Willatz Chomsky

Pictorial Grammar:
Chomsky, John Willats, and the Rules of Representation

Paul Smith
Detail from Paul Czanne,

Victor Chocquet Seated, c. 1877
(plate 18)
DOI:
10.1111/j.1467-8365.2011.00835.x
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
34 | 3 | June 2011 | pages 562-593
Association of Art Historians 2011
Noam Chomskys work has had enormous impact, not only within linguistics,
but also upon the humanities, social sciences, and sciences more generally. It has
certainly been of especial importance for philosophy because it has revivified the
stalled debate between Rationalists and Empiricists as to whether our knowledge is
innate or acquired with its proposal that our capacity to understand and produce our
own language and to learn others too is grounded in the fact that we are born in
possession of the principles governing all possible grammatical sentences.1
The discipline of art history has remained almost completely impervious to
Chomskys work, however. Instead it has preferred of late to draw its understanding
of what is language-like about pictures from structuralism,2 or from critical revisions
of this body of theory that nevertheless preserve its foundational assumption that
both signifiers and their associated signifieds are conventional and arbitrary. Applied
uncritically to pictures, this would imply that their signs simply cannot be iconic, in
the Peircean sense of resembling what they stand for, which would beg the question
why so many depictions do indeed look convincing. The other main theory of
representation to draw analogies between pictures and language (under the broader
rubric of the language of art) that still enjoys some currency among art historians
is Gombrichs. But this provides no more satisfying a resolution to the matter of the
arbitrariness or iconicity of depiction than its rival. Instead as Richard Wollheim
observed it contradicts its own thesis that pictorial signs can be illusionistic (or
strongly iconic) by maintaining at the same time that they are always conventional,
in the sense of subject to arbitrary rules of interpretation.3 (Gombrich also regards
painting as a code of sorts.) Given this impasse, not the least advantage of applying
Chomskian principles to the analysis of pictures is that it generates an account that
makes it possible to accommodate iconicity and conventionality together amenably.
In a career spanning forty years, the psychologist (and trained engineer and artist)
John Willats developed an account of precisely this kind, largely on the basis of the
standard theory Chomsky elaborated in his first two books.4 It is therefore relatively
unsophisticated compared with the more recent versions of Chomskys theory,5
which can specify the operations of linguistic grammar in minute detail in terms
that embrace syntax and semantics (or structure and sense) simultaneously, and at
the same time explain how we can in practice implement grammar economically in
our speech.6 Willatss account is none the less serviceable for pictures since it rests on
a conception of their operations that derives from those concepts most fundamental
to Chomskys account, and which have endured through the several reforms it has
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Pictorial Grammar
undergone. It also turns out that pictures possess only a restricted set of semantic
features organized by a relatively small number of syntactical rules. So, rather as
Chomskys work could reconfigure our understanding of the role of nature and
nurture in language acquisition, Willatss account is powerful enough to reconfigure
our understanding of what is natural and what is conventional about depiction. It is
capable, in other words, not only of transcending the limitations of semiotic theory,
but also those of philosophical theories (unfamiliar to most art historians) which
regard pictures as seamless and transparent icons that resemble what they represent
naturally (as opposed to conventionally).
In short, what Willats argues on this score is that pictures are neither wholly
conventional nor naturally iconic. Instead he proposes that pictures have a natural
basis, and non-conventional characteristics, because they issue from our innate
capacity to map percepts (or mental representations) of real scenes and their
components according to rules that preserve many of their objective properties. At
the same time, however, he also argues that convention plays a substantial role in
depiction, since it is this that decides which of the manifold possible variants of these
rules are employed by particular groups and cultures.
Willats acknowledged his debt to various aspects of Chomskys thinking in
several places. In his magnum opus, Art and Representation of 1997,7 he recognized both
the impact that Chomskys theory of syntax made on his understanding of pictorial
structure, and his indebtedness to the pioneering research into picture grammars
undertaken in the 1960s by David Huffman, Max Clowes, and Adolfo Guzman
under the impact of Chomskys theories.8 And later, in Making Sense of Childrens Drawings
of 2005, Willats declared that his explanation of how children learn to draw was
premised upon Chomskys ideas about our innate capacity for producing speech.9
Willats also recognized Chomskys more indirect influence in both books by stating
that the other main source of his general theory was David Marrs Vision of 1980,10 a
work that explicitly modelled its use of computational principles to explain how the
brain converted raw data into conscious percepts upon Chomskys use of similar
principles to explain how speech transformed its own base content.11
Notwithstanding this, fleshing out Willatss account will involve analysing a
good deal more explicitly than he does himself how his theory applies Chomskian
principles since he only rarely cites specific passages of Chomskys writings, and is
reluctant to pursue theoretical generalizations. More specifically, demonstrating
that pictures have a grammar similar in kind to the grammar Chomsky discerned in
language will involve demonstrating a series of more basic facts: first, that pictures
have parts which can be segmented out of their larger structures; second, that syntax
operates on their component parts; third, that they map shapes and spatial relations
in a grammatical way; fourth, that the grammatical rules operating in any picture
are innately grounded; and, finally, that these rules map, or transform, a deeper
perceptual content.
It must be acknowledged that the type of account to be developed solely by
extrapolating from Willats must necessarily be restricted to characterizing how
pictures perform their most basic cognitive function, namely that of rendering
objects in forms that allow them to be recognized. I nevertheless hope to show
that developing a theory of this kind (or of pictorial grammar pure and simple) is
worth the effort. One justification for doing so is that the reality of such a grammar
is vigorously contested.12 Another is that the analytical categories provided by
Willats greatly enhance our understanding of how pictures work. What is more,
even a rudimentary account of pictorial grammar is capable of making sense of the
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Paul Smith
complex meanings pictures sometimes achieve when they bend, or subvert, its rules.
And although it would be unwise to attach too much weight to any further claims
about the potential of a theory of pictorial grammar, I will none the less tentatively
suggest in my conclusion that it may be capable of explaining aspects of depiction
other than shape or spatial relations, and may also contribute towards a better
understanding of the relationship between pictures and language. A general theory
of pictorial grammar is, in other words, a worthwhile aspiration for art historians as
for others.
Convention, Iconicity, and Mapping
A convenient route into the differences between semiotic and natural resemblance
theories of depiction is provided by the arguments advanced by Yve-Alain Bois in
his essay, The semiology of cubism, of 1992,13 and by Richard Wollheim in his
response to it in his essay, Formalism and its Kinds, of 1995.14 In the principles laid out at
the outset of his essay, Bois argues that the pictorial sign in cubist collage from 1912
is used in the same way either as the arbitrary signifier (described by Saussure) or
the (Peircean) index, and that its iconic use is all but entirely suspended.15 An index
is simple enough in that it is a sign that refers to its referent by grace of a causal or
existential bond of some kind. Signifiers are more complex. In the first place, they do
not refer to things and the like, but signify their own signifieds. More specifically,
because signifiers are distinguished from one another within any system, or
language, by the play of phonic differences alone,16 the signifieds that system can
generate must also be a function of these differences, and hence must be as arbitrary
as their associated signifiers. It is also important to emphasize that the signifiers
actually present in any utterance do not signify by virtue of their relationship to each
another alone, but by virtue of their relationship to their absent relatives as well.17
Bois extends these arguments by analogy to propose that the meanings of pictorial
signifiers are a function of the whole system they constitute (although he is unclear
about how this category should be applied), and are therefore arbitrary in a strong
sense. Signs thus conceived are evidently incapable of reference,18 at any event, and
only mean what they do because convention assigns them their meaning.
Because Bois sees no role for iconicity in cubist collage, he does not allow that the
games at work in some cubist collages often flagged by the words jouer or jeu
or suchlike depend on playing with, or undermining, the function that iconic signs
fulfil when used more straightforwardly. In Picassos Bowl with Fruit, Violin and Wineglass
of 1912 (plate 1), for instance, it is ambiguous whether the piece of paper representing
a wooden violin is painted to look like wood and is therefore a straightforwardly
iconic sign or whether it is painted to look like faux-bois wallpaper and is therefore
a sign that imitates a sign that routinely employs iconicity for the purposes of posing
as indexical. But even while the ambiguity of such signs calls their own authority
into question, their ability to do so is ultimately parasitic upon the reliability of the
overwhelming majority of iconic signs to refer.19 So even though Picasso cut out the
illustrations of fruit in the top left-hand corner in rough angular shapes that place
them in the pictorial equivalent of quotation marks, the joke only works because they
still manage to resemble their referents.
Although Bois essay does not purport to be a general theory of depiction,
Wollheim nevertheless argues in Formalism and its Kinds that no theory of the kind
it implies could ever be tenable.20 Wollheims aversion to Bois way of thinking
arises from his commitment to the idea that seeing-in and iconicity are both
fundamental to depiction generally,21 even overtly non-figurative painting; from
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Not available online
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Paul Smith
1 Pablo Ruiz y Picasso,

Bowl with Fruit, Violin, and
Wineglass, 1912. Charcoal,
black chalk, watercolour,
oil, coarse charcoal or
black pigment in binding
medium, on newspaper (Le
Journal, 6 and 9 December
1912), blue and white laid
charcoal papers, supported
by thin cardboard, 64
49.5 cm. Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art
(A . E . Gallatin Collection,
1952- 61-106). Succession
Picasso/DACS, London. 2010.
Photo: Philadelphia Museum
of Art.
which it follows that any theory maintaining the possibility that a paintings
content can be non-representational falsifies what is most central to it. What
underlies Wollheims opposition to Bois, in other words, is what he construes as
the latent formalism betrayed by his concern for structure. Rather than tackling
this commitment head on, however, Wollheim prefers to criticize it indirectly by
countering Bois more general (and, to be fair, largely implicit) claim that pictures
are language-like in structure. And he does this by identifying a series of conditions
drawn from Chomskys thinking that representational pictures ought to be able to
satisfy were they language-like, but which they cannot because (in his view) they
are not.22 These all require that pictures possess grammatical features of a kind that
Bois cannot discern in them (any more than structuralism can in language).23 But
Wollheims critique goes further because it purports to show that there is no such
thing as pictorial grammar tout court, which if right must mean that Willatss
account of depiction collapses along with Bois.
Wollheims most fundamental objection to the idea of pictorial grammar is that
pictures cannot involve syntactical rules because, unlike sentences, they cannot be
segmented into smaller units or ultimately basic units upon which syntax operates.
Wollheim denies, in short, that pictures consist of lexical (and other kinds of) items
ordered by syntax. This claim can be understood better by grasping how it relates
to Flint Schiers criticism of the notion of pictorial grammar in Deeper into Pictures of
1986, a work Wollheim regarded highly.24 This contends that pictures are weakly
decomposable or compositional but not strongly so like sentences, and hence
contain nothing which plays the role of a word (or morpheme) in them.25 Schier
consequently claims that in order to understand a picture we have no need to grasp
anything akin to the syntax operating in a sentence, or the relevant grammatical
rules governing [the] composition of its parts.26 Rather, he believes that there
are no grammatical rules governing the composition of pictures, and so sees no
place for a grammar or syntax of pictures at all.27 Indeed, Schier sums up Wollheims
position along with his own when he asserts that There is no need for a grammar in
Chomskys sense for iconic systems,28 since a picture is just built up iconically out
of its parts. Our manifest ability to recognize a whole icon is, in other words, simply
a function of our ability to recognize the objects and states of affairs represented by
[its] parts.29 What this seems to suggest is that pictures iconify by grace of natural
resemblance alone, or in virtue of being somehow or in some unspecified sense
isomorphic to their referents.
One of the more important implications of such a view is that pictures resemble
things without making recourse to any independent syntax of their own which
might complicate their relationship to their referents. So, even though Wollheim
eschews the notion of pictorial grammar altogether, his arguments about the
naturalness of iconicity nevertheless accord with the Port-Royal grammarians view
that there was nothing in the grammar of language that exceeded the requirement
that it should be able to reflect the natural order of things. This view is highly
reductive, however, as Chomsky famously demonstrated when he showed that the
surface structure of a sentence maps or transforms a deep structure according
to rules proper to itself.30 It follows that inasmuch as he embraces a closely analogous
conception of pictorial grammar, Willats maintains that pictorial structure is to some
extent sui generis too.
At the same time as challenging Wollheims and Schiers account of
representation for being too strongly naturalistic, Willats implicitly contests Bois
view for being too strongly conventionalist. This is because Willats envisages pictorial
567
Pictorial Grammar
2 Drawing of a square produced

by a 3-year-old, figure
3.9 from John Willats, Art
and Representation: New
Principles in the Analysis of
Pictures, Princeton, NJ, 1997.
Princeton University Press,
1997. Photo: Reprinted by
Permission of Princeton
University Press. Adapted
from figure 10b from Jean
Hayes, Childrens visual
descriptions, Cognitive
Science, 2: 1, JanuaryMarch
1978, 14. Cognitive Science
Society.
3 Paul Czanne, Provencal
Landscape with a Red Roof,
or The Pine at LEstaque,
187576. Oil on canvas, 72
58 cm. Paris: Muse de
lOrangerie (Collection Jean
Walther et Paul Guillaume).
Photo: RMN (Muse de
lOrangerie)/Franck Raux.
mapping as a process that preserves a measure of identity between the structures

of pictures and those of the objects and scenes they represent. He suggests, more
particularly, that pictorial syntax requires semantic elements like lines, and higherorder structures like whole shapes, to fall into arrangements consistent with those
formed by their real counterparts. Lines, in other words, must occlude one another
since this is what edges do, and shapes must have continuous surfaces because this is
how they are in actual objects.
Although it may seem that pictures cannot both transform their referents and
preserve some of their features, Willats argues synthetically that pictorial structures
possess what might be thought of as a qualified isomorphism with the structure of
things. He seems to regard pictures, in other words, as closely akin to maps, which
transform what they represent regularly, and not just haphazardly. This sense of
pictures as approximating to maps is shared by Andrew Harrison, who argues that
they succeed in plotting many of the relations between things, even though they do
so according to the rules of their own syntax.31 Evidently, the great advantage of a
view such as this is that it makes it possible to maintain perfectly coherently that all
viable pictorial structures can be formalized in sets of normative or conventional
rules (like those of schoolboy grammar), and that they will be transparent or iconic if
they transform percepts in ways that allow these to be recoverable. Put another way,
it is implicit in Willatss account of representation that pictures succeed in referring to
things because their structures are ultimately constrained by what Richard Gregory
called the grammar of vision (a formulation cited by Chomsky).32
For and against Pictorial Grammar 1. Segmentability
Before it is possible to establish anything of this complexity, any theory of pictorial

grammar must first of all establish that pictures have component semantic parts
of a kind that syntax can operate on, or assemble into larger units of sense. This
is what Willats argues, and by doing so contests Wollheims view of pictorial
compositionality, which denies that they have parts of this kind. It is important to
realize, however, that Wollheim does not suggest that pictures have no parts tout
court. Indeed, he accepted that they do in an article of 1966, when he concurred with
Michael Podros view that a higher-level [pictorial]
composition can have basic, or sub-components,33
arguing that many Old Master paintings have
structures whose component elements are put together
and contained in larger pictorial structures.34 Rather,
Wollheims argument is that the parts of a picture are
not the same in kind as the discrete, and ultimately
irreducible, semantic units (or whole component parts
that make sense on their own) into which sentences
can be decomposed according to Chomsky. This more
restricted claim nevertheless runs directly against
the grain of the Chomskian argument Wollheim
made in 1973 that lexical items concatenated into
complexes, and syntax and semantics, belong to the
essence of art itself.35
One way of understanding Wollheims volte-face
is that his views were altered by reading Schier. But
it is also likely that his close dialogue with Nelson
Goodman throughout the 1970s affected his views, and
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Paul Smith
in particular the distinction Goodman proposed in Languages of Art (1976) between a

finitely differentiated system or notational scheme, such as the printed notation
we use for language, and the notational scheme of painting.36 In more detail, this
argument holds that whereas printed characters are disjoint, and readily identified
as different from one another by virtue of their membership of one class (such
569
Pictorial Grammar
4 Paul Czanne, Woman with

a Coffee-Pot, c. 1895. Oil on
canvas, 130 95 cm. Paris:
Muse dOrsay. Photo:
RMN (Muse dOrsay)/Herv
Lewandowski.
as a) or another (such as d), nothing of the sort can be said of the components of
pictures.37 Instead, pictures have syntactically dense systems that lack clear internal
differentiation,38 from which it follows that they cannot be ordered by syntax.
Goodmans views were contested almost as soon as they appeared by Curtis
Carter, who argued that shapes are indeed disjoint components of pictures that
exhibit character class membership,39 and hence that they are readily seen as
constitutive elements of larger units akin to phonemes, morphemes, and spoken
words.40 His argument falls, however, because it does not clearly establish what the
defining limits of a shape are. In a similar vein, Willatss predecessors, Huffman and
Clowes, argued that structures such as line junctions and vertices, being composed
of more simple elements in the form of lines, thereby imply the operation of pictorial
syntax on disjoint units. It is a weakness of Huffmans theory, however, that it does
not closely specify the character of these units, and of Clowess and Guzmans that
they characterized lines somewhat vaguely as the boundaries of regions.41
In the light of these partial successes, it was an important part of Willatss
achievement that he clearly identified pictorial units of the kind Goodman and
Wollheim regarded as indiscernible by developing the analytical category of the
picture primitive.42 These items come in a small number of simple forms: lines
denoting edges, points indicating luminosity, and colours referring to hues and tones
simultaneously. Put this way, the argument seems trite. But it actually represented
a major advance over earlier attempts to identify basic pictorial units because it
involved distinguishing a pictorial semantic unit from the marks carrying it. A line,
in other words, is no more identical to a pencil or pen mark, or a set of brushstrokes,
or the interstices between tesserae, than a word is the same as the sound in which it is
expressed.43 Nor is a point the same as a blob, or a colour the same as a brush mark.
Once this is appreciated, it starts to appear as though Wollheims objection to pictorial
segmentability involves conflating pictorial marks, which are not always readily
segmentable, with the primitives they carry, which are. Or to put it the other way
round, a picture decomposes straightforwardly once its units are correctly specified,
just as a sentence does.
What Willats achieved by identifying the semantic units of the picture in this
manner is thus closely comparable to what Chomsky achieved by inventing the
rewrite rule,44 that is, the technique of characterizing the components of phrases
generatively in terms of explicit lexical categories such as noun, verb, adjective and
the like.45 And, indeed, Willats not only regards picture primitives as elements of the
pictures denotation system, where they play a role akin to the constituents of the
lexicon in language,46 but casts them as lexical units on account of how they refer
to scene primitives, or to the basic perceptual units of the scene they depict. Lighter
and darker points, for example, refer to the degrees of luminosity we extract from the
luminous array, and lines refer to the edges we extract from it. This means that lines
are indeed genuine units of sense, or that they are components of larger structures
that stand for things rather like nouns. Furthermore, Willats supports this inference
by showing that childrens drawings sometimes use what he calls shape modifiers,
or marks appended to a line, to specify particular aspects of its shape almost as
adjectives illustrating his claim with a drawing of a cube (plate 2), where these marks
stipulate several such properties.47
Being primitive a line can evidently be decomposed out of the larger semantic
unit of a vertex, rather as a word can be isolated from a phrase. A vertex, moreover,
can be decomposed out of the larger unit of a surface, which can itself be extracted
from a whole shape, which can in turn be isolated from the whole scene depicted,
570
Paul Smith
571
Pictorial Grammar
5 Stages of drawing a
rectangular object, figure 5
from John Willats, The third
domain: The role of pictorial
images in picture perception
and production, Axiomathes,
13: 1, March 2002, 115.
Photo: With kind permission
from Springer Science and
Business Media.
6 Stages of drawing a
rectangular object, figure 6
from John Willats, The third
domain: The role of pictorial
images in picture perception
and production, Axiomathes,
13: 1, March 2002, 115.
Photo: With kind permission
from Springer Science and
Business Media.
just as phrases can be decomposed out of larger phrases and ultimately whole
sentences. (The caveat is that it is nevertheless misleading to think that the units of
sense to be identified at different levels of pictorial structure have equivalent valences
to the units present at different levels of linguistic structure.)
There is an initially plausible objection to the idea of pictorial segmentability,
however, which is that pictures do not have units that we see in isolation in the same
way as we (seem to) hear words individually. It might be claimed, for example,
that when we fixate on a particular line in a drawing we cannot isolate it from
the lines adjacent to, or conjoint with, it, whereas we hear words as having sharp
boundaries. The fact is, however, that our impression that we hear individual words
independently of the larger structures they form is retrospective. That is, we extract
individual words from the larger sequences in which they are rolled out only after
the fact, even if this is not how it seems to us.48 There is therefore a genuine analogy
to be made between the phenomenology of parsing a sentence into its constituents
and what happens when we identify a pictures units only in the context of the
complete work, or of a large section of it. The area behind the screen of trees in the
centre of Czannes Provencal Landscape with a Red Roof of the mid-1870s (plate 3) is a good
example of this last phenomenon at work, since it is almost impossible to identify its
constituent primitives, or shapes, when seen in isolation (from close-to), but these
are readily identified when a sufficient distance is attained for the whole painting to
be visible.
Czannes mature paintings in general tend to exhibit compositionality overtly,
since they make little attempt to hide the fact that the objects in them are made up
of smaller components. In Woman with a Coffee-Pot of c. 1895 (plate 4), for example, it
is difficult to resist the temptation to see the upper and lower halves of the sitter as
joined together in the same way as the two sections of the coffee-pot to her right,
as both objects readily parse into roughly conical or cylindrical components
of the kind Irving Biederman calls geons, or viewpoint invariant, volumetric
primitive[s] analogous to phoneme[s].49 It remains a problem, however, that many
paintings appear so fluent that it can seem as though Wollheims argument against
compositionality must prevail. We may nevertheless be aware of their component
572
Paul Smith
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parts as such subliminally, since one part of our perceptual mechanism is devoted
to picking out areas of high contrast like lines, even though what that mechanism
detects is amalgamated with lower frequency information in conscious seeing (rather
as edges are when we see real scenes).50 Compositionality is thus a real feature of our
perception of pictures, even when it is not obviously so.
One symptom of compositionality is that pictures and speech are both rolled out
in units. With speech, it is obvious enough that we fabricate sense in ever-larger units
consisting of words, whole and embedded phrases, and whole sentences. But Willats
shows that we do the same kind of thing in pictures too, when, in an argument about
occlusion in pictures, he contrasts the natural sequence in which we draw an object
with a possible sequence we almost never use.51 The natural drawing (plate 5) shows
that we set down all the lines making up the front face of the object first, then repeat
the process to form the adjacent face, and finally draw its partially occluded faces
one after the other. The second (plate 6) shows how it is possible to begin drawing
the same object by drawing some of its various edges without joining them up into
faces. The fact, however, that we almost never use this sequence strongly implies that
we are predisposed to assemble pictures out of whole units of the very kind whose
existence Wollheim contests, at the earliest possible stage of the picture-making or
picture-perceiving process.52
2. Syntax
Two of the key sources of Willatss ideas about pictorial syntax were Huffmans
article, Impossible Objects as Nonsense Sentences,53 and Clowess On Seeing
Things, both of 1971. Both of these used line drawings of anomalous objects such
as an impossible polyhedron (plate 7) to reveal the rules governing the combination
of edges in properly-formed objects and pictures, in imitation of Chomskys
technique of using ambiguous and nonsense sentences to reveal the rules governing
well-formed sentences and their component strings.54 By this account, the sentence
colourless green ideas sleep furiously could appear to be a well-formed string
inasmuch as the adjectives, noun, verb and adverb are all in the right place, but
it is anomalous nevertheless because it violates (and hence reveals) the sectional
rule that only certain kinds of lexical items can be placed together if a sentence
is to makes sense of itself. By contrast, there is no such problem with the sentence
revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently, for all that it is superficially identical
in structure.55
One of the more notable discoveries of Huffman and Clowes was the principle
that the rules governing the lawful combination of edges in a rectilinear object can
be expressed as variations of four basic categories of line junction, the V-, W-, Y-, and
T-junctions (plate 8), to use Huffmans nomenclature; or the Ell, Arrow, Fork, and Tee
junctions, to use Clowess.56 This made it possible to at least envisage the possibility
that pictorial grammar could be described systematically in terms of clear categories
like those Chomsky had isolated. It also provided strong evidence for the existence of
something closely analogous to the kind of well-formed structure, or string, that
Chomksy had discerned in grammatical sentences.
At the same time, Huffman and Clowes developed systems of labelling their
diagrams which showed the convexity or concavity of an edge clearly (a technique
they compared to parsing a sentence),57 but which also made it possible readily
to identify forbidden, or ungrammatical,58 combinations of edges as well. They
were consequently able to specify a number of rules that pictures could not infringe
without being ill-formed, which included the rule that the same surface cannot exist
573
Pictorial Grammar
7 Impossible polyhedron, figure 2e from David Huffman,

Impossible objects as nonsense sentences, in Bernard Meltzer
and Donald Michie, eds, Machine Intelligence, vol. 6, Edinburgh,
1971, 295323. Photo: Courtesy of Edinburgh University Press.
8 Look up list of labelled line junctions in drawings of rectangular
objects, figure 5.4 from John Willats, Art and Representation:
New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures, Princeton, NJ, 1997.
Princeton University Press, 1997. Photo: Reprinted by Permission
of Princeton University Press. Originally figure 6 from David
Huffman, Impossible objects as nonsense sentences, in Bernard
Meltzer and Donald Michie, eds, Machine Intelligence, vol.
6, Edinburgh, 1971, 295323. Photo: Courtesy of Edinburgh
University Press.
9 Tree diagram of the surface structure of the sentence, A wise man is
honest, from Noam Chomsky, Linguistic contribution: present
[1967], in Language and Mind, Cambridge, 2006 [1968], 26. Photo:
Cambridge University Press.
on two sides of the same edge, and the rule that the
character of an edge must be identical on both sides of
the line describing it (viz. either convex or concave).59
They also make it clear that all the junctions in an
object must be susceptible of being resolved coherently
together, just as the elements of a sentence must, if it is
to be well- and not ill-formed. In this way Huffman and
Clowes gave grounds for thinking that Wollheim was
wrong to contest the reality of pictorial grammar on the
basis that there is nothing analogous in pictures to the
well-formed strings of grammatical sentences because
it cannot be said of them, as it can of language, that the
meaning [of a well-formed] string is determined by
its syntactical form plus [its] vocabulary, or lexicon.
A further distinctive feature of Huffmans and
Clowess arguments is that they maintained that
we interpret shapes from the bottom-up, first of all
by identifying simple structures like line junctions
which are governed by only a few rules, then by
identifying the larger, coherent structures these create,
and ultimately by identifying the whole scene such
structures form together. Interpreting shapes this way
is clearly akin to the way that Chomsky suggests we
interpret sentences, by first identifying their smaller
units and then combining these into larger and more
complex structures. Chomsky notoriously developed
two methods of representing the consequences of this
process, bracketing sentences and representing them in
the form of trees (plate 9), both of which show clearly
how sentences are formed out of nesting structures,
or several levels of sense. Huffmans and Clowess
574
Paul Smith
10 Drawing of a rectilinear object in vertical oblique projection,

from figure 13.2 from John Willats, Art and Representation:
New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures, Princeton, NJ, 1997.
Princeton University Press, 1997. Photo: Reprinted by Permission
of Princeton University Press.
11 Drawing of a rectilinear object in oblique projection, from figure
13.2 from John Willats, Art and Representation: New Principles
in the Analysis of Pictures, Princeton, NJ, 1997. Princeton
University Press, 1997. Photo: Reprinted by Permission of
Princeton University Press.
12 Drawing of a rectilinear object in enclosure, from figure 13.2
from John Willats, Art and Representation: New Principles in the
Analysis of Pictures, Princeton, NJ, 1997. Princeton University
Press, 1997. Photo: Reprinted by Permission of Princeton
University Press.
diagrams have no structure of this sort because neither

they nor Guzman realized that a description of the rules
governing line junctions and their combinations are
subject to higher-level rules governing the manner in
which the picture projects, or maps, three-dimensional
spatial relations into two dimensions.60 But in
characterizing the drawing system at work in the
picture as a set of rules of precisely this sort, Willats
made it possible to see how it was also the top level of
pictorial syntax to which all subsidiary structures are
subservient.
The realization that projection was part of pictorial
syntax was only implicit in the research Willats
published in the book, Drawing Systems of 1972, coauthored with Fred Dubery. Nonetheless, this text
offered a clear description of how the various different
methods of projection each impart a specific character
to vertices and line junctions because they articulate
them differently. As Willats later made explicit, the
same vertex or junction can look quite different in
vertical oblique projection (plate 10), for example, from
how it looks in oblique projection proper (plate 11).
More importantly, his early research insisted that not
all projection systems bestow a particular secondary
geometry on shapes as a function of their primary
geometry, or because they map spatial relationships
in a scene as they appear from a single viewpoint.61 He
argued instead that some drawing systems can only
be understood in terms of their secondary geometry
alone, or through how they map relationships in a
scene without reference to viewpoint.
575
Pictorial Grammar
13 Pictorial patterns for scene A and picture F, figure 1.1 from King
Sun Fu, Syntactic Pattern Recognition and Applications, first edn,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1982, 2. Prentice Hall, 1982. Photo:
Reprinted by kind permission of Pearson Education Inc., Upper
Saddle River, NJ.
14 Hierarchical structural descriptions of scene A and picture F,
figure 1.2 from King Sun Fu, Syntactic Pattern Recognition and
Applications, first edn, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1982, 3. Prentice
Hall, 1982. Photo: Reprinted by kind permission of Pearson
Education Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ.
15 Picture-faces from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and
Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed.
Cyril Barrett, Oxford, 1966, section 10, 4. Photo: By permission
of John Wiley & Sons.
Willats and Dubery coined the term drawing

system to identify the different projection systems
that fell under this more comprehensive definition.
And, crucially, they were able to show that all forms of
vanishing-point perspective and parallel projection,
including complex systems such as three-point and
inverted perspective, or isometric and axonometric
projection, could be explained by systematic rules.
Later, in Art and Representation, Willats extended the
concept of the drawing system to very simple
projection systems that do not appear to be rulegoverned at all at first glance. Perhaps most remarkably
he even discerned a kind of regularity in the
enclosure system used by very young children (plate
12). Even though such enclosures do not map shape
systematically but merely describe brute extension in
individual shapes, they none the less give some sense
of the basic topological relations such as adjacency
that obtain between the elements of an object.62
Although it was shortly after the publication of
Drawing Systems that Willats realized his conception of
projection had analogies in Chomskys conception
of syntax,63 only in his last book did he explicitly
compare the drawing system to the high-level syntax
that organizes a sentences components into a coherent
whole.64 And although Willats remained reticent
about exactly how the analogy might play out, he
nevertheless implies that the drawing system might
be compared to the parameters that specify such
things as the sequence of subject, verb and object in a
particular language,65 or which determine whether a
576
Paul Smith
language is in Chomskian terms left-branching or right-branching in structure.66

It was clear in any event that the rules of the drawing system take precedence over
rules of the sort described by Huffman and Clowes, and that in consequence a
pictures units can indeed be described in terms of the kind of branched nesting
structures into which Chomsky analysed sentences. It is no surprise therefore that
the type of object recognition known as syntactic pattern recognition has proposed
to analyse drawings and visual scenes into tree diagrams of precisely this kind (plate
13 and plate 14).67
One of the most significant aspects of Willatss final conception of the drawing
system is its claim that the syntax of any such system organizes a pictures parts
exclusively in its own terms. This means that a pictures secondary geometry will
inevitably produce a pictorial space that is neither flat, nor the same as that of its
real counterpart, but which constitutes a third domain between the two that we
can recover only from its drawing system.68 This radical argument has several
consequences, the most important of which for the purposes of my argument is that
it reopens the gap between shape percepts and pictures, a gap which as already
mentioned had been completely overlooked in naturalistic accounts of iconicity,
and all but ignored in the early picture grammars too.
The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from Willatss arguments about
pictorial syntax is that it is the glue that binds the elements of a picture into a
coherent whole. By corollary, then, Wollheim and Schier are not able to explain
how pictures hold together. This shortcoming is evident in Schiers discussion of a
diagram composed of a rectangle surrounded by dots, which is taken to represent a
conference table surrounded by delegates. Even though Schier accepts that this image
uses a compositional system the grammar and lexicon of which are parasitic upon
the linguistic environment, he maintains that the significance of its composition
requires no special or prior stipulation, and can be explained by its quasi-natural
grammar alone,69 or its mysterious ability to replicate the structure of the scene it
represents. He therefore argues that while such a drawing may contain sub-iconic
parts in the form of lines and dots that do not signify anything outside their broader
pictorial context, their contribution to the whole is not determined conventionally
or by the operations of syntax.70 Even excusing Schiers curious insistence on the
sheer conventionality of linguistic grammar, which takes no account of its innate
basis, the problem remains that his account does not explain why we come to see
these parts differently in context from how we see them in isolation. That is, he
simply fails to see that this phenomenon can only be explained by the operations of a
syntax that is not bracket-free,71 but bracketed like Chomskys, or which determines
the form and sense of the units upon which it operates by combining them into
larger units themselves subordinated to yet larger units.
The problem comes into plainer view still in Schiers account of the ability of a
sub-iconic pair of dots, which iconify nothing on their own, to iconify eyes within
a picture-face. His argument here is that they can do so in this context because
they function as units of a whole icon.72 But again this does not explain what it is
about being placed in such a context that makes the dots look so different. Indeed, it
would seem that the only credible explanation for the fact that they come to life as
eyes is that the grammar picture-faces mimics the peculiarly holistic grammar of
face perception.73 The point here is that this form of perceptual grammar is unique
because it binds eyes and the other elements of faces together into a meaningful
whole. Within this gestalt the dot-eyes enjoy a special relationship to each other
as a pair, to the other features of the face, and to the rim of the face; with the
577
Pictorial Grammar
16 Henri Matisse, Blue

Nude (La Grenouille), 1952.
Lithograph by Mourlot
after the gouache decoupe
(published in Verve, 9:
356, 1958), 18 16 cm.
Succession H. Matisse/DACS
2010.
consequence that they look radically different in this setting from how they look
outside it. This idea would certainly seem to explain why the same feature looks
different on different faces, and why people find it hard to recognize a person from
one facial feature alone.
If the grammar of picture-faces does in fact mimic that of face perception
it would help to explain several aspects of their peculiarity. It makes sense, for
instance, of the way that even very small changes to a schematic picture-face will
normally result in significant changes to its expression, as Wittgenstein observed
(plate 15).74 It would also explain why the round regions denoting the breasts of
578
Paul Smith
the figure in Matisses Blue Nude (plate 16) seem unusually compelling, without quite
turning into eyes, when viewed within the context provided by her upraised arms
and torso. The peculiarity of this kind of grammar would, in addition, account
for the fact that there is what Andrew Harrison has called a minimal syntax to a
picture-face,75 or that it can only work when it organizes a sufficient number of
features within a sufficiently replete structure. As Harrison was fond of observing,
a vivid demonstration of minimal syntax is that it is all but impossible to draw the
Cheshire cat disappearing.76 Too much information, as in Tenniels illustration, will
yield a cat obscured by foliage; but too little will produce a grin without a cat
something Alice declared to be the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!
The peculiar, holistic, grammar of the face also poses a problem for artists,
inasmuch as it means that faces will look different in kind from other objects in the
picture. Most artists successfully dissemble any problems of this kind, but Czanne
sometimes overcame it, as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, by painting [the] face as an
object, or a mere assemblage of shapes.77 His reasons for doing so were undoubtedly
complex, but the fact that he took such drastic steps in portraits like Woman with a
Coffee-Pot demonstrates how pictorial syntax was and is an inescapable reality.
Another way of describing what happens when we see a face as a meaningful
whole as opposed to a mere collection of shapes is that the syntax allows us to
perceive the relation between its parts synchronically rather than piecemeal. Pictorial
syntax also allows us to see a whole picture as a single coherent unit the meaning of
which is present all at once, just as linguistic syntax makes the sense of a complete
sentence present as such. The synchronicity of sense in both kinds of output is
explained better by the idea that syntax subsumes the meanings of the constituent
parts of a picture or a sentence within the meaning of the whole. The effect is, of
course, normally involuntary and recent research shows that unconscious impulse
towards synchronic coherence results in unexpected similarities between the ways
in which we attend to both pictures and language. Robert Solso has demonstrated,
for example, that a spectator familiar with pictorial conventions will move her
eyes around a painting in an attempt to discover thematic patterns in it,78 rather
as Alan Kennedy has shown that the eye movements we deploy when reading are
not linear, but involve both retrospective movements designed to check the sense
we have already acquired and proleptic movements used to anticipate the sense we
think we are about to encounter.79 At all events, such findings strongly suggest that
it is simplistic to assert that a painting is perceived instantaneously while a piece of
poetry is heard sequentially.80 Rather, it would seem that syntax bestows a degree of
synchronicity upon both.
3. Grammaticality
Willatss conception of pictorial grammar as something that results in structures

analogous to well-formed strings or words arranged in grammatically correct
structures implies that pictures will normally display a form of grammatical
correctness.
A simple example of a well-formed pictorial string is a line junction that
obeys the rules of occlusion described by Huffman and others. To be well formed
at a higher level, a picture must use projection systematically. The majority of
pictures observe these rules and look right as a consequence, so much so that their
grammaticality is elusive. This obedience becomes apparent when they are compared
with pictures that do contravene the rules. Huffman used drawings of anomalous
objects in this spirit, demonstrating how ungrammatical combinations of lines
579
Pictorial Grammar
17 Drawing of a rectilinear
object in fold-out projection,
from figure 13.2 from
John Willats, Art and
Representation: New Principles
in the Analysis of Pictures,
Princeton, NJ, 1997.
University Press.
18 Paul Czanne, Victor
Chocquet Seated, c. 1877.
Oil on canvas, 46 38 cm.
Columbus, OH: Columbus
Museum of Art (Howald Fund
Purchase, 1950.024). Photo:
Columbus Museum of Art.
will render a picture spatially incoherent in ways

foreign to well-formed drawings. So too, Willats
argues that many Byzantine and Orthodox paintings
employing several drawing systems simultaneously
look anomalous, nowadays, since they contravene the
rule that projection should be consistent throughout
the picture, as it is in photographs and paintings
in perspective.81 It is clear, then, that Wollheims
protestations against the possibility of ill-formed
or ungrammatical strings in pictures, and Schiers
denial of the very possibility of an ill-formed [iconic]
symbol genuinely analogous to a sentence that is
ungrammatical in Chomskys sense,82 simply run
counter to the phenomenal facts.
If grammar operates throughout every level of a
pictures structure, it must not only employ a drawing
system and a denotation system that are each internally
consistent to qualify as well formed, but also ensure
that these are compatible with each other. Most of the
time this is the case, and, conversely, when a pictures drawing system clashes with
its denotation system its ill-formedness is normally patent. Willatss argument on
this count is complex, however, since his ideas about compatibility involve a dense
distinction between drawing and denotation systems that are view-based and those
that are object-based.
The basis of this distinction is that either kind of system maps a corresponding
kind of percept. View-based systems are simple enough in this regard, being
projection systems such as perspective which map how spatial relations look from a
particular point of view, or denotation systems which use primitives like contours
to express the views presented by edges and surfaces. By contrast, object-based
systems articulate the more elusive percepts that David Marr called object-centred
descriptions, or the mnemonic descriptions of shapes in general, from no particular
point of view, which we derive from objects by tracking their silhouettes back to
the three-dimensional forms capable of generating them.83 Although controversial,
Marrs arguments in favour of the existence of object-centred descriptions are
compelling.84 It would be difficult to understand how we could recognize things
unless we could match the views they present to relatively simple representations of
invariant shapes of a kind our limited memory is capable of storing. Moreover, only
recourse to something like object-centred descriptions can explain how we can be
aware of the solidity and depth objects have even though they only present us with
their surfaces. At all events, Willats argues persuasively that many projection systems
are predominantly object-based, including several forms of parallel projection, since
these preserve the relative lengths of the sides of objects as they really are, rather than
as they appear. So too are primitives of the kind Willats calls regions, which stand
for entire volumes rather than for surfaces as they appear. The stick regions children
use to represent limbs, for example, do exactly this, and should not be mistaken for
rudimentary contours.
Because the two kinds of system are fundamentally different, trouble inevitably
arises when a picture combines a projection system of one kind with a denotation
system of the other. Children, for example, get into difficulties as they mature when
they try to project views while remaining attached to the regions they had formerly
580
Paul Smith
581
Pictorial Grammar
deployed in drawings projected by enclosure. So, for example, when they experiment
with fold-out projection in an attempt to capture how the sides of a rectilinear
object appear to join up (plate 17), they still use regions to denote the objective shape
of these sides, with the result that their drawings look very odd indeed.85 Willats also
identifies several other uncomfortable combinations of projection and denotation
system,86 which further support the claim that a grammatical relation between the
two kinds of systems is normative. Ironically enough, so does Schiers conference dot
diagram, since it is an ill-formed icon of the very kind whose possibility he denies.
The more specific problem with it is that both its drawing system and its denotation
system are ambiguous. So it could be that it uses orthogonal projection to render a
birds-eye view of the contours of the table and the surrounding delegates, but it can
just as easily be seen as employing enclosure to articulate the same items in the form
of regions. It is unclear in any case whether we should interpret it according to the
rules of view-based or object-based systems.
Schiers diagram is fit for purpose nonetheless. One reason for this is that we
do not require diagrams to be consistent throughout in how they represent things.
But, according to Willats, we also find images of this kind acceptable because we are
accustomed to the fact that there are degrees of grammaticalness in pictures, just as
there are in normal sentences according to Chomsky.87 Willats also argues further
that we do not simply put up with ill-formed icons, but sometimes relish the way
they bend the rules, just as we enjoy grammatical play in poetry.88
Willats gives numerous examples of such creative play in pictures. He shows, for
example, how Klee creates a range of meanings by flouting Huffmans rule that a line
indicating a leading edge along one section of its course must not represent the fleeing
edge of the same surface along another.89 Willats also gives numerous examples of
the playful use of the anomaly known as accidental or false attachment,90 which
describes what happens when lines belonging to objects located at different depths
are allowed to join up, or to run into one another, with the result that they appear
to lie in the same plane. Czanne exploited false attachment to considerable effect
in his Victor Chocquet Seated of 1877 (plate 18), where a number of lines converge upon
the sitters wrist, making it look as though the planes to which they correspond are
pinned together at this point.91 It needs emphasizing, however, that pictures of this
sort are not completely ungrammatical, as they can only perform their tricks if they
are grammatical for the most part.92
A more radical subversion of pictorial grammar employed by Czanne and
the cubists is effected by the device known as passage, which describes their use
of marks interposed between or across occluding contours. Passage is particularly
evident in the area immediately to the right of the right edge of the pear in the lower
centre of Pot of Primroses and Fruit of c. 188890 (plate 19), where it elides the transition
between the base of the pot and the tabletop. Passage is significant because it is
unclear what kind of device it is. It might at a pinch be seen as lexical constituent
of the painting that Czanne used in order to register the vacillation edges undergo
when fixated;93 but it can just as easily be regarded as a functional constituent of
the work that Czanne used more synthetically to play down the breaks in depth
that contours normally create. This means that, if so, it only has meaning in so far
as it intervenes in the relationships between the pictures lexical items, just as the
functional constituents of a sentence (conjunctions, prepositions, determiners like
the and a, and complementizers, including auxiliaries and modals that modify
verbs) only contribute to its sense by specifying relations between its lexical parts.
But although words that are ambiguous between lexical and functional constituents
582
Paul Smith
19 Paul Czanne, Pot of

Primroses and Fruit, c. 1888
90. Oil on canvas, 46 56.25
cm. London: The Courtauld
Gallery (Samuel Courtauld
Bequest 1948). Photo: The
Samuel Courtauld Trust.
are largely absent from language, this does nothing to threaten the idea that passage
is a form of creative ungrammaticality. It merely points to the fact that pictorial
grammar is different from its linguistic counterpart.
Czanne also exploited higher-level grammatical anomalies by employing
more than one projection system in the same work. Willats argues that Czanne
did this in his Still Life with Commode of 188788 (plate 20) by employing one form of
projection approximating to vertical oblique for the table at the front and another
approximating to horizontal oblique for the commode behind it. The two systems
are not massively anomalous, however, especially since Czanne used neither strictly,
and may in fact have been using a disguised form of oblique projection for the
commode.94 So the picture is not just an ill-formed icon but a work that warps space
for expressive effect.95
Adults pictures can couple projection and denotation systems anomalously, just
as childrens do. Willats shows, for example, that van Gogh resorted to combinations
of this kind when he used vanishing-point perspective in conjunction with regions.96
Arguably, however, Czanne used more complex and ambiguous combinations,
employing forms of parallel projection that render reasonably convincing views
while preserving aspects of the objective character of shapes, and employing
primitives in the form of areas of contrasting tone and colour that serve equally well
583
Pictorial Grammar
20 Paul Czanne, Still Life

with Commode, c. 188788.
Oil on canvas, 62.2 78.7 cm.
Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art
Museum, Harvard University
Art Museums (Bequest from
the Collection of Maurice
Wertheim, Class 1906).
Photo: The Bridgeman Art
Library.
as contours denoting edges, or the boundaries of regions denoting three-dimensional

shapes. In Still Life with Commode, at any rate, loosely defined parallel projection systems
appear hand-in-hand with ambiguous contrasts of this sort, creating an expressive
ambiguity about whether the scene is a view or a more objective depiction.97
The expressive potential of parallel drawing systems is not analysed in great
detail by Willats, but it is implied by his equivocation over their nature, which
he characterizes as view-based in some places and as object-based in others. It is
apparent, in any case, that such systems are inherently ambivalent. For one thing, a
drawing in parallel projection produced from memory is, by transforming an objectcentred description, normally plausible as a view as long as it observes the rules of
occlusion. For another, parallel projection preserves the to-and-fro that occurs within
perceptual acts, between the object-centred description and views, or how we both
infer object-centred descriptions from views and use them to fill out our sense of
the objects that we view. It would therefore seem that it is their very ambivalence
that makes the parallel projection expressive. At any event, Czanne seems to have
exploited their dual nature to such ends, capitalizing on this dualitys capacity to
produce a sense of shape in something approximating to its plenitude.
The coherence and usefulness of the idea of pictorial grammaticality
notwithstanding, it has to be admitted that language possesses a far richer variety
of constituents than pictures. In the first place, its lexical constituents fall into
584
Paul Smith
a number of classes and can perform a wide variety of roles, most of which are
impossible for the narrow range of constituents to be found in pictures.98 Language
also possesses multifarious functional constituents, which can generate complex
syntactic relationships between its lexical parts, whereas nothing of the sort applies to
pictures. Wollheim is therefore on firm ground when he claims that pictures cannot
be segmented into parts that can be categorised according to the contribution
they make to the meaning of the whole,99 or that we have no need to classify the
basic units of pictures into general categories equivalent to noun, verb, adverb
etc. But such objections do nothing to undermine the idea of pictorial grammar
per se since parsing a picture only ever need involve distinguishing a few kinds of
primitives. And even these would seem to have some lexical diversity, and perhaps also
at least a suggestion of functional capacity.
4. Innateness
A key assumption in Willatss account, which sharply differentiates it from

conventionalist alternatives, is that pictorial competence is innately grounded in
the same way as language according to Chomsky.100 Chomsky argues that children
develop the ability to understand the grammar of their own language because they
are born with universal grammar, or the basic generative principles underlying the
possibility of all actual grammatical structures. Hence, simply through exposure
to their native language, they can parse and understand what they hear, and
begin to generate grammatical sentences.101 Put another way, Chomsky argues
that children learn their own language spontaneously, by acquiring I-language,
or the internalized language consisting of the rules governing all of its possible
sentences.102 In short, then, it is an innate linguistic competence that grounds
childrens ability to make infinite use of finite means.103 And, for Willats, the same is
true of their ability to draw.104
By way of evidence, Willats shows that a child who has learned to use a
particular drawing system to represent one kind of object already has a more general
command of the system, and so can use it inventively even when it is enclosure
to depict an enormously wide range of shapes.105 He also points out that children
come to command more and more complex rules of depiction as they mature,106
just as they deploy increasingly complex grammatical rules in their speech. This is
implicitly because an increasingly sophisticated command of grammar manifests
itself spontaneously in their brains as these develop. This conclusion is supported
by the fact that childrens drawing competence develops in a series of stages whose
sequence is normative. It appears, at any event, that they normally begin to draw
using regions within enclosure to represent volumes, then move on to using more
refined regions, typically lines, to represent cylindrical volumes such as limbs,
and afterwards adopt the use of contours to denote edges within an orthogonal
projection system. Moreover, it is only once having mastered this system that
children learn to command rudimentary parallel projection systems, and eventually
learn to use oblique projection proper when they reach artistic maturity. (By
corollary, Willats seems to imply that children will not learn vanishing-point
perspective spontaneously, but must be taught its rules,107 which would explain
why it appears so late in ontogenetic development, when it does at all.) The point
to emphasize is that this sequence is apparent in many cultures.108 Willats shows,
for example, that most Western childrens drawing of the human figure almost
always progresses from tadpole figures to stick figures, and then to figures drawn
585
Pictorial Grammar
GRAMTI
CA DE
ESQUEM
AS
in contours (plate 21). And he even demonstrates that many of the drawings that
researchers elicited from children of the Jiri valley in Papua New Guinea, who were
wholly unused to the practice of drawing, exhibit a similar morphology (plate 22).
The fact that childrens ability to understand speech and drawings greatly
outstrips their ability to produce them may, by contrast, seem to undermine the
argument that innate grammar underlies both kinds of competence. It simply goes to
show, however, that producing output in either form is complicated by the need to
co-ordinate grammatical competence with performative, and predominantly motor,
skills.109 Indeed, Harrison has argued that the capacity of most people to recognize
pictures of far greater sophistication than they can produce can only be explained by
the existence of a generative grammar of the pictorial that we all share.110
The fact that children characteristically make errors in both their speech
and their drawings could also seem to contradict the idea of innate grammatical
competence. But as far as speech goes, it is clear that
many of their errors are grammatical in the sense that
they occur when a child applies a rule that works
perfectly well for one situation to another for which
it is inappropriate, as for instance when they add ed
to the root of an irregular verb to turn it into the past
tense.111 Willats argues in a similar vein that some of
the errors in childrens drawings can be attributed to
misapplications of grammatical rules.112 An example
might be the transparency error, which children
commit when they draw the line denoting the edge of
a solid object which is occluded as happens in plate
23, where the line denoting the top edge of the table
top is visible through the box in front of it.113 Such
errors can at any rate be seen as the result of a failure
on the part of the child to grasp how the particular
task in hand demands a modification to the rules for
drawing shapes she had previously acquired. What is
586
Paul Smith
21 Drawings of a man made by

Western children of successively
greater ages, Florence L.
Goodenough Collection,
Penn State University
Archives, Pennsylvania State
University Libraries. Photo:
With permission. Figure 13.7
from John Willats, Art and
Representation: New Principles
in the Analysis of Pictures,
Princeton, NJ, 1997.
22 Drawings by children from
the Jiri valley in Papua New
Guinea, adapted from figure
13.7 from John Willats, Art
and Representation: New
Principles in the Analysis of
Pictures, Princeton, NJ, 1997.
University Press. Originally
from figures 2 and 3 from
Margaret Martlew and
Kevin J. Connolly, Human
figure drawings by schooled
and unschooled children in
Papua New Guinea, Child
Development, 67: 6, December
1996, 274362). Photo: By
permission of John Wiley &
Sons.
23 A drawing of a scene
in oblique projection that
includes the transparency
error, from John Willats, How
children learn to represent
three-dimensional space in
drawings, in G. Butterworth,
ed., The Childs Representation
of the World, London, 1977,
189202. Photo: With kind
permission of Springer
Science and Business Media.
more, the fact that children often learn to correct such mistakes themselves without
having to be taught the error of their ways suggests that they possess an innate sense
of what can count as grammatical drawing, just as they can work out what constitutes
grammatical speech.114 And indeed, in this drawing, the child spontaneously added
shading to obscure the illegitimate contour. Even the almost complete immunity
children exhibit towards adults attempts to correct their errors can be attributed to
their developing command of grammar. They will, in other words, normally only
elect to use the conventional norms when their competence has reached the point
where they are ready to do so.115
The broader significance of the argument that competence is innately grounded
is that it makes sense of facts that naturalists like Schier acknowledge but cannot
explain. So, for example, Schier acknowledges that our ability to recognize a wide
range of pictures is generative, in the sense of productive, and that our capacity to
produce a wide variety of icons exhibits generativity as well,116 rather as Wollheim
seems to,117 but denies that these competences are grounded in any innate grammar.
This means that his account offers no explanation of what makes generativity
possible. But Willatss argument that we are born with the capacity to map shapes
and their relations fills the explanatory gap perfectly.
5. Transformation
It is apparent from the general drift of Willatss account that his conception of the
mapping rules implemented in pictures is indebted to Chomksys thinking. His use
of the word transformations118 to describe the forms in which pictures render their
deep perceptual content also makes a clear allusion to Chomskys early idea that
a sentence transforms a deep grammatical structure into a surface structure. To all
intents and purposes, therefore, Willats would seem to regard pictorial grammar as
analogous to the universal grammar that Chomsky envisaged in the form of a set of
algorithms determining the transformations speech makes out of its underlying
contents. Admittedly, this conception of grammar begs some intractable questions
about what exactly the substrate to speech consists of.119 But if it is reasonable to
assume that language maps some pre-articulate linguistic equivalent of thought,
or even thought itself, into a public form,120 then by analogy it seems reasonable to
assume that pictures transform shape percepts into a form that makes them publicly
available.121 This idea or its principle finds support in the fact that computer
programs capable of mapping shape descriptions into visual form are readily
written.122
A more specific similarity between the transformational work done by pictures
and language is that both employ forms of deletion when they convert their deep
content into surface output. Hence, the surface structure of the sentence, A wise
man is honest, is more concise than the deep structure it corresponds to (plate
24), since, typically, it eliminates syntactic constituents that its counterpart makes
explicit.123 Notwithstanding, deletion of this kind has no serious deleterious effect
on the sense of most sentences. Something similar, although not identical, is true of
deletion in line drawings, which only inform us about the edges of objects and their
relations at the cost of excluding semantic information about the shape of objects
provided by shading. They can, as a result, be a little unclear about the contiguity of,
or distance between, objects, compared with fully elaborated drawings employing
cast shadows.124 But most of the time, line drawings provide perfectly good working
representations of objects and scenes, perhaps because they map what Marr calls the
2D sketch, or the skeletal preview of a scene that we construct for the purposes
587
Pictorial Grammar
of grasping its main features prior to forming it in

detail.125 In short, deletion allows both forms of output
to be more succinct than the underlying contents
they transform, enabling us to articulate meaning
efficiently. And, although he opposes the idea of
pictorial grammar altogether, Wollheim nevertheless
seems to confirm this conclusion since he subscribes to
the idea that deletion of a kind described by Chomsky
operates in pictures, arguing more specifically that
it plays a role within thematization, or the process
whereby the artist gives salience to particular features
of the eventual painting at the expense of features that
were significant in its earlier stages.126
The kinds of deletion at work in language and
pictures are nevertheless different inasmuch as it is
syntactical elements that are most readily abbreviated
in the one and semantic elements in the other. Hence,
while speech from which syntactic information has
been deleted is normally clear, removing the same
kind of information from line drawings can have a
catastrophic effect. Biederman has produced drawings,
for example, which show that while it is perfectly
possible to remove a segment of a continuous line
without making it particularly difficult to grasp the
shape it implies, eliminating a vertex or cusp with
the function of specifying the relationships between
the adjoining edges of the same object can sometimes
make it almost impossible to decipher its shape (plate
25).127 Hence, and although they are meant principally
to illustrate our perception of objects, his drawings
demonstrate that pictures of mundane objects and not
just faces must possess a minimal syntax.
Transformational rules also allow language the
capacity for movement,128 which means that it is
possible to change the sense of some sentences by
altering the order of their constituent phrases and
words. Movement thus allows us to turn a statement
into a question or a modal expression such as a surmise or speculation with ease,
whereas pictures can do nothing of the kind.129 So too, language can embed phrases
within a sentence recursively most obviously perhaps in The House that Jack Built,
where that is used in each iteration to embed another phrase within the sentence
previously enunciated while nothing strictly analogous is possible in pictures, as
Wollheim rightly points out (pictures within pictures being most closely analogous
to parentheses). But neither of these limitations implies that pictures have no
grammar at all. Rather, and once more, they merely show that pictures use a relatively
simple grammar appropriate to their particular content.
Nature vs Nurture
Any language must be at least potentially accessible to its users, since a logically
private language is not a language at all.130 One way of explaining how all languages
588
Paul Smith
24 Tree diagram of the deep

structure of the sentence,
A wise man is honest, from
Noam Chomsky, Linguistic
contribution: present
[1967], in Language and Mind,
Cambridge, 2006 [1968],
26. Photo: Cambridge
University Press.
25 Example of stimulus
objects in an experiment on
the perception of degraded
objects, figure 16 from Irving
Biederman, Recognitionby-components: A theory of
human image understanding,
Psychological Review, 94:
2, 1987, 11547. 1987,
American Psychological
Association. Photo: Reprinted
with permission.
are capable of being understood in principle provided their vocabulary is learned

is that they transform the same underlying content according to rules derived from
an innate, universal grammar. Language is thus in a very strong, and significant,
sense natural in the last instance, rather than purely or wholly conventional.
Schier evidently fails to grasp this argument. But Willats is almost equally obtuse
when he argues that language is conventional unlike drawing.131 It is, of course,
true that words are unlike picture primitives inasmuch as the form of any primitive
will map some of the properties of what it stands for. Hence a line which is darker
than the figure it encloses will map a contour more effectively than one that is
lighter.132 It is also the case that while most sentences do not mirror the structure of
the events they refer to, any regular drawing system will preserve at least some of the
spatial relationships obtaining in the scene it represents. However, neither of these
differences means that language is wholly conventional while depiction is wholly
natural. Rather, the difference between language and depiction is less substantive,
and narrower.
As regards the role of convention in language, and setting aside the issue of
the lexicon, the most obvious way in which convention determines the surface
El dibujo es
structures of any particular language is that it sets its many parameters arbitrarily.
una
Convention can nevertheless only set parameters that universal grammar makes
available, and it must set them according to the small set of options it allows. Thisrepresentaci
n
means that many of the widely divergent forms of different languages can be
attributed to the different ways in which they happen to set the same parameters. isomrfica, y
The word orders of English and Japanese, for instance, are grossly different,133 butadems muy
the structures of both are consistent with the possibilities sanctioned by universallimitada
grammar. And, by corollary, only very few languages have the form OVS, while OSV
respecto al
is almost non-existent, which suggests that universal grammar makes them very lenguaje, de
difficult, or nigh-on impossible, to generate.
ah que, se
By analogy, or just as the widely different particular grammar(s) of all
valga de la
languages are generated by the same innate rules in the last instance,134 so the alegora
diverse surface pictorial grammars sanctioned by the various academies and
cuando
different cultures all express rules consistent with universal pictorial grammar.
necesita
This suggests that convention gets into depiction by a more elliptical route then we
representar
commonly imagine, by deciding which of the rules made available by universal
cosas como
pictorial grammar will be used in practice. So, for example, while a particular
entidades
cultures preference for certain forms of drawing and denotation systems is a matter
of convention,135 all drawing systems are still ultimately generated by universal "Repblica" o
pictorial grammar. By the same token, if it is convention that sanctions the use of "Universidad"
por no hablar
widely different kinds of mark among different cultures and groups for establishing
the same picture primitives, it is universal pictorial grammar that permits a line de las
entidades
to stand for an edge or a luminous spot to refer to a point in space. Moreover,
although it may be convention that decides what counts as an acceptable degree ofmetafsicas,
grammaticality in pictures, it is universal pictorial grammar that makes it possibletodo
to es que,
speak of pictorial grammaticality at all.136
en el
Language and depiction are therefore similar in the respect that convention lenguaje, no
shapes the output they generate on the basis of innate universal grammar. But
supone
they are different inasmuch as pictorial form is closely constrained by its innate impedimento
grammar to conform to a limited set of norms whereas language can assume a wide
alguno.
multiplicity of particular, and extremely complex, grammatical forms. Put more
prosaically, the effect of convention on pictures is small beer compared to its effect
upon speech. So it is that the vast majority of pictures are transparent to people of all
589
Pictorial Grammar
cultures, whereas the different languages are relatively opaque to non-native speakers
irrespective of the question of unfamiliar vocabulary.
Conclusions
It is fair to say then, that one major achievement of Willatss account of representation,
suitably modified, is that by furnishing a conception of pictorial grammar as
something to which nature and convention both contribute it can relieve the profound
antinomy between pictorial syntax and iconicity that dogged earlier debates about
representation. But perhaps the most general conclusion to be drawn from Willatss
work is that grammatical structure is central to how, and what, pictures articulate.
This basic idea has many possibilities. One is that a more developed theory of
pictorial grammar might allow us to specify more closely just what pictures can, and
cannot, achieve by pictorial means alone, apart from brute depiction. For example, it
still needs to be decided whether a picture can represent a particular object, or kind
of object, by showing a cluster of visible properties alone, or whether it can only do
so by recruiting concepts from language. By corollary, the same sort of analysis might
make it clearer how pictures are dependent on the services of concepts when they
show particular aspects of things,137 and on more complex alien structures imported
from language when they make statements,138 or tell stories.139
Closer attention to the constraints imposed by grammatical structure might
also produce a different, or at any rate a more complete, understanding of why
some pictorial forms evolved as they did than is presently available. So, for instance,
although the composite forms used to articulate the human figure in antique Greek
vase painting are readily described as conventional schemata, it might enrich our
understanding of them to appreciate how they are determined by the orthogonal
projection system demanded by curved, rotatable, surfaces that do not readily tolerate
more sophisticated drawing systems dependent on a fixed viewpoint.
Another possibility of a theory of pictorial grammar is that it might reveal how
mapping rules apply to colour, as well as to drawing, in painting. More specifically,
it might be capable of expressing what kind of regularities must obtain between
colours in a representational painting if they are to stand successfully for colours
in the world, which they cannot do punctually because chromatic effects like
contrast,140 and chromostereopsis, operate differently on a flat surface from how
they operate in depth.
Willatss radical idea that the grammar of projection makes all pictorial space sui
generis might be extended, as well, into an analysis of the space produced by artists
individual styles of drawing, particularly if combined with his idea of how artists
disguise their drawing systems and play with the rules of concatenation. An analysis
of this sort might reveal, for example, how Czannes peculiarly elastic space lends
itself to the expression of our tendency inside acts of seeing to probe the world
before us for the meanings it has for our potentially grasping physical hands and
mobile body.
Willatss more specific ideas about the more basic semantic constituents of
pictures have a similar potential inasmuch as they might explain how an artists
individual style is closely dependent on such things as the particular manner in
which it articulates pictorial features like edges. More particularly, the notion taken
from Frdo Durand that pictorial marks bestow attributes, including colour, tone,
transparency, texture, thickness, wiggling and orientation upon lines and other
pictures primitives, might start to explain why some artists way of using marks gives
the objects and spatial relations in their pictures a characteristic look of their own.141
590
Paul Smith
In sum, Willatss account of pictorial grammar is pregnant with possibilities for

specifying the historical and aesthetic particularity of pictures and for explaining
how their different forms came about, because it offers a way of analysing pictorial
structure more precisely than previously, and at the same time vividly demonstrates
just how, and to what extent, this structure is responsible for the meanings and effects
that pictures produce.
Notes
This article owes much to the writings of and conversation with
several colleagues and friends, especially John Willats, Jason
Gaiger, Andrew Harrison, Michael Podro, and Richard Wollheim.
I am also indebted to the J. Paul Getty Trust for a scholar grant
which allowed me to pursue the research it presents.
17
18
1
2
3
4
5
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
On capacities, see Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations, Oxford,

1980. 45.
Throughout, picture is used in the strict sense to mean
representational picture.
Richard Wollheim, Reflections on Art and Illusion, in On Art and the Mind,
London, 1973, 26189, esp. 2667.
Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, The Hague, 1957, and Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA, 1965.
For an outstandingly lucid account of Chomskys thinking organized
according to its various phases, see Vivian Cook and Mark Newson,
Chomskys Universal Grammar: An Introduction, 3rd edn, Oxford, 2007. For
a perceptive account of his theories from a broader perspective, see
Neil Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2004.
We can do this by applying a small number of overarching
principles governing the broad possibilities of sentence and phrase
construction, and a series of parameters governing word and phrase
order, which together constitute a relatively simple hierarchical
system capable of generating all the specific rules required. See
Smith, Chomsky, 6094.
John Willats, Art and Representation: New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures,
Princeton, NJ, 1997, xii.
John Willats, Art and Representation, 279. For a review of the literature,
see W. F. Miller and A. C. Shaw, Linguistic methods in picture
processing: A survey, AFIPS Joint Computer Conferences: Proceedings of the
December 911, 1968 (fall joint computer conference), part 1, 27990.
John Willats, Making Sense of Childrens Drawings, Mahwah, NJ, 2005, ixx.
Willats, Art and Representation, xii and 1920, and Childrens Drawings, x.
See David Marr, Vision: A Computational Investigation into Human Representation
and Processing of Visual Information, New York, 1982, 289 and 3567, and
Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 14.
Criticisms of Chomskys early work often misconstrued what he
said, particularly about deep structure. See Deep Structure [1975],
reprinted in Noam Chomsky, On Language, New York, 2007, esp. 1712.
For an over-zealous attack on Chomskys method, see Robert D.
Levine and Paul M. Postal, A corrupted linguistics, in Peter Collier
and David Horowitz, eds, The Anti Chomsky Reader, San Francisco, CA,
2004.
Yve-Alain Bois, The semiology of cubism, in Lynn Zelevansky, ed.,
Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, New York, 1992, 169221. Wollheim also
refers to Rosalind Kraus, The motivation of the sign, in Zelevansky,
Picasso and Braque, 261305.
Richard Wollheim, Formalism and its Kinds, Fundaci Antoni Tpies,
Barcelona, 1995
Bois, The semiology of cubism, 173. For an argument in favour
of the existence of the conventional sign in painting almost
contemporary to cubism, see Teodor de Wyzewa, Wagnerian
Painting [1897]. trans. Paul Smith, in Charles Harrison and Paul
Wood, eds, Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford, 1992, 18.
Bois, The semiology of cubism, 1734. By contrast Chomsky
argues that language has infi nite productive capacity, implying that
phonocentrism can only impose practical limits on what it can say.
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
See Chomsky, Theory of Syntax, 8. Cf. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct:
The New Science of Language and Mind, London, 1995, 84.
Bois, The semiology of cubism, 174. Cf. Kraus, The motivation of
the sign, 2623, and Rosalind Kraus, In the Name of Picasso [1981],
in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge,
MA, 1996, 347.
Cf. Andrew Harrison, A minimal syntax for the pictorial: The
pictorial and the linguistic analogies and disanalogies, in Salim
Kemal and Iwan Gaskell, eds, The Language of Art History, Cambridge,
1991, 213, which argues that any account of linguistic or pictorial
meaning that takes no account of reference is absurd.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Oxford, 1969, 160, and Anthony
Grayling, Wittgenstein, Oxford, 1996, 956.
Wollheim also attacks Kraus here. See Wollheim, Formalism and its Kinds,
28 and 38, note 12. Cf. the argument that cubism is not about the
nature of the sign in Flint Schier, Painting after art? Comments on
Wollheim, in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey,
eds, Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, Cambridge, 1991, 154.
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, London, 1987, 43100. For a
succinct analysis of Wollheims position, see Harrison, Minimal
syntax, 2204.
Wollheim, Formalism and its Kinds, 267. All subsequent quotations
from Wollheim are from this section of text. The essay is reprinted,
in an abbreviated and modified form, as On formalism and pictorial
organisation, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59: 2, Spring 2001,
12737.
Cf. Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures: An Essay on Pictorial Representation,
Cambridge, 1986, 150, which paraphrases Roger Scrutons criticism
of Barthes semiotics for its inability to adduce a grammatical
rule connecting the meaning of a systems significant parts to the
meaning of the ensemble.
Wollheim, Formalism and its Kinds, 1995, 37, note 10.
Schier, Deeper into Pictures, 678.
Chomsky, Theory of Syntax, vi. Cf. Max Clowes, On seeing things,
Artificial Intelligence, 2: 1, Spring 1971, 79116, esp. 80.
Harrison, Minimal syntax, 21617 and 2257. For the view
that pictures cannot map appearances constituted by Gestalt and
constancy effects (inter al.), see E. H. Gombrich in Mirror and Map
[1975], in The Image and the Eye, Oxford, 1982, 172214.
Cited in Noam Chomsky, On Cognitive Capacity [1975], reprinted in
On Language, 335, esp. 8.
Michael Podro, Formal elements and theories of modern art, British
Journal of Aesthetics, 6: 4, 1966, 32938, esp. 335.
Richard Wollheim, Form, elements, modernity: Reply to Michael
Podro, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 6: 4, 1966, 33945, esp. 344.
Richard Wollheim, Giovanni Morelli and the origins of scientific
connoisseurship, On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures, London, 1973,
2001.
Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis,
IN, 1976, 133.
Goodman, Languages of Art, 13141.
Goodman, Languages of Art, 22532.
Curtis Carter, Painting and language: A pictorial syntax of shapes,
Leonardo, 9: 2, Spring 1976, 11118, esp. 11215.
591
Pictorial Grammar
40 Carter, Painting and language, 11416.

41 Clowes, On seeing things, 847, and Willats, Art and Representation, 94
(on Guzman).
42 Willats, Art and Representation, 4 and 93100.
43 Willats, Art and Representation, 89, 98100, and 220, and Childrens
Drawings, 11 and 638.
44 The rule was fi rst applied in Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 26. Cf. Cook
and Newson, Chomskys Universal Grammar, 2832. See Clowes, On
seeing things, 801 for the analogy with pictures.
45 On this, technical, sense of generative (as synonymous with
explicit) see Cook and Newson, Chomskys Universal Grammar, 356,
which prohibits its use as a synonym for productive. For a more
liberal view, see Neil Smith, Chomskys science of language, in
James McGilvray, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky, Cambridge,
2005, 2141 and 2956, esp. 296, note 4.
46 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 77 and 88.
47 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 8297, and Art and Representation, 30910, 356,
and 370.
48 Pinker, The Language Instinct, 15961.
49 Irving Biederman, Visual object recognition, in Stephen Kosslyn
and Daniel Osherson, eds, Visual Cognition, vol. 2, 12165, esp. 131 (on
natural parsing region[s] in the human figure) and 139 (on the geon
and parsing). Cf. Donald Hoffman and Manish Singh, Vision: Form
perception, in Lynn Nadel, ed., Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, vol. 4,
London, 2003, 48690.
50 Clara Casco and Daniela Guzzon, The aesthetic experience of
contour binding, Spatial Vision, 21: 35, 2008, 291314.
51 John Willats, The third domain: The role of pictorial images in
picture perception and production, Axiomathes, 13: 1, March 2002,
115, esp. 1112. Cf. Willats, Childrens Drawings, 1789.
52 In his early television programmes, Rolf Harris used to draw in a
sequence of this kind with the intention of withholding the meaning
of the picture until it was almost completed.
53 David Huffman, Impossible objects as nonsense sentences, in
Bernard Meltzer and Donald Michie, eds, Machine Intelligence, vol. 6,
Edinburgh, 1971, 295323.
54 Huffman, Impossible objects, 323 (where implicit reference is made
to Chomsky), and Clowes, On seeing things, 7980. Cf. Willats,
Art and Representation, 29, 175, 272, 279 (citing Clowes), and 282, and
Childrens Drawings, 199.
55 Chomksy, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1489.
56 Huffman, Impossible objects, 3014, and Clowes, On seeing
things, 867. Cf. Willats, Art and Representation, 11415, and Biederman,
Visual object recognition, 1279.
57 Huffman, Impossible objects, 305, and Clowes, On seeing things,
7980 and 8791. Cf. Willats, Art and Representation, 118.
58 Clowes, On seeing things, 89, and Huffman, Impossible objects,
30613.
59 Huffman, Impossible objects, 30411, and Clowes, On seeing
things, 1046. Cf. Willats, Art and Representation, 113.
60 On the analogy between drawings and maps, see Fred Dubery and
John Willats, Drawing Systems, London, 1972, 9, and Willats, Art and
Representation, 706.
62 Willats, Art and Representation, 7084, and Childrens Drawings, 6870.
63 Willats, Childrens Drawings, ixx.
64 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 77 and 88. The analogy is implicit in Art and
Representation, but is suggested in a citation from Clowes, On seeing
things, 273.
65 Smith, Chomsky, 79. Cf. Andrew Carnie, Syntax: A Generative Introduction,
2nd edn, Oxford, 2007, 19 and 23. Cf. Pinker, The Language Instinct, 234,
which includes OVS among the rare forms.
66 Noam Chomksy, The Minimalist Programme, Cambridge, MA, 1995, 35,
and Theory of Syntax, 1214, and 835.
67 King Sun Fu, Syntactic Pattern Recognition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1982,
17.
68 Willats The third domain, 5. This radical view fi nds some support
in Michael Podro, Depiction, New Haven and London, 1998, 9,
which argues that our sense of the work a line performs will affect
the course, and the outcome, of our visual experience of what it
represents.
69
70
71
72
73

Schier, Deeper into Pictures, 67. Cf. 170.
Harrison, Minimal syntax, 22930.
Doris Tsao and Margaret Livingstone, Mechanisms of face
perception, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31, July 2008, 41137, esp.
41820.
74 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and
Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett, Oxford, 1966, 10, 4.
75 Harrison, Minimal syntax. The essays title may allude to Chomsky,
Theory of Syntax, 3, which refers to minimal syntactically functioning
units.
76 Harrison, personal communication.
77 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Czannes doubt, in Galen Johnson, ed.,
The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Evanston, IL,
1993, 5975, this quotation 66. See also The Phenomenology of Perception,
London, 1962, 322
78 Robert Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts, Cambridge, MA, 1996, 147.
79 Alan Kennedy, The Psychology of Reading, London, 1984, 12639. I am
grateful to Katherine Shingler for this reference.
80 See Gotthold Lessing, Loacoon, in Selected Prose Works of G. E. Lessing,
London, 1879, chs IV, XVI, and XVII.
81 Willats, Art and Representation, 3416, and The rules of representation,
in Paul Smith and Caroline Wilde, eds, A Companion to Art Theory,
Oxford, 2002, 41718.
82 Schier, Deeper into Pictures, 66, note 1.
83 Willats, Art and Representation, 201, 401, and 1704. Marr, Vision,
31317.
84 See Vicki Bruce, Patrick Green and Mark Georgeson, Visual Perception:
Physiology, Psychology & Ecology, 4th edn, Hove, 2003, 27689, for
succinct accounts of Marrs (and Nishiharas) theory of the role
played by object-centred co-ordinates in object recognition, and of
Biedermans alternative.
85 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 16, 1048, 1223, 146, Art and Representation,
93, 1778, 1825, and 31617.
86 Willats, Art and Representation, 1657.
87 Willats, Art and Representation, 29 (citing Chomsky, Theory of Syntax, 148).
88 Willats, Anomaly in the service of expression, Art and Representation,
24867, and Childrens Drawings, 18.
90 Clowes, On seeing things, 104. Cf. Willats, Art and Representation, 30
(on Guzman) and 357, note 1 (on Huffman).
91 Meyer Schapiro, Paul Czanne, New York, 2004, 62.
93 Paul Smith, Interpreting Czanne, London, 1996, 46.
94 Willats, Art and Representation, 48 and 51, and Childrens Drawings, 197.
95 Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Czannes doubt, 64, which offers some dubious
remarks about another warped table in Czanne, and Huffman,
Impossible objects, 31213, on how ungrammatical combinations
of lines can lead to a warped appearance.
98 This means that even grammatically simple sentences can express
abstract concepts like number, while pictures can only show
particulars, although this allows them to exemplify the sensuous
properties and relational properties of objects more fully than even
the most poetic language. See Nelson Goodman, Art and inquiry,
Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 41,
19671968, 519, esp. 12.
99 Richard Wollheim, On pictorial representation, in Rob van Gerwen,
ed., Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting, Cambridge, 2001, 14. Cf. Alex
Potts, Sign, in Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds, Critical Terms for
Art History, Chicago, IL, 1996, 22.
100 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 13, 15, 221.
101 Chomsky, Rules and Representations, 4.
102 See Smith, Chomsky, 2832, and Cook and Newson, Chomskys Universal
Grammar, 1319.
103 Chomsky, Theory of Syntax, v.
104 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 8, 78, and 170.
105 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 77 8.
106 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 19, 40, 233.
592
107 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 147, 171, 177, 216, and 235. Children, such
as Stephen Wiltshire, who draw in perspective spontaneously are
exceptional. See Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, New York, 1995,
1857.
108 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 159, and Art and Representation, 289 and
31115.
109 Cf. Willats, Art and Representation, 165, and Childrens Drawings, 379, 601,
and 767.
110 Harrison, Minimal syntax, 229.
111 Cf. Willats, Art and Representation, 175.
112 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 89.
113 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 17980.
114 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 170, 181, 201, and 229.
115 Willats, Childrens Drawings, 172. Cf. Carnie, Syntax, 21.
116 Schier, Deeper into Pictures, 55, 66, note 1, and 151. Cf. Harrison,
Minimal syntax, 221, which argues that Wollheim clearly does
think that the pictorial is in some central sense generative despite
his opposition to semiotic theories of it.
119 See Chomsky, Theory of Syntax, 1718 and 634, and The Minimalist
Programme, 223. Cf. Smith, Chomsky, 434.
120 Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 1953,
319, 320, 329, and 335, and Pinker, The Language Instinct, 5582;
121 Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 198e.
122 See Willats, Art and Representation, 1712.
123 On the condition of deletion, see Chomsky, Theory of Syntax, 17984,
and Language and Mind, 502. Cf. Cook and Newson, Chomskys Universal
Grammar, 280.
125 Willats, Art and Representation, 112 and 1523. Marr, Vision, 26894.
126 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 23 and 359, note 16.
127 Irving Biederman, Recognition-by-components: A theory of human
image understanding, Psychological Review, 94: 2, 1987, 11547.
128 Smith, Chomsky, 608, and Cook and Newson, Chomskys Universal
Grammar, 203 and 325.
130 See Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, London,
1997, 11342.
131 Willats, Art and Representation, 146, 364, note 6, and Childrens Drawings,
1314.
133 Pinker, The Language Instinct, 2034.
134 Chomksy, Theory of Syntax, 6.
135 Cf. Willats, Art and Representation, 34 and 3534, which emphasizes the
function and purpose to which the different systems are put.
137 See Victor Burgin, Seeing sense, in The End of Art Theory: Criticism and
Postmodernity, Basingstoke and London, 1986, 5170, and Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, 193e214e.
138 Schier, Deeper into Pictures, 1205. Cf. Harrison, Minimal syntax, esp.
219. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 244, and Hans Sluga,
Whose house is that?: Wittgenstein on the self, in Hans Sluga and
David Stern, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, Cambridge,
1996, 340.
139 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 1889.
140 Cf. Jean-Dsir Rgnier, De la lumire et de la couleur chez les grands matres
anciens, Paris, 1865, esp. 318.
141 John Willats and Frdo Durand, Defi ning pictorial style: Lessons
from linguistics and computer graphics, Axiomathes, 15: 3, September
2005, 127, esp. 37, and 1221.
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Pictorial Grammar:

Chomsky, John Willats, and the Rules of Representation

Detail from Paul Czanne,

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1 Pablo Ruiz y Picasso,

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2 Drawing of a square produced

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mapping as a process that preserves a measure of identity between the structures

Before it is possible to establish anything of this complexity, any theory of pictorial

Not available online

in particular the distinction Goodman proposed in Languages of Art (1976) between a

4 Paul Czanne, Woman with

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7 Impossible polyhedron, figure 2e from David Huffman,

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10 Drawing of a rectilinear object in vertical oblique projection,

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diagrams have no structure of this sort because neither

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Willats and Dubery coined the term drawing

language is in Chomskian terms left-branching or right-branching in structure.66

16 Henri Matisse, Blue

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Willatss conception of pictorial grammar as something that results in structures

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will render a picture spatially incoherent in ways

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19 Paul Czanne, Pot of

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Not available online

20 Paul Czanne, Still Life

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as contours denoting edges, or the boundaries of regions denoting three-dimensional

A key assumption in Willatss account, which sharply differentiates it from

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21 Drawings of a man made by

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of grasping its main features prior to forming it in

24 Tree diagram of the deep

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are capable of being understood in principle provided their vocabulary is learned

In sum, Willatss account of pictorial grammar is pregnant with possibilities for

On capacities, see Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations, Oxford,

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40 Carter, Painting and language, 11416.

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Schier, Deeper into Pictures, 65.

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