975); Jonathan Lasker’s Heavy Metal (1985), one of his breakthrough works; Sean Scully’s Backs and Fronts (1981), a massive, twentyfoot-wide assemblage of thirteen high panels of stripes in varied colors; and Thomas Nozkowski’s Untitled (6-30) (1988). We compare Lawrence Carroll’s Untitled, Insert Painting (1985) (Figure 8), oil, wax, canvas on wood, shown at MAMbo. By then, all of these artists were well established; they all had had regular gallery exhibitions and museum retrospectives tracing their history. None

Figure 8 Untitled, Insert Painting (1985).

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of them were interested in appropriating images, or in using materials from popular culture like the Pop artists. Nor were they interested in making figurative images. What’s striking, then, is how diverse the theorizing associated with these five artists is. What may link the abstract expressionists in the 1940s, notwithstanding their obvious diversity, is that Greenberg’s theorizing provided a way to identify their common concerns. Not that they agreed with his analysis, but his writing did, I think, provide a shared framework. And the 1960s minimalists shared some agreed-upon sense, at least, of how to interpret their works, if only in their rejection of Greenberg’s formalism. In the 1980s, however, no longer was it possible to have a unifying conception of abstraction. As was often said, that decade truly was a pluralistic era. Let’s start our discussion by looking at titles of artworks, for often titles of abstractions are revealing. Almost inevitably identifying the subject matter of figurative painting provides its title—landscape, nude, cityscape. With abstractions, however, some artists feel that giving titles is a reductive procedure. And so they prefer to number their pictures—David Reed and Thomas Nozkowski do this, and so does Gerhard Richter. Sean Scully always titles his paintings. His titles, names of friends, books, and places of importance offer significant interpretative clues. And Cy Twombly’s titles often display his erudition; for example, Triumph of Galatea (1961), Empire of Flora (1961), and Hero and Leander (1981). You see his love of classical Roman literature. Contrast Carroll’s titles from the Ligornetto exhibition—keeping in mind that many of his works are untitled. There are straightforward references to pop culture—Yellow to Yellow for Neil Young; literal descriptions of the works—Bucket, which is one; Small Figment, which is not especially small; and Figment, which is larger; and Untitled-Flower Painting #2 and Untitled (Stacked Painting), which are paintings with flowers and, in the second case, a stacked painting. No classical culture here! Look at Carroll’s list of what a painting can do: “It could sleep, shed its skin, sit on the floor, breathe, repair itself, lean, empty itself, rest in a corner, fold over on itself, be pieced back together, survive, be optimistic, hope, sweat. I began to explore these possibilities in my work, and to trust in them” (Carroll qtd Milazzo 1998: 42). As his titles signal, his ways of visual thinking are very literal-minded. In the 1970s, David Reed was making process art. In a recent retrospective with a marvelously evocative title “Painting Paintings,” which is devoted to

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these early works, the curator Katy Siegel meticulously reconstructs his art world life during this period. “The problem .  .  . was that process inevitably became image. In the end, illusion crept in; value contrast and the very fact of the picture plane created a picture. More disturbing still was Reed’s feeling that even as he made a work, he was outside the painting as well as inside it” (Siegel and Wool 2017: 6). His #73 (1975), which was in that exhibition, consists of thirteen horizontal stripes, on a canvas just over six feet tall, these paint lines running more or less straight, as if Reed isolated for display the gestural brushwork of the abstract expressionists. What’s perhaps problematic is that these early Reeds appear less finished pictures than (very handsome!) samples of his activity of art making. Given these obvious uncertainties, it’s not surprising that he soon moved on, both in his painting and in his theorizing about it. Reed related his 1980s abstractions to baroque painting. Comparing Guercino’s Samson Captured by the Philistines (1619), which is in the Metropolitan, to his works, he suggested: “I can’t use the religious light of baroque painting, which comes from above, from God. Instead, I can use another kind of divine light, techno-light, which is uniform and has no source” (qtd Paparoni 1993: 133). Reed secularizes the light, using slick surfaces, which owe something to pop art, distancing his brushwork from the rhetorically heroic gestures of the abstract expressionists. More recently, again rewriting his brief, he has related his paintings to the narratives in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Reed’s search for appropriate theorizing to support his art shows a real problem faced by abstract painters of his generation. The demise of Clement Greenberg’s formalism left these artists without a common language. Peter Halley, who also emerged in this period, developed a highly imaginative reading of French philosophy, which was important for understanding his painting, but proved to be too idiosyncratic to inspire general allegiance. In 1993, Halley and Scully were both in a large San Marino exhibition, which I attended. After Halley described his aesthetic, Scully remarked that his was quite different. It is instructive, then, to set Halley’s Day-Glo colors alongside Scully’s oil paintings, which offer a very different view of urban reality as a source for abstraction. However you interpret Halley’s cells and connecting lines, they provided inspiration for marvelous compositions. It is surprising,

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indeed, how much variety he gets from a simple format, playing smooth against rough textures, juxtaposing brightly colored basic geometric forms. Jonathan Lasker was another painter who theorized abstraction: “I am very interested in the things in a painting being things unto themselves, which I would call ‘things of paint.’ It is in this literalness that I feel my pictures have a dialogue with Minimalism. The objects within the paintings are things you can think of as being in real picture space” (Lasker 2010: 9). His paintings rework the abstract expressionist concerns of Franz Kline’s art, but in gestural works, which are highly distinctive. Consider, for example, his recent description of Heavy Metal: This painting has rectilinear bars, which were thickly painted with a palette knife, in its background motif. Upon close inspection I noticed traces of maroon paint on the edges of these bars. That was part of an underpainting on the ground of the painting around the bars. On top of this I added silver paint, which was scumbled over with isolated brushstrokes of gold. The traces of maroon hue were intended to be evidence of painting process. (Lasker 2010)

The allover dark background is overlaid with a partial grid of blue lines, and then three small forms are overlaid above and under that structure. Lasker’s forms might best be identified in negative terms: Not organic, not graceful, they are clunky. Nozkowski, who loves reading art history and has catholic tastes in art of all periods, has never theorized, saying only that his source always is direct visual experience. His images demand loving prolonged attention. In order for their works to survive in our visually busy environment, abstract painters must create compelling images. Nozkowski does that. Like almost all of his paintings, Untitled (6-30) is hard to describe. These biomorphic light green and dark blue forms on a deep red background are elusive because they don’t closely resemble any familiar animal or plant—and are not visually akin to any recognizable equipment. Not a geometric composition, the painting shows some thing, which is almost elegant. Look at the generous curves! But its source remains mysterious, which is the artist’s goal. Of these marvelous painters, Scully turned out to be the most important one—and, also, the one whose aesthetic contrasts most revealingly with Carroll’s. And so here I focus upon him. Sometimes an artist’s entry point into

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the contemporary art world can be traced very precisely. Sean Scully’s entry into the American art world is datable to early 1982, for it’s at that moment, after a number of frustrating years, that he came to wide attention. A number of critics organized rooms at PS 1, in Queens, in a group of shows, “Critical Perspectives,” which offered diverse visions of what was coming next. Joseph Masheck organized a room of younger abstract painters, including Scully’s Backs and Fronts. Scully incorporated the repetitions of urban architecture into this manifesto picture. I was thinking about people standing in a long line. Making a reference to people, (the panels) . . . are all about the size of human beings apart from that one in the middle .  .  . I painted them all—all separately, all over the place—and when I had finished painting them, I just stuck them together. (Scully 2006: 47)

Scully was interested in the rhythms of African American blues, which excited him in London in the 1960s, and in the urban grids, which nowadays can be found everywhere. This massive painting was created at a time when there was almost no market for Scully’s art. Soon after it was shown, everything changed for him. Usually an art historian has only a bookish experience of the events he or she describes. But I know this story by acquaintance, because I was there. I remember as if yesterday, walking into PS 1. At that time, Scully didn’t have a dealer; nor was he much known in New York. Immediately his art inspired me, I met him and when I sought to explain it, I become an art critic. And two decades later I published a book about him (Carrier 2004). Around 1984 when Carroll, then completely unknown, contacted a number of established artists in Manhattan, Scully was the only one who responded. Like Scully, Carroll had Irish-Catholic roots. And like Scully, he had to find his way in New York. But their backgrounds were very different. Scully was born in Dublin in 1945, and educated in England, where he initially did figurative pictures; and had the start of a successful career in the 1970s London’s galleries. Knowing that America was the best place for an ambitious abstract painter, he moved to that country in 1975, and then had a difficult few years. The dark tight-striped paintings he did during this period have recently been successfully exhibited. But only a radical break with the past made it possible for him to find himself in America and have a career in his adopted country.

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All the paintings that I made after I came to the USA were made with horizontals only, so I stripped down the paintings to their utter minimum. . . . I understood the difficulty of being an immigrant, and there’s more to being an immigrant than you would realize, at the outset. . . . These are, in a sense, burned paintings but relentlessly Zen, contemplative and meditative, and they gave me a chance to make my work, hold my position and be ready. (Scully 2006: 167)

Carroll, born a decade later, had a much poorer education. But as we have seen, when he came to New York it took only four years, from 1984 until 1988, before he found himself and when his career moved very quickly. Scully’s early figurative paintings and the quasi-minimalist stripes from the late 1970s are quite unlike the works which in the 1980s made him famous. And then, when his American career got going, he went through several dramatic stylistic developments. By contrast, the body of Carroll’s work is remarkably unified. From the very start, he was himself. Carroll found a remarkably fertile personal style, one that has allowed him over three decades of fecund development. That is a very surprising, most remarkable achievement. Where Scully’s art is attached to the urban world—to the city rhythms and, also, the rhythms of music, Carroll’s is involved with the bodily experience of viewers. Where Jasper Johns had early on had the invaluable critical support of Steinberg, whose essays soon became classic, in the 1980s Carroll did not attract any comparable American critical support—although he did get the attention of some major collectors, curators, and dealers, many of them in Europe. It’s striking to read the friendly account in the most important American journalistic publication, the New York Times, by Ken Johnson, which in my judgment (certainly debatable), gets just about everything wrong: Mr. Carroll .  .  . makes poetically gloomy, dirty white, boxy, irregular paintings that verge on sculpture. Glued, patched, stapled and otherwise cobbled together, they look as if they had been abandoned for years in some funky basement. For all the physical presence, however, there is a curious lack of energy; a mood, even, of depression. This is compelling in a way. Old shoes or dried bouquets evoke a sense of nostalgic loss. But the ennui also conveys diminished creative vigor. The depressed mood is experienced as a hopeless feeling that everything interesting has been done and that all that is left is to construct tasteful ancestral memorials. One wants to urge this artist to try something radically new. (2000)

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In fairness, it’s not easy (as Steinberg’s selection of early commentary on Johns shows) for a critic to respond to entirely unfamiliar novel work. This reviewer accurately describes some of the physical qualities, but fails entirely to grasp the expressive features of these works. In any event, Carroll was free to develop on his own—no wonder, as I noted, the words on the paintings at the entrance to MAMbo are, “I am alone.” The memoir Memories of a Collector by Carroll’s great patron Count Giuseppe Panza provides a nicely full record of this early situation. I first met Lawrence Carroll in 1992. . . . It is interesting to describe his home, as this helps us understand his work. It was downtown near the huge bulk of Brooklyn Bridge. . . . In order to reach Carroll’s rooms we had to go through the studio of an artist who used wood, along a corridor between the planks. Carroll’s rooms had no windows and were full of works in progress that took up all the space. . . . You couldn’t see the sky, you couldn’t see the city. . . . There was a strange sense of isolation and compression, as in certain nearby poverty-stricken areas. The works of art were in the right place, in their own environment. (Panza 2007: 249, 250)

Perhaps this reading of Carroll’s works is excessively pessimistic because Panza focuses on his vivid response to their setting. Nowadays, of course, Carroll has much nicer studios, but the expressive nature of his art hasn’t changed. Count Panza adds: Carroll’s work expresses intensely and efficiently the reality of paint because it sublimates it in a metaphoric representation of a situation that otherwise would be aggressive, wounding, and too violent to be shown. . . . Carroll’s subjects are not violent events, they are those of the sad life of people who cannot live like others for many reasons: vices, mental illness, character deformations, physical weakness, and often poverty. .  .  . Misery has apparently disordered colors and forms that the artist makes use of, and art then imbues them with a new harmony that is amazing in its beauty.

This account does very nicely grasp Carroll’s concerns. Like an artist, an art writer has an entry point which matters, for while you can read art writers from anywhere anytime there is a big difference between responding to your contemporaries and looking to culturally or temporally distant authors. Nowadays focusing your commentary on Greenberg’s writings would either suggest that you are ignorant of the several decades of critiques of his ideas, or that you self-consciously revive formalist ways of thinking—indeed,

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I myself occasionally have done that. One way to understand the importance of entry points is to consider changes in books that are translated. La transfiguration du banal. Une philosophie de l’art, is the French translation of Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. The very title raises some questions, for in English “banal” has a different connotation than “commonplace.” The notes in the translation explain that Mark Rudd, whose name is known to everyone who was at Columbia University during the 1960s, was the student leader of campus revolt (1989: 285 n. 5). And they identify a phrase adapted by Danto, which comes from a then-famous Bob Dylan song, “you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing” (Danto 1989: 286 n. 6). And of course, beyond these points of local knowledge lie larger, more elusive philosophical differences, which reflect broader cultural differences.

Figure 9 Lawrence Carroll, Permanent installation; Villa Panza, Varese, Italy

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In the 1980s I usually visited New York City every six weeks, picked up the gallery guide and started walking. To sort out this challenging experience, I made my way to as many galleries as possible—and also I went, of course, to the museums. I met some artists; David Reed, in particular, was generously helpful, and sometimes we went to galleries together. New York was a visual paradise for the art writer, because it was possible to see an extraordinary variety of art, both contemporary and, in the museums, old master and modernist masterpieces in the permanent collections, as well as many marvelous special exhibitions. And of course I also read the art journals and myself wrote for some of them—for Artforum, ArtInternational, the Burlington Magazine, and Tema Celeste; and I became a writer and contributing editor at Arts Magazine. I wrote Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (1993a) because his art, which fascinates me entirely, raises fundamental philosophical issues. I published Sean Scully (2004) because he is for me a great contemporary artist whose abstractions demanded original theorizing. And now I am doing this book on Carroll, who is a very different painter from Scully, because his art offers important, very different philosophical challenges. Poussin, Scully, Carroll—they certainly are very diverse painters. But they are the three painters who have inspired my philosophical art writing. This book will draw at times on the arguments in my accounts of Poussin and Scully (and also my writing about Andy Warhol), because at some points those prior philosophical discussions are relevant, also to Carroll. In one interesting way, which influences the present account, quite apart from the obvious differences in their art, Poussin, Scully, and Carroll pose very different issues for any commentator. Poussin, always much admired, has never needed to be revived. And so since the mass of writing about him is enormous, under pain of reinventing the wheel, any new writer must take the measure of this literature. By 2004, Scully had become famous in New York’s art world, and was much written about for almost a quarter century. There were many reviews, numerous catalogue essays, and already one prior book. Carroll, a decade younger than Scully, has been frequently reviewed and is the subject of many catalogue essays. But whereas by 2004 any interpretation of Scully had to build upon or argue with these prior accounts, including mine, at present, discussion of Carroll, who has not recently shown in New York, has not yet resulted in a well-defined interpretative viewpoint. In general, successful New

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York artists inspire massive commentary; but if you work and live outside of that city, as Carroll has, then you may not get such attention. Attention is not always a good thing, for the art world tastes are often very fickle. Timing is everything. Had Lawrence Carroll come to New York not in 1984 but a little earlier, he would have entered a very different art world. When the art world and also the intellectual world are changing rapidly, then the change of just twenty-some years in entry point makes a big difference. Consider one example—compare Robert Mangold’s Gray window wall (1964), the first painting he acknowledges as belonging to his oeuvre, with Carroll’s Untitled, Insert Painting (1985). There are some interesting parallels between Mangold’s and Carroll’s aesthetic interests. Working after the heroic era of abstract expressionism, both painters wanted that their work engage with their experience of the urban world. And Mangold was one of the creators of minimalism, which in the 1980s was important for Carroll. Unlike Carroll, he was a well-trained artist, coming from Yale, a formidable graduate school. Mangold entered New York’s art world in the 1960s after graduation from Yale University. The city, then very gritty, was an industrial landscape; and so he looked closely at lofts and institutional spaces. In response to this environment, he put paint on in the simplest manner, with a brush, then using a spray gun and, finally, employing a roller. The structure of these flat paintings was inspired by the gaps between buildings, “where there is really nothing, just air and light capsuled in a negative architectural shape.” Trying to eliminate as much as possible “of design and taste,” he found early pop art refreshing. Coming as it did on the heels of the prevailing Abstract Expressionist attitudes, where you were facing the white canvas, supposedly free from preconceived ideas .  .  . Pop Art reintroduced the outside, the street, the familiar, the banal, and the idea of a preconceived picture. . . . I wanted to make paintings that extended the kind of serious dialogue I saw in the work of Newman and Rothko, but the only way seemingly to do this was through a door that Pop Art opened. (qtd Carrier 1996b)

Even early on his works look polished compared to Carroll’s. And soon Mangold went on to work in series, a procedure which never has been employed by Carroll.

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Why Painting’s History Matters

I have said something about the identity of Carroll’s paintings as artworks. Also, I’ve discussed how to identify them as paintings. And we have described his entry point into the art world, giving some sense of his personal experience of the 1980s visual culture. Now, taking our investigation further in a natural way, I need to place Carroll’s paintings within the history of art. To do that, at the start of this chapter I briefly explain how we write a history of anything— and, then, how to create a history of art. We’ve seen what Carroll learned from looking at modernist paintings; at minimalist sculpture; and from the art of some of his near contemporaries. How, I will ask, can we place his works within this history of art, which he knows? We want a narrative, which will show what he learned from his predecessors and how he, in turn, has contributed to the ongoing traditions of painting. To start organizing our history, I’ve picked three modernist artworks to which Carroll responded early on. And then we will also look at some older paintings, for seeing these works will suggest how to write a history of art. These paintings are all on display on the second floor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which makes it easy to see them. Imagine that we’ve come, first, to look at Willem de Kooning’s Easter Monday (1955–56). The recent life of the artist by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan gives a marvelous summary description of this masterpiece: The brushwork in Easter Monday rose above the streets, at once celebrating and transcending the artist’s adopted city. And the downtown milieu of artists and poets in New York, which had suffered such neglect and ignominy in the thirties and forties, also found its paradoxical moment of resurrection. Easter Monday was de Kooning’s first truly mainstream painting. De Kooning in Easter Monday sought a heightened fluency in which he could work, like Rubens, “with complete conviction and reckless abandon.” (381)

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Easter Monday, the first Monday after Easter Sunday. The title alludes to the date that this painting was finished, which was the day de Kooning’s second one-man show opened, April 3, 1956. By that date, the reception of this work demonstrated that abstract expressionism was well established. Carroll has said that if he could possess but one painting not his own, it would be de Kooning’s Gotham News (1955), another de Kooning work from the same period. It’s revealing to look nearby in the Met at two related paintings, both also well known to Carroll, Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950) and Jasper Johns’s large White Flag (1955). Contrast Pollock’s large allover composition with de Kooning’s much smaller painting, whose structure is oddly difficult to decipher. As Stevens and Swan say, Easter Monday’s built upon a twisted grid, a container for de Kooning’s truly virtuoso brushwork, which employs white and blacks, but also green, blue, and even some reds and pinks—it’s truly an amazing performance. White Flag comes, as it were, from another world, for its grid is the American flag. You can learn a lot by prolonged scrutiny of these three paintings. For one thing, you see how varied the 1950s New York painting was. And, also, you see that these artworks are all strikingly unlike Carroll’s paintings. Compare Easter Monday, Autumn Rhythm, and White Flag to UntitledFlower Painting #1 (2007–12) (Figure 10), which is in room 14 at Carroll’s Ligornetto exhibition. There’s a plastic flower at the top of Untitled-Flower Painting #1, and at the bottom buried underneath the paint and wax you can see traces of blue flowers on silk. But there’s nothing here akin to Pollock’s majestic brushwork or de Kooning’s magnificent color. And the flower and fabric don’t create a grid, as in White Flag. Carroll has described his uses of such fabrics: “The pattern is a way of setting up painterly problems for myself once the materials (are) cut up and collaged onto the painting. Something to react against, to quiet down” (personal communication). In his travels, he collects fabric samples for his paintings. Matisse collected glamorous fabrics, which he used in his luxurious-looking pictures. Carroll’s fabric is low-key; as he suggests, UntitledFlower Painting #1 is a quiet picture. What could someone whose view of modernist visual culture was based upon knowing these artworks of de Kooning, Pollock, and Johns make of Carroll’s painting, which offers nothing of de Kooning’s brushwork, Pollock’s

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swirling composition or Johns’s deadpan stars and stripes? What compensating qualities, they would ask, does Untitled-Flower Painting #1 offer in return? Why, indeed, we need to consider, is Carroll’s painting also deserving of attention? The fear that highly original new art will be disappointing because it refuses to adapt the ingratiating qualities which we admire in earlier work is by now very familiar. Leo Steinberg eloquently describes his initial disappointment in the 1950s with the early paintings of Jasper Johns. “What really depressed me was what I felt these works were able to do to all other art. The pictures of de Kooning and Kline, it seemed to me, were suddenly tossed into one pot

Figure 10 Untitled-Flower Painting #1 (2007–12), in room 14 at Ligornetto.

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with Rembrandt and Giotto. All alike suddenly became painters of illusion” (12–13). Those earlier painters, he explains, were revealed to be “artists who use paint and surface to suggest existences other than surface and paint” (42). With Carroll that basic situation seems to repeat itself. Compared with the older works, judged by the established standards, his new ones initially seem slight. Like Steinberg faced with Johns’s flags, we need what he called “other criteria” to make sense of Carroll’s art. Sometimes when faced with such dilemmas it’s useful to look briefly to another art form for help. The development of modernist literature bears some analogies to our story of recent painting. Imagine, then, that some reader deeply interested in Marcel Proust turns to read the novels of Samuel Beckett. Since Beckett greatly admired Proust and wrote an excellent book about him (Beckett 1931), it’s not a great stretch to compare their writings. Swann’s Way begins with a famous scene—the boy, Marcel, is suffering from insomnia: For a long time, I went to bed early. I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light. I could hear the whistling of the trains which, remote or nearby, like the singing of a bird in a forest, plotting the distances, described to me the extent of the deserted countryside. (1913 (Eng. trans. 2002a): 3)

Molloy also begins with the narrator in bed: “I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him” (Beckett 2010: 3). We find in Proust a richly developed psychology; elaborate description of the people and homes where these characters live and love; and a very full historical analysis. The last volume of his novel In Search of Lost Time gives a clear account of the Dreyfus affair and the impact of the Great War on France. By comparison, Beckett’s Molloy seems radically simplified. You don’t get any fully elaborated sense of the lived world of the characters— although it is possible, of course, to read the book as an elliptical social history of Beckett’s France. Still it’s impossible, I think, not to feel that there is a certain impoverishment associated with this development. Something similar seems to happen when we go from de Kooning, Pollock, and Johns to Carroll’s painting. How, then, can we understand that tradition in a positive

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way? What’s required here, then, is an historical perspective on painting, an account which sets Untitled-Flower Painting #1 within a history of modernist abstraction. We want to understand the relationship of de Kooning’s, Pollock’s, and Johns’s paintings to Carroll’s. To gain perspective here, we need also to use a few examples of older works to learn how histories of art are composed. Then we will be better prepared to consider a history for these three paintings and, also, for Carroll’s works. Ernst Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art (1995) and then his Mellon Lectures published as Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1961) build upon Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550), and so offer us a good starting point. Where Vasari tells the history from Cimabue and Giotto through to Michelangelo in his own time, a period of about 250 years, Gombrich takes the story to go from the origin of European figurative art, in Egypt and Greece, through to the nineteenth century. It has to seem astonishing that Vasari’s account, which though centered on the development of art in Tuscany, gives only marginal significance to painting in Venice or in Northern Europe—provides this framework also for a more expansive analysis, which covers a much larger region over a very much longer time period. Gombrich offers an unsurpassed account of the traditions of art historical writing. In thinking about this history it’s convenient to keep looking in the Met, which is a very rich storehouse of examples. Let’s set just three paintings onto the basic timeline provided by Gombrich, selecting works that will provide suggestive comparisons to Carroll’s art: a history painting by Nicolas Poussin; a still life by Jean Simé on Chardin; and a modernist still life by Paul Cé zanne. In Poussin’s The Abduction of the Sabine Women (1633–34) we admire his magnificent painterly technique, which is at the service of his exalted subject from the history of Roman antiquity. In Chardin’s The Silver Tureen (1728– 30), there is marvelous technique, but by comparison with Poussin’s history picture, what a humble subject! How, recognizing this, can an art writer do justice to such a work? In his Salon of 1765 Diderot faced this problem when commenting on Chardin. He wrote: “If it’s true, as the philosophers claim, that nothing is real save our sensations, that the emptiness of space and the solidity of bodies have virtually nothing to do with our experience, let these philosophers explain to me what difference there is, four feet away from your paintings, between the Creator and yourself ” (1765 [1995]: 60). And he goes

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on to say that Chardin’s works hold their own, and perhaps even draw the viewer away from Claude Vernet’s seascapes, with their much more excitinglooking subjects. For a present-day viewer, who most likely prefers Chardin to Vernet, that’s a modestly surprising comparative evaluation of works like The Silver Tureen. We know still life painting to be a richly suggestive art form—the very traditional idea that only the grand subjects of Poussin yield grand painting is no longer remotely plausible. In his essay “Chardin” Marcel Proust urges a man “of limited means and artistic tastes” who is bored by his middle-class Parisian household to visit the Louvre, in order to see the Chardins, where he will find subjects represented which are just like those of his everyday household. If all this now strikes you as beautiful to the eye, it is because Chardin found it beautiful to paint. . . . Your pleasure and his are so inseparable one from the other that if he had not been able to credit yours, you would not credit his, and if he had chosen to become absorbed in feeling and conveying his, you would inevitably recant from yours. You will be a Chardin, less great, to be sure, but great to the extent to which you will love him, to which you will re-constitute yourself to be, like him, one for whom metal and pottery will come to life and fruits have language. (1953 (1984): 323, 325–26)

Finally, let’s look in the Met also at Cé zanne’s Still Life with Jar, Cup, and Apples (1877). In his “The Apples of Cé zanne. An Essay on the Meaning of Still–Life” (1968) Meyer Schapiro offers a famously magisterial account. Still life painters, he notes, “have had to contend with the prejudice that their art is of a lower order because of the intrinsic inferiority of its objects.” In response, he shows how, with explicit reference to Cé zanne, “the represented objects, in their relation to us, acquire meanings from the desires they satisfy as well as from their analogies and relations to the human body” (1978: 21, 23). Now, however, as we move further toward the present, neither Proust’s commentary on Chardin nor Schapiro’s account of Cé zanne can explain why Easter Monday also deserves our attention. In this de Kooning, after all, we find painterly virtuosity, as in Poussin and Chardin, but without any depicted subject. And that means that the commentator who would understand these paintings needs to adjust his or her visual thinking. We need to consider de Kooning’s astonishing ability to control gestural paint strokes, some narrow,

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others broad, many short, but others running across the surface. And his range of colors also is extraordinary. Autumn Rhythm is organized by sweeping lines of paint, and White Flag by the grid provided by the flag; Easter Monday, a much smaller picture than either of these, has a much more elusive structure. These really are three very different pictures. For Gombrich the story of art is the history of progress. Artists learn from their predecessors to make more naturalistic images. We can place works from the entire history of art in Europe, from Cimabue to Constable (and Camille Pissarro) in the nineteenth century in what appears a natural order because we can see that they progress in showing more details of the visual world. And that order, after all, is the historical order of making; the art historical narrative reconstructs the history of the artists’ activities. Here, because we are concerned with Carroll’s abstract art, we need not take up the much-discussed problems with Gombrich’s analysis of illusionism. Our present concern, rather, is asking whether his historical narrative can be extended to cover abstraction. How, we ask, can this discussion of the history from the old masters be extended to include contemporary art? For a long time, it’s been taken for granted that the subjects in paintings do not in themselves determine the significance or value of these works. Following Gombrich, the art historian can set these artworks by Poussin, Chardin, and Cé zanne in a history identifying the developing skills of figurative painting. Cé zanne, Gombrich says, sought to create the “grandeur and serenity” of the pictures of Poussin, but by painting from nature. And so in his still lives he wanted to study all the shapes on the table in their relationships. . . . In his tremendous effort to achieve a sense of depth without sacrificing the brightness of colours, to achieve an orderly arrangement without sacrificing the sense of depth . . . there was one thing he was prepared to sacrifice if need be: the conventional “correctness” of outline. (Gombrich (1995): 543–44)

The Story of Art shows how focus on the development of skills in representationmaking permits telling a history of European art. Poussin, Chardin, and Cé zanne depict very different subjects but have this similar goal. But when it comes to abstraction, Gombrich’s basic way of thinking developed in this book breaks down. Since abstract painting by definition does not depict appearances, there’s no way to use Gombrich’s basic account of the perfection

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of naturalism to include a history of abstraction. How then can we set Carroll’s painting in an art historical narrative? The artist and art historian Julian Bell has nicely described this situation: “Humans tell stories, and humans make objects to fascinate the eyes. Occasionally their stories concern those objects. This kind of narrative, which gets called art history, is commonly driven by a person’s wish to consider how it was to be someone else at some other time, and to wonder at whose those other hands made” (6). In his Mellon Lectures Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock the former MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe offers a response to this situation. Selfconsciously relating his argument to Art and Illusion, he says that his goal is to do for abstraction what Gombrich did for figurative art: “I want to recapture some of the excitement that must have filled the National Gallery’s lecture hall in 1956 when Gombrich spoke” (2006: 28). And, again, he says late in the book: “I wondered out loud whether there might be an argument for abstraction that was as good as Gombrich’s for illusionism—that is, an argument for abstraction as a legitimate part of both our cognitive process and our nature as a modern liberal society” (2006: 246). This, unfortunately, is a mistaken description of Gombrich’s argument. Pictures of Nothing is a marvelous book, full of passionate, often, convincing analysis of individual works; but it emphatically does not provide anything like Gombrich’s historical perspective. But the problem lies not in any limitation of Varnedoe’s intellectual skills or expository talents, but in the intrinsic difference between his and Gombrich’s subjects. Varnedoe speaks of the need to be “revising and expanding Gombrich’s idea of making, by which he meant the invention of forms and schemas, the mind’s primal work in building knowledge” (2006: 29). This is misleading since for Gombrich “making and matching” always involves matching art to appearances. Indeed, Varnedoe recognizes this when he goes on to say: “With illusionism, the argument could be made that art progressed by a series of corrections, made according to the unchanging standard of nature and perceptual mechanics. But there obviously is not any standard of measurement or external resemblance by which we could correct abstractions” (2006: 29). Here he rightly recognizes the key point: the analogy between development of figuration and abstraction has broken down completely. There is no way that the abstractions of Mondrian, Pollock, and Carroll fit into an historical development like that of, say, the figurative paintings of Giotto, Masaccio, and

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Raphael. The paintings of Giotto, Masaccio, and Raphael depict appearances, and so it’s possible to compare their naturalistic accuracy; the pictures of Mondrian, Pollock, and Carroll do not, and so there’s no comparable way to set them in historical order. The development of abstraction cannot be anything like the story of progressive “making and matching” told in Art and Illusion. The history of abstract painting simply does not have that sort of structure. How then can we place an abstractionist like Carroll in the history of art? In his Mellon Lectures, Arthur Danto asked the right question: “Can we imagine a narrative for abstract art, which is relatively new, which will be as rich as the narrative of illusionist art turned out to be?” (1997: 155). The most prominent theory claiming to do that is Clement Greenberg’s, which we briefly discussed in Chapter 2. Let’s go back to the key claim in that account. Greenberg says: From Giotto to Courbet, the painter’s first task had been to hollow out an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface. One looked through this surface as through a proscenium into a stage. Modernism has rendered this stage shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its curtain, which has now become all that the painter has left to work on. (1961a: 136)

We saw how this account set the work of Morris Louis in the traditions of art. But it’s obvious that Greenberg’s analysis doesn’t provide a productive way of understanding Untitled-Flower Painting #1 or Carroll’s other works, for the development of a shallow modernist picture space isn’t the key to these paintings. At present there’s no generally agreed-upon way to write a history of abstraction. For our purposes, then, brief critical discussion of one very good recent historical book will suffice to demonstrate the basic issues. After an introduction tracing the origin and history of abstraction, Bob Nickas’s Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting presents eighty artists, all contemporary, most of them established, but not all of the most famous figures—he doesn’t include Gerhard Richter or Robert Ryman, to name two names. He employs six categories identifying pictorial organization: hybrid pictures; rhythm and opticality; color and structure; found/eccentric abstraction; form, space, and scale; and the act of painting. The scope of his survey is admirable, but its conceptual framework is obviously problematic. Where, one can ask, do these six categories come from? And what have they

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to do with the early modernist development of abstraction? Nickas doesn’t answer these questions. Many of the painters in Painting Abstraction could be placed in several of these categories, which emphasizes the way in which they are arbitrary, and so not, I think, really the basis for a satisfactory historical analysis. Nickas gathers a great deal of useful information about a number of fascinating artists. That said, his book reveals the extreme difficulty of developing a narrative history of contemporary abstraction. Look at the pictures in Painting Abstraction. Some are geometric designs, others gestural compositions; some are near monochromes, while others are multicolored; some are geometric abstractions, some have forms drawn from nature, while others look like industrial products; some are painted like the classic works of de Kooning, while others use piercing straight lines of color. These works seem very varied. If, however, you stand back and look for their common features, then you will discover that every one of these artists is involved in marking a stretched rectangular canvas. The ways that they mark these canvases are very varied, but no one is engaged in sustained bold experimentation with the medium of painting, as is Carroll. How then do we write a history of abstraction? Better still, to ask that question in a very general way: How do we write a history of any sort?—and, then, how do we write an art history? To understand actions and history (including art’s history) we need to explain how events are connected. Inspired by Arthur Danto’s classic account of historiography, Analytic Philosophy of History (1965), let’s sketch an account of historical explanation, starting with a very simple case. Rather quickly we will get to a narrative including Carroll’s paintings. Let’s start with very ordinary happenings. Historians explain events—and art historians, sequences of art works. The basis for such narrative explanations is found in common sense psychology. Why did Susan momentarily stop her lecture; lift the water glass on the podium; and take a drink? Because she was thirsty. Such actions are explained in commonsensical ways. Other more surprising actions may be harder to explain. And we may need psychoanalytic explanations to account for word slips and self-deception. Historical explanations are often more difficult and usually controversial. When we are dealing with events which are the collective product of many diverse

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personalities, it is hard to produce a satisfying explanatory analysis. The causes of the French Revolution; the origin of the First World War; or, looking to the near present, the election to the American presidency of Donald Trump are much disputed. The historian seeking to explain these happenings must do the best possible, knowing that debate about any commentary is certain to occur. Consider, then, one recent sophisticated example of historical writing, Sean McMeekin’s The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923. The book starts by noting how puzzling this change was: The Ottoman Empire had endured for more than six centuries before it was finally broken against the anvil of the First World War. .  .  . The Ottoman sultans gave their millions of subjects . . . a common identity and pride in belonging to a great empire, pride held above all by Muslims but also shared, to some extent, by the empire’s large Jewish and Christian minorities, who depended on the sultan for protection. (xxi)

And yet, very quickly and to everyone’s surprise, this long-lived empire disappeared completely. The obvious starting point for the end was the assassination on June 28, 1914, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo. But at that moment, McMeekin notes, Turkey was in the background, a situation which changed only toward the end of July, when the German Kaiser reached out to the Ottomans for an alliance, as he had in the past. Probably war was inevitable: “Buried deep in these layers of deception and duplicity was a very simple truth. The war was going to happen, because nearly everyone in a position to influence events wanted it to” (132). When events are said to be inexplicable, what that means is that they are very surprising—very difficult to comprehend. How surprising it is, even with the full advantage of historical hindsight, that the Bolsheviks, a very small, marginal party in 1914, were able to seize power in Russia in 1917. Historians describe events—wars, civil strife, and economic development. Looking at the prior history, they explain why these events took place. And one very specialized group of historians, art historians, describe artworks. The relatively parochial concerns of art historians differ from those of other historians, in a way that is important here. One important goal of art history is to produce a satisfying narrative relating successive works of art. When visiting

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a large, historically organized museum, as we did at the start of this chapter when we went into the Met, looking first at the modernist pictures, and then the old masters, it’s natural to ask: how are these successive works related? Let us make a simple distinction between a mere listing of unconnected events and a history. Momentarily, then, we will turn to consider connections of artworks. Consider first a listing of these three imaginary events: On January 2, 2000, at 10:00 a.m. a man in Beijing entered the palace museum; at noon the next day, a woman in Paris entered the Louvre; and at 4:00 p.m. on January 4 a boy entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. These events appear unconnected. Consider, then, a different group of three events: On New Year’s Day, 2010 in Pittsburgh, David Carrier went for a walk in the winter weather without a coat; On January 2, 2010, Carrier developed a cold; On January 3, 2010, Carrier stayed in bed, reading Proust. Those three events, unlike those in my prior example, almost beg to be connected in a narrative. It’s natural to compose from them a little history: Because Carrier went for a walk without a coat in winter he caught a cold and so had to stay in bed. What constitutes a history, on this bare account, is a description connecting events. Art historians are interested in historical connections between works of art. Just before his death in 1906 Paul Cé zanne painted Large Bathers (Philadelphia Museum of Art); in 1907 Pablo Picasso did Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York); in 1953 Willem de Kooning made Woman VI (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh). Here, as in the account of Carrier’s cold, the list of events suggests an obvious history. Inspired by Picasso’s reworking of Cé zanne’s images of women, de Kooning made Woman VI. Art history is based upon making such connections. These histories both have subjects, something (or someone) which changes. Thus Carrier, who is the subject, changes—he gets a cold; and the art of painting, which is another subject, develops. As we said in our discussion of essences: to write history, we need to identify some person or thing, the subject, which changes. The key concept of Danto’s Analytic Philosophy of History, the narrative sentence, draws upon this feature of histories (Danto 1965). Danto is interested in the ways that historical perspective provides knowledge about events, which was not available at the time of happening. In 1900 no one could have known that Cé zanne’s painting would be responded to by Picasso or de Kooning. And so the narrative sentence, “In 1900 one source of Woman VI was painted,” can

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only be uttered long after the event, writing from an historian’s perspective. What defines history writing, Danto argues, is the use of narrative sentences. Only a culture which has an historical perspective can make such statements. History gives us knowledge of the past, letting us understand what happened then in terms which no one could understand at that prior time. By connecting events or objects, historians (and art historians) provide historical explanations. When Cé zanne’s, Picasso’s, and de Kooning’s paintings are set alongside one another in one exhibition, or placed in an historical narrative, then it’s natural to look for connections between them. Just saying that Cé zanne’s picture caused Picasso’s work, which in turn caused de Kooning’s painting is inadequate: that leaves the creative role of Picasso and de Kooning to one side. Indeed, even using the verb “caused” is a facile evasion of analysis. We understand how collision with a billiard ball causes another ball to move; the causes of paintings are more complicated. In what way, we need to ask, does one painting “cause”—or bring about—another? How then do we narrate the process which takes place? Picasso saw Cé zanne’s painting, and de Kooning saw Cé zanne’s and Picasso’s paintings: that statement merely describes the happenings without explaining them. A history needs to explain what first Picasso and then de Kooning found of use in the earlier artworks. David Sylvester does this in his description of Woman I. “There was certainly a picture that was a predecessor . . . the Demoiselles d’Avignon. The 1950s Women loom up over us in the same forbidding way . . . they are figures that stop us in our tracks, figures as impregnable as fortresses” (1996: 369). The details of the development of abstraction have been much discussed— they are the subjects of numerous exhibitions, with full catalogues, and a vast academic literature. And so we need to provide just a brief summary account. Around 1910, in the first part of the story, a number of pioneering artists developed abstraction. Thanks to a recent show, “Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925. How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2012, we have a remarkably full picture of this development. First in France but then soon in Germany, and also in Central Europe, England, Russia, and the United States many artists rather suddenly discovered that visual artworks need not have an identifiable subject, but could be abstractions.

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By inventing the classical style, the High Renaissance painters drastically changed art’s history. The invention of abstraction was a much more dramatic development. Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael revolutionized the figurative artistic tradition. The inventors of abstraction did something more— something absolutely untraditional: they made paintings without recognizable subjects. Already in 1877 Walter Pater compared paintings from the School of Giorgione with “a space of .  .  . fallen light, caught as the colours are in an Eastern carpet” (104). But it was one thing to suggest that nonmimetic paintings were possible, and another to actually make them. We tend to take abstraction for granted because for three generations much ambitious art has been abstract. But at the time, it inspired massive resistance from art writers, the public and even from the artists themselves. Did this dramatic, unforeseen artistic revolution also have a political dimension? That important question is hard to answer. We readily associate artistic and political radicalism, but that facile way of thinking may prevent us from understanding the real history revealed here. In Russia abstraction was linked almost immediately with radical Bolshevik politics, but then the regime soon turned against its artistic avant-garde. And elsewhere, where art’s development was not constrained in this way, many artists themselves returned (or retreated) to more traditional art forms. The felt danger, it seems, was that non-figurative painting and sculpture, denuded of its artistically revolutionary potential, would become just another art form. Right after 1914, some major artists continued to paint abstractly— Kandinsky and Mondrian are two notable figures. But many of the most important painters did not. Had someone surveyed the art world in 1945, abstraction would have appeared just one genre of art making, certainly less important than landscape painting, the portrait or the still life, to list three major modernist genres. But then circa 1948, in a really unanticipated development, the American abstract expressionists temporarily made abstraction the leading art form. Prior to this date, there were significant artists in the United States, and serious collecting devoted to both the old masters and modernism. But, as the English art historian David Anfam notes, the scale and obvious significance of this development was entirely novel, and so totally unexpected: We might compare this to the far vaster shift which saw America itself command the centre of Western political power and culture after 1945. . . .

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(Abstract Expressionism) thrust that country for the first time in history to the forefront of the visual arts, a sphere in which it had always traditionally either imitated Europe or followed its own eccentric patterns. (7)

For the first time, a group of American painters—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and a few others who collectedly constituted the abstract expressionists—were major figures. The center of the art world had moved from Paris to New York. Before 1948, these Americans were good artists; starting in that year, they became canonical painters. One might have expected, then, that, thanks to these extremely influential artists, abstraction would have remained the dominant art form for a long time. Certainly that was what some of them expected. But less than twenty years later, in the early 1950s, the very different figurative works of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and, a little later, of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol became important. Like the initial development of abstraction in 1910, this moment too has been much analyzed. Here, then, to develop our story we should get back to the Met, looking at the de Kooning, the Pollock, and the Johns. For our parochial purposes, what’s at stake is understanding how to place Carroll in relation to this complex prior history of modernism. In the 1980s, when he arrived in New York, we had what amounted to a third starting point for abstraction, less grand than the birth of abstract expressionism in 1948. In that decade several senior American abstractionists, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, and Robert Ryman were the best known, continued to work productively; so too, indeed, did de Kooning. But for younger artists, these much-admired figures were already historically distant. And so to speak of a third development of abstraction is to acknowledge that a new beginning took place at this date. If this were the whole story, then it would be hard indeed to explain Carroll’s historical role. Knowing the state of abstraction in the 1980s when he entered the art world would not tell us how to understand his development. Fortunately, there is another way to narrate this history, in a way that will allow us to do justice to his art. But that is a story for the next chapter.

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Our presentation of Carroll’s paintings within a history of art is not, as yet, entirely satisfying. Perhaps, as we suggested, it’s inherently difficult to write a history of abstraction. Or maybe, also, it’s hard to understand Carroll’s work just because it’s hard to have an accurate perspective on the near present. In any case, we need to find some better, fuller way of understanding his achievement. In Chapter 4 we described the New York art world, which Carroll entered in the 1980s. Now we need to get an historical perspective on that visual culture. Our earlier synchronic analysis, which showed the options available, needs to be supplemented by a diachronic account, which explains where the art of that period came from. But writing a history of abstraction, so we found in the previous chapter, proves to be surprisingly difficult. It wasn’t clear how to offer a convincing account of Carroll’s paintings. And so, here let’s experiment, and consider an entirely different way of proceeding. Let’s construct what I will call a reverse historical narrative—let us start with Carroll’s art and, identifying the precedents which were important for him, work backward historically, to trace his sources. Carroll has said: “Painters . . . hunt history for paintings, some that are forgotten, and they find value in them and they carry this newfound value into their own work, they unfold it into what they create. They keep this light burning. They keep the spirit and feeling of that painting alive in their own painting” (Carroll 2015: 59). Inspired by this suggestion, let’s see if when we can understand where his painting came from, we gain an historical perspective on his achievement. In fact, I have already done this already, repeatedly. But now I need to make the claims of this methodology explicit in a systematic way. First, we will construct a reverse historical narrative, and then we shall describe the methodology involved. Some of our ideas come from Carroll, others are due to his commentators, and still others are my suggestions.

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Normally art history starts with the past and moves toward the present. Our reverse narrative starts with Carroll’s paintings and looks historically backward for their sources. This reverse historical narrative gives some sense of Carroll’s place in the history of abstraction—it shows, as we say, where he’s coming from. In writing a normal forward-looking art history narrative we move from earlier to later works. Thus an account of old masters goes from Duccio to Masaccio to Raphael; and an account of modernism from Manet to cubism to abstract expressionism. Here, starting with the present, we go backward, which means that the order of the order in which we present our case studies is arbitrary. To offer a backward-looking narrative is the strategy of an artist taking the allowance needed to adopt a critical perspective on his own work, a way of thinking developed by Joseph Masheck (Masheck 1993: “The Play of Texts”). Carroll’s painting Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013) (Figure 11) contains two light bulbs, which are burning, and others that are extinguished. As he has described it: To me, that is the beauty and frustration in looking at and trying to understand a painting. I’ve used light in my paintings since my early days in my New York studio on Broadway. For me it connects with my practice of folding a painting or freezing a painting. My paintings are waiting for another moment, for another artist who brings the light on. (qtd. Mina: 59)

Here, following a wonderful intuition of Barbara Catoir, let’s relate Nothing Gold Can Stay to Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage (1434), which is in the National Gallery, London. In the mirror, van Eyck shows the Arnolfini couple holding hands. He, like Carroll, thus “shows you the fragility of this fleeting moment that can be gone so quickly” (Mina 2017: 60). Both works are concerned with light and transience, but where the Flemish painting depicts the lit candle, Nothing Gold Can Stay contains actual light bulbs. Very often Carroll sources Mondrian’s abstractions, fascinated with how his “black painted line . . . would nudge . . . just around the edge of the painting, emphasizing the object quality of the painting” (qtd. Milazzo: 62). Early on he wanted that viewers look not just at the face of his pictures, as Greenberg’s

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account of modernism suggests, but also at the tops, the bottoms, and the sides. The critic John Yau nicely describes this important feature of Carroll’s paintings: “His uncategorizable objects . . . cannot be seen in a single glance. They are things to be explored, and some even have distinct hiding places that the viewer discovers only by closely examining the work from all sides. They slow down the viewer’s experience, as well as help make the individual become conscious of moving through space” (Yau: 24). And Carroll likes to stack his paintings, a procedure suggested by Jasper Johns’s Three Flags (1958). Only, where Johns depicts his flags, Carroll, operating in a more literal way, in paintings like Untitled (2017) in Ligornetto, places three-folded, unstretched canvases on top of one another. Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) is an important model for Carroll, for it employs a banal physical object, a bed, as the medium of a painting. Carroll also uses fabrics in works we discussed, Untitled-Flower Painting #1 is one

Figure 11 Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013).

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Figure 12 Untitled (2017) in Museo Vela Ligornetto

example. And in the early 1990s Carroll wrote to Robert Rauschenberg asking him if he would send him a pair of his shoes. Just as Rauschenberg had erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning in the process of creating his own work, Carroll wanted to incorporate Rauschenberg’s shoes into his work in some way. To Carroll’s delight, Rauschenberg complied with his request and a pair of white Italian shoes arrived in the post. Over a couple of years, having tried but failed to work with them in his paintings, Carroll decided to try them on. They were large, size 12 and paint spattered; Carroll danced around the studio in them. “It was a beautiful moment, to dance with a lover, a father to

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me in some ways, my American Picasso and there I was dancing in his shoes” (Carroll 2012: 1. Carroll still failed to find a context for them in his paintings. It was then the “Closet Painting” concept came to him. “A painting could hold anything that I had around me in the studio that had failed me in some way, in becoming a part of a painting for some reason or other.” In Untitled (2014), in MAMbo (Figure 13), five shoes are incorporated into the painting. The personal history is concealed yet referenced, waiting for another context when the items will be revealed, prompting another meaning while still carrying with them their earlier history.

Figure 13 Untitled (2014), in MAMbo.

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And of course Giorgio Morandi’s painting has long been very important for Carroll: Morandi is someone who has shown me that you don’t need much to be an artist. . . . This became very important to me, to my work: to make work that might seem very ordered but that also had a history of its own making, a history of what it carried with it. I want that history and those emotions to be very present. (Carroll 2017: 47)

Carroll is concerned not with the literal appearance of Morandi’s figurative paintings, but with his way of thinking about art making—making do with humble materials. With Morandi, it’s true, the individual paintings appear more meaningful when set in the larger story of his body of art. That said, each of these works taken individually is aesthetically satisfying. With Morandi’s still lives, you see how he arranges and rearranges his bottles, in surprisingly varied compositions. How surprising, I think, to see the variety he finds in successive images of a simple-seeming subject. With Carroll’s art, what one finds is something quite different—a very different form of variety. When you see a large group of his paintings, as in the Bologna exhibition, you realize that he deconstructs the medium of painting in a variety of ways. The stretcher can be manipulated or taken apart (Figure 14); the surface left intact, or cut, or folded without any frame; the picture plan attached on the wall, or set directly on the floor, or mounted on a support. Here in this reverse historical narrative we could present many more examples. We might, for example, note Carroll’s use of yellow in allusion to the yellow of Gauguin’s Christ on the cross, as discussed in his newspaper commentary “I’m looking for it in the yellow and white” (Carroll 2010: np. We could cite Frank Stella’s very early black paintings, whose literality impressed Carroll. We could mention Medardo Rosso, whose sculpted heads involve a play of fragmentation and wholeness like many of Carroll’s paintings (Figure 15). Following Richard Milazzo, we could note that the pale allover pigment of Luc Tuymans’s paintings is one model for Carroll’s color. And of course we should consider Sean Scully, who like Carroll inserts windows in his abstractions. As he explains:

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At the end of the eighties my paintings started to flatten out. And instead of making paintings figurative, figural, or with body, with the body of the box of the painting, I started to put windows in. And the windows, the inserts were painted separate to the painting and then put into the painting to disturb or violate or puncture the field, to make an intrusion in the field. And to make a figurative figure-ground relationship. (Carroll 2016: 213–14)

Figure 14 Untitled Table Painting (2006–14).

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Figure 15 As on cover, Untitled (1985). #9.

This sketch of a reverse historical narrative has enough examples to point to the richness of Carroll’s resourceful use of art history. And it shows what a remarkable artistic synthesis he creates. Because this way of writing a history of contemporary art is unfamiliar, let us consider its implications. Artists make artifacts. And so the task of the art historian is to construct a narrative describing and relating those objects, in a history telling of art’s development and explaining its meaning and significance. Art history narratives are very diverse. Some are formalist accounts, while others are Marxist social histories or psychoanalytic commentaries. And their

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political perspectives are equally varied. Some are politically conservative, others liberal or radical; and some claim to be apolitical. But what they almost all share is a straightforward basic narrative structure: they describe earlier/ later/latest art in that order; otherwise very varied art writers all construct forward-looking narratives. Vasari begins his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (1550) with Cimabue and Giotto and ends with his contemporary Michelangelo. Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1672) adopts a similar structure for an account of the next century. And Arthur Danto, after telling the story of modernism, takes us to the later post-historical period. Before Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, art was in a time of development; after that, the history of art no longer had any direction. T. J. Clark’s Farewell to An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), which offers a novel commentary, takes us from Jacques-Louis David to Cé zanne, Picasso, and then Pollock and the other abstract expressionists; except in the Introduction and the Conclusion, it moves strictly in historical order. Art since 1900: Modernism. Antimodernism. Postmodernism by Rosalind Krauss and her fellow historians associated with the journal October offers a radically revisionist account. Presenting four different, conflicting methods, they refuse to tell the “story unified by a single voice”; and they make some novel judgments of taste (Foster 2004: I, 13). But they, too, tell the story in chronological order. This familiar forward-moving form of art history narratives relies upon and reconstructs the pattern of real causal connections. In Vasari’s story Cimabue comes before Giotto, and their successors take the story up to Michelangelo. In Greenberg’s account of modernism, the old masters come before Manet, who in turn influences Matisse who influences the abstract expressionists. The life of a visual culture is akin to the life of an individual, who is first a child, then an adult, and, finally, an old person. Of course, that is only an analogy, but it is a suggestive one. When Vladimir Nabokov tells the life of the Russian writer Gogol in reverse order, starting with the novelist’s death and ending with his birth, we recognize his mischievous creativity. Just as historians first present the earliest, then the later events, and intellectual historians typically move from earlier to later to latest scholars, so art history writers present the earlier, later, and then the latest artists. What comes earlier has some effect

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upon what comes later—that’s the inevitable order of historical causation. After all, the wars of Philip II of Macedonia influenced the political career of his son Alexander the Great; but not vice versa. And Kant influenced Hegel, but not, obviously, vice versa. When the cultural historian George Lichtheim titled one of his books From Marx to Hegel, that title alone makes it clear that a revisionist analysis was being developed (1974). The recent history of Marxist thought, Lichtheim suggested, involves a retreat from Marx’s own focus on activism back historically toward a return to Hegelian conceptual ways of thinking. Our rejection of this very well-entrenched way of thinking follows the lead of several recent art historians. In Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, Michael Baxandall notes the problems inherent in speaking of artistic influences (1985: 85). To say that an artist is influenced by some earlier work, he argues, is to attribute the power to that art from the past, imagining it to, as it were, reach into the present and bring about new art. Thus, for example, saying, “In the 1980s Carroll was influenced by Morandi’s art” suggests that it was Morandi, or, at least, Morandi’s art, which was doing the acting. But of course that activity actually involved Carroll looking at Morandi’s paintings and making art in response. The past cannot act on the present—it’s always the case, rather, that someone in the present acts in response to the past. The psychology implicit in this statement is revealing: “influence” implies that the present artist merely makes explicit what was implicit in the past, with Carroll guided by Morandi. That very misleading way of thinking treats Carroll as if he were passive. Saying, rather, that in the 1980s Carroll responded to Morandi’s art, gives a more accurate view, for it acknowledges Carroll’s active relationship to earlier art, developing the earlier painter’s concerns in unexpected ways, in a fashion, which Morandi could hardly have imagined. This, after all, is why Baxandall’s book is titled “patterns of intention,” not “patterns of influence.” In his book Cé zanne/Pissarro, Johns/Rauschenberg: Comparative Studies on Intersubjectivity in Modern Art, Joachim Pissarro, with reference at one crucial point to Baxandall’s account, develops a highly distinctive analysis of artistic historiography. As he explains, he is interested in artistic collaboration: “What happens when artists work together? More specifically, what is the role of the viewer of an artist’s work when the viewer happens to be another artist and

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the two of them work closely together? . . . What is the status of a work of art that is the result of communal thinking?” (2006: 3). Pissarro’s book served as the basis for his MoMA exhibition, Pioneering Modern Painting: Cé zanne and Pissarro 1865–1885 (2005). The New York art world was not prepared to understand the implications of this very original analysis. In his review Peter Schjeldhal, the New Yorker critic, for example, complained: In terms of a viewer’s chief experience, “Pioneering Modern Painting: Cé zanne & Pissarro, 1865–1885,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is a show about Paul Cé zanne: what he did, how it works, and why it’s classical. Camille Pissarro, a likable man and a delightful artist, important in any number of contingent ways, is not in the same league as that driven revolutionary. Not since the similarly titled “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism,” in 1989– 90, has MoMA, or any other museum that I can think of, produced such a pitiless comparison of stylistically related painters, one great and one just very good, with results that are instructive—providing vigorous exercise for the thinking eye—while sort of painful. (2005)

As Sean Scully observed to me in conversation, this account missed the point entirely. Preoccupied with his very New York obsession with artistic rivalry, Schjeldhal fails to understand the role of collaboration: Cé zanne’s singular greatness, the show claimed, depended in part upon collaboration with Camille Pissarro, in which, working together, the two men developed a novel visual language. In his description of reverse historical narratives Joachim Pissarro writes: “The past, usually seen through the categories of traditional art history, presents a different appearance when we approach it from the perspective of our present. It appears to be less uniform, less simple than we are wont to expect” (Pissarro 2005: 226). When comparing forward- and backward-looking histories there is no disagreement about the facts. Both forward- and backward-looking accounts can include the same artists, and both may describe the ways that artists learn from prior art. But these differently organized narratives certainly suggest very different ways of understanding the facts. Traditional art history assembles objects which have already been made. We have a group of artworks and present them in a narrative or exhibition in a revealing order. That forward-looking presentation offers the perspective of the curator or a traditional art historian. Pissarro, however, takes the perspective

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of the working artist. A painter comes into the art world; surveys art of the past; and uses that experience to create new art. The goal is to explain how that new work makes use of older art, in a backward-looking reconstruction of the painter’s creative process. He offers a marvelous story which sums up this way of thinking. “Having come across certain parallels between (Camille) Pissarro’s works and Rauschenberg’s, I once asked Rauschenberg whether he had ever looked at Pissarro’s works. Rauschenberg, after a few seconds of reflection, half-jokingly replied that he had not paid attention to Pissarro, but that Pissarro had paid a great deal of attention to him” (Pissarro 2006: 11). Think of this parallel: A person can look at their life in the past and consider what they have done up to the present. Or they can, rather, look to their future, and imagine how, starting from the present, given their talents and situation, they might choose to act. Narratives of the history of art have a similar structure. We can organize information about art which has been completed—or analyze the way that new works are being made. Looking forward, it’s natural to seek out law-like descriptions of art’s development; by contrast, looking backward historically involves focusing on the artist’s freedom to make use of the past as he or she chooses. In writing art history from the artist’s viewpoint, we reconstruct the process in which an artist looks at the history of art and chooses how to employ it. The story of art is open, which is to say that no one can predict exactly how a creative personality will make use of this history. An innovative contemporary artist changes how we see earlier works of art. As Baxandall says: “We will never see Cé zanne undistorted by what, in Cé zanne, painting after Cé zanne has made productive in our tradition” (1985: 61–62). Thanks to cubism, now we see Cé zanne’s art differently. In starting with the present and working backward, we do not change what has happened. The past is past and so of course cannot be changed. But what is changed is our present here-and-now experience of older art. Now we cannot but see Cé zanne’s paintings as proto-cubist pictures. And so our art history should acknowledge as much. Here we find an important difference between history proper and art history. Historical events really are only in the past, and so can only be reconstructed in our books; but art works exist here and now. We cannot change the past: Nothing can change the events or outcome of the French Revolution, which was finished long ago. But thanks to more recent events we may, however,

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perhaps better understand the French Revolution—that is: we may interpret it differently in more plausible ways than earlier commentators. By comparing it to the Russian Revolution, to take one obvious comparison, we may gain additional knowledge of the past. Lenin’s and Stalin’s totalitarian employment of terror may help us better comprehend the Thermidorian Reaction in Paris circa 1794. Political revolutions, we may conclude, have a tendency to overreach. When considering that claim, what we interpret differently are the events of the past. Art history writing has an essentially different structure because we understand art differently. When we can set a Cé zanne portrait right now next to a cubist Picasso portrait, we may see the older work in new ways which were not available before cubism. This is a basic distinction between history proper and art history. Now the Spanish Civil War belongs to the past, whereas Picasso’s painting Guernica remains in the present, visible here and now. What perhaps is paradoxical is Baxandall’s claim that in looking at Cé zanne, we cannot undo our awareness of the effect of cubism. If that is true, how then can we know that cubism has had this effect? After all, we cannot see the Cé zanne paintings as it appeared in 1906 in order to compare it to that picture as we look at it now, after cubism. We cannot, that is, undo our experience of recent art. To say that Cé zanne’s portraits look different implies that we can compare them as they appear now and as they looked before cubism. But no such comparison is accessible to us. In discussion of what he calls “radical historicism,” Richard Wollheim considers and quickly rejects this view, the claim “that works of art actually change their meaning over history” (1980: 187). The problem, he argues, is that this view is inherently incoherent, because it asks us to imagine something that “is unimaginable”—that the prior meaning of an artwork is no longer accessible. Wollheim’s argument is laconic, and perhaps for that reason is not obviously satisfactory. Imagine, if you will, that we are aware of how cultural or political or sociological change has affected our ability to retrieve the original meaning of the work. We can only see it in what we know is a new way. Still, why cannot our awareness of this change itself affect our present awareness? In Chapter 8 we will develop a systematic account of the implications of this point, the nature of radical historicism, with reference to Carroll’s painting. Here, in anticipation, we offer a tentative discussion of the key argument.

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One answer to Wollheim’s query is that pre-cubist commentary allows us, to some extent, to retrieve the pre-cubist experience of Cé zanne. These written accounts allow us to imagine how his paintings used to look. Another answer is that we may know there has been change even if we cannot directly see it. I believe that history reveals other similar cases. When a political culture changes dramatically, we may find it difficult to imagine life before that change. It is difficult today, for example, to imagine a society in which the rightness of slavery was taken for granted by most people. And yet, we certainly recognize that a dramatic change has taken place even if we cannot unthink our present circumstances. We cannot, perhaps, really imagine a culture in which slavery was generally accepted; as, less dramatically, we cannot imagine a visual culture without cubism. We thus may acknowledge that radical change has taken place without being able to really imagine its effects. Within the present art historical literature we can find accounts developing backward-looking narratives, without (so far as I can tell) offering a systematic perspective on their implications. Consider, however, one suggestive example from the writings of Arthur Danto. As I mentioned earlier, Danto’s art historical historiography is basically forward-looking. After surveying the forwardlooking narratives of Gombrich and Clement Greenberg, he introduces his own variation on their accounts—the claim that now we have moved forward to the end of history. But in one place in his criticism he offers an innovative backward-looking narrative. In his 1998 review “Abstracting Soutine,” after naming Chaim Soutine’s own admired precursors, Rembrandt, Chardin, and Courbet, Danto discusses Willem de Kooning’s admiration for Soutine: “What de Kooning might have seen in Soutine was how it was possible to paint like a New York artist—with slabs and strokes of thick paint—and do the figure: to be abstract and referential at once” (2000: 317). There were, Danto concludes, two modes of painting abstractly: the abstraction without recognizable subject like the art of Pollock or Rothko, circa 1950; and de Kooning’s painting of figurative subjects without the traditional “isomorphism between the image and the subject’s visual form as traditionally sought.” Very often de Kooning was criticized for painting a figurative subject, women, after he and the other abstract expressionists made their breakthrough into abstraction. How, it was asked, could he return to the past, to an exhausted tradition, which many of his peers aspired to leave behind? Danto offers an original response to this

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question. Inspired by Soutine, de Kooning developed a distinctive form of abstract-like painting of figurative subjects. His art was in fact as innovative as Pollock’s and Rothko’s, though not, I grant, also always completely abstract. To put this claim in the terms of our backward-looking history, de Kooning teaches us to see Soutine’s art differently. Now we can see how he made an original style of painting possible. Here, then, Danto adopts the perspective of an art history made for and by artists. But he never discussed the general implications of this analysis. Vasari believed that Michelangelo was the greatest living artist; Greenberg that the abstract expressionists were the successors to the modernist tradition of impressionism and cubism; and Danto that Warhol’s Brillo Box ended the history of art’s development. Because they had legitimate confidence in their judgments about what contemporary art mattered, they could with confidence compose forward-looking narratives. Today we really cannot, for it seems surely impossible to offer a convincing account of the canon of contemporary art. All judgments about what recent art matters are up for grabs; any account identifying the present successors to the great tradition is sure to be highly controversial. And this means that it is extremely hard to write a forwardlooking art history extending into the present. No one, can, with confidence identify the legitimate heirs to the old masters and the major modernists. A backward history resolves this problem, for instead of focusing on how the tradition leads up to the present, it instead starts with the very recent art and then looks back at prior, earlier art works. Writing the narrative from the viewpoint of the here and now thus corresponds with the way in which so much attention is devoted to contemporary art. Saying this is not necessarily to assert that contemporary art is more important than art from the recent or even the distant past, but it is to adopt a style of art writing that does justice to the unprecedented situation in which so much attention is given to the display, sale, and study of contemporary art. To understand Carroll’s place in the history of art does not, in itself, tell us how to evaluate or judge his art. How should we understand the significance of Carroll’s art— what, in other words, does it mean and what visual value does it have? To answer these questions we need to develop our account of the philosophy and practice of interpretation of visual art. That is the task of the next two chapters.

7

Interpreting Carroll’s Artworks

To understand an artwork, we need an interpretation, an account of what it means and why it is important. To tell why something is an artwork, how it is placed in the art world, and what its place is in art’s history—this knowledge certainly guides interpretation, but it doesn’t by itself necessarily tell us how to interpret. But here a briefly sketched historical perspective is suggestive. There are almost no records of what Caravaggio said about his art—only commentary by mostly hostile critics. However, for Poussin, in large part because he needed to keep in touch with his many French patrons, there is an extensive correspondence describing his paintings (Carrier 1995). The same variety of response by artists is found among modernists. Some of the abstract expressionists—Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, are two examples—were not verbal people. And Willem de Kooning offered only tantalizing, suggestive but elliptical commentary on his painting (Carrier 2001). But Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman wrote extensively and so did Robert Motherwell, who had graduate study in philosophy and published a great deal about both abstract expressionism and modernism. Often nowadays artists are pressed to discuss their art with critics. This is partly because ours is a very loquacious art world, but also because, as we have seen earlier, a great deal of modernist and contemporary art needs commentary to be accessible and even, in some cases, to be identified as art. To cite one example, there are two full recent books devoted to Sean Scully’s statements (2006, 2016). Nowadays, because most artists get an MFA, they usually learn in school how to verbally present themselves. Because Carroll was trained in art school as an illustrator, not a painter, as we have noted earlier, he didn’t receive training as a writer. As we have seen, Carroll is happy to discuss his painting with critics. Building on these commentaries, the next chapter, gathering my thoughts, will offer an

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original, comprehensive interpretation of his painting. In this chapter, then, in preparation I want to focus upon one significant resource that I use, which has not been employed in these prior commentaries—interpretations of his art in Carroll’s newspapers. At art galleries two sorts of handout information are customarily provided: Xeroxed sheets, which give a brief description of the art; and exhibition catalogues, which usually are well-illustrated books, which are for sale. Carroll adds a third category, newspapers about his art. In the 1980s while teaching himself to paint, he supported his family by making illustrations for news stories in the New York Times, the Nation, and other publications. More recently he has employed that skill to make newspapers, in editions of two thousand, distributed for free at each of his exhibitions (Figures 16 and 17 ). Carroll’s newspaper publications, created immediately before or even during the exhibition, include a variety of materials: close-up photographs and installation shots of the art displayed; his own figurative drawings, and notes from his children when they were young (he saves everything); reproductions of work by artists he admires, sometimes with his commentary. And there are photographs of some of these artists—de Kooning is one. The newspapers include drawings of the room layouts for his exhibitions. Also, they reproduce photographs of him, his family, studio assistants and people in the galleries and museums associated with his displays; and pictures of his studios and of the places where his art was displayed along with images of exhibition announcements. Some poems are presented, along with personal narrative comments about his exhibitions. Often they are with copy-editing notes on these texts. There also are photographs about the rustbelt places in mid-West America, and also sites in Berlin and Italy where Carroll’s lived and worked. And at the end page of each newspaper, there are notes listing his materials, with full credits for the photographs and writing. Carroll’s accounts of his childhood, which are found in his catalogues and also in his newspapers, are very personal. My father one day wanted a better way to get into the garage. Normally he would lift the garage door up, but he wanted to make a door within a door, so he did. He made a normal door within the garage door. That I am sure was an influence. He never threw things away, he was always repairing them. No money taught him that, and taught me that.

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Figure 16 Self-published Newspaper #7, Dublin City Museum the Hugh Lane exhibition, “In the World I Live,”  November 9, 2012–February 10, 2013, Sketch, 2012; Marquette, MI.

My father was always building things. He built half our home with the help of my brother and me. At that time there was a lot of houses being built. He would just walk a few streets away and look at how they did it and copy it. He learned from looking and trial and error. Kinda of like I did when I

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Figure 17 Self-published Newspaper #7, Dublin City Museum the Hugh Lane exhibition, “In the World I Live”  November 9, 2012–February 10, 2013, Sketch, August 22, 1985, NYC, Ball point pen.

moved to NYC. You look and try things out until you find your way your method your voice. (personal communication)

Indeed, sometimes when he describes his father it’s easy to see that he’s also describing himself: “He was a great story teller. Always telling stories to anyone he would meet.”

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Thanks to these newspapers and his stories we learn a great deal about Carroll’s working habits. Carroll prefers not to have visitors when art is in progress, but sometimes we see photographs of his studio. Much of this enchanting material is not easy to identify—that’s a real part of its pleasure. Some pages are pure works of art, deserving of display. Mostly the artworks shown are not titled, and they’re not displayed in chronological order, which enforces the sense that the body of his art possesses an essential unity. Compared with the daily newspapers, how much aesthetic pleasure Carroll’s newspapers provide! All the news that he presents is good news. It’s revealing, also, to consider what Carroll’s newspapers don’t show: no luxurious settings; no formal pictures of old master art; no photographs of bustling urban life. Sometimes unidentified details of old master paintings are mixed in. Mostly Carroll’s newspapers are black and white, but some are color. And occasionally these large newsprint images are out of focus. From these newspapers you get a view of his shows from the artist’s point of view, with an account of his studio life. He communicates a sense of marvelous good cheer. You feel that he must love being a painter, and that he communicates this happy sense to everyone around him. As he has said: “My work for the last 25 years has been exploring the possibility that ideas can have another life, that nothing is truly exhausted, and that ideas can unfold in time in the hands of the artist or later in the hands of another and new meaning can form” (2011b: np). An aesthetic version of the commercial newspapers he illustrated in the early 1980s, these exhibition newspapers, marvelously well composed, like a major newspaper, have a rhythmic presentation of smaller and larger images. They offer a portrait of Carroll’s world, thus constituting an interpretation of his art, an evocative combination of images and words. I know of no other artist who has presented his art in this democratically accessible way. Catalogues published by galleries and museums are relatively expensive, and they usually contain academic essays. Carroll’s newspapers are a brilliant original invention, sure, I expect, to be imitated by other artists. The major contemporary painter who has developed the most complete sustained account of his own art is Frank Stella, whose Charles Eliot Norton lectures, given at Harvard University, were published as Working Space. The contrast of his self-presentation to Carroll’s is most revealing. Stella, who had a Princeton undergraduate education, when still a student had a painting

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selected for a MoMA exhibition. Very well placed, he had famous teachers who supported him. Written at a time when abstraction was in crisis, Stella’s book offers a far-ranging historical account. Many artists, he notes, have looked “backward for sanctions of value and quality” (3, 43, 5, 155). But that doesn’t mean, he added, “that abstraction’s line of succession is guaranteed.” After its dramatic beginning, which we have discussed, early in the twentieth century, and after the striking success of classical abstract expressionism, by 1970, “abstract painting had lost its ability to create space.” For Stella the key historical figure is Caravaggio, for what he did for late sixteenth-century naturalism is what needs to be done now for abstraction— he provided a “space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, a space in which the subjects of painting can live.” Stella concludes: “What I believe abstract painting itself wants to do today, is to bring some of the solidity of Italian painting into the foreground of our painting experience.” He wants that contemporary abstraction to create a space, abstractly, which is as real and vivid as that of Caravaggio’s pictures. His goal, to put this interpretation in a phrase, is to build upon and extend old master tradition. Although published without many notes and with only a skeletal bibliography, Working Space is a book that draws upon the resources of contemporary art history. Above all, as Stella jokes, he’s conscious of the presence of Harvard art history professor Sydney Freedberg’s writing about Caravaggio. A dazzling performance, an extremely winning commentary, it is a marvelously wellproduced, fully illustrated Harvard University Press publication. The book is surprising, clear, and forceful, coming from a mid-career artist with no prior public record as writer. And yet, for the contemporary art world Stella’s analysis was somewhat beside the point. The younger abstract painters I met in the 1980s read Stella’s book, but none of them were much influenced. Partly the problem was that the interests of the art world had shifted away from the focus on abstraction, characteristic of the time, 1959, when Stella made his very early entry to the art world. He says, “there has not been a serious challenge to abstraction in the last thirty years” (167). Some other senior artists shared this feeling. Robert Ryman has said: “abstraction is a relatively recent approach to painting. I think abstract painting is just beginning .  .  . . I feel that the possibilities of painting are so great, and that we’ve just scratched the surface” (qtd. Storr 1993: 39). But the most prominent American figures of the

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1960s, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, and also many of their best-known successors from the 1970s and 1980s disagreed. In the 1980s, the claim that our postmodernist era had broken with the modernist past, the era of abstract expressionism, dominated New York discourse; even most critics who rejected it entirely felt that they had to respond. In mostly linking his abstractions to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings, Stella fails to do that. Attempting to align his own art with the work of Caravaggio and Rubens undercuts the obvious differences between their figurative, mostly sacred works and Stella’s abstractions. To speak, again, in Baxandall’s terms, Stella’s brief is very different. Caravaggio and Rubens painted sacred themes (and portraits), working for patrons, often for clerical patrons; Stella does abstractions whose ultimate home is the art museum. For this reason, his argument really is an extreme version of formalism. Clement Greenberg didn’t greatly admire Stella’s paintings, but Stella’s argument is, ultimately, an updated version of Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting.” Only when we bracket our awareness of the visual content of old master pictures, can they appear similar in their use of space to his abstract paintings. Ironically, Stella’s title comes from New York graffiti, “Working Space,” illustrated in color but not discussed in his book, which makes no attempt to identify the artist. When Stella compares his Leblon II (1975) to Paul Potter’s The Young Bull (1647), then these problems with his formalist analysis become clear (144–45): The heads of the peasant, cow, and bull form a triangle within which the X shape of the crossed tree trunks are inscribed. .  .  . This triangle is the compositional focus, the painting’s organizational core. Once we have found it we feel secure, even though we are puzzled as to why we have drifted so far to the left; we feel that in order to keep our aesthetic balance we have to turn right to look out over the landscape’s imaginary distant center.

And he adds: “One always loves paintings that are like one’s own.” Seen abstractly, the two paintings are somewhat similar compositions, but when Stella says that the Naples-yellow at the center of his picture is “keyed to the white cow’s face,” then the limitations of this parallel seem obvious. In a brilliant but problematic and much criticized analysis, Roger Fry described a painting he believed to be by Poussin, Ulysses Discovering Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedon, in this formalist way.

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The curious impression of the receding rectangular hall seen in perspective. . . . Next . . . the four dark rectangular openings at the end of the hall. . . . We note, too, almost at once, that the excessive symmetry of these four openings is broken by the figure of one of the girls, and that this also somehow fits in with the slight asymmetry of the dark masses of the chamber walls. (25, 26)

Only after this description, he says, do we need even consider the picture’s subject. In fact, Fry argues, the story told is trivial, even silly, while the composition is brilliant. (The story has Ulysses tricking Achilles, who is hidden in drag among the young women, to reveal himself by reaching for a sword.) For Poussin, he concludes, “the story of Achilles was merely a pretext for a purely plastic construction.” But in fact, to understand Poussin’s pictures, we usually do need to identify their subjects. And here, as Anthony Blunt notes, Fry “had the bad luck to select for his analysis a painting which is now universally dismissed as not being by Poussin himself ” (4, n. 2). Stella does not admire Poussin, but his account of Caravaggio as a model for abstraction adopts the same highly problematic interpretative strategy. Contrast Stella’s account of Leblon II (1975) with Carroll’s commentary about what he calls one his own most important paintings, Figment (1985) (Figure 18), which is in room 13 at Ligornetto. In the middle of the painting you can see a small window that was cut out and then placed back in the painting, not quite perfectly, but the imperfections were never a negative thing to me. The imperfections were actually what I was attracted to. My paintings began to have this very human sense of imperfection, which became, ironically, one of the strengths of my paintings. (qtd. Mina: 2017)

Where Stella thinks of his art in terms of its art historical associations, without ever setting it outside of that world, Carroll’s account focuses on the psychological significance of his work. To be sure, as we have seen, Carroll knows his art history, but he uses that tradition without referring to it in his interpretation. The polish and extreme self-confidence of Stella’s commentary are linked with his determination to extend art’s history. When he insists that he, as much as de Kooning, is an abstract expressionist, one is aware of the pressure of belatedness; in fact, Stella is really of the next generation, though he was, I grant, a very fast starter.

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Figure 18 Figment (1985), room 13, Museo Vela, Ligornetto

By contrast, Carroll is centrally concerned with what might be called the psychological role of paintings—with the ways that they, overcoming vulnerability, create an environment, which is healing. In this world of lost forms and side- or non-forms of being, there can be found as if in a cubist collage executed at the end of the century the world of the other, the world of all else, hidden in the eye, in the simultaneous and multiple points of view, of an imperfect god—a new world of beauty hidden in the eye of tragedy and imperfection. (Milazzo: 48)

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An intuitive visual thinker, in his published statements and, also, in interviews, documents which I have frequently quoted, Carroll speaks in immediate ways about his art. “Painting for me is always a place where I am looking for things to anchor me in this world” (2015: np). In the 1980s, as we have seen, many visual artists felt that they had to justify their activity with allusions to philosophical interpretations, often with reference to French post-structuralism, which was very fashionable. That was never Carroll’s concern. In art school, he studied design, and when he started seriously painting he was inspired by what he saw in New York’s galleries and museums, but not by reading. Laura Mattioli Rossi offers a very clear statement of his viewpoint: “With Carroll . . . we are dealing only with painting, essential and real painting, painting that has no need to imitate nature or to pretend to be three-dimensional but which, all the same, does not forgo dialoguing with reality and making it its own” (Rossi). By themselves, these marvelous statements do not constitute an interpretation of Carroll’s paintings. But they provide essential information for that task. A powerful interpretative theory developed by Hegel, and reworked for contemporary art by Arthur Danto treats art as cultural expressionism. In this chapter we shall explain cultural expressionism. Then in the next chapter we will interpret Carroll’s painting as a form of cultural expression. In his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, given in Berlin in the 1820s, and published after his death, in 1831, from student notes, Hegel presents his highly influential ideal of art as cultural expression. He employs an idealist vocabulary, which has become exotic; and, although the art historical details are rudimentary, judged by our standards. Hegel wrote just when academic art history was being developed; and his own travels as an art tourist were limited. But his basic conception remains of great living interest. What defines painting as an art form, Hegel argues, is the intimate relationship between its subjects and the ways that they are presented. Because it makes use of color, unlike sculpture, in painting, the object depicted “is transformed from the shape of something real into a pure appearance artistically created by the spirit of the artist” (II, 801). Painting, Hegel argues, is the art particularly well suited to presenting seemingly slight subjects: “A ray of sunshine falling through the open door of a room we are entering, a neighborhood we travel through, a seamstress, a maid we see busy at her work” (II, 834). As he explains:

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In portraying such living realities, art entirely alters our attitude to them because it cuts away all the practical ramifications, which otherwise connect us with things in the world, and brings them to us in an entirely contemplative way; and it also cancels all our indifference to them and leads our notice. Painting conducts us at once .  .  . into the present .  .  . but in .  .  . that present-day world it cuts all the threads of attractiveness or distress, or sympathy or antipathy.

Painting displays “the magic of their pure appearance in their varying momentary colour,” that is to say aesthetically (II, 836). The argument of this section of his lectures comes together in a justly famous, very richly suggestive and highly condensed commentary on the Dutch art of the Golden Age. Hegel never visited Italy, let alone Greece or Egypt, and so his account of their visual cultures is completely bookish. But he did briefly get to Holland, and you can feel how much he saw and learned from this extraordinary, vivid account. Italian Renaissance painting was the product of an authoritarian Catholic culture—while the Dutch were mercantile Protestants—and so what follows, Hegel argues, is that this very different culture created very different painting. After enumerating the bourgeois subjects of Dutch art, he presents this general point, in a commentary, which deserves extensive quotation: In all their paintings they link supreme freedom of artistic composition, fine feeling for incidentals, and perfect carefulness in execution, with freedom and fidelity of treatment, love for what is evidently momentary and trifling, the freshness of open vision, and the undivided concentration of the whole soul on the tiniest and most limited things. It is the Sunday of life which equalizes everything and removes all evil; people who are so whole-heartedly cheerful cannot be altogether evil and base. The poetical fundamental trait permeating most of the Dutch painters at this period consists of this treatment of man’s inner nature and its external and living forms and its modes of appearance. (II, 886–87)

Recent commentators, Svetlana Alpers and others, have offered careful qualifications to this analysis. But after her own detailed description of the relationship between the “intellectual and social circumstances and the images themselves” she notes, in a footnote: “Hegel, in a short passage in his lectures

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on aesthetics, already characterized Dutch painting in terms close to these” (73, 249 n. 1). The Golden Age Dutch were not all Protestants—and so any attempt (Hegel mentions no artists by name) to include such diverse artists as Rembrandt, Saenredam, and Vermeer in one such all-purpose description surely blurs significant differences. When, in the passage we earlier quoted and discussed, Gombrich says that there is no Art, only artists, he notes in a pithy way his deep skepticism about this Hegelian vision of art as cultural expression. What’s at stake here in philosophical analysis is, among other concerns, a judgment about the ultimate importance of visual art. Many people think that art works are merely grand luxuries, like the other commodities found in upscale stores—posh cars or designer clothing. That nowadays the canonical artworks are so very expensive, and that their value is so frequently discussed in popular commentary is evidence for this view. The frequent demand that contemporary art be politically critical is just the converse of this identification of these artworks as commodities. Because artworks are saleable, and because some of them are extremely valuable, it is thought that they should critique this situation. Good art, so a long tradition of leftist commentary has insisted, should assess critically the art world culture. According to modernist criticism, art should self-critically employ its medium. This demand for political critique tweaks that idea: Since artworks are commodities, it is often said that they should critique the role of art as commodity. For the philosopher of art, this view of visual art misses entirely its significance. Of course it’s of great interest sociologically that much admired paintings have great economic value. But so are numerous other commodities, most of which have no particular general emotional or spiritual significance. Recently, for example, an antique Ferrari was priced at one hundred million dollars, which is in the same price range as some upscale paintings. No doubt such cars can be fascinating. But who thinks that used cars have the expressive significance of artworks? To be sure, the aesthetician needs to take account of the ways that grand paintings are highly valued. That such artworks are relatively rare is very interesting—it means that the intersection between aesthetic and exchange value is important and unavoidable. And all art writing, including philosophical art writing, unavoidably involves the writer in these commercial concerns. Writing about an old master like Poussin validates

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his status. When the contemporary art world is so crowded, even a negative review singles out an artist. And devoting a book like this to a living painter certainly signifies that he is deserving of serious attention. And yet, for the philosopher, the value of significant art cannot be reduced to a concern with its role in revealing social status. The art dealer Michael Findlay writes: “There is a basic symbiosis between the commercial value of art and the social value of art in our lives. After all, people like to talk about how much things cost. Owning big-price-tag art compels the interest of others in ourselves” (194). No doubt his account accurately describes how many people within the New York art world think. But I don’t live there and so when once (just once!) I owned an abstract painting that became extremely valuable, I was fascinated to see how for local academics who were outside the art world, it was essentially invisible. A used Ferrari would have drawn more attention. I believe that painting is culturally significant—that it’s not just a specialized activity (at worst, the productive of glamorous, expensive decorative objects) but—as Hegel saw—a form of cultural expression, which deserves philosophical analysis. Certainly, Carroll’s paintings are. But of course the truth of that assertion needs to be demonstrated. How do you do justice to an aesthetically revolutionary contemporary artist whose work you greatly admire? One way to begin is to start by looking within yourself, for if you can understand why his art gets under your skin, then you may be in a position to explain the importance of his art to other people. The essential “trick,” then, is to use your own understanding as a starting point for commentary, which makes reference to personal experience.

8

Why Lawrence Carroll’s Paintings Matter

We have described Carroll’s entry point to the 1980s art world and offered an historical perspective on that period. But showing how to place Carroll’s artworks historically doesn’t by itself tell us how to interpret them. As we have seen, the abstract artists who emerged in that period theorized their art in very various ways. And, also, we discussed the medium of painting. Now, finally, we are ready to see how synthesizing those two earlier discussions provides the key to his art. This chapter will interpret Carroll’s painting by using two tools provided by Arthur Danto, which we have discussed earlier: his definition of art; and the style matrix. In Chapter 5 we worried about whether Carroll’s works like Untitled-Flower Painting #1 are impoverished compared to the modernist masterworks that inspired him. This chapter will resolve that worry, also, by showing how to place Carroll’s paintings in the history of art, in an account that builds upon and summarizes our entire prior analysis. Frequently our discussion has been motivated by comparisons of Carroll’s paintings to those of other artists. These visual parallels (or contrasts) have proven to be a good way of bringing out the distinctive qualities of his art. At the start of this book we contrasted his Untitled Floor Piece (1992–94) to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, comparing the different ways that these works challenge our definition of art. Now let’s interpret Carroll’s art employing another juxtaposition with Warhol’s art—we will contrast his Hammer and Sickle (1976) to Carroll’s Guilt (1992) (Figure 19), a painting which was displayed at Ligoretto. Warhol showed that art with very ordinary subjects made by using deskilled techniques can be aesthetically significant. And that is a serious achievement. Carroll demonstrates that simple-seeming abstract artworks, which reveal the surprising variety of the medium of painting, also can be of great interest. And that is an entirely different, and, also, a very serious achievement. Recall Arthur

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Danto’s definition of art: “to be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning” (1997: 197). Interpreted thus, Carroll’s art is about the medium of painting, for it reveals the multiplicity of ways that medium can be employed. And it embodies that meaning by practical demonstration, by showing what is possible. But there’s more to be said; we need to unpack the significance of this definition. Earlier in this book I’ve mostly focused on wellknown recent aesthetic theory. Here, seeking a legitimate way to respond to

Figure 19 Guilt (1992), Ligornetto, room XV.

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Carroll’s extreme originality, I appeal to some theorizing, which will, initially at least, be unfamiliar to most people interested in contemporary painting. Guilt is a small work consisting of five rounded wooden forms, laid on top of one another. There’s some paint on the sides and also on the top. Carroll’s description is straightforward. “Altering the shapes of wood, cutting away what was not needed. The small fragments that I cut off started to interest me, so I collected them. The smaller paintings have been around my studio for several years, quietly there on the wall waiting for me to know what to do with them” (personal communication). Then, after referencing the title, he offers a more personal association: Guilt could be stacked on you, and one spends their life taking off those layers. A lifelong process for this kid. We all have different weights put on us, some far worse some have less for sure, That is life, we deal with the cards given us. My titles would float in like that. Thoughts I carried, struggles I carried, carry, often can enter the work in some way. Not only in a title, but in the work itself Cut apart and put back together, holes cut into to it to breathe was not an accidental decision, at times I felt as if I could not breathe. Remembering things can trigger this. So the studio thank god was a place for all of this to sit and stir and be with. A place for the most part, to figure out a damaged life and try and straighten it out is some sort of normalcy, once I understood what normal and abnormal were. That took some time.

In a more neutral account, Richard Milazzo has described how paintings like Guilt are made: “Rather than building a structure of some kind, Carroll seems to be repairing or mending an old piece of furniture or an inanimate object which has been around so long it has become like a family member” (1998: 25). Carroll uses these humble objects to create a space where he (and we) can feel at home. Consider how Carroll deals with the tensions of traveling. When I first started traveling with my work in the late 80’s, I would often travel with small paintings in my suitcase. I was traveling alone mostly and when arriving at a hotel in a foreign city I would hang a small painting of mine in the room. I would also move the furniture around, often moving the desk if there was one, in front of the window facing out into the world. When I would return back to the hotel and see a painting of mine hanging

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on the wall and my books scattered on my desk I would feel this is where I belonged. These simple acts would ease my anxiety of being somewhere new and make me feel at home. This is the same for me in my studios and when I create an installation of my paintings. (2015: np)

As Bruno Cara says, “Carroll’s works do not fill space but produce it” (9). Art that makes you feel safely at home wherever you are—that of course is an ancient dream, but what prominent contemporary artist has expressed it so frankly? John Yau understood this point perfectly: “Lawrence Carroll has treated the painting as an extremely supple and tangible thing that is both a surface and a container; it can be constructed, taken apart, and reconstructed” (24). His works are really strange—strange enough to be extremely interesting. Paintings that would empty themselves, turn themselves inside out, breathe, fold over, repair or piece themselves together, and sweat are all paintings that are extremely physical and willing to experiment with their formal being to attain new, perhaps unknown forms of meaning, unique, more deeply felt or rawer forms of abstraction, and perhaps even another side of being as such. They would seem to explore every possibility, including the deepest void in themselves, the deepest hollow in their being, in order to find a singular way to breathe as paintings. (qtd. Milazzo: 48)

It’s very in character that when asked to participate in an exhibition in Venice using glass as medium, Carroll puzzled over that request for a long time before accepting the invitation. Glass art is a Venetian tradition, but all too often it is merely decorative, so he “needed to find a way to use the material that could fit into my language, and hold true to what I do” (2011b: np). Traditionally Venetian life centered around the pozzos, those places where Venetians gathered water to sustain their families. Nowadays when that city has become an overcrowded tourist destination, Carroll’s goal was to find some element from the past, which might help reawaken Venice—“I wish for a Venice that is more than a decoration.” His starting point involved finding the right pozzo. “I needed to find one that was humble, neglected and forgotten. I needed one that cried out for another life, for another chance. I avoided the pozzos that took pride of place and position in the city. This was of no interest to me” (2011b). After a long search, first walking in the city, then looking in a library, he found the right pozzo on the island of Torcello. He made drawings of that site and then was ready to cast glass, which was then incorporated into

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his painting. Another Life (2009) (Figure 20), shown that year in Buchmann Gallery, Lugano, is made of glass, bricks, and wood. A squat structure just a little over a meter tall, it is a determinedly unheroic attempt to bring the traditions of Venetian art into the present. Advertising images are slick, while Carroll’s art looks hand made. He has little interest in mass media images or in the pop art tradition. In everyday life, to be sure, he enjoys the benefits of fine up-to-date technology. But his artistic concerns are entirely unlike those of Warhol. Anyone can see at first glance the significance of Hammer and Sickle; like all of Warhol’s more successful works, its subject is immediately and universally recognized. By contrast, Guilt is a puzzling artifact. Like Untitled Floor Piece, it’s an object we would hardly notice were we to encounter it in the street. But in room fifteen at Ligoretto, where it’s juxtaposed to large and small wall-hanging paintings, it attracts attention. Again, as we saw in our discussion of MAMbo, understanding the full context of Carroll’s exhibitions is essential. Repeatedly in this book we’ve referenced Carroll’s two recent retrospectives, which both include large groupings of his

Figure 20 Another Life (2009).

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paintings. You can learn a great deal about his art by comparing retrospectives of other artists, both contemporary figures and, also, old masters. Sometimes we focus on paintings one by one, but of course in galleries and museums we are sensitive to the ways that they are displayed in ensembles. I am interested in historical presentations in art museums, and in how commercial galleries display art for sale. You cannot understand our art world, I have argued elsewhere, without reflective analysis of the ways in which individual works are shown in these sites. The art writer typically moves back and forth, first looking at each work by itself, then evaluating the effect of these groupings. Consider an important example of old master art. Much is to be learned here by a surprising contrast, by comparing three retrospectives devoted to Nicolas Poussin. In 1989 the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, Texas, held an important exhibition of the early works of Poussin. This show indicated how he found himself in the rich artistic environment of Rome. In Paris, in 1994, the Grand Palais held a retrospective celebrating the fourhundredth year of his birth. This comprehensive exhibition presented all of his paintings and, also, many drawings. And, more recently, in the 2015 Poussin Louvre retrospective, an exhibition offered a different interpretation of his art, a presentation focused on his sacred works. Such exhibitions are essential for the connoisseur, for they allow side-byside comparisons of the various works, permitting the placement of them in order of making. Denis Mahon, the greatest Poussin connoisseur, in Paris in 1960 and also later in Fort Worth rehung the paintings, displaying the works according to his reconstruction of order of their making. That is an important procedure, for in such historical displays, dates of execution become visible and dubious attributions stand out; getting the order of making exactly right really matters. What ideally unfolds in such exhibitions is a presentation of an artist’s complete body of works, understood as a whole, as if Poussin created over forty some years a single, dispersed work of art. Each of these hangings conveyed an interpretation, arranging the paintings to convey a picture of Poussin’s development. In the case of Carroll, retrospectives reveal something different, what might be called the array of his potential pictorial options. It’s the body of Carroll’s art which we are viewing, for each of his works acquires its meaning and significance, in part at least, through its place in his oeuvre. In old master exhibitions each work is visually

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self-sufficient. You can attend fully to individual Poussin paintings without seeing them in such a sequence. But if you want to understand his stylistic evolution, then of course you need to look at the whole of his art. Poussin’s exhibitions reveal the variety of his subjects. You see how he depicted pagan and Christian themes, modifying his style to accommodate their varied expressive concerns; Carroll’s MAMbo and Linornetto retrospectives demonstrate how he makes use of the medium of art. If, in some unimaginable disaster, all but one of Poussin’s pictures were destroyed, then it might be possible, still, from that one surviving painting to judge his basic skills. But if we had only one Carroll painting, we could not grasp his most important achievement, for we could not know how various are his uses of the medium. Poussin’s exhibitions show a rich range of figurative subjects; Carroll’s present a wide array of uses of the medium of painting. Not that they are installations, assemblages of works, which exist as artworks only in some such setting. These exhibitions present individual paintings, made at various dates, some of which before and after the shows were displayed individually. To properly interpret Carroll’s particular paintings, you need to see them in these ensemble displays; you need to view his groupings of works, in order to identify the intricate variations on a theme. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s a great many artists experimented with shaped canvases. But no one else experimented so boldly and consistently with the medium of painting. Carroll’s concern with creating these bodies of paintings, works revealing the expressive potential of the medium of painting, takes him far indeed from Warhol. A great deal of contemporary political art influenced by Warhol uses images to critique economic inequality, racism, and gender inequality; and address other political themes. The masterworks of the pop artists are in galleries and art museums, and the originals of the advertising images they recycle are everywhere. The genius—and the perversity—of Andy Warhol consisted in the way that he brought industrial styles of labor into the art world. Inspired by a trip to Italy, where the local communist party still was powerful, Warhol decided in the 1970s to paint this political motif, the hammer and sickle. He sent his assistant downtown in Manhattan to Canal Street, to a hardware store, to purchase a hammer and sickle, which he photographed. Turning that image into a silkscreen, he then painted Hammer and Sickle. As Arthur Danto has observed, this was a shrewd choice of subject (1998: 134–

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35). While the German Nazi regime has disappeared, the swastika still remains its potency; but the demise of state socialism means that the symbols of the communist world now are dead upon arrival, and so are safe subjects for still life painting. Employment of the novel technique of silkscreen painting allowed Warhol to be relentlessly prolific. He took a photograph; had a commercial firm turn it into a silkscreen; and then, with the help of assistants, swiftly mass-produced acrylic paintings. What’s philosophically interesting about this process, I have argued elsewhere, was that it permitted Warhol to make paintings, and also sculptures, novels, and films in a mechanical way, without employing the traditional techniques of art making (2009b). He made art without creating anything in the way that a traditional painter, novelist, or filmmaker creates. Thus, he silkscreened the images on Brillo Box; produced his book A: A Novel by transcribing tape recordings; and made films without either scripts or sets, by encouraging people from his studio to spontaneously perform before a running camera. Calling Warhol’s studio “the Factory” alludes to its employment and parody of factory-style labor. Of course, often very successful artists have had many studio assistants. What, however, was novel about “the Factory” was Warhol’s radical deskilling of artistic creativity. Bernini and Rubens had skilled assistants who helped them realize their visual conceptions. In Warhol’s studio, the process of art making was transformed—it became mechanized, like factory life. The ambition was to dissolve the traditional conception of artistic creativity. His deskilled art-making process was semimechanized. Carroll lives in a different world; he has studio assistants, but he doesn’t mechanize the making of his paintings. If you look just at Warhol’s subjects, then his art seems radically original. Earlier artists did not treat the hammer and sickle as a self-sufficient still life object. Nor did they paint soup cans or the other pop subjects of the 1960s in his deadpan fashion. And if you consider how Warhol made his paintings, then, again, his art is radically original. The use of the silkscreen and acrylic paint, both novel technologies, was highly innovative. And in the 1970s he made “piss paintings” by having studio assistants urinate on copper-painted canvases placed on the floor (Hainley). However, if you look at Warhol’s use of the medium of painting, then he is an oddly traditional artist, for he mostly uses a wall-mounted stretched rectangular canvas. Carroll’s deep originality

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involves experimentation with not the subjects, but the medium of painting. In demonstrating that the stretched rectangular canvas mounted on the wall is only one of many possible options he rethinks in an extremely fundamental way the very nature of painting. Warhol paints very ordinary subjects; Carroll uses absolutely ordinary materials, but his paintings are extraordinary ordinary things, as paradoxical as that phrase may sound. To properly understand this contrast between Carroll and Warhol, it helps to rehearse some philosophical ideas about labor. There is a long Marxist tradition, which is relevant here, linking modernist art with the labor process. According to classic German philosophy, coming from Kant and Hegel, we need to understand how the activity of labor transforms the world, in what (potentially) can be a liberating process. As a recent account of Karl Marx notes, his “invocation of the self-making of man by labour” develops his “idea that freedom meant self-activity . . . the capacity to produce was man’s ‘most essential’ characteristic .  .  . ‘estranged labour’ formed the basis of all other forms of estrangement” (Jones: 197–98). The key here is Hegel’s concept of alienation, developed in Phenomenology of Mind (1807). To work without being able to recognize what you have produced is the product of your own activity is, in a very literal sense, to be alienated; your product is alien to you. As Marx says in his early writing: “The work is external to the worker . . . it is not part of his nature; and that . . . consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work. . . . The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless” (Avineri: 106). In the first volume of Capital he spells out the significance of labor and, especially alienated labor: “Labor is . . . a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature . . . in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own needs” (177, 178). But because the worker cannot control this process, “the less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he employs it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.” Marxists have amplified this analysis. For example, in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Georg Lukacs says:

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The labour of the capitalist division of labour existing both as the presupposition and the product of capitalist production, is born only in the course of the development of the capitalist system. Only then does it become a category of society influencing decisively the objective form of things and people in the society thus emerging, their relation to nature and the possible relations of men to each other. (87–88)

According to Marx, this alienation will be overcome in an ideal future communist society. In one tradition of leftist art writing, discussion of alienation plays an important role. Art making is important, commentators argue, because it overcomes the otherwise all-pervasive alienation in the laboring process. During the 1930s Meyer Schapiro did explicit Marxist art history writing. Later, tempering his political commitments, he discussed alienated labor, without reference to Marx, as when in his “Abstract Art,” in obvious allusion to painterly abstract expressionism, he writes: What is most important is that the practical activity by which we live is not satisfying: we cannot give it full loyalty, and its rewards do not compensate enough for the frustrations and emptiness that arise from the lack of spontaneity and personal identifications in work: the individual is deformed by it, only rarely does it permit him to grow. (218)

Art making is a form of non-alienated labor. As Schapiro said: Paintings and sculptures . . . are the last hand-made, personal objects within our culture. Almost everything else is produced industrially, in mass, and through a high division of labor. Few people are fortunate enough to make something that represents themselves, that issues entirely from their hands and mind, and to which they can affix their names. (217)

By collapsing the distinction between factory labor and such traditional art making, Warhol challenges this way of thinking. Paintings like Hammer and Sickle extend the still life tradition, depicting inexpensive commodities, as his other pictures show mass-produced images of celebrities, of famous paintings (Leonardo’s Last Supper and Mona Lisa) and, of course, soup cans and the other very ordinary things depicted in his 1960s pop art. Carroll’s painting isn’t involved with these media—he doesn’t present or critique mass media images. But his art offers a real alternative to Warhol’s worldview, a utopian

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vision of the potentiality of labor. He rescues the dignity of labor by using banal materials worked without any special skill, to give aesthetic pleasure by virtue of his virtuosity in using the medium of painting. Needless to say, this abstruse philosophical commentary does not describe Carroll’s conscious concerns when he works. What I am arguing, however, is that such a perspective provides the most productive way of understanding his paintings. This concept of virtuosity is not familiar to art writers, and so it needs a little explanation. Some vivid examples come, perhaps unexpectedly, from classical music. Much of the piano music of Franz Liszt and, especially, Ferruccio Busoni, most particularly his variations on themes of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is composed for virtuosos. So too are many of the operatic solos and duets of Gioachino Rossini. This virtuosic music isn’t necessarily the greatest music—it’s music that proposes challenges in performing. For the virtuoso, dealing with difficulties is a welcome challenge. Speaking of virtuosic music thus is something more than an all-purpose term of praise. In visual art the term does not to have a firmly established meaning. And so here, in preparation for our discussion of Carroll’s virtuosity, I assemble six examples, from a wide variety of art, of visual virtuosity. One: In his visionary account of the fifteenth-century relief sculpture Madonna and Child with Angels (1450–60), by Agostino di Duccio, which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Adrian Stokes writes: Agostino was the master of undulation in the stone. His stone becomes a hotbed of shape. See the angel’s head at the bottom of the relief, his hand clinging to the frame as if he had emerged from the back layers and had passed through the Virgin to the front, or as if the stone were a sea in which he rocked by his hand to and from a breakwater. (248)

Two: In his discussion of Piero della Francesca’s Nativity (1470–75) (National Gallery, London), Kenneth Clark says: To anyone standing in front of the Nativity all . . . talk of influences . . . and of geometrical combinations, must seem beside the point. His whole attention will be focused on the harmony of blues which unfolds with cool and steady radiance in the lucid atmosphere. Of all Piero’s works, this is the one whose voice we hear first. Not only the angels but the colours seem to sing, and

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with a note so celestially pure that we feel as if he had discovered some new instrument. (62)

Three: His account deserves comparison with the justly much praised discussion by Roberto Longhi, which Clark speaks of with great admiration, of the same painting: It is a picture in which even the old, firmly joined spatial structure is reduced to a newer, freer one, indicated by subtle hints and practically intuitive relief effects: the perspective of the roof, barely indicated in relation to the ruined building; the way the ox is boxed in by a cubical foreshortening; the various directions taken by the groups of figures; the sudden glimpses into the distance. Precisely because of the very sparseness with which they are all tied together, all these spatial indicators are, as it were, enraptured, by the light. (74)

Four: In Art and Illusion Ernst Gombrich discusses the ways that painterly painting can elide presentation of detail, encouraging projection from the spectator. In J. M. W. Turner’s Approach to Venice (1843), he notes “the structure of objects if often quite swallowed up by the modifications of the moment—mist, light, and dazzle. . . . He suppressed what he knew of the world and concentrated only on what he saw” (1961: 296). Gombrich offers here a highly condensed history of “making and matching.” “When Duccio showed a boat, he depicted close details, which Turner sacrifices to depict appearances.” Thus, we see progress in representation making. Five: In Henri Matisse’s The Painter and His Model: Studio Interior (1941), David Sylvester notes, the artist shows a palm tree outside the room, in “a teasing allusion to Vermeer’s A Painter in his Studio.” The artist has his back to us—and the model faces us. In bringing together a seductive woman with a palm tree, Matisse had unwittingly painted a traditional allegory of fertility. She . . . remains the dominant element in the scene. . . . At the same time, she is scarcely more real, in a sense, than her effigy on the canvas; she is almost equally flat, schematic, featureless. (1996: 141)

Six: In his description of an Agnes Martin exhibition Peter Schjeldhal says: Edge and shape, figure and ground, and matter and atmosphere are reversible, bringing about, for me, a distinct oscillation in the optic nerve

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. . . My analytical faculties, after trying to conclude that what I’m looking at is one thing or another, give up, and my mind collapses into a momentary engulfing state that is either “spiritual” or nameless. (2008: 179)

These examples describe very different features of diverse visual artworks: use of the medium, stone; painted color; depiction of illusionistic scenes; art historical allusions; and a visual experience of abstraction which is hard to characterize. The uses of virtuosity in visual art thus are very varied. What all these cases share is an unusual skill in the activity of art making. Carroll is not an especially technically proficient painter; making his art does not involve the skills of, say, de Kooning’s painterly abstractions like Easter Monday. His virtuosity involves his uses of the medium of painting. Musical performers perform the score. By analogy, we might say that Carroll performs the medium of painting—he shows what options are possible. We’re very familiar with the long tradition in which the painter, working with pigment and a surface, creates precious objects by virtue of his skill at making representations. Carroll takes this process a step further, making fascinating artifacts by taking apart the medium of painting. The old masters and their modernist successors very often produced marvelous depictions of humble subjects. Carroll uses modest skills to produce exquisitely refined, wonderfully varied presentations of the medium of painting. And doing that gives a novel perspective, which I have attempted to spell out, on the entire pictorial tradition. In Chapter 2 we discussed, tentatively and so somewhat inconclusively, Carroll’s use of the medium of painting. There we focused on debates from the 1980s. Now, returning to that theme, we take up the terms of discussion looking to an earlier historical moment. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art has a long section of the medium of painting. Because he writes from the perspective of Berlin in the 1820s, Hegel’s suggestive account now seems obscure; there is, however, an instructive, lucid popularization of his argument in Walter Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873). What, concerns us here, in any event, is not Hegel-exegesis, but showing how his account is relevant to Carroll’s art. And so, we will not critically evaluate Hegel’s speculative analysis, which would be a task for another book, but merely use it to open up an historical perspective on Carroll’s achievement. Hegel is interested in the relationship between Christian sacred subjects and the medium of old master painting, pigment on a surface. Just as Christ is,

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according to believers, both man, incarnate, and God, who is spirit, and so not physical, so painting as representation is both a mere pigmented flat surface and a representation. Since Christ is both spirit and man, God incarnate, how then can He be represented in visual art? Christ the man can be presented visually, but not Christ who is one person of the Holy Trinity (II, 797, 801, 870). Because the medium of painting is the flat picture plane, in sacred works the subject “is transformed from the shape of something real into a pure appearance artistically created by the spirit of the artist.” Sculpture can show beautiful bodies, and so (Hegel thinks) was an art unique, well adapted to present the Greek gods. With its power to be suggestive, presenting sacred subjects that cannot satisfactorily be represented, painting is the art of Christian culture. As Pater writes, “The sensuous expression of ideas which unreservedly discredit the world of sense, was the delicate problem which Christian art had before it” (179). Here, of course, we get to the question of iconoclasm: How can God be represented in visual art? Hegel is concerned with the contrast between the subjects of old master painting and the medium of painting. His concern can be generalized, for often in old master and modernist art there is a contrast between humble artistic subjects and sophisticated representations of them. The Le Nains’ seventeenthcentury pictures of French peasants; Thomas Jones’s late eighteenth-century images of banal Neapolitan buildings; and genre scenes showing humble people and the still life pictures depicting inexpensive artifacts: all of these works present ordinary things beautifully painted. Carroll takes this process a step further. He uses ordinary materials and simple labor techniques to make highly sophisticated deconstructions of painting. A great deal of earlier European painting represents ordinary or banal or frumpy subjects. Carroll takes apart the medium of painting to present his artifacts. As we saw in Chapter 3, accounts of modernist abstraction envisaged successive artists flattening the old master picture space until, finally, with no room left for content, abstract art was created. Carroll arrives at abstraction by a completely different, arguably much more radical approach—by deconstructing the very medium of painting. Painting has long used banal materials to present precious things. When it depicts rare luxuries; shows distant landscapes; or, most especially, represents the scenes from Greco-Roman antiquity or from Scripture: then it makes

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present opulent artifacts and distant events. Renaissance and baroque Italian paintings do this when they depict sacred scenes, and Northern still life pictures do it when they show precious foodstuffs and varieties of natural marvels. Thanks to the power of visual representation, these various things, people, and places can be shown as if present. Painting has the ability to make visible these precious things and exotic sights. That makes it a great luxury. What exactly, it might be asked, do I mean here by luxury? To understand the particular way that I interpret Carroll’s paintings, a short, highly selective history of the concept of luxury is helpful. In his book Metaphor the Irish-born literary scholar Denis Donoghue recalls how when in childhood he served at a Mass, the priest employed incense: The smell of sanctity was thrilling. I wanted it never to end. Father McMullan swung the thurible slowly, and the smoke and the small drifted through the church. It was my introduction to luxury. (17)

Inherently precious objects—gold, silk fabrics, diamonds—are luxuries. And so too are rare things, like exotic seashells and the other contents of premodern Kunstkammers, the predecessors of our natural history museums. Some manufactured goods are luxuries because they are unusually finely finished and, also, relatively rare—suits by Giorgio Armani, shirts by Vivienne Westwood, and dresses by Commes des garcons, and cars by Rolls Royce or Ferrari, for example. And we have highly wrought representations of previous objects, in which precious things and exalted persons are presented in luxurious materials. As Michael Baxandall notes, in Sassetta’s St Francis Giving His Cloak to a Poor Knight (1437–44) the saint’s cloak is painted in lapis lazuli, the costliest pigment. After gold and silver, ultramarine was the most expensive and difficult colour the painter used. .  .  . To avoid being let down about blues, clients specified ultramarine . . . the exotic and dangerous character of ultramarine was a means of accent that we, for whom dark blue is probably no more striking then scarlet or vermilion are liable to miss. (1988: 11)

A sophisticated contemporary viewer would have recognized that pigment immediately, but nowadays, because painters use different materials, its importance needs to be registered. Other luxurious artistic media are easier to identify. For example, carvings in ivory such as Descent from the Cross (1653)

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by Adam Lenckhardt, which is in the Cleveland Museum of Art, use precious media to represent sacred figures. Finally, precious works of art made from banal materials using simple techniques can be luxuries. This, the category of luxury in which Carroll’s paintings fit, needs to be explained. When an old master painting shows sacred subjects, we are aware of the contrast between the typical banal pigments and the exalted figures represented. Some old master art shows banal subjects in pictures employing exquisitely subtle technique. In such images there is a dramatic contrast between what’s depicted, banal things, and the artist’s techniques used to make the representation, a contrast which becomes all the more dramatic when these paintings themselves become highly valued commodities. Here, of course, we have the familiar distinction between the subjects of figurative art and the means of presentation of those subjects. Carroll’s abstract art changes this conception of luxury in a challenging way. Finally, let us return to again consider the style matrix. Within the art world, every artwork exists alongside all of the others. That’s what we see in encyclopedic museums—and in world art history survey books. In Chapter 3 we discussed Arthur Danto’s account of style matrix and T. S. Eliot’s view of tradition. Let’s now go back to that commentary. Danto quotes Eliot’s essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”: “What happens when a new work is created is something that happens simultaneously to all of the works which preceded it . . . the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered” (1997: 164). Danto describes this result in terms of what he calls a style matrix, a description of all artworks. Adding a new work means that all the previous works are seen in new ways. After he developed this analysis, Danto himself became ambivalent about his conclusion. He worried that this ahistorical way of looking runs contrary to the art historian’s concern to understand the history of art. The style matrix redescribes art of the past after the fact, making visible connections which were unknown at the time. So, for example, adding Malevich’s monochrome Black Square to the art world means that we need an additional row on the chart, thus redescribing all the art that went before. And adding Carroll’s deconstructions of the medium of painting means that yet another row is required. This style matrix cannot explain change because it involves looking back on the events after the change has taken place. In that way, it is like the reverse

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historical narratives considered in Chapter 6. Later art changes how we see what came earlier. The critical question, still, is: Can the historian of art legitimately consider this result? As we said earlier, we cannot change the past—the past remains what it was: History cannot be rewritten. But that is not exactly what happens here. New art causes us to see earlier art differently. Thanks to Carroll, for example, we see the uses of the medium in modernism differently. As we said in Chapter 6, what we are comparing is not the older work as it appeared originally, and as it is seen now, but that older work seen first by itself and then in relation to some newer work. Suppose, following Danto, we conclude that experience of the more recent art changes unavoidably how we see what came before. And so, when Carroll deconstructs the medium of painting, he enables us to see early art, both modernism and old master artworks differently. By showing how the medium of painting can be taken apart, Carroll adds a new column to the style matrix. And that means that earlier art now is seen differently. If we look at the broad history of European art in terms of its subjects, then we find dramatic development, for the grand subjects of history painting, stories from Scripture or the history of antiquity, are replaced by landscapes, still lives and cityscapes, representational content which is seemingly banal. Now, so Carroll shows, that process can be taken a step further. At the start of his career Carroll found a way of thinking, not previously much explored and certainly not adequately written about. His art matters because it engages in fundamental ways with the medium of painting. A great deal of the philosophical literature devoted to contemporary painting is concerned with the death of this art form. Many critics felt that after Morris Louis, painting had gone as far as was possible, and that nothing new was conceivable. Douglas Crimp expressed this commonplace idea very clearly: “The systematic, single-minded, persistent attempt to once and for all empty painting of its idealist trappings gives to Ryman’s work its special place during the 1960s as just the last paintings which anyone can make” (165). The young abstract artists of the 1980s whose work we have surveyed in Chapter 4 had to deal with this worry. Carroll isn’t interested in dealing with these concerns. He doesn’t want to, for his practice demonstrates that now the development of abstraction involves something more than an endgame. In his essay on Morandi, Carroll says: “Time is one of the greatest gifts a painter can have and Morandi protected his with a life spent focused on what he

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needed, and not foolishly chasing after what he did not. I don’t think Morandi always understood exactly what he was doing. He trusted that he would find the painting through the painting of the painting” (2017: 65). Here, of course, Carroll also describes himself. What matters in the end is the sensuous experience of his paintings. Made of banal materials, using simple tools, with techniques that hardly involve any skill of craft, they will seem strikingly subtle once you become aware of their place in the history of art. Gilles Altieri offers a good account of the relationship of these two painters: “Like Giorgio Morandi, Lawrence Carroll seeks to express the interior beauty of things, above all those things that are most humble, neglected and daily” (2007). Coming from a seemingly narrow starting point, Carroll creates an immense variety of works. In that way, he is like Morandi—if you can imagine someone with Morandi’s sensibility working abstractly. This I think is the ultimate source of the pleasure inspired by his art—a gratifying sense of plenitude, a demonstration of the richness of abstract art. When in this chapter I have discussed visual virtuosity and luxury of visual art, I was offering ways to describe this pleasure. Throughout this book I have been very conscious of the vast distance between my bookish intellectual analysis and experience of the immediate sensual qualities of Carroll’s paintings. What is intrinsic to philosophical art writing is the distance between abstraction of thought and concreteness of reference: this is intrinsic to the nature of philosophy (including aesthetics), which must generalize. The difficult critical question, then, is how such an analysis can do justice to the art. Let’s go back one last time to Hegel’s Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art: “Art has nothing else for its function but to set forth in an adequate sensuous present what is itself inherently rich in content, and the philosophy of art must make it its chief task to comprehend in thought what this fullness of content and its beautiful mode of appearance are” (I, 611). Allowing for the very large changes in the vocabulary of art theorizing since Hegel’s time, this I would argue, is a word-perfect statement of what Carroll’s painting achieves. Carroll has the gift of simplicity—and in our crowded, noisy visual culture, that is a rare skill. Here, in conclusion, let us return briefly to some distinctions made in the Introduction. The gap between philosophical aesthetics and the usual practice of art writing is enormous. Generally, philosophers write mainly for their academic philosopher colleagues—and art writers certainly do not seek to

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engage philosophers. These philosophers usually offer abstract arguments, typically without close reference to art historical examples; while the art writers look at case studies, generally without focusing on abstruse aesthetic theory. How then can a philosophically grounded analysis like this book, which is devoted to one contemporary painter, bridge this gap? The central tension, the apparent paradox, which is motivating our analysis, lies in the dramatic contrast between Carroll’s intuitive ways of thinking and the abstract philosophical commentary, which I offer. There is, I grant, a real conflict between focus on individual artworks and offering the arguments of aesthetic theorizing. But that can be a productive situation, because here it has inspired thinking about Carroll’s art in what I hope are nicely original ways.

Lawrence Carroll: Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2017 Lawrence Carroll. As the Noise Falls Away Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Madgeburg Lawrence Carroll. That What Comes Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris I Have Longed to Move Away Lawrence Carroll, Opere/Works 1985–2017 Museo Vincenzo Vela, Ligornetto Lawrence Carroll Buchmann Box, Berlin Lawrence Carroll. I Want to Go Home Buchmann Lugano Lawrence Carroll. Under the Blue Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

2014–15 Lawrence Carroll. Ghost House MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna

2013–14 Lawrence Carroll. Back to the Cave Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

2013 Lawrence Carroll. Nothing Gold Can Stay Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris Lawrence Carroll. In the World I Live Fundació Palma Espai d’Art, Casal Solleric, Palma, Mallorca

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Deposizione. Opere di Lawrence Carroll Chiesa di San Fedele, Milan

2012–13 Lawrence Carroll. In the World I Live Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Dublin

2011–12 Lawrence Carroll. Another Life Buchmann Galerie, Agra/Lugano

2010–11 Lawrence Carroll. Everyday I am Here Galerie Karsten Greve, Köln

2010 Lawrence Carroll. Dusty Corners Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris

2009–10 Lawrence Carroll. Dust, Prop, Freeze Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

2008 Lawrence Carroll Museo Correr, Venice Lawrence Carroll Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

2007–08 Lawrence Carroll. Peinture, Installations Hôtel des Arts, Toulon

2007 Lawrence Carroll. New Works Galleria Cardi, Milan

2006–07 Drawings 1995 Ace Gallery, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

Lawrence Carroll: Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions

2006 Lawrence Carroll Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

2005 Lawrence Carroll Schmidt Contemporary Art, St. Louis Lawrence Carroll. 20 Works Galleria Fumagalli, Bergamo Lawrence Carroll. Pitture attorno al bianco Villa Panza, Varese Lawrence Carroll. Work that Needs Silence Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice Lawrence Carroll. 50 Octobers Galeria Altair, Palma, Mallorca Lawrence Carroll Galeria Xavier Fiol, Palma, Mallorca Lawrence Carroll Ace Gallery, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

2004 Lawrence Carroll Galeria Carles Taché, Barcelona Lawrence Carroll Ace Gallery, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles Lawrence Carroll Studio Trisorio, Rome/Naples Lawrence Carroll Tannery Arts, London Lawrence Carroll Luca Giordano. Deposizione, Galleria San Fedele, Milan

2003 Lawrence Carroll Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki Lawrence Carroll

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Ace Gallery, Los Angeles Lawrence Carroll Studio La Città, Verona

2002 Shadow Paintings Buchmann Galerie, Köln Lawrence Carroll. Getting Lost Raum der Stille Karmelitenkirche, Munich Lawrence Carroll Galeria Xavier Fiol, Palma, Mallorca Lawrence Carroll Galerie Carles Taché, Barcelona Lawrence Carroll Galeria Altair, Palma, Mallorca

2001 Lawrence Carroll Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

2000 Lawrence Carroll Studio La Città, Verona Lawrence Carroll Ace Gallery, Los Angeles Lawrence Carroll Ace Gallery, New York

1999 Lawrence Carroll Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris Lawrence Carroll Project Room, Ace Gallery, New York

1998 Lawrence Carroll Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart

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Lawrence Carroll Buchmann Galerie, Köln Lawrence Carroll Galerie Alexander Seis, Düsseldorf

1997 Lawrence Carroll Galerie Peter Bäumler, Regensburg Lawrence Carroll Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris Lawrence Carroll. Recent Works Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea, Milan (in collaboration with Gian Enzo Sperone)

1996–97 Lawrence Carroll Kunsthalle, Munich

1996 Lawrence Carroll Galleria Milleventi, Turin Lawrence Carroll Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem Lawrence Carroll e una natura morta di Giorgio Morandi Studio La Città, Verona Paintings and Drawings Buchmann Galerie, Köln Lawrence Carroll Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome Blanket for Rothko Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles

1995 Lawrence Carroll. Painting and Drawings Lawing Gallery, Houston Lawrence Carroll. Drawings Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles

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Lawrence Carroll-John Millei. Paintings Studio Trisorio, Naples

1994 Lawrence Carroll Städtische Galerie im Museum Folkwang, Essen Lawrence Carroll: où les choses dorment Centre d’art contemporain du Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan, France Lawrence Carroll Buchmann Galerie, Basel Lawrence Carroll, Paintings and David Carrino: Photographs (Projects Room) Grand Salon, New York

1993 Lawrence Carroll Jim Schmidt Contemporary Fine Art, St. Louis Lawrence Carroll Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles Lawrence Carroll Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach

1992 Lawrence Carroll Stux Gallery, New York Lawrence Carroll Galerie Beaumont, Luxembourg

1991 Lawrence Carroll Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris Lawrence Carroll Röntgen Kunst Institut, Tokyo; Gallery Hibell, Tokyo

1990 Lawrence Carroll Stux Gallery, New York

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1989 Lawrence Carroll Stux Gallery, New York Lawrence Carroll Galerie Ryszard Varisella, Frankfurt am Main

1988 Lawrence Carroll Stux Gallery, Boston/New York “New Paintings” by Lawrence Carroll Stux Gallery, Boston

1986 Silvermine Gallery, New Cannan, Connecticut City Without Walls, Newark, New Jersey

Selected Group Exhibitions 2017 Focus. La materia della forma Collezione Panza di Biumo Museo d’arte moderna di Trento e Rovereto Mart, Rovereto (a cura di/curated by Denis Isaia e/and Gianfranco Maraniello) Switch On 3: Vito Acconci, Giovanni Anselmo, Lawrence Carroll, Tony Cragg, Hanne Darboven, Giorgio Gri a, Jannis Kounellis, Chiara Lecca, Dennis Oppenheim, Gilberto Zorio Galleria Fumagalli, Milan

2016–17 Zeichnung Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

2016 Accrochage: Josef Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Lawrence Carroll, Lucio Fontana, Gotthard Graubner, Mimmo Jodice, Catherine Lee, Claire Morgan, Gideon Rubin, Joel Shapiro, David Smith, Pierre Soulages and Cy Twombly Galerie Karsten Greve, Sankt Moritz

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Summer show Galerie Karsten Greve, St. Moritz/Köln Hurt: Basil Beattie, Lawrence Carroll, Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Patrick Graham, Catherine Lee, Alice Maher, Michael Warren Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin Sammeln ist wie Tagebuch führen Galerie Rainer Wehr, Stuttgart

2015 Flowers for you Buchmann Galerie, Agra/Lugano Lugano Mostra Bandiera Lungolago, Lugano Accrochage: Bill Beckley, Lawrence Carroll, Stephane Da on, Ulrich Erben, Jürgen Klauke, Robert Longo, Dennis Oppenheim, Kenny Scharf Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf Au Rendez-vous des amis Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini «Collezione Burri», Città di Castello (a cura di/ curated by Bruno Corà)

2014–15 Omaggio a Giuseppe Panza di Biumo La passione della collezione Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Roma (curated by Nicoletta Cardano and Francesco Moschini) Allegro Giusto. Exploring Villa Maraini: a tour with many guides Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome Exposición XXV ANIVERSARIO Tim Ayres, Adam Ball, José Bechara, Lawrence Carroll, Frank Gerritz, Herbert Hamak, Umberto Manzo, Cecilia Paredes, Winston Roeth & Santiago Villanueva Galeria Xavier Fiol, Palma, Mallorca

2014 Per formare una collezione #3 madre-Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples (in progress) Infinito presente. Elogio della relazione Museo Diocesano Tridentino, Trento

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(curated by Andrea Dall’Asta, Domenica Primerano and Riccarda Turrina) Acchrochage Galerie Karsten Greve AG, St. Moritz Enantiodromia. Simon Callery, Angela de la Cruz, Lawrence Carroll, Onya McCausland Fold Gallery, London Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. Dialoghi americani Ca’ Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna (curated by Gabriella Belli and Elisabetta Barisoni) Künstlerräume Galerie Karsten Greve, Köln

2013–14 Ri-nascere. Nascita e rinascita tra arte antica e arte contemporanea Museo del Territorio Biellese, Biella (curated by Andrea Dall’Asta and Irene Finiguerra) Accrochage Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf Incontri. Zeitgenössische Italienische Kunst Schauwerk Sindel ngen, Sindel ngen

2013 Summer Show Spazioborgogno, Milan Tàpies. Lo sguardo dell’artista Palazzo Fortuny, Venice In principio. Studio Azzurro, Josef Koudelka, Lawrence Carroll Padiglione della Santa Sede, 55. Esposizione internazionale d’Arte della Biennale, Venice (a cura di/curated by Antonio Paolucci) Nur Skulptur! Kunsthalle, Mannheim Turn o the Sun: Selection from La Colección Jumex Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona

2012 Tra Natura e Spirito Omaggio a Giuseppe Panza di Biumo Galleria San Fedele, Milano

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Holy . . . holy . . . holy Galerie Toxic, Luxembourg Poule! Jumex Collection, Mexico City Giorgio Morandi Museo d’Arte Città di Lugano, Lugano (curated by Maria Cristina Bandera and Marco Franciolli)

2011–12 New Exhibition The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami Personality Galleria Michela Rizzo, Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, Venice

2011 Lawrence Carroll, Gotthard Graubner, Sean Scully—Body and Soul Hôtel des Arts, Toulon (curated by Gilles Altieri) Bocconi Art Gallery, Università Bocconi, Milan Alla luce della croce. Arte antica e contemporanea a confronto Raccolta Lercaro, Bologna

2010–11 The Crystal World. To J.G. Ballard Buchmann Galerie, Berlin Lawrence Carroll Yellow Works and Wilhelm Mundt Yellow Murano Glass Sculptures Buchmann Galerie, Agra/Lugano Just Love Me. Regard sur une collection privée Musée d’Art Moderne Gran Duc Jean, Luxembourg-Kirchberg Il Museo Privato. La passione per l’arte contemporanea nelle collezioni bergamasche Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and M. Cristina Rodeschini)

2010 Entre glace et neige Processi ed energie della natura

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Centro Saint-Bénin, Aosta (curated by Laura Cherubini and Glorianda Cipolla) Collettiva. Tony Cragg, Lawrence Carroll, Giovanni Rizzoli, Luca Clabot, David Rickard Galleria Michela Rizzo, Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, Venice Light Show-Group Show Buchmann Galerie, Agra/Lugano State of Mind. Minimal Art, Panza Collection Lucca Center of Contemporary Art, Lucca (a cura di/curated by Maurizio Vanni) It must be abstract Galleria Cardi, Pietrasanta Juni Edition 1991—18 Künstler aus New York Kunstraum no. 10, Mönchengladbach Latitudini-Longitudini Galleria Michela Rizzo, Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, Venice Situations Galeria Altair, Palma, Mallorca

2009–10 Crossed Landscapes. Views of Es Baluard’s Collection Es Baulard, Museo d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma, Palma, Mallorca

2009 Bollito misto Buchmann Galerie, Berlin Opere dalla Collezione. La Donazione Panza di Biumo. Acquisizioni, donazioni e depositi recenti. Dalla ne dell’Ottocento alle Avanguardie Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano Glasstress Evento collaterale alla 53. Biennale d’Arte Internazionale, Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, Venice Detournement Venice 2009 Evento collaterale alla 53. Biennale d’Arte Internazionale, Ca’ Zanardi, Venice 1999/2009, Regard sur la Collection du Conseil Général du Var

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Hôtel des Arts, Toulon E si prese cura di lui. Elogio dell’accoglienza Galleria San Fedele, Milan Objectschilderijen Roger Raveelmuseum, Machelen aan-de-Leie

2008–09 Wall Works. Giovanni Anselmo-Daniel Buren- Lawrence Carroll-Mario MerzFelice Varini- Lawrence Weiner Buchmann Galerie, Agra/Lugano Made in Munich—Editions from 1968 to 2008 Haus der Kunst, Munich Ortus Artis e Fresco Bosco. Natura e Arte in Certosa Certosa di San Lorenzo, Padula (curated by Achille Bonito Oliva)

2008 Call it what you like! Collection Rik Reinking Art Centre Silkeborg Bad, Silkeborg 25 anys Galeria Altair, Palma de Mallorca Corpo Sociale ’08 Galleria Pack, Milano Palazzo Fortuny, Venice

2007–08 Lawrence Carroll & Steve Riedell. A Conversation Between Friends Studio Trisorio, Naples/Rome La vida privada. Colección Josep M.Civit. Representaciones de la Tragedia y la banalidad Contemporàneas Centro de Arte y Naturaleza, Huesca (a cura di/ curated by Menene Gras Balaguer)

2007 La Collezione Giuseppe e Giovanna Panza di Biumo a Palazzo Lomellino Arte contemporanea nell’appartamento Strozzi Palazzo Lomellino, Genova SEA, Simposium Escultura Alicante, Colección Panza Castillo Santa Bárbara, Alicante Il settimo splendore. La modernità della malinconia

Lawrence Carroll: Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions

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Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti, Verona (a cura di/curated by Giorgio Cortenova) Americanos. Made in USA Galeria Pelaires, Palma, Mallorca

2006 EMMA—Espoon modernin taiteen museo, Espoo, Finland 2006, The Year in Art. 5th annual exhibition Sydney Disegni, Carla Accardi, Lawrence Carroll, Rebecca Horn, Bethan Huws, Anish Kapoor, Jannis Kounellis, Marisa Merz, Juan Munoz, Marco Tirelli Studio Trisorio, Naples/Rome Domenico Bianchi, Lawrence Carroll, Jannis Kounellis, Remo Salvadori, Giuseppe Uncini Galleria Cardi, Milan Sentire con gli occhi. L’arte della Compagnia di Gesù: annuncio di fede e promozione della giustizia Galleria San Fedele, Milan The Painting Show Galeria Xavier Fiol Arte Contemporáneo, Palma, Mallorca (a cura di/curated by Pilar Ribal)

2005–06 La strada. Sedicesima edizione di Fuori Uso con i lavori di una ventina di artisti Ex mercato ortofrutticolo, Pescara (a cura di/curated by Agnes Kohlmeyer)

2005 Acqua, Aria, Terra, Fuoco. I quattro elementi: l’energia della natura fra arte e scienza Palazzo della Borsa, Genova Pittura e spazio. Carroll-Chamberlain- Mundt-Paladino-Penone Buchmann Galerie, Agra/Lugano 50 Jahre documenta 1955–2005. Diskrete Energien Kunsthalle Fredericianum, Kassel (a cura di/curated by Michael Glasmeyer) West Coast Painting Galerie Biedermann, Munich (curated by Petra Giloy-Hirtz)

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Visioni. 20 artisti a Sant’Agostino Ex Chiesa di Sant’Agostino, Bergamo (a cura di/curated by Annamaria Maggi) La Collezione Panza in Università Università Bocconi, Milan

2004–05 AAVV:30 Galleria Fumagalli, Bergamo Je ne regrette rien Studio La Città, Verona

2004 Shadow Paintings—Colored Paintings Ace Gallery, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles Eclips. 25 jaar Deweer Art Gallery Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem Poëziezomer Watou Watou Practice Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles (curated by David McDonald)

2003–04 Da sein. Positionen zeitgenössischer Kunst aus der Sammlung Reinking Ernst Barlach Museum, Wedel

2003 Taché a Pelaires. Carroll, Cragg, Kounellis, Rousse, Scully Centro Cultural Contemporani Pelaires, Palma, Mallorca

2002–03 Le stanze dell’arte. Figure e immagini del XX secolo Museo d’arte moderna di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto (a cura di/curated by Gabriella Belli) Heintz’s Wonderland Dexia Art Gallery, Brussels

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2002 Monochromatic Light. Artisti americani ed europei dalla collezione Panza. Anne Appleby, Lawrence Carroll, Timothy Litzman, Winston Roeth, David Simpson, Phil Sims, Ettore Spalletti Palazzo Ducale, Sassuolo (a cura di/curated by Filippo Trevisani)

2001–02 Il respiro nascosto delle cose. Pier Paolo Calzolari, Lawrence Carroll, Lena Liv [. . .] Studio La Città, Verona

2001 La percezione dello spazio. Arte Minimal della Collezione Panza dal Guggenheim di New York Palazzo della Granguardia, Verona Oggi per domani Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano Anstiftung zu einer neuen Wahrnehmung Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen

2000 Lawrence Carroll & Images of People Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem Painting Today—Overseas and Here Renate Schröder Galerie, Mönchengladbach Pleasure Treasure. Recent Acquisitions from the Collections of Eileen and Peter Norton Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles Dello spirituale nell’arte. Dai miracoli all’opera come reliquia Lumezzane, Gardone, Orzinuovi, Breno

1999–2000 Panza. The Legacy of a Collector The Giuseppe Panza Di Biumo Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

1998 La Collezione Panza di Biumo. Artisti degli anni ’80 e ’90 Palazzo Ducale, Gubbio Lawrence Carroll and Sean Scully

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Lawing Gallery, Houston Les objects contiennent l’in ni Tours, École supérieure des beaux-arts de Tours, organisée en collaboration avec le Centre d’Art Contemporain du Domain deKerguéhennec, Bignan (a cura di/ curated by Denis Zacharopoulos) Master Drawings Galerie Peter Bäumler, Regensburg Pollution Galleria Gian Ferrari, Milan

1997 Tra post-minimal e concettuale. Opere inedite dalla Donazione Panza di Biumo Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano After the Fall: Aspects of Abstract Painting Since 1970 Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, New York (curated by Lilly Wei, Snug Harbor)

1996–97 L’ossessione del segno Studio La Città, Verona

1996 Silence Douglas Lawing Gallery, Houston La collezione Panza di Biumo: artisti degli anni’80 e ’90 Palazzo delle Albere, Trento Positionen. Reisen an die Grenzen der Malerei Museum Folkwang, Essen (a cura di/curated by Gerhard Finck) Bild-Skulpturen/Skulpturen-Bild. Neue Aspekte plastischer Kunst in der Sammlung Jung, Aachen Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen

1995–96 The Material Imagination Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York (a cura di/curated by Nancy Spector e/and Lisa Dennison)

Lawrence Carroll: Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions

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Intervenciones en el espacio: la historia de un proyecto Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas (a cura di/curated by María Elena Ramos)

1995 A sculpture show Sperone Westwater, New York Donazione Panza di Biumo Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano The Spirit of the Matter Grand Salon, New York Abstraction from Two Coasts Douglas Lawing Gallery, Houston

1994 Der Stand der Dinge Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln (curated by Udo Kittelmann) The Painting Show Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem (a cura di/curated by Jan Hoet) Lawrence Carroll, Tony Cragg, Wilhelm Mundt Manuela Allegrini Arte Contemporanea, Brescia Skulptur. Works by Lawrence Carroll, Marianne Eigenheer, Mic Enneper, Jan Fabre, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Rüdiger Last, Barbara Probst, Beverly Semmes, Xavery Wolski Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf Reveillon ’94 Stux Gallery, New York

1993–94 Object Bodies William Weston Clarke Emison Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle; Turman Art Gallery, Indiana State University, Terre Haute (a cura di/curated by Terry R. Myers)

1993 Residual hope: Eric Cameron, Lawrence Carroll, Michel Dector, Michel Dupuy S. L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto (a cura di/ curated by Sharon Brooks)

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Plötzlich ist eine Zeit hereingebrochen in der alles möglich sein sollte Kunstverein, Ludwigsburg (a cura di/curated by Udo Kittelmann) Elvis Has Left the Building (A Painting Show) 521 West 23rd Street, New York (curated by Collins & Milazzo) Extravagant—The Economy of Elegance Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York Beyond Paint Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (curated by Maurice Poirier) Privat—Lawrence Carroll, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Tony Oursler, Nina Roos, Marianne Uutinen, Anders Wido Galleri F 15, Moss Jours tranquilles à Clichy John Good Gallery, New York

1992 Whiter Shade of Pale Galerie Sophia Ungers, Köln (a cura di/curated by Udo Kittelmann) Who’s Afraid of Duchamp. Minimalism and Passport Photography? Annina Nosei Gallery, New York (curated by Collins & Milazzo) The New Physical Abstraction in Los Angeles Ace Contemporary, Los Angeles Documenta IX Museum Fredericianum, Kassel (curated by Jan Hoet) Habeas Corpus. Vito Acconci, Louise Bourgeois, Christian Boltanski, Lawrence Carroll, Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, Wolfgang Laib, Bruce Nauman, and Andres Serrano Stux Gallery, New York Für die Galerie. Dealing with Art Künstlerwerkstatt Lothringer Strasse, Munich

1991 Invitational Tony Shafrazy Gallery, New York Lawrence Carroll, Holt Quentel, Erwin Wurm—Körper und Hüllen Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna

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1990 Musée de Beaux-Arts Bruxelles Mayor Rowan Gallery, London Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf Je viens de chez le charcutier Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris

1989–90 All Quiet on the Western Front? Galerie Antoine Candau, Paris (curated by Collins & Milazzo) Einleuchten. Will, Vorstel & Simul in HH Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (curated by Harald Szeemann)

1989 De Rozeboomkamer Beeld-en-Route Foundation, Diepenheim (curated by Urbain Mulkers) Galerie Ryszard Varisella, Frankfurt am Main Pre-Pop Post-Appropriation Stux Gallery, New York (curated by Collins & Milazzo, in cooperation with Leo Castelli) Holtegaard Museum, Vedbaek

1988–89 The New Poverty II Meyers/Bloom Gallery, Los Angeles (a cura di/curated by Collins & Milazzo)

1988 Art at the End of the Social The Rooseum, Malmö (curated by Collins & Milazzo) O White: Ford Beckman, David Carrino, Lawrence Carroll, Saint Clair Cemin, Abraham David Christian, Suzan Etkin, Andrew Lord, Holt Quentel Salvatore Scarpitta, Not Vital Diane Brown Gallery, New York (curated by Collins & Milazzo) New Works by Gallery Artists Stux Gallery, Boston

1987 Larry Carroll and Steve Riedell. Recent Paintings

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Gallery 503 Broadway, New York Performance Space 122, New York Miniatures Stux Gallery, Boston Artist in the Marketplace: 1987 Bronx Museum, New York Queens Museum, Flushing, New York Juried Exhibition, Best of Show Award City Without Walls, Newark, New Jersey (jurors: Peter Frank and Stefan Stux) Philip Stanbury Gallery, New York

1986 Silvermine Gallery, New Cannan, Connecticut City

1985 Now Gallery, New York

1983 Hanson Gallery, Santa Barbara

Lawrence Carroll: Selected Public and Private Collections

United States Hall Collection

Houston Museum of Fine Arts MFAH

Los Angeles Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA Luckman Gallery, California State University Museum of Contemporary Art MOCA

Miami Margulies Collection at the Warehouse Rubell Family Collection RFC

New York Chase Manhattan Bank New York Guggenheim Museum

San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art

Mexico Città del Messico/Mexico City Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo

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Venezuela Caracas Museo de Bellas Artes

China Shanghai Long Museum

Japan Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art MoMAT

Australia Sydney Art Gallery of New South Wales

Finland Espoo Espoo Museum of Modern Art EMMA

Tampere Sara Hildén Art Museum

France Tolone/Toulon Hôtel des Arts

Germany Amburgo/Hamburg Sammlung Reinking Mannheim Kunsthalle Mannheim

Lawrence Carroll: Selected Public and Private Collections

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Mönchengladbach Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Sammlung Wemhöner Sindel ngen Schauwerk Sindel ngen, Sammlung Schau er Stoccarda/Stuttgart Kunstmuseum Stuttgart

Italy Roma/Rome Musei Vaticani

Rovereto Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto Mart

Sassuolo Palazzo Ducale (permanent installation)

Varese Villa e Collezione Panza (permanent installation)

Venice Ca’ Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna

Switzerland Collezione Rolla/Rolla Collection

Lugano BSI Art Collection Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Collezione Cantone Ticino & Donazione Panza di Biumo

Mendrisio Panza Collection

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Bellori, G. (1672 [2005]), The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1672), trans. H. Wohl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blunt, A. (1967), Nicolas Poussin: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1958. London: Phaidon. Bois, Y-A. (1992), Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954. Washington: National Gallery. Bostrom, N. (2016), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. R. Nice. New York: Routledge. Cabanne, P. (1971), Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. New York: Penguin. Carrier, D. (1975), review of G. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, Journal of Philosophy, LXII, 22: 823–25. Carrier, D. (1983a), review of A. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and R. Wollheim, Art & Its Objects, Studies in Visual Communication, 8, 3: 86–88. Carrier, D. (1983b), “Gombrich on Art Historical Explanations,” Leonardo, XVI, 2: 91–96. Carrier, D. (1985), “Painting into Depth: Jonathan Lasker’s Recent Art,” Arts, 59, 5: 142–44. Carrier, D. (1986), “New York, Museum of Modern Art. Morris Louis 1912-1962,” Burlington Magazine, CXXIX December l986: 926–27. Carrier, D. (1987a), “Ekphrasis and Interpretation: Two Modes of Art History Writing,” British Journal of Aesthetics, XXVII, 1: 20–31. Carrier, D. (1987b), Artwriting. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press Carrier, D. (1989a), “Early Poussin in Rome: The Origins of French Classicism, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth,” Arts, 62, 3 March l989: 63–67. Carrier, D. (1989b), “Signification and Subjectification. The Recent Paintings of Tom Nozkowski and Gary Stephen,” Arts, 62, 5 May 1989: 48–53. Carrier, D. (1991a), “David Reed. An Abstract Painter in the Age of Postmodernism,” in S. Bann and W. Allen (eds.), Interpreting Contemporary Art. London: Reaktion Books, 67–84. Carrier, D. (1991b), with David Reed, “Tradition, ‘Eclecticism’ and Community. Baroque Art and Abstract Painting,” Arts, 64, 1 January l991: 44–49. Carrier, D. (1991c), Principles of Art History Writing. University Park and London: Pennsylvania University Press. Carrier, D. (1993a), Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. Carrier, D. (1993b), “Tom Nozkowski. An Interview with David Carrier,” Tema Celesta 40 (Spring 1993): 68–69.

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Index Alberti, Leon Battista 49–50 Alpers, Svetlana 147–8 Andre, Carl 35, 38, 80 Anfam, David 118–19 Animals, The 66 Antonioni, Michelangelo Blow Up (1966) 76 Arendt, Hannah 36 Arte Povera 41 Bakhtin, Mikhail 85 Barthes, Roland 67 Baudelaire, Charles 12 Baxandall, Michael 15–16, 35, 81, 132, 143, 165 Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures 21–4, 25, 130 Beckett, Samuel 108 Bell, Julian 112 Bellori, Giovann Pietro 129 Benjamin, Walter 42 Bess, Forest 94 Blunt, Anthony 7 Bois, Yve-Alain 8 Bostrom, Nick 63 Bourdieu, Pierre 77 Burden, Eric 66 Busoni, Ferruccio 161 Cabanne, Pierre 43 Cara, Bruno 154 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 37, 86, 91, 137, 142 Carroll, Lawrence 4th Room, MAMbo 58 Another Life (2009) (artist sketch) 155 Drinking the Rain (1994) 59 Figment (1985) 144, 145 Guilt (1992) 151–3, 155 MAMbo, first gallery 19

Museo Vincenzo Vela, Ligornetto, room 13 82 newspaper illustrations self-published Newspaper #7, Dublin City Museum the Hugh Lane exhibition, “In the World I Live,” November 9, 2012–February 10, 2013, Sketch, 2012; Marquette, MI. 139 self-published Newspaper #7, Dublin City Museum the Hugh Lane exhibition, “In the World I Live” November 9, 2012–February 10, 2013, Sketch, August 22, 1985, NYC, Ball point pen 140 Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013) 122, 123 permanent installation; Villa Panza, Varese, Italy 102 Untitled, Insert Painting (1985) 95, 104 Untitled, insert painting (1986) 18 Untitled (1985) #9 128 Untitled (1986) 18 Untitled (1988) 18 Untitled (1989–90) 18, 81 Untitled (1990) 17, 32, 33, 56, 60 Untitled (1998) 40, 56, 57 Untitled (2014) 125 Untitled (2017) 123, 124 Untitled box painting (2006–14) 19 Untitled Cut Painting (1985) 32 Untitled Floor Piece (1992–94) 17, 32–3, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 48, 60, 81, 151, 155 Untitled-Flower Painting #1 (2007–12) 106, 107, 123, 151 Untitled flower piece (2014) 18–19, 56 Untitled Freezing Painting (2013–14) 48–9 Untitled hinge painting (2013) 19, 59 Untitled light painting (2014) 19, 48

206

Index

Untitled No. 51 (1993) 19, 56 Untitled shelf painting (1985) 18, 40, 56 Untitled Table Painting (2006–14) 17, 60, 127 Untitled Yes bag (2014) 18 Yes (Floor Piece) (2000) 18, 58–9 Catoir, Barbara 122 Cattelan, Maurizio 64 Cavell, Stanley 58 Cézanne, Paul 111, 133 Large Bathers (1906) 116 Still Life with Jar, Cup, and Apples (1877) 110 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon A Lady Taking Tea (1735) 22 Silver Tureen, The (1728–30) 109–10 Cimabue Crucifix (1290) 52 Clark, Kenneth 161–2 Clark, T. J. 129 Courbet, Gustave 37 Crimp, Douglas 167 Danto, Arthur 8, 9–10, 14, 29–30, 113, 129, 146, 151–2 “Abstracting Soutine” 134–5 Analytic Philosophy of History (1965) 114 style matrix 79–80, 166–7 Transfiguration of the Commonplace, The 4–6, 7, 102 De Duve, Thierry 8, 57, 76 De Kooning, Willem 80, 134–5, 137 Easter Monday (1955–56) 105–6, 111, 163 Woman VI (1953) 116–17 della Francesca, Piero 80 Baptism of Christ (1440–50) 22 Nativity (1470–75) 161–2 Di Duccio, Augustino, Madonna and Child with Angels (1450–60) 161 Di Suvero, Mark 35 Dickie, George 74–5 Diderot, Denis 8, 12, 109–10 Donoghue, Denis 165 Duchamp, Marcel 35, 36, 38, 43 Fountain 33, 64, 71

Elderfield, John 7–8 Eliot, T. S. 79 Elstir Harbor at Carquethuit

89–90, 90

Félibien, André 37 Forge, Andrew 42 Freedberg, Sydney 142 Fried, Michael 8, 10, 49–50, 51, 60–2, 69 “Art and Objecthood” 57 Fry, Roger 12, 143–4 Gauguin, Paul 126 Gilliam, Sam 40–1 Golub, Leon 40–1 Gombrich, E. H. 9–10, 66, 148 Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1961) 109, 162 Story of Art, The 43–4, 111 Goodman, Nelson 6, 10 Languages of Art 9 Greenberg, Clement 10, 12, 17, 50–1, 54, 55–6, 62, 66, 69, 80, 94, 96, 113, 122–3, 135, 143 “After Abstract Expressionism” 60 Guercino 97 Halley, Peter 96–7 Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich 4, 5, 149 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 146–8, 163–4, 168 Phenomenology of Mind (1807) 159 Heidegger, Martin 76 Hockney, David 44 Hume, David 65–6 Hung, Wu 59 Johns, Jasper 107 White Flag (1955) 106, 111 Three Flags (1958) 123 Johnson, Ken 100–1 Jones, Darren 83 Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The 9–10 Judd, Donald 35, 38 Kandinsky, Wassily 30 Kant, Immanuel 4, 84

Index Kierkegaard, Søren 84–5 Krauss, Rosalind 8, 10, 66–7, 69, 129 Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, The 62, 67 Kubler, George 44–5, 86 Lasker, Jonathan 95, 98 Lenckhardt, Adam Descent from the Cross (1653) Lichtheim, George 130 Liszt, Franz 161 Longhi, Roberto 162 Louis, Morris 51, 61, 71, 167 Alpha Pi (1960) 48–50 Lukács, Georg 159–60

165–6

Mahon, Denis 39, 156 Malevich, Kazimir 40, 80, 166 Manet, Édouard 51 Mangold, Robert 104–5 Martin, Agnes 162–3 Marx, Karl 159 Masheck, Joseph 8, 10, 17, 52–6, 57, 122 Matisse, Henri Painter and His Model: Studio Interior (1941), The 162 McMeekin, Sean 115 Milazzo, Richard 35, 126–7, 153 Morandi, Giorgio 126, 130, 167–8 Motherwell, Robert 31, 137 Mozart, Wolfgang 161 Nabokov, Vladimir 129 Nehamas, Alexander 20 Newman, Barnett 137 Nickas, Bob 113–14 Nozkowski, Thomas 95, 98 Panza, Count Giuseppe 101 Pater, Walter 118, 164 Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, The (1873) 163 Picasso, Pablo 31, 38 Demoiselles D’Avignon, Les (1907) 116–17 Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910) 22 Pincus-Witten, Robert 48

207

Pissarro, Camille 130–1 Pissarro, Joachim 85, 130–2 Plato 63 Pliny the Elder 4 Podro, Michael 4–5 Pollock, Jackson 137 Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950) 106, 111 Potter, Paulus Young Bull, The (1647) 143 Poussin, Nicolas 31, 34, 37, 38, 72, 91, 94, 103, 137, 156–7 Abduction of the Sabine Women, The (1633–34) 109 Death of Germanicus, The (1628) 39 Ulysses Discovering Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedon 143–4 Proust, Marcel 27, 91, 110 Finding Time Again 62–3 In Search of Lost Time 12–13, 14, 15, 108 In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower 89–90 Puryear, Martin 40 Quine, W. V.

67

Rauschenberg, Robert 38, 42, 57, 73, 124, 132 Bed (1955) 123 Rawls, John 63 Reed, David 95, 96–7, 103 Reinhardt, Ad 36 Reylea, Lane 47 Reza, Yasmina 77 Rodchenko, Alexander 40 Rodin, Auguste 42 Rossi, Laura Mattioli 146 Rossini, Gioachino 161 Rosso, Mendaro 126 Rothko, Mark 137 Rubenstein, Raphael 93 Ryman, Robert 83, 142 Saltz, Jerry 49 Sassetta St Francis Giving His Cloak to a Poor Knight (1437–44) 165

208

Index

Schapiro, Meyer 94, 110, 160 Schjeldhal, Peter 131, 162–3 Scully, Sean 24, 77, 91, 95, 103–4, 126–7, 131, 137 Backs and Fronts 98–100 Serra, Richard 87 Siegel, Katy 97 Smith, David 40 Soutine, Chaim 134–5 Spark, Muriel 14 Steinberg, Leo 56, 73, 107–8 Stella, Frank 81, 126 Leblon II (1975) 143, 144 Working Space 141–4 Stevens, Mark 105 Still, Clyfford 137 Swan, Annalhy 105 Sylvester, David 25, 117 Tatlin, Vladimir Counter-Corner Relief (1914) 90–1 Titian 80 Todorov, Tzvetan 85 Tomkins, Calvin 73 Truitt, Anne 40 Turner, J. M. W. Approach to Venice (1843) 162

Tuymans, Luc 126 Twombly, Cy 96 van Eyck, Jan Arnolfini Marriage (1434) 122 Varnedoe, Kirk 40 Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock 112–13 Vasari, Giorgio 4, 109, 129, 135 Venice 154–6 Vico, Giambattista 4 Warhol, Andy 38, 151, 158–9 Brillo Box 29–31, 33, 36, 48, 71, 75 Hammer and Sickle 155, 157–8, 160 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 42 Wittkower, Rudolf Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750 6–7 Wolfe, Tom 77 Wollheim, Richard 10, 34–5, 48, 133–4 Art and Its Objects 9, 34 “The Institutional theory of art” 77–8 “Minimal Art” 34–6, 36, 38–9 Yau, John

123, 154

Plate 1 Ghost House/MAMbo, 2016. Foreground Untitled (1998), courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve. Back wall at far right Center Untitled (1990), Untitled (2014), Collection of the Artist, Far right, 1992-2000 Untitled Private collection

Plate 2 Victory (2009–10), Private Collection

Plate 3 Untitled slip painting (2011), Collection of the Artist,

courtesy Galerie Buchmann

Plate 4 Ghost House/MAMbo, 2016. Fugitive”(for Mark) (1991–1993), I don’t have answers (1985-1986), Void (1985–1986). Collection Museum Cantonale de’Arte Lugano (CH) Panza Collection Gift 1994

Plate 5 Museo Vincenzo Vela, 2017. Far left, Figment (1985). Collection Museo Jumex, Mexico City. Center, Little Figment (1985). Collection the artist. Far right, Untitled (1985), Museo Cantonale d’ Arte, Lugano, Panza Collection. In foreground, Drop (1992), Panza Collection.