In his collection of essays, "Toward a psychology of Art" (UCal Press, 1966) Rudolf Arnheim discusses figure and ground in art quite a lot. Arnheim was trained by the Gestaltist Psychologists Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler in Berlin and later became the foremost Gestalt interpreter of art (and movies).

Mesoamerican artists were skilled at creating figure-ground patterns where the ground mirrors the figure. The most common motif is what is called in Nahuatl xicalcoliuhqui, "the curved thing on gourd bowls," inspired by an ornament called ehecacozcatl, "the wind jewel," made by making two transverse cuts in conch and other sea snail shells:

http://www.arqueomex.com/S2N3nConcha79.html

The xicalcoliuhqui motif is related to the sea, rain, fertility, life, and the deity Ehecatl Quetzalcoatl, "the wind, serpent of precious quetzal feathers", who wears the ehecacozcatl on his chest (note also the xicalcoliuhqui in his headdress):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quetzalcoatl_Ehecatl.jpg

The xicalcoliuhqui was applied as a symbolically potent form of surface decoration to ceramics, jewelry, textiles, architecture, and other supports. It continues to be popular as a decorative motif in a variety of media. Here are some examples from the pre-Hispanic and early colonial periods:

http://www.bmimages.com/results.asp?image=00523805001&stockindexonline.com=1

http://www.ccd.rpi.edu/eglash/noelle/fretworkdetail.htm

http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/images-1/180_04_2.jpg

http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/images-1/180_03_2.jpg

http://www.famsi.org/research/graz/magliabechiano/img_page007.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BldgC2TChico.JPG

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_detail_in_Mitla-Oaxaca-Mexico.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greca_de_Mitla..JPG

Susan, Thank you for your suggestions and the link. You are correct to suggest the work of Yves-Alain Bois and his compatriots such as Hal Foster, as being of central interest to me. Does your work touch on the area of figure-ground and the destruction of the difference?

Thank you for you're suggestion James.

As always David, thank you for your excellent input.

The focus of my interest is indeed in abstraction and how these artists attempted to rid themselves of figure-ground opposition. Does anyone have any more information about this?

By figure I am assuming you mean sign or anything signified or suggested. If not please correct me. I know that Mondrian was one of the first but the whole of the New York School were interested in this. Franz Kline was definitely another. I guess in my own work I paint abstractly but I have no eagerness to remove communication from my paintings. Can there be a painting that communicates anything without a figuration? What does the elimination of the figure achieve? No communication so a purely interpretable object. Rorschach did this in his use of the inkblot by intention. I don't know of anyone who has come closer, though Rorschach did not I think consider himself a visual artist.

Neil, do you think Rothko's paintings have figure / ground separation? What about some of Malevich's work or Yves Klein's work? Do you not think these works communicate?

It looks to me like Neil is using the word "figure" to mean the represention of something on a surface, while Paul is using the same word in another sense, meaning something that seems to pop out from the surounding area (the "ground"), perceived as being in front of that area, without necessarily representing something. Neil is thinking of content, Paul of form. Correct me if I have misread your comments, please.

I cannot speak for Neil (obviously) but I am talking about that part of a two-dimensional artwork that consciously or subconsciously the viewer differentiates from the ground within which this is located. Some of the Modernists attempted to destroy this differentiation.

I don't really know much about this, but my initial, intuitive response is that it is impossible (or very difficult?) to get rid of this ambiguity. When drawing a human figure, for example, artists learn to perceive the negative spaces (for example, the "empty" space between the arm and the torso) as a figure in its own right, using the mind to "flip" the usual relationship between figure (in front) and ground (behind), seing a framed portion of the ground as a figure, and drawing that non-figure instead of directing attention to the volumes of the body. Figure and ground can be flipped back and forth at will in the mind, much as "impossible" figures like the Necker cube and the Penrose triangle are flipped by human observers:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Necker_cube_and_impossible_cube.svg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Penrose-dreieck.svg

It is either one or the other, but not both at the same time.

If someone has learned to cancel this effect, I would like to see the image that achieves the cancellation. It could be used in a survey to see if the effect is effectively cancelled in the minds of all human observers, or at least a majority.

The Mesoamerican examples that I provided in my post 26 days ago flip back and forth smoothly (at least in my perception).

Image flipping is fun stuff. Check out these images:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lattenkiste_b.png

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lattenkiste_c.png

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penrose_triangle_(animation).gif

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Perth_Impossible_Triangle.jpg

(I'm sorry, this isn't figure-ground flipping, but I think there is some kind of neuroaesthetic connection, since we are walking on the common ground of ambiguity in visual perception.)

Neil, I'm sorry, I just re-read my comment to you and it sounds aggressive - this was not my intention!

Oh no worries. I think I see what you are asking.

Hello there! Great to see some interesting outlines here! I am actually drawing with outlines, researching a correlation between my own praxis and an antique theory.

http://georgiossourmelis.in/?p=678

In order to imagine a lost painting genre that its outlines "terminated or suggested other parts" transforming the graphic surface, as Pliny mentions the painter Parrhasios. A fine example of this paradigm may be "the rape of Persephone" in Vergina discovered by Manolis Andronikos in the late 70s.

http://imgarcade.com/1/hades-abducting-persephone-wall-painting/

Perhaps artists are somehow "trained" in the way they perceive figure and ground and can thus manipulate it. Radiologists seem to process images in a different way to the radiologically naïve (Sven Haller, MD, MSc, Ernst W. Radue, MD. What Is Different about a Radiologist’s Brain? Radiology 2005; 236:983–989 http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teachingP140C/Papers/Haller_Radue_2005.pdf ) and much of what they do involves separating meaningful shapes from the ground.

The ability to identify a shape from surrounding ground (?signal from noise) has clear evolutionary advantages. The visual ambiguity surrounding trick images of contrast boundaries relates to the brain's automatic attempt to create depth, and probably explains our ability to see shapes on a two dimensional surface as representing three dimensional structures. A number of "pop-art" pieces used this ambiguity to sometimes head-splitting effect.

Ambiguity of form may generate cognitive processes that "attempt" to transform them into forms of practical or emotional significance to the viewer (? Rorschach blots) or create lines into an identifiable object. I still find myself seeing a mole in Kandinsky's Garden of love! Even if a viewer attempts to be detached, his/her subconscious cognitive processes will rebel.

Works such as those of Pollock or Mondrian can create a sense of ordered depth, "this line is in front of that one, so is it closer?" Which is part of the same process of trying to create recognisable aspects of form. Perhaps this also reflects the artist's manipulative talents.

Which begs the question, "what is seen in the absence of form, when all is ground?" I remember as a teenager diving into a lake from a boat. At that moment the sun went behind a cloud and the blue of the lake turned dark, and as the surface approached I had the disconcerting sense of diving into infinity. I get a similar effect when looking at Rothko, but the works I have viewed, whilst often giving the same sense of the infinite, can generate a wide emotional range, and sometimes the feeling of moving within infinity.

Phenomenologist Merlau-Ponty presents us with a situationist, as opposed to geometric/scientific mapping of spatiality as a context for the figure-ground problem…

"As far as spatiality is concerned,…one’s own body is the third term, always tacitly understood, in the figure-background structure, and every figure stands out against the double horizon of external and bodily space. One must therefore reject as an abstraction any analysis of bodily space which takes account only of figures and points, since these can neither be conceived nor be without horizons[….] When I say that an object is on a table, I always mentally put myself either in the table or in the object, and I apply to them a category which theoretically fits the relationship of my body to external objects. Stripped of this anthropological association, the word on is indistinguishable from the word ‘under’ or the word ‘beside’. Even if the universal form of space is that without which there would be for us no bodily space, it is not that by which there is one." (Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London)

Merlea-Ponty used the figure-ground concept in discussions of perception and consciousness throughout his life, and most relevant to your question in ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’ in Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964). Sense and non-sense. Northwestern University Press, [Evanston]

@ James, many thanks for this thought provoking answer James.

In real 3D scenes visual perception all  familiar local objects that we  recognize is the FIGURES - for example, in searching lost ball on the grass. In this case the texture of grass is the GROUND. However in other tasks - for example in searching the way in the mountains -  ground becomes the FIGURE itself because space perception is based on the texture gradients of Gibson and some others monocular features. And what  do we need to consider as  the GROUND in this case?

In modern art the relation figure-ground has been problematic:

Abstraction moved to Overall Painting (Cézanne (1885) - Pollock (1944) = the painting itself becomes figure.

(a color for example - or a line - becomes form within a form

-  became autonomous (Kandinsky (1910)):

Otherwise put:

In modern art a positive form can be because of a negative form.

Form  =  Choice