SUMMERS, David, Form, Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and The Problem of Art

"Form," Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description
Author(s): David Summers

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1989), pp. 372-406
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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"Form,"
Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics,
and the Problem of Art Historical
Description
David Summers
It has seemed to me for some time that a discussion should be
begun
concerning
the
descriptive language
of the
history
of art. The transfor-
mation of works into words is of crucial
importance
and in a certain
sense
everything
follows from the
way it-is
done. Some of the
language
about works of art is
unproblematical
because
agreement
is
fairly easily
reached on certain issues. We
may easily agree
that a
painting
is a
mural,
or a book illumination
(even
if these
things
have to be
defined),
or that
a
person
or
group
of
persons
is
depicted. Iconography provides fairly
definite
procedures by
means of which conventional
subject
matter
may
be restored and
deciphered.
But
things
become more difficult when we
approach
what is called "form." At this
point
the
history
and criticism
of art
clearly
seem to veer off into their own realm and also into more
difficult
problems
of
description
and
interpretation.
These difficult
prob-
lems cannot
simply
be avoided since it is on the "formal" level that we
usually
talk about both
expression
and
style
in art. The
technique
of
formal
analysis,
which
grew up
with the
discipline
of art
history,
seemed
to
provide
a
sturdy bridge
between what we see and what we
say,
a secure
metalanguage applicable
to
any
art whatever. Formal
analysis
is, however,
open
to
very
serious
criticisms,
as we shall see. It is also
intimately
related
to
nineteenth-century
idealist
metaphysics
and thus to kinds of historical
inference and
generalization running
the
gamut
from
quaint
to
dangerous.
It is no wonder that formal
analysis, although
it survives as a
professional
technique,
is used with less and less
certainty
about its
systematic impli-
cations,
and with a
greater
and
greater
sense of its distance from central
Critical
Inquiry
15
(Winter 1989)
? 1989
by
The
University
of
Chicago.
0093-1896/89/1502-0008$01.00.
All
rights
reserved.
372
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 373
art historical
problems.
At the same
time,
formal
analysis
remains the
way
in which "the work of art itself" is talked
about,
and if it is
simply
abandoned,
then the
history
of art is
placed
in the
paradoxical position
of
being
unable to
speak
in
significant ways
about the
objects
of its
peculiar
concern,
which is not even to mention the
problems
of
fashioning
histories of these
objects.
An art historian's art historian disavows the
speculations
of the
"methodologians"
and
prides
himself or herself on
going
about what needs to be done in the
way
demanded
by
the matter
at hand. It is not
possible
to avoid
methodological questions,
however,
when
they begin
to touch the most basic
procedural
and
pedagogical
matters.
Moreover,
it is
precisely
because of the
specific
character of its
own theoretical
past
that the
history
of art now finds itself in a situation
in which the discussion of works of art "themselves" is a
problem.
It is
that
problem
I will
begin
to address in this
essay.
I wish
briefly
to examine
the notions "form" and "formal
analysis,"
to consider the relation of
these notions to more
general
issues of idealism and
materialism,
and to
raise the
question
of how kinds of
description might
be devised that
sidestep
old alternatives but still make it
possible
to talk about art as
distinct from other human endeavors in a
historically significant way.
I
will
not,
of
course,
in a
single study
succeed in
completely overhauling
ideas that so
thoroughly permeate
the
conceptual
and institutional structure
of the
history
of art. Still I believe all these
problems
and
questions
must
begin
to be addressed before it will be
possible
to consider
higher problems
of art historical
interpretation
or the
further,
perhaps
more
elegant prob-
lems of the
ways
in which art historical
interpretation
relates to inter-
pretation
in fields not
immediately
concerned with
saying
what we see.
I shall
begin
with what Michael Podro calls
"interpretative
vision."'
This is the art theoretical version of the
broadly
Kantian notion that
consciousness constitutes its world. It is an idea
absolutely
central to the
modern intellectual
discipline
of the
history
of art.
According
to this
idea,
which is now so familiar as to seem truistic
(or axiomatic)
in
many
fields
in the
humanities,
the artist is not
just
a recorder of
appearances
but a
shaper
and
interpreter
of them. Heinrich
W61fflin
begins
his
Principles
of
Art
History
with the
story
of four
painters
who set out to
paint exactly
the same
thing just
as it was and came
up
with four
quite
different
1. Michael
Podro,
The Critical
Historians
of
Art
(New Haven, Conn., 1982),
p.
61.
David Summers is William R.
Kenan,
Jr.
Professor of the
History
of Art at the
University
of
Virginia.
The author of
Michelangelo
and the
Language of
Art
(1981)
and The
Judgment of
Sense: Renaissance Naturalism
and the Rise
of
Aesthetics
(1987),
he is
currently writing
a book to be titled
The
Defect of
Distance: Toward a Universal
History of
Art.
374 David Summers Art Historical
Description
pictures.2
Two conclusions,
one
negative,
the other
positive, may
be
drawn from this anecdote. The
negative
conclusion is that
objective
vision
is
impossible;
but the
positive
one-drawn at
length by
Wolfflin himself
in the book that follows-is that the nonmimetic
component
of
art,
evident in the
very disparity among
the
paintings, pointed
toward another
dimension of
reality altogether.
"Form,"
as this nonmimetic
component
came to be
called,
rather than
being
incidental or
superfluous,
is
essential;
it is the
expression
of
spirit,
and,
as
such,
it is also an
expression
of the
essential freedom of the human
spirit, opposed
to
nature,
which is a
realm of resistance and
necessity. By
the
analysis
of form in
art,
the
argument
runs,
it is
possible
to
investigate
the structures of the human
spirit
itself. It is
possible
not
just
to see the individual character of a
painter
even in the
drawing
of a mere
nostril,
as W61fflin
wrote,
it is also
possible
to see and characterize "the
style of
the
school,
the
country,
the race"
(P,
p.
6).
Shared nonmimetic features of works of art
may
be
explained
in terms of individual or collective
"spirit,"
which accounts not
only
for
individual differences but for differences
(and similarities)
among
the
"styles"
of
periods,
nations,
and races. In this idealist
matrix,
"form" thus
took on a
vastly important
modern
connotation;
it became the essence
of
art,
supplanting
imitation once and for all. At the same time form
also became essential in a new
way
to the
artist/viewer,
whose
spirit
it
reflected or
expressed.
It should be evident that Wolfflin's familiar device
of
comparing
treatments of the same theme from different
periods
inserted
these
assumptions
into the technical basis of art historical
teaching
and
writing.
The notion of
interpretative
vision
might
have been carried a
step
further to include the critic or
historian,
the
analogy being
that
just
as
the
painter interprets
what is seen and reveals his or her own
spirit
in
the forms in which what is seen is
expressed,
so the historian has a
point
of view in the
expression
of which
psychology, ideology,
or
general
culture
and historical
predicament
are to be discerned. But the
complexities
of
such a hermeneutic
position
seem to have been almost
entirely ignored
or avoided
by
art
historians,
who
confidently
and even
"scientifically"
set
about the task of
defining
the new
territory
of form. The scientific cast
of this
enterprise
was
very
much reinforced
by
traditional
philosophical
meanings
of form and
by
the ancient taxonomic connotations of the
idea,
which blended
easily
with the
diachrony
of
taxonomy,
that
is,
with the
idea of evolution. Taken
altogether,
form came to
provide
access to the
"development
of
spirit,"
and the notion of form
provided
the basis for
historical narrative of a sublime
grandeur.
An
important
and
deeply
transformative
consequence
of the
great
generality
of the idea of form was the
unprecedented
breadth and reach
2. Heinrich
W61fflin,
Principles of
Art
History:
The Problem
of
the
Development of Style
in
Later
Art,
trans. M. D.
Hottinger
(New York, n.d.),
p.
1;
hereafter abbreviated
P.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 375
it
gave
to the idea of art. Form came to be
regarded
as the universal
common denominator of human
things,
"fine" and "minor" arts
alike,
and the idea of form thus made it
possible
for the
history
of art to become
a kind of universal cultural
history.
It was
largely
under such
auspices
that the
history
of art came into existence and
currency
as an intellectual
discipline.
The new
understanding
of the traditional idea of form-
opposed
now not so much to matter as to nature-also
gave
new
meaning
and
vastly greater potency
to the idea of
style (which
had
always
referred
to what was artificial rather than natural about imitative
art),
and
style
became basic to the
history
of art in a
way
it could not have been before.
In
sum,
the
newly grasped
dimension of "form" in art
provided
the basis
for
"formalist"
art
history,
a term now used somewhat
imprecisely
to
cover all art
history
written as if art had a distinct and
independent
history,
as I shall discuss below in more detail. Consistent with this
general
enterprise,
the idea of form also
fundamentally
altered the
description
of works of art and
finally
stands behind current
pedagogical practices
of formal
analysis, practices
that continue even
though
their intellectual
ancestry may
have been
forgotten.
As Podro
points
out,
even so
discerning
a critic as Goethe still described Leonardo's Last
Supper mostly
in terms
of narrative and verisimilitude. Late nineteenth- and
early
twentieth-
century
authors, however,
discovered "a
way
of
showing
non-literal order
in which the
depicted figures
of the
composition
could be reconstituted."3
A modern author
may
write about the Last
Supper
in terms of the character
of its
symmetry, speak
of the
figure
of Christ as a diamond or
triangle,
or of
horizontality
and
axiality,
and be understood to be
writing
not
only
about what is
legitimately
in the work of art but also about what is most
important
about it.
According
to the ideas we are
considering,
"form" is
the indicator of differences in the
interpretation
of
subject
matter,
or
nature,
and it follows that form is thus not
only
the means
by
which
artists
(and
styles) interpret
the historical and natural worlds. It also
follows that form must be the
agent through
which this
interpretation
is
expressed. Interpretative
vision thus
implies
a
theory
of
expression.
It also
implies
a
theory
of abstraction since form as such
may
be isolated.
Because form is also
expressive
and is in a sense
primary significance,
subject
matter in such a view tends to be
superfluous.
The rise of abstraction
goes
hand in hand with the
problem
of the relation of "form" and "content"
(the
latter of which came to be associated at once with the natural and
the
conventional)
that has
plagued
modern criticism. How do the
meanings
of form
square
with manifest
subject
matter? This
problem
entails familiar
alternatives: that form is more
important
than
content,
or vice
versa,
or
that there is a
unity
of form and
content,
or should be one.
3.
Podro,
The Critical Historians
of
Art,
p.
62. See also Leo
Steinberg,
"Other
Criteria,"
Other Criteria:
Confrontations
with
Twentieth-Century
Art
(New York, 1972),
pp.
64-66.
Steinberg
provides
a brief but
insightful history
of formalist criticism
beginning
with Baudelaire.
Description
It will be useful to consider
briefly
how the ideas
surrounding
"form"
work in
practice.
Such ideas
rapidly developed
to a
high stage
of so-
phistication, subtlety,
and
complexity,
but
they
did
not,
I
believe,
stray
from the foundations I have tried to indicate for them. Let us consider
the
example
of Wilhelm
Worringer,
who,
like Alois
Riegl,
found it
pref-
erable to discuss ornament rather than
images
because ornament is a
purer expression
of form and therefore
provides
a less encumbered view
into form's
spiritual meaning. Concerning
interlace ornament of the first
millennium in Northern
Europe, Worringer
wrote that it is
"impossible
to mistake the restless life contained in this
tangle
of
lines";
it is "the
decisive formula for the whole medieval North." The "need for
empathy
of this inharmonious
people" requires
the
"uncanny pathos
which attaches
to the animation of the
inorganic";
the "inner
disharmony
and
unclarity
of these
peoples
... could have borne no clearer
fruit."4
Here
forms-
mostly
lines and
edges
and their relations-are
compared
to a natural
outgrowth,
a
fruit,
and are
interpreted
in such a
way
as to
permit
the
characterization of all
peoples among
whom artifacts with such forms
were made and used. The
range
of formal
style
becomes coextensive
with the
range
of the
deep principles
of the worldview of
races, nations,
and
epochs.
It is not
necessary
to follow the ideas of form and
expression
to
quite
the
hypertrophied consequences Worringer
did,
although many
authors have done so and
many
more have done so less
systematically.
The
important thing
for
my purposes
is the
pattern
of inference from
form to historical statement and conclusion.
In
general,
"form" has a
simple meaning, something
like
"shape,"
and then a
higher meaning, something
like "essence." In older
philosophical
language
it made
perfect
sense to talk about
"intelligible
form,"
which
was invisible. The idea
underlying
this old
usage
seems to be that "form"
as
shape
is the means
by
which
things
are
distinguished
and
thereby
begin
to be understood
(they
are named on the basis of this
prior
dis-
crimination,
for
example),
and that because form
provides
access to the
intelligible,
it is in fact
fundamentally
related to that about
things
which
is
intelligible.
Form in this
second,
higher
sense is
by
definition more or
less abstract and
general,
and,
because it is abstract and
general,
it is
associated with the
spiritual
(or
mental or
intellectual).
This ambivalent
notion of
form,
combining
a visual
metaphor
with a definition of the
intelligible
as
nonvisual,
provided justification
for
long
traditions of both
allegory
and idealization.
"Form,"
in the
post-Kantian
sense in which we
use
it,
is still
"higher"
than
sensation;
it has also become more
specifically
"visual,"
rooted not in sensation but in the determinable structures
by
means of which "sense" is made of visual
sensation,
the
properly
aesthetic
4. Wilhelm
Worringer,
Abstraction and
Empathy:
A Contribution to the
Psychology of Style,
trans. Michael Bullock
(Cleveland
and New
York, 1967),
p.
77.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 377
structures of
perception standing
between sensation and
thought.
This
higher meaning
of "visual" was
given great authority
and
currency by
Gestalt
psychology.
On such a view
perception
(or
the
higher
"vision"
that unifies
simple optical
sensation)
is a
principle awaiting
sensation,
becoming
actual
along
with sensation. It is
very important,
however,
that
this new visual "form" retained its association with the
higher
and with
the
general.
The
general
cannot be
specific,
and that is
why
when we do
the formal
analysis
of,
say,
a
Raphael
Madonna,
the
painted
surface
becomes a
plane,
and in
general
we abstract from three dimensions to
two,
from centers of
gravity
to
verticals,
from horizons to
horizontals,
simplifying
as we
go;
as we do that we
presumably approach
what is
essentially
"visual" about the
painting.
But the
particularity
of the formal
relationships
in the work thus abstracted never comes close to the
simple
particularity
of the work
itself,
many
of whose obvious features have
been left aside or
suppressed
in
analysis. Space
has been eliminated or
reduced to relations of
overlapping; light
is eliminated
together
with all
modeling, except
insofar as it can be seen to make
shapes.
In
short,
we
ignore
at the outset
many
features and
qualities possessed by
the
painting
and shared with other works of
art;
more
simply
still,
we
ignore
what
we
may just
see before
us,
a
faintly smiling
woman seated on the
ground,
looking
over two
children,
palpable
but distant in a
space
of considered
clarity,
in even and
peaceful light, painted
in earth and
primary
colors.
And this is not even to mention the stretched canvas on which the
image
is
painted,
the
pigments
used,
the
preparation
and
sequence
of
execution,
the facture and
finish,
all of which have more or less
complex
and
significant
histories,
histories
leading up
to the
making
of
Raphael's painting
and
leading away
from
it,
to the survival and career of use of the
painting.
These are all
things
that we
see,
even if
they
are not "visual" in a
higher
"formal" sense.
The
opposition
between form and content
strongly implies
that
whatever can be said in a
fairly straightforward
sense not to be
subject
matter must
belong
in the realm of form
and,
as
form,
must be left to
the free
prerogative
of the individual artist
(or
to definition
by
the
larger
stylistic "spirits"
with which that freedom is
concentric,
form
expressing
not
just
the
spirit
of the artist but the
"spirit
of the
age").
Given the
opposition
of form and content
implicit
in the
general
idea of
form,
we
might
call a
strong
formalist
position
one
governed by
the
assumption
that form in some sense is itself a kind of
content,
and a weak formalist
position
one in which form is
simply
the vehicle of content. As
might
be
expected,
art historians tend to be
strong
formalists to the
degree
that
they
are not
simply
concerned with the
chronology
of events
relating
to
works of art. Political historians
(and
historians who are not art historians
in
general)
tend to be weak formalists insofar as
they
concern themselves
with
art,
since
they regard
it as illustration of events
irrespective
of the
significance
or
historicity
of the
ways
in which these events are
represented.
Description
Against
the
backdrop
of the
opposition
of form and
content,
the ideal
of the
unity
of form and content also
provides
familiar alternatives.
Iconographers might argue
that
meaning
has
priority
in works of art
because form serves
meaning,
and there is a
corresponding position
that
meaning
must be
given
form. Sometimes efforts are made to combine
these
possibilities,
as when
generalizations
about the formal
styles
of
periods
or
places
are worked into other kinds of
history,
or,
more com-
monly,
when the works of an artist are worked into his or her
biography.
At this
point
I would like to introduce some more
general questions
of
interpretation
that will be seen to be
closely
related to the idea that
art is
essentially
formal in nature. Rosalind Krauss has characterized what
might
be called usual
interpretation
as based on the "notion that there
is a
work, x,
behind which there stands a
group
of
meanings,
a, b,
or
c,
which the hermeneutic task of the critic
unpacks,
reveals,
by breaking
through, peeling
back the literal surface of the
work."5
In such a view
the
understanding
of how
images
mean
underlying
usual
interpretation
is
very
much like the traditional notion of
allegory.
In fact the
metaphorical
language
of "surfaces" and "rinds" is the same
language
of
integumentum
and involucrum used to
explain allegory
in the late Middle
Ages,
when
allegory provided
a
major justification
for the blandishments of
poetry
(and
painting). Poetry,
as the formula
went,
is truth
(or
at least
higher
meaning)
set out in a fair and
fitting garment
of fiction. The lies of the
poet
lead us
by
an
appeal
to sense to
meaning higher
than the
appeal
itself. Botticelli's Primavera
really
sets forth the realm of the Natural
Venus,6
and if that is not what it sets
forth,
it shows
something
like
that,
some idea of a similar level of
abstractness,
unity,
and
simplicity
in com-
parison
to the
complexity
of the surfaces and
appearances
of the
painting.
The demonstration of such
significance
at the heart of works of art is
never
easy,
and the
example
chosen,
Botticelli's
Primavera,
has
provoked
a series of
scholarly interpretations.
These
interpretations
do not differ
in the relation assumed to hold between the
painting
and its own
meaning,
however. This
explanation
of
higher, unitary meaning
is
very deeply
lodged
in our
expectations
(and
explanations)
of
images,
and has been
for a
long
time. A Renaissance
portrait
was
thought
to show not
just
someone's
appearance
but the soul
through
the
appearance,
and a similar
opposition
of
higher
and lower was also
argued
to hold for
emblems,
in
which the
image
was the
"body,"
the text the
"soul."7
Allegory,
like
naturalism
itself,
may
be said to
depend
on a kind of
transparency
of
5. Rosalind E.
Krauss,
"Poststructuralism and the
Paraliterary,"
The
Originality of
the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths (Cambridge,
Mass., 1985), p.
293;
my emphasis.
6. See Erwin
Panofsky,
Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art
(New
York and
Evanston, Ill., 1969),
pp.
188-200.
7. E. H.
Gombrich,
"Icones
Symbolicae: Philosophies
of
Symbolism
and their
Bearing
on
Art,"
Symbolic Images:
Studies in the Art
of
the
Renaissance,
II
(London, 1972), pp.
123-
91.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 379
means in the
simple
sense
that,
as the
metaphorical language
of usual
interpretation implies,
it is
possible
to "see
through"
the surfaces of the
work to its
meaning.
To be
sure,
there were
(and are)
different
degrees
of
allegory, differing precisely
in
point
of
difficulty.
Some
allegories
were
(and are)
meant to be
easily penetrable,
others to demand a "sweet labor"
before
understanding
is
attained,
still others to be
impenetrable
and
therefore exclusive of most of their
potential
audiences,
either because
such concealment was
(or is)
thought appropriate
to sacred
subject
matter
or because the
image
was made for a select
group.8
But the
pattern
is
always
the same: the
opposition
between lower
appearance
and
higher
meaning.
With modernism all this
transparency,
both of
meaning
and
of
pictorial
means,
began
to
change,
and at the same time
allegory
came
to be
thought impossible,
or comic. The "usual"
allegorical expectation
lives
on, however,
animating
both "usual" reactions to works of art and
their
interpretation,
or
expectation
of
interpretability.
An
unsophisticated
viewer
might express hostility
to a work that seems to block such un-
derstanding. Perhaps
more
frequently,
however,
this same viewer is in-
timidated
by
his or her own
puzzlement,
and the
allegorical expectation
is
tacitly exploited
to
mystify
and
dignify
work, artist,
and
apparent
cognoscenti,
at the same time that it stratifies and classifies them relative
to the
viewer,
all because it is assumed
by
the viewer that there must be
some
higher meaning
he or she is for some reason
inadequate
to
judge.
These remarks about "usual"
interpretation suggest
that there are al-
ternative but
congruent assumptions
about the
way
in which either form
or content must be the essence of a work of
art,
that its
"meaning"
must
either be "visual" in a
higher
sense or
conceptual (usually specifically
textual).
These
assumptions
are in
my
view
large
and stubborn
impediments
to
many
kinds of art historical
understanding
and in
general
terms fun-
damentally
misdirect art historical
interpretation.
Having
brushed in the
genealogy
of the notion of form and considered
some of its
implications
for art historical
analysis,
I would now like to
continue
my argument by considering
two
major
attacks on art historical
essentialism launched
by
E. H.
Gombrich,
whose ideas will
already
have
been
glimpsed
at several
points
in the
preceding
discussion. In an
essay
on
Raphael's
Madonna della Sedia first delivered as a lecture in
1955,
Gombrich criticized the idea of formal
analysis
and
suggested
alternatives
to it.9 He had become
aware,
he
writes,
of the
frequency
with which he
used the
phrase "organic unity"
in reference to works of art he
admired,
and he had come to feel that Gestalt
psychology
had
perhaps
succeeded
too well in its
attempt
to teach us to understand
perception
in terms of
8. David
Summers,
"Difficultd," Michelangelo
and the
Language of
Art
(Princeton, N.J.,
1981),
pp.
177-85.
9. See
Gombrich,
"Raphael's
Madonna della
Sedia,"
Norm and Form: Studies in the Art
of
the
Renaissance,
I
(London, 1966),
pp.
64-80;
hereafter abbreviated "M."
Description
whole
configurations.
The criterion of such
unity
seems too inclusive
and therefore too
incapable
of
making
distinctions. Gombrich's
target
in
these
arguments
is not
really
Gestalt
psychology
but the
long
tradition
of Aristotelian
metaphysics,
from which the idea of
organic unity
descends.
Aristotle's notion of
order,
or
organic unity,
is linked to his idea of
entelechy,
thus to final cause. There is a
higher principle,
an essence
that unifies both the structure and the
unfolding
of the structure of
natural
things,
and so
by analogy
a work of art has
(or
should
have)
an
essence
unifying
its
parts.
What is the essence
by
which the work of art is unified and which
corresponds
to the
entelechy
of a natural
thing?
It
is,
Gombrich seems
to
mean,
the
putative
formal
unity
of the work itself. Of course
every
"composition"
of "forms" is unlike
every
other,
but however different
they may
be,
they
must still all be
unities;
they
must all fall under that
one
category. Actually,
Gombrich
argues,
the
possession
of formal
unity
does not
distinguish
a
great
work of art from lesser or even trivial ones.
Most
important,
if the Madonna della Sedia is
essentially
the unified com-
position
it
is,
how are we to relate its formal essence to the historical
context from which it arose?
(This
question
assumes,
of
course,
that we
wish to do
that.)
Or how are we even to connect this
aspect
of the work
with
everything
that is obvious about it?
It is form in art that
expresses
what is nontrivial about
representation,
and form entails the
question
of
expression,
as we have seen. Gombrich
addresses this
question
in terms of what he calls the
"physiognomic
fallacy,"
which he has defined in a series of
essays begun nearly fifty
years ago.1'
The
adjective "physiognomic"
refers to the
ancient,
now
pseudoscience
of
physiognomy, according
to which it was
thought
that
the nature of the souls of individuals could be inferred
directly
from the
characteristics of their
appearance,
that those who resemble lions are
leonine and those who resemble
pigs, porcine.
The
"physiognomic fallacy"
is the mistaken
assumption
that in an
analogous way
we
may
infer
directly
some
spiritual reality-the
inwardness of artists or the
"spirits"
of the
ages
or
places
in which works of art were made-from the forms of the
works themselves.
The
physiognomic fallacy,
Gombrich
argues,
is rooted in a more
general
and neutral
"physiognomic perception."
This is the first
projective
individual encounter with
things
and as such
occupies
a central
place
in
Gombrich's
adaptation
of Karl
Popper's "searchlight theory
of
percep-
tion."" At this
projective
level we
begin
to discriminate
things,
and these
10. See
Gombrich,
"On
Physiognomic Perception,"
Meditations on a
Hobby
Horse and
Other
Essays
on the
Theory of
Art
(London
and New
York, 1963),
pp.
45-55.
11.
Gombrich,
Art and
Illusion:
A
Study
in the
Psychology of
Pictorial
Representation,
The
A.
W.
Mellon Lectures in the Fine
Arts, 1956,
Bollingen
Series XXXV
(Princeton,
N.J., 1969),
p.
28.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 381
discriminations lead to the
relatively
more
"objective"
levels of
systematic
inquiry
and
scrutiny.
At the
physiognomic
level, colors,
say, may
have
an emotional reach
embracing
a
great variety
of
sensory
data. The
sky,
distant
mountains,
certain
music,
and the emotional state of
depression
might
all be united
by
the color
blue,
for
example. Physiognomic perception
might
be said to become the
pathetic fallacy
before it becomes the
phy-
siognomic
one when we
suppose
that
projective meanings belong
to the
works over which
they
are
projected.
"Blue skies
smiling
on me"
may
be
blue,
but it is
wrong
to
suppose
that
they
are
really smiling,
or
happy,
and that the macrocosm
really
mirrors our microcosmic mood. If we
further
suppose
that the
form
of works of art
expresses
these
projected
meanings,
then we have crossed over from the
pathetic
to the
physiognomic
fallacy.
The
gist
of these
arguments
is that the
meanings
we
simply
see
in works of
art,
although
not without their own
value,
are not
historical,
and therefore not
explanatory.
In order to
try
to
gain
such historical
understanding
we must
actually
do
history.
Gombrich's
arguments
are thus
part
of a
systematic
attack on
expres-
sionism. He
again
and
again rejects
the idea that the
feelings
of the artist
and the
feelings
of the viewer are
symmetrical
on either side of the forms
the artist uses. If such
symmetry
held for all
art,
then it would follow
that we are
simply
able to see what is essential about
any
art. Such an
idea in fact
undergirds
the modern
notion-upon
which the
history
of
art stakes much of its claim as an intellectual
discipline,
and not
incidentally,
much of its claim to a
place
in
university
curricula-that art is a "universal
language" capable
of
making
other cultures available to us as
nothing
else can. We could never learn the
languages
and literature
necessary
to
understand what we seem to
apprehend
about the French of the twelfth
century
or about the Aztecs
by learning
to see the forms of their art.
Gombrich is well aware of the attraction and
apparent
naturalness of
such
thinking.
He is also aware that his own
arguments
threaten the
foundations of the modern institutions of the
study
of
art,
and further
threaten the laudable idea of art as an
important agent
of human com-
munity.
But he nevertheless
rejects
the
arguments supporting
this view
because he feels that
expressionism implies
essentialism. A line does not
just
"mean"-or
possess,
or
express-happiness
or
sadness, rather,
he
wishes to
insist,
it means whatever it means in relation to other lines and
in
general
to other
forms,
and to the
reality
of the conditions within
which these forms are seen.
Gombrich's idea of the
physiognomic fallacy
collides head-on with
another of the
great
critical "fallacies" of our
time,
the so-called intentional
fallacy,
one of the cornerstones of the New Criticism. The intentional
fallacy
seems to
me
to be
little
more than a
corollary
of
the kind
of
expressionism
Gombrich wishes to call into
question,
and
perhaps only
became formulatable when the idea of
expressive
form had made it
thinkable that the work of art
(which
in the classic
essay
of W. K. Wimsatt,
Description
Jr.,
and M. C.
Beardsley
is,
of
course,
a work of
literature) is,
or should
be,
an
adequate expression
of its own
meaning,
or
better,
that its
meaning
is
primarily
what its form
expresses.12
The
argument presupposes
both
complete
confidence in the
expressiveness
of the form of the work and
a reader sensitive
(or
passive)
to that
expressiveness.
This neat
symmetry
is
merely complicated
when it is
supposed
that either the work or the
reader/viewer or both are determined
by deeper
structures,
psychological
or
broadly ideological,
and such an
assumption,
rather than
substantially
changing
the
situation,
again
throws the
interpreter
back on the construal
of "forms." It is still assumed that historical reconstruction of intention
is irrelevant or
merely ancillary
to
interpretation.
For
Gombrich,
there are even more sinister
implications
of the
phy-
siognomic fallacy involving
an even more
dangerous
kind of essentialism.
The forms of art
may
be
imagined
not
just
to
express
the inwardness of
individual
artists, but,
as we have
seen,
the
spirits
of whole
nations, races,
and
epochs.
Thus
baldly phrased,
such inferences seem
improbable
and
daring,
but in fact
they
are
everywhere
to be found in art historical
writing
and
teaching.
Gombrich traces this habit of
thought
back to the
beginnings
of modern art
history,
to
Johann
Winckelmann,
who saw in the
impassivity
of classical
sculpture
not
just
"'noble
simplicity
and
quiet grandeur,'
"
but the "'noble
simplicity
and
quiet grandeur' of
the Greek
soul."13
Over
the centuries Winckelmann's classical ideal was
eclipsed
and ceased to
be
normative,
but the
principle
of
interpretation
has remained the
same,
and has been
incorporated
into the
great
relativistic scheme of universal
art
history.
Thus at the same time that the idea of form served the
positive
purpose
of
universalizing
and therefore
relativizing
the
study
of
art,
this
univeralization was based on kinds of inference and on at least
implicit
assumptions
of the existence of historical entities and forces that are
very
problematic.
Gombrich
closely
identifies the
with the idea
of
Weltanschauung,
with "the Romantic belief that
style expresses
the
'worldview' of a civilization." This belief
encouraged
a
conception
of the
history
of art as the
history
of some
metaphorical "seeing,"
a
history,
that
is,
of "formal"
vision.14
The
and its
corollary
understanding
of form are thus not
only
Romantic,
they
are once
again
obviously
idealist. The
history
of artistic
style
in such a view is
ancillary
to the
history
of
culture,
and looks first of all to the
history
of
spirit
for
the
primary
motive forces behind historical
change.
The
implications
of
Gombrich's
argument
are
that,
in order to avoid
unproductive
critical
12.
Summers,
"Intentions in the
History
of
Art,"
New
Literary History
17
(Winter 1986):
306-7.
13.
Gombrich,
"On
Physiognomic Perception," p.
51;
my emphasis.
14.
Gombrich,
"Andre
Malraux
and the Crisis of
Expressionism,"
Meditations on a
Hobby
Horse,
p.
82.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 383
circularity
and essentialism on the one
hand,
and to avoid
being party
to the fabrication of some of the most murderous
myths
of modern times
on the
other,
we must avoid such historical inferences
altogether.
And
if Gombrich's
critique
of form and
expression
is taken
seriously,
then
some
very
basic art critical and art historical habits must be called into
question.
If Gombrich is
right
and we cannot see
through
form
(or
through
all
form)
to some kind of
meaning,
then new
ways
must be
devised for
talking
about works of art and for
making
historical inferences
from them.
Gombrich's
critique
of form and
expression
is
closely
linked to his
critique
of historicism.
Again following Popper,
Gombrich has
argued
repeatedly
that the sort of
"spirit
of
peoples" thinking
that has
justified
racism and
genocide
in our time is a brand of
essentialism,
or
pseu-
doessentialism
(if
such a term is
possible),
that seems to make the ends
of
history
visible,
thus to
justify
the
liquidation
of
groups
seen not to
have a
place
in the scheme of
history.
The
programmatic ideological
skepticism animating
Gombrich's
arguments unequivocally rejects totalizing
historical schemes of all kinds and dismisses the
Hegelian
tradition of
historical
interpretation,
idealist and materialist alike.
The
arguments
to this
point might
be summarized to
say
that art
historical
interpretation
is often conducted as if directed toward some
essence,
formal or thematic or both. What has been called
strong
formalism
pursues
a visual
essence,
weak formalism
pursues
a thematic
essence,
and the
"unity
of form and content"
really
means that essential form
agrees
with
animating subject
matter. As we have also
seen,
the modern
notion of form has
always implied development.
This is to
say
that the
history
of art in
being
formalist is also historicist. In this
essay
I shall
consider three
meanings
of the term historicism. The
first,
just briefly
encountered in Gombrich's
arguments against
it,
arguments
he derives
from
Popper,
is that laws of
history
are formulatable and that in
general
the outcome of
history
is
predictable.
The
second,
which I shall discuss
in the
example
of Walter
Benjamin,
is the idea that
history
is a universal
matrix
prior
to
events,
which are
simply placed
in order within that
matrix
by
the historian. The third is the idea that a
thing
is
meaningful
insofar as it is a
part
of a
development.
The
history
of art is
heavily
involved in all of these
arguments.
We need
only
consider the
teaching
of
history
of art
surveys,
in which
periods, styles,
and,
at least
implicitly,
whole cultures "turn into"
something
else,
and in which this
"turning
into" is shown to be a more or less
necessary development.
This
assumption
of
continuity
contains the further
assumption
that there is one
thing
that
changes
(art)
that is
always essentially
the same
(formal);
it also makes
series of events or
sequences
of
period styles
into
"developments"
and
makes art historians look for the
ways
in which one series of
works,
regarded
either
morphologically
or
physiognomically, changes
into another
one. Such radical
diachronicity,
of
course, has the
great advantage
of
Description
providing
a kind of transcendental thread
through
the
complexity
of
history, permitting
us to
say
what was
"really" baroque
as
opposed
to
what
simply happened
in the seventeenth
century.
The same
principles
are fundamental to art criticism and the art market. "Modernism" has
always
meant the
"really"
modern,
not
just
what has
happened
in the
late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries,
and modernist criticism consists
not so much of
simple judgments
about
contemporary
works as in
jus-
tifications of
judgments
in historicist
terms,
or even in the
shaping
of
judgments
to historicist
arguments
(which
last makes
problematical judg-
ments of
"quality" unnecessary).
A formalist critic
explicitly
or
implicitly
asserts not
only
that "formal" art is
better,
but also that
only
such art is
historically
authentic and fashions a narrative to show that this is so. In
the case of criticism as
opposed
to
history,
historicism
provides
a means
by
which a thin line
may
be selected from the vast
production
of artists
of all kinds and defended as in some sense
necessary,
thus at least
providing
an absolute criterion for the selection of works of
art,
a criterion at least
incidentally necessary
to the
optimal functioning
of the art market. Post-
modernism,
which as a
general
intellectual
tendency
arises from currents
deeply
at odds with the historicist habits of
thought
of the last two
centuries,
still takes much of its
authority
as the
unwieldy style
term it is from its
supposed developmental
relation to modernism.
Postmodernism,
that is
to
say,
takes much of its
authority
and
vitality
from the
very
historicist
scheme it would
reject
in its own terms.
As an essentialist and historicist
idea,
form
provides
a link between
this
part
of the
argument
and the
next,
in which I would like to examine
formalism in relation to idealism and materialism as
they
bear on the
history
of art. Art historians are now sometimes classified as idealist in
professional judgments
and communications of one sort or
another,
and
I would like to consider the
question
of
just
what this
categorization
means and how it affects what seems to me to be one of the
simplest
and most basic
problems
of art historical
interpretation,
the
explanation
of
why
works of art look the
way they
look.
At a recent conference a
paper
on the
early
modern
theory
of ab-
straction was introduced with an
apology
for its
being
a "formalist"
subject.
The
enterprise
in which the writer of the
paper
was
engaged
could be
justified,
however,
the introducer
explained,
because the formal motif
under examination had
"ideological" import. Everyone
in the room
understood that the
apology
was
necessary
and
desirable,
or at least
understood
why
it was
made,
and in fact it
points
to
many
of the inter-
pretative
issues I have tried to raise in the first
part
of this
paper.
In the
history
of art the term "formalist" has come to refer to a
number of
paths
of
interpretation proceeding
on the
assumption
that
art is in
important respects historically autonomous, and that therefore
a
meaningful history
can be written about art without reference to other
historical factors. On such a view the
very
term
"history
of art" would
seem to be formalist and therefore idealist in that it
implicitly
states the
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 385
assumption
that art itself has or is some kind of
history.
The
opposite
of formalism is
"contextualism,"
a set of methods based on the idea that
art is in a
very
real sense made
by
historical situations. One
setting
out
to do formalist
history
will be concerned with works of art "in
themselves";
one
setting
out to do contextualist art
history
will be concerned with the
circumstances in which art was made. If these
options
were to be carried
into
practice
as
they
stand,
it would mean that formalists would not be
interested in circumstances and contextualists would not be interested
in works of art themselves.
Very
few art historians
really occupy
either
of these
extremes,
which are
probably impracticable.
The
possibility
of
the
logical purity
of either extreme
clearly
exerts a
pull
over art historical
writing,
however,
and this
pull
is reinforced
by
the relation of these ideas
to other intellectual issues.
The term "context" is of course a broad
one,
and art
may
be
interpreted
in relation to a number of external factors. One of the most
powerful
contextualist methods has been Erwin
Panofsky's iconology.
The context
in
question
here is
predominantly
cultural and intellectual
historical,
however,
and for that reason such
investigations may
be said to
belong
to the idealist tradition of art
history. (Iconography,
the
technique pre-
liminary
to
iconological interpretation according
to
Panofsky, may
also
be used for the
purposes
of
political interpretation,
which
may point
to
a
very
different
general
definition of
context.)
Even
though
it is not
formalist,
such art
history
is consistent with the formalist and idealist
version of art
history
as the
history
of the
spirit.
This leads to what I
think is the real force of the
category
of "idealist art
history,"
which is
only
understandable if
"idealist"
means not materialist. "Materialist art
history" points
to another definition of
context,
not as cultural historical
but as
social,
political,
and economic historical. And to return to the
story
with which I
began,
it is now clear
why
it was
necessary
to
apologize
for
a "formalist"
paper topic,
to
justify
it
by indicating
its
ideological
dimension.
Although ideology
is also a
complex term-especially
in relation to the
question
of historical idealism or materialism-its use has at least the
rhetorical effect of
transforming
an
apparently
idealist
topic
into a ma-
terialist one.
In the next section I am
going
to examine materialist art
history,
argue
that it also is
ultimately unsatisfactory
as a kind of
essentialism,
and close
by offering
some alternatives outside the bounds of these nine-
teenth-century metaphysical categories.
I wish to
begin by examining
certain
arguments
from
Benjamin's
brief "Theses on the
Philosophy
of
History,"
which seem to me to
pro-
vide a
paradigmatic
and influential treatment of what
Benjamin
himself
calls "materialistic
historiography."'5
His
arguments
are set in terms
closely
related in one or another
aspect
to those we have been
considering.
15. See Walter
Benjamin,
"Theses on the
Philosophy
of
History,"
Illuminations,
ed.
Hannah
Arendt,
trans.
Harry
Zohn
(New York, 1969), pp.
253-64.
Description
Benjamin
also wrote about
"historicism,"
but used the term in a
special
sense,
as we have seen.
Benjamin
understood the word to refer to the
presumption
of a kind of Newtonian continuous time into which all
events can be
placed.
The method of historicist
history
is
"additive,"
which is to
say
that what we call "contributions" can be assumed all to
have a
place
in the same
great
but abstract narrative. The historicist
historian need not
worry
about more than
setting
events in their
proper
order,
and
so,
beyond
the
presumption
of
underlying
time,
what
Benjamin
calls "universal"
(that is, historicist)
history
"has no theoretical armature."16
Benjamin opposes
all of this to his "materialistic
historiography."
He
considers it
imperative
that historicist
history
be
rejected
because his-
toricism,
by making
the
present
seem to be the cumulative
progressive
consequence
of what has
gone
before,
can be seen to
justify
the status
quo.
Human
history, Benjamin
wants to
say,
is neither neutral nor is it
positive progress;
it is instead endless
carnage
and
suffering, Hegel's
slaughterbench.
The
very assumption
of the absolute
continuity
of
history
is
acquiescence
in
oppression
and murder.
"Materialistic
historiography,"
in
short,
sees the terrible confluence
of
history
with
momentary victory,
and
Benjamin
wants to eliminate the
political
and moral anesthesia of historicism once and for all
by denying
its
assumption
of
underlying continuity.
Events are not continuous with
one
another,
they
are
disjunctive;
and materialistic
historiography
embraces
this
disjunctiveness, making
it a
part
of the historian's own
procedure,
which cannot
simply
be
justified by
what needs to be done in some
subscientific sense. The
past may inevitably
be at
hand,
but if it is alive
it is made alive in the
present.
The
rejection
of
continuity
thus
implies
a
willfully
violent hermeneutics in which the
past
is
appropriated
to the
purposes
of the
present.
The
historian,
Benjamin says,
seizes the
past
with virile force in a
revolutionary
transformative act. I
linger
over these
ideas because such ideas are
widely
diffused;
but to
keep
to
Benjamin's
arguments, they
are based on an extreme
dichotomy corresponding
to
extreme circumstances.
Benjamin
was
trying
to cut
away
the intellectual
underpinnings
of fascism and to do so
rejected
the entire tradition of
what he called universal
history.
To do that he
juxtaposed
absolute con-
tinuity
and absolute
discontinuity.
Both
Benjamin
and Gombrich formulated their
arguments
under
the immediate
pressure
of the
cataclysmic
threat of the rise of Nazism
and both
rejected
what
they
called "historicism." However different their
understanding
of this word
may
have
been,
for both writers the
rejection
of historicism meant the
rejection
of
negative principles
of
continuity
that had to be
given up
not least because of their horrible moral and
political consequences.
The solutions to the
problem
of
discontinuity
16.
Ibid.,
p.
262.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 387
offered
by
the two writers
point
in two
quite
different
directions,
raising
an alternative that will
guide
much of the remainder of this
essay.
If
discontinuity
is
materialist,
then
continuity
is
(at
least
by implication)
idealist. If
Benjamin
does not in fact
say
this,
it is a tack taken
by
other
"materialist"
writers and has a
place among
the issues of this discussion.
Historicism as
Benjamin
understood it is essentialist if not idealist because
it
implies
that time itself is a
progressive principle
of
change.
As such it
misplaces
the locus of
significant
historical transformation from class
conflict to a
metaphysical
(or
physical) principle.
Since it is based on the
rejection
of
continuity, practitioners
of ma-
terialistic
historiography might
be
expected
to favor
synchronic
over
diachronic
explanation.
This
again gives
a more
specific
definition to
"context,"
which is not
only
economic and
political,
but is
structurally
rather than
causally
related to whatever is to be
interpreted.
Art is not
to be
explained primarily
in relation to
previous
art,
and this
position
may easily
be translated into terms of the earlier
argument.
"Form" was
said to be a
principle
of
continuity, expressive
of the culture to which it
belonged.
Form thus had a kind of built-in historical
cogency,
but at the
same time it made it difficult
(if
not
impossible)
to
explain anything
but
evolutionary change
and relations to broader
"spiritual"
factors. This
difficulty
was
acknowledged
in the conclusion of one of the
greatest
and
best-known formalist
essays
in the literature of the
history
of art. At the
end of his
Principles of
Art
History
W61fflin
acknowledged
that his formal
principles,
which had been used to describe a
development
from Ren-
aissance
through baroque
art,
could not
explain why
the same
development
should end and
begin again.
He
regarded
this recommencement
(that
is,
the return to a linear
style
in art around
1800)
as "unnatural" and
attributed it to
"profound changes
in the
spiritual
world,"
to "a revaluation
of
being
in all
spheres"
(P,
p.
233).
Meyer Schapiro
defined a similar
problem
in more
general
terms in his
essay
on
style,
this time
suggesting
social rather than
spiritual
historical context as a solution.
The
principles by
which are
explained
the broad similarities in
development
are of a different order from those
by
which the
singular
facts are
explained.
The normal motion and the motion
due to
supposedly perturbing
factors
belong
to different
worlds;
the first is inherent in the
morphology
of
styles,
the second has a
psychological
or social
origin.
It is as if mechanics had two different
sets of laws.17
This
paradoxical
state of affairs has
by
no means
ended;
rather the
pendulum
has
swung
now to
one,
now to the other side. The
availability
17.
Meyer Schapiro, "Style,"
in Aesthetics
Today,
ed. Morris
Philipson
(Cleveland
and
New
York, 1961),
p.
97.
388
David Summers Art Historical
Description
of the distinction between the
synchronic
and the diachronic
(which
Ferdinand de Saussure formulated in reaction to a
developmental
lin-
guistics)
has
only
served to harden the
opposition,
as we have
seen;
but
again,
this
opposition
is
perfectly
consistent with the
general
distinction
between materialist
discontinuity
and idealist
continuity.
To the
degree
that it can be called formalist at
all,
materialist art
history might
be
expected
to take a weak formalist
posture,
that
is,
to
assume that the means of
representation
are vehicles of content and are
historical
only
insofar as
they
are vehicles of
content,
which is determined
by
social and economic context. I now wish to discuss some of the
writings
of T.
J.
Clark,
which are of interest because
they depart
from this
pattern
and address the
question
of the nonidealist
description
of works of art.
Clark's
writings
are
explicitly
materialist
(and Marxist)
and at the same
time
they
are
very seriously
concerned with the
problem
of how the work
of art is to be
brought
as evidence into art historical
argument.
In the
introduction to his
Image of
the
People:
Gustave Courbet and the Second French
Republic,
1848-1851, Clark,
as
might
be
expected, rejects
the formalist
idea that art is an autonomous
tradition,
and further
rejects
the idea that
art "reflects"
ideologies,
or that
history
is the
"background"
of
art,
wishing
instead to write a
history
of "mediations." He also wishes to avoid "intuitive
analogies"
between form and
ideological
content. He would
reject,
for
example,
the
argument
that lack of
compositional
focus in the Burial at
Ornans
expresses
Courbet's
egalitarianism.
The
"strange
and
disturbing
construction" of this
painting,
Clark
says,
must rather be
explained
"in
contact and conflict with other kinds of historical
explanation."'18
Again
as
might
be
expected, many
of the
techniques
Clark uses for
getting
at a work have more to do with
reception
than with
any
kind of
inference from its characteristics. If we want to know what the work
meant
(as
opposed
to what it
"means")
then we
ought
to consider how
it was received. This is not a
simple thing
to do. Clark examines criticism
with
great
care,
but
only
certain
criticism,
that in which there are tears
and
ruptures
in normal discourse
(IP, p.
12).
Visible
through
these various
ruptures
is what Clark calls the
"public"
(as
opposed
to the actual audience
of
art),
which he
compares
to the Lacanian unconscious. The
public
is
the
imagined
audience of artistic
utterance,
verbal or
pictorial,
which
exerts
pressure
on the whole of discourse. It is visible not so much in
figure
as in
ground,
not so much in statement as in
pause,
intonation,
outburst,
non
sequitur,
in all the inflections of real
speech.
This
way
of
reading
sources is
integral
with the
project
of a
history
of real
transformations,
and the multiform interested
reactions, avoidances,
ambiguities,
and evasions
very
much enrich the discussion of "influences"
and "sources"
upon
which art historical
argument
has
long
centered. If
such "formalist" devices are
rejected outright, however,
the relation of
18. T.
J.
Clark,
Image of
the
People:
Gustave Courbet and the Second French
Republic,
1848-1851
(Greenwich, Conn., 1973), pp.
10-11;
hereafter abbreviated
IP.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 389
historical
complexity
of the kind Clark describes to the actual character-
ization of the
paintings
that make
up
the backbone of his
history
is more
subtle and
perhaps problematical. Despite
his disavowal of such
things,
Clark does seem to draw
analogies
between the formal/visual structure
of the work and its
meaning.
The Burial at Ornans is
simple
and
straight-
forward in
"structure";
there is "no
single
focus of
attention,
no climax
towards which the forms and faces turn." In
general,
the
image
is
impossible
to characterize as a sum of its
parts.
Clark seems to wish to
say
that these
characteristics are not
formally expressive
so much as
semiotic;
it is a
"lack of
open,
declared
significance
which offended most of all"
(IP,
p.
83).
The
painting
is,
so to
speak, objectively
evasive;
the
contradictory
responses
of the critics are therefore
appropriate,
and the reasons for
them are visible to us in the
painting.
In another
painting,
the Peasants
of Flagey,
"colour
is at war with
form,"
and in terms of
form,
Courbet
has "broken the whole surface into a mosaic of distinct and
clashing
shapes"
(IP,
p.
84).
This was
"perfectly
deliberate,"
and the
painting
is
disjunctive
and
powerfully
ununified.
Taken
altogether,
these
arguments
combine observations about the
intrinsic
expressiveness
of
disjunctive pictorial
forms with an insistence
on semiotic
disjunction
or ambivalence. It is not clear to me that these
two
things
are
really compatible,
a
question
to which I shall return
shortly.
For the
present,
however,
it is
enough
to observe that if the latter semiotic
alternative were
generalized
into a
program
for the
history
of art and
extended
beyond
a few
years
in Courbet's
career as a
painter
(that is,
beyond
the reach of
basically synchronic explanation),
then the
history
of art
might
be written not as a
history
of form but as a
complex
his-
tory
of codes. Such a method would
depend
on the historical reconstruction
of the
likely meaning
of
any
instance of the
many
codes discernible in
a work of
art,
and all
higher interpretation
would have to be based on
this reconstruction.
If,
for
example, composition
itself involved
hierarchy
(as many
have
argued
that it
does),
then it
might
be
argued
to have
ideological significance,
and it
might
further be
argued
that a
painter's
avoidance of such visual order within that tradition of
meaning
was
therefore also
ideologically significant.
Such a historical
argument
could
be made without recourse to intuitive inference from the
expressive
nature of form. But to
keep
to the matter at
hand,
if a
history
were to
be written in which formal and/or semiotic discontinuities evident in
works of art were connected to contradictions in
society,
it is not clear
what kind of visual continuities
might
be accounted for. As we have
seen,
idealist art
history
had the
advantage
of built-in formal/visual
continuity,
and the
outright rejection
of formalism is a
rejection
of that
advantage.
But if there are evident continuities in the
history
of art, why
should
they
be
ignored
as a
problem?
And how are
they
to be
explained?
Clark addresses this
question
in his more recent book, The
Painting
of
Modern
Life.
In the first
place,
he
accepts
the idea that there is a
continuity,
which he
might
not have done, and he further
accepts
the
Description
characterization of this
continuity given by
earlier formalist writers.
"Something
decisive
happened
in the
history
of art around Manet which
set
painting
and the other arts
upon
a new course."19 Clark also
regards
"flatness" as the salient
diagnostic
feature of
characteristically
modernist
painting. Perhaps
he
accepts
these formulations
precisely
in order to
invert
modernism,
to show that as a whole its
acknowledged deep
features
are
negative
rather than
positive.
I have noted before that Clark tends
to treat as
signs
what were
previously regarded
as
forms, and,
he
says,
flatness can
only
have been so
compelling
and fruitful in
avant-garde
painting
"because it was made to stand for
something:
some
particular
and substantial set of
qualities
which took their
place
in a
picture
of the
world." The
avant-garde
between 1860 and 1918
exploited
the
significant
values of
flatness,
"values which
necessarily
derived from elsewhere than
art"
(PML,
p.
13).
Flatness could
signify
several
things
(the
popular,
the
modern),
but it was also an assertion of the
presence
of art
itself;
more
deeply,
flatness was a barrier
against
dreams
(as
Clark varies one of
Mallarme's
themes),
that
is,
a barrier
against virtuality
or
transparency
erected
by
modernist
painters by
insistence on the
very
fact of
pictorial
representation.
At first flatness was its
early meanings,
but then it became
a
sign
of
modernity
itself;
rather than
having
a historical relation to its
origins,
it seemed to
express
the modern. It becomes
clear, however,
that
flatness is more than a
sign
for
modernity
flaunted
ever
more
insistently
and
aggressively by avant-garde painters through
the
1970s;
it is
according
to Clark also an indication of
something
essential about
modernity
itself.
At this level of
generality,
a level of
generality
felt to be
necessary
in
order to account for the
presumed unity
of
modernism,
the distinction
between
expressive
form and
sign collapses
and the
argument
swerves
toward the old habits of inference of idealist art
history.
There
is,
Clark
writes in a detailed
analysis
of Pissarro's
splendid
Coin de
village
of
1877,
a
necessary
distance between
painting
and
representing.
Rather than
allowing
"normal habits of
representation"
to
rule,
and thus to
paint
the
already
known,
Pissarro searched in
painting
for
equivalents
that were
not
representations, always running
the risk of dissolution into sheer
matter.
Although
there are "Realist intentions" evident in
impressionist
painting,
and
although
it still has to do with
light,
these
things
cannot
explain
the "elaborate indirectness" of its
technique,
the fundamental
dissociation of
painting
and
representation.
"And did not all this
ambiguity
have to do at bottom with the character of modern life?" Clark asks
(PML,
pp. 20, 21).
Later
on,
Clark returns to these themes in reference
to the
paintings
of Manet. His
paintings
of Parisian life show
"places
...
for
display
but also for
equivocation,"
where
gestures
are
unconvincing,
objects
and actions are hard to make out. In this
ambiguity,
"the
city
can
19. Clark,
The
Painting of
Modern
Life:
Paris in the Art
of
Manet and His Followers
(New
York, 1984),
p.
10;
hereafter abbreviated PML.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 391
be seen most
sharply";
it
"inflects
the new
painting's
account
of seeing
in
general:
the visible comes to be the
illegible,
and the new
city
is thus the
perfect place
for the
painter
who trusts
appearances"
(PML,
p.
48;
my
emphasis). Impressionism
(or
the new
painting-for
all its
landscapes)
is thus an urban
style
and a
style
that at its formal/semiotic base states
"the
essential
myth
of modern life." The
city
is
"ambiguity,
it is a mixture
of classes and
classifications,
it is anomie and
improvisation,
it is the
reign
of
generalized
illusion"
(PML,
p.
49).
The semiotic
ambiguity
of modern
painting
is like life in the modern
city,
where
"spectacle"
is the
principle
of social cohesion of consumer
capitalism.
The
history
recounted in the
book is a kind of real
allegory
of the modern
period,
and it must be
presumed
that the
unity
and
continuity
of modernism now rests in the
deep
social historical continuities of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Haussmann's Paris is the
prototype
for later
Babylons
(New
York),
monuments to
apparent
social
unity
in the
consumption
of man-
ufactured
goods,
with class difference as a
principle
of
city planning,
where
something
like
theatricality
is the
norm,
the hallmark of
modernity.
In an article
published
three
years
before The
Painting of
Modern
Life
Clark set forth
closely parallel arguments.
The differences between the
book and the earlier article are instructive.
Again
Clark wishes to dismiss
the formalist idea that art has its own values. He first attacks the
question
historically,
not
just
to
provide
an
example
but to make the
point
that
values are
always part
of a "real cultural
dialectic," that,
as visible in
criticism,
they
are
always subject
to the
presence
of
ruling-class ideology.20
The
patron-capitalist speculator Dupuy bought landscapes
from
Seurat,
whose
paintings
"tried to be
tight,
discreet,
and
uniform,
done with a
disabused
orderliness,
seemingly
scientific,
certainly analytic,"
and all of
these characteristics were
signs
of art's
"detachment,"
which is to
say
its
evidence of
independent
value.
Dupuy's liking
for these
paintings
"was
founded in a sense he had of some
play
between those
qualities occurring
in art and the same
occurring
in life"
("CG,"
p.
150).
That
is,
capital
in
the 1890s was
confident,
scrupulous,
scientific,
still
trusting rationality,
observation,
and control. If I understand the
argument,
the
charge
of
"crude" Marxism is avoided because
Dupuy
did not
simply buy paintings
of the stock
exchange,
as he
might
have,
but instead
may
be connected
to his
purchases by deeper
structural and more
nearly
unconscious relations
between his economic historical self and the aesthetic
(not
to
say
formal)
character of Seurat's
painting.
But Clark's central
argument again
centers around the notion of
flatness.
Again
he
argues
that flatness "in its
heyday"
was a
sign
of the
popular,
the
modern,
for
pure seeing,
for willful
nontransparency,
so
that the
literality
we have come to admire was realizable
only through
20. Clark,
"Clement
Greenberg's Theory
of
Art,"
Critical
Inquiry
9
(Sept.
1982): 151;
hereafter abbreviated "CG."
Description
the mediation of these
metaphors
("CG,"
p.
152).
Here
again,
the
argument
is
evidently
intended to make a
jump
between
particular
instances
(why
a stock
speculator
as a stock
speculator might
have been drawn to the
paintings
of
Seurat)
to a level of
generality
covered
by
the formalist idea
of modernism
(why
flatness should be a continuous issue in the dominant
tradition of modern art
making).
It is evident that to concede
autonomy
to the issue of medium is also to concede the
possibility
of a
history
of
art not reducible to
fairly
direct historical
parallels
of the kind made at
the microeconomic level of
patronage.
In order to avoid this
concession,
Clark identifies all evidence of medium-that is to
say,
"flatness,"
the
identifying
characteristic of modernist
painting-as "negation
and es-
trangement."
This
permits
him to
say relatively
few
things
about modern
art
(since
its essence in all its instances has
already
been
defined),
but it
allows him to
say things
about modern
society
he wishes to
say. By
denying
the
"ordinary consistency"
of medium in favor of all kinds of
gaps
and
silences,
modernist art becomes an
expression
of the
"negativity"
of modern life
("CG,"
pp. 152, 154).
Modernist art is "the black
square,
the
hardly
differentiated field of
sound,
the
infinitely flimsy
skein of
spectral
colour,
speech stuttering
and
petering
out into etceteras or ex-
cuses." It is an art "in which
ambiguity
becomes
infinite,
. . . a mere
mysticism
of
sight"
("CG,"
p.
154).
What concerns us here is once
again
the nature of inference from works of art to historical
generalization,
the
way
in which flatness/surface/medium becomes the relation of the
modernist artist to historical circumstances. It is once
again very
difficult
to
separate
a statement such as
"negation
is the
sign
inside art of this
wider
decomposition;
it is an
attempt
to
capture
the lack of consistent
and
repeatable meanings
in the culture-to
capture
the lack and make
it over into form"
("CG,"
p.
154)
from the old idealist statements based
on the
assumption
that we
may
see
through
formal essences to historical
essences. Such formulations to
my
mind run
exactly
counter to Clark's
admirable insistence on real historical connection and on the role of art
as a
possible
(and
perhaps
inevitable)
agent
of social
change.
Why
do such
contradictory patterns
of
explanation
occur? I believe
it is because both "idealism" and
"materialism"
as a
priori
bases of historical
investigation
demand the
suppression
of one or another kind of historical
evidence. Idealism and materialism are alternative
principles
of the
highest
generality.
This is not to
say
that
they
are
simply
different
ways
of
describing
the same
thing
since each involves the relative
deepness
or
priority
of
one or another
principle,
that
is,
the
generality
means that one kind of
thing
is
always
able to be
explained
in terms of the other
("mind
is the
highest
form of
matter"; "matter is
something
about
mind").
The whole
question
thus revolves around the
point
of which
principle
is
explanatory
relative to the other, and if we turn these distinctions to
history,
it means
that some kinds of evidence are
always explanatory
relative to others. I
observed above that a most basic task of the
history
of art is the
explanation
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 393
of
why
way they
look. This is not a trivial
statement;
it
provides
a criterion
according
to which both idealist and materialist
art
history
are of limited
explanatory
usefulness. Either alternative must
exclude kinds of evidence that bear on the
explanation
of the
appearance
and
change
in the
appearance
of series of works of art. Idealist art
historians tend to be unconcerned with the
patronage,
use,
and
reception
of
images,
which are
manifestly part
of their
legitimate history,
and
materialist art historians tend to avoid
any
reference to cultural
history
or the technical
history
of art traditions themselves because
they
are
assumed to bear
merely
a
"superstructural" relationship
to a
deeper,
"truer" historical
principle.
How is this dilemma to be resolved? We
might
consider the
following.
When Marx inverted
Hegel's
scheme of
history,
he retained one essential
thing, namely
its absolute
totality.
This
totality
followed
inevitably
from
the continued reduction of all historical
process
to a
single metaphysical
principle,
but it also retained a vision of
something
like
overarching
providential purpose
in
history
and in human action. In the terms of
this
argument,
however,
totality
is based on a most
general
kind of es-
sentialism,
which is
finally disenabling
for historical
interpretation.
At this
point
it is
necessary
to
distinguish carefully
between idealism
and essentialism. If idealism is essentialism then materialism is its
opposite;
but if both idealism and materialism are kinds of
essentialism,
as I have
argued they
are,
then both
may
have another
opposite,
which I shall call
functionalist.
A functionalist
history
of art is not a
history
of how art has
changed,
or even in a
simple
sense of what art
"means."
It is rather a
history
of what art has
done,
or to
put
two
goals together,
it is a
history
that
explains why
way they
look in terms of what
art has been meant to do. Such an
enterprise might
embrace and continue
earlier forms of
investigation
and
interpretation,
but it must also
give
them a new orientation and
encourage study
in new directions.
I am aware that the term "functional" is not
unproblematical,
and
I wish to use the term in a
way
related to what I understand Gombrich
to have meant
by
it in the
essay
on
Raphael's
Madonna della Sedia I
considered earlier
("M,"
p.
76).
Function must be
given
a
special
definition
in order to be a solution to the
problem
it
purports
to solve. The
slogan
"form follows
function,"
for
example, simply
makes a telos of function
and demands that
interpretation proceed
in the "usual"
allegorical
mode
discussed
above;
that
is,
we see
through
the forms to the function
(or
we should be able to do
that)
just
as there should be a
unity
of form and
content. This
difficulty
is
only displaced
if we define art in terms of its
social
function,
since this also
implies
that we have
adequately
understood
art when we have done that. Functionalist art
history
would not
proceed
from the work
"essentially"
understood in
any way
to context; rather it
would be based on the
assumption
that works of art are
radically
cultural
or historical and that
they
are therefore
always meaningful
in the cir-
Description
cumstances in which
they
are made and that
they
continue to be
meaningful
in new circumstances into which
they
survive. This definition and the
definition of the interrelations of these multiform
meanings
are the be-
ginning
(but
not the
end)
of art historical
understanding.
Before
returning
to Gombrich's
essay,
I wish
quickly
to establish a
few
general principles.
The
problem
with which I am concerned is art
historical
description,
and the first
part
of the
paper
was concerned with
an
argument
to the effect that "formal
analysis"
is a method of
description
that raises more
problems
than it
solves,
that
by
its
very
definition does
not allow us to ask or answer
many questions
we
might
like to ask or
answer,
and that therefore
puts
an undesirable
stop
to both
explanation
and
interpretation.
I am
going
to
begin by following
a lead offered
by
Michael Baxandall
and
develop
the idea that the
language
of art
history
is
basically
ostensive,21
that when we make art historical
arguments involving
works of art
(as
opposed, say,
to
documentary arguments
about
them)
we in effect indicate
their characteristics to our audience as we write or talk about
them,
just
as we
usually
lecture with some sort of a
pointer
in one hand.
Ostensivity
is a
principle
of basic aesthetic
significance.
When Alex-
ander
Baumgarten began
to stake out the field of modern
aesthetics,
he
distinguished
between what he called "intensive"
language,
which is
general
and
analytic,
and "extensive"
language,
which is
particularizing,
sensate,
and
"poetic."22 Beginning
from this
division,
language
is used
by
the
philosopher
and the
poet
in different
ways,
the latter
favoring
the met-
aphors
and
figures
shunned
by
the former. The
poet
on such a view
fashions an artificial
reality,
and does this
precisely by avoiding analytic,
logical language,
which would at once
catapult
the matter into the
nonpoetic
condition of the
general.
So in a
perhaps
more modest
way
does the art
historian,
with the difference that the
reality
to which the
language
refers
is not the
imagined
or constructed
particular
but the work of art itself.
Some
descriptions
of the work
may
be
straightforward-
size,
support,
medium, condition,
for
example-which
are
always specific
to the work
under discussion. But there are also more
complex
modes of
particularity
related to more
complex
kinds of
interpretation.
Baxandall,
taking
as his
text a
paragraph by
W61fflin,
has
argued
that,
in addition to
personal
reactions to works
(ugly, chilling),
we use a
variety
of
metaphorical language,
some of it formal
("a
thicket of
lines"),
and also
language
from which
agency
can be inferred. This last
category points
to what Baxandall calls
"inferential
criticism,"
which I shall discuss in detail later on. It is clear
21. See Michael
Baxandall,
"The
Language
of Art
History,"
New
Literary History
10
(Spring
1979): 453-65;
hereafter abbreviated "LAH."
22. Alexander Gottlieb
Baumgarten, Reflections
on
Poetry,
ed. Karl Aschenbrenner and
W.
B. Holtner
(Berkeley
and Los
Angeles, 1954),
p.
43. Extensive and intensive
language
correspond
to confused and distinct
ideas;
more extensive
language
is clearer and more
poetic.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 395
that the second
category, metaphorical
characterization,
is
inexhaustible,
even if we
may regard
some characterizations as better than others. This
is so both because the
particular
characteristics of works of art cannot
be
definitively
named and because
attempts
to do so are
always
made
by
individuals. This does not mean that
anything
can be said about a work
of
art,
or that
everything
said is
equivalent
to
everything
else. It
may
not
be
agreed
that the Mona Lisa has "trafficked for
strange
webs with Eastern
merchants,"
as Walter Pater wrote of
her,23
even if we
might
be able to
"see"
why
he
might say
a
thing
like
that,
but there is much less
disagreement
that her
figure
is modeled in virtual
light
and that in itself is of
great
historical interest. The most
important thing,
however,
is the
primacy
of the nonabstractive and ostensive
description
of the
work,
that we are
(or
are
not)
able to see what Pater is
talking
about. Art
history
in such
a view is an
ongoing
discussion about works of art
by people
who
continually
indicate and
try
to
explain
to others what
they
see either in works of art
or series of them and what is
significant
about what
they
see. Such
description,
seriation,
and
explanation
are
by
nature consensual and
open
to the works themselves.
What is
possible
in addition to accounts of the
physical
condition of
works of
art,
personal
reaction to
them,
or
metaphorical
characterization
of them? How do we
get
from works of art to
historically specific
context?
To answer that
question
let us now turn to Baxandall's third class of
descriptive
terms,
those that
imply agency.
"Words inferential as to cause
are the main vehicle of demonstrative
precision
in art criticism"
("LAH,"
p.
461).
He cites as an
example
the words of Adrian Stokes on Donatello:
"'The bottom of the
angels'
robes is
gouged
and undercut so as to
provide
a contrast to the
open planes of
Christ's nude torso. ... In brief the
composition
is not so much
founded upon
the
interrelationship
of
adjoining
surfaces,
as
upon
the broader
principles of
chiaroscuro' "
("LAH,"
p.
465
n.9;
my
em-
phasis).
What all the italicized terms have in common is the
implication
that Donatello's relief is the result of deliberate action. It is first of all to
be remembered that Stokes'
language
is
ostensive;
it indicates Donatello's
relief and could in
principle
be reformulated in the face of it. Discussion
is
always open
to the
particularity
of the work. Look
here,
we
might say,
the
angels'
robes are not
undercut,
or we are
looking
at this in the
wrong
light,
and therefore there is no
contrast,
or these surfaces are continuous
and therefore this
composition
is based on the
interrelationships
of surfaces.
These technical and critical
questions
would have to be sorted
out,
and
the conclusion of the
argument might
have to be
adjusted accordingly.
But if such
problems might
arise
(and
do arise all the
time),
what Baxandall
calls "inferential criticism"
proceeds by assuming
that a work of art is in
fundamental
respects
a
product
of deliberate
agency, by describing
the
23. Walter
Pater,
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and
Poetry,
ed. Kenneth Clark
(London
and
Glasgow, 1961),
p.
123.
Description
"work" (not
a neutral term in this
context)
in line with that
assumption,
then
asking why
such a
thing might
have been done. In the case of
Donatello,
we
might try
to
explain
the
general
conclusion of the
description,
that his relief is based on the
"principles
of
chiaroscuro,"
by trying
to find
evidence outside the work for such an
implicit
course of action. We would
quickly
ascertain that Donatello
really only
left his
sculpture
to
speak
for
itself,
but that focus on
light
and dark as the elements of
representation
is to be found in
early fifteenth-century
Florentine
writing
about
painting,
and that Donatello's
"pictorial
relief"
(as
every
textbook calls
it)
considerably
antedated both the discussion and the realization of similar
optical
effects
in
painting.
We
might,
in
short,
come to a
provisional
but defensible
understanding
of
why
Donatello's relief
might
have been
given
the
ap-
pearance
it has. And we
might go
a
step
further. If we
compare
Donatello's
sculpture
to that of
others,
then we
begin
to understand how novel his
relief
style
was,
and if we
pursue
the
question
of
why
and
how,
for what
purposes
and for whom it came to be desirable in the late Middle
Ages
and the Renaissance to make such
optical
art,
then we
may
become
involved in
very complex
and basic historical
questions
indeed. The ex-
planation
of its evident
optical
character
might prove
to be consistent
with the values
given
to it
by
its
novelty
and
by
its manifest
virtuosity,
values that would continue to inform the art of the modern era at the
beginning
of which Donatello stood.
Inferential criticism
points partly
in the direction of the sort of
prox-
imity
to the work of art familiar in
connoisseurship
and conservation.
The same characterization of
material, facture,
and
quality
of facture
used to establish the historical relations of the work
might
also be used
to attribute it to Donatello. The technical studies
necessary
to conservation
may
show the
making
of the work of art-its own internal
history-
with a kind of
stratigraphic clarity
not otherwise evident. Such matters
are of course not cut and
dried,
but still works of art are in
many
cases
as
distinguishable technically
as
they
are
"stylistically"
(which
is to
say
that certain
techniques
and
operations
underlie certain
appearances;
Riegl's opticality develops together
with the ever more
prevalent
use of
the
sculptor's
drill).
The
pigments
used in a
painting
are in themselves
linked to local
geology, botany,
or
patterns
of
commerce;
they
are
products
of
extracting, gathering, burning,
and
precipitation.
Materials themselves
are also of relative status and
meaning,
as are
jade, gold,
ultramarine,
and bronze.
Before
turning
to issues of material and
facture,
I would like to
examine further
my major
theme,
the notion of form. In Western
phi-
losophy
the distinction between "form" and "matter" has
always
been a
deeply
and
simply gendered
one,
and this durable and
pervasive opposition,
rooted in
equally
durable and
pervasive patriarchal
social institutions,
has had the
deepest
formative
consequences
for our notions of artistic
making,
of
imagination ("conception"),
and, in its
latter-day form, of
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 397
"creation."
According
to this
view,
form has
always
been an
active,
"male"
principle opposed
to
passive,
"female"
matter,
which was of course con-
sidered
necessary
(or
a
necessary
evil)
but was also considered lower than
form and
relatively
nonexistent.24
The
prime example
of the relation
between form and matter was
always
art,
usually sculpture.
Bronze
(matter)
may
be
poured
into
any shape,
and the
shape
(form)
is determined
by
the
imagination
of the craftsman. The bronze
may
become
any
form
whatever,
as the craftsman
wishes.25
In real historical terms it is hard to
imagine
what
might correspond
to such
passive
"matter,"
and
yet
the
history
of art as the
history
of
imagination
tends to be written as the
history
of
imagined
forms
corresponding
to this
infinitely
malleable stuff.
If we think of works of art in terms of their facture as I have
begun
to
suggest,
that
is,
if we think of them as indexes of all the
purposeful
processes
of their
making,
most of them were
clearly
collaborative
efforts.26
If we think of a statue of the
pharaoh simply
as an
expression
of "the
genius
of the individual
artist"
or of the
"Egyptian imagination,"
then
we
may
be little concerned with the stone "formed" in
making
it,
since
that form
(except perhaps
as a "block" in its own
right)
is incidental in
the terms of the
argument.
But the stone was
quarried,
that
is,
cut
squared
from the
earth,
and moved with
great expense
of labor before
being
made into an
image.
Both the
power
to command stone to be
quarried
and moved and the
power
to command skilled craftsmen to
fashion it in the
pharaoh's image
as
pharaoh
are visible in the
work,
not
in the sense that the forms of the work
express meanings
to
us,
but in
the sense that the work was
squared,
is of hard
stone,
is
closely
similar
to the
images
of other
pharaohs,
and those features can be indicated
and
explained. They
are
explained by
a
process
of
"contextualization,"
that
is,
by
the
explanation
of
why
those
people
then and there did what
they evidently
did do. This
example
is sufficient to
suggest
that
fairly
obvious characteristics of works of art
may-one might
rather
say
must-
lead to more or less
specific
social historical
understanding.
24.
Aristotle,
in
Physics
192a,
called matter a "mother" of what comes to
be,
"a
joint
cause,
with the form.... The truth is that what desires the form is
matter,
as the female
desires the male"
(The
Basic Works
of
Aristotle,
ed. Richard McKeon
[New York, 1941],
p.
235).
Gerda
Lerner,
The Creation
of Patriarchy
(New York, 1986),
pp.
205-11,
provides
a
discussion of the
pervasive
form-matter distinction in Aristotle's
philosophy.
25. Aristotle,
Metaphysics,
1032a- 1038b.
26. On such
"actor-orientation,"
see
"LAH,"
p.
463,
where Baxandall cites Clifford
Geertz,
"Thick
Description:
Toward an
Interpretive Theory
of
Culture,"
The
Interpretation
of
Cultures: Selected
Essays
(New York, 1973),
pp.
3-30. Baxandall's ideas seem to me to be
an
adaptation
of Geertz's
(and finally
Gilbert
Ryle's)
notion of "thick
description,"
in which
case other kinds of
description,
the
physical
state of the
work,
personal
and
metaphorical
language,
would
drop
into the
category
of the "thin." "The
thing
to ask ... is not what
...
ontological
status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on
the
other-they
are
things
of this world. The
thing
to ask is what their
import
is: what it
is,
ridicule or
challenge, irony
or
anger, snobbery
or
pride,
that,
in their occurrence and
through
their
agency,
is
getting
said"
(Geertz,
The
Interpretation of
Cultures,
p.
10).
Description
To take another
example,
the
language centering
around facture
points
in various
ways
to attitudes toward the work of art as work. In
the Italian Renaissance the rise of naturalism was
accompanied by
the
rise of a variant of the idea that mental and
imaginative
work is
higher
than manual
work,
and realization of such "creation"
(it
was in the Ren-
aissance that this
metaphor
first
appeared)
was
increasingly praised
in
terms of aristocratic
(as
opposed
to
simply
aesthetic)
virtues of
grazia,
maniera,
leggierezza
di mano. This
happened
at the same time that the
artist,
rather than
simply improving
in social
standing,
came to be
regarded
as a kind of aristocrat
by
election,
a status fundamental to the modern
myth
of the artist and to the modern notions of selfhood and fulfillment
for which this
myth
is the
paradigm.
It is
consequently again
of
great
historical
significance
that such ideals had
very
much to do with the
characteristic
appearance
of a
great many
works of art in the
Renaissance,
and
comparable
connections could no doubt be made for the art of other
periods
as well. We should not avoid the effort
necessary
to understand
these terms
simply
because we consider "ideas" to be "idealist."
Ideas,
after
all,
are
culturally
and
traditionally specific
and are bound to
equally
specific
modes of
action,
some of which are the
fashioning
of works of
art
in certain
ways.
Facture as I have defined it
provides
a
principle
of
continuity,
which
has been an
important
function of the idea of
style.
The
history
of art
as the
history
of
imagination
tends to
neglect
the
simple
fact that art is
always taught.
This fact is
neglected
because the
history
of
imagination
is concerned first of all with
novelty,
and schools are
by
definition
places
where the
simply
and
obviously
traditional is
passed
from one
generation
to another. If we want to
explain continuity
as well as
change
(both
of
which
history
seems to me to
demand),
then such a basic element as the
teaching
of art can
hardly
be overlooked. It is as
apprentice
or student
that
procedures
and values are learned that will
shape
the
artist,
even if
that
shaping
means an
attempt
to overthrow
everything
that is learned.
I
say "procedures
and values" because the
practical, pedagogical language
of art must be assumed to be a central
point
at which the values of a
society
at
large
come to bear on
making,
and
shape
it in
specific ways,
before an artist has ever had a
commission,
before a traditional theme
has ever been
interpreted.
It is
important
to insist on such
simple principles
of
stylistic continuity
because it is
easy
to find ourselves
positing
collective
spirits
to fill the same
gap.
As noted in
passing,
we do not
usually
think of
any history
as either
absolutely
continuous or
discontinuous,
and one of the
problems
to be
solved is the
devising
of a
way
of
talking
about it as both. This
may
be
done
by rejecting
the
idea of absolute
time
(as
Benjamin
wished to do),
without, however,
replacing
it
by
its absolute
opposite, discontinuity.
There is also the alternative of the more Kublerian notion of
"shapes
of
time," of time
fundamentally
defined
by
series of related artifacts or
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 399
distinguishable
features of
artifacts,
without the
presupposition
of an
underlying
and
homogenizing
duration.27
This seems to me to avoid the
problem
of historicism as both
Benjamin
and Gombrich have defined
and criticized it. In order to
develop
this
argument
it is
necessary
to
return
yet again
to
analyze
the Aristotelian notion of form. In
Aristotle,
as we have
seen,
form is at least that
by
which a kind of
thing
is
recognized.
Thus,
because the soul takes the form of
things
from the sensation of
them,
it is
possible
to
experience
other
things
as
things
of the same kind.
In
seeing apples
we
apprehend
the form
"apple"
and are able
subsequently
to fit this
template
to other
apples.
Form in this sense became
closely
identified with
essence, nature,
or definition. Even if we do not think of
classes in such absolute terms
(the
biological
notion of
species having
undergone significant change
since
Aristotle),
it is useful to draw a dis-
tinction between class and series. Series
clearly belong
to art rather than
nature
(which
Aristotle
habitually compared
or even
identified)
and are
always culturally specific
in the first instance
(that is,
comparable patterns
may
be found in different
cultures,
but
they
must be shown to be com-
parable
rather than
simply
assumed to be related to some common
higher
term).
Series are defined
by
the resemblance of their members and
by
the diachronic relations of members. This distinction between class and
series has
extremely important implications.
If we think of the class of
painting
then we are
inevitably pushed
in essentialist
directions,
toward
ideas of
painting
as such
according
to which
many
kinds of
things may
be said to be
painting: European
canvases,
Maya
murals,
Chinese scrolls.
If we think of the same
things
as
series, however,
we are
urged
in other
directions,
toward definition in terms of
culturally specific usages
and
language,
and the term
"painting"
becomes a
provisional
means of
grouping,
a
point
from which we can come to understand that the
"paint-
ing"
of other cultures is not
just painting
as we understand it.
The members of series are not formal in the sense
rejected
above,
although
there
may
be series of forms in a more usual sense of the word.
Series,
although by
definition
diachronic,
may
not be
developmental
or
progressive (although they
also
may
be),
and the idea is
sufficiently
broad
to cover all cultural
forms,
language,
and
genres
of literature as well as
tools, motifs,
and formats.
Although
some series
may
be
simple repli-
cations-of
plain
bowls,
for
example-most
are more or less
complex
combinations of other series.
This
brings
us back to Gombrich's
essay
on the Madonna della
Sedia,
in which he
began
to define a kind of
unity
more
complex
and more
stratified than formal
order,
which he calls
"polycentric
order"
("M,
p.
77).
This is an awkward
term,
but it introduces a
principle
that
may
be
developed
in
very
useful
ways. According
to this
idea,
the work of art is
27. See
George
Kubler,
The
Shape of
Time: Remarks on the
History of Things
(New Haven,
Conn., 1962).
Description
to be understood as
doing
a number of
things
at
once,
things
that
may
be in themselves
quite disparate.
Format, theme, medium,
light,
dark,
and
color,
certain notions of what art is or
ought
to
be,
understandings
of what institutional
purposes
art
serves,
of how it is made and sold-
all of these bear on the
making
of a work. All of them also have
complex
historical,
and not
justformal historical,
affiliations. We
may briefly
consider
the
example
of format. In
general,
it
may
be stated that all formats are
conventional in that
they
come into existence as a result of
historically
determinate social
practices
to which
they
are
shaped.28
This has
important
implications.
A new format
may
be a
significant
artistic invention in the
first
instance,
but it is
neverjust
that,
and formats are
always
subordinate
to broader
purposes.
Format thus in most cases comes to hand as a
problem demanding
resolution,
together
with an
open-ended
number
of other elements and
conditions,
some
readily apparent,
others not.
As it bears on the
practice
of art historical
interpretation,
the idea
of
polycentric
order
implies
both
analysis
and
synthesis.
It
implies analysis
because it
requires
that
any
work be resolved into some of the series to
which it is seen to
belong.
But after such seriation is
completed,
it is also
necessary
to reevaluate and characterize the work as a
performance
in
its
place
and
time,
as a
unique
transformation of its
precedent
elements
at the new level of
understanding
achieved
by analysis.
This
higher
level
of
synthesis,
a view of the work
through
a
glass
of historical
analysis,
is
inescapably
critical,
involving
a kind of
judgment
different from that
involved in
seriation,
its
justifications
and
explanation.
The
interpretation
of works of art thus
proceeds
from initial interest
through analysis
to a new
synthesis
that in its turn
implicitly
or
explicitly
relates works to some characterization of the broader
history
to which
they belong.
The
analytical phase-central
to
my
mind to the kind of
understanding
we call historical-entails a certain
understanding
of in-
tention. The reclamation of intention cannot be understood to be the
reclamation of a
putative subjective concept existing
in the
imagination
of
any
artist before
any
work of art was made
(an
essentialist idea
clearly
related to the usual
allegorical expectations
of
interpretation
discussed
above);
rather what is
being
reclaimed in a more or less
incomplete way
28. When we
say
that format is
conventional,
we mean that
many
formats are
possible
or that
many
exist in
many
times and
places.
This
may
conceal a formalist
assumption,
namely
that
"painting"
is
being
made on
supports
of different
shapes
and sizes in different
times and
places,
and that these
shapes
and sizes are "conventional" or
"arbitrary"
because
they
are
formally interchangeable
or are all variants of a
higher
absolute
format,
the
"picture plane."
"Arbitrariness" raises the
metaphor
of
language,
which in turn
brings
with
it the
principle
of the arbitrariness of the
signifier.
This
metaphor,
however,
will not
do,
and
actually points
to
important
differences between words and
images.
Formats are not
radically arbitrary;
rather
they
are
shaped
to
culturally specific
circumstances and
practices,
to which their formal
definition--their
characteristic
shape-is subject.
See
Summers,
"Conventions in the
History
of
Art,"
New
Literary History
13
(Autumn 1981):
103-25.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 401
by
historical means is an
understanding
of what
any
work
might
have
meant in the situation in which it was made. This can
only
be done
by
careful and
arguable
historical seriation and reconstruction. This recon-
struction-consequent
to
analysis
as discussed above-is
finally
based
on a functionalist
understanding
of works of art
according
to which
"meaning"
is
necessarily
a much more
open-ended
issue.29 One must
caricature the idea of intention in order to
suppose
that concern with it
closes off
possibilities
of
interpretation.
On the
contrary,
I would
argue
that the
outright rejection
of intention closes off innumerable
paths
of
historical reconstruction and therefore of art historical
interpretation,
and that concern with intention as I have defined it is
indispensable
to
the more or less
complex
contextualization we do all the time when we
actually
do art
history.
If we read
contemporaries writing
about some
Renaissance art as
"difficult,"
this
may
mean little to
us,
or
might easily
be skewed into some
category
of our own
understanding.
But when we
begin
to establish what it meant to write in this
way
in the
Renaissance,
we not
only
find ourselves
looking
at Renaissance art
differently,
we also
find ourselves
thinking
about how art worked in Renaissance
society
in
new
ways,
or about how art works in
society
in
general
in new
ways, ways
that
simply
would not have been thinkable without the effort to establish
what
might
have been "meant"
by
a word and the features of works of
art to which it referred.
It was
argued
earlier that the
opposition
of form and content has
the bad effect of
pushing everything
that
might
be
regarded
as the vehicle
of content in the direction of the nonconventional and therefore of the
historically
unreconstructable. I wish now to examine this idea more
carefully
in the
example
of
Panofsky's
remarks on
iconography.
In his
later
writing-and especially
in the
very
influential introductions to Studies
in
Iconology
and
Meaning
in the Visual
Arts,
which have had such an
impact
on American art
history--Panofsky
presents
a streamlined scheme
op-
posing
form and content.30 He ridicules the
strong
formalist idea that
works of art
may
be understood in
any very important way by just looking
at them and insists on the
indispensability
to art historical
interpretation
of the reconstruction of conventional
meaning
that has become established
as the art historical
technique
of
iconography.
The
weight Panofsky gives
to "content" and his
corresponding
dismissal of "form" has the effect of
severely circumscribing
form,
making
it the medium of content. The
more
closely
form is hemmed
in, however,
the more anomalous the
split
between form and content becomes.
Panofsky recognized
that we could
not
just
"see" even the
simplest subject
matter,
that the
"practical experience"
29. See
Summers,
"Intentions in the
History
of
Art,"
pp.
305-21.
30. See
Panofsky, Meaning
in the Visual Arts:
Papers
in and on Art
History
(Garden City,
N.Y., 1955),
and Studies in
Iconology:
Humanistic Themes in the Art
of
the Renaissance
(New
York and
Evanston, Ill., 1962).
Description
necessary
for
"pre-iconographical description"
(our
recognition
that an An-
nunciation,
before we know it is an
Annunciation,
is a
winged
man
alighting
in the room of a
reading
woman)
has to be
supplemented by
the
"controlling
principle"
of the
"history
of
style,"
which is
"insight
into the manner in
which,
under
varying
historical
conditions,
objects
and
events
were
expressed
byforms."3' Obviously
this
opens up
a whole
system
of
possibilities
covered
neither
by iconography
nor
by
the definition of form as the neutral
substratum of
recognizable images.
What it
suggests
is
that,
like
themes,
the means of
representation
(as
these elements of the
"history
of
style"
might
be
called)
are themselves members of
series;
they
are not
just
formal series but are
culturally specific configurations changing
at rates
different from those of
iconographic
motifs. This in turn
suggests
some
of
Panofsky's
own earlier
essays,
"The
History
of the
Theory
of Human
Proportions
as a Reflection of the
History
of
Styles,"
or
"Perspective
as
Symbolic
Form,"
where basic
organizing
devices,
rather than
being
con-
signed
to the realm of
noncontent,
are treated as historical
subjects
in
their own
right,
as
subjects
for historical
explanation."2
Let us consider the further
example
of
modeling. Modeling
is some-
thing
that falls into the
category
of
form,
that
is,
into the
category
of the
arbitrary,
the
configurations
of which are determined
by
the
style
and
judgment
of the artist. But as Gombrich has
pointed
out in several
places,
modeling
does not
appear
in the
history
of art with the kind of randomness
such an
explanation might
lead us to
expect.
The
overwhelming majority
of
examples
of
modeling
are in Western
art,
and in certain
periods
of
Western
art,
classical
antiquity
and the naturalistic and neoclassical
styles
begun
in the late Middle
Ages
and the
Renaissance.33
If we consider
what
modeling
is and
does,
then it becomes much more than one of the
ways
in which content
happens
to
get presented. Modeling may
be defined
as the
systematic
transition from
light
to dark or from one hue to another
(usually
the
former)
within a
shape.
When it is
modeled,
a
shape
becomes
an
apparent
three-dimensional
form,
and the area
surrounding
the
shape
becomes a virtual
space. Modeling
is thus an
integral part
of the Western
project
of the imitation of
appearances
of
physical things,
but it is a
part
the examination of which adds a rich dimension of
meaning
to the more
general
notion of mimesis.
Modeling
not
only puts
a form in
space,
it
places
it in
light
and in
implicit
relation to a viewer.
Moreover,
it
puts
the
language
of
painting
in relation to the
psychology
of
perception
and
to the science of
optics,
both of which
began
at about the same time and
in the same
place
as
modeling began
in
painting.
(Such
connections
only
31.
Panofsky, Meaning
in the
Visual Arts,
pp.
40-41,
and Studies in
Iconology, p.
15.
32. See
Panofsky,
"The
History
of the
Theory
of Human
Proportions
as a Reflection
of the
History
of
Styles," Meaning
in the
Visual Arts,
pp.
55-107,
and "Die
Perspektive
als
'Symbolische
Form,'
"
V6rtrage
der Bibliothek
Warburg
4
(1924-25):
258-330.
33. See the introduction to
Summers,
The
Judgment of
Sense: Renaissance
Naturalism
and the Rise
of
Aesthetics
(Cambridge,
1987),
pp.
1-31,
for a fuller treatment of this issue.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 403
seem farfetched if the cultural
specificity
of
modeling
itself is
ignored
or the
importance
of this
specificity underestimated.)
I do not wish to
pursue
these
arguments beyond
what is
necessary
to make the
point
that characteristics of works of art so obvious as
hardly
to seem
worthy
of
interpretation
are in fact of
primary
historical
impor-
tance,
and that much of their
apparent
historical
insignificance
owes to
their
absorption
and
homogenization
under the
category
of form. If
"formal structures" are seen as
culturally specific configurations,
then it
becomes
possible
to
plot changes
in
meaning
that
unquestionably
bear
on
questions
of
change
and
continuity among
series of art
objects
and
at the same time relate them to other contexts. When it
appeared again
in the late Middle
Ages, modeling,
which entailed the
opticality
of
painting,
involved from the start the notion of
painting
as made
up
of "natural
signs"
and therefore functioned as a kind of universal
language,
a
major
theme in the discussion of
painting
to the
present day.
Chiaroscuro is of
course a variant of
modeling,
and in that form
modeling
was involved
in a new
conception
of
pictorial organization
and in the whole
question
of the rhetorical
power
and use of
images.
This discussion
provides
a
context of
significance
for the tradition of chiaroscuro in
painting
from
Leonardo and
Caravaggio
to
Courbet, Manet,
and the end of tonal
painting.
The context of
significance
is not
simply
"formal" because chiaroscuro
always
had concrete historical affiliations. Some of these affiliations are
in social
history,
some in intellectual
history,
some in the
history
of science
(which
is not to
say
that these histories can be
entirely separated).
Chiar-
oscuro,
which
presupposes
the
priority
of value to hue
(a
priority preserved
in the
techniques
of tonal
painting
itself),
made
painting subject
to the
revisions of the definition of color that
finally
contributed to the trans-
formation of
European painting
at the end of the nineteenth
century.
Color itself is another "formal element" with
deep culturally specific
meanings.
The association of color with
"accident"
and with the
superficial
and feminine is an
important
habit of Western
thought
with all kinds of
ramifications
(in rhetoric,
for
example)
from Plato
through
the critical
reaction to
impressionism
and
beyond.
When
Georges Braque
remarked
that he
began
to
put
color in his
synthetic
cubist
paintings
when he
realized that color was a
substance,
his
simple
statement was as
opposed
to this
long
tradition of the
significance
of color as his
painting
was a
departure
from the
painting
of the whole earlier neoclassical tradition.
And this
simple
remark
presupposes
a basic
change
in the
understanding
of the
significance
of the art of
painting,
and
points
forward to a
period
in which
painting
would
explore
new and different
regions
of
meaning.
I would
finally
like to touch on two
questions
I feel are raised
by
the
arguments
I have made. Both of these
questions
demand studies of
their own,
but it will still be useful to indicate what kind of solutions
Description
might
be
given
to them. The first of these
questions
concerns the relation
of the
analysis
and reconstruction I have described to other kinds of
interpretation.
The
position
I am
trying
to set out
might
be summarized
to
say
that it is
necessary
to understand as best we can what was meant
in order to
try
to
figure
out what was not meant in
any specific
instance,
to understand the lines in order to read between them. I have been
concerned with the
problem
of
description
and its relation to the historical
reconstruction of what was
meant,
or what
might
have been
meant,
but
the further
question
of what more is revealed in the actual combination
of
meaningful
elements in
any
work of art
points
to other
interpretive
measures.
The works from which we
begin
are
particular,
and we
begin
to
try
to understand them
by considering
them
aesthetically
in the sense of
assessing
them
precisely
in their
particularity.
When we
analyze
them
by
placing
their constituent
parts
in
series,
that
is,
by trying
to establish
what
they might
have
meant,
we
necessarily
treat them both
partially
and in
general. Although
such seriation
may
be
highly significant
in itself
(we
might
write the
history
of
altarpieces, perspective,
the theme of
Judith
and
Holofernes,
the trade in
paintings),
none of these is sufficient
for the historical
interpretation
of the works from which we
began.
As
mentioned
above,
we must
go beyond analysis
and make
synthetic judg-
ments.
Thesejudgments
are double in the sense that
they
are
ourjudgments
and that
they
are also
judgments
about the character of the
particular
synthesis
of elements in the work.
They
are,
in other
words,
judgments
about the historical
particularity
of the work that elucidate our
experience
of the work as it stands before
us,
usually
in
spaces
(museum
spaces)
which,
as machines for formalist
looking,
are
fundamentally incompatible
with the kind of historical
imagination
I am
trying
to describe.
Analysis
and
reconstruction,
which
bring
the work into view as
historical,
that
is,
which contextualize it in
any
number of
possible
dimensions,
thus
heighten
both the
past
and
present particularity
of the work. Since works of art
are almost
always
decontextualized,
either because
they
have been removed
from their
original spaces
of use or because we who are
writing
their
history
do not
belong
to the
spaces
and times for which
they
were
made,
this historical
particularity
is
always
more or less
imaginary
(those
other
spaces
of
use, times,
purposes,
audiences).
This
imaginary particularity
informs our
understanding
of the
work,
that
is,
it
changes
our
judgment
of it in the
present.
This
brings
us back to the work as it stands before
us. The
synthesis consequent
to
analysis
is the historian's
judgment,
shaped by
the initial
judgment
of the
work,
which the new
judgment
then modifies. These
judgments
should not be
regarded merely
as
sup-
plements
to the inherent limitations of
analysis
and reconstruction; rather
they
are
integral
with the
particularity
of the work to be
explained.
Psychoanalytic interpretation-to
take that
example-may
contribute
significantly
to the
explanation
of the
particular
character of a work of
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 1989 405
art as it stands and to the
understanding
of
specific ways
in which mean-
ingful
elements were treated or related when it was made. Such inter-
pretation,
like the
synthesis
of the
historically particular
work in
imag-
ination,
on which it also
depends,
is informed
by
reconstruction but is
finally
rooted in the
specific
relation between
interpreter
and work.
As for social and economic
interpretation,
it seems to me that much
might
be
accomplished simply by taking seriously
material and facture
and the various contexts of
production
and use to which
they point,
rather than
trying
to construe
"style"
in a
way
that links it to social or
economic
circumstances,
which is to
my
mind
clearly
an old idealist habit
turned to new
purposes.
The second issue I wish to raise
briefly
is that of uniformities
among
works of art in unrelated cultures. Formalism involved
interpretive pro-
cedures that assumed uniformities and then
explained
them. But if for-
malism is
rejected
and all art is assumed to be bound to different
contexts,
how are formal uniformities to be
explained?
How,
for
example,
are we
to account for the
practical universality
of the
appearance
of hierarchical
images
based on bilateral
symmetry
and other kinds of
planar
order? I
believe such uniformities arise because
images
are
always
embodied and
share real
space
with those who see and use them. This real
space
(as
opposed
to the virtual
space
we see in the kinds of
images
to which we
are most
accustomed)
may
be constructed in
ways
that
exploit
the
significant
values of our own
spatiality.
The
meaning
of some
images
is stated more
in these
terms,
others less. This real
spatiality
means that what we call
art
possesses
kinds of
significance irreducibly
different from the
significance
of texts. Works of art must be understood in terms of the real
spatial
conditions of
presentation
that assume
any
number of conventional
forms,
that
is,
any
number of
culturally specific
forms.34
Art historians seldom examine the
implications
of their own habits
of
interpretation, preferring
instead to limit themselves to the
application
of these
professional
habits to individual
problems
or to borrow
"ap-
proaches"
from other more self-critical fields. In this
essay
I have
tried,
by examining
some of the
major categories
of the
history
of art as it has
been discussed in this
century,
not
only
to revise old
patterns
of
description
and inference but also to
argue against
all kinds of
interpretation
I have
called
allegorical
and
against
both idealism and materialism as sufficient
principles
of art historical
explanation.
Such
nonmetaphysical
art
history,
everywhere intersecting
with other kinds of
history
but reducible to none
of
them,
implies
that art
itself,
rather than
being
an inclusive
(or exclusive)
category
is defined
by
the
history
of
art,
by
all that which we call art has
done. It also
implies
a future
potential history
of art that is all the
things
34. See
Summers,
"The 'Visual Arts' and the Problem of Art Historical
Description,"
Art
Journal
42
(Winter 1982): 301-10; Summers,
"This Is Not a
Sign:
Some Remarks on
Art and
Semiotics,"
Art Criticism 3
(1986): 30-45;
and
Schapiro,
"On Some Problems in
the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in
Image-Signs,"
Semiotica 1
(1969):
236.
Description
that what
might
be called art
might
do. I have also tried to
argue
for a
kind of historical discourse based on the
assumption
that
any
work of
art was made
by people
in real circumstances and that in those circimstances
it was a
meaningful thing
to have done. Such an
assumption
is consistent
with the
history
of the
changing
uses to which works of art are
put
after
they
are first made. Both the
meanings
art had and the
meanings
it has
subsequent
to its
making
are
analyzable
and reconstructable
(which
is
not to
say
recoverable)
by
the same means. Beneath the level of aesthetic
characterization of the whole work a
high degree
of
unanimity
about
aspects
of works that
may
seem
unimportant
is
possible
and at this same
level much
fundamentally significant history
is
possible.
At the same
time,
these
arguments
mean that art
history
will
always
be at least
explicitly
critical because both
analysis
and
synthesis
involve
judgments
about the
work at hand. But it is
perhaps
most
important
to insist on the
possibility
and the
necessity
of
preserving
the ostensive and consensual
discourse,
the reconstructive
discourse,
by
means of which richer contextualization
and therefore richer historical criticism are
possible.

SUMMERS, David, Form, Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and The Problem of Art

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SUMMERS, David, Form, Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and The Problem of Art

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"Form," Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description

Author(s): David Summers

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