Painting and Language: A Pictorial Syntax of Shapes

Abstract

In previous articles, the author proposed that paintings can have syntactic rules. In this article he develops his proposal further and shows that shapes act as syntactic elements in the languages of painting styles. He meets Nelson Goodman's objections to his proposal by showing that shapes meet the criterion of syntactic discreteness proposed by the latter to separate linguistic from other symbolic systems. His approach is to specify style as the domain of a language of painting, to show that style is syntactical and to argue that shapes are the primitive syntactic elements of style. His essay relates current research on the development of syntax for picture-reading machines to the question of syntax for paintings. Analysis is a way of learning what works of art are in their actual presented being, by learning the aesthetic elements and relations which go to make up that being. D. W. Prall [1] I. PAINTING AND LANGUAGE The principal difficulty plaguing all efforts to speak of painting as language is to make clear what it would be for painting to be a language [2]. Of those philosophers who take up the general question of language and art, some, such as Dewey and Ducasse, speak mainly of 'the expressive language of art' [3]. Gombrich's treatment of painting as language in Art and Illusion gives a helpful analysis of semantic or representational aspects of a 'language of painting' [4]. Neither of these approaches clarifies adequately what it would be for painting to be a language. The expressive hypothesis takes account of a single aspect of painting or language and explanations of semantic or representational aspects of painting or language are incomplete when considered apart from syntax. Gombrich's use of the terms 'vocabulary' and 'schemata' to characterize language-like features of painting is ambiguous as to the precise nature of language-like features of paintings because he does not clearly differentiate between representationalsemantic and syntactic features of paintings [5]. Even Mothersill's critical discussion of Gombrich's thesis on art and language omits consideration of