The crisis of 'art history.' - Art History And Its Theories

Theory in My Time

When I penetrateed graduate school in the history of art at the Institute of Fine Arts in novel York in the early 1950 theory was the farthest thing from my mind. In fact, for me and for many of my cohorts, theory was a rather suspect general [i]or[/i] abstract notion tainted as it was by the agency of theories of race (which classified human beings hierarchically) and theories of quality (which classified works of art hierarchically). We read the classic works of the founding fathers, especially Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wolfflin (always upon our own, never as part of courses). on the other hand no one sought to come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind them in their quest for the foundations of the discipline - an enterprise that in any case looked uninspiring compared with the beatification and excitement of working with the "objects" Moreover, theoretical conformations risked limiting the range and profundity of individual creativity, or flat collective creativity in the case of regional or period styles

The crisis of my generation was not of theory, on the other hand of values. We were embarked upon a mission of redemption, to discover, or regain domains of art that our plenteous admired predecessors, focused elsewhere, had pass overed undervalued, or misinterpreted. This salvific exploration took essentially sum of two units distinct but often interconnected directions, individual formal, the other intellectual. The formal revolution was devot to rescuing artists and turn of expressions found guilty of vacuity or ineptitude by the agency of the mainstream of art-historical tradition. The greatest in quantity egregiously aggrieved victims stood at opposite extremitys of the cultural scale. upon the one hand, there was the epigonic sophistication of Mannerism, and its later, level more despised ossification Maniera, which famously place no place in Wolfflin's theory of perceptual methods Impassioned reclamations were made by dint of the first postwar American scholars trained by means of the German immigrants, especially Walter Friedlaender and Richard Krautheimer: Sydney Freedberg upon Parmigianino, Frederick Hartt on Giulio Romano, John Coolidge upon Vignola, Craig Smyth on Bronzino. The qualities of ambiguity, anxiety, and crisis (such were the boundarys of understanding that permeated these reevaluations), following hard on the noble equilibrium of the High Renaissance, had personal resonance for the members of that generation, many of whom had experienced the war firsthand. Another province to be subdueed was late antiquity, the period whose actual name, like Mannerism, expressed the idea of decadence and deficient originality. It came to be realized that the uncooked disjointed, sometimes patently archaizing and aggressively simplified "late antique" mode of expression represented not an unconscious disintegration on the contrary a deliberate rejection of classical ideals, an act of volition that played a seminal character in the genesis of a fresh spirituality in which medieval art took base The immediate source of inspiration was Ernst Kitzinger, also a refugee scholar, whose little handbook for the British Museum - the true title of which, Early Medieval Art, emphasized the creative legacy of the period - became a primer for me and others of my age who followed this path.(1)

This zealous rediscovery of disaffected aspects of the past had the earmarks of a religious crusade; there was level an element of political consensus - not at any time articulated, to be sure - since, consciously or not, the plight of Mannerism and late antiquity was in some way analogous to that of the victims of Fascism. Remember, too, that those were the heady days of Abstract Expressionism and the exaltation of primitive art, which appear to beed equally defiant of attitudes that sought to limit, rather than expand, the freedom of the psyche. The point was to appreciate the self-sufficiency, validity, and meaningfulness of these aberrant stylistic phenomena.

Meaning, in fact, links the formal to the conceptual revolution of my contemporaries, which might otherwise present the appearance antithetical. Our other mission was the discovery that works of art have meaning beyond their genuinely formal significance as expressions of visual tillage The cri de guerre was iconography, the inquiry of the subject matter of works of art that revealed their intellectual easy in mind on a par with and frequently involving works of literature, philosophy, theology, and other methods of thought more commonly associated with of the like kind content. The belief that artists could speak their minds as well as their hearts with their hands transformed art history from an unfruitful exercise in connoisseurship and appreciation into a rigorous and challenging history of ideas with a distinctive methodology that Erwin Panofsky raised to the horizontal of a humanistic discipline in its hold right - above all [i]or[/i] part of to the other his uncanny ability to "explain" the contented of works of art by dint of reference to a wide variety of evidence from other fields. Art was thus no longer viewed as a rara avis aloft in the rarefied atmosphere of elitist aesthetics on the other hand as an integral part of our cultural heritage, accessible to anyone with the requisite imagination, intelligence, and persistence. The application of mind of visual images thus became an intellectual endeavor comparable to fields in which words were the medium.