Art-historical accounts of the last 200 years identify developments in the types, or “modes,” of address that a picture can present to a viewer as critical to the experience and evaluation of paintings. The authors focus on “anti-theatrical” theories of pictorial address and the complex and innovative “double relation” of absorption and acknowledgment introduced by the painter Edouard Manet. They report a case study of Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère investigating expert and novice spectators' eye movements and utterances in response to the painting to find evidence that viewers seek resolution of the complex “double relation” that the theories describe.
The spectatorship of portraits by naïve viewers (beholders) was explored in a single experiment. Twenty-five participants rated their liking for 142 portraits painted by Courbet (36 paintings), Fantin-Latour (36 paintings) and Manet (70 paintings) on a 4-point Likert scale. The portraits were classified in terms of focussed versus ambiguous nature of sitter gaze and the presence of salient features in the context beyond sitters. Participants rated portraits while having their eye movements recorded. The portraits were split into regions of interest (ROIs) defined by faces, bodies and context. Participants also completed individual difference measures of attention and task focus. Results showed naïve spectatorship to be subject to attentional capture by faces. Paradoxically, the presence of salient features in the context amplified the attentional capture by faces through increasing participants liking of portraits. Attentional capture by faces was also influenced by sitter gaze and task focus. Unsurprisingly, the spectatorship of portraits by naïve beholders is dominated by faces, but the extent of this dominance is influenced by exogenous and endogenous attentional factors.
Participants judged 94 portraits painted by Édouard Manet (70), Gustave Courbet (12) and Henri Fantin--Latour (12) for horizontal and vertical pupil misalignment and gaze ambiguity (Experiment 1) and focal point of gaze (Experiment 2). Eye movements were also measured as participants considered the extent to which sitters in the same portraits acknowledged viewers (spectators; Experiment 3). The results showed Manet portraits to be frequently painted with misaligned pupils that are associated with gaze ambiguity, especially when misaligned on the vertical axis. This ambiguity of gaze was associated with the average focal point of gaze as being judged further up and to the left of the centre for ambiguous relative to non--ambiguous portraits. These decisions in relation to portraits displaying ambiguous gaze were associated with increased eye--movements to the eye region relative to those portraits not displaying ambiguity. Finally, ratings of acknowledgement taken in Experiment 3 correlated with those of gaze ambiguity taken in Experiment 1. The results are interpreted in terms of the role of eye gaze in influencing spectatorship of portraits and, specifically, Fried's theory of the 'double relation' (Fried 1980; Fried 1996) between painting and spectator in the paintings of Manet.
Abstract:The ability to form stable mental representations (or concepts) from a set of instances is fundamental to human visual cognition and is evident across the formation of prototypes, from simple pseudo-random dot patterns through to the recognition of faces. In this paper we argue that the cognitive and perceptual processes that lead to the formation of stable concepts are also important in understanding spectatorship of a certain class of serial artworks that are composed of multiple discrete but related pictures. This article considers the processes that enable the formation of stable mental representations in relation to a series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral by Claude Monet. The implications of understanding these processes for the spectatorship of this class of serial artworks are discussed.
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