Painting and Language: A Pictoral Syntax of Shapes

Curtis Carter, Marquette University

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Originally published in Leonardo, Volume 9, No. 2 (Spring 1976).

This version of the article is identical to the published version.

The published version of the article is available here.

Abstract

In previous articles, the author proposed that paintings can have syntactic rules. In this article he develops his proposal further and shows that shapes act as syntactic elements in the languages of painting styles. He meets Nelson Goodman's objections to his proposal by showing that shapes meet the criterion of syntactic discreteness proposed by the latter to separate linguistic from other symbolic systems.

His approach is to specify style as the domain of a language of painting, to show that style is syntactical and to argue that shapes are the primitive syntactic elements of style. His essay relates current research on the development of syntax for picture-reading machines to the question of syntax for paintings.