Looking and Difference in the Abstract Portraits of Charles Demuth and Duncan Grant

CR (Christopher Reed):

This is a talk on two themes: looking and difference. The first is a very Prownian one, for Jules’s classes always emphasized careful looking. What we learned as the “Prown method” begins with, in his words, “a close analytical reading of the image, moving from objective description.” ¹ Jules drilled us in categories of formal analysis: Where is the area of lightest light? Darkest dark? What are the repeating shapes? Implied diagonals? Now, in the classroom, I hear myself ask the same questions, and I am grateful for his teaching.

And then there is difference—a less Prownian theme, perhaps. For Jules, in his writings as in his teaching, faith in sameness is an enabling premise. In “Style as Evidence” he comments: “As different as minds may be or become, there is reason to believe that. . . the sensory apparatus and perceptions of all individuals are not and have not been drastically dissimilar. . . . allowing for the facts that one’s cultural perspective undoubtedly colors perception.” Difference—what is called here “cultural perspective”—is not so much ignored as sidelined in order to reach, and here I quote again, “the premise, and it is admittedly a large one, . . . that rough is rough, wet is wet, hot is hot, and red is red to all human perceivers.” ² Without going into arguments about comparative physiology—and without denying the extremely useful work enabled by the assumption of sameness—we want to rescue from the sidelines the notion of difference.

The objects we have chosen from the Yale collections raise the issue of difference in several interrelated contexts: differences rooted in sexuality and gender, differences associated with national identity, the difference that separates the avant-garde from the mainstream. These, obviously, are not the only formations of difference relevant to the practice of art history. But our engagement with these objects—and with each other’s engagement with these objects—has focused on these issues as case studies in the dynamics of difference roiling under the calm surface of Prownian practice.

If we take seriously the claims of structural linguistics, for starters, all the terms of Prownian formal analysis—roughness, wetness, hotness, even redness—are not objective perceptions of fact, but judgments based on difference: rough, not smooth; wetter than what? But we are more interested in a related set of questions: Rough to whom? Wet in what context? Red rather than pink? Rather than “cranberry” or “cerise”? These questions may seem like needless complications of the factual realm marked out by, for example, the color wheel, but, of course, the wheel is just one system. Various nineteenth-century color theorists proposed other relationships among hues; the Japanese draw the blue/green distinction differently than we do in the West; the Abelam of New Guinea recognize only four hues, so tones we would distinguish as purple, blue, or green are all seen as black. ³ Even within our own society, forms of cultural difference may lead to arguments over such superficially objective distinctions. Women—or men, for that matter—with a connoisseurial expertise in lipstick and blush may perceive important distinctions between colors like “cranberry” and “cerise,” which others experience simply as “red”. In short, even on the level of perception, different lookers may see different things.

One could—and in Jules’s seminars, we did—try to resolve such differences in our search for the sameness we called objectivity. When debates over interpretation arose during the so-called “factual description” stage of analyzing an object, Jules instructed us to postpone them to the later stage of “subjective interpretation.” As in all processes of consensus, however, there was a cost to rendering away our differences in the melting pot of the seminar. Instead of opening up inquiry into the sources of our differences—the way our varying “cultural perspectives” might or might not be rewarded or frustrated by the visual repertoire of the object—this methodology reaffirmed common habits of vision as “objective,” and categorized variations as the products of individual subjectivity.

Now we want to acknowledge that...