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Seeing Comics through Art History pp 75–95Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction

Part of the Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels book series (PSCGN)

Abstract

“Psychologies of perception” refers in this chapter to a strand of art-historical debate that recruits empirically derived observations about the nature of the human perceptual system to the exploration of philosophical problems regarding the interpretation of pictorial images. The first half presents an overview of this tradition beginning with Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich’s work on caricature and taking in contributions from Rudolf Arnheim, Richard Wollheim and Kendall Walton. Each of these writers is characterised as engaged in a balancing act between the competing aims of making falsifiable claims about perceptual processes and evoking the pleasures of engaging with artworks.

The relevance of these debates to Comics Studies is framed primarily with respect to the attention they pay to the effects of drawing style on the recognition of pictorial images. This argument is developed in the second half, which introduces recent developments including the influence of Arnheim’s work on contemporary metaphor theory and Simon Grennan’s recent theorisation of narrative drawing, both of which inform the author’s autobiographical comics presented in this section. The chapter concludes by suggesting that comics scholarship’s focus on the narrative effects of depiction offers to art historians a novel way of exploring artists’ representational choices.

Keywords

  • Psychology
  • Drawing style
  • Caricature
  • Depiction
  • Seeing-in

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Narratological analyses of style in comics include Pascal Lefèvre’s (2011a, 2011b, 2016) emphasis on graphic style’s ability to create fictive worlds; Simon Grennan’s (Grennan 2012, 2017) conceptualisation of graphic style as the realisation of intersubjective relationships; Eszter Szép’s (2020, pp. 109–134) analysis of the ethics of style as an element of interpersonal engagement; and Elisabeth El Refaie’s theorisation of “stylistic metaphors” (2019, pp. 109–117)

  2. 2.

    Gombrich returns to the analysis of caricature later in Art and Illusion (2002, pp. 279–303); also of interest to comics scholars is his argument that visual metaphor is the primary weapon in “the cartoonist’s armoury” (1963).

  3. 3.

    For further discussion of caricature Cf. Mutard chapter “From Giotto to Drnaso: The Common Well of Pictorial Schema in ‘High’ Art and ‘Low’ Comics”.

  4. 4.

    Gombrich himself provides evidence of this shift in his discussion of Rodolphe Töpffer’s Essai de Physiognomonie (1845), which he frames as a systematic investigation of the psychological principles of “minimum clues” and “release mechanisms” (Gombrich 2002, pp. 283–289)

  5. 5.

    For further discussion of Arnheim and visual balance Cf. Sommerland chapter “Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga”.

  6. 6.

    The collection can be browsed at http://bit.ly/lescolemanlcc

  7. 7.

    Beyer began self-publishing in 1975 and is best known for comic strips starring his luckless characters Amy and Jordan. During the 1980s and 90s his work appeared in a variety of underground and alternative periodicals including the influential anthology RAW, and has been reprinted in Amy and Jordan (Beyer 2004) and Agony (Beyer 2016).

  8. 8.

    An anthropomorphic elephant who starred in seven children’s books authored by Brunhoff between 1931 and 1937.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kingston University, Kingston, UK

    John Miers

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  1. Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, UK

    Dr. Maggie Gray

  2. London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, London, UK

    Dr. Ian Horton

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Miers, J. (2022). Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction. In: Gray, M., Horton, I. (eds) Seeing Comics through Art History. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_5

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