Can a Painting have a Rhythm

This paper challenges the widely held assumption that paintings and other works of graphic art have a communicable rhythmic structure. I defend the view that although the experience of viewing a picture takes place in time, and thus is successive, it cannot be temporally structured in a sufficiently determinate manner to sustain the kind of attentional focus required for the communication of even simple rhythmic patterns. With reference to examples of both abstract and figurative painting, I argue that the graphic arts—unlike music and poetry—are non-sequential and that this has important consequences for how a work of graphic art is perceived. In the concluding sections of the paper, I consider some recent empirical research that offers an alternative way of approaching these issues

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Focus (optics · Graphic arts · Linguistics · Literal and figurative language · Literature · Painting · Poetry · Rhythm · Simple (philosophy · The arts · Visual arts · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Color perception and design · Computer Science · Multisensory perception and integration · Philosophy