6 ideas
Art historical education teaches viewers to meet a painting with context, attribution, iconography, and theory, and this analytical stance slowly displaces the capacity to be overwhelmed. Elkins treats this as a real loss that the discipline has quietly accepted, not a neutral trade-off.
Visitors to the Rothko Chapel in Houston have written in its guest books, and to Elkins, about crying in front of its nearly black, featureless canvases. These paintings depict nothing, so the tears cannot come from narrative or represented suffering. The case shows that emptiness, darkness, and the absence of imagery can provoke overwhelming feeling as powerfully as a depicted scene can.
Weeping at pictures has a history. Whether people cry at art depends partly on whether their era permits and rewards it, not only on the art itself.
From readers' letters and historical accounts, Elkins sorts the causes of tears into recurring kinds. Some viewers cry at a painting's overwhelming fullness or beauty, some at its emptiness, some at a sudden sense of passing time or mortality, and some at religious presence. A few cry simply at having been alone with a picture long enough for it to become a real encounter.
Elkins admits he has never actually wept at a painting. The closest he came was before Giovanni Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert at the Frick, where he was nearly overcome as a young man. He recounts how later knowledge and familiarity with the painting eroded that response, so his own biography serves as evidence for the book's thesis about expertise dulling feeling.
Elkins suggests conditions under which strong responses become possible. Go to museums alone, look at only one or a few paintings rather than trying to see everything, and stay with a single picture for a long time. Let personal memory and attention take precedence over informational labels. Tears come from sustained, solitary, undistracted looking, not from efficient coverage of a collection.