Intentions

Anton Groner
Bookbinding Design
ca. 1890
watercolor on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Franz von Seitz
Bookbinding Design
1867
watercolor and gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Karl Friedrich Schinkel
Decorative Scheme for Dining Hall
ca. 1827-28
watercolor and gouache on paper
(this sheet was destroyed during World War II)
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Valentin Lefebvre
Design for Tomb of Ruler
ca. 1677
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Domenico Santi
Design for Cartouche Frame
ca. 1660
etching
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Hans Thoma
Putti with Armillary Sphere
(design for mosaic)
1883
watercolor on paper
(this sheet was destroyed during World War II)
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Julius Victor Berger
Sketch for Art Nouveau Poster
ca. 1890
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous French Artist
Ornamental Design
for the Grande Galerie at the Louvre
ca. 1660-70
watercolor and gouache on vellum
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous German Artist
Warrior supporting (blank) Coat-of-Arms
ca. 1520-30
drawing, with added watercolor
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

René-Marie Castaing
Joan of Arc with her Voices
ca. 1930
oil on canvas
(modello for stained glass)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

René-Marie Castaing
Joan of Arc at the Stake
ca. 1930
oil on canvas
(modello for stained glass)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

René Boyvin after Léonard Thiry
Design for a Mask
ca. 1550-60
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

René Boyvin after Léonard Thiry
Design for a Mask
ca. 1550-60
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Francesco Ponte
Costume Design for Hasse's opera Solimano
ca. 1753
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anton Groner
Ornamental Frieze Design
ca. 1890
watercolor on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Johann Hermann
Design for Printed Textile (Silk Scarf)
1865
watercolor and gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

The very point of Richter's story, after all, is that style rules even where the artist wishes to reproduce nature faithfully, and trying to analyze these limits to objectivity may help us get nearer to the riddle of style.  One of these limits we know from the last chapter; it is indicated in Richter's story by the contrast between coarse brush and fine pencil.  The artist, clearly, can render only what his tool and his medium are capable of rendering.  His technique restricts his freedom of choice.  The features and relationships the pencil picks out will differ from those the brush can indicate.  Sitting in front of his motif, pencil in hand, the artist will, therefore, look out for those aspects which can be rendered in lines – as we say in a pardonable abbreviation, he will tend to see his motif in terms of lines, while, brush in hand, her sees it in terms of masses.

The question of why style should impose similar limitations is less easily answered, least of all when we do not know whether the artist's intentions were the same as those of Richter and his friends.

Historians of art have explored the regions where Cézanne and van Gogh set up their easels and have photographed their motifs.  Such comparisons will always retain their fascination since they almost allow us to look over the artist's shoulder – and who does not wish he had this privilege?  But however instructive such confrontations may be when handled with care, we must clearly beware of the fallacy of "stylization."  Should we believe the photograph represents the "objective truth" while the painting records the artist's subjective vision – the way he transformed "what he saw"?  Can we compare "the image on the retina" with the "image in the mind"?  Such speculations easily lead into a morass of unprovables.  Take the image on the artist's retina.  It sounds scientific enough, but actually there never was one such image which we could single out for comparison with either photograph or painting.  What there was was an endless succession of innumerable images as the painter scanned the landscape in front of him, and these images sent a complex pattern of impulses through the optic nerves to his brain.  Even the artist knew nothing of these events, and we know even less.  How far the picture that formed in his mind corresponded to or deviated from the photograph it is even less profitable to ask.  What we do know is that these artists went out into nature to look for material for a picture and their artistic wisdom led them to organize the elements of the landscape into works of art of marvelous complexity that bear as much relationship to a surveyor's record as a poem bears to a police report.

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).