The students of the 1920s were the first to profit from the documentation projects launched in the late nineteenth century: biographies, bibliographies, corpuses of paintings, museum catalogues, topographical handbooks, yearbooks with reports on archival discoveries. Now every major library stocked transcriptions of unedited primary sources and good editions of the old printed texts. Universities and research institutes built huge collections of photographic reproductions. The authoritative Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler, a biographical dictionary of artists edited by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker (thirty-seven volumes, 1907–1950), was well underway. Georg Dehio’s Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenkmäler, a series initiated in 1900, was a travel guidebook for professionals. The editing and compiling encouraged two tendencies: the adoption of a hierarchical conception of scholarship, whereby interpretation builds upon facts; and a precocious turn to historiography, or the reflection on the genesis and development of the discipline itself.
In 1921 and 1924 Wilhelm Waetzoldt (1880–1945), professor at Halle, author of a treatise on the art of portraiture, published a two-volume history of art-historical writing in Germany entitled Deutsche Kunsthistoriker. This was the first major study of the history of the discipline. Waetzoldt told his story as a series of lives. The first volume began with the spare comments on art by sixteenth-century German writers and reached to Rumohr; the second volume extended the sequence of the lives of the German art historians to Carl Justi, professor at Bonn in the Gründerzeit, with a sentimental cast of mind, who had himself stuck to biography as the basic principle of art history and who had died in 1912, the very year in which Waetzoldt launched his historiographical project. Justi’s first book had been a three-volume life-and-times study of Winckelmann.
It is often said that art history is more absorbed with its own origin and history than any other academic discipline. This is hard to measure; there were other disciplinary histories in this period, including the History of Classical Scholarship from antiquity to the nineteenth century by the Cambridge classicist John Sandys (three volumes, 1903–1908) and Geschichte der neueren Historiographie, a history of the writing of history since the Renaissance, by the Swiss historian Eduard Fueter (1911).
Art historiography, or the history of the history of art, seemed to symbolize the autarky of a discipline no longer auxiliary to art instruction. Yet beyond Germany there were still plenty of major universities without a professorial chair or a degree program in art history. The occupant of the first chair of art history at Oxford was Edgar Wind, appointed in 1955; Cambridge has offered degrees in art history only since 1970. At Yale University art history was taught in the art school until the 1940s when several students of Henri Focillon, who for some years had been engaged as a visiting professor, established an advanced-degree program.
Historiography also marked a self-distancing of the discipline from the image of the belletristic art historian: from the lethargic pursuits, as it were, of Charles Swann. By writing a genealogy of the German historiography of art that stretched back to the sixteenth century, Waetzoldt was distinguishing his discipline from the newcomers sociology, anthropology, and psychology. He was also constructing a German tradition to rival the Italian. Still, Vasari is present in the book’s principle of organization: neither Sandys nor Fueter thought to organize his history as a series of Lives. The format of the scholar’s biography invited identification and hero worship, an overrating of individual innovation and underrating of the collective nature of scholarship. The vita reminded the reader that scholarship was rooted in existence, subject to social and other real conditions, and that the history of a discipline was not an abstract succession of ideas. Waetzoldt writes the annals of art historiography.
Waetzoldt sketched a tripartite history. He characterized the first period, running from Winckelmann to Rumohr, as Hellenophile and aestheticizing and the second, running from Passavant to Justi, as historicist and scholarly. Waetzoldt cut short his account just before art history became interesting. But he grasped well that the third period of art history, coextensive with his own lifetime, taking for granted and therefore emancipated from the mass of fact, had introduced the free analysis of form. The history of art, according to Waetzoldt, will become a mere auxiliary discipline not to training in painting but to the higher interpretation of art. It is thus ironic that Carl Justi should have been the figure to crown this phase, given the embarrassing exposure, in 1905, of a fabricated document in his Velázquez monograph, which had appeared in 1888. Justi had introduced into his narrative the text of a letter supposedly written by Velázquez about his experiences in Rome. He did not indicate that he had invented the letter, nor did he pretend that he had found it in an archive. One could charitably see this episode as an imaginative but misfired attempt to transcend mere historicist probity and venture instead that higher criticism.
Waetzoldt’s note of condescension toward the historical scholarship of the nineteenth century, and the desire to rid himself of the prejudices of his father’s generation, resonates with Bloomsbury; as if Deutsche Kunsthistoriker were a milder, more prosaic Eminent Victorians, the ironic unmasking of Victorian pretentions published in 1918 by Waetzoldt’s exact contemporary Lytton Strachey.
Waetzoldt, like other art historians of his day, was reminded constantly by artists that artworks exceeded the factual worlds they emerged from. The moment had come to stand back and assess, to convert data into meaning. Many German and Austrian art historians in the early 1920s believed in the special intellectual promise of the discipline.
The term Kunstwissenschaft, meaning “systematic study of art,” or better yet “artology,” had already been used in the early nineteenth century. The frequency of use of the term increased sharply in the 1880s. By the 1920s it signified recognition of the limits of a strictly historical approach to art. The use of the term would decline after the Second World War, rise again in the 1970s, and then fall again.
Historiography also signalled a turn away from collecting, custodianship, museums, and generally art history’s sensuous involvement with art. The authors of art histories from this point on are less likely themselves to be collectors or painters. Still, Kunstwissenschaft was prepared to account for the aesthetic, to factor it in, anticipating the objections from beyond the university. No one wanted to make the blunder of misrecognizing the artwork. The academic discipline, invested in empiricism, compensated by introducing the aesthetic at another level of analysis: engagement with art was sublimated as engagement with form.
A discipline enters into a state of self-consciousness, writes its own history and theorizes its practices, when something is unresolved. A prehistory of good empirical practices would be of limited interest, a chronicle of false starts, of trial and error. The practicing physician has no need to know the history of medicine. That history is valuable only when profiled against an alternative history: Asian medicine, for example. The art historians proceed by importing attitudes alien to them, provincializing their own scholarship as a hedge against the possibility of their own fatal detachment from possession and beauty.
The doyen of the Viennese school of art history, Julius von Schlosser (1866–1938), a student of Wickhoff, and a more original scholar than Waetzoldt, published in 1924 his magnum opus, Die Kunstliteratur: ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte (The Literature of Art: A Handbook for the Study of the Sources of Modern Art History). This was a history, with commentary, of writing on and about art from the Middle Ages to the dawn of the modern age. Across more than 600 judgmental and most readable pages Schlosser described texts by several hundred authors in a range of genres: medieval treatises on painting, treatises on perspective and proportion, treatises on architecture, and the early histories of art, principally Lorenzo Ghiberti.
A disciple and friend of the philosopher Benedetto Croce, Schlosser was dissatisfied with art history and felt that academic scholarship was alienated from its true object, namely creativity or intuition. Schlosser’s guide to the sources undermined its own subject matter. Schlosser dismissed many of the most notable as excessively “literary,” a strange reproach given that the title of the book is Kunstliteratur. The only witnesses to the genesis of the artwork that Schlosser trusted were the artists themselves—some artists. We have already noted his admiration for Philipp Otto Runge. He did not trust Leon Battista Alberti or Giorgio Vasari. Schlosser sometimes treats Alberti as if he were a mere rhetorician. Vasari, although a painter, had according to Schlosser an impoverished artistic imagination and could only think in terms of influences, dependencies, and technical progress. Schlosser dismissed Gian Paolo Lomazzo as a “pedant.”
Schlosser brings his history to a close around 1800, leaving the impression that he saw no meaningful task left for the modern historian of art other than a pointless sifting through the written testimonies and a circling round the taciturn artworks. For Schlosser, nineteenth-century academic art history subjected a living tradition of writing about art to the conventions of the university. Nineteenth-century art history was not the beginning so much as the beginning of the end.
The one fixed point that anchored all of Schlosser’s work, and the only text he truly trusted, was Ghiberti’s Commentaries. For Schlosser, only Ghiberti was sufficiently sachlich, or “to the point.” Only Ghiberti gave access to the artist, the true source of art. Schlosser would have admired the writings, had he known them, of Dong Qichang and Shitao.
Schlosser’s recursive handbook presents the writing of art history as the possibility of a belated contribution to an already alienated tradition of writing. Why was he so pessimistic? Riegl, whom he revered, was dead, but Schlosser’s own students Otto Pächt and Hans Sedlmayr were tending to Riegl’s legacy. In 1923 Riegl’s lecture notes on Baroque art, first published in 1908 as Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, were reprinted. Late Roman Art Industry and The Dutch Group Portrait, as noted, were re-edited. In 1929 Sedlmayr prefaced a collection of shorter writings with an essay entitled “The Quintessence of Riegl’s Teachings.” Heinrich Wölfflin was also very much still present; Schlosser expressed great admiration for his 1905 monograph on Albrecht Dürer. Schlosser made out the true physiognomy of the discipline between the wars: the academicization of the classic mode of art history. The readership from now on will mostly be other professors of art history. The same thing happened to sociology and anthropology, disciplines whose classic moments (Durkheim, Weber, Boas, Malinowski) were similarly brief.
Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) published several early essays assessing the theoretical achievements of Riegl and Wölfflin. His Habilitation or second thesis (1920; the only typescript was lost in the war and rediscovered by accident in 2012), entitled Die Gestaltungsprinzipien Michelangelos, was an exercise in formal analysis in the mode of Wölfflin, philosophically fortified. (The term Gestaltungsprinzipien, or “formal principles,” had been introduced to art history by August Schmarsow in his Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft [Basic Principles of the Study of Art] [1905], a book that extended the project of formal analysis to architecture, in particular to the problem of space, more thoroughly than anyone had before.) Panofsky argued that Michelangelo’s art cannot be assimilated to the sequence of styles Quattrocento—High Renaissance—Baroque. That first style Panofsky characterized as an unfree lawlessness, the second as a freely chosen lawfulness, and the third as the equally free negation of the law. Michelangelo’s style, by contrast, expressed an inner struggle between freedom and law. In crafting a fable about form, Panofsky hoped to correct his own bias toward humanism, or edifying content. Panofsky’s conscientious form-biographies, however, did not derive from mistrust of the referential claims of the pictorial signifier, such as to support an aestheticism, but rather from the plausible conviction that content has a better chance to survive the vicissitudes of history when it is carried by beautiful form.
In 1920 Panofsky took a chair at the university of Hamburg and soon fell under the spell of Aby Warburg, his library, and the community of scholars and thinkers drawn to the library. Panofsky’s essay “Perspective as ‘Symbolic Form,’ ” delivered as a lecture at the Warburg Library in 1924 and published three years later in the library’s publication series, shared with Schlosser’s book its recursivity. This tour de force of art-historical writing, an ambiguous text that still generates debate, redescribes in seventy-two pages (more than half given over to footnotes) the entire sweep of European art history from Greco-Roman antiquity to the seventeenth century. Panofsky’s thesis is that painters’ perspective, or the projection of three-dimensional reality onto a plane surface, is never true to reality. Every perspectival method distorts reality in one way or another. The question facing the historian, then, is not whether a given artist or artistic culture can paint in perspective, but which sort of perspective they use.
This is a relativist history of perspective. Still, one system of perspective emerges as special, namely, the perspectiva artificialis or costruzione legittima invented by the Florentines Brunelleschi and Alberti in the fifteenth century and systematized by artists and mathematicians over the next two centuries. Alberti’s linear, central, or one-point perspective measures the diminishment in apparent size of objects as their distance from a stationary beholder increases. Panofsky believed that curvilinear perspective, of the sort used by some ancient Roman painters, produced a more accurate representation of optical impressions. He reasoned that the success of the less accurate method, Alberti’s linear perspective, must reflect the peculiar demands of Renaissance and post-Renaissance European culture. Panofsky saw each perspectival system as an expression or “symbolic form” (a concept borrowed from the philosopher Ernst Cassirer) of a mentality, of an approach to reality. According to Panofsky, the linear perspective invented in fifteenth-century Florence, and perfected over the next two centuries, negotiated between the objecthood of the viewed scene and the subjecthood of the beholder. The model for this epistemological reconciliation was what Kant would not until the eighteenth century describe as the “category,” the cognitive framework that makes possible the mind’s apprehension of the world.
In later writings Panofsky built upon this thesis to argue that Renaissance painting provided the metaphor of the very “intellectual distance between the present and the past” that “enables the scholar to build up comprehensive and consistent concepts of bygone periods.” The perspectival metaphor implies charity toward both the claims of the researcher and the claims of the past, a past that included Renaissance painting. In this way Panofsky turns the history of art back on itself. He offers an image of equilibrium between scholar and artwork. The modern person, according to Panofsky, thinks perspectivally. Events in the foreground appear too large, events in the background too small. The writing of history acknowledges the distortion but does not necessarily correct for it.
The German academic model of relativist art-historical scholarship guided by critical philosophy, and tracked by a disciplinary self-consciousness, is powerful. To find countermodels to Kunstwissenschaft one must venture to the margins of academia.
As a student in Berlin, Carl Einstein (1885–1940) heard the lectures of Heinrich Wölfflin and like many others first absorbed and then rejected his teachings. The main lesson stuck, however, namely, that artistic form alone—not the depicted subject, not the function of the work, not the historical circumstances—has a chance of opening onto something real. An account of the subject matter of an artwork, Einstein wrote in his book Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture) (1915), “moves beyond the given object, by treating it not as a formal construct but appropriating it as guide to some practice outside of its proper domain. Formal analysis, on the other hand, remains within the domain of the immediate. … [F]orms serve the analysis better than individual things because they also contain information about ways of seeing and laws of vision, and so precisely compel us to practice a kind of knowledge that remains within the sphere of the given.”
In Paris in 1912, Einstein discovered Cubism as well as a political calling. Later he would participate in the revolutionary fighting in Berlin in 1919 and in the Spanish Civil War. In Cubism he witnessed what he interpreted as an irreversible break with conventional seeing, with the orientation of the European subject to reality, that he believed prefigured an overall rupture in history.
Einstein did not follow an academic career but wrote independently. In 1928 he left Germany for Paris where he developed close ties to the Surrealists; he was involved as well with the Russian avant-garde and with the Bauhaus.
Einstein wrote on Picasso and Braque in 1912 and 1913 and then found his voice as a visionary ideologist of a new art with Negerplastik, a short tract on African sculpture. The African artifacts were cult objects, Einstein asserted, which did not signify or represent the gods so much as make them real. The sculptures “will never mingle in the process of human life.” They achieved this “unentangled” and “unconditional” status by excluding human subjects, sculptor and beholder alike. The African work “absorbs time by integrating into its form what we experience as movement.” It renders three-dimensionality not by way of the representation of objects, as European art does, but directly with form. European sculpture was ruined when it submitted itself to mere “pictorial surrogates” for form—planar and perspectival arrangements of form. Cubism opens a path out of this overly psychological, experiential concept of artistic form.
In 1926 Einstein published the volume Art of the Twentieth Century in the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, a handbook for a general readership. In 1929 he cofounded the periodical Documents with Georges Bataille. In the first issue Einstein published an essay entitled “Methodological Aphorisms,” clarifying his project. European art imposes a stable world picture and offers artworks only as epistemological objects ensuring the stability of subject. This is exactly what Panofsky was saying in his perspective essay, where the presence of time in the perspectival model is unaddressed but is implicit: the picture will change the moment the subject moves. The intertwining of form with experience and psychology acknowledges that time is the medium of existence and so creates the possibility of a biography of form as empathetic, existential, and linear; form coordinated with other aspects of life, namely, form as style. African sculpture revealed that the true medium of art is space, because only here can it establish its own time beyond mere psychology, which is the time of metamorphosis or “revolt.” The first step is the rejection of historical art: the African works encourage “skepticism [which] brings the dissociation of vision from the visual heritage.” Einstein had already predicted in Negerplastik that the modern artist would have difficulty extricating himself: “The artist of today is not entirely a partisan of pure form. He still senses its opposition to his own prehistory.”
Einstein believed that the art of his own time had transformed human nature and expanded human powers. “During the past twenty years,” he wrote in 1929, “the grip of mechanized reality has diminished, and hallucinatory and mythological invention has increased.” The new art, he wrote in his Art of the Twentieth Century, is rebelling against reason:
We constantly experience elementary and unverifiable processes such as the dream and the miracle, where the psyche apparently acts oblivious to the correctness of physics or to a superficially formal correctness. Reason imposes on man an idiotic monotony of existence and of the gestalts, of which he will at best produce variations or rearrangements; this is a fatal limitation.
But the old tactics no longer suffice: “In earlier times, myths had served as a means of defense against such gestalt monotony; gestalt formation was not a matter of aesthetics but of religion.” Today art takes up that challenge:
This same impulse is at work today in the experiments with new gestalt structures; the fundamental drama of metamorphosis, of gestalt transformation, is being played out anew. That’s easily possible in a painting, for any one form can signify a great number of things.
Profiting from the intrinsic ambiguity of the depicted object, the painter creates an interplay between the painting as object and the objects it depicts, attempting to configure space directly. They are “free, autistic figurations.” A conventional history of art, which must discover or create temporal order, can only account for those artworks that fix reality. The works that instead strive to capture the invisible flux will escape historiography. Reality is a “pluralistic complex”:
Beyond a reality that has been fixated there exists a sphere of permanent creation and metamorphosis, that is, of the continuous revolt against the imposed world picture.
Art delivers the real by recreating that “continuous revolt.” Art is an event in the sense that it signals a break in what is self-evident. That event inhabits multiple present tenses because it is capable of reproducing that break over and over again. Such events elude storytelling, or the construction of cause-and-effect chains. Form is closed but not autonomous, for it joins art to other metamorphoses, other revolts.
Like Anita Brenner, Einstein compared artworks to miracles. In a letter of 1923 to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, he defined the miracle as “two moments in time that our contemporary sensation is unable to align into congruence. Which simply means that one had the courage to come up with experiences that transgress the psychological method that’s habitual nowadays. Nobody will deny that these people actually did experience miracles. But that means that these forces must have been displaced somewhere.” They have been displaced, according to Einstein, into art. Art is the place where the points in time that reason holds apart are reunited.
This is the moment of the fission of art-historical thinking, the moment of the ascendancy of the formal method together with its countermodel. Einstein exposed the inadequacies of Wölfflin’s concept of form, and by extension Riegl’s and Hildebrand’s, not to mention the concept of form of such historians as Panofsky who could educe their synthetic, consolatory lessons from history only by remaining on the surface of the artworks. Einstein’s approach to art history is not historical at all. Instead he brings to bear on the art of his own day an art that supposedly lies outside of time: African art (just as the Documents authors will look to paleolithic painting). The only alternative to Einstein is a retrenchment in historicist scholarship, even for African art, an approach that has thrived in the academy but may well appear, from the outside, to represent a retreat into a state of non-knowing about art, inexcusable after Modernism. This is the divide in the discipline that prevails even today.
Both Anita Brenner and Carl Einstein were saying that the Enlightenment’s teaching is an incomplete teaching. History does not converge on understanding as a life might. Art discredits the Enlightenment’s discrediting of the miracle. Even some academic art historians shared these doubts. Wilhelm Pinder in an article of 1926 on the problem of art historical generations wrote of the temporal clusterings of form as unintelligible, as nature’s “casts of the dice.” Erwin Panofsky in 1927 wondered whether it still made sense, given the stylistic disparities among contemporaneous works, to reflect on art-historical events as if they were temporal occurrences: it is possible, he continued, that “the very idea of a historical and temporal relation [among artworks] is practically unrealizable and even a logical contradiction.”
The theologian Karl Barth in an essay of 1920, “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas,” wrote of the modern sense of standing “outside,” expressed in “our naturalism, our soulless historism, our estheticism.” The “history of religion,” he remarks disparagingly, had already gotten underway with Aaron. “At the moment when religion becomes conscious of religion,” as a “psychologically and historically conceivable magnitude in the world,” it falls into idolatry. Barth is saying that there is no external vantage point on the soul, for you are it. That is what Brenner was saying about the ex voto. The painted miracle cannot participate in histories of art because it is too close to disorderly experience. It emerges out of a non-time where no one has control. The ex voto involves you in the miracle and offers you no vantage point outside a history of life, suffering, and death.
If you are speaking from a position within art, within the circle of creation, you do not see the reality outside, or do not recognize it as reality. If you are speaking from outside the circle of art, as art historians do, you cannot grasp the anarchic, miraculous quality of art. Brenner and Einstein were standing right on the border between inside and outside. They were not artists, but they were not art historians either. For Einstein, the history of art converged on the definitive discrediting of self-evidence—with decisive political stakes, he believed—carried out by early twentieth-century European art. For Brenner, the history of art was a nonhistory because for her art was always already modern, more true to reality as people experience it than the ideologies, cults, and sciences devised by civilization.