Art history made a new pact with modernity in the 1950s, a pax aesthetica. Form was asked to reconcile modern art and the modern forms of life.
In 1955 Arnold Bode, an artist and curator, staged an ambitious exhibition of modernist and contemporary art, called the Documenta, in his hometown of Kassel, a city in the middle of Germany that had been one of the headquarters of the Nazi army and severely bombed in 1945. Among the few barely intact historic buildings was the Fridericianum of 1779, which we recall was the first building in Europe designed to be a public museum. Documenta was a relaunch of modernism, a rebuke and damnatio memoriae of the National Socialists’ popular traveling exhibition of 1937, Degenerate Art, an obscene denunciation of Cubism, Expressionism, Abstraction, and Dada. In that first Documenta—the exhibition is staged roughly every five years in Kassel, most recently in 2017—there was mostly painting, with little sculpture, the latter medium suspect because favored by the Nazis. The exhibition was curated by Bode, Will Grohmann, Werner Haftmann, and Werner Schmalenbach and included 570 works by 148 artists. There were 130,000 visitors. Some exhibits attempted to identify an enduring image of human nature that could serve as the basis for repair. Others reverted to abstraction. By the 1950s critics across a wide ideological spectrum saw abstract painting as the covenant of a new spiritualism, austere or romantic, in the face of the brutal literalisms and delusionary mythologies that had together wrecked the century. The bourgeois amateur of art could congratulate herself for apprehending a modern art that, according to André Malraux, writing in 1949, “has liberated painting which is now triumphantly a law unto itself.” The neo-Thomist theologian Étienne Gilson, who delivered the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in Washington in 1955, asserted that painters could never again indulge in “the easy pleasures of imitational or representational art.” Since Cézanne, Gilson affirmed, painting had been forced to submit to a “cure of abstractionism.” Not everyone liked this complacent tone: the American art historian Leo Steinberg reminded readers in 1953 that the ambitions of the major modern artists, including Manet, van Gogh, Cézanne, and Matisse, had been “adequately summarized in [John] Constable’s dictum which defines the goal of painting as ‘the pure apprehension of natural fact.’ ” There was an elitist dimension to postwar abstraction, especially in Europe.
Avant-garde and conservative art histories of this period are symmetrical: both stress the cosmic or order-endowing functions of art. That point of view encouraged scholarly study of the art beyond Europe and did not discourage a therapeutic medievalism. The catalogue of the large 1950 exhibition of early medieval art in Munich under the rubric Ars Sacra invited comparison and contrast with “spiritual tendencies of our own day.” The exhibition revealed the “cultural unity of Europe in the early middle ages.” So did the popular series of magazines and books dedicted to Romanesque architecture and sculpture, Zodiaque, published by the Benedictine priest Angelico Surchamp at his abbey in Burgundy. The Zodiaque publications, especially the series of topo-graphic handbooks inaugurated in 1953 under the rubric La Nuit des temps, gave pride of place to the monuments of Burgundy, Poitou, and Anjou, but Zodiaque was not nationalist in spirit so much as Christian-international. Surchamp had studied with the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes, a disciple of the neo-Thomist philosopher and aesthetician Jacques Maritain. The photographs printed in lush, grainy heliogravure extracted the bare shaped stones from their liturgical and historical contexts. Christian art supported the hope that art in general could shepherd sensibilities to a higher altitude. The pain of the war is internalized, and the Romantic taste for dissonance democratized. Hypertrophied disciplines of formal organization, whether those of Renaissance and Baroque art or those of the late nineteenth century, are now seen as screens blocking our access to the universal wisdom.
Disappointment in the unfulfilled promises of the avant-gardes led to a divergence between histories of architecture and histories of art. Building is always cosmic, if cosmic is understood as a placing of man in nature, including the second natures he builds, above all, society. Whereas art, made by individuals, is noncombinatory, noncumulative, nondialectical, and not anchored to anything real. Mistrustful of art because it deals in illusion, many art historians looked to architecture as a reliable vehicle for content, any content, signalling a willingness to trust again in ancestors. After Sedlmayr’s book on the Gothic cathedral, there was Günter Bandmann (Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeutungsträger, 1951), Otto von Simson (The Gothic Cathedral, 1956), and Hans Jantzen (Kunst der Gotik, 1957). Architectural history is always orienting itself to the production of new buildings. Rudolf Wittkower’s ideas about proportion fed straight into practice; architects figured out quickly how to translate past to present.
In his posthumously published book Gothic vs. Classic: Architectural Projects in Seventeenth-Century Italy (1974), Wittkower devoted several pages to the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century debates about how to complete the façade of the cathedral of Florence, left unfinished, mostly bare, an episode we discussed earlier in the context of nineteenth-century restorations. He reviews a series of never-realized proposals, from 1589 to 1636, by the major architects of the day, all of them classical in style, with pilasters, windows, and niches designed by the book, the orthodox system of the orders—that is, completely indifferent to the Gothic style of the rest of the building. Wittkower marvels that the Florentines did not respect the “principle of conformity,” as had those postmedieval builders in Bologna and Milan who “had far outpaced Florence in progressing toward a positive historicizing attitude in relation to the Gothic style.” By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Wittkower says, the Florentines finally came to their senses and built a pastiche of a Gothic façade, the one we have today and which is taken by many visitors to be Gothic. Wittkower’s idealism needs nineteenth-century historicism as a foil. And indeed in architecture idealism could thrive alongside the understanding of architecture as living in time. Art and architecture are not symmetrical. Wittkower’s approbation of the nineteenth-century façade of the Duomo, a forgery, is patronizing. Surely he would not condone Gaetano Bianchi’s 1852 pastiche of a Trecento painting of St. Louis in S. Croce to supplement Giotto’s figures. Why? Because painting has been expected since 1800 to march in step with its own time, but architecture only since 1920? Wittkower asks sincerity of the nineteenth-century painter; of the architect he asks only competence.
Wittkower consigned the nineteenth century to limbo and cast his lot with his own century. He must have envisioned some rebirth of civilization, perhaps not as the Futurists had planned it, but a renewal anyway. Born with the century, he still believed in it.
Wittkower did not agree with his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer that art was lost to us moderns. From the vantage point of the philosopher’s cathedra, it was impossible, apparently, to articulate what had happened to art except in negative terms. The philosopher is not easily persuaded that our wounds could be healed by an abstract painting. In 1960 Gadamer asserted placidly that
no one can doubt that the great ages in the history of art were those in which people without any aesthetic consciousness and without our concept of “art” surrounded themselves with forms whose functions in religious or secular life were understood by everyone and gave no one exclusively aesthetic pleasure.
In other words, artistic beauty is wanton unless it is steered by an extra-artistic purpose. A cult of art is not the answer. Gadamer was an anti-modernist in the sense that he believed that the idea of art was a decoy, even an idol, that distracts us from the work that works of art properly do. Gadamer believed in antiquity and the Middle Ages but not in the Renaissance and its degraded aftermath. Yet his doctrine is compatible with the avant-garde ambition of escaping the aesthetic sphere and recovering a political rhythm.
Gadamer also believes—and here he is in tune with the artists—that historical scholarship misrecognizes art. Like his teacher Heidegger, Gadamer considers historical scholarship an aspect of modernity’s plight, not its salvation. Gadamer detected dimensions of art that will always escape capture by scholarship:
The scholarly investigation conducted by so-called Kunstwissenschaft is aware from the start that it can neither stand in for nor exceed the experience of art. That an artwork offers an experience of truth attainable in no other way constitutes the philosophical significance of art, asserting itself against all reasoning. Thus the experience of art, alongside the experience of philosophy, is the most forcible admonition to the scholarly consciousness to acknowledge its own limits.
He is saying that the humanities should not bother competing with the natural sciences. Art eludes objective analysis because it is never fully historical. Even the art of the past is always pointing forward, opening up unseen paths leading to unanticipated places.
Melancholy is palpable in Theodor W. Adorno’s brief essay of 1952–1954, “Valéry Proust Museum.” Back in Germany at this point, and evidently as depressed as he had been while living in Pacific Palisades during the war, Adorno used the contrasting attitudes of Paul Valéry and Marcel Proust (who were both born in 1871 and so represented for Adorno the generation of the father—his own father had been born in 1870) toward the imprisonment of the masterpieces of painting in the museums of Paris. Valéry saw painting and sculpture as the forlorn children of architecture. His reaction to the chaos and superficiality of the museum was simply to stay home. Proust, according to Adorno, solved the dilemma by introducing the works into his own consciousness, so avoiding “idolatry” and offering his own literary art as the ideal modern gallery of historical art. Adorno sees some cause for hope in Proust’s quietist withdrawal from the world, his resigned devotion to a promise, his willingness to postpone. Valéry by contrast
is a bit too ingenuous in his suspicion that museums alone are responsible for what is done to paintings. Even if they hung in their old places in the castles of the aristocrats … they would be museum pieces without museums. What eats away at the life of the art work is also its own life.
Relieved to be back in Europe, Adorno resigns himself to the art museum. “Works of art can fully embody the promesse du bonheur only when they have been uprooted from their native soil and set out along the path to their own destruction.” Anything important is going to have to happen in consciousness, the real laboratory of form. This is the opposite of the point of view of the architectural historian who wishes to see the life of forms staged in public.
It is easy to imagine what Gadamer and Adorno thought of the European cities now partitioning themselves into an Altstadt or centro storico—a nucleus of authentic medieval structures, heavily restored—surrounded by an inauthentic nineteenth-century fabric, at best invisible, at worst hideous. This is art history written in stone, a triage of good (reflective) and bad (functional) modernities. The philosophers would have disapproved for the wrong reason: that the Altstadt only makes the bad modernity more conspicuous. Most everyone agreed that historicist buildings quoting past styles were now unacceptable; they belonged to the world that had begotten the two wars. The protagonist of Heinrich Böll’s novel of 1959, Billard um halb zehn (Billiards at Half-Past Nine) is a German architect whose father, also an architect, had built a much-admired neo-Romanesque monastery in the 1920s. Near the end of the Second World War, the British army decided to destroy the monastery for strategic reasons. The British compelled the son, whose knowledge of statics, or the science of making things stand up, was easily reversible, to dynamite his father’s building: “Demolition is only the reverse of statics. So to speak its reciprocal.”
After the war the son is unable to build anything at all; his architectural practice now consists of nothing but verifying other people’s measurements. Architecture in Böll’s 1950s is reduced to engineering, adjustment, precision, adaptation to circumstance; a damaged and self-protective approach to creativity. The father, meanwhile, absorbs the blow of the destruction of his masterpiece with phlegmatic, ecological wisdom: “I could never take buildings seriously; dust, baked and concentrated dust, transformed into structure; an optical illusion, fata morgana, meant to become rubble.” The father arrives at a final anthropomorphization of architecture as something made by people for people and that must share in human fortunes. He no longer takes any interest in the thesis that a monument might concretize the values of a civilization. The civilizations that call on art and architecture to endorse their hierarchies of value will end up destroying what they create. Civilization winds down by creating anti-monuments: “Dynamite, a few formulas, that was his opportunity to erect monuments.” The monument, in principle its own historian, instead persists only on the page: finally a task for the historian.
The British officer apologizes to the son for destroying the twelfth-century Crucifixion group that his father’s monastery had housed but not for destroying the modern neo-medieval structure—and most certainly not for the death of the son’s wife in an air raid. The Nazis set in motion a destructive cycle that in the end drew in their adversaries. The British officer has surrendered to an impious logic of war that is able to displace the reckoning of loss from the plane of life itself onto the plane of civilization, a psychological economy. The officer’s conception of civilization involves a distinction in value—between the authentic twelfth-century Crucifixion and its ersatz neo-Romanesque container—that in the fires of war has come to seem meaningless. The officer probably believes that maintaining that distinction is the way to prevent the next war. He knows the difference between original and substitute because his Baedeker or even Dehio handbook has pointed it out. But by what criterion is the twelfth-century artifact more precious? Because it is irreplaceable, more difficult to reproduce technically, than a building? Yes, to some extent. Because it is more beautiful? But the twelfth-century church is not necessarily more beautiful than its twentieth-century simulacrum. Because it is older and rarer? This is not a reliable criterion: there is plenty of old junk not worth keeping. Because it is a relic of a superior civilization—the civilization that begat the Crusades? Because it reminds moderns that art once had a lofty purpose? Yes, this certainly.
The officer’s dubious distinction reveals what could not be seen before the war: that the neo-medieval churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries entered into a flow of building that had always, from the beginning, involved repetition and citation, compliance with types, and a concept of the true origins of a building that exceeded the bare, punctual date of its construction. From that point of view, the Romanesque monastery of the 1920s was still a medieval building. Although not a relic of the twelfth century like the Crucifix it housed, it was nonetheless connected to the past by a chain of structures conforming to a flexible but symbolically dense program. At the same time the monastery of the 1920s, which no doubt took advantage of reinforced concrete, was a modern building. Many of the forward-pointing buildings of the nineteenth century also emerged out of historical matrices: Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s plans for a department store, for example, a Renaissance palazzo in steel and glass, or Henri Labrouste and Viollet-le-Duc’s iron-framed architecture.
Symbol-laden and technologically-driven histories of building were historically interwoven and conceptually compatible. National Socialism adopted just this convergence of the symbolic and the technological as a program, and this made it impossible ever after to pursue such a program.
Rudolf Wittkower’s Renaissance had appeared to obliterate not only the nineteenth century but also the Middle Ages, completing what he believed to be Alberti’s own project. Wittkower condescended to both the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century—they were perfect for each other. Panofsky, by contrast, plunged back into the Middle Ages in his short treatise Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). He took advantage of the historical distance that, in his own account, was the principal intellectual achievement of the period that succeeded the Middle Ages, the European Renaissance. The Renaissance pictured the world in perspective, while we moderns picture the past in perspective. The Renaissance bequeathed to us the conceptual tools to excavate the very historical period that the Renaissance itself had buried. Panofsky argues that the principles of construction of the great French cathedrals between 1130 and 1270 followed from “mental habits” established by the teaching of the Scholastic philosophers. The narrative content of a sculptural program on a portal, for example, is clarified by framing devices and compartmentalization. The building itself is limitlessly “fractionized” into parts. Panofsky points out that these are the very principles of argumentation and presentation of Scholastic doctrine. The cathedral, he shows, reconciles in its plan and its structure seemingly irreconcilable architectural principles. Such syntheses were also characteristic of a school of philosophy bent on preserving the authority of the supreme authorities—Aristotle, the Church Fathers—at all cost. Like Wittkower, Panofsky succeeds by excluding. For he focuses not on the content of the Scholastics’ thought but the form. He is describing the house of God, but an empty house. He performs a double abstraction—on the buildings and on the texts—and arrives at the essential structure underlying them. This was also Riegl’s method.
In his afterword to the French translation of Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture (1967), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that Panofsky’s vision of a “structural affinity” between different aspects of the historical totality was more intuitive than positivist, and therefore laudable. Panofsky, according to Bourdieu, discerned the schemata (habitus, customs, rules) that serve as the matrix for all typical thoughts and perceptions. To discern the deep grammar of the Gothic worldview, Panofsky had to mask out the history of building, the typological aims, the symbolic programs coordinated with liturgy, the availability of techniques and materials, and the movement of artisans. Panofsky ventured to the frontiers of empiricism in order to produce a partisan interpretation of a world. He anticipated methodological objections by claiming that he was correlating a building style with a mentality that, if not shared by everyone in the society, was prevalent among Parisian professors. Scholasticism enjoyed in this period a monopoly on education. Everyone in the urban professional milieu of the cathedral’s designers and builders was exposed to the thinking of the Scholastics. Panofsky contextualizes the buildings not by constructing laborious causal chains but by pointing out that everyone in 1951 speaks of “vitamin deficiencies” or “inferiority complexes” without knowing much about biology or psychology. This is a rather breathtaking argument, for it implies that the cathedrals themselves, noble piles, were grounded in garbled lay misconstruals of the Scholastic teachings. A cultural conservative like Panofsky suspected that the glories of modern culture were built on half-understandings. Perhaps Panofsky was slyly dismissing the cathedrals. After all, his book may be read as a preemptive strike against the thinly disguised eulogies for medieval civilization by the even more conservative von Simson and Jantzen, or as a direct response to Sedlmayr’s Entstehung der Kathedrale (1950), discussed in the previous section and later noted by Bourdieu as Panofsky’s foil. Unlike Sedlmayr, who did not condescend to the Middle Ages, Panofsky depicted a thirteenth century bereft of an all-knowing father.
The discipline settled on a basic consensus around form. Every painting, figurative or abstract, is read as if it were abstract, though not always as inventively as Lionello Venturi, whose deft narration of The Bridge at Narni (1826) by Camille Corot slips from motif to form and back again:
The river Nera is turbid and sandy until, through the shadow of the bridge in the middle distance, appears the clear blue of the water flanked by the gray-greens of the hills and the blues and shadows, until in the far distance appear the blue mountains veiled in mist under the pale blue of a sky broken by white clouds. With a few intense blacks the painter plunged right into the battle of light and shade over the broken ground and the ruined bridge, a battle which finally spends itself in the distant azure of the sky. From the neighboring tumult of life, to the distant, yearned for peace, this is the theme of the picture.
Meyer Schapiro, meanwhile, reverts to pure form. In his magisterial essay “Style” (1953), explaining art history to non-art historians, Schapiro says that all art can be reduced to a simple algorithm modeled on the framed painted tableau:
Basic for contemporary practice and for knowledge of past art is the theoretical view that what counts in all art are the elementary aesthetic components, the qualities and relationships of the fabricated lines, spots, colors, and surfaces. These have two characteristics: they are intrinsically expressive, and they tend to constitute a coherent whole. The same tendencies to coherent and expressive structure are found in the arts of all cultures.
This is not so different from what Alois Riegl had said in Late Roman Art Industry, which although not yet translated into English enjoyed a secret esteem in the United States: classical archeologists, Riegl had insisted, must learn “to see the ancient artwork first of all, and with their own eyes, with regard to its material apparition as outline and color in space and plane.” The art historian Robert Goldwater reviews Riegl’s ideas and influence in his book Primitivism in Modern Art (1938). Schapiro discusses him directly in the essay “Style.”
Where in Schapiro’s framed aesthetic system does the real leave its trace? He has described nothing but the interrelation of signs. Riegl’s relativizing formalism, even before it was formulated, had been refuted by photography. Riegl met this challenge with his study of the protophotographic group portraits of seventeenth-century Holland. Art in a cosmic or hierarchical society—and Sedlmayr is saying nothing else than this—is a real act in the world. In the seventeenth century it is realistic painting that makes this gesture; in modernity it is the photograph. But the avant-garde artwork, photographic or not, is also a real gesture. Schapiro does not seem to grasp this. Form-based paintings in the twentieth century can mimic such gestures, but they are no longer cosmic.
Schapiro says in 1953: “Art is now one of the strongest evidences of the basic unity of mankind.” All right, but to maintain this claim Schapiro has to make the following assertion about art: “There is no privileged content or mode of representation.” But we know that for Schapiro there are privileged contents. Riegl had not been a relativist of values any more than Schapiro was. Riegl was looking for the sympathetic mutual attentiveness that was the basis of liberal democracy just as Schapiro was looking to Romanesque sculpture for early signs of the profane fertility of the collective life. Schapiro wants to have his cake and eat it, too. All art can be judged by a common set of criteria, he says, but some art is more important than other art. “This approach is a relativism that does not exclude absolute judgments of value; it makes those judgments possible within every framework by abandoning a fixed norm of style.” So it is not quite the end of the pastoral fable, the primitivism, the wielding of the past as a lever against the present.
Panofsky in his 1927 essay on perspective had been equally ambivalent. Every era has its own way of seeing, he said, and none of them is more faithful to reality. And yet, the European linear perspective is different because it anticipates Kant, whose account of the mind is not relative but simply true, in all times and places.
For Wittkower and Panofsky, war brought the pastoral fable to an end. Now the present needs lessons from the past. That is the basic split after the war, even today: who is confident any longer that modernity can manage its own affairs? Wittkower looked to architecture, seeking to historicize the impression of permanent validity conveyed by some fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European buildings. In painting, that stability was provided by the frame. Thus Schapiro’s reassertion of painting as the paradigm of art at the very moment when painting was losing its unquestioned primacy. Schapiro writes as if the framelessness of much avant-garde art (readymades, the various Dada and Surrealist found and other objects—little of that at the first Documenta!) were responsible for all the troubles. The picture counteracted such disorientations. The stable frame contained all forces: gestural painting, Art brut, Art informel, outsider art, neo-Dada combines. No amount of formlessness could destabilize the framed picture. Painting can even afford to discard its frame. The frameless canvases of Abstract Expressionism are only a tribute to the power of the frame.
Where Schapiro as a modernist and as an American was not yet ready to give up on the twentieth century, Panofsky had no high opinion of his own era. Panofsky looked not to architecture for ballast but to the improving content of premodern philosophy and literature. Iconography originally meant the sequence of portraits that writes the life of a great man. Iconography in the context of art-historical scholarship was the study of the coding of theology in medieval Christian art. Aby Warburg, de-Christianizing, coined the word “iconology” to designate a general scholarly study of images in history and in society. Panofsky created a postwar research program by narrowing the concept of iconology to the study of allegorical and other images informed by theology, philosophy, or literature. The books that established iconology as a scholarly program in the United States were Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939) and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955), both collections of closely focused studies of Renaissance art. Here he argued that the aim of art historical interpretation in general was the apprehension of “those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion—unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed into one work.” The art historian could improve on the mere stylistic and thematic analysis of the work by applying what Panofsky called “synthetic intuition,” or “familiarity with the essential tendencies of the human mind,” and then by tempering this intuition with “insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, essential tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts.” Iconology sounds neutral but it was not. It began as an alternative to the social history of art but ended as a reverse primitivism, that is, the recognition that we have become the primitives and yet have nothing to teach the civilized past. The pretense to iconology’s value-neutrality was thin or nonexistent. Iconology was designed as a hermeneutic of paintings produced in Italy in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when paintings could be expected to encipher edifying content prepared by the study of ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as by modern poets and thinkers.
Panofsky’s faith in historical scholarship was completely opposed to Gadamer’s fatalism. But then his attitude to the century was completely different. Gadamer was born in 1900, Wittkower in 1901, Adorno in 1903, and Schapiro in 1904 (and Arnold Bode in 1900). This was the first generation born into the teeth of the avant-gardes, who never knew a world without Cubism. Panofsky shared neither Gadamer and Adorno’s pessimism (they saw no way backward and no way forward) nor Schapiro and Wittkower’s confidence in the new century. Panofsky, born in 1892, just wanted to go backward.
Humanism was not a loss of confidence either in art or in art’s capacity to exceed historical scholarship. For Panofsky humanism meant dedication to a balanced ideal of human nature. As such, it was a formal concept. Humanism sees asymmetries and imbalances in human nature as deformations. Humanism is the form classicism takes after the discrediting of the Idea.
Panofsky’s picture-readings were inspired not by the old outward-pointing idealism of Platonic pedigree, whose intellectual fortunes in the art theory of the ancien régime he had traced in his book Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924), but a new “inner” idealism, customized to the imperfect postwar pax, venturing again the thesis of the perfectibility of human nature. In his essay “Art History as a Humanistic Discipline,” written in 1940, as Europe plummeted into war and the year he obtained American citizenship, Panofsky had conceded the ahistoricity of humanism: as if the moment had arrived to draw the limits of the once totalizing—as recently as Meinecke’s treatise of 1936—historicist project. The stakes were suddenly too high: historicism seemed like a peacetime luxury, the slowly brewed product of a century of European prosperity and conquest interrupted at home only by distracting clashes among the social classes. There was no leisure now for the fables that had ironized civilization.
Iconology responded to the public expectation that the art historian decode historical artworks that had receded into illegibility. Modern art, meanwhile, was swinging between undercoding (Impressionism, naturalism, or the more recent objects that seemed to rebuff interpretation altogether, the readymade or the monochrome painting) and overcoding (abstruse Symbolist allegories or their Surrealist parodies).
If iconology offered allegories of reconciliation of art and culture, then it was the so-called social history of art that might have been expected to produce allegories of division and disappointment. The social history of art as conceived in the years before and during the war, however, was losing momentum.
Ernst Fischer, an Austrian Communist intellectual and politician, active in exile in Moscow in the war years, wrote Von der Notwendigkeit der Kunst (On the Necessity of Art) (1959). For Fischer, the task of the art of the present and the future is to re-create the lost collectivity that was once the ground of art. This was a left-wing version of the postwar restorative impulse. How does an artwork, a fabrication, mediate a collectivity? According to Fischer, through a “possessed” individual who paradoxically exists at the margins of collective life and shared experience. In early societies the sorcerer was the “representative” or “servant” of the collective. When the sorcerer entered into a state of demoniacal possession, he “forcibly re-created the collective, world unity.” “The content of demoniacal possession,” Fischer argued, “was the collective reproduced in a violent manner within the individual, a sort of mass essence.” This is indeed a theory of art, as Heidegger had been asking for, and not a theory of representation: the collective reproduced in a violent manner within the individual.
Pierre Francastel, in Peinture et société: naissance et destruction d’un espace plastique de la Renaissance au cubisme (1950), offered the artwork as a means of communication. Interpreting perspective as a system of signs, he rewires art history as a species of cultural anthropology. In Art et technique aux XIXe et XXe siècles (1956), Francastel presents art and technology as equivalents, differing only in their ends: they both transform nature. Technology, however, does not establish values. Although born in 1900, Francastel still believes that the avant-garde is modern, that is, in tune with modern life.
Even Arnold Hauser appears in his 1958 Philosophy of Art History to repudiate his own Social History of Art, published only seven years earlier. “We are living now in the day of the sociological interpretation of cultural achievements. That day will not last forever.” “A work of art is a challenge; we do not explain it, we adjust ourselves to it.” Here he sounds more like Croce or Warburg. Social art history always seems to be putting water in its wine. Hauser is conceding that the work comes at us from history, that we are dominated by it; he casts historical explanation as a kind of defensive manoeuvre. “In interpreting it, we draw upon our own aims and endeavours, inform it with a meaning that has its origins in our own way of life and thought. In a word, any art that really affects us becomes to that extent modern art.” The converse is: any art of the past that doesn’t affect us is just bric-à-brac. He also redeems Panofsky and Wittkower, revealing them to be presentists who mask the creative violence they do to the past behind scholarly protocols.
Art history did not respond to the proliferation of new forms of art—how could it? it was all happening too quickly. The past was receding at a swifter pace. And yet a moving lens still sees in perspective. José Ortega y Gasset began his essay “On Point of View in the Arts” (1949) with the assertion that “when history is as it should be, it is an elaboration of cinema.” History gives “the image of a movement.” “ ‘Vistas’ which had been discontinuous appear to emerge one from another, each prolonging the other without interruption.” But a shifting point of view also generates new overlappings and blockages, new perspectival distortions to be overcome.
This is the moment of art history’s consolidation within the framework of mass education. Art history finds its berth within the American university. Alfred Neumeyer, a German-Jewish emigré and professor of art history at Mills College in Oakland, California, published in 1956 a short report on art-historical study in the United States. Neumeyer paints a nondepressive picture of American scholarship that reveals much about the German art-historical establishment that he left behind in 1935. Neumeyer listed the innovative interdisciplinary approaches that had transformed art history: psychoanalysis, anthropology, economic analysis, as well as the opening onto art beyond Europe, including the colonial New World, and finally folk art. Neumeyer downplayed the contribution of his fellow emigrés, crediting them with introducing the iconological method (Panofsky) and the topic of the migration of symbols (Wittkower). He feared that the iconologists were apt to neglect style, form, and creativity. Neumeyer’s survey is surprising because it was the perception of the closure of art history in the 1950s to anything beyond its traditional frontiers that would later drive the self-reform of the discipline in the 1970s. Of 430 articles published in the Art Bulletin between 1923 and 1948, Neumeyer had to concede, only thirty-two covered art since 1800, and only twenty-two the arts of Asia. Still, in Europe an article on Asian art would have been found only in a specialized journal, not in the general periodicals of the discipline. That is still largely true today. These articles bear witness to an increasing submission of the study of world art to the common principles and procedures of empirical scholarship. Sometimes this dovetailed with indigenous traditions of connoisseurship and historiography, principally with Chinese or Japanese art, sometimes not.
The survey course, or series of lectures introducing students to world or Western art, had been around a long time. Charles Eliot Norton’s course at Harvard was the model. Survey courses build art history’s financial base and they still initiate thousands. The aims and style of such courses have been much altered, but many still rely on the textbook published in 1962 by the emigré scholar H. W. Janson, History of Art. Janson distilled the century’s art-historical knowledge. His treatment was evenhanded across time and place yet keyed to the concept of the timeless and placeless masterpiece, a concept that met students’ expectation that the purpose of a liberal-arts education was improvement through exposure to the best. The survey course protected the idea of art as rarefied and esoteric, salvaging remnants of aristocratic ideas of decorum and grace by translating them into the idiom of modern sociology. The premise of the survey course was that form was the medium of achievement and expression. The biography of form preserved the continuity of the present with the by now multiple ancien régimes, reconnecting with those distant societies that preceded computers, decolonization, two World Wars, photography, the French Revolution, and even the steam engine. This was the continuity that had been explicitly asserted by Burckhardt and Riegl, but really by all art historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In its proudest, least ineffectual versions, the life of form overcomes barriers of language and mistrust, the most bitter memories of injury and betrayal, overcomes also the Renaissance, finding common cause with the illiberal and misguided societies of the Middle Ages. This is Janson on the twelfth-century portal sculpture at Moissac: “Human and animal forms are treated with the same incredible flexibility, so that the spidery Prophet on the side of the trumeau seems perfectly adapted to his precarious perch. … He even remains free to cross his legs in a dancelike movement.” The praise is unstinting; the emphasis is not on limits but on freedom, freedom even from tradition: “intense expression, unbridled fantasy, and a nervous agility of form that owes more to manuscript illumination and metalwork than to the sculptural tradition of antiquity.” In Janson’s textbook there are no breaks and no sense that art in the modern world has either lost its way or come into its own.
Contrast this with Ernst H. Gombrich’s Story of Art (1950), which had told the story of art as representation, a story neither homogeneous nor uninterrupted. Art beyond representation escapes Gombrich. He narrates medieval art but his heart is not in it. For Gombrich medieval art is applied art. This is Gombrich on the late twelfth-century church of St.-Trophime in Arles. In the tympanum above the door, the sculptor has carved an implacable enthroned Christ, as if sitting in judgment, flanked by four creatures, as described in the book of Ezekiel and later interpreted as symbols of the four Evangelists. Gombrich apologizes for the style: “We must not expect such sculptures to look as natural, graceful and light as classical works. They are all the more impressive because of their massive solemnity. It becomes much easier to see at a glance what is represented, and they fit in much better with the grandeur of the whole building.” Is that all he can think of to say? He musters about as much enthusiasm for this masterpiece of Romanesque art as could be expected from an open-minded antiquarian of the early nineteenth century.
Gombrich (1909–2001) wrote a dissertation under the supervision of Julius von Schlosser. In 1936 he was called to London by Fritz Saxl to put Aby Warburg’s papers in order. This project, interrupted by the war, generated an intellectual biography of Warburg (1970) that, though often criticized by defenders of Warburg’s legacy, comes closer to grasping the essence of Warburg’s thought than many other studies. Gombrich stayed on at the Warburg Library, by now a degree-granting branch of the University of London, and from 1959 to 1972 served as director. Gombrich published important studies on iconographic topics in Renaissance art and mostly ignored his British art-historical colleagues (Anthony Blunt, Kenneth Clark) or quarreled with other emigrés, notably Otto Pächt. Gombrich eventually aimed his writings beyond the discipline or even over the heads of the professoriate, at an educated lay public. All his books had their origins in public lecture series except one, the most widely read of all, The Story of Art. In that book, still in print and widely read, Gombrich addressed everybody. He is the most widely read of all art historians, even more than Burckhardt, and possibly the most widely read scholar of the twentieth century in any field.
Gombrich cannot take modern art seriously, whereas Janson did. Modern art was too concept-driven for him. Gombrich, in a later book, would disparage even Renaissance art of the Neoplatonic sort for its submission to the concept. He deflated the enterprise of the early modern art academies by suggesting that Neoplatonism, which “held sway … for at least three hundred years, from 1550 to 1850” and which ascribed to the painter the gift of perceiving “eternal patterns,” hardly represented a break with the Middle Ages at all. For Neoplatonic aesthetics was basically “a continuation of Villard’s [Villard de Honnecourt, a thirteenth-century artist] conceptual art, with a slightly specious philosophical halo.” Now, in modernity, art seems to regress to medieval conceptualism. Conceptual art, modern or medieval, seemed to Gombrich a useless luxury, for it is so much easier to make than nonconceptual art.
If Gombrich points to an obscure future where art may be unrecognizable, and where the entire modern project of art history breaks down, Janson tells a story that need not ever end. Janson’s narrative of a continuity of purpose carried by form is still the invisible framework for most art historical research.