A comparable set of experiences occurs whenever we look , for example , at a landscape painting in a gallery . We adopt both a position in space and a personal perspective . Namely , we experience ourselves inside the gallery building looking out of that space , and through a simulated window and into the artist-created space of the painting . Once again , the visualized field in the painting is limited by the frame ( or perhaps the edges ) of the painting itself . Notably , the visualization of the painting ' s landscape may even be identical to the actual landscape represented in the painting - a phenomenon famously captured in Magritte ' s disconcerting “ La condition humaine ” - so that the artist-created representation essentially overlaps the natural one . Let me call this simulated-looking-through-the-window experience , “ visualism .” Until the early twentieth century , the aesthetic concept of “ visualism ” provided a useful functional model for the understanding and appreciation of art by viewers . That is , because the images that painters commonly incorporated into their artworks were two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects that were readily recognizable from the natural world ( e . g . people , animals , flowers , sunsets etc .), viewers of paintings could appreciate their aesthetic value and meaning by relating the painted images to those natural objects . Even the creative liberties with representation taken by impressionist painters like Monet , Cezanne , and Van Gogh resulted in images that most viewers could still recognize as familiar , and still experience in an aesthetic sense by means of the simulated-looking-through-the-window approach . Most viewers could appreciate the beauty of art in the same way that they could appreciate the beauty of nature .
However , jumping ahead to the mid-twentieth century , artists like Rothko , Pollock , de Kooning , and many others were creating enormous abstract paintings that apparently rejected the notion of “ representing ” real-world objects altogether . At the same time , art critics like Roger Fry , Clive Bell , and Clement Greenberg , the most vocal proponents of non-representational painting , had been arguing that the “ true ” or “ pure ” aesthetic aspects of a painting arose autonomously from the formal characteristics of the painting itself , and did not rely upon anything outside the artwork , such as whatever the painting may have resembled .
Then , what did this radical development in painting mean for the aesthetic experience of “ visualism ?” Was “ visualism ” still a meaningful approach to the understanding and appreciation of painting when the “ objects ” appearing on the opposing side of the simulated window ( if any could be discerned at all ) were not familiar or even recognizable to the viewer ?
In my view , “ visualism ” as an aesthetic model in painting did not become obsolete with the rise of non-
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