Brushstroke and Emergence: Courbet, Impressionism, Picasso by James D. Herbert (review)

Within a modern critical context, it goes without saying that artists cannot control the interpretive reception their work receives, no matter how insistently they make their standpoint known. Relying on a theory of emergence, Herbert takes a further step, a long one, arguing that the message itself is not wholly the artist's. By "emergence," he means "the way in which the interactions of simple behaviors at one level of a complex system can prompt unpredictable events at a higher level of the system that are qualitatively different from anything that exists at the lower level." He applies this concept to the pictorial mechanics of painting not in the familiar sense that no one fully controls a collective aesthetic discourse already in play, but rather in the sense that an artist cannot, any more than anyone else can, exercise ultimate control over his or her productive effort. If Herbert is correct, we must no longer interpret an artist's brushstroke or concatenation of marks as an adequate, uncomplicated index to an expressive personality. Nor may we assume that the resulting representational image was wholly intended, as if preconception and execution could flow from a single human source with no interference.

The assumption of direct expression was dear to many nineteenth-century artists and critics, if only because it offered a way to resist the indoctrination of the state, its institutions, and society with its bourgeois norms. You could express yourself in your personal way by whatever means available, rather than parroting clichés of the general culture. But even during the nineteenth century, historians, as opposed to critical advocates of individual aesthetic expression, looked broadly for the causes of perceived effects; an expressive personality was not the only potential origin for properties of an image that seemed "expressive." Excepting the psychoanalytically inclined, today's art historians, like their predecessors, do not assume a direct path between effort and creative result; and even for psychoanalysis the way meanders. Something is always intervening, and that something becomes the secondary target of critical interpretation. When pictorial convention contradicts the assumption of direct expression, we call on stylistic analysis to reveal the inner workings of the artistic process. If the intervening factor is social constraint, we do some social history. If it is economic or class interest, we critique the dominant ideology (as best we can, since it is ours).

For Herbert, the intervening factor is emergence. He does not deny that canonical forces operate but seeks to redress the balance between them and emergence, as if to prevent the closure so typical of historical analysis that finds the true cause for the chosen effect (whether in convention, psychology, society, ideology, or their combination). Emergence is no ordinary intervention—or perhaps it is the most ordinary and ubiquitous of all. As an internal rather than external force, it is not subject to analysis as we usually apply it, interpreting from the outside, relying on factors that operate apart from art as well as on it: conventions, psychologies, societies, ideologies. When Herbert analyzes examples from Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and others, he perceives in these works evidence of emergence. He presents this evidence, which nevertheless cannot explain the pictorial order. He is in the position of the entomologist who, even if able to track the behavior of each individual ant, cannot account for the form the colony assumes. Failure to reach analytical closure—willingness to admit this failure—leads the investigator to a concept of emergence that becomes an explanation of the lack of explanation. Addressing the painter, not the ant, Herbert writes: "It is as if the dynamic of the brushstrokes colonized the character of the artist, rather than the artist dictating the nature of painting."

A theory of emergence establishes the limits of customary historical practice: "We must avoid regarding the painting itself [as] translating world to artist or viewer, or artistic sensibility to viewer." We no longer reason that Monet observed and then represented a...