12
The Turn from Marx to Warburg in West German Art History, 1968–90
MARXIST ART HISTORY IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC
The resurgence of Marxist art history after 1968 throughout western Europe took different forms, depending on political conditions in each state. In the Federal Republic of Germany, it inserted itself into a challenge to the institutional and personal persistence of academic elites from the National Socialist dictatorship into the newly constituted democracy. It was aimed at the defensively apolitical conservatism of the prevailing West German art-historical establishment, which had politically compromised itself before 1945.
The academic challenge ran parallel to a change of government drawn out over more than three years. In 1966, the Christian Democrats, in office since the inception of the Federal Republic in 1949, saw themselves obliged to form a coalition government with the Social Democratic opposition. This in turn provoked the formation of a self-avowed ‘extra-parliamentary opposition’ on the left, which threatened to jeopardise the Federal Republic’s prized constitutional stability. Then, as a result of a close election in 1969, the Christian Democrats were ousted by a coalition of Social Democrats and Free Democrats led by Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt. By that time, the ‘extra-parliamentary opposition’, with a fully developed Marxist ideology in place, was entrenched in the public sphere. Another kind of Marxist challenge came from the German Democratic Republic, put in place as a Soviet response to the foundation of the Federal Republic sponsored by the western Allies. It was a communist-dominated ‘people’s democracy’ which styled itself the first ever socialist state on German soil. Any left-wing cultural opposition in the Federal Republic intent on radicalising democracy found itself obliged to take a maximum distance from the GDR’s ‘Marxist–Leninist’ state doctrine.
In this situation of political strife, junior scholars who promoted Marxist art history as a vehicle of anti-establishment scholarship took recourse to Marx’s and Engels’s early writings, that is, those antedating the foundational texts at the core of communist orthodoxy. Their aim was a potentially revolutionary cultural critique of capitalist society rather than the political empowerment of the working class, let alone any socialist state formation.1
Such a take on Marxist theory, deliberately disengaged from the practice of art history in the GDR, could draw on the example of only a handful of marginal scholars in exile who had practiced a self-avowed Marxist art history in the decade after the Second World War, most notably the two Hungarians Arnold Hauser and Frederick Antal, and the German Max Raphael. These authors were bent on discerning class relations in styles and art forms as identified by conventional art history before them. Abiding by accepted periodisations, they stopped short of inserting their accounts into any long-term historical perspective of capitalist development and revolutionary change in the Marxist tradition.
In order to make up for the gap between the rudimentary state of Marxist art history and the theoretical cutting edge of the Marxist tradition, West German Marxist art historians, like their colleagues in other disciplines, absorbed the body of literature emanating from the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. Founded in 1924 as a research centre to serve the workers’ movement, since the start of the Depression this institute had started to retrench into academic scholarship. After its emigration to New York in 1934, it had deliberately stayed clear of left-wing politics. In the years following its return to Frankfurt in 1950, it had become a dominant influence in the public and academic culture of the Federal Republic, going against the grain of its predominantly conservative politics. In 1968, in the midst of widespread student unrest, two of its former and current members, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas, sought to revalidate its Marxist origins.2
Art-historical scholars associated with the neo-Marxist movement were acting from within the Ulmer Verein (Ulm Association, hereafter UV), a dissident spin-off from the German Art Historians Association (Deutscher Kunsthistorikerverband), the mainstream professional organisation. The UV was founded in 1968 to promote the interests of junior scholars through a democratic opening of publication venues, congresses and, ultimately, university appointments. Within one or two years, its journal, the Kritische Berichte, became the West German platform for neo-Marxist art history. At the 1970 Congress of the German Art Historians Association, its most prominent members organised a provocative session, titled ‘The Work of Art Between Scholarship and Weltanschauung’, a trenchant reckoning with the persistence of the Nazi past in the art-historical discipline.3
Two of the Ulm Association’s most prominent members were Martin Warnke, appointed to a professorship at Marburg University in 1970, and his student, Horst Bredekamp, who in 1975 received his doctorate from Warnke. The rise to pre-eminence of these two scholars over the next 30 years within the art-historical establishment of the Federal Republic as professors at the universities of Hamburg and Berlin respectively is central to the turn from Marx to Warburg, which is the theme of this chapter.
Warnke’s book Bau und Überbau (Structure and Superstructure) of 1976, developed out of his seminars at Marburg, and Bredekamp’s book Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte (Art as a Medium of Social Conflicts) of 1975, developed from his doctoral dissertation, were the two outstanding works of Marxist art history published during the decade.4 Both offer comprehensive analyses of medieval art – architecture in Warnke’s case, religious imagery in Bredekamp’s – as a vehicle of class relations – consensual ones in Warnke’s case, conflictual ones in Bredekamp’s.
In Bau und Überbau, Warnke proceeds from a sociological analysis of the published body of written sources about medieval building. He elucidates the cooperation between distinct segments of medieval societies that was necessary in order to raise ecclesiastical architecture up to super-regional standards of accomplishment, out of reach for single patrons. He shows how kings and bishops, monks and burghers, noblemen and commoners had to resolve their social antagonisms and pool their rights and resources for the purpose of an architecture meant to transfigure the coherence of Christian communities over and above class divisions.
In Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte, Bredekamp deals with the protracted and often deadly debates about the legitimacy of religious imagery from early Christianity to Iconoclasm and on to the Hussite reformation. Behind them he uncovers class struggles between secular rulers and ecclesiastical institutions for political control and economic exploitation of their subjects. He shows how they used pictures of Christ and the saints as power symbols in their contest for the religious allegiance of a population spellbound by the magic of images. More radical than Warnke, Bredekamp thus revalidated Marx’s early critique of religion as an instrument of power in the hands of the ruling class, as outlined in the notes for his article ‘On Religious Art’ of 1842.5
THE TURN TO CONSERVATIVE POLITICS
Between 1978 and 1982, Marxist scholars in the capitalist democracies of Europe and the United States found out that their axiomatic anti-capitalist postures ran counter to the democratic majority support of newly elected conservative governments. These were bent on redressing the worldwide recession under way since 1973 through an unrestrained capitalist development fuelled by deficit spending, energised through an arms race with the Soviet Union and enforced by the political disempowerment of the working class.
In this changed political environment, the revalidation of Marxist scholarship, art history included, lost most of its ideological resonance in the public sphere, since it was no longer able to redeem its claims to democratic support. It was outflanked by a myopic social history of art, intent on artistic practices, milieus of patronage, and cultural functions of artworks, but refraining from any synthesis with political history at large. Non-political post-structuralist theories of social diversity and competing claims to self-empowerment advanced by upstart minorities stopped short of the totalising political dynamics projected within the Marxist tradition.
It took West German art historians, led by Warnke and Bredekamp, nearly ten years to fashion the work of Aby Warburg and his library into a new, compelling paradigm for such a depoliticised social history of art with a German pedigree. It was made to suit the newly ascendant ‘citadel culture’ of self-assured capitalism now dominant in the Federal Republic of the 1980s,6 with its residual anxieties about social injustice and the threat of war.
An international Warburg Congress held at Hamburg in 1990 certified Warburg’s posthumous elevation to the status of a pivotal figure for German art history of the day.7 It happened to fall in the year of German unification, with the political, economic and social systems of the Federal Republic left intact and dominant, those of the German Democratic Republic dismantled and discredited. When German unification could be hailed as a triumph both of democratic freedom over communist oppression and of productive capitalism over bankrupt socialism, it was a bad time for a defence of the Marxist tradition.
From now on, forging a long-term cultural historicity for the ‘Berlin Republic’, the reconstituted national state became a political concern for art history as well. Its habitual yearning for traditions antedating, and untainted by, the National Socialist dictatorship was imbued with a new sense of urgency. Central to this quest was the long-held assumption that the displacement of Jewish scholars under Hitler had deprived German art history of its most enlightened practitioners.
Recovery of the Warburg Library’s tradition, the most significant group contribution to German art history by Jewish scholars, tied in with this agenda. The worldwide reputation these scholars had attained after their escape to England and the United States confirmed the lasting viability of this tradition. Soon after the Hamburg Congress, the recovery was institutionalised under Warnke’s leadership by restoring the original building of the ‘Bibliothek Warburg’ at Hamburg to become a fully operative research centre.
At the Hamburg Congress, Bredekamp hailed Warburg as one of the most influential thinkers of the century, on a par with Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, and reclaimed the Warburg tradition to back up the international standing West German art-historical scholarship had attained on account of its professional modernisation.8 The critical achievements of some of its participants for the political renewal of West German art history 20 years earlier were left out of the equation. The congress transfigured Warburg as a fountainhead of two of the most urgent concerns of cultural history of the day: a supra-historical science of images and an anthropology of artistic culture.
It was not the critical dissolution of the ‘Renaissance’ ideal into a self-serving ideology of the Florentine merchant class or into a superstitious vehicle of Reformation propaganda, the achievement of Warburg’s ‘first period’, which fired up the imagination of most Congress speakers. Rather, it was Warburg’s later speculations about the life-sustaining power of images as an anthropological constant factor, the target of his journey for the ‘serpents’ ritual’ of the Arizona Indians,9 and the grand project of his Mnemosyne Atlas in the making.10
The Congress never addressed the social history of art as a methodological concern. Warburg’s peculiar version of it was simply taken for granted as the premise of his search for the anthropological foundations of pictorial culture. It could be acknowledged as yet another scheme for the interrelation of art and society, whose unresolved nexus had become all but commonplace in international art history of the time.
WARBURG’S SOCIAL HISTORY OF ART
Warburg’s social history of art was limited to the artistic culture of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and was not advanced with claims to stand as a paradigm beyond his field of inquiry. With sober-minded accuracy, he managed to disentangle the professional, sociological and ideological mechanisms of that artistic culture. Yet, unlike Marx and writers on art within the Marxist tradition, he never cared to anchor its functions as part of larger economic, social, and political processes transcending his immediate subjects.
It is the expansion of pictorial culture into seemingly non-artistic fields such as pageantry or printed broadsheets, where a vital impact of imagery on social life is most apparent, that has attracted art historians to Warburg’s approach. No matter how inclusive, though, even this expansion takes visual culture for granted as a potent force without measuring it against the historical realities it purports to represent, that is, it stops short of ideology critique germane for the Marxist tradition pursued during the 1970s by Warnke, Bredekamp, and other contributors to the Kritische Berichte. Warburg’s approach exuded a peculiar appeal for art-historical scholarship during the 1990s, which had become uncertain of aesthetic standards and prone to submerge art into visual culture in exchange for an expanded social relevancy of pictorial representation. Unlike Marxist-inspired art history of the 1970s, it tended to disregard both the aesthetic distinctions of art from visual media in general and the social circumscription of art as a privileged realm.
Warburg’s concentration on one historical period, at least as far as his investigations into the social history of art are concerned, was narrowed down still further to a single-minded focus on the cultural ambitions of the Florentine merchant class. It was this class that he obsessively scrutinised for its attempts to strike a balance in its public self-display between financial calculus, catholic faith, and astrological superstition. What attracted him was its yearning for the self-assertion, and self-awareness, of the individual, a notion of the ‘Renaissance’ ideal he took from Jacob Burckhardt’s writings.
In Warburg’s telescoped correlation of art production and social formation, money takes the place of work as the mainstay of the wealth that underwrites artistic culture. Segments of society beyond the direct participants in this transaction between art and money fall from view. Artists’ professional accomplishment consists in the delivery of a beautiful visual setting, the learned profundity and emotional ambivalence of which can animate the patron’s self-reflection.
Thus, single-handedly, Warburg transformed early ‘Renaissance’ painting from a timeless aesthetic ideal of emancipated humanism into an unapologetic class culture of enterprising merchants. That class culture he transfigured into an unacknowledged ideology of the modern subject, intent on mastering the business world without losing its ethical bearings. At the historic turning point of 1990, such an ideology appealed to the culture of ascendant capitalism in the ‘Berlin Republic’.
Warburg’s move from a social history of art to a fundamentalist anthropology of pictorial expression, which enthralls current historiography about him, went in tandem with Germany’s political trajectory from the self-secure Wilhelmine Empire to the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic. His micro-analytical inquiry into the ‘serpents’ ritual’ of the Arizona Indians and his macro-synthetic project of the Mnemosyne atlas are extremes of a flight from historical constraints. Both conjure up a time-transcending imagery of uncertain origin, drawn upon but not invented by its makers, and transfigured into a quasi-metaphysical anthropology apt to stabilise self-consciousness.
Many speakers at the Hamburg Congress of 1990 took the implicit claim to a supra-historical profundity of art-historical scholarship as Warburg’s legacy for themselves to reanimate, if not to duplicate. With not a moment’s reflection about the historic date of their meeting, they made the individual’s quest for cultural self-orientation into the key issue of ‘modernity’ (‘die Moderne’). With unrivalled flamboyancy, Kurt Forster compared the Warburg Library with an electric power plant and the Mnemosyne Atlas with El Lissitsky’s photomontages.11
Warburg and most, if not all, of his immediate associates were averse to any philosophy of history that subordinates art as a discrete component. Therein lies their irreconcilable difference from the intellectual tradition of the left that leads from Hegel to Marx and on to contemporary thinkers such as Bourdieu or Habermas. Rather, Warburg’s pre-eminent philosophical authority was Friedrich Nietzsche, not only for his conception of a classical antiquity in which the ‘Dionysian’ mindset was valorised above all else, but also for his ideal of art as a life-enhancing cultural device. Both these tenets underlie his definitions of art as a spiritual resource for the well-to-do merchant class of fifteenth-century Florence. It figures that the turn from Marx to Warburg under way in West German art history since the beginning of the 1980s coincided with the ascendancy of Nietzsche as the principal reference figure for the public and academic culture of the Federal Republic.12
In the decade following the Hamburg Congress, both Warnke and Bredekamp continued to invoke the Warburg legacy for their successful institutional ventures of art history at the universities of Hamburg and Berlin respectively. It enabled them to anchor key ideas of modernisation current in German political culture in the historiographical authority of tradition. Warnke’s project for the Warburg-Haus, labeled ‘Political Iconography,’ is focused on a typology of pictorial formulae for political culture that cuts across historical periods and political systems.13 The programme of the Helmholtz Centre for Cultural Technology, founded in 1998 by Bredekamp at the Humboldt University in Berlin as an interdisciplinary venture, projects a historically grounded science of images as vehicles of knowledge and communication, no longer confined to art and aesthetic expression.14
Radical art history today entails a two-fold response to the historic turn from Marx to Warburg in German art history during the 1980s, sketched out above. It can spell out both the continuities and distinctions between the theoretical premises, methodological procedures, and thematic interests in the work of its two protagonists before and after.
As part of an effort at recovering what Marxist art history of the 1970s achieved, it can revalidate the results of Warnke’s and Bredekamp’s books from that decade, Bau und Überbau and Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte, which have had less of an impact on the field of medieval art history than they deserved. An ideology critique of political iconography and cultural technology, the new concepts advanced by the two authors in the later parts of their careers, is bound up with their institutional ascendancy in the unified Federal Republic of the early 1990s. At a time when a robust economic and political self-assurance was flanked by the recovery of long-term intellectual traditions for the reconsolidated German state, Warburg was more readily embraced than Marx. Fifteen years later, in plain political and economic crisis, the resurgence of the left in the political culture of the Federal Republic makes this move appear to be a passing one.