Art in Crisis

The Lost Center

Hans Sedlmayr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351531092
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The history of art from the early nineteenth century on- ward is commonly viewed as a succession of conflicts between innovatory and established styles that culminated in the formalism and aesthetic autonomy of high modernism. In Art and Crisis, first published in 1948, Hans Sedlmayr argues that the aesthetic disjunctures of modern art signify more than matters of style and point to much deeper processes of cultural and religious disintegration. As Roger Kimball observes in his informative new introduction, Art in Crisis is as much an exercise in cultural or spiritual analysis as it is a work of art history. Sedlmayr's reads the art of the last two centuries as a fever chart of the modern age in its greatness and its decay. He discusses the advent of Romanticism with its freeing of the imagination as a conscious sundering of art from humanist and religious traditions with the aesthetic treated as a category independent of human need. Looking at the social purposes of architecture, Sedlmayr shows how the landscape garden, the architectural monument, and the industrial exhibition testified to a new relationship not only between man and his handiwork but also between man and the forces that transcend him. In these institutions man deifies his inventive powers with which he hopes to master and supersede nature. Likewise, the art museum denies transcendence through a cultural leveling in which Heracles and Christ become brothers as objects of aesthetic contemplation. At the center of Art in Crisis is the insight that, in art as in life, the pursuit of unqualified autonomy is in the end a prescription for disaster, aesthetic as well as existential. Sedlmayr writes as an Augustinian Catholic. For him, the underlying motive for the pursuit of autonomy is pride. The lost center of his subtitle is God. The dream of autonomy, Sedlmayr argues, is for finite, mortal creatures, a dangerous illusion. The book invites serious analysis from art cri

Part One

SYMPTOMS

I affirm
Nature is whole in her least things exprest,
Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm.
Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
And all man's Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.

FRANCIS THOMPSON.

I
New Master Problems

For the task set us is nothing less than life itself as it struggles to find expression in concrete form.—H. SCHRADE.

SINCE the end of the eighteenth century our principal tasks have included some that were wholly new. They have included problems that have either never previously existed at all or, if they did exist, were of subordinate importance.

Till then men had been chiefly concerned with the church and the palace, but now these things began to be thrust aside, and a succession of new preoccupations, one following rapidly upon the other, began to take their place. Between 1760 and the present day we can distinguish six or seven different master problems, each in its own time clamouring for solution over the whole of Europe. We have landscape gardening, the architectural monument, the museum, the theatre, the exhibition and the factory. None of them as a problem can claim priority of place for more than one or, at the most, for two generations. Each of them, however, is a symptom and we can recognize in the order in which they follow one another a certain specific trend.

Indeed, these master problems show us the main lines of this trend more clearly than do other artistic developments, although the process is to some extent obscured by certain extraneous currents and cross-currents that in the main have no intrinsic cohesion. If we can look at the matter from this point of view, we shall obtain the best available guiding thread through the labyrinth of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There is one reservation we must make immediately. We have spoken of certain master problems, but it is only with certain key problems of architecture that we are here concerned. It is only the architects and the great landscape gardeners—and indeed we shall mention all of these—that are relevant to our analysis. What has been said only applies in slight measure to the great achievements of painting, despite their profound significance in their own field. This very field, however, lies aside and apart from that in which these master problems arise. Indeed there are really no pictorial master problems at all. Painting is practised as a free art and not to serve any specific end, it is not practised as an art that has a clearly delimited task to perform in public life.

We must, however, observe in this connection that the new master problems do not relate to composite works of art like the palace and the church, which gave to the plastic arts a distinctive place and theme; they are either concerned with pure architecture, as in the case of the architectural monument, or with a mere architectural framework such as a house or museum, which could be filled with the free arts according to taste. It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that, thanks to the building of theatres, there arose a renaissance of the composite work of art, as such, and in this task alone of all those here concerned painters and sculptors of distinction worked within the strict limits set them by their commission.

Yet in what sense can we still speak of master problems? It is not arbitrary to select just the few we have chosen out of all the multiplicity of tasks that now begin to claim the creative artist’s attention. For alongside of those here selected there were stock exchanges to be built, parliaments, universities, hotels, hospitals, railway stations and so on.

We have chosen the term master problem in relation to certain tasks for the following reasons:

1. (1) because those tasks were of a character that particularly attracted the creative imagination;
2. (2) because, where these problems were concerned, there came to be a kind of certitude in the whole manner of approach, and something in the nature of a fixed type came into being;
3. (3) because, even if only in a limited degree, they exercise a certain power over the creation of style in general, so that the manner in which other tasks were executed tended to approximate to the example which they set;
4. (4) because consciously or unconsciously these are the problems that may claim to have taken the place of the ancient sacred architecture.

There is moreover in many of the works to which this term master problem has been applied, a suggestion of art’s communal significance and power, a thing that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with their unlimited individualism, tended almost wholly to lose. Although they lack the power of the great composite works of art of the past, they are, for all that, their heirs.

The master problem, in the early period of European civilization, was the building of churches. It was par excellence the great composite task in which all the arts were employed. None of the other artistic problems of the day can compare with it in importance, and all in the matter of style and motif came under its influence.

Beginning with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, new problems began to arise. Among these, in a few isolated districts, that of the town hall attained for a short time an importance comparable to that of church building, and began to develop a new pictorial world of its own. The future belonged to two different problems, which to a certain extent were two expressions of one and the same problem, it belonged to the castle and the palace. Created in the fourteenth century, these last began by the fifteenth to carry a weight equal to that of church building. Indeed their importance tended at times to be even greater. They too became sacred buildings, centres of the cult of the great, the divine man, and developed their own pictorial world, their own iconology. Beside the composite works of art, which are the churches, there now stand their worldly counterparts, and it is these that seem of the two to have the greater self-assurance.

The Withering of the Old Composite Works of Art

In the course of the nineteenth century the old master problems begin to lose their priority. Not that many castles, urban palaces and churches fail to get built. Many are still erected, and often at great cost. But the old certitude and self-assurance is gone and the new edifices lack the power to originate styles.

Church architecture can no longer produce a new clear-cut building. It gropes indecisively after empty shells, seeking vainly for some kind of hold in them; it explores the early Christian, Byzantine, the Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance. From time to time it even seeks refuge in the externals of a Greek temple. Yet how superficial is this whole system of forms is shown with horrifying clarity by Schinkel’s designs for the Werdersche Kirche in Berlin. The basic cubic shape has remained unchanged, but it is dressed up, it is masked to suit the changing whim of the beholder, now with Romanesque, now with the Gothic, now with disguises suggestive of the antique. This crass divorce between basic and subordinate design, the latter being now conceived as mere decoration, becomes the fate of European art as a whole, yet nowhere is it so plainly visible as in ecclesiastical architecture, a thing for which there are no doubt deeper reasons.

The fact is that the whole conception of a church building— and this not in Protestant countries alone—is of something massive and bare, it is a thing speaking to the reason. The religious element in it is not sacramental and mythical, rather it is poetic, it is not something organic, but a kind of garment, a piece of ideological drapery borrowed from the past. Only once in the whole period from 1760 to the present day does it seem as if the problem of ecclesiastical architecture could again become the master problem of the day. This was at the time of the Holy Alliance. It was at this time that Schinkel conceived his designs for a German National Cathedral in Gothic form. In 1815 there appeared a pamphlet, The New Church, and shortly after this men set about the building and completion of Cologne Cathedral with considerable enthusiasm, but again the thought inspiring these plans betrays a certain hollowness, and even later in the century, when the new Neo-Gothic churches cling more faithfully to their historical models, the details betray the unsubstantial quality of ghosts conjured up from another world. For all that, the Neo- Gothic was the form of ecclesiastical architecture that maintained itself most consistently and for the longest time, though its individual manifestations expressed a wide variety of spiritual attitudes. Right up to our own day churches continued to be built in Neo-Gothic style.

Yet, unlike the revival of scholastic philosophy, the revival of the Gothic church did not succeed—it had no spiritual content— a fact which finds its most palpable expression in the circumstance that this architectural revival had no pictorial counterpart. Architectural achievement no longer had any link with the anaemic lucubrations of contemporary religious art. The church of the nineteenth century is bankrupt of anything in the nature of an ‘iconology’. What is produced in the way of pictures is to an astonishing degree theologically empty of imagination, its content being subjective and devoid of genuine precision of thought. The story of the decline of Christian iconology—it is paralleled by the decline of ancient mythology—will one day have to be written, so that we may see from it just what really did happen to the nineteenth-century church. There was no longer any picture produced that had a valid place as an instrument of a cult. Nor could it be otherwise, for religious sentiment had become purely aesthetic.

Attempts to make so-called ‘modern’ architectural trends bear fruit in the ecclesiastical field began late, and, despite some achievements by outstanding artists, remained on the whole as unsuccessful as were the efforts to win back the working man to Christianity. Neither the worker nor the new technical architecture was ever Christianized. Yet those visions of enormous buildings made of iron and glass seem to have had in them a hidden transcendental element, and one cannot help feeling that the very promising conception of these structures held out the possibility of a new kind of church, precisely as, at the end of the antique world, the new form of Christian religious edifices developed from the profane architecture of the day. But the opportunity was not seen, or, if seen, was not exploited.

The story of the castle and the palace is the same. Towards the middle of the century castle architecture displays even greater conservatism than the church, its traditional forms persisting with a chronological irrelevance that suggests the museum piece. Round 1830, however, this domain also is invaded by an all-pervading uncertainty. A new type of castle with genuine validity of meaning failed utterly to appear, nor could it do so. The castles of Ludwig II of Bavaria seem to exhibit the general malady in an extreme form; the castle became merely theatrical—in the worst sense of that term. Nowhere is that more in evidence than in the reproductions of Versailles, at Herrenchiemsee, a thing that many have attempted to endow with a more profound meaning than it actually possesses.¹ Here the rooms in which a monarch living on the verge of lunacy sought to enact the part of a new Roi Soleil, are in the general plan set in the midst of others which serve no clearly discernible purpose at all. They are thus literally in the void. This is a symptom and symbol of what the castle stands for spiritually—and its plagiarized iconology is as sterile and as empty as itself.

The uncertainty that is increasingly displayed in tackling these ancient problems is all too palpable; the fact is that the first real attempts to form a new style originated from the handling of quite different themes. They derived from attempts to solve problems unknown to the earlier epochs of Western culture or to any other culture of which world history has a record.

However, it is as well to start this general review with a work of art that over some seventy years absorbed an enormous volume of spiritual and material energy. It has certainly the right to the title of master problem, though during its period of greatness the emphasis on other forms of artistic effort may from time to time have been more intense, and its symptomatic importance for the central theme of this book is very considerable indeed. The work of art in question is the landscape garden.

The Landscape Garden

The landscape garden had its origin in England about 1720 as a conscious protest against the architectural gardens of France. The French product’s use of geometric forms in its layout was now rejected as something unnatural. From 1760 onwards the ‘English Garden’ swept the Continent with a rapidity and completeness which, in a matter of this kind, was wholly without precedent. Under the hands of artists of note its early and uncertain attempts to take shape gave place to creations of unparalleled grandeur. Everywhere the French parks were transformed, often at enormous expense, into English ones. Towards the end of the epoch— say, around 1830—whole stretches of territory began to be transformed into nature parks. Enthusiasm for the new art infected the widest circles. Even at the end of the epoch Prince Armin von Piickler-Muskau, who had twice attempted to transform his great Silesian properties into a single landscape and had ruined himself in doing so, could still spe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Transaction Introduction
• Part One. Symptoms
• Part Two. Diagnosis and Progress of the Disease
• Part Three. Towards A Prognosis and A Final Judgement
• Postscript
• Index of Persons