Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?: On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity

by James Elkins

Book Overview

With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415919428
• ISBN13: 9780415919425
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"