In
a 1977 essay, E. H. Gombrich called Hegel “the father of art history,” arguing
that Hegel was the first to see art in terms of its development as a reflection
of a periodized human history.[1] Nevertheless, Gombrich also attacked
Hegelianism, exposing “a number of Hegel’s critics who, in his view,
unwittingly remained Hegelians”[2]
including Wölfflin and Panofsky. To
compound the irony, James Elkins and others have deftly read Gombrich himself
as a Hegelian malgre lui. Gombrich could not reconcile his attraction
to positivism with the deeply Hegelian foundations of his own discipline,
despite his explicit acknowledgement of those foundations. The larger point of these ironies is that
Gombrich’s conflict is paradigmatic of much of the analytic philosophy of art.
During
the 1980’s there was a kind of backlash in the academic world against theory
and specifically against Hegel. In
retrospect it revealed an unexpected consonance between postmodernism and
analytic philosophy, as did the parallel desire within both traditions to
eliminate or reduce subjectivity and the shared focus on language. In response to this general tendency to
reduce the role of theory and the specific project of exorcizing Hegelian
holism, James Elkins argued that art history is inescapably Hegelian in a broad
sense. In fact he proposed that “by
looking at the points of similarity between the ‘Hegelian’ theories which
infest art history and certain concepts fundamental to the discipline itself,”
we will find that “to remove one is to remove the other and dismantle
conventional art history altogether” (Elkins, 1988:361):
Periods-and by extension styles,
the Zeitgeist, and other holistic
concepts-are self-justifying and not in need of positivist verification or
falsification…an art history organized by holistically defined periods is
independent of positivism…what would the practice of art history look like
without stylistic analysis or periods organized by Hegelian historicized
collectivism? (Elkins, 1988:374)
[1]. E. H. Gombrich, “‘The Father of Art History:’ A Reading
of the Lectures on Aesthetics of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831” in Tributes: Interpreters of our Cultural
Tradition Angela Wilkes, trans. Ithaca, N. Y. 1985 [find pubs]
[2]. James Elkins, “Art History Without Theory” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 14, No. 2 Winter,
1988 p. 361
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