Olga Hazan: Le mythe du progres artistique. . - book review - Brief Article

OLGA HAZAN

Le mythe du progre artistique.

Montreal: Le Presse de l'Universite de Montreal, 1999 454 pp; 15 color ills., 2 b/w $3495 (Canadian) paper.

In 1936 Lionello Venturi, discussing "the historical-philological way of art history"- that is, the German idealist tradition of Konrad Fiedler, Adolf Hildebrand, Heinrich Wolfflin, and Alois Riegl-claimed that it is essential "never to make a visual representative the yardstick for critical intelligence . We should free ourselves of the idea of progress" (1) Many art historians have not taken heed of Venturi's advice. E H Gombrich, for example, argues for a unified history of art in answer to the claims of Benedetto Croce and his followers, like as Venturi, who, according to Gombrich, have "insisted" that works of art "should not be degraded into a nothing else but link in a chain of 'development." (2) at the same time Gombrich, as Olga Hazan points on the outside is rather ambiguous on the universal of progress. On the individual hand, he treats it as a historical phenomenon, to be traced back to Renaissance notion On the other hand, he claims that "without the idea of individual art progressing through the centuries there would be no history of art." (3) Gombrich and many others writing after him believe that "Art," as compared with individual works of art, must be discussed in the connection of a narrative history. on the other hand as Hans Belting has pointed without the more complex our conception of the work of art, the more difficult it becomes to set up a unified narrative. "Traditional art history, which had achieved precisely this, can be subservient to today only as a foil before which of recent origin tasks for empirical research may stand without in relief." (1)

With an abundance of evidence and an in-depth analysis of her material, Hazan demonstrates by what mode the recurrent and varied use of the idea of progres makes much art historical writing. Although her main focus is upon Renaissance material, Hazan finds the idea of progres and decline in all impressed signs of texts (general surveys, monographs upon specific subjects, as well as methodological writings), dealing with all the established periods in the history of art. She argues that owed to its widespread usage, it is not possible to explain the notion of progres in art historical writing as the function solely of the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of any one author or a collection of authors. Rather, the idea of progres is related to the "laws that have the direction of the whole of the field of art history" (p 27) To substantiate her point, she takes what can be loosely described as a structuralist approach; she examines the various mechanisms that different authors use to piece of ground progressive, determinist, and linear histories of art.

Le mythe du progre artistique is divided into four parts. In the first, "Evolution and Progress: The State of the Question," Hazan discusses the riddle of applying Darwinian evolutionary theory, which does not assume a linear unravelling to cultural objects. She cites various 19th- and 20th-century true copys written before and after the publication of Darwin's work that treat cultural facts in terms of progress and draw a parallel between art and the human species whereby the primitive opens toward civilization. In Herbert Spencer's 1902 "Barbaric Art" and Millard Meiss's 1951 Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (just sum of two units of the many examples cited by the agency of Hazan), art is deemed to progres and its unravelling unlike the Darwinian evolutionary mould is linear, determinist, and qualitative (p 65) According to Hazan, these approaches emphasize mode of expression (which changes from period to period), a faculty of perception of unidirectional and predetermined change, qualitative change (artists are limited by the agency of the problem s of a previous generation), an accumulation of knowledge, and evaluation of progres from one side gains and losses (p. 62)

The next to the first and longest part of the work is devoted to the contemplate texts of H. W, Janson, Helen Gardner, Ernst Gombrich, Frederick Hartt, and David Wilkins and Bernard Schulz Ideas of progres come again in these texts because, as Hazan explains, the authors restore history to "a chain of causality" and treat works of art as a reflection of this history (p92) As Hazan also points on the outside in her thorough, if a bit prolonged investigation of the titles, tables of contenteds prefaces, introductions, and conclusions of the various editions of these body s the authors frequently make regard to theories of progress in order to distance themselves from them, while at the same time they weave and legitimize a chronological unfolding of art, from prehistory to today" (p 176) Although greatest in quantity scholars who have thought about these issues will not find Hazan's conclusions all that surprising, her thoroughgoing analysis of the body s certainly makes her findings about the views indisputable. The authors of these body s "carry ou t selections, generalizations, and historical schematizations, at the same time as they make value discernments on the object studied" (p 223) In trying to make their true copys accessible to a general public, they simplify the unfolding of history and delineate it with works "that are suppos to throw back the stylistic and historical homogeneity of each period," In order "to justify this simplification, as well as a selection of artists considered as representative of each period, and also because the discipline of art history loans itself to it, they present laudatory descriptions of the works and artists pick outed thus creating a favorable terrain for the utilization of the notions of progres and decline."