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Abstract
Whilst the traditional view of aesthetics is often as a detached or disembodied form of experience, engagement with the aesthetic qualities of painting — its specific properties of line, colour and form — is far more than a merely visual phenomenon. The psychological resonances which are necessarily involved are complex, subliminal and multi-sensory. Psychoanalysis offers what seems like an authoritative account of these; but it lags some way behind actual developments in modern art, and is biased towards figurative iconographies. Object-relations provides ways of understanding more informal or even abstract aspects of painting: Adrian Stokes's writings are a good example of this at its best. But the range of embodiment in aesthetic response is far wider than the more or less infantile prototypes put forward by psychoanalysis, and a different, more poetic language is needed to deal with them.