...agency entails the irreducibility of an artist’s reasons for painting abstractly to causes like those in physical nature.

Jackson Pollock, The Key 1946

Oil on canvas, 59 x 84 in

The Art Institute of Chicago 

The problem of an art history sealed off from the historical contexts of style that appears in Wölfflin is also found in Greenberg and Danto, all of whom claim to discern an autonomous inner logic of the history of art (according to cycles or purity of media or becoming philosophy) which is relatively independent of the surrounding social and historical conditions.  In the context of the origins of modernism, Schapiro replies that just saying that artists were exhausted with representation explains nothing about “the particular direction and force of the new movement” (Schapiro, 1937:189) and that simple boredom with verisimilitude “reduces human activity to a simple mechanical movement, like a bouncing ball” (ibid.).  Philosophically, then, Schapiro takes it that agency entails the irreducibility of an artist’s reasons for painting abstractly to causes like those in physical nature.  Notice that he simultaneously argues for historicism (as the deep singularity and complex convergence of factors that mark genuine historical events like dramatic changes in style) and for the innovation and uniqueness of particular artists.  Here we should point out that historicism, contrary to some of its detractors (like Popper), need not reduce the role of human agency in its account of historical change.  In fact, if we admit that human agents cause historical change, then we have a constructivist view of the social world, and that itself does open the way to historicism.  We’ll return to this point later.