Is knowledge important in responding to art?

Yes … and There’s also Raw Emotion, Life Experience and World View.

According to our course tutor there’s no point in looking and just liking or not liking.  She often pushes us to see that our emotional response to a work depends on our personal worldview, and that knowledge about the artist and the context of his work can change that view.  My first essay was to interpret Painting (1946). by the British artist Francis Bacon.  After a while I saw what she meant.

Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946.

Oil and pastel on linen, 197.8cm x 132.1cm.

 Museum of Modern Art, New York.

When I first googled it up, my emotional response  was "What a horrible picture - hate it!"  But I decided to write about it anyway since I had the chance to go to the Bacon exhibition in Sydney.

I fell to thinking about the date of the picture and the way the essay question pointed us to war symbolism.  I remembered the aftermath of the war in London: bomb sites, bad food, men in suits (all our fathers dressed like the figure in the painting); I noticed the umbrella and remembered the furled umbrellas that were often carried by politicians in newspaper photographs of the time.  So I used this life experience and started googling stuff around politicians and umbrellas.  Within an hour I'd built up an amazing plot involving Winston Churchill, the British intelligence service and the severe bombing of Coventry)!!!!

That may all reflect my warped world view, but when I got to see the exhibition and to read material about Francis Bacon the new knowledge I picked up showed me how wrong I was.   I found out that when it was exhibited in 1946 the public took it to be a comment on the war that had ended the year before.  I also found out other stuff about Bacon that showed Painting could be interpreted in other ways (Freudian for example).  So I decided to write about how Painting can have different interpretations, how it's ambiguous.  

Doing that reflects another aspect of my world view:  I love puzzles and subtlety and I often find it hard to commit to a single interpretation of something.  And I should add that, while I still wouldn't put a print of Painting (1946) on my wall, my appreciation of the work, as well as my respect for Bacon, grew all the time I was working on the essay.