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The Art Historian: In the first of his two lectures, In Defense of Representation, Richard Bernheimer follows the representative function of art through the centuries from the time of the cavemen up to our own day and comes to the conclusion that, 'Representation in art is ultimately inevitable … because, whatever its other functions may be, art is a total human response to reality in its entirety; since this reality is offered to us in sensible shapes and forms, we deprive ourselves of the principal source of artistic illumination by excluding these from our experience… It seems to me one of the primary tasks of criticism to understand the relation between the formal and the implied values in art, to establish how formal means have been and can be used to create a deeper understanding of the world beyond the limits of mere pleasantness and good taste. We are only at the beginning of that task.'
In his second lecture, Concerning Symbols, Bernheimer investigates the significance of our symbols, mainly the representational and conventional ones. He states that symbols are of great significance in all artistic expression, that they are inherent in all works of art. Religious symbols serve to unify the spatially separated congregation into the oneness of a real community. Symbolism in art has a similar social function. The psychoanalytic interpretation of symbolism and its significance for the effect of works of art is not taken into consideration in this lecture.
The Archaeologist: In his first lecture, The Archaeological Approach, Rhys Carpenter attempts to follow the genetic line of development of representative art from its early beginnings with the main emphasis on form. In his second chapter, Modern Painting, he follows the development of the technique of painting in its imitative quality and avers that, 'The emotional sources of art are its nonmimetic forms'. The third chapter, Further Comment, deals with the secularization of the content of art out of co