Intention and the Interpretation of Works of Art

INTENTION AND THE INTERPRETATION OF WORKS OF ART ALBERT PRIOR FELL In the Sewanee Review (Summer, 1946) there appeared an article written jointly by W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley entitled "The Intentional Fallacy," which has become something of a classic as a short pungent statement of the negative side in the controversy about whether or not artists' intentions are relevant to the tasks of interpreting and evaluating works of art. Several types of person have contributed to the discussion of this question; literary critics and scholars, historians of the visual arts, and philosophers who have been interested in clarifying the concepts of intention and the work of art. At the risk of a certain oversimpli£cation, one could say that anti-intentionalists are those who maintain that in the tasks of interpreting and evaluating a work of art we should refrain from posing questions about the artist's intention because this inevitably draws us away from the work of art to the biography of the artist, whereas intentionalists are those who say that it is often useful, and indeed necessary on occasion, to pose such questions and that it does not seem to be the case that preoccupation with biography ensues. The problem is a complex O ne which, for complete analysis, calls for an examination and clarification of two notoriously difficult concepts-the concept of intention and that of the work of art. This paper is restricted to the more limited tasks of distinguishing several senses in which critics and historians speak of interpreting works of art and showing how intimately this interpretive activity is bound up with a concern for the artist's intention. It seems to me that it is almost necessary to ally oneself with the inten· tionalist position in some form because if all questions about the artist's intention are eliminated in the endeavour to cleanse the work of extraneous material there is a mortal danger of throwing out the baby with the bath. A work of art doesn't just happen. It is a "work." An artist intends that his work be approached and understood in a certain way. The spectator may fail to see the point of what he has done, but he nonnally Volume XXXVI, Number I, October, 1966 INTENTION AND THE INTERPRETATION OF WORKS OF ART 13 assumes that a work of art is the sort of thing that has a point, that it can be understood or misunderstood, read correctly or misread. When the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood was in London during the First World War he used to pass by the Albert Memorial each day. For a long time he thought it mis-shapen, corrupt, crawling. By any standard of beauty which Collingwood entertained, it seemed a very inferior work. The Memorial began to obsess him because he was not sure that his assessment of what the architect, Scott, had done was correct. Collingwood thought of works of art as objects which compel not only attention but also an effort of interpretation. Perhaps Scott had not intended to produce something which would be thought beautiful. Before making a critical judgment Collingwood wanted to be sure that he at least understood it, that he was approaching it with the expectations required to discern its formal and expressive qualities. An art historian could compare Collingwood's experience with that of a Hellenistic Greek travelling in Egypt who might well have wondered why Egyptian carvings and drawings were so rigid and unconvincing . Didn't the Egyptian craftsmen know how to give an accurate representation of a real or imagined reality? Or was it perhaps partly because they did not share the narrative and representational intention of Helenistic craftsmen? If the latter, would it not have been more reasonable to approach the works, not as naively handled scenes from daily life, but, say, as pictographic embodiments of typical and timeless realities? Consider Picasso's bronze sculpture "Baboon and Young" (1951). Picasso has taken a toy car and used it to form the head of the grotesque figure of the baboon. The general intention-the humorous association of the grill, mudguards, hood, and windshield with the features of a baboon...