Piet Mondrian, “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” 1943
Oil on canvas, 1.27 m x 1.27 m
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Since art historical
knowledge is just one of many registers of interpretation and
self-interpretation available to artists, we have to have knowledge of more the
more general historical and social world expressed by the aesthetic life of the
period. The artists’ exposure to
scientific theories of color, their interest in biological discoveries, their
responses to developments in social life, their beliefs about synesthesia or
mysticism, may all affect the form and content of the canvas. The holistic nature of art history means that
any art historical study is forced to invoke all of the human sciences,
including but not limited to the social sciences like psychology, anthropology,
sociology and so forth. For example,
Margolis describes Schapiro’s work as “centered on art history, but…more of a
psychological discipline” and suggests that Schapiro practices a kind of
“empirical phenomenology.”[1] This last
remark indicates an Hegelian tendency to view one’s own interpretations as
grounded in the practices and traditions that make up one’s milieu and the
consequent problems of historicism, relativism and interpretation are opened up
by that view. Each period appears to
have its own aesthetic criteria and modes of artistic self-understanding, so
the study of artworks demands singular combinations of disciplines in different
cases.
[1]. Joseph Margolis, “Meyer Schapiro and the Science of Art History” in British Journal of Aesthetics (Summer, 1981)
Vol. 21, No. 3 p. 242
No comments:
Post a Comment