June 30, 2006
Weekend reading: Thomas Crow on art history in America
The Spring 2006 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, contains a strong, readable essay on the development of art history in America by Thomas Crow. It clocks in at 10,000 words, so I recommend picking up the magazine rather than reading it on-screen. I've selected a few teaser excerpts:
George Kubler (1912-1996), the great specialist in both colonial Spanish architecture and pre-Columbian art, was one of the rare American scholars of his generation to address the theoretical underpinnings of a discipline operating under this designation. He likened the gaze of the art historian to that of the astronomer, "concerned with appearances noted in the present but occurring in the past. . . . However fragmentary its condition, any work of art is actually a portion of an arrested happening, or an emanation of past time." The "initial commotion" entailed in the making of an art object survives--as does no other creative act--as a unique, physically sensible pattern.In comparison, the textual materials relied upon by the profession of history can seem, despite their profusion, thin and remote. The object of art, by contrast, allows its maker to speak in the present with the full vividness of an unforced creative act, one that can preserve a significant, if not absolutely complete, inventory of its particular traits and structural complexity. By this I do not mean to say that artists and craftsmen do not operate under a confining series of stipulations and constraints, but these are the standard conditions of all human activity, within which art production is exceptional in the scope it provides for nuanced emotional expression as part and parcel of its social utility.
The difficulty, it hardly needs stating, lies in interpreting this physical commotion from the past that arrives in our midst like a traveler through time.
[Much more after the jump.]
Surely wiser [than Steven Pinker’s cognitive-science view of art history] in this regard is Kubler, who had a profound knowledge of the Mesoamerican traditions from which the Aztec effigy arose. No particular partisan of modern avant-gardism, he describes the same European aesthetic revolution circa 1910 in these terms:The fabric of society manifested no rupture, and the texture of useful inventions continued step by step in closely linked order, but the system of artistic invention was abruptly transformed, as if large numbers of men had suddenly become aware that the inherited repertory of forms no longer corresponded to the actual meaning of existence. . . . The nature of artistic invention therefore relates more closely to invention by new postulates than to that invention by simple confrontation which characterizes the useful sciences.A postulate on the order of the heliocentric planetary orbits, the movement of tectonic plates, or, indeed, natural selection itself can force as abrupt (and to many as freakish) a reordering of cognition as the eruption of a new, antinaturalistic set of criteria for success in painting.
In fact, over the millennia evoked by Pinker, naturalistic depiction has been the exception rather than the rule (though the technical barriers to its achievement are quite low) because it is not, on the whole, what human beings have desired from their art. One key element in any explanation for the drastic artistic transformations of the early twentieth century, as Kubler conceives them, lies in the grafting of tribal and non-Western formal sequences in all their historical concreteness onto an otherwise played-out European line that had lost, by any objective measure, most of its capacity for fresh invention. The new African, Oceanic, and archaic models offered, in addition to an expanded range of expressive intensity, an advanced capacity for rendering volumes into linear patterns transferable to a flat surface, in a way that acknowledged with a new realism the painting as a two-dimensional thing. Any single object in this new sequence captured for the future its concrete moment of active translation between two symbolic technologies.
The task of understanding such a moment necessarily entails a patient unpacking of a process, many layers of which are only partly visible or indeed entirely obscure to the immediate, untutored glance.
Then he goes on to chart the development of art history in the United States, which he begins by saying:
It is not the case, however, that the scholars who established art history in American universities necessarily resisted the temptation to regard the apparent immediacy of visual art as a relief from the more laborious demands of historical interpretation. In an essay of 1929, Charles Rufus Morey, the most influential figure in the development of the field at Princeton, lamented the absence of historical depth in the environment surrounding American students compared to the palpable sense of tradition enjoyed by their European counterparts. To amass a commensurable awareness through the study of languages or history consumed years and, even then, might yield only uncoordinated fragments of knowledge: "the disiecta membra of the history of human action and thought." In the history of art, however, "the student is conducted to the spirit of an epoch by his most direct sense, the eye ... [which] provides a history capable of exposition within the narrow limits of time and effort which have been left for such integrating disciplines by the multiplicity of the modern college curriculum."No hint here that the proper unpacking of even one representative object requires no less elaboration of philological and historical knowledge than that required by any cognate discipline--in fact, one could argue that it requires a good deal more.
And:
But this climate of postwar optimism and opportunity did not at first alter the conservative tendencies of the American discipline. The first wave of European professors, as they stepped in to meet the demand for trained personnel, found their new American charges lacking the level of erudition they would have assumed in their European counterparts (and cultural misunderstandings doubtless led these professors to exaggerate both the norms they had known and the deficiencies they were discovering). Thus they tended to prune away many of the more complex and speculative elements of art history in favor of conceptually simple and often mechanical tasks: decoding iconography, tracing fragments of dispersed ensembles, identifying hands, dating. Ascertaining points of fact that European scholars--and other humanists in America--would regard as just the starting point for interpretation became sufficient justification for a successful research career.
And:
In contrast, the increasingly independent, disenchanted, and rapidly changing art of modernity impelled its interpreters to begin comparing an arrangement of pigments in an oily emulsion with rapidly evolving phenomena like the Industrial Revolution or mass urbanization. The two phenomenal orders--aesthetic and historical--could at first be made only tenuously commensurable with one another because few, if any, ready mental maps existed that were adequate to both.In the face of such a challenge, the first plausible explanatory strategy, adopted from the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury group in England and promoted by Barr, was to steer art history in a direction parallel to that of New Criticism in literary studies, giving pride of place to an artwork's internal relationships and transformations of acknowledged precedents and prototypes (thereby bracketing historical determination and the consequent need for wide research).
I won’t quote more, for fear of overstepping the bounds of fair use, but the essay is an incredibly engaging history of the discipline. It runs up to Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, doubles back for an extended meditation on Meyer Schapiro, then rumbles forward to Linda Nochlin and Robert Herbert’s (separate) “building of a systematic iconography for Parisian modernism,” Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss, the splendors of early-‘80s “social history of art,” and so on, concluding by positing some disconcerting assertions, raising very relevant questions, and, in the end, holding out hope for “a new synthesis at a higher level.”