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“There is a sense in which all art is of the body, particularly so in the eyes of those who accept that the painted surface and other media of art represent as a general form, which their employment particularises, the actualities of the hidden psychic structures made up of evaluations and phantasies with corporeal content”
This chapter will consider how a number of important British psychoanalytical concepts, discussed above, have been deployed in the aesthetic theory and art criticism of two significant contributors to contemporary aesthetics. I shall be focusing on the writings of art critic Peter Fuller, and philosopher and aesthetician Richard Wollheim, with a view to exploring their respective contributions to a British psychoanalytic aesthetic: one that is essentially grounded on a corporeal theory of pictorial meaning and aesthetic value.
Fuller's account of the “colour field” painters, Robert Natkin and Mark Rothko, provides an interesting example of how