Encyclopedia entry on Michael Podro more

Michael Podro was born in 1931 and read English at Jesus College, Cambridge from 1951 to 1954 where he attended F. R. Leavis’s seminar. He was a part-time student at the Slade from 1955 to 1956 and in November 1956 joined the Philosophy Department at University College, London to undertake a qualifying year in philosophy prior to engaging in doctoral research. He wrote his doctorate on Konrad Fiedler’s Theory of Art under the supervision of Ernst Gombrich and Richard Wollheim. He was head of the History of Art Department at Camberwell School of Art and Design from 1961 to 1967. He was appointed Lecturer in the Philosophy of Art at the Warburg Institute, University of London, in 1967 and was there until 1969 when he joined the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. He was made Chair of the Department in 1973 and retired in 1996. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992. Hovering in the terrain between art historiography and philosophy, Podro’s books develop a continuous line of thought that started from a problem in Gombrich’s Art and Illusion identified by Wollheim in a critical review. Gombrich assimilated the perception of a painted picture to Jastrow’s duck-rabbit: either one could see the duck or the rabbit but not both at the same time (becomes) either one could see the paint or the picture but not both at the same time. Wollheim objected that while duck and rabbit were two incompatible interpretations of the same configuration, the analogy was imperfect for paint and picture. Podro turned this into a more general problem concerning the way in which the mind worked upon a pictorial surface (painted, drawn or sculpted) to generate a transfigured subject. The deep difference between Podro and Gombrich is Podro’s aesthetic response to images, which hardly interested Gombrich at all. This, in turn, led to a running debate between Podro and Wollheim on the precise nature of the dual aspectuality of the painted image. The Manifold in Perception is an historical account of a group of closely related theories concerning the relationship between a subject and the artist’s painted depiction of that subject. It discusses the views of Kant, Schiller, Herbart, Hildebrand, Schopenhauer and Fiedler and concludes with a discussion of the tradition from Kant in contemporary retrospect. That tradition ‘had two underlying assumptions. The first was that any account of art must indicate distinctive or at least characteristic uses of our perception, uses which if not exclusive to art are at least necessary to it, and which are seen in art in a particularly striking way. The second assumption was that art involves our attitudes, in the sense of our serious purposes as human beings.’ (p.121) The Critical Historians of Art addresses the work of art historians who aimed to explore particular works of art in the light of a conception of art, not as historically determined objects but as works that may be seen in the light of each other. What, in other words, does a work of art qua work of art hope to achieve? The book considered the distinctive answers given by Hegel, Schnaase, Semper, Göller, Riegl, Wölfflin, Springer, Warburg and Panofsky. Depiction uses the tools of philosophy and criticism to examine the work of Donatello, Rembrandt, Chardin and Hogarth and is an outstanding demonstration of the full complexity of aesthetic response to artistic depictions. BIBLIOGRAPHY The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford, 1972) The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven and London, 1982) Depiction (New Haven and London, 1998)