The Present Prospects of Social Art History

Robert Slifkin, Anthony E. Grudin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501341571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

The Present Prospects of Social Art History represents a major reconsideration of how art historians analyze works of art and the role that historical factors, both those at the moment when the work was created and when the historian addresses the objects at hand, play in informing their interpretations. Featuring the work of some of the discipline's leading scholars, the volume contains a collection of essays that consider the advantages, limitations, and specific challenges of seeing works of art primarily through a historical perspective. The assembled texts, along with an introduction by the co-editors, demonstrate an array of possible methodological approaches that acknowledge the crucial role of history in the creation, reception, and exhibition of works of art.

1

Social Art History in Retrospect

Elizabeth Mansfield

What’s in a Name?

The term “social history of art” asserts reassuring methodological transparency. Not only does the phrase deliver a straightforward description of the subjects presumably at hand, but it also echoes the title of a formative text: Arnold Hauser’s The Social History of Art (1951). That the term “social history of art” came into wide use only after the appearance of Hauser’s study would seem to confirm the origin of the methodology as a postwar tendency, Marxist in its approach to cultural analysis, and a likely offshoot of the field of historical study called social history. But such a genealogy would be incomplete. What came to be designated as the social history of art in the second half of the twentieth century is an approach with much earlier origins, its antecedents coalescing as a methodology in the eighteenth century in response to Enlightenment ideas about culture and society.¹

Broadly defined, the social history of art is a mode of analysis that privileges material forces of production and consumption over individual volition or metaphysical impulses as determinative for the history of visual culture. This emphasis on material conditions overlaps to some extent with social history, but distinctions between the two practices are significant and worth noting. Scholars from both fields have tended to assume that their methods were homologous if only by virtue of their shared nomenclature: surely, the social history of art is an extension of social history into the area of visual studies? Yet, though the interests of the social history of art and social history certainly have intersected, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, social history dates not to the Enlightenment but was, instead, developed largely in Britain during the 1960s as an emphatically empirical, quantitative, and socially conscious corrective to the discipline’s tendency to privilege diplomatic, military, and elite histories. A chief aim of social history was to broaden the scope of historical inquiry to include ranks of society normally left out as irrelevant: the urban working classes, criminals and the incarcerated, rural laborers, women and children, for example. Methodologies that would facilitate a more even-handed, democratic approach to historical analysis were especially sought after, and quantitative analysis quickly emerged as an essential tool in this vein. Microhistory would follow as a standard for social history, allowing the particularities of individuals’ lived existence to take precedence over accounts of the rise and fall of empires, kingdoms, and nations.

The social history of art, in addition to its much earlier origins, has never exhibited an attachment to quantitative methods. Even now, with the so-called “empirical turn” in humanities exerting pressure on the field of art history—largely through growing interest in digital and computational methods—social art history is moving sluggishly (if at all) in this direction.² Another distinction concerns the role of microhistory as a means of reorienting historical analysis. Localized study of an individual artist or family of artists, a single patron, or a particular workshop or atelier has always figured into art historical practice, whether in the service of connoisseurship or formal analysis or any number of methods and is not a distinguishing characteristic of social art history. What is more, the social history of art maintains an interest in elite culture and society. Even as social art history has alternately widened or narrowed the scope of its field of interest since its emergence in the eighteenth century, its methods have been elastic enough to accommodate elite as well as humble social actors and cultural forms.

The distinction between social history and the social history of art bears delineating here, because the occasional conflation of these endeavors has contributed to a misunderstanding of the aims and the history of social art history. It might even be a factor in recent disavowals of social art history by scholars formerly allied with its practice. A potent illustration of this retrenchment occurred in the year 2000 at art history’s annual professional meeting in North America, organized by the College Art Association. That year, a panel of four art historians and one social historian addressed the question, “Whatever Happened to the Social Art History?”³ The presumed kinship between social history and the social history of art that structured the panel contributed to a heated discussion among panelists and audience members, with several attributing the declining influence of social art history to its failure to fulfill the promise of its presumptive formation in the wake of 1968. Others heralded the emergence of visual culture as an antidote to the hegemonic and hide-bound social history of art, a critique that failed to recognize visual culture’s own descent from the incorrigible methodology.

Anxiety about the status of the social history of art persists. “For many today, it seems difficult to ascertain whether the social historical approach has succeeded beyond all expectations or failed completely.”⁴ Behind statements like this hover questions about methodological efficacy and ethics. What are a methodology’s terms of success or failure? By what means might they be measured? Pursued energetically enough, questions like these begin to reveal uncertainties about the integrity of the discipline itself. Methodological debates inevitably reveal a discipline’s vulnerabilities. And in this case, discipline and methodology share a history: both emerged as expressions of Enlightenment attitudes toward culture and society, and both find their earliest codification in the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68). For this reason, a consideration of the history of the social history of art promises insight not just into the vagaries of methodological trends but into the intellectual and ideological investments of the discipline as well.

This enmeshed history of discipline and methodology invites a reflexive historiography. Because the discipline of art history and the social history of art are, to some extent, mutually constitutive, it makes sense here to apply the axiom that a methodology cannot be an exception to its own theory.⁵ To seek to understand the social history of art by attending to the material conditions from which it arose along with the circumstances of its development, promulgation, and reception serves both to demonstrate and to test its premises. The social history of art is as much a consequence of specific economic, political, and institutional conditions as any form of cultural production, and a materialist approach to historiography could elucidate these forces. What is more, because this methodology is intrinsic to the discipline, a reflexive approach offers a means of identifying the limits of art historical inquiry.

Three Tendencies in the Social History of Art

It is possible to discern over the long history of the social history of art three successive tendencies within the method, what here will be described as positivist, Marxist, and subjective. These tendencies should not be understood as discrete phases. Though they developed more or less sequentially, they also overlapped and, at times, blended. And the point of identifying these three tendencies is not to insist on a rigid structural account of the social history of art, but to give shape to the fact that it has a history.⁶ Methodologies—like works of art—operate within specific temporal and cultural geographies. In the case of the positivist tendency, the dominant social conditions were those of European mercantilism and nascent nationalism. Within the same compass as these social forces arose the intellectual practice of empiricism and an attendant desire for predictive approaches not just to the natural sciences but to human behavior as well. Thus, the use of “positivist” to describe the initial mode of the social history of art is not intended to link the movement to a particular philosophical movement, but, rather, merely to highlight the empirical and predictive impulses that propelled early contributions to the methodology.

Positivist

The 1764 appearance of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art confirmed the influence that empirically grounded research in natural philosophy was having on studies of culture. Art thus joined history and even theology as domains of the new science.⁷ Winckelmann’s monumental publication dispensed with then dominant approaches to the analysis of the art of antiquity. Aesthetic philosophy and antiquarianism were pushed aside in favor of direct observation and a systematic appraisal of the visual arts as products of local climate, geography, political systems, and the artistic temperaments fostered by these conditions. Just as important, his field of study—ancient art—could not be accommodated by the genre of artists’ biographies popularized by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) two centuries earlier.⁸ With few works convincingly associated with a named artist, ancient art resisted classification according to individual skill or genius, a method so persuasively applied by Vasari to the artworks made by his Italian colleagues and near-contemporaries.

Winckelmann begins the first chapter by announcing the systematic approa ch through which he will explain the origins of art and the causes of differences in the appearance of art through time and across cultures. Every aspect of artistic production and reception can be traced to social and material conditions. An ardent Hellenophile, Winckelmann nonetheless had to accommodate the apparent fact that Egyptian sculpture—which he found aesthetically wanting—reached its maturity long before Greek sculpture.⁹

The causes why art flourished at an earlier date among the Egyptians appear to have been the dense population of the country, and the power of their kings . . . nature has apparently intended for it a single, indivisible, and consequently mighty kingdom, since it is traversed by one large river, and its boundaries are the sea on the north, and lofty mountains on the other sides. . . . Hence, Egypt enjoyed in a greater degree than other kingdoms tranquility and peace—by which the arts were brought into being and nurtured.¹⁰

Straightaway, Winckelmann lays out the factors that guide the production of art. Geography, climate, political system, and social temperament not only determine where and when the visual arts will develop, but these conditions also affect the formal character of works of art. This happens through two means. The first is the popularity of human figures in art. “Man has been in all ages the principal subject of art,” an observation from which Winckelmann proceeds to assert that individuals from temperate climates are inherently more beautiful and, therefore, artworks that represent these peoples are de facto the most beautiful. The second means by which the physical and social conditions of a culture determine the appearance of its visual arts is through their influence on language and “mode of thought.”¹¹ And, just as the most attractive bodies were formed in Greece, so were the most aesthetically sympathetic minds: “The Greeks . . . lived under a more temperate and a milder rule; . . . and as their language is picturesque, so also were their conceptions and images.”¹² Advantageous natural resources only tipped the scales further in favor of the Greeks. Their access to diverse types of fine marble (a material particularly coveted, according to Winckelmann, by all cultures that value art) contributed to the superiority of their art.¹³

Winckelmann presses his theory even further, observing that aesthetic sensitivity—once formed by local social and material conditions—is so culturally specific as to be incapable of even recognizing foreign works of art.

We must . . . take into consideration, not merely the influence of climate alone, but also that of education and government. For external circumstances effect not less change in us than does the air by which we are surrounded, and custom has so much power over us that it modifies in a peculiar manner even the body, and the very senses with which we are endowed by nature; thus, for instance, an ear accustomed to French music is not affected by the most touching Italian symphony.¹⁴

With this, Winckelmann offers not merely a mode of social art history, but also a theory of visuality that holds that visual perception is learned and mediated by cultural experiences. Here, then, is an early hint that the eventual shift toward visual culture as a distinct mode of analysis was always a part of the agenda of the social history of art.

Winckelmann’s attraction to empirical and systematic methods was, of course, not unique in the eighteenth century. By the time Winckelmann published his History of Ancient Art, metaphysical rationales for imperial expansion had already been jettisoned for frankly economic ones; political realms were increasingly justified on the basis of linguistic, ethnic, or national identities of “citizens” rather than on intangible ties of fealty or custom. Winckelmann’s social history of art deploys a similar logic. Defining cultural production in terms of communities, geographies, raw mater...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Present Prospects of Social Art History
• 1 Social Art History in Retrospect
• 2 Marat’s Two Bodies
• 3 The Anti-Heroism of Modern Life, or the Social History of Art in Standard Time
• 4 T. J. Clark, Peasant Materialism, and the End of Social Art History
• 5 Daumier and Method
• 6 The Age of Social Art History : Berger, Clark, Fried
• 7 A Secret History of Martin Wong
• 8 Vernacular Modernism All Over the Deep South
• 9 Note to Self : On the Blurring of Art and Life
• 10 The Role of Form in the Social History of Art
• 11 Abject Art History
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright