Understanding Form in Painting

DEAR DR HAYLEY,

Dr Esman, a psychiatrist, has not commented upon the major theoretical contentions of my paper (Int. Rev. Psychoanal., 9), essentially applied psychoanalysis, but has restricted himself to interpretations of art history and criticism, not the principal area of my expertise nor his either, I might add.

The theories that I advanced in my psychoanalytic approach to understanding the new art are neither validated nor invalidated by the facts of art history.

I would point out that Dr Esman has made a few blatant mistakes of his own in attempting to correct me:

• 1Dr Esman points out that Noland had a rich palette and is therefore to be excluded from the ranks of contemporary painters who employ minimal principles such as sparseness of color. No so. As Waldman (1977) points out, Noland is fundamentally concerned with symmetrical centered organization and the way color works within that structure. Form heightens the impact of color when he juxtaposes pure vibrant colors into separate but contiguous zones. Color interest, in the new art, as opposed to the old, is subordinate to structural function.

• 2Dr Esman does not understand that while there were examples of certain isolated features of three dimensionality before the Renaissance, the scientific basis of the perspective image and the principle of depth perception (which includes nine classes of cues for the third dimension, overlapping contours, linear perspective, aerial perspective, interpretation of size, etc) postdate that era … See explanation in The Oxford Companion to Art, Clarendon Press, 1920: 'an achievement of the 16th Century A.D.' (pp. 854f).

• 3The same sort of confusion exists in Dr Esman's discussion of large size in which he gives examples of large size which existed before the modern contemporary period which I was discussing in my article. It is true that these are large size but they are not what I was talking about large scale. None of the examples he gives qualify as large scale works