 Art theorists such as Roman Jakobson challenged this division between pictorial art and language early in the twentieth century (Jakobson [1921/1971] 1987), reacting against what were thought of as illusionistic styles of painting. Once it was understood that artistic styles are comparable to languages or codes, it was thought, artists would feel freer to abandon academic conventions, to follow “primitive” models, and to participate in the fauvist and cubist experiments of Matisse, Picasso, and Braque (Bois 1987). Conventionalism was well established by the 1950s. For example, the following remark appears in an article by the American art historian Leo Steinberg entitled “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind”, which anticipates Gombrich’s and Goodman’s stance on the “innocent eye” (see above  §1.1):