ABSTRACT

In the late 1970s various attempts were made to break the closed circle of traditional art history in Britain: by feminism, for example in Old mistresses (1981) by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock; by Marxism, for example in Tim Clark’s essay on Manet’s “Olympia” first published in Screen in 1980. Vision and painting is a text of great subtlety and force of analysis. Vision and painting attacks the particular form of the naturalist fallacy prevalent in its specific area, in fact naming the view that art is a copy of nature as “the Natural Attitude”. Not for the first time Vision and painting draws on Bakhtin when asserting that “the sign exists only in its recognition, ‘dialogically’, as interaction between the signifiers presented by the surface of the image or of the text, and the discourses already in circulation”.