Portrait of Dora Maar

Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar (shown at right) illustrates another dramatic treatment of figure-ground and the play of flatness and depth.  Both the head and the body of Dora Maar open to merge with the field.  As a diagram of a figure merging with the ground, the drawing acts as a metaphor.  It suggests that there is a world of causality transferring information from extensive space to the figure, and from the figure to extensive space.  The image seems like a shorthand notation of the third dimension creatively adapted by Picasso to link modernism’s interest in painting as a flat surface to the Western tradition of modeling in perspective and deep space. 

In their book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson give the name “image-schematas” to what I have called models in images.  They show in detail how image-schematas are inherent in metaphors such as the body as a container, and represent a fundamental process by which we express our understanding of structure in the world. 

Metaphors direct us toward a realization of what Whitehead calls conceptual feelings.  These are thought-feeling constructs of causality, immanence, and the idea that more than one position in space-time is required to comprehend objects.  Such is the power of the imagination in processing a few signs which link us to discourses of previously harmonized experience. Lakoff and Johnson tell us that we remold our experience by metaphors as we experience the image in the first place.  Thus image-schematas are mental organizations that we use to navigate between abstract propositions and the particularities of concrete images.

Picasso’s drawing allow us to find relations between the sense of the body as a container that is, never less, open to the world, and an imagined sense of Maar’s life history. For example, while Maar is painted facing us, her left eye and left side of her mouth read in profile, and her hand is shown in two positions forming image-schematas in close proximity that imply the multiple positions of cubism.  While Picasso avoids the illusion of homogeneous perspective space that characterized Renaissance painting, he achieves feelings of depth both of space and of human poignancy.  The foreshortening of the arm and the tiny ear, in contrast to the larger scale of the face, suggest the third dimension and give a satisfactory and even forceful gestalt of the actual compactness of Maar’s figure as we know it from photographs.  The sensitive eyes and mouth, and the tensions and lyricism of the calligraphic strokes of the head, eyebrows and neckline all contribute to content via their metaphors.  The pensive eyes and sensitively drawn mouth, their ambiguities reflecting perhaps an introspective sadness, pique our curiosity about the woman’s state of mind.  Picasso’s decisive gesture of opening the figure has an abruptness that can be harmonized with the abruptness of the foreshortened arm and the spatially isolated right eye.  The evocative power of these compressions and the economy of their powerful design demonstrate Picasso’s genius as he creates possibilities for drawing upon already harmonized meanings of unseen experience through the reconstitution of a few potent cues.  The abruptness forces our attention and recognition.  A lesson to be drawn from this painting is that the parts are particularly effective as carriers of information, and that we continually formulate these parts into wholes based on our assembly of contexts.  We remember this process from gestalt theory, while it finds fuller elaboration in Whitehead.  Picasso’s Dora and Rembrandt’s complex modeling in Lady With a Pink, and The Jewish Bride, for me, exemplify heights of the West’s achievement in representing spatial depth as a metaphor of immanence and causality.

An Analysis of Picasso’s Baboon and Young Using Whitehead’s Theory of Events

A perceptual event is best envisioned as a matrix of cues within the visual field.  We act on the cues with apparent simultaneity.  What really happens is that some cues act as instructions for the interpretation of others.  A perceptual event is always a process; it is never a fixed totality given at an instant.  Any verbal presentation of the perceptual event has to be somewhat linear, and thus somewhat arbitrary in assigning emphasis and order.  As Whitehead characterized the event of “Humpty Dumpty seated on a wall,” the wall is not actually antecedent to Humpty Dumpty.  Bearing this qualification in mind, I turn to the figure shown to the lower right.  My eye is drawn first to the car-head of the baboon mother, her girth and to the baby on her chest.  These closures and the recognition of a tail, an ear, and a leer are near simultaneous perceptions.  I could as well have included the mother’s feet and the baby’s arms.  All these features can be considered as events.  I shall describe what I believe to be important useful properties initiated by the ingression of selected objects that qualify these events.

Consider the baby’s head.  Its form admits to several possibilities.  It could be a baby baboon, a human head or even a planet-world.  In his expression of these possibilities, Picasso utilizes the negative prehension.  This is Whitehead’s term for the initial mental process of taking up any perceptual object, a process that includes the recognition that the object is this and not that.  The negative prehension excludes possibilities, yet it enables us to feel the contrast of an excluded possibility together with the selected possibility, which can give art ambiguity, depth and complexity of meaning, as in this sculpture.     

This comparative process can be a component of a propositional feeling, which is a latter phase of the perceptual process.  The feeling that the baby’s head could also be a human head, and it’s near spherical shape also a symbol of the world, are propositional feelings.

Paraphrasing Rudolph Arnheim, who describes the process in simpler terms, memory concepts are flexible.  As we search for a suitable closure or concept – this toy Volkswagen is a baboon head or this baby head is a planet – we call upon various aspects of such concepts until an appropriate one presents itself.  Continuing our analysis we notice that the baboon mother’s arms do not comfort and support the baby but extend out into space.  The mother’s eyes also stare into space; they do not engage the baby.  These cues offer instructions that we use to form certain propositional feelings.  They contradict the idea of mother caring for infant.  They allow alternatives such as disengagement or indifference.  I call attention to the baby’s outstretched arms on the mother’s chest.  Along with the baby’s arms, I recognize the mother’s shoulder, biceps, extended forearm and hand as events.  The arms are long, consistent with my experience of baboons or other simians.  The gesture of both arms reads not only as “clinging to mother,” but also as an act of obeisance.  Picasso’s genius is evident in the economy with which he recalls simian and human anatomy and spans meanings from clinging to praying.  He has left much unfinished texture and detail.  This provides an ambiguous ground, encouraging us to impute meaning and to find harmony in the more defined details. 

There is a pronounced sense of audacity in Picasso’s sculpture.  Among the instructions which direct us to audacity as a reference frame are the outsized feet, planted as if to forcefully present the “outrageous” aggregation of pot-bellied stove body and outsized leering car head with even more exaggerated ears.  Another instruction is provided by the material itself.  The bronze surface of the sculpture has connotations of age, permanence and coastlines, and is redolent with associations from art history.  Picasso is probably aware of shocking conventional taste here, just as Degas was when he presented a bronzed ballerina wearing a tutu made of real cloth to a Victorian audience conditioned to figures of homogeneous marble or bronze.  Picasso is making a statement, qualified by audacity, humor and confidence that his ad hoc assemblage of discarded objects is in the same class as preceding high art bronzes.  At every level, my description involves a complex meld of feelings induced by shapes, subjects, contexts, propositions and associations that are directed by my subjective aims or ideals as I survey the events in Picasso’s sculpture. 

This discursive analysis may leave the impression that perception is a linear interpretation of individual cues.  This is not usually the case.  Perception is much more a networking matrix in which random and simultaneous cues are evaluated on both conscious and subconscious levels.  The mind is comparing shapes, forms, textures, associations, and other stored knowledge to intensify and control the relationships between toy car and baboon mother.  The process calls attention to likenesses and narrows down alternatives.  We make new meaning out of analogies between forms and ideas not usually associated with each other.  By making associations, displacements and new combinations, we create symbols that unify the dissimilar at a level of deep feeling or highly-interesting intellectual significance.  For instance, Picasso’s audacious ensemble evokes irony.  Is the baboon-car mocking humankind as if it worships technology?  Or does Picasso’s sculpture mean that we have come to recognize that the universe is constituted so that some aspects of any of its events, no matter how disjunctive the events may appear to us, can mingle?  The most likely answer is that Picasso’s decisive design devices intend to project the importance of both meanings. 

The most fascinating property of the human mind, unlikely to be duplicated by computers, is its ability to anticipate and reconstitute the briefest shorthand notations and to place them within appropriate, rapidly changing, highly complex contexts that can link events throughout our known continuum of space-time.  The spherical head of the baby is presented as if it were included in a class of similar events:  the spherical eyes of the mother, the spherical headlights, and the spherical midsection of the mother, which supports a second baby with a spherical head at lower left.  This is the familiar artistic device of repetition.  It created rhythm, and it is a means of separating while linking the forms within the class.  As Suzanne Langer puts it, “The explicit image is of two or more particulars, but the whole gamut is implicitly presented, so that they seem like selective realizations springing out of a matrix or body of potentialities.  A selective realization can be powerful, as in the head of the baby.  Is this the head of a baby or a planet-world, or a symbol of “Technological Man and Woman” objectified within the gamut?  Langer goes on to say, “The appearance of partial realizations within the gamut makes elements emerge and submerge like transient aspects of its inward being.”  Langer’s partial realizations and transient aspects are another way of describing the inter-subjective feelings engendered by Whitehead’s negative prehensions.

To sum up: visually perceived things, such as stones, pencils and artworks, are best considered as s matrix of cues that are processed as Whiteheadian actual entities whose meanings have come to realization out of our experiences in the continuum of space-time.  The body-mind, conceptualized as a changing yet continuing stream of actual occasions that form the individual personality, governs the process of synthesizing meaning.  Visually perceived things are not single, permanent entities, nor can any part of an entity remain contained within one limiting focus of meaning.  All entities extend to the world beyond themselves.  Gregory Bateson comes to a similar, common sense conclusion about the extensive world.

I see a redwood tree standing up out of the ground, and I know from this perception that underneath the ground at that point I shall find roots, or I hear a sentence and may know at once from that beginning the grammatical structure of the rest of the sentence and may very well know many of the words and ideas contained in it.  We live in a life in which our percepts are perhaps always the perception of parts and our guesses about wholes are continually being verified or contradicted by the later presentation of other parts.  It is perhaps so that wholes can never be presented.