Modernism: Grand Narratives of Art History

André Masson, Battle of Fishes 1926

Sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas

(36.2 x 73 cm) MOMA

Wölfflin’s marginalization of Mannerism has a parallel in Barr and Greenberg, namely the marginalization of Surrealism in favor of abstract expressionism.  In Barr’s case, working under the influence of Greenberg, this was reflected in the narrative structure of the hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, which seemed to lead inevitably from Cezanne’s Bather (1885) to Pollock’s Lavender Mist (1950).  Surrealism was represented in two small rooms by a couple of Duchamps, two outstanding early Giacomettis and Masson’s Battle of the Fishes (1926).  One irony here is that Duchamp was in not a Surrealist, but that it was Masson, as well as Duchamp, who was a Surrealist, who pioneered the automatism that climaxed in Pollock.  It’s also true that even though Jean Arp was associated with the Surrealists, he could easily be located within the tradition of abstract, organic modern sculpture that includes Brancusi, Alexander Calder, and Henry Moore.  It took the likes of Kirk Varnedoe, nearly 30 years after Barr, to experiment with an alternate program structured by themes instead of historical narrative, and it was ironically the Met, not MOMA, that finally displayed Pollock as a terminus of Surrealist automatism in the Desire Unbound exhibition in 2001.  The point is that once a theory or narrative is adopted, the evidence may be made to fall into place by the rhetoric of museum display.  The historical marginalization of Surrealism is reflected and reinforced by its physical marginalization.  The parallel to the treatment of Mannerism is striking, as we’ll see later.

Schapiro concludes his discussion of the relationship between philosophy and painting by demanding a high level of detail in establishing that a particular worldview is reflected in painting at a given time, and a warning about overgeneralizing the particular mode of that reflection: The equation of the philosophy and painting requires specification of the traits, details, et cetera, of both the work and the worldview or philosophy.  However, the constructability of links between them, whether historical or intellectual, is relevant only for a theory of the unity of philosophy and painting of a time and place, but not for a general theory of unified worldview in art and philosophy (Schapiro, 1958-68:71).

Duchamp’s Birthday 3: “...comedy leads to the dissolution of art altogether.” Hegel

Bicycle Wheel

New York, 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913)

Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool

51 x 25 x 16 1/2" (129.5 x 63.5 x 41.9 cm)

The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection

Today’s writers on Hegel’s Aesthetics generally leave out a curious and important feature of art’s dissolution, which is that “comedy leads to the dissolution of art altogether” (Knox’ translation, 1975:1236) taking the historical forms of satire (as the end of classical antiquity) and irony (as the dissolution of romantic art).  The omission constitutes a missed opportunity to apply Hegel’s theory of art history to today’s artworld, because contemporary art is dominated by ironic and satirical modes.  It is, in fact, Marcel Duchamp more than any other single artist who shifts the artworld from seriousness and sincerity to satire and irony.  In fact, as I will argue, Duchamp’s innovation constitutes a synthesis of the satiric and ironic forms of art’s dissolution, and therefore inaugurates yet another period of dissolution, one from which we have not yet emerged.  That’s how, as I’ve already suggested, a close reading of art’s dissolution would yield a genuinely Hegelian account of contemporary art from its inception among the Dadaists to the present time.  In order to produce such a reading, it’s necessary to give a detailed treatment of the earlier satirical and ironic dissolutions.

Duchamp’s Birthday 2: Dissolution of art in Hegel

From a Hegelian perspective, Duchamp’s place in the development of the contemporary involves a synthesis of the satiric and ironic modes of art’s previous moments of dissolution.  A Hegelian understanding of satire and irony, which are the specific forms taken by the dissolution of Classical and Christian art, will allow us to grasp historically, as a replaying and a synthesis of art’s previous dissolutions, the meaning of the peculiar narcissism, hermeticism and emptiness that afflict the contemporary artworld. That reading reworks the theme of art’s dissolution into an analytic tool, and saves the concept of “the end of art” from being a mere slogan, one charged with nostalgia and despair, but of little value as a term of art-historical and aesthetic understanding.  Once we address art in terms a systematic reading of Hegel’s Lectures, we’ll finally be able to apply Hegel’s concept of art’s dissolution to the contemporary artworld by historically grasping the advent of Marcel Duchamp as a replaying of the moment of art’s dissolution.  For better or for worse, it is in large part Duchamp’s synthesis of the satirical and ironic dissolutions of art that define contemporary art.  The revised Hegelian approach that emerges is not merely critical of the contemporary, however, but is also equipped to understand and appreciate it, prepared to retain its most valuable possibilities, and thereby able to remain hopeful about what lies beyond.[1]

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[1]. Duchamp’s “Rotorelief” disc (1923) from http://wnycradiolab.tumblr.com/post/32671593449/marcel-duchamp-rotoreliefs-duchamp-recognized

Happy Birthday, Marcel Duchamp! (1887-1968)

Marcel Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bond Paris 1924

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
photocollage on colored lithograph/letterpress, 
mounted on flat cardboard holder
imitated, rectified readymade
31.5 x 19.5 cm

A firm grasp of what Hegel really meant by the dissolution of art would be a very strong interpretive tool in the contemporary art world.  Of course, the test case for Hegel’s true relevance to contemporary art is the application of the Lectures on Aesthetics to Marcel Duchamp, because Duchamp is by common consent the ürsprung of the contemporary.[1]  In addition, Duchamp’s own aesthetics-or anti-aesthetics-intersects with Hegel’s in a way that reveals much about art’s dissolution.  Arguing strongly for the continuing relevance of the Lectures, Hegel’s philosophy of art illuminates Duchamp’s anti-art, and Duchamp’s work in turn illuminates Hegel’s aesthetics.  Duchamp’s interest in Pyrrhonian philosophy invites an investigation of skepticism as it appears in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, while the satirical aspects of Duchamp’s work recall Hegel’s treatment of Roman comedy.   Furthermore, Duchamp’s reading of Max Stirner’s The Ego and its Own allows us to develop a Hegelian criticism of Duchamp’s work from an ethical perspective, immediately recalling the philosopher’s trenchant criticism of irony during the Romantic period.

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[1]. For example, Kimball complains: “Almost everything championed as innovative in contemporary art is essentially a tired repetition of gestures inaugurated by the likes of Marcel Duchamp” (Kimball, 2008:27).  The conservative position in art writing, for lack of a better word, generally frowns on contemporary art as lacking in aesthetic, moral, and spiritual value, but agrees with advocates of the contemporary on the central importance of Duchamp; “the post-1945 artists of Pop Art, Happenings, Op Art, Fluxus, Conceptual Art…all felt that Duchamp belonged to them, that he was their ‘prototype.’” Rudolf E. Kuenzli’s introduction to Marcel Duchamp, Artist of the Century Eds. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (Massachusetts; MIT, 1991) p. 1  Therefore Duchamp is blamed for contemporary artists who uncreatively follow in his footsteps, while the importance of Duchamp in his context is entirely missed.

...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.

“The history of modern art is presented as an internal, immanent process among the artists...”

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism with Eight Rectangles (1915)

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Oil on canvas, 49 x 58 cm

In a 1937 essay on abstract art, Schapiro opposed Alfred Barr’s account of modernism.  Barr, who was then director of the Museum of Modern Art, seemed to have absorbed the ahistorical notion that abstract art displays the “autonomy and absoluteness of the aesthetic,” that in abstraction, “finally, was an art of painting in which only aesthetic elements seemed to be present.”[1]  This position prevented Barr from developing a full explanation of the emergence of abstract art and of the changes in and diversity of styles within abstraction.  Schapiro writes: “although Barr sets out to describe rather than to defend or criticize abstract art, he seems to accept its theories on their face value in his historical exposition…In places he speaks of this art as independent of historical conditions, as realizing the underlying order of nature and as an art of pure form without content…Hence if the book is largely about historical movements, Barr’s conception of abstract art remains essentially unhistorical…no connection is drawn between the art and the conditions of the moment.  He excludes as irrelevant to its history the nature of the society in which it arose, except as an incidental obstructing or accelerating atmospheric factor.  The history of modern art is presented as an internal, immanent process among the artists; abstract art arises because, as the author says, representational art had been exhausted” (Schapiro, 1937:187-8).

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[1]. Meyer Schapiro, “Abstract Art” [1937] in Modern Art-19^th and 20^th Centuries (Collected Papers, Vol. II) George Brazillier, 1978 pp. 185

Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Philosophy?

Like Hegel, then, Schapiro certainly believed that art revealed the spirit of the time, but not in a way determinable for all times.  Rather, the relationship between art and society, while relevant to the question of stylistic change at any time, takes different forms at different times.  The visual arts may often contain or reflect philosophical ideas, but to show in any case how this is so requires a very detailed account of both the philosophy and the art in question.  For example, Schapiro criticized Panofsky’s claim that Gothic architecture was strongly shaped by its way of encoding elements of Scholastic philosophy.[1]  Panofsky, he said, had relied upon Thomistic dialectic in a way that strained the available evidence.

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[1]. See Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1957) and Schapiro’s criticism in Cynthia L. Persinger, The Politics of Style: Meyer Schapiro and the Crisis of Meaning in Art History (ProQuest, 2007) pp. 188-9 http://search.proquest.com/docview/304822071

The Art Historian as Philosopher: Meyer Schapiro

Parmisianino, Madonna dal Collo Lungo (Madonna with Long Neck) (1534-40)
Oil on panel, 216 x 132 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Meyer Schapiro was unique partly because of his unparalleled multidisciplinary abilities and partly because of the acuity of his eye and his ability to interpret and explicate the facture of a painting.  We might call Schapiro a practical theorist.  He was adept at combining available knowledge from many fields in order to widen the interpretive context for a given work.  Although drawn to Marx and Freud, didn’t lean on a single approach (like formalism or iconography), instead improvising a singular treatment of important artists and movements, and responding to the commentary other thinkers on important artists like Van Gogh, Leonardo and Cezanne.  He did not try to frame a grand theory (like those of Wölfflin or Greenberg) but stuck to mid range generalities as heuristics intended for the analysis of particular movements and artists.  He was, in fact, suspicious of grand theory; for example, he was “quite properly suspicious of theories of style that contradicted or elided historical data (Wölfflin had notoriously omitted Mannerism from his discussion because it did not fit his cyclical scheme).”[1]

Thus, Schapiro’s improvised approach was characterized by “1) a concentration on the way social structures impinge on the formal structure of works of art, 2) a focus on concrete, historical objects, 3) a refusal to admit any transhistorical forces into the analysis, 4) an adequate conception of historical processes, and 5) a scientific rigor which can only result from an empirical study of historical conditions and factors.”[2]   In a 1953 essay Schapiro states that an adequate theory of style will require “a unified theory of the processes of social life in which the practical means of life as well as emotional behavior are comprised.”[3]  This means that art history will require the support of many other fields, like economics and psychology, in order to properly address its own proper concern with style.

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[1]. Allan Wallach, “Meyer Schapiro’s Essay on Style: Falling Into the Void” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 55, #1 Winter, 1997  

[2]. Michael Ann Holly, “Schapiro Style” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 55, #1 Winter, 1997 p. 7

[3]. Meyer Schapiro Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society Selected Papers, Vol. IV George Brazillier, 1994 p. 100  

Art history is Necessarily Multi-disciplinary

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space (1928)

Bronze, 137.2 x 21.6 x 16.5 cm.

Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C.

When addressing any particular work or artist, the art historian must integrate all of the relevant disciplines on an ad hoc basis; that is, with different bodies of work, certain distinct problems arise for which solutions will have to be improvised.  But those problems will vary for artworks of different periods and cultures. Some statues, like those of the classical Greeks and Egyptians, demand an extensive knowledge of ancient mythology. Michelangelo’s David (1501-4) belongs within the historical context of Florence’s Republican defiance of domination by much larger political entities, despite its small size; parvum sed potens. But that context is rooted in the story of David and Goliath from the Jewish Bible. Rodin’s statues call up problems of originality and authorship, since there are editions of casts made after his death but authorized by the government,[1] but also raise feminist issues because of the crucial assistance of Camille Claudel and Rodin's mistreatment of his pupil, assistant, and lover. The seminal modern sculpture Bird in Space (1925) was the subject of “the most famous trial concerning the definition of a work of art [which] took place in 1927, in New York: Brancusi vs. United States.”[2] In that trial the question of the identity of a work of art was raised in a pointed way, involving both legal and philosophical questions that would have been impossible one hundred years earlier. But Brancusi’s sculpture also invokes the Magical Bird of old Romanian mythology. In each of these cases, the relevance of a variety of disciplines intertwine variously. So art history, because of its essentially historicist and holistic nature, is multi-disciplinary. And the principles for selecting and integrating those disciplines will vary according to the works addressed.

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[1]. See Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation Brian Wallis, ed. (Boston:  David R. Godine, 1984) pp. 13-27 and “The Originality of the Avant Garde” (1986) 

[2]. Margit Rowell Brancusi vs. United States: The Historic Trial 1928 (Paris: Adam Biro, 1999) p. 7

"...art is often the key, and in many nations the only key, to understanding their philosophy and religion."

Fresco wall painting in a cubiculum (bedroom)
Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, ca. 40–30 B.C.Late Republican Roman

We can see how Hegel’s historicism and holism are linked; if art changes over history, as it surely does, those changes are embedded in, and indicative or expressive of, the wider context of change in society as a whole.  It’s because the way a society sees itself changes over time that art has a history; “In works of art the nations have deposited their richest inner intuitions and ideas, and art is often the key, and in many nations the only key, to understanding their philosophy and religion” (Hegel, 1998:7).  It’s not enough to know the history of art itself; Classical mythology, holy scriptures, psychology of perception, the chemistry of color, economics and many, many other considerations impose themselves on the art historian in a variety of ways.

Defense of Raphael’s Transfiguration: Composition and Meaning

Raphael, Transfiguration (1516-1520)

Oil on panel, 405 x 278 cm.

The Vatican

Hegel offered an interesting defense of Raphael’s Transfiguration, which had been faulted for the stark division between the upper and lower halves of the canvas.  Hegel points out that this compositional feature effectively communicates the radical split between the human and the divine that nevertheless allows the healing power of Christ to cure the epileptic boy (Aesthetics, Vol. II, Part III, §3).  We see here a closeness to the art of painting, an understanding of composition, an ability to function as an art historian, that’s uncommon to many aestheticians today and which by itself lends credence to the more theoretical aspects of his philosophy of art. But also, that attention to detail is underscored by Hegel’s wider philosophical appreciation for the actual, the singular, the unique, the concrete which both balances the massiveness of his world-historical vision and insures a strong empirical grounding in the details of the painted scene and surface.  For it’s the nature of art history to range freely between minute attention to the singular details of artworks and the collective, parasensual entities like periods and styles by which it makes sense of those details.

Hegel as Art Historian

Joos Van Cleve, The Death of the Virgin (1515)

Oil on wood panel, 65 x 125.5 cm

Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation

Despite the central importance of holism, historicism, and generally, World-Spirit in art, Hegel’s lectures never lose sight of the sensual and singular nature of artworks and the need to closely encounter them, for Hegel had a deep sense of the potentials and limitations of different arts and of the different personalities of individual artists.  “In a work of art we begin with what is immediately presented to us and only then ask what its meaning or content is” (Hegel, 1998:19).  Hegel’s knowledge of art, and especially painting, was both extensive and detailed. For example, he once correctly saw that a painting in the Boisserée was by the same painter as one owned by Ferdinand Wallraf on the basis of similar treatment of the figures.  The dying Virgin Mary “was attributed…to Jan van Scorel, but is actually by Joos van Cleve…Hegel was thus correct in his judgment that both paintings were by the same artist, but he attributed them to the wrong man.”[1]  Gombrich comments that this is “the basic skill of what we call art history: the ability to assign a date, place, and, if possible, a name on the evidence of style.”[2]

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[1]. Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel and the Art of Painting” in Hegel and s William Maker, ed. SUNY, 2000 p. 77, fn. #7 (Äesthetic 1820/21, 261; Werke, 15:53; A 2:826; Hegel: The Letters, 594; Kunst als Kulturgut, 286)

[2]. E. H. Gombrich Art History and the Social Sciences: The Romanes Lecture, 1973 Oxford, 1975 p. 7

Florentine Art and Society

Paolo Uccello, The Counterattack of Michelotto da Cotignola at the Battle of San Romano (c. 1455)

Wood panel, 182 x 317 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi

Another example of the holistic and historicist nature of art history: the sociology and economics of patronage, and its effects on the fundamental aesthetic categories of Renaissance art, is essential to explaining changes in the style and subject-matter of painting from Uccello to Caravaggio:

“It is in the problematic negotiations of working according to ideas of facilitá (facility) and grazia in a social context that required both urbanitá and civilitá-and quite specifically in the complex political world of Florence-that the new style arising around 1515 found its role to play.  When an actual court was established in 1523 with the advent of Alessandro de’ Medici as duke under aegis of the emperor, this art would supply a body of formal and critical principles governing the new practices of literature and painting soon to be aggressively sponsored by Cosimo I de’ Medici.”[1]

This kind of detailed historical and social context is why the art historian always awaits further developments in the various fields of the human sciences, always knowing that they will assist in the future interpretation of painting and sculpture, but never knowing exactly how; for artworks are creative improvisations of the cultures that produce them and the interpretive practices that unfold them.  The historically singular, specific nature of any milieu will yield artworks that are also historically, but also personally, singular.

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[1]. Elizabeth Cropper, “Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia: A Double Portrait” in Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004 p. 8

Artworks: Repositories of the Self-image of a People

Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii c. 50 B.C.E. Fresco

Hegel’s dictum about the deeply social nature of artworks calls attention to one way the human sciences may contribute to art history.   For example, take a case in which a sociologist of nineteenth-century Paris helps us read the work of Degas and Manet, or an anthropologist the carvings of Dogon or Yoruba artists.  The human sciences tend to interpret artworks as repositories of the self-image of a people or stratum of society, a self-depiction of a unique and dynamic form of life.  For example, the frescos at the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, as well as being beautiful artworks of the most moving and mysterious quality, is one of the most valuable sources of information about the inner workings of the mystery religions in Rome.[1]

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[1]. See Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire (Great Britain: Blackwell, 1997) pp. 307, 309-11

Each Work of Art Expresses a whole History, Society, and Culture.

The Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles (c.350 BC)

Hegel's approach to art is, ironically, much more evidence-laden than most efforts in analytic philosophical aesthetics today, which claim to take their cue from scientific method and empiricism.  It’s simply the case that to study an artwork is to study a communication from a person or group of persons who embody a particular form of life, defined by a whole history, society, and culture.  The artwork drives the historian simultaneously into the tiniest details of the marble or canvas and into the vast history of an entire period. This is part of why art history is both historicist and holistic. The close empirical moment of art historical investigation is governed by the larger systems of which the work is an expression.