Whole sight...

This is the first line of John Fowles' Daniel Martin: "Whole sight, or all the rest is desolation." What does he mean?

Well, in aesthetic terms, I think he means something like the painting above. Look at that face. Seriously: look at it. There are, as you can imagine, lots of opinions about Rembrandt's portraits. Some people – those with a more historiographical bent – think of them almost exclusively as being a response to the market's demands. Plain performance, in other words; a series of facial expressions and bodily poses that give potential buyers what the painter thinks they want. Then there are those who have decided that they are pretty much all self-expression; a glimpse of Rembrandt's inner man and nothing more. Laura Cumming doubts if he particularly needed an audience. John Berger thinks that he was waiting for a future audience to catch up with him.

But that's all pretty much irrelevant, I think. I've struggled with Rembrandt on occasion. There are an awful lot of his paintings where I simply cannot see what all the fuss it about. But that isn't the case with the portraits. Because what you have with the portraits, at their best, is the sense of an absolutely blazing interiority. Look at those eyes. How did he do that? Rembrandt is like Shakespeare in that the character he presents cannot be reduced to a simple formula. This face is both unknowable and full, seemingly, of contending feelings – aggression? mistrust? anxiety? affection? fastidious right-mindedness? – while, at the same time, it appears to be so real that you feel not just its presence but its aura; that sense you get of people when you're sitting next to them. What you're getting, here, is a whole life. You know him and you don't know him, just as you would if you were sitting opposite him on a train, and that, in the end, is all you need to know. The rest is just biography.

But what about this?

A "legendary" painting, apparently: one that caused controversy in the early fifties when it was first displayed and one that continues to be argued about by all those critics who sound suspiciously like any group of boys arguing about cars or films or the music of Led Zeppelin. De Kooning was an abstract expressionist and, at the time, it was considered sacrilegious that he had painted a figure at all.

Interiority? Absent, surely. Misogyny? It's certainly been accused of it. Julia Kristeva said that a woman could not have painted this because of her relationship with – her intimate bodily resemblance to – her own mother. Peter Schjeldahl says that what it is, essentially, is the work of a good boy indulging his own worse impulses. It's part of a series, the women of which were described by Robert Hughes as "part Ishtar, part Amsterdam hooker and part Marilyn" but David Sylvester makes the point that "entirely formal" marks "that have been made in order to give the form a heightened vitality or presence" should be interpreted as such. (This strikes me as the critical equivalent of a Get Out Of Jail Free card.) He also quotes De Kooning's wife, herself an abstract expressionist, who said,

"That ferocious woman he painted didn't come from living with me. It began when he was three years old."

His mother? I gather that she was ferocious too. As for me, I think that "Woman I" is the twentieth century equivalent of an ancient idol. It's warding off something. Yes, it's a comment on centuries of nudes (on art's exhaustion: how was he expected to paint another one?), as well as an acknowledgement of the power of sex (look at those stockings, coiled, like rattlesnakes, on her right shoulder) but it's also the visual equivalent of crossing your fingers; of protecting yourself against the very power that you're supposed to be depicting. It's an act, simultaneously, of fear, worship and propitiation. Do I like it? I don't know. It troubles me. I feel as though the artist's thumb is pressing on the scales. Which brings me to this:

Picasso painted this in 1907. Partly, according to Will Gompertz, he wanted to reassert "the drawn line that had been abandoned by the Impressionists". He was competing with Matisse, whose Le Bonheur de Vivre had caused a stir in 1906, and he had also been inspired by Cezanne's Memorial Exhibition. He wanted to "continue the Master of Aix's line of enquiry into perspective and ways of seeing."

It was a hugely revolutionary and influential image: it led to cubism, for one thing. It has become canonical, in the same way that Ulysses has, or Heartbreak Hotel. Gompertz talks about the lack of spatial depth and the fact that the bodies are reduced to a series of triangular and diamond shapes; he mentions Apollinaire saying that "Picasso studies an object in the way a surgeon dissects a corpse". It's meant to be a representation of prostitutes. A warning in fact: they'll take your money and then syphilis will almost certainly kill you. Robert Hughes talks about the masks' primitive power. (That word again.) They certainly come roaring out at you in a way that, say, a Renoir or a Degas nude wouldn't dream of doing. But what really intrigues me is this, which is Siri Hustvedt's summary of Picasso's attitude to women: "fear, cruelty and ambivalence". What are those masks doing? Well, they're annulling the women's faces. But they're also communicating a power that is, frankly, scary. He's erasing and magnifying them, all at once. In other words, I don't think that it's really the prostitutes that Picasso is scared of. Or not per se. I think it's women. I get the same impression from the De Kooning and, ultimately, this is what I think: that these are not adult pictures at all but rather the images – the graffitti – of little boys.

In other words, they're stunted. This seems to matter more and more to me. I couldn't stand Baz Luhrmann's Elvis because, for all its visual pyrotechnics, there was a vacuum at the centre of it. There was no sense of a lived life. The drama, Luhrmann seemed to be implying, all came from him: from the swooping and dive-bombing of the camera's lens. Or take Hemingway, the careful choice of whose words can barely mask a fear and rage that's so intense that you end up wanting to hold the book at your fingers' ends. As a corrective, look at this:

This is from an article by Rebecca Mead (it's in the New Yorker's online archive):

"The story of Susanna and the Elders, related in the Book of Daniel, was a popular subject for artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and no wonder. Susanna, a virtuous, beautiful young woman, is bathing in her garden while two older men spy on her. The men suddenly accost her and demand that she submit to rape; if she resists, they warn, they will ruin her reputation by claiming that they caught her with a lover. The tale offered painters an irresistible opportunity to replicate a similar kind of voyeurism. ...But a very different Susanna is offered by Artemisia Gentileschi, who was born in Rome in 1593, and who painted the scene in 1610, when she was seventeen. In her version, two men emerge from behind a marble balustrade, violently interrupting Susanna’s ablutions. Her head and her body torque away from the onlookers as she raises a hand toward them, in what looks like ineffectual self-defense. Strikingly, her other hand shields her face. Perhaps this Susanna does not want the men to identify her or see her anguish; it’s equally likely that she does not want to lay eyes on her persecutors. In its composition, execution, and psychological insight, the painting is remarkably sophisticated for a girl in her teens. As the scholar Mary Garrard noted, ...the painting represents an art-historical innovation: it is the first time in which sexual predation is depicted from the point of view of the predated. With this painting, and with many other works that followed, Artemisia claimed women’s resistance of sexual oppression as a legitimate subject of art."

I offer this not as a political point. What I'm saying, I think, is that this painting contains everything that you might want represented in this moment: the men's complicity; the way that they leer aggressively forward; that look they have of being, somehow, definitively untrustworthy; the woman's shock; her attempt to block herself from view and, most importantly, the sense that her body should only belong to her – that our smug viewerly assumption that it belongs to us is being directly challenged. Gentileschi may have been seventeen, but she had more to say – or, at least, more of human worth to say – than Picasso and De Kooning managed to muster in their entire careers. Which is my point. Let's have art created by people who think like grown-ups, can we? Let's have art that deals in insight and in nuance. Let's have art that attempts not only to see but to feel, and to feel, moreover, in a way that seems first-hand. No pyrotechnics, please, without a countervailing human weight. No feelings cheapened by the need to reach the gallery. No lumpen makeweights and no dizzying cartoons. Whole sight, in other words, or none at all.