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Time in the Visual Arts: Lessing and Modern Criticism

Author(s): Jeoraldean McClainReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 41-58Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430538 .

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JEORALDEAN McCLAIN

T i m e i n t h e V i s u a l A r t s :L e s s i n g a n d M o d e r n Criticism

THIS ESSAY is a study of the question oftime in the visual arts as it is related to aselected body of art and literary criticismwhich had its origin in Lessing's Laocoon(1766). First of all, it should be remarkedthat whereas Lessing's famous distinctionbetween literature and art has played a sig-nificant role in modern literary criticism, itsuse in art criticism has been relatively slight.It might have been greater, and indeed itwill be one purpose of this paper to showhow the two fields of criticism can bebrought together. Time as a factor in thevisual arts emerged in the LaocoonthroughLessing's polarization of time and spacewhich led him to identify two separatecategories of aesthetic expression, succes-sion and simultaneity. Lessing meant thatthe visual arts are essentially spatial andsimultaneous whereas literature is tem-poral and successive. (It followed that ar-tists and writers should stay within the limitsof their proper domains.) As a result ofLessing's Laocoon, historians have had themeans with which to gauge the relative de-grees of spatiality or temporality in works ofart as well as literature, and literary criticshave used it frequently since the 1940's. Asfor the art historians, a number have be-come involved with the same distinction be-tween the simultaneous and the successivethat Lessing made, but with respect to thephilosophy of Henri Bergson, and this isthe chief legacy of Lessing to recent artcriticism.The major point which this paper makesis that Lessing's polarization of space andtime, of art and literature, does provide auseful approach to the subject of time invisual art. But it willbe reactivated, throughlinks with literary criticism, to explore theJEORALDEANCCLAINs assistantprofessor n thedepart-ment of art and designat Iowa State University.

historical coexistence f time and space in artin order to show the manner in which paint-ing has been able to transcend the limita-tions inherent in the spatial medium. Thatspace and time coexist in art has been re-marked often. One recalls that Ann CoffinHanson said of Manet's Bar at the FoliesBergerethat the picture was both constantlyin motion-out of focus-as well as static,thus fulfilling "Baudelaire's admonitionthat the modern artist must extract fromthe ephemeral and transitory the poeticand eternal qualities of his own age." AndLilian Brion-Guerry said of Cezanne'slandscapes that the artist showed that paint-ing could give the illusion of successivemoments in time so that the observer thinkssuccessively as well as simultaneously in hisimagination.In the following examples, time in artranges from a passive coexistence withspace in the expression of timelessness, toactive instantaneousness, prolonged dura-tion, and a dramatic intraspatial tension.There we will see polar stylistic expressionsof the visual unity of space and time, but notspace and time at opposite poles in art andliterature, and these expressions will be re-lated to Kenneth Pike's linguistic theory ofthe particle, wave and field modes of per-ception. In this way art and literary criticismcan join more comprehensively around theissue of time in the arts.I.

The author who is most closely associatedwith bringing Lessing's name into the lightof modern criticism in the arts is JosephFrank, a historian of literature, whosewell-known article entitled "Spatial Form inModern Literature" was published in1945.1 Frank cited a passage from the Lao-coon (1766) which is well worth repeating? 1985 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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since it continues to be quoted to the pres-ent day.I reason as follows: If it is true that Painting

employs in its imitations entirely different means orsymbols from those adopted by Poetry-i.e. theformer using forms and colours in space,the latter,on the other hand, articulate sound in time-if it isadmitted that these symbols must be in suitablerelation to the thing symbolized, then symbolsplaced in juxtaposition can only express subjects ofwhich the wholes or parts exist injuxtaposition; andconsecutive symbols can only express subjects ofwhich the wholes or parts are consecutive.Subjects, the wholes or parts of which exist injuxtaposition, are termed bodies. Consequentlybodies, with their visible properties, are the specialsubjects of painting.Subjects, the wholes or parts of which are consecu-tive are generally termed actions. Consequently ac-tions are the special subjects of poetry.Yet all bodies do not exist in space only, but also intime. They continue to exist, and may, at each mo-ment of their duration, assume a different appear-ance or stand in a different combination. Each ofthese momentary appearances and combinations isthe effect of a preceding one, and may be the causeof a subsequent one, thus forming, as it were, thecentral point of an action....[A painter] can only make use of a singlemoment nthe course of an action, and must therefore choosethe one which is the most suggestive and whichserves most clearly to explain what has precededand what follows.2

With this publication Frank establishedsimultaneity and succession as basic formalcategories of aesthetics in the critical litera-ture of the modern arts. The purpose ofFrank's essay was to apply Lessing's methodto modern literature, saying, "It is quitepossible to use Lessing's insights . . . as in-struments for analysis." However, Frankreactivates Lessing's attempt to define thelimits of literature in order to show exactlyhow modern literature has transcendedthese boundaries.

Modern Anglo-American poetry received its initialimpetus from the Imagist movement of the yearsdirectly preceding and following the First WorldWar. "An image is that which presents an intellec-tual and emotional complex in an instant of time."Such a complex does not proceed [in the form of anarrative sequence], in union with the laws of lan-guage, but strikes the reader's sensibility with aninstantaneous impact. At the very outset, therefore,modern poetry advocates a [method] in direct con-tradiction to Lessing's analysis of language. [Theinherent consecutiveness of language is under-mined], frustrating the reader's normal expectationof a sequence and forcing him to perceive the ele-ments of the poem as juxtaposed n spacerather thanunrolling in time. Aesthetic form in modern poetry

[in works by writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,Marcel Proust andJamesJoyce] is based on a space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in thereader's attitude toward language. [Modern poetryis reflexive; meaning is apprehended] by the simul-taneous perception in space of word-groups thathave no comprehensible relation to each otherwhen read consecutively in time. Time is no longerfelt as an objective, causal progression with clearlymarked-out differences between periods; it has be-come a continuum in which distinctions betweenpast and present are wiped out. Pastand present areapprehended spatially, locked in a timeless unitythat ... eliminates any feeling for sequence by thevery act of juxtaposition.3

Frank called this new use of language "spa-tial form" and said that Wilhelm Worring-er's Abstractionand Empathy,first publishedin 1908, holds the key to understanding it."The heart of Worringer's book is his dis-cussion of the spiritual condition which im-pels the will-to-art to move in the directionof either naturalism or an abstract-geometric style." A naturalistic style wasused by peoples who had achieved a senseof harmony with nature; the ClassicalGreeks and Renaissance culture to the endof the nineteenth century were at home inthe world. But when the relation betweenman and the cosmos was disharmonious, anonorganic, geometric art resulted. Thislatter style is characterized by planarity be-cause depth in three dimensions gives ob-jects a time-value, placing them in the realworld where change occurs.

In non-naturalistic art, the inherentspatialityof thevisual arts is accentuated by the effort to remove alltraces of time-value. And since modern art is non-naturalistic, we can say that it is moving in the direc-tion of increased spatiality. The significance of spa-tial form in modern literature now becomes clear; itis the exact complement in literature, on the level ofaesthetic form, to the developments that have takenplace in the visual arts.

The synchronic relations within a text takeprecedence over the diachronic so thattemporality becomes "a purely physicallimit of apprehension, which conditions butdoes not determine the work and whoseexpectations are thwarted and supercededby the space-logic of synchronicity." As inProust's A la recherchedu tempsperdu, this isthe contrary of time that flows becausespace is an "extra-temporal eternity."4The direction which Frank has given toliterary criticism provides a solid basis forthe consideration of the subject of time in

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Time in the Visual Arts 43

Figure 1

Figure 2


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Figure 3

Figure 4

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Time in the Visual Artsthe visual arts. Even though Lessing andFrank considered painting to be a spatial,not a temporal, art, Frank's chief contribu-tion to modern criticism may be that he hasshown literature and art do not form twomutuallyexclusivepoles of time and space, asLessing thought. Thus, because modernliterature can transcend the sequentialcharacter of the linguistic medium, onemay ask whether art cannot, and has not,overcome the inherent spatiality of the pic-torial medium in order to express tempor-ality? As Wolfgang Holdheim has put it,Frank is actually "describing a dynamic ten-sion" between narrative progression and"spatial form" in works such asJoyce's Ulys-ses. "He knew that without emphasizing it,for what matters to him is the second (spa-tial) pole alone."5 The following studydemonstrates that visually art is both spatialand temporal, and that a dynamic tensionbetween space and time exists in modernart which is comparable to modern litera-ture. The relation between space and timein painting stretches all the way from a pas-sive coexistence to the tense partnershipfound in Analytic Cubism; indeed, simul-taneity in the Cubist style, with its roots inthe art of Cezanne, is the most dramaticexample of the type of "spatialization oftime" which was described above by Frank.Frank himself made this point when hecompared the naturalistic art of Cezanne tothe work of Proust and Joyce, and the later,more abstract, Cubist style of Braque to thatof Djuna Barnes' novel also using the prin-ciple of "spatial form."6II.

The first concept to consider is that paint-ing in general is not exclusively a spatial art.Time and space are unified visually in artand their qualities are complementary. Toexemplify this point we have only to remarkthat Lessing's polarization of literature andpainting in Laocoon resulted from a confu-sion of the sister arts in the doctrine of utpicturapoesis.Rensselaer Lee has shown thatart criticism from c. 1500 to 1700 "wascon-cerned with defining painting in funda-mental terms"just as Aristotle's Poeticshaddone for literature. Basing their work onlimited passages from the Poetics andHorace's Arspoetica in which painting and

poetry were compared, critics developed atheory of painting based upon the ancienttheory of poetry. Art "submitted to a bor-rowed aesthetic," and the Aristotelian doc-trine of unity of action came to beaccepted.7The doctrine of ut picturapoesis is foundin an academic discourse recorded in 1667by Felibien which was held between CharlesLeBrun and another, unidentified, criticabout Poussin's Fall of the Mana in the Wil-derness (Figure 1). The discussants de-fended the Cartesian idea that expressionmust serve to dramatically illustrate thecentral idea of painting. More interestingly,they also defended Poussin's picture by say-ing that since the artist was not a historianwho used a succession of words, he depictedan event as taking place in a single momentof time; however, it often was necessary tojoin together many incidents to tell the storyto avoid giving only the conclusion of anaction. Poussin had not destroyed the unityof action; he had "merely showed theperipateia, or passage from ill to good for-tune in the manner of poetic art." Thus,Lee remarks, the painting unfolded tem-porally with a beginning, a middle, and anend. In this discourse "the Aristotelian doc-trine of unity of action was pronounced asvalid for painting as for dramatic poetry(and) painting was declared to be an art oftime." It was something new in the doctrineof utpicturapoesis for a painter's design to begoverned by temporal considerations.Lessing objected to the adherence toAristotle's unity of action in painting forseveral reasons. "First because he held bod-ily beauty to be a higher end in paintingthan the expression of the passions; andsecondly because it was dangerous for aspatial art like painting to attempt the pro-gressive effects of a temporal art likepoetry. Thus, Lessing restricted expressionto the fruitful moment, whereas the goal ofpainting was beautiful shapes in gracefulattitudes." Yet, the fruitful moment was aconcession to the temporal imagination forit was suggestive of past and future actions.8Steven Levine has pointed out that duringLessing's lifetime "an alternative criterionto beauty and time" was developed by Di-derot.9 Diderot opposed Lessing's pregnantmoment with the "frozen instant of truth."Rather than seek the purpose of art in an

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abstract ideal of beauty, Diderot claimedthat "at every instant one could say of theuniverse that everything therein is as it isabsolutely necessary that it should be." Andthis axiom of instant truth was the principleof "a quasi-religious cult whose creed wasbased on Newton's laws."Therefore, the concept of pictorial unityof the XVIIth century was significantlymodified in the XVIIIth century. Thechange, explained by Michael Fried, ap-pears with Diderot's art theory and wasexemplified by Jacques David's painting,the Oath of the Horatii (1784-1785).10 Theideal history painting now should eliminateall incident that does not bear directly onthe drama, and the central dramatic ideamust be set in motion by a dynamic causeand be clearly intelligible: pictorial unitymust be instantaneously apprehensibleat asingle glance (Figure 2). The actors in thedrama were to be unconscious of the be-holder's presence to deter a mannered dis-play for the audience's benefit. Indeed, thetableau was sealed off entirely from theworld, and the spectator's role wasobjective.With the Realist movement of the mid-nineteenth century there was a loss of unityof action in progressive painting. Thesingle, infinite space of Renaissance artrepresenting a single moment of time wasdestroyed. The objective detachment of thespectator also was lost: infinite space be-came the particular space of the viewer, andthe generalized temporal factor becamehistorical time. However, if space and timewere no longer universal, they were stillcopresent and complementary, and thesechanges are seen in the work of Courbetand Manet.Courbet's Burial at Ornans (1849) re-jected traditional notions of death and the"sublime poetry of Christianity" with itsmeeting of heavenly and earthly realities.Nochlin has remarked that Courbet con-centrated upon the "purely secular import"of the burial; it was the concreteness of theevent that concerned Courbet, and it didnot have a metaphysical meaning.1'Moreover, Fried noted that Courbetcreated a new model for history paintingbased on a non-dramatic representation offigures. The striking instant of action seenin David's Oathof the Horatiiwas eliminated:the figures do not show intense effort, but

rather their presence is accompanied by asense of temporal passivity or extendeddura-tion. Not only is the painting not unified inthe traditional sense, but Courbet abolishedthe objective condition of the viewer by ab-sorbing him bodily into the space of thepicture.l2 Manet's painting Sur la Plage deBoulogne of 1869 also shows a loss of picto-rial unity, but for different reasons; it re-sults from the spectator's temporal and spa-tial reading of the picture in fragments.Manet refused to compromise the im-mediate experience of seeing the beach inwhich his eyes moved about. As Hansonremarked, "The sense of spatial unity isbroken so that the entire scene cannot beunderstood at once."'13The eye jumps fromgroup to group, and because of this part-by-part reading the work can only be seenin time.In the later nineteenth century pictorialunity was re-established on a new basis. Inthis enterprise the temporal factor becamemore explicit, as seen in Monet's Im-pressionist paintings of a series of poplars(1891) and Cezanne's landscape paintings.According to Levine, the novelist GustaveGeffroy compared Monet's poplars withdramatic poetry saying, "Thus this chang-ing poem develops, so harmoniously, withnuanced phases, so strictly consecutive andunified that one has the feeling in thesefifteen canvases of a single work of insepa-rable parts." Each painting in the series, inits specific configuration of light and color,captured "the life of an instant that comesafter and foretells." In stressing the inter-action of the instants, Geffroy echoedMonet who said that the separate pictures"only acquire their full value through thecomparison and succession of the entireseries." Taken together, the series of in-stants contributed a single whole. Anothernotable critic, Ernest Chesneau, who wasthe first to use the term "instantaneous,"thought that instantaneousness, as in takinga photograph, was a condition of truth andserved as the principle to justify Im-pressionism. Thus, Monet reactivated oneof the central problems of traditional his-tory painting: the representation of a mo-ment in time and Diderot's "instant oftruth." 14On the other hand, Cezanne constructedlandscapes such as Bibemus Quarry of c.1895 to give the illusion of a synthesis of

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Time in the Visual Artsnumerous moments in time (Figure 3). AsBrion-Guerry remarks, Cezanne synthe-sizes the successive moments of a temporalcontinuity-the different harmonies ofcolor in the sun's progress with the passageof the hours-and in doing so constitutes"the great divide in the history of spatialcomposition." Cezanne's space is no longerthe empty cube of Renaissance perspectivespace. The spatial container does not existprior to its contents and is not distinct fromthem. The object, such as the quarry, ex-pands in three dimensions and "is indissol-ubly bound to the space it engenders andfrom which it will never be able to dissociateitself." Objects are not encased and isolatedwithin limiting outlines; the Cezannianpassage keeps them from being separatefrom each other by breaking the forms atsome point, and allowing the planes to spillinto adjacent planes. The viewer sees theobjects from many angles successively andsimultaneously in the imagination, whereasvibrations of the atmosphere also "give riseto movement, uncertainty and the possibil-ity of structural variation." In brief,Cezanne did not want "to condemn his ob-jects to immobility and have them . . . iso-lated from the living world." He did notwant "the object to refuse to adapt itself toTime."15George Hamilton has discussed Cez-anne's working process and the observer'sexperience of Cezanne's painting.16First hepoints out that Cezanne came of age artisti-cally during the Impressionist period,characterized by the work of Monet, andImpressionism was based on the concept of"instantaneous time in a homogeneousNewtonian space." Cezanne's new styleheld out a Bergsonian view of conscious-ness which was not the instantaneouspresent,because instantaneousness contained notraces of memory. Cezanne worked slowlyand gave his memories of successive ex-periences of the motif in space and time."Distortions" resulted from his sensationsof presenting three-dimensional space on atwo-dimensional surface, and from themultiple viewpoints from which he ob-served the motif in time. As a result, thespectator cannot comprehend the variousfoci in Cezanne's painting in a single glance.

The painting has to be considered as much animage of temporal as of spatial experience. It fol-

lows that to apprehend the multiple points of viewthe spectator must proceed slowly and continu-ously. He must recreate on a shorter scale the artist'sexperience by shifting his own position from side toside and moving back and forth in front of thepainting until he comes to feel that his processofviewing is a repetition of the process of creation. Ifwe re-enact in this fashion the artist's experience,continuous through time in space, then the paintingwill be seen as an image of time, since we shall havefound that it cannot be comprehended as an imageof a simple, single discrete experience of space.Hamilton remarks that the experience ofcreating and viewing the work of art repre-sents Bergson's "duration" which is con-tinuous "becoming." Bergson persuades us,in CreativeEvolution of 1907, that the con-sciousness of even the most motionless ob-server is constantly undergoing change:

Let us take the most stable of internal states, thevisual perception of a motionless external object[the painting]. The object may remain the same...;nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs fromthat which I have just had.... My memory is therewhich conveys something of the past into the pres-ent. My mental state, as it advances on the roadof time, is continually swelling with the durationit accumulates; it goes on increasing [like a snow-ball]. . . . The truth is that we change withoutceasing... .17The search for pictorial unity on a newbasis joins the work of Cezanne withBraque's painting, and William Rubin hasshown that Braque arrived at early Cubismthrough a direct extrapolation fromCezanne's passage of planes and facetedbrushstrokes.'8 Braque's landscape paint-ings made in 1908 after the trip to L'Es-taque, such as Houses and Trees,are the firstgroup of truly Cubist paintings. Here he

pushed Cezannism beyond his earlier adap-tation of the high horizon from Cezanne,where he set the scene more vertically thanin depth. The advance concerned Braque'sgrasp of Cezanne's passage of planes, withthe emphatic outlines of the forms of treesand buildings being broken to allow theplanes to "bleed" into adjacent planes. Inthis way Braque was able to concentrate onthe "materialization of space," on paintingthe "visual space that separates objectsfrom each other" and making space as con-crete as objects. At this time Braque's con-ceptual approach-detached from themotif as he worked in the studio-was nottotally different from Cezanne's method ofworking. For although Cezanne placed

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great emphasis on his sensations before themodel, he also said: "In painting there aretwo things, the eye and the brain (and) onemust work for their mutual development.The eye for the vision of nature, the brainfor the logic of organized sensations whichgive the means of expression."19 Indeed,Cezanne's new way of composing a paintingmade such a drama of pictorial integrationthat the picture was a mosaic of decisionsthat determined its becoming a work of art.Picasso made this process the subject of hisearly Cubist paintings, and he was "the firstconsciously to emphasize the paintingprocess" as an experience for the viewer(Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 1909).20Early Cubism extends to the limit the po-tential of Cezanne's ideas. Not only does thesingle moment in a single space disappear,but there is no sense of prolonged durationeither. Cubist space and time are in a tensepartnership: they are subjective, experien-tial, finite (incomplete), and heterogeneouswith changing, discontinuous views that areshown simultaneously and unified on theflat plane of the canvas. Heterogeneoustime and space have undergone planifica-tion. Robert Rosenblum provides a clearidea of early Cubist painting by Picasso andBraque.21 Picasso's Portraitof Daniel-HenryKahnweilerof 1910, like innovative contem-porary architecture, is made with transpa-rent planes implying a fusion of volumewith the space around it, and the solidity ofthe object is destroyed. Space and time arerelative in quality rather than absolute:

Unlike the fixed positions determined by Renais-sance perspective, planes are in a state of constantflux, shifting their relative locations according tothe changing contexts [of the views]. Fixed tem-poral relations are rejected, too. The spectator isobliged to assume that the figure is pieced togetherfrom fragments taken from multiple and discon-tinuous viewpoints. This produces the ambiguousquality of time in the Cubist painting, for one doesnot sense either duration or instantaneity, butrather a composite time of fragmentary momentswithout permanence or sequential continuity.Braque and Picasso also continued to in-

vestigate the process by which nature be-comes art and made it more explicit.Braque placed a trompe-l'oeilnail and itsshadow in Still Life with Violin and Pitcher(1909-1910); and being no more or lessreal, or false, than the still life itself, the

viewer realizes that there is a tension be-tween art and reality:In the new world of Cubism, no fact of vision

remained absolute. A dense, opaque shape couldsuddenly become a weightless transparency; asharp, firm outline could abruptly dissolve into avibrant texture; a plane that defined the remote-ness of the background could be perceived simul-taneously in the immediate foreground. Even theidentity of objects was not exempt from these visualcontradictions. In a Cubist work, a book could bemetamorphosed into a table, a hand into a musicalinstrument. For a century that questioned the veryconcept of absolute truth or value, Cubism createdan artistic language of intentional ambiguity. Infront of a Cubist work of art, the spectator was torealize that no single interpretation of the fluctuat-ing shapes, textures, spaces and objects could becomplete in itself. And, in expressing this awarenessof the paradoxical nature of reality and the need fordescribing it in multiple and even contradictoryways, Cubism offered a visual equivalent of a fun-damental aspect of twentieth-century experience.22Since the temporal factor of processplayed such an important role in AnalyticCubism, let us review certain methods thatPicasso and Braque used to reveal it begin-ning with the Cezannian passage. AlfredBarr introduced the term into English inCubismandAbstractArtof 1936, describing itas the "merging of planes with space byleaving one edge (of the form) unpainted orlight in tone." As Steinberg comments, theplane is diffused into the field, and thisprevents the materialization of full-bodiedsolids and maintains discontinuity.23 In1912 Hourcade noticed the whole surfaceof Cubist paintings was organized in termsof interpenetrating or interacting planes,saying, "The fascination of the paintings

lies . . . in the dynamism which emergesfrom the composition, a strange, disturbingdynamism." And in Du Cubismepublishedin 1912, Gleizes and Metzinger discussedthis factor as coming from Cezanne:He [Cezanne] teaches us to understand adynamism that is universal. He shows us the modifi-cations which objects thought to be inanimate im-pose on each other.. . . His work, a homogeneousmass, moves in front of our eyes, expands, seemsmotionless or flickers. . . 24Secondly, the method of simultaneity in-corporated the idea of time as movementaround the object. Jean Metzinger said in1911 in Cubismand Tradition:The cubists have allowed themselves to movearound the object, in order to give ... a concrete

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Time in the Visual Artsrepresentationof it, madeup of severalsuccessiveaspects. Formerly a picture took possession ofspace, now it reigns in time also. In painting, anydaringis legitimatethat tends to augmentthe pic-ture'spoweras painting.25

The following year Gleizes and Metzingerremarked: "Then the fact of movingaround an object to seize it from severalsuccessive appearances, which, fused intoa single image, reconstitute it in time, willno longer make reasoning peopleindignant." 28Representing multiple points of viewsimultaneously is related to the influence offour-dimensional geometry on the Cubists,according to Linda Henderson.27 Hender-son compares Henri Poincare's Science etl'Hypotese of 1902 with Gleizes and Met-zinger's statement given above in DuCubisme.The notion that the artist movesaround the object to seize successive ap-pearances is exactly the procedure for rep-resenting four-dimensional bodiessuggested by Poincare:

Just as the perspective of a three-dimensional fig-ure can be made on a plane, we can make that of afour-dimensional figure on a picture of three [ortwo] dimensions.... We can even take of the samefigure several perspectives from several points ofview. In this sense we may say the fourth dimensionis imaginable.

Gleizes and Metzinger also took from Poin-care the concept that "pure visual space" isEuclidean three-dimensional space, or"geometric space," and it should be con-trasted with subjective perceptual spacewhich results from tactile and motor ex-periences. The latter has "as many dimen-sions as we have muscles." They wrote, "Toestablish pictorial space, we must have re-course to tactile and motor sensations, in-deed to all our faculties."28Another source for the geometry offour-dimensions, Henderson shows, was E.Jouffret's Traite elementaire de geometriea quatre dimensions of 1903. Jouffret'swork is like Analytic Cubism because itpresents varied views which construct afour-dimensional body simultaneously in akind of mental picture of the process ofrotation. Time, says Henderson, is themeans by which the artist viewed his sub-ject. Time played a "supporting role" for aCubist painter seeking the fourth dimen-

sion in space and using four-dimensionalgeometry:It allows either the moving around the object or theturning of the object itself which is necessary toform an idea of its total dimensionality. It is throughthe subject of four-dimensional geometry thatCubist simultaneity is best understood.There is still another process in early Cu-bist painting, the dual process of analysisand synthesis derived from Kant's writingand described by Daniel-Henry Kahnweilerin The Rise of Cubismof 1915. He said thatanalysis is the reduction of the figure to

basic geometric forms which lack closedcontours, and the presentation of severalviews. Synthesis is the assembling of theseforms and views into a new image unitedwith the surface. Camwell has studied thisdual process and notes that it originated inKant's distinction between two kinds ofjudgment: a judgment is called analyticwhen a subject concept contains predicateconcepts ("a tondo is circular"), whereas ajudgment is synthetic when it synthesizesdistinct concepts. "What the writers onCubism inherited (from Kant) was the ideaof two opposed processes: analysis as thestudy of objects in nature and breakingthem up into basic components; synthesis asthe assembling of distinct parts to make aunique whole."29

Certain directions in post-Cubist Ameri-can abstract art have resumed the aestheticof instantneousness, or "presentness," andalso cultivate extended duration. Both ofthese traditional temporal qualities havebeen discussed by Michael Fried.30 Worksby artists such as Kenneth Noland, MorrisLouis and Frank Stella exemplify "present-ness," and Kuspit has remarked of thisaesthetic that it is completely isolated fromthe world of daily experience. "Present-ness" entails a sensation of timelessness, oreternal nowness, because the picture is ap-prehended instantly in its entirety: beingimpersonal and anti-theatrical, the audi-ence has no sense of time passing (du-ration).31 Minimal, or Literalist, art showsduration, says Fried, because the art objectis a simple thing with a strong Gestalt(shape) which is experienced as having anendless duration. The thing is inexhausti-ble, it goes on and on, and Fried concludesthat the Minimal artist "is preoccupied with

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time." Minimal art takes the form of a singlebody in space, such as a cube, or a clearlyarticulated succession of bodies in spacehaving the same shape, such as DonaldJudd's untitled steel sculpture of 1966 hav-ing six cubes in a row 25' 4" ong. Minimalistart has been related to Phenomenology byAlien Leepa,32and Rosalind Krauss has as-sociated Maurice Merleau-Ponty withMinimalism.33 About the Gestalt he said,"Our spontaneous way of seeing is not asum of sensations but a structure, groupingor configuration,"34 and his Phenomenologyof Perceptionhelps to explain the sense ofendless duration in Minimalism:There is a temporal style in the world.... Timeabides, and does not flow or change.... If I considerthe world itself, there is simply one indivisible andchangeless being. . . . The past, therefore, is notpast, nor the future future. [These exist] only whena [viewer] is there . . . to adumbrate a perspective.[Time] is not real process, not an actual succession.It [only] arises from my relation to things. Changepresupposes a certain position which I take up andfrom which I see things in progression beforeme.... Within things themselves, the future andthe past are in a kind of eternal state.... What is pastor future for me is present for the world.35

Thus, in Minimal art the thing in itself, theGestalt, is timeless, whereas the viewer'sperspective of things, or lived time, is rep-resented as succession in space. Kraussremarks that "looking along its length onesees (the work) in perspective:" it "de-mands to be seen in perspective," and "ispresented as an indefinite series ofperspectival views." But the crucial factor,explains Fried, following Judd, is shapeand "the wholeness that can be achievedthrough the repetition of identical units."36

III.It is important to realize that the Kantianand modern relativistic conceptions of thephysical world have resulted in widely dif-ferent modes of representing the unity ofspace and time visually, and that space andtime have similar characteristics at both

poles. For example, the space of which Les-sing spoke was the single, infinite containerof Renaissance art and it was visualized withan instant of time in David's Oath of theHoratii. This picture is at the opposite poleto early Cubist heterogeneity and the

dynamic tension between space and time inPicasso's PortraitofDaniel-HenryKahnweiler.The first is an isolated tableau set apart fromthe outside world, and the latter is expe-riential in character. The concept of thecorrespondence of space and time at theEuclidean pole is explained by ErwinPanofsky in "Perspective as SymbolicForm."37 Classical space, or "the world,"was discontinuous. Democritus had built upthe world with tiny particles which werebodies in motion in the non-being; andPlato opposed a world of geometricallyshaped bodies to space, a shapeless orshape-hating receptacle. Even Aristotlethought there was "no continuous quality inwhich the essence of individual thingswould be resolved . . . no actual infinitewhich extends beyond the existence of in-dividual things." Renaissance space revealsa perfectly unified and rational world: infi-nite, homogeneous, and continuous, it is an)unchanging quantity consisting of threephysical dimensions experienced as "some-thing that transcends and reconciles theopposition between bodies and non-bodies(what is left between bodies)." However, thereason for perspective construction was torealize in the representation of space ahomogeneity and infinity of which im-mediate experience had no knowledge, "totransform . . . psychophysiological spaceinto mathematical space."

. . . the perspective space of the Renaissancetacitly makes two very important assumptions: first,that we see with a single motionless eye; second, thatthe plane section through the cone of sight is anadequate reproduction of our visual image. Thefact is, however, that these assumptions involve anextremely bold abstraction from reality [subjectivevisual impressions]. For the structure of an infinite,unchanging, and homogeneous-in short, purelymathematical-space is directly opposed to that ofpsychophysiological space. Perception is unac-quainted with the notion of infinity. It is . . . con-fined . . . to a definitely limited part of space. Andwe can no more speak of perceptual space ashomogeneous than we can speak of it as infinite....Homogeneous space is never given, it must be con-structed. ... In the space of immediate perception. . . there is no strict uniformity of places and direc-tions, but each place has its own

individual quality.The single, three-dimensional space ofRenaissance art was an a priori intuitionaccording to Kant. His argument for the apriori nature of the representation of space

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Time in the Visual Artsis contained in passages of the Transcen-dental Aesthetic:

Space is not an empirical concept which has beenderived from outer experiences. For in order thatcertain sensations be referred to something outsideme ... the representation of space must be presup-posed. The representation of space cannot, there-fore, be empirically obtained from the relations ofouter appearance. On the contrary, this outer ex-perience is itself possible at all only through thatrepresentation.38Henry Allison remarks that the crucialpoint is that by "outer experience" is meanta sense through which one can become per-ceptually aware of objects as distinct fromthe self and its states. Kant is saying that therepresentation of space functions withinhuman experience as a necessary conditionof the possibility of distinguishing objects asdistinct from the self and from each other.Ernst Cassirer explains the objective natureof time in Kant. Time also is a priori and it isthe presupposition for our determining ob-jective temporal relations. Otherwise wewould be simply abandoned to the chancesequence of impressions in ourselves ac-cording to the mere play of association.39Also Milic Capek has shown that the spaceand time of Euclid, Newton, and Kant weresimilar. Like space, time had continuity,uniformity of flow (it was unchanging),eternity (infinity), homogeneity, and inde-pendence from physical contents.40There was a spatial model for Classicalspace-time: an instantaneous cross-sectionof the world containing all simultaneousevents, as it was believed that there was aworld-wide instant stretching throughoutthe whole universe. All points contained inthe cross-section were simultaneous in theabsolute sense. The "timeless space" ofKant, and even of Bergson, was "a label foran infinite series of successive instantane-ous spaces which, though qualitatively iden-tical, still differed by their positions in theuniversal flow of time." With Einstein'sSpecial Theory of Relativity (1905), the ob-jective existence of a worldwide instantane-ous space, the universal now, was denied;and in 1908, when Minkowski first showedthe impossibility of separating space andtime, the relativistic space-time continuumwas formulated. At this period the pro-posed fusion was thought of as the spatiali-zationof time.Time was a fourth dimension

of space.41 In Relativity Theory there wasno absolute space and no absolute simul-taneity. Space was not a homogeneous, uni-form, static container independent of itsphysical contents, and it was not causallyinert and indifferent to physical action.Mass and space were fused in a dynamicreality which was not a rigid structure, buthad curvature varying from place to placeand moment to moment. Correspondingly,time lost its sense of uniformity andhomogeneity.Whereas the heterogeneous space andtime in Analytic Cubist painting are notKantian, Cubism is definitely post-Kantian.But as Lynn Camwell remarks, Cubism hadstrong ties to the nineteenth century:

[It has been said] that the truth beyond nature de-picted by the Cubists was not a nineteenth-century,timeless Absolute, but the unstable and fluxuatingreality of the twentieth century. Although inhindsight Rosenblum's words ring true to us today,the contemporaries of the cubists consistentlythought in categories inherited from nineteenth-century idealism, symbolism and science. Thosewith a more tough-minded temperament, such asMetzinger . . . and Kahnweiler, looked to Kant,Poincare and science, whereas the more lyrical andmystical, such as Apollinaire . . . were open toBergson's intuitionism and the tradition of sym-bolism.42

The role of contemporary philosophy inthe development of the new representationof space and time in Analytic Cubist paint-ing is exemplified in the relation of HenriBergson to the Cubists. This relation wasproblematical and concerns a number ofaspects of Bergson's writing, especially histhought about memory and the polarity ofspace and time. It is important to note thatin 1911 the defenders of Cubism had begunto declare that Henri Bergson had given hisapproval to Cubism. Andre Salmon, in an-nouncing the exhibition of the "Sectiond'Or," intimated that Bergson would writethe preface to the catalogue, which in factBergson did not do as he had never seen aCubist painting.43Edward Fry has pointed out, followingHamilton's study of Cezanne, that theCubists were influenced by Bergson's em-phasis on the role of memory in experience:

... with the passage of time an observer accumulatesin his memory a store of perceptual information

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about a given object in the external visible world,and this accumulated experience becomes the basisfor the observer's conceptual knowledge of thatobject. [The method ofl simultaneity was derivedfrom the idea of the cummulative character ofhuman memory as expounded in such works asL'EvolutionCreatriceof 1907.44Fry links the Bergsonian methods ofCezanne to the development of Cubism in1908-1910. Kahnweiler also had said thatthe new Cubist method stimulated thememory of the viewer:

[Using the new method the painter] no longer hasto limit himself to depicting the object as it wouldappear from one given viewpoint, but wherevernecessary for fuller comprehension, can show itfrom several sides, and from above and below....Starting from a background [space] the painter nowworks toward the front by a sort of "scheme offorms" in which each object's position is clearly indi-cated. ... If only this "scheme of forms" were toexist it would be impossible to see in the painting therepresentation of things from the outer world. Onewould only see an arrangement of planes, cylinders,quadrangles.... At this point Braque's introductionof undistorted real objects into the painting takes onits full significance. When "real details" are thusintroduced the result is a stimulus which carrieswith it memory images. Combining the "real"stimulus and the scheme of forms, these imagesconstruct the finished object in the mind. Thus thedesired physical representation comes into being inthe spectator's mind.45However, whereas the representation ofmemory traces posed no difficulty inCubism, Christopher Gray called theCubists' mobile relation to objects in space aBergonian concept of dynamic realitywhich was limited, limited to showing onlyinstants in the process of moving around

the object, not the movement itself.46Theproblem which Gray saw in representingmotion resulted from the fact that Bergsonpolarized space and time, just as didKant-except that Bergson called Kant'snotion of time spatial, or "outer experi-ence." Real duration for Bergson was saidto be an intuitive inner experience thatcould not be spatialized.To understand this distinction, it is firstnecessary to realize that Bergson acceptedKant's concept of homogeneous space:What the Transcendental Aesthetic of Kant ap-pears to have established once for all is that exten-sion [space] is not a material attribute of the samekind as others. Intelligence [for Kant] is bathed inan atmosphere of spatiality, to which it is insepara-

bly united. Our perceptions reach us only afterhaving passed through [spatiality]. They have beenimpregnated in advance by our geometry, so thatour faculty of thinking only finds again in matterthe mathematical properties which our faculty ofperceiving has already posed there. With Kant,space is given as a ready-made form of our percep-tual faculty.[The mind perceives] under the form of extensivehomogeneity [i.e. space] what is given it as qualita-tive heterogeneity.... [This conception is] a kind ofreaction against that heterogeneity which is the veryground of our experience. What we must say is thatwe have to do with two different kinds of reality, theone heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, theother homogeneous, namely space.47

However, Bergson did not think that Kant'snotion of time was a true "inner experi-ence" of the self.Kant's great mistake was to take time as ahomogeneous medium. He did not notice that realduration [as experienced] is made up of movementsinside one another, and that when [time] seems toassume the form of a homogeneous whole [instant],it is because it gets expressed in space. Thus [this]amounts at bottom to confusing time withspace....48

In the following passage Bergson concludesthat we spatialize time, or symbolize it, inintellectual and scientific thought:Beset by the idea of space we introduce it unwit-tingly into our feeling of pure succession; we set ourstates of consciousness side by side in such a way asto perceive them simultaneously, no longer one inanother ... the succession thus [taking] the form ofa continuous line or chain, the parts of which touchwithout penetrating one another. We introduceorder . . . by distinguishing [the parts] and thencomparing the places which they occupy.... [In

thisway succession] is converted into simultaneity and isprojected into space.... We here put our finger onthe mistake of those who regard pure duration assomething similar to space. But how can they fail tonotice that, in order to perceive a line as a line, it isnecessary to take up a position outside it, to takeaccount of the void which surrounds it, and con-sequently to think a space of three dimensions? Ifour conscious point A does not yet possess the ideaof space [then] the succession of states throughwhich it passes cannot assume for it the form of aline; but its sensations will add themselves dynami-cally to one another and will organize themselves,like the successive notes of a tune. ... In a word,pure duration might well be nothing but a succes-sion of qualitative changes, which melt into andpermeate one another, without precise outlines,without any tendency to externalize themselves inrelation to one another, without any affiliation withnumber: it would be pure heterogeneity.49

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Time in the Visual ArtsThe impossibility of depicting motionthrough multiple views was also discussedin Cubist literature by Daniel-HenryKahnweiler. Kahnweiler defended theKantian idea that time is represented as aseries of instantaneous spaces.

The Futurists tried to represent movement [us-ing the Cubist language of forms] by depicting themoved part of the body several times in variouspositions, [or] by reproducing two or more phasesof movement of the entire figure. . . . Can theimpression of a moving form be awakened in thespectator in this way?It cannot. All of these solutions suffer from thesame mistake which render that impression impos-sible. In order to produce "movement," at least twovisual images must exist as succeeding points intime. In Futurism, however, the various phasesexist simultaneously in the painting.50In fact to overcome Bergson's polariza-tion of space and time, Futurist art relatedmotion to Bergson's own concept of intui-tion, according to Brian Petrie's article of1974 entitled "Boccioni and Bergson."5'Boccioni, who was a serious student ofBergson's philosophy, challenged Cubism

with the idea that "ifworks of art necessarilyexist in space, at least the attempt to makethat spatiality somehow expressive of dura-tion (should) avoid an analytical methodol-ogy. . . ."52 Boccioni's own contribution wasan intuitive approach to representing dura-tion, or flux, as visualized in The UniqueFormsof Continuity n Space of 1913. Whatdid an intuitive approach to motion consistof? Bergson had said, "Intuition is the sym-pathy by means of which one places oneselfinside an object in order to coincide withwhat is unique in it," and Boccioni inter-preted that as meaning that an actualobject-the work of art-could bridge thegap between the mind and the externalworld, as though the object were a state ofmind that one could sympathize with. Boc-cioni identified four crucial aspects in vis-ualizing the intuition of motion: inter-penetration, "absolute" and "relative"motion, and force-lines. Interpenetrationwas the means by which the artist madedirect contact with the phenomenal world.It was intuition, a sensation of the interac-tion of his psychic states and matter takingthe indivisible form of a continuum. Sec-ondly, Bergson had said the time sensed byour intuition was indivisible, whereas the

intellect operated by making fixed divisionsin space, or stoppages (immobile states).Boccioni called this "relative motion," anintellectual approach associated with Cubistart, which is a spatially divided time break-ing down into repetitive, separate partsperceived by an observer outside the object.It, too, was given a place in his style; but athird factor, "absolute motion," preventedthe spatially divided time of AnalyticalCubism from having a dominant effect.This motion is intuited within the objectitself, and lines of force are used to repre-sent it as it follows its own innate energies.These energies synthesize the object, andthe object with its environment, in somekind of unique dynamic unity. Boccionisought to combine all these factors in TheUnique Formsof Continuityin Space, havingthought he had found a visual formula forBergson's idea that time precedes space,that the fundamental reality of human exis-tence is the feeling of temporal process.However, the usefulness to the visual artsof Bergson's thought about time was calledinto question by Marcel Duchamp, as dem-onstrated in another article of the 1970's byLucia Beier describing Marcel Duchamp'sLarge Glass of 1912-1923.53 Duchamp'sLarge Glass materialized Bergson's idea thattime, as the artistic ego itself, could not berepresented spatially (Figure 4). AsBergson said, considering whether timecould be represented by space, "Yes if youare dealing with time flown. No, if youspeak of time flowing." After Beier'sanalysis, the manner in which Duchamprepresented this now seems clear. Durationwas the subject of the Large Glass, the artist'sduration as the creator of the work. Therewere three important aspects of the artist'sself which entered into the creative processand were shown in a comical way. TheBachelor Machine below functioned likethe intellect, which breaks things up intounits and loses the dynamic flow of dura-tion. The Bride above represented intui-tion. These two processes, the Geometricand the Vital, were fused momentarily bythe Vital Impetus, the creative force, whichBergson compares to steam and whichDuchamp incorporates into the Large Glassas fog, droplets of water, splashes, and cur-rents of electricity. With these elements ofthe creative process Duchamp demon-

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strated that it is impossible to experiencethe artist's duration in the art object becausethe creative process, as an ongoing activity,is not visible to the viewer. Indeed, the onlymovement which the Large Glass has is thespectator's duration "which keeps it alive."By the time of the Large Glass of 1923, itappeared that the range of Bergson'sthought about time, space, intuition andintellection had been fully illustrated in thevisual arts.54IV.

The progress of literary criticism fromLessing's idea of the polarity of space andtime has been summed up by William Holtzin an article of 1977 entitled "Spatial Formin Modern Literature: A Reconsidera-tion."55 Remarking that twentieth centuryphysics "recast physical reality in terms of aunified spatial-temporal field," Holtz haspointed to spatiality in Kenneth Pike's tri-modal linguistic theory of perception whichis based on modern physical theory. Weperceive the world, said Pike, in three ways:as particle (a discrete unit such as a word), aswave (a flowing continuum as the sound ofspeech), and as field (figure and ground)within which a unit gets its meaning. Eachmode is useful and should be retained. In-deed, the modes are supplementary be-cause a single view is necessarily incom-plete. "Within this tri-modal scheme," saysHoltz, "wecan say Frank . .. has focused onthe field ..-. while emerging structuralistcriticism focuses on the larger context ofwhich the poem is a part." In both casessynchronicity is a condition of knowledge,and in both Frank's spatial "metaphor" isapplicable.Let us adapt Pike's tri-modal theory tovisual art in an effort to further clarify thequestion of "spatial form" relative to thequalities of time which have been discussed:unity of action, instantaneousness, dura-tion, eternity, and heterogeneity.56 Whenthe particle view is applied to art, it can bedefined as thing-centered and objective.The particle is an isolable thing without asubjective, experiential context; static andtimeless, it is apprehended intellectually.This concept about art synthesizes thethoughts of Pike with those of Worringer,Frank, Holdheim, and Bergson, and

examples are found in abstract styles suchas Byzantine mosaic decoration, as well as inthe naturalistic style of David's Oath of theHoratii (Fig. 2). Pike's isolable unit clearly iscomparable to the concept of abstract-geometric art discussed by Worringer be-causeone has abstracted (an object) fromits environment and delimited it as a com-plete thing."57The urge to abstract, we re-call, results from a desire to get away fromthe restlessness of the changing world-the"ceaseless flux of the forces of nature" toa realm of stasis, harmony and wholeness.58Moreover, in Bergsonian terms, Holdheimhas noted the abstracting method remindsof the scientific method which isolatesphenomena so that the object is removedfrom the familiar ground of experience.This distances reality, destroys subjectivity,and "replaces vital spontaneity and emotionwith intellectual lucidity."59From the parti-cal view, art represents a timeless truth or a"frozen instant of truth" (instantaneous-ness), and these temporal qualities corre-spond with the "timeless unity" whichFrank thought characterized the spatializa-tion of time in modern literature.It is important to realize that the particleview of art does not so much denyspaceas itdenies the changing world of time whichcan be found in space because, as Wor-ringer and Frank remarked, time destroysthe objective character of reality.

The preference for abstract-geometric form inprimitive man [resulted from a state of perplexity inthe face of the mutiformity of the world picture].Primitive man tore absract form out of the flux ofhappening, to free it from all caprice, to raise it upinto the realm of the necessary, in a word, to eter-nalize it.60

The particle view of art is the same asSpanos' teleological "world of God" and theAristotelian plot,61 and it is the world ofByzantine mosaic decoration as discussedby Otto Demus. The Byzantine church it-self is the "particle," having its own intellec-tual, dogmatic context apart from the realworld of experience. The Byzantine churchwas an image of the Cosmos with an or-dered hierarchy of spaces descending fromheaven, the sphere of the cupolas, to theearthly zone below. The rounded space inwhich each icon is set is not two-dimensional; it opens outward and includes

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Time in the Visual Artsthe beholder so as to give reality to the con-cept of divine world order. Corre-spondingly, time in the Byzantine church issymbolic. It is based on the Calendar of theChristian year, and the icons are arrangedin accordance with the liturgical sequenceof ecclesiastical festivals. Linked with thespatial symbolism of the building, the flowof time is converted "into an ever-recurringcycle moving around a static center."62 Butthe particle view of art is not only found inthe timeless quality of Byzantine mosaics; itis also represented in naturalistic art withperspective depth by David's Oath of theHoratii. We recall that the paintingexemplifies Diderot's art theory, and it hasan instantaneously intelligible pictorialunity with a powerful dramatic idea set inmotion by a cause. This tableauis an objec-tive world which is set off from reality: it is a"frozen instant of truth," following New-ton's idea that "at every instant one couldsay of the universe that everything thereinis as it is absolutely necessary that it shouldbe."The field view of art presents anotherform of the spatialization of time. It is sub-jective, experiential and temporally lifelike.This view emphasizes the process of mak-ing a picture, as discussed above in relationto Analytic Cubism: space and time are fi-nite (incomplete), heterogeneous, and theyhave undergone planification. Accordingto Pike, the field view places the object in acontext, just as Cubism interwove the objectwith multiple spaces, and it is dependentupon the external world and the viewer.The separate parts, or "particles," disap-pear and melt together as the unit is viewedagainst a larger background. One is dealingwith a total complex, a fused whole, thefigure and the ground.The field view of art incorporates aspectsof Worringer's empathetic (naturalistic)style because it is temporal and requiresthe active, subjective participation of theviewer. Even though Cubism has under-gone "planification," Worringer could nothave intended Cubist art as an example ofthe abstract-geometric style, becauseCubism does not focus on the closed unityof an isolated thing:

The art of antiquity avoided rendering space anddepth.... The aim of artistic volition was to render

the natural model as an individual materialbody-not by perception in walking around it-butto reproduce it as a whole for the imagination byamalgamating the fragmentary, temporal succes-sion of perceptual moments. The artist intendedtorendera closed whole derived from the imagination.He did this in an attempt, foreover beyond hisreach, to establish the absolute material individual-ity of a thing.63

The art of the field view is not space-denying. Space is a primary factor and itsmany depthrelationsrequire the viewer's at-tention just as does perspective space. Be-cause of the active role of space in the fieldview of art, things are "confused and min-gled," as Worringer said of perspectivedepth, and the viewer must subjectivelymake an effort at understanding how thevaried perceptual elements might becombined.64As Holtz has remarked, the field viewalso has the simultaneous mode of whichFrank said, "Temporality becomes a purelyphysical limit of apprehension . . . super-seded by a space-logic of synchronicity."65That is, the image is viewed simultaneouslyand successively, as Brion-Guerry said ofCezanne's painting (Fig. 3) and Holdheimof Joyce's Ulysses, because of the factor ofthe moving observer.66 This is the world ofprocess in which the temporal flow of thenovel, or the unified picture space of thepainting, is interrupted. What Frank actu-ally describes, says Holdheim, is not thepolarity of time and space but a "dynamictension" between time and space. What theAnalytic Cubist painting requires of theviewer s an effort to recompose the object ina unified pictorial space which is broken upby excessive temporalizing. In order toachieve a "unified spatial apprehension" ofthe work, the viewer is forced into "activeempathy." This is the same process asHoldheim's organicizing, temporalizingrole of the reader who attempts to restorethe temporal line of narrative. In both artand literature abstraction, or discontinuity,functions "as a spur to exacerbatedempathizing."67

The wave view of art means a fusion ofunits like the field view-and an emphasison process and change-but over an ex-tended period of tiine. According to Pike,the wave view is useful in describing histori-cal change and development, in a wavelike

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fusion, as a continuous behavioral event.This view is exemplified by phenomenasuch as the historical development ofAnalytic Cubism or Monet's series paintingsof poplars and haystacks.With these observations it should be ap-parent that literary criticism has done muchto elucidate the subject of time in visual art,and that a passageway has been openedwhich is beneficial to art history. The twofields have common concerns and can sharea common terminology.1Joseph Frank, SewaneeReview 53 (1945): 221-40,433-56, 643-53; see also his The Widening Gyre(Rut-gers University Press, 1963), and "SpatialForm: an An-swer to Critics," CriticalInquiry4 (1977): pp. 231-52.2The Laocoonand OtherProse WritingsofLessing, ed.W. B. Ronnfeldt, (London), pp. 90f; see WilliamSpanos, Martin Heideggerand theQuestion of Literature,(University of Indiana Press, 1979), pp. 115-48.3 Frank, The Widening Gyre, pp. 9-10, 13, 59.4 Ibid., pp. 50,53-54,56-57, and "SpatialForm: anAnswer to Critics," 233-35.5 Wolfgang Holdheim, "Wilhelm Worringer andthe Polarity of Understanding," in TheQuestionof Tex-tuality, ed. William Spanos, (University of IndianaPress, 1982), p. 346, and Frank, "Spatial Form: anAnswer to Critics,"233. See also a reprinting of Hold-heim's article in The HermeneuticMode, (Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1984).8Frank, The Widening Gyre, pp. 27f.7Rensselaer Lee Ut Pictura Poesis: The HumanisticTheoryof Painting, (New York, 1967), pp. 6-7, 27, 29f,62-64. Humphry House, in Aristotle's Poetics,(Westport Conn., 1956), pp. 64-66, notes Aristotlesaid little about the unities of time and place. Timesimply was the 24-hour period of a day; and as forplace, the Greeks did not divide the stage and usuallyhad only one stage set.BLee, pp. 20f, 61, 66. Lessing's view was anticipatedby AbbeJean DuBois in 1719; see Michael Fried, "To-ward a Supreme Fiction: Genre and Beholder in TheArt Criticism of Diderot and His Contemporaries,"New Literary Theory6 (1974-1975): 547f, and StevenLevine, "The "Instant" of Criticism and Monet's Criti-cal Instant," ArtsMagazine 55 (1981): 114.9 Levine, p. 117.10Fried, pp. 548-74. See also his "Thomas Coutureand the Theatricalization of Action in 19th CenturyFrench Painting," Artforum8 (1970): 41f; "The Be-holder in Courbet: His Early Self-Portraits and TheirPlace in His Art," Glyph4 (1978): 113, 116f; Absorptionand TheatricalityPainting and the Beholder n the Age ofDiderot, (Berkeley, 1980).n Linda Nochlin, Realism, (Johns Hopkins Univer-sity Press, 1971), pp. 30-32, 48, 78-81.12 Fried, "Thomas Couture ...," 44; "The Beholderin Courbet...," 114, 116f; "Representing Representa-tion: On the Central Group in Courbet's 'Studio,"' Artin America69 (1981): 168.13 Ann Coffin Hanson, Manetand theModernTradi-tion (Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 202,204; see also

Alan De Leiris, "Manet: 'Sur La Plage De Boulogne,'"Gazettedes Beaux-Arts 57 (1961): 55-59.14 Levine, pp. 114-20.15Liliane Brion-Guerry, "The Elusive Goal,"

Cezanne,The LateWork,ed. William Rubin, (New York,1977), pp. 73-82.16George Hamilton, "Cezanne, Bergson and theImage of Time," CollegeArtJournal 16 (1956): 2-12.17 Ibid., p. 11. Where a Bergsonian approach to artis concerned, Hamilton's thought about Cezanne canbe compared with that of Dewey in Art as Experience(New York, 1934), pp. 184, 220, who is cited by PaulLaporte; see n. 28. Dewey says that the distinctionbetween the spatial and temporal arts is wrong. Allobjects of art are matters of perception and perceptionis not instantaneous.Architectural structures provide, I should imagine,the perfect reductioad absurdumof the separation ofspace and time in works of art. If anything exists inthe mode of "space-occupancy," it is a building. Buteven a small hut cannot be the matter of estheticperception save as temporal qualities enter in. Acathedral, no matter how large, makes an instan-taneous impression. A total qualitative impressionemanates from it as soon as it enteracts with [ourvision]. But this is only the substratum andframework within which a continuous process ofinteractions introduces enriching and definingelements. The hasty sightseer no more has anaesthetic vision of... the Cathedral of Rouen thanthe motorist traveling at sixty miles an hour sees thefleeting landscape. One must move about, withinand without, and through repeated visits let thestructure gradually yield itself to him in variouslights and in connection with changing moods. [Toperceive, or have an esthetic experience, a be-holder] must create his own experience and hiscreation must include relations comparable to thosewhich the original producer underwent. They arenot the same in any literal sense. But with the per-ceiver, as with the artist, there must be an orderingof the elements of the whole that is ... the same asthe process of organization the creator of the workconsciously experienced. Without the act of recrea-tion the object is not perceived as a work of art....18 William Rubin, "Cezannism and the Beginningsof Cubism," Cezanne,TheLateWork,ed. William Rubin,(New York, 1977), pp. 151-69, 189.'9Judith Wechsler, The Interpretation of Cezanne,(University of Michigan Press, 1981), p. 29.20 Rubin, p. 189.21 Robert Rosenblum, Cubismand TwentiethCenturyArt, (New York, 1976), pp. 42-45, 65.22Ibid., pp. 13f.23 Leo Steinberg, "The Polemical Part," Art inAmerica67 (1979): 121f.24John Golding, Cubism,A Historyand an Analysis1907-1914, (Boston, 1968), pp. 32ff.25Edward Fry, Cubism,(London, 1966), pp. 66f.26Linda Henderson, "A New Facet of Cubism: theFourth-Dimension and Non-Euclidian GeometryReinterpreted," Art Quarterly 34 (1971): 428. SeeMarianne Martin FuturistArt and Theory1909-1915(New York, 1968), p. 205; the term "simultaneity"wasa word "jealousy guarded" by the Futurists who hadbeen the first to use it in the context of painting (Pref-

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Time in the Visual Artsace to the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery Exhibition, Feb.1912). At first simultaneity stood for the pace of mod-ern life with its speed and "simultaneity of states ofmind." According to Lynn Camwell, Cubist Criticism(University of Michigan Press, 1980), p. 59, Apol-linaire used the word to describe the contrasting colorin Delaunay's Orphist paintings, then in 1913 to de-scribe the Cubist use of multiple viewpoints for obtain-ing the most complete description of objects.

27 Henderson, pp. 411-33.28 Paul Laporte also had realized that Cubist simul-

taneity integrated kinesthetic sensations with visualperceptions; see "the Space-Time Concept in theWork of Picasso," Magazine of Art 41 (1948): 26-32,and "Cubism and Science," Journal ofAesthetics nd ArtCriticism7 (1949): 243-56. Of special interest is his ideathat great artists have integrated time and space eitherimplicitly or explicitly.9 Camwell, pp. 16f, 33f, 96ff. Kahnweiler's a priorigeometric scaffolding also in Kantian:... the described geometric forms give us the sturdyscaffolding, upon which we place the products ofour imagination consisting of retinal stimulae andimages from our memory. Our a priori knowledgeof these forms is the prerequisite without which wecouldn't see and there wouldn't be a physical world.30 Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Artforum

(1967): 12-23.31 Donald Kuspit, "Authoritarian Aesthetics andthe Elusive Alternative,"Journal of Aestheticsand ArtCriticism4 (1983): 271-88.32 Allen Leepa, "Minimal Art and Primary Mean-ings," Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. GregoryBattock, (New York, 1968), p. 205.33 Rosalind Krauss, "Allusion and Illusion inDonald Judd," Artforum 4 (1966): pp. 24-26.34 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Nonsense(Chicago, 1964), pp. 48f.35 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologyof Percep-

tion (New York, 1962), pp. 41 If, 42 If; on the link be-tween Phenomenology and duration in Cezanne'spaintings, see Forrest Williams, "Cezanne and FrenchPhenomenology," Journal of Aesthetics nd Art Criticism,12 (1954): 481-92.38Fried, "Art and Objecthood," 12.37Erwin Panofsky, "Die Perspektive als symbolischeForm," Vortrageder BibliothekWarburg (1924-1925),pp. 258ff.38 Henry Allison, Kant'sTranscendentalIdealism.AnInterpretation nd Defense (Yale University Press, 1983),pp. 82-98. The argument that space and time are pureintuitions continues:Space is not. . . [a] general concept of relations ofthings . . . but a pure intuition. For . . . we canrepresent to ourselves only one space; and if wespeak of diverse spaces, we mean thereby only partsof one and the same unique space. [These] partscannot precede the one all-embracing space, asbeing . . . constituents out of which it can be com-posed; on the contrary, they can be thought only asin it. Space is essentially one; the manifold in it...depends solely on [the introduction of] limitations.

Allison notices that in support of his claim that "we canrepresent to ourselves only one space," Kant only of-fers the observation that we are somehow constrained

to think of particular spaces as parts of a single space.Kant here is contrasting the relation between spaceand its parts (particular spaces) with the relation be-tween a concept and its extension. In the case of theconcept, the partial concepts out of which a generalconcept is composed are all logically prior to the whole.A general concept is thus a collection of partial con-cepts, but this is not the case with space and its parts.The parts of space are only given in and through thissingle space which they presuppose. Space is not onlypresented as single, but as a unity, consequently itcannot be conceived as a collection or aggregate.

39 Ernst Cassirer, Kant'sLfe and Thought(Yale Uni-versity Press, 1981), pp. 182ff.40 Milec Capek, The PhilosophicalImpactof Contem-porary Physics, (New York, 1961), pp. 1-50, 153-6,158-77, 205-12. Capek thinks with Bergson that it isimpossible to reconstruct any temporal process out of

static geometric elements, so that "anabandonment ofvisual (for auditory) models in modern physics is im-perative" (Ibid., pp. 234f).41 Capek calls this a static.view of space-time becausethe spatial diagram suggested that successive momentscoexist, whereas temporal reality is by nature incom-plete and its "parts" are not simultaneous.42Camwell, p. 7.43 Fry, p. 67; see also Camwell, p. 32f.44Fry, pp. 38, 13 f.45Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism(New York, 1949), pp. lIf. However, we should re-member that Bergson's thought about the distant pastbeing carried into the present does not concern

Cubism directly; see Henri Bergson, Creative Evolu-tion, trans. Irwin Edman (New York, 1944) p. 68:Our duration is not merely one instant replacinganother; if it were, there would never be anythingbut the present-no prolonging of the past into theactual, no evolution.... Duration is the continuousprogress of the past.... And the past grows withoutceasing.... In reality, the past is preserved.... In itsentirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; allthat we have felt, thought and willed from our ear-liest infancy is there, leaning over the present whichis about to join it, pressing against the portals ofconsciousness that would fain leave it outside....Our personality, which isbeing built up each instantwith its accumulated experience, changes withoutceasing....

Capek has discussed the difference between im-mediate memory and more distant mnemic links inBergson; see Bergsonand ModernPhysics, (Dordrecht,1971), pp. 158-60:From Descartes to [Alexius] Meinong the presentwas regarded as a mathematical point; Lovejoy ex-tended this point up to a definite temporal length;James insisted that this length has no constant andsharp edges; but all these views agreed in consider-ing the present moment as theonlyrealityhoveringbetween two abysses of non-being. . . . Time thusconceived is a "perpetual perishing" in which thespark of the present moment is continually extin-guished in order to be replaced by another spark,equally ephemeral. Such was the instantaneousworld of [Heraclitus and] the Arabian atomists, ofDescartes and of Leibnitz, the world of perpetual

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58perishing and perpetually recreated by God, itsevanescent events lost forever in the abyss of non-being.The main difference between such a view of timeand the Bergsonian view consists in a different viewof the status of the past. [For the atomists] succes-sive moments of the specious present were com-pletely external each to the other; James admitted'feelings of transition" or "feelings of relation" be-tween them which are the links of immediatememory. Bergson's duration has, besides the linksof immediate memory, a number of relations bind-ing together temporal terms which are not [in suc-cession]. These links are more and more tenuous asthe difference in date grows larger . . . [however]there is only a difference in degree and not that ofkind between immediate memory and more tenu-ous mnemic links joining temporally noncontigu-ous moments. In Bergson's duration the whole ofthe past persists ...; forJames only the "immediatepast," perceived on the "rearward edge" of thespecious present, is real. This is the main differencebetween the next-to-next continuity of [James']stream of thought and the total continuity of realduration. While inJames' view the distant phases ofthe past are completely separated from the presentmoment . . . the Bergsonian past is indivisibly im-manent in the present "occasion." Within thedynamic totality of the past there are no gaps, nofull stops.46 Christopher Gray, CubistAestheticTheories Balti-

more, 1967), pp. 65ff, 85ff.47 Bergson, pp. 223-27.48 Henri Bergson, Timeand FreeWill.An Essayon theImmediateData of Consciousness,trans. F. L. Pogson(London, 1971), pp. 232f; originally published in1886.49Ibid., pp. 101-105.50Kahnweiler, pp. 21f.51 Brian Petrie, "Boccioni and Bergson," BurlingtonMagazine (1974): 140-47; on the influence of Bergsonon Boccioni, see also John Golding, Boccioni'sUniqueFormsof Continuity n Space, (New York, 1972), pp. 6-8.52 Petrie, p. 143. Petrie cites Boccioni's Pittura Scul-tura Futuriste of 1914. Boccioni said that Analytical

Cubism did not "present the nature of life. [With amultitude of planes] Picasso ... extracts dead elementstific analysis which seeks to study life by dissecting acorpse."53 Lucia Beier, "The Time Machine: A BergsonianApproach to 'The Large Glass' Le Grand Verre,"Gazette des Beaux-Arts88 (1976): 194-200.

MC L A IN

54 This has not proven to be true as Duchamp was amajor influence on the development of ConceptualArt which focuses on process; see Robert Smith, "Con-ceptual Art" in Conceptsof Modemrnrt, ed. Nikos Stan-gos (New York, 1974), pp. 256-70.55 William Holtz, "Spatial Form in Modern Litera-ture: A Reconsideration," Critical Inquiry 4 (1977):276-80.56 Kenneth Pike, Linguistic Concepts.An IntroductiontoTagmemics, University of Nebraska Press, 1982), and"Language as Particle, Wave and Field," The TexasQuarterly 2 (1959): 37-54; see also William Holtz,"Field Theory and Literature," Centennial Review(1967); 532-48.57 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy,trans. Michael Bullock, (New York, 1967), pp. 5, 38.58Joseph Buttigieg, "Worringer Among the Mod-ernists," TheQuestionof Textuality,ed. William Spanos(University of Indiana Press, 1982), p. 362.59Holdheim, p. 353.60Worringer, pp. 35, 46.61 Holdheim, pp. 348ff; see also William Spanos,"Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of

Time: An Existential Critique,"Journal ofAesthetics ndArt Criticism29 (1971): 87-104, and "Modern Dramaand the Aristotelian Tradition: The Formal Impera-tives of Absurd Time," ContemporaryLiterature 12(1971): 345-73. The "Bergsonian" self-space whichSpanos remarks in the work of writers such as Proustnot only recalls Frank's "spatial form," but also theunity of time and the self discussed by Hans Meyerhoffin Time in Literature(Berkeley, 1955).62Otto Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, (Lon-don, 1947), pp. 13-16.63Worringer, pp. 39f.64 Ibid., pp. 22, 38.65 Frank, "Spatial Form: an Answer to Critics,"pp. 235.66 Rosenblum, p. 43, compares Joyce's Ulysses withCubist art.67 Holdheim, pp. 347, 353.

Figure 1. Nicolas Poussin, Fall of the Mana in theWilderness.Louvre, Paris. Courtesy of Service photo-graphique de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux.Figure 2. Jacques David, Oath oftheHoratii. Louvre,Paris. Courtesy of Service photographique de la Reun-ion des Musees Nationaux.Figure 3. Paul Cezanne, Bibemus Quarry. MuseumFolvang, Essen. Courtesy of Zentrale Museumsver-waltung.Figure 4. Marcel Duchamp, Large Glass. Philadel-phia Museum of Art: Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier.

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