expression theory of art

Oxford Reference

The expression theory of art, as it is usually spoken of, is the theory that art should be viewed as the expression of the mind of the artist-of his or her emotions, feelings, thoughts, and so on. In comparison with the much more ancient conception of art as imitation or representation of the world, expression theories of art are of relatively recent provenance. The question of how expression theories are different from imitation theories, however, is itself a significant one. An imitation theory might claim, after all, that art is sometimes the representation of emotion or other mental states, and even of the artist's mental states in particular. It is clear, at any rate, that while imitation theories tend to emphasize the relation between the artwork and what it imitates, expression theories have traditionally stressed the relation between the artwork and the artist, with a corresponding emphasis on authenticity of feeling and expression rather than faithfulness of representation. But a more important difference, as we shall see, is that proponents of the expression theory, as it was developed in the Romantic period, viewed expression as an act with a quite distinctive character that differentiates it from other forms of representation.

The concept of expression has also been used in a variety of other ways to elucidate the nature of art, apart from the expression theory proper, and one of these has been especially prominent. This is the notion that whether or not artworks should be seen as expressions of the artist, they are at any rate themselves expressive of emotions or feelings, as for instance a piece of music may strike us as melancholy or a painting as solemn. Expression theories characteristically seek to explain art's expressiveness as deriving from the fact that the artist expressed his or her emotions in making it; the emotion an artwork expresses is the emotion expressed in it by the artist. But expressiveness and expression have often been regarded as independent, and other explanations of expressiveness have been sought. Whether they are in fact independent is an open question, but, at any rate, the two uses have given rise to two bodies of literature that, at least to some degree, are concerned with distinct issues and have distinct aims. We should thus consider these two notions - art as expression and art as expressive- separately, bearing in mind the question of whether they can ultimately be seen as wholly independent.

Traditional Expression Theories.

What are usually thought of as the classic philosophical expression theories of art-those of Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood-emerged only around the turn of the twentieth century. But while it may be tempting to some degree, in light of this fact, to view expression theories as arising in direct response to the development, at around the same time, of styles of art that did not fit so easily into the model of art as the imitation of nature, such a view would be at best an oversimplification. In various ways, art has been viewed as the expression of the artist's mind since at least the late eighteenth century, and this notion was indeed a key feature in the development of Romanticism. William Wordsworth's "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" is but one well-known example. (For the development of metaphors of art as expression during this period, see M. H. Abrams's classic study The Mirror and the Lamp.)

As mentioned above, the notion of art as expression that took hold in the romantic period tended to be based on a quite particular conception of expression. Expression, on this view, is not merely one human activity among others, but a mode of knowledge distinct from, and prior to, conceptual knowledge. In the theories of Croce's Aesthetic (1992) and Collingwood's Principles of Art (1938), this distinction becomes explicitly thematised. For Croce and Collingwood, the key point is not just that through the creation of art the artist expresses his or her feelings, but that in this process of expression the inchoate feelings that impelled the artistic act come to be clarified, better understood-and understood in a way not possible by means of concepts. Art is in fact here so strongly identified with expression that the notion of the "aesthetic" becomes radically broadened: not only is all art expression, but also all expression is aesthetic. The accounts given by Croce and Collingwood are in essentials very similar, Collingwood having developed his views very much under the influence of Croce. I will here focus mainly on Croce's presentation of the ideas.

Croce speaks of the form of knowledge embodied by art not only as expression, but also as "intuition." (In a similar vein, Collingwood speaks of "imagination.") Intuition, for Croce, is that fundamental activity whereby passively received impressions (sensations, feelings, emotions, or impulses) are given form and unity by the human spirit. It is because in Croce's view intuition is active that he also calls it expression: in each act of forming an intuition the human spirit expresses its particular state at that time. To express a mental state in this sense is not merely, to use Collingwood's term, to betray it, as a blush may betray embarrassment. Expression is a conscious activity in which, by giving form and articulation to our impressions, we come to know them and, hence, liberate ourselves from them. Intuition-expression is thus not merely the province of artists. The everyday world of each person is, indeed, made up of a series of "little" expressions-artists are merely those with a greater aptitude for expression. This move, undercutting the dichotomy between art and everyday life, is characteristic of many expression theories; such a dichotomy, says Croce, threatens to turn art into an "aristocratic club or specialist activity."

In the sense in which Croce and Collingwood use the term, however, "expression" does not refer to a physical activity or the creation of a physical artifact for both theorists ascribe to an idealist ontology of artworks: The real artwork is "internal," a mental entity. Since for Croce expression is identical with the act of intuition, he distinguishes sharply between the expression of mental states and their externalization in a painting, text, or sequence of sounds. Any artwork, as Collingwood puts it, is already complete and perfect as it exists in the artist's head. So too there can be no technique for making the real, internal artwork, though there may be techniques of externalization.

The idealist ontology of art to which these versions of the expression theory ascribe has provided fuel for a good deal of criticism of them. It has often been pointed out that the position has some very counterintuitive consequences: on this view, the physical object hanging on the wall that we call Édouard Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe is not an artwork; and on this account, artworks come in and out of existence when we think of them and stop thinking of them, and they cease to exist entirely if not thought of at all. It is true that Collingwood concedes that it is often essential, in order for a painter to express a given thing, that he or she must have the experience of actually putting paint on canvas in a certain way. But if this is granted, it becomes questionable whether what the painter imagines can really be defined as independently of the physical canvas as the idealist theory claims (See Wollheim, 1980.)

However, versions of the expression theory of art exist that do not rely on such a questionable aesthetic ontology. The expression account developed by the novelist Leo Tolstoy in his 1898 essay What Is Art? (1930), for instance, avoids such commitments. Similarly, the influential expression theory proposed by John Dewey in Art as Experience (1934) eschews an idealist ontology of art in favour of a more naturalistic one. Like Croce and Collingwood, Dewey stresses the continuity between art and everyday experience; indeed, for him art is the "clarified and intensified" development of features present in certain kinds of vital everyday experience.

These are experiences that are complete, harmonious, and unified in that, guided by some impulse, they run their course naturally and continuously toward their fulfilment - as when, for instance, we finish our work successfully or solve a problem. In such experiences lie the roots of the artist's concern with unity and harmony. Any such experience begins with an "emotional impulsion" that is initially inchoate; and again like Croce and Collingwood, Dewey views the process of artistic expression as the artist's effort to bring such an emotion to consciousness. Expression cannot be mere unthinking discharge - for Dewey it essentially involves the intention to communicate. But precisely for this reason, it is also essential in his view that it be embodied in an external medium that makes it communicable. Thus, while for Dewey an artwork cannot simply be identified with a physical object, neither can it be defined as independently of physical objects as it can for Croce and Collingwood.

Expression theories of art have, however, been widely criticized on grounds other than ontological ones. One focus of these critiques has been on the expression theory as a definition of art. In the simplest version of the expression theory, in order to count as art, an entity must satisfy several conditions: (1) the artist must at the time of creating the work have felt some emotion, (2) whose nature was unclear to him, and (3) intentionally created that entity in such a way that its form makes manifest that emotion, (4) thereby clarifying the emotion to himself and perhaps others.

The main difficulty with this account has sometimes been said to be that it leaves out some of the things we call art: It is doubtful whether the Parthenon, for instance, or a finely wrought altar, would meet these conditions. But the expression theorist would just admit this point - what he is offering, after all, is a definition of "real" art as opposed to those things that are merely called art but fail to satisfy the above conditions. Collingwood, for example, banishes to this latter category craft, "amusement art," and art that serves a practical purpose (such as religious icons).

Other difficulties have been raised for the theory, however, that are more immediately damaging. First, it is possible only rarely to know whether in fact a given artwork was produced by such a procedure; so at any rate, the notion that art is expression could not function as a criterion for deciding whether something is a work of art. But more importantly, it must be asked whether, even if we did somehow discover that the creator of a work had not at the time he created it felt any emotion that we take the work to embody, would we really reject our former opinion that it is a work of art? Igor Stravinsky, for instance, wrote his Symphony in C at the time of the death of his wife and his mother, but he did not view the music as reflecting his grief (Davies, 1994). Is it any less art for this reason? A more sophisticated version of the expression theory might maintain that, in order for something to count as art, the artist need not have felt the relevant emotion at the time of creating it but only at some time in her life. But it has been argued that even this condition is too strong. Must the artist have actually felt the emotion in question, or would it be sufficient that she merely have a conception of it or imagine it? The expression theory, it is alleged, makes the question of whether something is art too dependent on the actual psychology of the artist.

Criticism of the expression theory as a definition of art has also come from other quarters. It has sometimes been suggested that while the notion that art is personal expression may have been a useful one around the turn of the twentieth century, as artists shifted away from naturalistic representation, the succession of artistic movements in the twentieth century increasingly revealed its inadequacy as a definition of art (Danto, 1986). It is hard to see the differences of style among fauvism, cubism, and Dada as simply a matter of differences in the way the artists' emotions are expressed. The "aesthetic of expression" has, indeed, sometimes been associated with modernism itself and, by some critics, has been said to be on the wane with the development of postmodernism (Jameson, 1985). This kind of point is, however, perhaps best seen as a critique not of the notion that artists may convey aspects of themselves through their art, but of a particular ideal of art as self-expression, one in which the internal state can be identified independently of its external expression.

The expression theory has been criticized, further, not only as a definition of art, but also for its account of art's expressiveness (see Tormey, 1971; Wollheim, 1980; Davies, 1994). On this account, in order for a work to have a given expressive quality, the artist must have felt a corresponding emotion and made that emotion manifest in the work. But if Bach's Suites for Solo Cello strike us as melancholy, we would not, it seems, withdraw our interpretation solely on the basis of discovering that Bach had not actually felt melancholy at the time of composing them, or even if we learned he had been very happy. This is not to say that facts about the biography of the artist may not influence our interpretation. But what it suggests is that art's expressiveness does not derive solely from the intention of the artist to convey his actually felt emotions. This is supported by the observation that we commonly view not only artworks but natural objects as expressive - willow trees as sad, for instance. Ways may exist, of course, in which the traditional expression theory's account of expressiveness could be modified to withstand this sort of objection, and we will return to this possibility later. But points such as these have led many theorists since the 1970s to turn their attention toward giving accounts of expressiveness itself, independently of the artist's emotions.

Expressiveness without Expression.

Few of those interested in explaining expressiveness have viewed it as the basis for a definition of art. However, expressiveness is certainly one element of the significance of all of the arts - a musical melody may be lonely, a painting full of gaiety, and a dance mournful. It is characteristic of the experience of expressiveness that we take the emotional quality to inhere in the form of the artwork itself, and the question is then, as it has sometimes been put, how can a feeling or emotion get into an object?

The account offered by the traditional expression theory is a causal one: to say that an artwork is sad is to say that its creator was sad and made his emotional state manifest in the work. But in light of the shortcomings of that view, another kind of causal account - called the arousal theory - has sometimes been offered as more plausible. Perhaps to say that an artwork is sad is to say that it has the power, at least under the right circumstances, to make its audience sad, this sadness then being projected onto the object. But the arousal theory faces difficulties of its own. The central problem is that it seems we often see an expressive quality in an artwork without feeling the corresponding emotion at all; we might see that a piece of music is intended to be solemn while feeling rather detached, or even jubilant, ourselves. Even if art may sometimes rouse emotions in us, then, it would seem difficult to explain art's expressiveness in terms of those emotions. (See Bouwsma, 1971, and for some recent qualified versions of the arousal view, Davies, 1994.)

The point is, in short, that our experience of the sadness of an artwork seems often to be not a matter of feeling any kind of sadness but rather of recognizing sadness in the work. In light of this, a number of theorists have developed accounts that seek to explain art's expressiveness not causally, but in terms of its ability to symbolize emotion. One prominent example of such an approach is the view of Suzanne Langer (1942). In order to function symbolically, for Langer, a thing must be similar in structure to what it symbolizes; but, in her view, art is a symbolic medium of a different kind from language. Unlike language, art lacks a vocabulary and syntax, and hence it is ideally suited to symbolize what language cannot, namely, the detail and complexity of the world of our feelings, in which she includes everything from emotions to states of excitement and repose. More particularly, what art can symbolize is not the feelings themselves but the temporal process of feeling, that is, patterns of motion and rest, tension and release that may be shared by different feelings. Thus the expressiveness of music derives from the similarities between its formal properties and these changing patterns of feeling; visual art synthesizes such processes into an a temporal form.

Langer's account has often been thought seriously limited, however, by its use of a model of emotion according to which even the most complex emotions are to be conceived as felt bodily changes in the organism (see, for instance, Budd, 1985; Robinson, 2005). This model has been widely criticized in recent philosophy, for most emotions clearly have a cognitive component that relates them intrinsically to circumstances in the world but which the feeling model leaves out. It does not seem possible to differentiate many emotions, for instance, fear and anger, solely on the basis of bodily feelings that might accompany the emotions. Fear is, in part, identified by something like the belief that one is in danger and anger by the belief that a wrong has been done. Correspondingly, Langer misrepresents art's capacity to tell us about the emotions: if joyful music could only tell us about the bodily feelings that might accompany joy rather than about joy in all of its aspects, we would not have nearly the interest in it that we do.

Perhaps the most influential recent approach to expressiveness is what might be called the "similarity theory," which pursues a rather different tack. Rather than explaining expressiveness causally or as a symbolization of emotion, such an approach seeks to demystify the question of how an emotion can "get into an object" by finding analogues of this phenomenon outside the realm of art. Two of the most significant examples of this approach are the views of Peter Kivy (1980) and Stephen Davies (1994, 2006), both of which concern expressiveness in music. What such theories point to is our natural tendency to view the human body and its behaviour - the face, voice, gait, gestures, carriage, and so on - as themselves bearers of expressive qualities. A sad face, drooping posture, and sad-sounding voice, of course, often tell us that the person exhibiting them is sad; indeed. some philosophers would go further and say that there is a conceptual connection between the behaviour and the mental state: part of what it means to be sad is to be disposed to "sad behaviour" of this kind. Nonetheless, on any particular occasion such "sad behaviour" does not necessarily indicate that the person in question is sad - he or she might be acting or just have a permanently sad-looking face. Many human features and elements of behaviour can, then, present an emotional appearance and be expressive of emotion, without actually being expressions of the agent's emotion on that occasion. We sometimes regard the sadness as belonging to the appearances themselves - and this is just what we do in the case of music or painting as well.

For Kivy and Davies, then, artistic expressiveness derives primarily from the expressiveness of behaviour. To hear a piece of music as sad is to perceive a similarity between its formal features and some of the behavioural expressions of sadness, as funeral marches mimic the slow, heavy movements and speech of sad people. On this view, instrumental music cannot represent the cognitive components of emotion; it can express emotion only by virtue of its similarity to emotional behaviour. The range of emotions that music can express will thus be restricted to those that have characteristic bodily expressions - it could not, presumably, express envy or nostalgia. Davies (2006), for instance, holds that the range of emotion types expressed by music is quite limited, including sadness, happiness, timidity, anger, and perhaps a few others. While musical expressiveness in this sense may be partially structured by convention, it is not simply a matter of convention. Kivy and Davies do allow, however, for another, more explicitly conventional source of expressiveness, as, for instance, minor keys have come to be associated with grief.

Similarity theories of this kind undoubtedly uncover an important element that commonly underlies our sense of a musical work's expressiveness. But it does not seem they can offer an exhaustive account of what determines expressiveness in all of the arts, or even in music itself. The bright yellows, blues, and reds of Henri Matisse's late paintings and cut-outs, for instance, are often joyous, but it would be hard to find any similarity between these colors and joyful behaviour. So too Charles Baudelaire once described the painting of Eugène Delacroix as "melancholy" in part because of his simple, abundant, and harmonious use of colour. Baudelaire's writings suggest that what connected this use of colour with melancholy for him was his association of colour, as opposed to line, with the poetic and the sensual. What these examples suggest is that the connections between an artwork and an emotion that underlie expressiveness may be more various than the similarity theory allows and may include complex chains of association and belief. If this is right, it may be precipitous to restrict a priori the emotions that music or any artwork can express to those which have characteristic bodily expressions.

Another concern about the similarity theory is whether the similarities to which it points can really serve as the grounds or justification for descriptions of expressive qualities, as similarity theorists generally hold. Emotive descriptions of art like "that music is sad" have sometimes been compared to what Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of as language having a "secondary sense" (Wittgenstein, 1953). If - to take two of Wittgenstein's examples - someone wants to say that Wednesday is "fat" and Tuesday "lean" rather than vice versa or that the vowel "e" is "yellow," in this case "fat" and "yellow" have a secondary sense. For Wittgenstein, "fat" in this use is "secondary" in that it presupposes a prior understanding of the "primary" application of the word to people; we could not explain what "fat" means here by pointing to Wednesday as an example but only by reference to its ordinary meaning. For this reason, Wittgenstein suggests, although the secondary use of the word occurs in a quite different context from its primary use, it cannot be regarded as having a new, independent literal meaning. But neither does the fact that the secondary use differs from the primary one mean that "fat" is the wrong word to use in this case, for no other word would adequately convey what he wants to say.

Different conclusions have been drawn from the comparison between emotive descriptions of art and secondary uses (see, for instance, Scruton, 1974; Tilghman, 1984; and Davies, 1994, 2006). But one suggestion might be that if the use of "sad" to describe music does not have a new literal meaning independent of its primary one, the features we use to support that use cannot be independent criteria analogous to the criteria that govern the literal meanings of words. If this is right, then pointing to the similarities or other connections between an artwork and sadness, while it may be illuminating in many ways, cannot serve to justify the description of that work as sad-nor can it serve, as at least Kivy intends, as a response to the skeptic who doubts the legitimacy of such descriptions.

Recent Developments.

Recent years have witnessed a number of important developments in debates concerning both the understanding of expressiveness and the viability of the expression theory of art.

One important development in discussions of expressiveness has been the appearance of what might broadly be called imagination - or inference-based views of this phenomenon (Vermazen, 1986; Robinson, 2005; Levinson, 2006; for an earlier emphasis on the role of imagination in expressiveness, see Scruton, 1974). Often the imagination involved in experiences of expressiveness is taken to be the imagination of a kind of "persona" in the work. In Levinson's (2006) view, for instance, a passage of music is expressive of an emotion if and only if it is readily heard by an experienced listener as an expression of that emotion by a persona heard or imagined in the music.

When we hear the opening of Brahms's First Symphony, for instance, we feel ourselves presented with the image of a person in the throes of emotion, which is somehow expressed through the music itself. However, such "persona" theories have met with significant criticism - for instance, that it is simply not always the case that listeners who hear a work as expressing an emotion imagine a persona in that work, and that listeners' imaginations are too unconstrained by the music for us to attribute what they hear to the music itself rather than to their own fantasies (see, e.g., Davies, 2006). Levinson (2006), for one, responds to these criticisms by arguing that the imagination of a persona is presupposed in all experiences of expressiveness even if listeners are not explicitly aware of it and that the requisite objectivity can be established for at least some expressive qualities by reference to a class of listeners who are demonstrably competent in understanding the relevant type of music.

An important debate that has been rekindled by the development of persona theories concerns the question of how wide a range of emotions artworks may legitimately be said to express. As noted above, similarity theorists such as Kivy and Davies view instrumental music as restricted to expressing a narrow range of fairly coarse-grained emotions such as happiness and sadness. However, several proponents of the persona theory have argued that if hearing a musical work as expressing an emotion involves hearing an imaginary persona in the work, and if this imaginary persona can be adequately grounded in features of the music, then this gives us a basis for holding that music can capture not only behavioral aspects of emotions, but their cognitive components as well. Karl and Robinson (1995), for instance, maintain that the cognitive content of many complex emotions involves sequences of several cognitive components and that because music is a process we can hear it as expressing such sequences of mental states in a persona. They thus argue that certain passages in Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony conform to the central features of the cognitive content of hope, notably a positive attitude toward the attainment of a state and a desire to bring it about. Music can mirror a state like desire, for instance, in that a theme may struggle for dominance, fail repeatedly, but finally emerge triumphant. If music can capture cognitive elements of the emotions in this way, this suggests not only that music may express a wider range of emotions than similarity theorists usually allow, but also, according to Robinson (2005), that by combining cognitive elements from different emotions, it can express emotions that are more fine-grained than can be captured by any words (Robinson, 2005).

Another recent suggestion (Spackman, 2012) is that much of the discussion of expressiveness since the 1960s, especially that of the similarity theorists, has lost sight of one of the central features that make expressive qualities distinctive according to theorists such as Croce, Collingwood, and Langer, namely, that they are nonconceptual and ineffable. Spackman points out that, for these thinkers, this feature is one of the main sources of the value of expressive qualities, and he argues for a moderate view on the question of whether they are ineffable. On this view, although expressive qualities are not strictly speaking ineffable, since they can be adequately captured by demonstrative expressions such as "that expressive quality," at least some expressive qualities are nonetheless "descriptively ineffable" in that they cannot be captured by any nondemonstrative descriptions, however complex. And, he suggests, the fact that instrumental music and other nonrepresentational artworks can represent emotions that language cannot is indeed an important source of their value. If this is the case, most recent discussions of expressive qualities have neglected one of the main sources of our interest in them. (For an overview of recent work on expressiveness in music, see Matravers, 2007.)

In addition to these debates concerning expressiveness, recent years have also seen a resurgent interest in defending expression theories of art of one kind or another. While few today would accept any version of the expression theory as a definition of art, several recent philosophers have suggested that some modified form of the expression theory might be required in order to give an adequate account of the expressiveness of most artworks, as opposed to the expressiveness of natural objects. Despite the shortcomings of the idea that art's expressiveness derives from emotions felt by the artist, it has been pointed out that we take a much deeper interest in the expressiveness of art than in the expressiveness of natural objects and that the interest is of a different kind as well. As Richard Wollheim, for one, suggests, the obvious thought is that this difference derives from the role of the artist in creating the artwork (Wollheim, 1993). Wollheim acknowledges our tendency to see even natural objects as bearing emotional qualities as one source of expressiveness. But the expressiveness of an artwork is also controlled and refined by the artist's intentional activity, and Wollheim's conclusion is thus that what a successful artwork expresses is in all cases the emotion the artist intended to express in making it. Wollheim's account makes several crucial modifications in the traditional expression theory: first, the artist need not actually have felt the emotion expressed at the time of creation, but only at least have had access to it in memory; and second, the sense of "intention" in which the artist's intention determines what the work expresses should be construed quite broadly so as to include not only what was deliberately willed, but also all of the thoughts and emotions that caused and guided the creative act.

Another important recent version of the expression theory is that offered by Jenefer Robinson (2005). Robinson does not hold that art can be defined in terms of expression or even that expression is the main function of all art. Nonetheless, she argues that when an artist does express emotion in a work, a modified Romantic form of the expression theory gives the right account of what expression is. A version of the persona theory plays an important role in this account. If an artist expresses an emotion in a work, she intentionally creates the work in such a way as to be perceived as evidence for attributing that emotion to a persona, which may or may not be the artist's own.

The artist need not, then, as in Wollheim's view, ever have felt the emotion in question; she need only have conceived of it. Hearkening back to Croce and Collingwood, Robinson also maintains that the artwork that expresses the artist's emotion will "articulate" and "individuate" this emotion, that is, it will bring to consciousness the particular character of an emotion, which often could not be fully captured by words, and provide an understanding of what it is like to feel that emotion that the artist did not have prior to the expression. On her view, though natural and created objects may have expressive qualities independently of an artist's intentional activity, properly speaking, if an artwork can be said to express an emotion, this is always because an artist has expressed an emotion in it.

A still more moderate form of expression theory is one proposed by Stephen Davies (1994). Music may, Davies allows, sometimes express emotions that do not derive from the composer's intentions. Ordinarily, however, part of what is involved in the composer's crafting of his materials is an attempt to exert intentional control over the expressive content of the product. Thus, usually what a piece of music expresses is some emotion of which the composer had at least some conception, even if he never actually felt it, and which he intended the work to express. If this were not normally the case, we would have no reason to care about the emotions in art in the way that we do. (For another recent defence of a modernized version of the expression theory, see Dilworth, 2004.)Enter your text here...