Art History and Its Institutions

The Nineteenth Century

Elizabeth Mansfield, Elizabeth Mansfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134585021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

Art History and Its Institutions focuses on the institutional discourses that shaped and continue to shape the field from its foundations in the nineteenth century. From museums and universities to law courts, labour organizations and photography studios, contributors examine a range of institutions, considering their impact on movements such as modernism; their role in conveying or denying legitimacy; and their impact on defining the parameters of the discipline.

Part I
PUTTING ART HISTORY IN ITS PLACE

1
ART HISTORY AND MODERNISM

Elizabeth Mansfield

Art history stands apart from other humanistic disciplines. Galvanized into a professional, academic field during the nineteenth century, the discipline took shape in response to distinct and often novel institutional pressures. Humanistic inquiry in the West had, until the appearance of art history, largely traced its methods and goals to classical or medieval models. The fields of history, literature, and philosophy, for example, inherited institutional traditions and legitimacy from the academies of ancient Greece and the universities fostered by Scholasticism. Art history does not share this genealogy. Though its academic practices resemble those of the traditional humanities, art history maintains a distinctive disciplinary character. In practice, art history combines the authenticating and valuating mission of the connoisseur, the hagiographic indulgences of the biographer, the cataloguing impulse of the botanist, the alternately reflective and reflexive tendencies of the historian, and the philosopher’s willingness to calibrate aesthetic transcendence. During the nineteenth century, these ambitious and contradictory pursuits were conjoined – by no means seamlessly – to form a new profession. Confidently secular, apologetically commercial, and ambivalently poised between scientific and philosophic aims, art history is a liberal discipline born of modernism.

Art history’s unusual status complicates its institutional history. The institutions most often associated with art history’s professionalization are the museum and the academy. Indeed, one could convincingly argue that the vocational history of art history begins with Jean-Dominique Vivant Denon’s appointment as director of the Musée Napoléon in 1803 or Gustav Waagen’s 1844 installation as professor of art history at the University of Berlin. As the most prominent and plentiful employers of professional art historians in the nineteenth century as today, the museum and the academy enjoy a justifiably high profile in histories of the discipline. They are not, however, the only institutions to guide art history’s disciplinary formation. A much broader institutional history informs the field.

At this point, I wish to clarify my understanding of institutional history. By “institution,” I refer generally to any organization or matrix capable of the sustained production and dissemination of social beliefs or customs. Institutions, in this sense, may or may not manifest themselves as physical sites of social exchange. They must, however, function as vehicles for social discourse long enough to be able to claim an internal tradition or history.¹ Whether as tangible as a Catholic cathedral or as evanescent as technical jargon, institutional discourse helps to shape our perceptions of reality. Institutional history, then, involves the study of the development of these ideologically responsive organizations as well as their effects.

One of the main challenges facing a historiographer concerned with institutional practices is the opacity of institutional discourse. At most points embedded imperceptibly into social discourse, discrete moments of institutional pressure often remain below the radar of historiographic scrutiny. Louis Althusser has, perhaps most trenchantly, shown how modern institutions can both disguise and reveal the elusive and falsifying effect of ideology.² Multifarious in its relationship to ideology, institutional discourse participates in its reception, manipulation, and dissemination. Cultural institutions serve as capacitors of ideology, distorting and disguising their relation to social practice. We may, however, detect traces of their influence in our work. By treating our texts, methods, and policies as the realization of our institutional history, we begin to discern its effects. For example, the stories we write about art may in fact be read as myths insofar as they carry reassuring references to our disciplinary purpose and history. In particular, those stories that manage to absorb and sustain our scholarly attention may yield most readily to interpretation as myth.

Among the most persistent stories to arise in recent art historical scholarship concerns the history and significance of modernism. Hundreds of exhibitions, books, articles, and symposia have addressed this subject in the past decade. This scholarly preoccupation demands historiographic scrutiny. Undoubtedly, art historians find in modernism an intriguingly complex history as well as an interpretive challenge. What scholars who pursue this challenge generally fail to acknowledge is its inherent self-reflexivity. The history of modernism circumscribes the history of art history. Equally responsive to post-Enlightenment aesthetic and cultural debates, to the economic and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, and to the entrenchment of these once radical challenges, modernism and art history have followed parallel courses. Any exploration of modernism, then, produces a historiographic echo. Quietly resonating, this historiographic pulse somehow fails to captivate our scholarly attention.

The aim of art history, then, is to define the role of art, a role which has already been played out.

Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?

The concomitant maturation and, some would argue, disintegration of art history and modernism has been observed most pointedly by Hans Belting. In The End of the History of Art? (1987), Belting implies but does not pursue a historical evaluation of art history’s institutional relationship to modernism.³ A possible model for such an inquiry may, however, be gleaned from T.J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999). In this summa, Clark proposes a history of modern art belayed to a history of socialism. Though adamantly unhistoriographic, Clark’s book does offer a motive of discursive “codependency” that invites historiographic application. Initially lamenting that “clearly something of socialism and modernism has died,” he then wonders: “If they died together, does that mean that in some sense they lived together, in century-long co-dependency?”⁴ I find embedded in Clark’s question its historiographic corollary: in what sense is the history of modernism the history of art history?

Before broaching the question of art history’s relationship to modernism, a brief characterization of the latter is required. The recent explosion of publications attempting to chart modernism’s fractious history indicates both an urgent desire to define modernism and a perception that this task remains incomplete. Modernism’s unsettled relationship to scholarly discourse is, of course, fundamental to its nature. Rooted in the Industrial Revolution, modernism was forged in the repeated collisions between antithetical philosophical and political traditions. ⁵ Philosophically, modernism grows out of the positivist as well as the idealist traditions articulated in the eighteenth century and codified in the nineteenth. Politically, modernism’s unstable alloy includes bases of mercantile capitalism as well as utopian socialism. Modernism, then, is a condition of tension, instability and, ultimately, irresolution. What is more, modernism participates in an unfulfilled dialectic. By this I mean to say that modernism exhibits a seemingly dialectical reliance upon antithetical impulses as well as a potential for synthetic resolution/revolution. This is the character ascribed to modernity by Clark.

Despite the teleological underpinnings of Clark’s definition of modernity, it does provide a practical armature for an inquiry into modernism’s relationship to art history. According to Clark, modernism is the cultural consequence of modernity, a social shift in which “the pursuit of a projected future – of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, or infinities of information” supersedes dependence upon tradition, ritual, and “ancestor worship.”⁶ The political and aesthetic potentiality that Clark ascribes to modernity reveals itself most forcefully in the visual arts. Manifested first in Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793), modernist art makes its final appearance in American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. I agree with Clark’s description of the relationship between modernism and modernity as well as his assertion that the latter is a largely nineteenth-century phenomenon bracketed by moments of intense political and cultural self-awareness in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. I do not, however, share his optimistically Marxist faith that modernism carries a promise of resolution/revolution of class conflict. Modernism could never participate in a radical social realignment because modernism depends upon irresolution. To return to the Hephaestian metaphor, modernism is the hammer blow, not the resulting amalgam.

I wish to ascribe a similar condition to art history. Arising from conflicting epistemological positions, art history is unmistakably modern in its origins.⁷ Evidence of its discordant nascence remains embedded in cultural institutions formed during the period of art history’s methodological and professional standardization. The art museum provides a concrete example of the condition I describe. Few art museums existed prior to the nineteenth century because the social conditions required for their proliferation were not yet established.⁸ Museums are profoundly modern institutions because they attempt to reconcile both a positive and intuitive impulse. The fundamental mission of the art museum – to collect, preserve, and exhibit works of art – testifies to its modernist roots. On the one hand, the museum defines art objects as quantifiable: they can be gathered, classified, and displayed like so many zoological specimens.⁹ On the other hand, museums make a qualitative distinction in the works they choose to collect and exhibit by judging objects according to such ephemeral standards as “quality,” “cultural significance,” or “aesthetic merit.” Or, as Walter Benjamin points out:

Museums unquestionably belong to the dream houses of the collective. In considering them, one would want to emphasize the dialectic by which they come into contact, on the one hand, with scientific research and, on the other hand, with “the dreamy tide of bad taste.”¹⁰

The museum, of course, is not the only art historical institution negotiating the legacy of modernism’s Janus-faced origins. In the academy, the problem has recently manifested itself in the United States through the vocal debates surrounding traditional survey courses.¹¹ Despite persistent criticisms regarding the reductive nature of courses that neatly categorize artistic production according to periods and movements, few American art historians are willing to jettison completely this pedagogical framework. The determined attempt by the academy to reconcile the rival claims of positive and intuitive (or interpretive) approaches offers a tangible consequence of art history’s manifold origins.

Our uneasiness with the ambiguity of our discipline is not new. Roger Fry, writing early in the century following art history’s institutionalization, felt obliged in his inaugural address as Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge to justify his discipline’s very existence in the university’s curriculum. Emphasizing that art history “is inextricably involved in a number of studies which are regarded as eminently worthy of Academic status,”¹² Fry promises an art history “in which scientific methods will be followed wherever possible, where at all events the scientific attitude may be fostered and the sentimental attitude discouraged.”¹³ Conceding a few paragraphs later that “we must abandon all hope of making aesthetic judgments of universal validity,” Fry leads his audience across the familiar – and rhetorically hallowed – terrain of dialectic. He then offers the hopeful synthesis that

In trying to show, first that the search for an objective standard of aesthetic values is hopeless and secondly that, could we attain it, the mere knowledge of that standard would be entirely useless to us, I have been trying to bring about something like a shift of perspective in our attitude to aesthetic values.¹⁴

This comment reveals itself to be something of a red herring, however, as his concluding remarks point to a different purpose:

It is possible, I think, by some such methods to circumvent our native prejudices and predilections and to acquire a more alert passivity in our attitude. And it is by cultivating such an attitude that we can best, I think, increase the delicacy and sensibility of our reception of the messages of the present artists. It is the fulness, richness and significance of our feelings in face of works of art that matters.¹⁵

Initially vowing allegiance to the discipline’s positive or “scientific” strain, Fry ultimately offers a passionate defense of art history’s association with aesthetic idealism. Fry’s apologia bears close resemblance to his long and ardent defense of modern art. For example, in a 1917 address to the Fabian Society, later published as “Art and Life,” he finds “something analogous in the new orientation of scientific and artistic endeavour.” He goes on to explain that:

Science has turned its instruments in on human nature and begun to investigate its fundamental needs, and art has also turned its vision inwards, has begun to work upon the fun...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: PUTTING ART HISTORY IN ITS PLACE
• PART II: INSTITUTING A CANON PLACING THE CENTER AND MARGINS OF ART HISTORY
• PART III: THE PRACTICE OF ART HISTORY DISCOURSE AND METHOD AS INSTITUTION