Painting, aesthetics of

References and further reading

All the readings below are written in an approachable style.

	Baxandall, M. (1985) Patterns of Intention, London: Yale University Press. (Chapter 3 contains a useful discussion of painting’s ability to explore the nature of visual experience.)
	Greenberg, Clement (1961) Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ and ‘Modernist Painting’ provide particularly clear and vivid statements of Greenberg’s fundamental views.)
	Hopkins, R.D. (1997) ‘Pictures and Beauty’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XCVII (2): 177–94. (Shows how to preserve what is right in Lessing’s idea that painting inherits the beauty of its objects; addresses some of the issues sketched out in §6.)
	Langer, Susanne K. (1953) Feeling and Form, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Offers distinct aesthetics for painting, sculpture and architecture, integrated into a general theory of art.)
	Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1766) Laocoon, trans. E.A. McCormick, Indianopolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill. (A seminal piece, from the errors of which much can be learned.)
	Ruskin, John (1843–60) Modern Painters, five vols, London: Smith, Elder & Co; repr. London: J.M. Dent & Co, 1906. (A magisterial, insightful and idiosyncratic exploration, both critical and theoretical, of painting, with special reference to the work of Turner.)
	Wollheim, Richard (1987) Painting As An Art, London, Thames & Hudson. (As well as providing the archetype for all accounts of pictorial experience which acknowledge both aspects of pictures, this is the most extensive, sophisticated and accomplished attempt to answer our question.)