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| Georgia O'Keeffe From the Plains II 1954 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"Any language, not only humanist Latin, is a conspiracy against experience in the sense of being a collective attempt to simplify and arrange experience into manageable parcels. The language has a limited number of categories, grouping phenomena in its own way, and a very limited number of conventions for setting these categories in relation to each other. So as to communicate with other people we keep more or less to the rules; we contract to call this section of the spectrum orange and that other section yellow, and to use these categories only in certain acceptable relationships, such as nominal and adjectival, to others. In our normal speech we struggle to compromise between the complexity and variety of experience on the one hand, and the relatively limited, regular, and simple system of our language on the other. Because a degree of regularity and simplicity is necessary if we are to be understood, and because also the language itself has been deeply involved in our acquiring ways of discriminating at all, the system of the language is always pressing us to conform with it. Yet, from the other side, we continually resist the formal pressure of this system by testing it against experience. So that our speech may keep a usefully close relation to experience we insist on irregularities and awkwardness, resist the system's pull toward simplicity, force modifications and qualifications on its categories, rebuff its invitations to tidiness and pattern."
– Michael Baxandall, from Giotto and the Orators: Humanist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition, 1350-1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)
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| Georgia O'Keeffe Abstraction Blind I 1921 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Georgia O'Keeffe Shell and Old Shingle V 1926 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Georgia O'Keeffe New York Street with Moon 1925 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Georgia O'Keeffe White Iris no. 7 1957 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
More from Michael Baxandall on the conflict between language and experience –
"Art criticism, making remarks about paintings, is usually epideictic rhetoric: that is, it discusses art in terms of value, praise or dispraise, and demonstrates the speaker's skill. Its language is florid, not grand or plain. One man disposes pigments on a ground, and another man seeing this tries to match words with the interest of the thing. To do this much beyond the point of saying 'good' or 'bad' is difficult and eccentric, and does not often happen except in a culture which, like neo-classical cultures, sets this activity up as an institution and rewards it, as the phrase is, with approval. It therefore very quickly develops a style and a domestic history within which the critic is expected to exercise his skill. But terms used of the interest of painting tend not to be sharply delimited or readily checked against experience: 'beauty' is a less verifiable category than 'wealth'. Further, there are in any case not many terms specific or proper to the interest of paintings, and above the level of 'big', 'smooth', 'yellow', 'square' our discourse must quickly become oblique. In the case of representational arts like Renaissance painting, one can cheat by talking about the represented things as if they were real; one can also talk about how real or not they seem, though this only has a limited usefulness."
"Other approaches have to be found: we may characterize the quality of the painting by comparing it with something else, either by straight comparison or more commonly by metaphor, transferring to painting a word that has been defined by use in some other area; or we may characterize quality by imputing to it causes or effects: we may refer to the process or intention we suppose went to produce it, or to the response we claim it stimulated in us. These are only the simplest of the linguistic tricks a critic must use. At any time very little is said about paintings in direct descriptive terms. It is a sort of linguistic activity specially exposed to pressure from the forms of the language in which the remarks are made."
"The ascendancy of language over experience inevitable in any critical discourse was compounded by the humanists' attitude to language in general. We have seen that humanists shared a preoccupation with imitating the structures of classical Latin prose, itself a very elaborately patterned language; they were sufficiently linguistic determinists themselves to believe they must yield to the forms of the classical language before they could enter into the true classical consciousness and culture. So, for more respectable reasons than one might think, the humanists were passive and compliant in their relationship to the forms of literary Latin; they let verba influence res to an extraordinary degree, and the forms of the Ciceronian period had an authority for them of a kind they could not have had for Cicero, however much better he did it. The humanists decently disposed matter – matter naturally not in conflict with general experience – within the grand and delicately balanced forms of classical language; often, like Leonardo Bruni, they let themselves fill out the forms by generating inoffensive matter along classical lines from rather small kernels of sense. Relatively little of their energy need be spent on brutalizing the beautiful patterns of language to make a workable fit with experience, relatively more could be spent on playing on these patterns correctly and stylishly, accurate et eleganter."