Modern Painting and Art History

Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)

Oil on canvas, 153 cm × 118 cm

Des Moines Art Center, Iowa

Hegel famously said that we are all children of our times. In the context of art history, the implication is that we have to study the cultural conditions under which artworks are made in order to fully understand and appreciate them: “For, on account of its nature, at once material and individual, the work of art issues essentially from particular conditions of the most varied sort, amongst them especially the time and place of its origin, then the specific individuality of the artist, and above all the technical development of his art.  Attention to all these aspects is indispensable for a distinct and thorough insight into, and acquaintance with, a work of art, and indeed for the enjoyment of it…” (Hegel, Aesthetics 1998, a34-5).

Hegel’s idea here is that art history starts with the dissolution of art, the condition under which our experience of artworks is mediated by theory.  Once our experience of art is unhitched from its role in our sittlich (or “social-worldly”) religious practices, it becomes mediated by art historical knowledge.  That’s true not only for the viewer but also for the painter, who in the modern period must act from some emic view of art history, some native sense of what the available moves are.  Therefore our knowledge of any painting, but especially a modern one, must include the details of how the painter viewed art history and his or her location in it.  So a full explanation of how a modern painting physically looks may often involve reference to the painter’s self-perception and self-interpretation.  Painters deliberately engage in dialogue with other painters and artists, and it’s within this dialogue that any one personal effort makes sense.  The work of an artist is now not to represent or transcend nature, nor merely to express their own times, but to find for themselves a location in art history. 

Art History, Classification, Singularity

Diego Velázquez, Las Meniñas 1656

Oil on canvas, 10' 5" x 9' 1" (3.2 m x 2.76 m)

Museo Nacional Del Prado

In art history, holism may involve the idea that the artist and his or her art are parts of the societies in which they live, which is a special case of the organic idea that changes in a part may spread systematically throughout a whole, just as changes in a whole can affect the parts.  This is not an explanation, but a model for interpreting facts and seeing the connections among many discreet historical phenomena.  There’s no point to criticizing holistic explanations, because there are none; there are only holistic models for coordinating facts and descriptions into classificatory or causal explanations.  When we address the changes in style that characterize the history of Western art, we have to use the larger social context that was the background of an artist’s life.  For example, as a court painter, Velázquez recorded the lives of Spanish royalty in the 1600’s, whereas Manet explored the anomic cultural conditions of Paris in the late 1800’s.  From that perspective, the artist’s work becomes a personal expression of his or her culture.  “Explanations of the perceptible features of a painting are at once both causal and interpretive, rendered chiefly case by singular case, but always with attention to prevailing personal and cultural practices.” (Joseph Margolis, “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” in  British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. XIV, No. 3 (1974) p. 247)

Art History and Holism Again: Meyer Schapiro

Alice Neel, Meyer Schapiro 1983 

Oil on Canvas, 106.7 x 81.3 cm

The Jewish Museum, New York

Schapiro, then, acknowledges the relative and shifting nature of art’s history, and also the contingencies under which the discipline of art history operates: “The interpretation of the social contexts of art is conditioned by the aesthetic theory and social context of the interpreter.”[1]  So we are perhaps justified in calling Schapiro a “methodological holist” because he holds that the “explanation of individual actions…may often have to be given partly in societal terms…that link individual behavior with types of social conditions.”[2]  Again, we see here that methodological holism does not posit any agencies besides those embodied in actual persons, and so does not reduce the autonomy or minimize the uniqueness of the artist.  After all, we see that Schapiro rejects a strictly causal account of changes in style, which would reduce something as complex as the development of abstraction to an instance under covering laws, as well as ontologically supervenient wholes like race or spirit (Schapiro, 1937:189).  Schapiro, like Hegel and Margolis, seeks instead to locate the choices of individual persons within the matrix of the larger social and historical context, neither reducing nor reifying the greater whole.  The whole is an emergent property.

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[1] Meyer Schapiro, “Art and Social Change” in 1999:113

[2]. W. H. Dray, “Holism and Individualism in History and Social Science” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol. IV Paul Edwards, ed. Macmillain, 1967 p. 54