Diary: Eric Kandel on the Beholder‘s Share
Gustav Klimt, Judith (1901). Photo: Johannes Stoll ©Belvedere, Vienna
One of the interesting features of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century is that Freud was not the only person developing insights into unconscious mental processes. There were writers like Arthur Schnitzler, on the one hand, as well as artists like Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. All of them were exploring the human mind at the same time, living in the same Zeitgeist, and they brought to bear upon the examination of human psychology a number of new insights that Freud lacked. Austrian modernist art penetrated the Victorian veneer of middle-class Viennese life—particularly society’s restrictive and hypocritical attitudes toward mental life, sex and aggression, and women and their sexuality—to reveal the reality that lies beneath the surface. At the same time contemporary scholars of art history began focusing on psychology as a scientific discipline to cast light on the artist’ and the viewer’s inner experience as reflecting dimensions of the work of art.
Gustav Klimt, for instance, focused on becoming a psychological painter of women. Over the course of his life, he replaced the angelic feminine types of his earlier pictures and the traditional idealized or mythologized nude with portraits of women as sensual creatures, developing their full potential for pleasure and pain, life and death. In a long series of drawings, Klimt tried to capture the feeling of female sexuality. In his exploration of the erotic, he banished the sense of sin surrounding sex that had plagued his father’s generation and portrayed the variety of sexual pleasures women can achieve, alone or with a male or female partner. In capturing the fullness of female sexuality that had eluded Freud and many of his contemporaries, Klimt became a great liberator of women’s sexuality. Klimt introduced a new dimension to eroticism in Western art—he portrayed real women with no regard for the viewer.
Klimt sensed that a fear of sex haunted many of the men of his generation. He recognized that the liberation of female sensuality carried with it an anxiety about death. In his painting Judith, a major example of his erotic art, Klimt introduces the themes of aggression and castration, in this case disguised as decapitation. Judith, fresh from killing Holofernes after seducing him, glories in her voluptuousness. Klimt pictures her as a young, extravagantly made-up woman. She faces the viewer, whom she regards sensually, through half-open eyes. She is absent-mindedly stroking the head of a man in the lower part of the picture. The murder of Holofernes is presented in sublime form: there is no trace of blood or violence in the picture. Although Judith is a murderess, the murder is symbolic only.
Viennese art historian Alois Riegl was the first in his field to apply scientific thinking systematically to art criticism. He and his colleagues at the Vienna School of Art History attained international renown at the end of the nineteenth century for their efforts to establish art history as a scientific discipline by grounding it in psychology and sociology. Riegl discovered a new, psychological aspect of art: namely, that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only does the viewer collaborate with the artist in transforming a two-dimensional likeness on a canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the visual world, the viewer also interprets what he or she sees on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture. Riegl called this phenomenon the “beholder’s involvement.” (His student, art historian Ernst Gombrich later elaborated on this concept and referred to it as the “beholder’s share.”) Based on ideas derived from Riegl and from contemporaneous schools of psychology and psychoanalysis, Ernst Kris and Gombrich devised a new approach to the mysteries of visual perception and incorporated that approach into art criticism.
Kris studied ambiguity in visual perception, and those studies led him to elaborate on Riegl’s insight that the viewer completes a work of art. Kris argued that every powerful image is inherently ambiguous because it arises from experiences and conflicts in the artist’s life. The viewer responds to this ambiguity in terms of his or her own experiences and conflicts. The extent of the viewer’s contribution depends on the degree of ambiguity in the image.
The idea of ambiguity as Kris used it was introduced by the literary critic William Empson, who held that ambiguity exists when “alternative views [of a work of art] might be taken without sheer misreading.” Empson implied that ambiguity allows the viewer to read the aesthetic choice, or conflict, that exists within the artist’s mind, whereas Kris held that ambiguity enables the artist to transmit his sense of conflict and complexity to the viewer’s brain.
Gombrich extended Kris’s ideas about ambiguity to visual perception per se. This led him to realize that the brain is not simply a camera, it is a creativity machine. It takes information from the outside world and makes it complete. Our brain has evolved to do this. Many things we take for granted are built into our brain by evolution. For example, the brain realizes that the sun is always above us, no matter where we are. We therefore expect light to come from above. If it does not—as in a visual illusion—our brain can be tricked. Gombrich was fascinated by how the brain responds to such illusions.
Perception also incorporates knowledge based on learning, hypothesis testing, and goals—and this knowledge is not necessarily built into the developmental program of our brain. Because much of the sensory information that we receive through our eyes can be interpreted in a variety of ways, we must use inference to resolve this ambiguity. We must guess, based on experience, what the image in front of us is.
Gombrich drew on studies by the nineteenth-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz of how the brain makes inferences about the three-dimensional world based on two-dimensional visual information. The influence of such neural processing on the beholder’s perception convinced Gombrich that there is no such thing, to use his predecessor John Ruskin’s phrase, as an “innocent eye”: all visual perception is based on classifying concepts and interpretation. He realized in addition that each of us brings to a work of art our memories. We remember other works of art that we have seen. We remember scenes and people that have meaning to us. And when we look at a work of art, we relate it to those memories. In a sense, to see what is actually painted on a canvas, we have to know beforehand what we might see in a painting. In this way the artist’s modeling of physical and psychic reality parallels the intrinsically creative operations of our brain in everyday life. As we look at a portrait, for instance, our brain is busy analyzing facial contours, forming a representation of the face, analyzing the body’s motion, forming a representation of the body, experiencing empathy, and forming a theory of the person’s mind. These are all components of the beholder’s share, and modern biology makes it possible for us—the beholder, the viewer—to explore them.
Eric R. Kandel is University Professor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of physiology and cellular biophysics, psychiatry, biochemistry, molecular biophysics, and neuroscience at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on the science of memory, including The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present and Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures. He is also a coauthor of Principles of Neural Science, the standard neuroscience textbook. He received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of learning and memory. (He was, incidentally, born in Vienna in 1929.) This post is drawn from his new book out this month from Columbia University Press, Essays on Art and Science.
Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Become a paying subscriber to support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Recent posts: Peter Brooks on Robert Darnton’s The Revolutionary Temper, Yasmine El Rashidi on Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s personal history of the Iraq War; Andrew Delbanco on a rediscovered gem of the Jazz Age.
Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, is Book Post’s Winter 2023 partner bookstore! We partner with independent bookstores to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We’ll send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 with our partner bookstore during our partnership. Send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com. Read more about Square here in Book Post. And buy a Book Post Holiday Book Bag for a friend and send a $25 gift e-card at Square with a one-year Book Post subscription!
Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostusa
If you liked this piece, please share and tell the author with a “like.”