Thomas Crow

The practice of art history

in America

“ . . . the moment just past is extinguished languages, in the particular use of the
forever, save for the things made in it.” term ‘art’ to designate painting, sculp-
ture, drawings, prints, and (more dis-
–George Kubler, The Shape of Time1 tantly) architecture. In any event, it pri-
marily denotes a range of physical ob-
As the name for a discipline, ‘art his- jects. Its true, much wider application
to any creative practice or product gen-
tory’ enacts a syntactical clash every
erally requires some explicit indication
time it is uttered or written. Which is
–an odd reversal of the general and the
the principal term, which its modi½er?
particular. Is this anomaly a mere acci-
The two elements in their coupling con-
dent of usage? Or does it point to some
front one another in an undecided hi-
actual eccentricities in the term’s his-
erarchy. The more decorous substitute,
torical formation that bear on the posi-
‘history of art,’ puts the weight on the
tion of art history in the American con-
object that history is called upon to
stellation of humanistic disciplines?
serve, but its currency is less–and in
The fact that the visual arts success-
the shorthand of everyday speech, vir-
fully lay claim to a general, honori½c
tually nil.
designation as Art may lie–and this
There is, of course, a large measure of
is speculative–in the physically endur-
convention, common to most European
ing nature of the artifacts that fall un-
der such a description. Literature can
Thomas Crow is director of the Getty Research manifest itself in any legible transcrip-
Institute at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, and tion, and the performing arts of music
professor of art history at the University of South- and theater can conjure physical actu-
ern California. His publications include “Paint- ality from a score or script, but ½delity
ers and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris” to any original enactment can never
(1985), “Emulation” (1995), “The Intelligence be secured–dance is even less traceable
of Art” (1999), and most recently “The Rise of beyond living routine and memory. By
the Sixties: American and European Art in the contrast, the intricate physical remains
Era of Dissent” (2005). He has been a Fellow on which art history concentrates its
of the American Academy since 2001.
1 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on
© 2006 by the American Academy of Arts the History of Things (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
& Sciences University Press, 1962), 79.

70 Dædalus Spring 2006

attention are the actual things fashioned our midst like a traveler through time. The practice
of art his-
and handled by the subjects of history Kubler observes in The Shape of Time tory in
themselves. that there is nothing in the cultural rec- America
Therein lies a rightness in the obdu- ord so resistant to analysis and interpre-
rate pair of nouns that name the disci- tation as the single work of art.3 Hence
pline. George Kubler (1912–1996), the the necessary recourse to schemes of
great specialist in both colonial Spanish generalization and comparison around
architecture and pre-Columbian art, was which arise the endless disputes that,
one of the rare American scholars of his in effect, constitute the history of the
generation to address the theoretical un- discipline. But the unique material ob-
derpinnings of a discipline operating un- ject also beckons as a place of refuge
der this designation. He likened the gaze and safety from any spirit of controver-
of the art historian to that of the astron- sy. It is what it is, an epistemological
omer, “concerned with appearances dif½culty readily inviting redescription
noted in the present but occurring in the as a quasi-mystical presence. The cura-
past . . . . However fragmentary its condi- tors of museum collections and mer-
tion, any work of art is actually a portion chants of the art trade–most of whom
of an arrested happening, or an emana- underwent the same training as art his-
tion of past time.” The “initial commo- torians in academia–frequently resort
tion” entailed in the making of an art to claims of superior knowledge based
object survives–as does no other crea- largely on physical proximity and famil-
tive act–as a unique, physically sensible iarity. Beyond the work of description
pattern.2 and classi½cation, the work of art is pre-
In comparison, the textual materials sumed to ‘speak for itself.’
relied upon by the profession of histo- Subtending the mutual suspicion be-
ry can seem, despite their profusion, tween museum and academy is the pat-
thin and remote. The object of art, by ent reality that art history’s objects of
contrast, allows its maker to speak in study cross over into the category of ob-
the present with the full vividness of an jects of desire. The rarity, technical dis-
unforced creative act, one that can pre- tinction, emotional intensity, and for-
serve a signi½cant, if not absolutely com- mal beauty that variously characterize
plete, inventory of its particular traits these survivals of Kubler’s distant “com-
and structural complexity. By this I do motions” have made them among the
not mean to say that artists and crafts- most sought-after possessions in the
men do not operate under a con½ning modern world. (A scholarly interpreta-
series of stipulations and constraints, tion is, in its way, as much a claim on
but these are the standard conditions the object of art as any other.) As mar-
of all human activity, within which art ket prices are continually bid up to lev-
production is exceptional in the scope els incommensurable with virtually any
it provides for nuanced emotional ex- other category of human artifact, pow-
pression as part and parcel of its social erful players in the system–public and
utility. private–can impose demands for flat-
The dif½culty, it hardly needs stating, tering af½rmation that run counter to
lies in interpreting this physical com- the requirements of historical and in-
motion from the past that arrives in terpretative probity that the discipline

2 Ibid., 19–20. 3 Ibid., 36.

Dædalus Spring 2006 71

Thomas shares with its sisters in the humanities who had grown staggeringly wealthy on
Crow
on the at large. the leading industries of the era–rail,
humanities At the same time, the operations of oil, and steel–but were still short of the
desire that drive the circulation of art requisite cultural polishing. The Amer-
objects, along with all the perturbations ican discipline of art history would be
that their movement sets off in subse- unthinkable without the public collec-
quent art practice, constitute a key cate- tions subsequently endowed by these
gory of research in modern art history. direct ancestors to a ½gure like hotelier
For example, one cannot set apart the Steve Wynn of Las Vegas, whose person-
antique fragments incorporated into the al museum of art at the Bellagio hotel ri-
basilica of San Marco in Venice, spoils vals the institutional weight of the Gug-
of predation on Constantinople, from genheim-Hermitage effort.
any other element of its design history Both of these new institutions of art
and meaning. And the same spectacular strive to present objects of art in a man-
desire for possession has resulted in the ner that is as deracinated, as divorced
reproduction at a reduced scale of the from the circumstances under which
entire Piazza San Marco, with all of its they arose, as human ingenuity can con-
layered accretions of form and symbol, trive. Paintings that satis½ed the courtly
as the facade of the largest hotel in the aggrandizement of Russian potentates
world, the Venetian in Las Vegas. This come to stand in perfectly isolated splen-
gambling and entertainment resort ad- dor against the pitted reddish-brown
ditionally boasts a joint branch of the walls of industrial steel stipulated by
Guggenheim and Hermitage museums architect Rem Koolhaas. In no environ-
–the latter collection itself the plunder ment could the visitor be less encour-
of the monetary raids by the Czarinas aged to probe the internal complications
Elisabeth and Catherine the Great on of any one of them, that is, to search out
the artistic trophies of western Europe. the telltale imprints of the particular
Such phenomena already lie ½rmly on past commotion that brought each one
the agenda of ‘visual culture’ studies, a into being. The cult that surrounds the
hybrid category embraced by a number displaced objects in all of America’s mu-
of art historians to whom the cult of ½ne seums reach a kind of pure extreme in
aesthetic discrimination appears an un- this, their ultimate desert outpost. A lay-
sustainable relic of the past. The global ered, intricately worked physical artifact
entrepreneurship of the Guggenheim hovers before the eyes as an ‘image,’ that
Museum, of which the Las Vegas fran- is, a mental event; and its promise points
chise is just one part, has thrived on exclusively toward the realm of pleasure
the disdain of museum traditionalists, –the single-minded purpose of the en-
which has only served to enhance its tire built environment in which they ½nd
intended aura of postmodern glamour themselves.
and friendliness toward popular cul-
ture. But these latest episodes directly
echo the process by which the great ex-
Elucidating fully the sources and wide
effects of this phenomenon would re-
emplars of European ½ne art came to quire concentration on the anthropolo-
this country in the ½rst place. Selection gy and psychology of the fetish. For the
and promotion by entrepreneurs like purposes of this essay, taking some mea-
the Duveen brothers placed this legacy sure of its distorting effects is suf½cient.
in the hands of Gilded Age magnates Among these are an exaggerated sense

72 Dædalus Spring 2006

of possession and a blindness to the par- inform him that artists and their patrons The practice
of art his-
ticular and contingent circumstances in have, over those millenia, just as often tory in
which these fascinating works are expe- sought to elicit somatic and emotional America
rienced. Colleagues in the cognitive sci- responses that lie far from the loci of
ences–lately the most vocal commenta- pleasure. The entire gamut of human
tors to set their sights on art from out- feeling and knowledge has been fair
side the ½eld–have tended to adopt the game for artists since the advent of the
Las Vegas mindset as their idea of a uni- ½rst “man-made object to which we as-
versal human norm in the experience sign a more than utilitarian value” (cit-
of art objects. Linguistic psychologist ing Erwin Panofsky’s degree-zero de½-
Steven Pinker, summing up the lessons nition of art).6 As often as not, the de-
of recent research into what he calls cidedly unpleasant experiences of in-
“evolutionary aesthetics,” informs us timidation, guilt, exclusion, taboo, and
that “art is a pleasure technology, like dread have been the intended effect of
drugs, erotica, or ½ne cuisine–a way the objects that come under the scruti-
to purify and concentrate pleasurable ny of the art historian. Take the colossal
stimuli and deliver them to our senses.”4 stone block bearing the ferocious like-
It follows for him that any form of art ness of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue/
that might irritate or confound the view- Cihuacoatl, with her monstrous coun-
er’s perceptual faculties must be a per- tenance of opposed rattlesnake pro½les
verse and willfully unnatural deviation emerging from her severed neck, which
from the path dictated by our common today constitutes one of the artistic glo-
genetic predisposition. ries of the National Anthropological
Foremost among such deviations have Museum in Mexico City. Consider the
been the formal experiments of twenti- range of emotions likely to have been
eth-century modernists, who cast aside felt in its presence by any potential vic-
with startling abruptness “all the tricks tim of the priest’s obsidian knife, and
that artists had used for millennia to then try to equate that with the hedo-
please the human palate” in favor of nist’s menu of sensory grati½cations
“freakish distortions of shape and color adduced by Pinker.
and then to abstract grids, shapes, drib- Surely wiser in this regard is Kubler,
bles, splashes . . . . ” Such behavior Pinker who had a profound knowledge of the
can only comprehend in terms of some Mesoamerican traditions from which
imposed, partisan agenda: if art holds the Aztec ef½gy arose. No particular
a mirror up to nature, then modernism partisan of modern avant-gardism, he
represents a willful campaign to assert describes the same European aesthetic
that the social world itself had lost all revolution circa 1910 in these terms:
harmony with just human needs and as-
pirations.5 But any scholar of art could
to demonstrate such conscious political lean-
4 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern ings in the practice of exemplary modern art-
Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking ists–and have usually come up empty.
Penguin, 2002), 405.
6 Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art,” in
5 A further weakness in this assertion lies in The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar
the fact that many assiduous scholars on the in America, ed. W. R. Crawford (Philadelphia:
Left, devoutly wishing that Pinker could be cor- University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953; re-
rect, have spent at least a generation attempting print, New York: Arno Press, 1977), 83.

Dædalus Spring 2006 73

Thomas The fabric of society manifested no rup- object in this new sequence captured for
Crow ture, and the texture of useful inventions
on the the future its concrete moment of active
humanities continued step by step in closely linked translation between two symbolic tech-
order, but the system of artistic invention nologies.
was abruptly transformed, as if large num- The task of understanding such a
bers of men had suddenly become aware moment necessarily entails a patient
that the inherited repertory of forms no unpacking of a process, many layers of
longer corresponded to the actual mean- which are only partly visible or indeed
ing of existence . . . . The nature of artis- entirely obscure to the immediate, un-
tic invention therefore relates more close- tutored glance. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
ly to invention by new postulates than to d’Avignon, perhaps the prime moment in
that invention by simple confrontation this process of translation, has enjoyed
which characterizes the useful sciences.7 just such an unpacking by Leo Steinberg,
the recondite scholar of Leonardo da
A postulate on the order of the heliocen-
Vinci and High Renaissance art.8 The
tric planetary orbits, the movement of
work’s legions of admirers share with
tectonic plates, or, indeed, natural se-
art historians like Kubler and Steinberg
lection itself can force as abrupt (and to
a fascination with the moment of inven-
many as freakish) a reordering of cog-
tion and with the creative act itself, into
nition as the eruption of a new, antinat-
which this prime modernist work ½nds
uralistic set of criteria for success in
ways to draw its spectators–and the
painting.
same could be said of an equally foun-
In fact, over the millennia evoked
dational object for a previous tradition,
by Pinker, naturalistic depiction has
say, Leonardo’s cartoon for his Virgin,
been the exception rather than the rule
Child, and Saint Anne. This higher order
(though the technical barriers to its
of communication virtually necessitates
achievement are quite low) because it
that the artist confound comfortable
is not, on the whole, what human be-
habits of viewing, pushing aspects of
ings have desired from their art. One
form toward or beyond the limits of
key element in any explanation for the
what might be comfortable or even legi-
drastic artistic transformations of the
ble at any given historical juncture. The
early twentieth century, as Kubler con-
evolution of what is heard as a ‘disso-
ceives them, lies in the grafting of trib-
nance’ in European music provides an
al and non-Western formal sequences
instructive parallel almost too obvious
in all their historical concreteness onto
to mention.
an otherwise played-out European line
that had lost, by any objective measure,
most of its capacity for fresh invention. I t is not the case, however, that the
The new African, Oceanic, and archa- scholars who established art history
ic models offered, in addition to an ex- in American universities necessarily re-
panded range of expressive intensity, sisted the temptation to regard the ap-
an advanced capacity for rendering vol- parent immediacy of visual art as a re-
umes into linear patterns transferable lief from the more laborious demands
to a flat surface, in a way that acknowl-
edged with a new realism the painting 8 See Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Broth-
as a two-dimensional thing. Any single el,” pt. 1, Art News 71 (5) (September 1972): 20–
29; Ibid., pt. 2, Art News 71 (6) (October 1972):
7 Kubler, The Shape of Time, 70. 38–49.

74 Dædalus Spring 2006

of historical interpretation. In an essay both of these founding ½gures also pro- The practice
of art his-
of 1929, Charles Rufus Morey, the most fessed in their teaching and polemics tory in
influential ½gure in the development an avowedly conservative social agen- America
of the ½eld at Princeton, lamented the da, wherein the perceived hierarchy and
absence of historical depth in the en- dogmatic certainties of the Middle Ages
vironment surrounding American stu- could be held up as an alternative mod-
dents compared to the palpable sense el for Americans, one to be set against
of tradition enjoyed by their European the democratizing forces of advancing
counterparts. To amass a commensu- industrial technology, mass immigra-
rable awareness through the study of tion, urban growth, and materialistic
languages or history consumed years consumption. As Morey wrote in 1944:
and, even then, might yield only unco- “There is revealed in every work of me-
ordinated fragments of knowledge: diaeval craftsmen, from the macrocosm
“the disiecta membra of the history of of the cathedral to the microcosm of the
human action and thought.” In the miniature or ivory carving, an element
history of art, however, “the student is bitterly missed in the modern scene,
conducted to the spirit of an epoch by an element whose restoration would do
his most direct sense, the eye . . . [which] most to integrate a new and more hu-
provides a history capable of exposition man civilization, in a new and more
within the narrow limits of time and ef- reasonable world. And that is unity of
fort which have been left for such inte- faith.”11
grating disciplines by the multiplicity A good deal of faith, in fact, underlies
of the modern college curriculum.”9 this pronouncement, as it sets aside the
No hint here that the proper unpack- distinct possibility that the eclectic cor-
ing of even one representative object re- pus of medieval objects present in Amer-
quires no less elaboration of philologi- ican public collections could themselves
cal and historical knowledge than that appear as so many disiecta membra, cut
required by any cognate discipline– off from one another and divorced from
in fact, one could argue that it requires their inspiring original contexts. Porter
a good deal more. Morey’s own scholar- simply gave up the struggle, retiring to
ship, in particular his founding and use a castle on a remote Irish coast, there
of the monumental Index of Christian Art to shut out the modern world amid his
as a comprehensive guide to the visuali- pious rural clients. The more practical
zation of doctrine over the entire body Morey sought a less drastic solution; he
of medieval art, belies his own proposi- championed the fashioning of an archi-
tion. The achievements of medievalists tectural pastiche from the architectural
like Morey and Arthur Kingsley Porter, remains of ½ve French monasteries–
his equally forceful and accomplished ½nanced by the devout John D. Rocke-
colleague at Harvard, had been impres- feller, Jr.–in order to create the Cloisters
sive enough to elicit the admiration of museum in New York, where the bulk
jealously nationalistic Europeans.10 But of the Metropolitan Museum’s medie-
val objects have come to be housed. The
Cloisters, he wrote,
9 Charles Rufus Morey, “The Value of Art as
an Academic Subject,” Parnassus 1 (3) (March
15, 1929): 7. 11 Charles Rufus Morey, “Mediaeval Art and
America,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
10 Panofsky, “The History of Art,” 85–88. Institutes 7 (1944): 6.

Dædalus Spring 2006 75

Thomas represent the maturity of American mu- his initiative to the acquisition of physi-
Crow seum planning towards the evocation of
on the cal objects, frequently declaring (with
humanities the mediaeval scene . . . . The rugged height a somewhat disturbing insouciance):
of Fort Tryon park provided a typical mo- “Hitler is my best friend. He shakes the
nastic site, and the cloisters, halls, and de- tree and I collect the apples.”13 That an-
tails of ½ve French monasteries furnished ecdote was reported by Panofsky, one
the core of the architectural complex, of Cook’s chief recruits, who went on
which was brought to consistency by judi- to occupy the ½rst chair in the discipline
cious copying of necessary elements from at the Institute for Advanced Study. Sim-
other South French abbeys . . . . In the land- ilarly, by gathering in Rudolf Wittkover,
scaping, most dif½cult of all mediaeval as- a commanding authority on Renaissance
pects to recapture, a great deal of diligent architecture and humanism, Columbia
research resulted in a convincing lay-out lifted the ambition and performance of
of monastic orchards, and even included its already established program. Nor was
a garden of medicinal herbs conforming the exodus limited to Jewish refugees.
to a Carolingian list of the year 812.12 Yale’s program did not really exist prior
to the arrival of Henri Focillon, a poly-
The yearning of fantasy is palpable in
math with a strong theoretical inclina-
this passage. The Cloisters can boast
tion toward autonomous formal devel-
the actual stones of the Middle Ages,
opments in art, who migrated in 1940
and the intervening decades have lent
from occupied France.
the complex its own patina of age, but
Because the discipline’s traditional
the conceptual difference between its
core in the study of classical antiqui-
re-creations and those of the Las Vegas
ty and the Italian Renaissance had re-
Venetian have remained more a matter
mained under recognized German
of degree than of kind.
dominance, the one ½eld of conspicu-
As the Cloisters opened in 1938, the ous American investment and prestige
to that date had been in early Christian
unfolding political catastrophe in Eu-
and medieval art. This influx of talent
rope was surpassing the worst fears
from the German-speaking sphere was
these American medievalists may have
bound to undo the medieval idyll of art
harbored for their own culture. Touch-
history in the United States. It further
stones of European artistic achievement
set the stage for a marked expansion of
had been arriving in America piecemeal
the ½eld in the aftermath of World War
over the previous half-century; in a
II. Within the elite universities, the in-
burst, the cream of Old World scholar-
creasing ease and frequency of overseas
ly achievement in interpreting those ob-
travel had begun to stimulate a need for
jects followed, as a wave of Jewish art
training in the history and meaning of
historians sought refuge across the At-
signi½cant European monuments. As
lantic. The Institute of Fine Arts, housed
more meritocratic admissions made this
within New York University, established
preoccupation less socially exclusive, art
itself in a few short years as the peer of
history began to assume its habitual po-
any Ivy League program by incorporat-
sition as a favored elective, and the char-
ing the largest number of refugee Euro-
ismatic survey teacher became a campus
peans. Its director, Walter Cook, likened
staple. For the proportionally smaller

12 Ibid., 2. 13 See Panofsky, “The History of Art,” 95.

76 Dædalus Spring 2006

number of majors who chose to contin- just waiting for the enterprising graduate The practice
of art his-
ue in the ½eld, relatively plentiful op- student to work up into an article.”14 tory in
portunities existed in two sectors (dou- Not to underestimate the dif½culty America
ble that generally offered in the other of detective work frequently entailed
humanistic disciplines): there was the in these endeavors, but they had in com-
continuing higher-education expansion, mon a ful½llment in some de½nite con-
which was feeding on itself and spread- clusion. This pedagogically reduced ver-
ing the discipline into state schools and sion of European art history largely set
smaller colleges; at the same time, there the limits for the entire discipline in its
was an equally growing museum sector postwar American translation. An inher-
in need of curators and administrators. ited social conservatism thereby joined
But this climate of postwar optimism itself to a structurally generated intellec-
and opportunity did not at ½rst alter the tual conservatism, both reinforced by
conservative tendencies of the Ameri- material rewards that could go well be-
can discipline. The ½rst wave of Euro- yond comfortable salaries and tenure.
pean professors, as they stepped in to Here, the unanalyzed power of the
meet the demand for trained personnel, physical art object worked once again
found their new American charges lack- to set the discipline apart from its text-
ing the level of erudition they would based counterparts in the humanities.
have assumed in their European coun- Because of the inherent charisma of Eu-
terparts (and cultural misunderstand- ropean masterpieces, generous patrons
ings doubtless led these professors to were willing to provide an exceptional
exaggerate both the norms they had level of ½nancial support for fellowships
known and the de½ciencies they were and study centers abroad. As the center
discovering). Thus they tended to prune of the ½eld shifted, thanks to the émigré
away many of the more complex and influx, toward the Italian Renaissance
speculative elements of art history in and Baroque, Rome and Florence be-
favor of conceptually simple and often came regular destinations for summers
mechanical tasks: decoding iconogra- and whole years of leave. What was
phy, tracing fragments of dispersed en- more, the resulting exclusivity bene½ted
sembles, identifying hands, dating. As- a signi½cant number of art historians
certaining points of fact that European who could present themselves to the art
scholars–and other humanists in Amer- market as the sole experts in the attribu-
ica–would regard as just the starting tion of works by a particular artist–fees
point for interpretation became suf½- for this kind of expertise could mount
cient justi½cation for a successful re- into six ½gures.
search career. Irving Lavin, until recent- Even if many art historians steered
ly the long-serving professor of art his- clear of overt dealings in the market,
tory at the Institute for Advanced Study, the mindset that naturally followed from
has been forthright about the pedagogy this activity, the identi½cation with the
offered by “those miraculously translat- interests of wealthy collectors and their
ed Elijahs bringing the good word from manner of living, ½ltered widely through
the Old World to the New,” going so far the ½eld and became internalized as a re-
as to celebrate as a lost golden age the
times when “Panofsky would hand over 14 Irving Lavin, “The Crisis of ‘Art History,’”
to every member of his seminars a spe- in Mieke Bal et al., “Art History and Its Theo-
ci½c new idea or discovery of his own, ries,” Art Bulletin 78 (1) (March 1996): 14.

Dædalus Spring 2006 77

Thomas quirement for professional acceptance. commanded. Of the many forces that
Crow
on the For those who were bene½ting so abun- undid that restricted compass was the
humanities dantly from this system, the stigma of progressive shift of interest among new
the soft option, a certain disdain from entrants to art history toward the mod-
colleagues outside art history, was a ern period, meaning roughly Western
price worth paying. Their ½rst line of art since the mid-nineteenth century.
defense became the mysti½cation of an During the same years that John D.
intuitive ‘eye’ that allowed the expert to Rockefeller, Jr., was ½nancing the me-
perform feats of connoisseurship that no dievalists’ dream at the Cloisters, his
merely bookish historical scholar could forward-looking wife, Abby Aldrich
accomplish. Even the close connections Rockefeller, planted the seed of this
to Europe and to foreign scholars, a po- development. In 1929, with the support
tential boon in an American academic of two female friends, she established
scene prone to a certain parochialism, the Museum of Modern Art in New
fostered the imitation of a high-handed, York. They chose a young art history
authoritarian treatment of students out instructor from Wellesley College, Al-
of keeping with the more collegial style fred Barr, as the museum’s founding
of graduate training that characterized director. And Barr used his growing col-
the contemporaneous development of lection and landmark special exhibitions
other disciplines. to stamp a historical schema on the art
The foregoing picture, despite its of the very recent past where none had
largely unflattering character, repre- existed before.
sents an attempt to describe a system The early program of the museum in-
according to what might be called its cluded gestures toward native artists
default functioning. While much sin- and vernacular forms consistent with a
cere and valuable work was accom- philanthropic mission in Depression-
plished in the 1950s and 1960s, the sys- era America. But the heart of its activi-
tem nonetheless worked against this ties, like those of the Gilded Age collec-
collective acumen coming together in tors and academic medievalists, lay in
such a way that it could take the study the imported culture of Europe. The dis-
of visual art to the next intellectual lev- tinction of Barr’s enterprise resided in
el. This has in fact happened over the the fact that the Europeans themselves
last three decades–and Anglophone were not producing a competing body
art history has in the process come to of scholarship or museology. Writing in
set the pace for the world. But the sys- the early 1950s, Panofsky acknowledged
tem had to change before what was still that a systematic history of modern Eu-
an immature body of thought and pro- ropean art had required the intervention
cedures, too long diverted to noncogni- of Americans. On their home ground,
tive ends, could truly grow up. he opined, the immediate impact of the
European avant-gardes “forced the lit-
The persistence of the old system térateurs into either defense or attack,
and the more intelligent art historians
depended on conditions that could
be maintained for only so long. Chief into silence. In the United States such
among these was keeping the research men as Alfred Barr . . . could look upon
agenda of art history close to the cen- the contemporary scene with the same
ters–both geographical and chronolog- mixture of enthusiasm and detachment,
ical–that the ½rst postwar generation and write about it with the same respect

78 Dædalus Spring 2006

for historical method and concern for declaring, “The forms in which the con- The practice
of art his-
meticulous documentation, as are re- cepts of Christianity were cast showed tory in
quired of a study of fourteenth-century remarkably little variation throughout America
ivories or ½fteenth-century prints.”15 the Middle Ages and throughout the me-
Those art historians then devoting diaeval world.”17
themselves to such objects did not, in In contrast, the increasingly indepen-
the main, share Panofsky’s sympathy for dent, disenchanted, and rapidly chang-
this development. “Modern art,” Morey ing art of modernity impelled its inter-
declared, “is on the whole an art of disil- preters to begin comparing an arrange-
lusionment, struggling to free itself from ment of pigments in an oily emulsion
the ruins of abandoned shibboleths . . . . with rapidly evolving phenomena like
Hence its emphasis on the material as- the Industrial Revolution or mass urban-
pects of our civilization, and especially ization. The two phenomenal orders–
on those more sinister ones of economic aesthetic and historical–could at ½rst
stress and social injustice, which stir the be made only tenuously commensurable
modern artist, writer, musician, to con- with one another because few, if any,
scious or unconscious satire.”16 These ready mental maps existed that were
words, written during the mid-1940s, adequate to both.
appeared in a leading scholarly journal, In the face of such a challenge, the ½rst
at a moment when Barr’s prestige had plausible explanatory strategy, adopted
reached something of a peak. Indiffer- from the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury
ence or active resistance on the part of group in England and promoted by Barr,
the established academy was such that was to steer art history in a direction
training in the history of modern art re- parallel to that of New Criticism in lit-
mained distinctly marginal compared to erary studies, giving pride of place to
the established subject areas from classi- an artwork’s internal relationships and
cal antiquity to around 1700; even the transformations of acknowledged pre-
eighteenth century lay near the edge of cedents and prototypes (thereby brack-
the discipline’s zone of chronological eting historical determination and the
comfort. consequent need for wide research).
This self-imposed restriction had ef- The new power of American abstract
fects on the study of all periods. The dis- painting in the postwar period seemed
cipline’s principal intellectual tools had to con½rm criteria of value that required
evolved from a preoccupation with sta- no justi½cation outside the formal char-
ble symbolic systems as yet untouched acter of any individual work, and this in-
by the secular tumult and corrosion of tensional approach came to have its hey-
modernity. There was next to no intel- day during the early 1960s under the ae-
lectual equipment available for gauging gis of New York critic Clement Green-
the impact of conflict, disruption, or berg and his followers in the academy,
even of change itself, the raison d’être of chief among them Michael Fried of
any historian. In the same essay cited Harvard and later Johns Hopkins.18
above, Morey gave passionate voice to
this assumption of stability, implausibly 17 Ibid.

18 Fried’s principal work in this vein has re-

15 Panofsky, “The History of Art,” 91. cently been collected in Michael Fried, Art and
Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Uni-
16 Morey, “Mediaeval Art,” 5. versity of Chicago Press, 1998).

Dædalus Spring 2006 79

Thomas The historiography of art has habitu- came to be called, in misleadingly reduc-
Crow
on the ally shadowed the expanding self-con- tive shorthand, ‘the social history of art’
humanities sciousness of the advanced art practice succeeded to a signi½cant extent by tap-
contemporaneous to it (which has had ping this unique and underexploited
far more to contribute than the well- combination of pursuits. The two halves
meaning efforts of the aestheticians in of established art history–the mania for
departments of philosophy).19 As Amer- documentation and the cult of ½ne dis-
ican artists moved away from formal crimination–had both represented a
abstraction toward the context-depen- silencing of the demand for interpreta-
dent strategies of Minimalism and Con- tion. But when these categories of anal-
ceptual Art, this narrow set of formal ysis were put back together, they were
preoccupations largely ceded the ½eld to spark a collective release of pent-up
–or, better, found itself incorporated energy and a recovery of lost time.
into a more comprehensive brief. The
emerging direction in studies of the
modern period bore the imprint of those
E ach phase in the development of
American art history appears to require
developments in advanced art around a privileged geographical locus. For the
1970 that brought to the fore the deter- ½rst phase, it probably hovered some-
mining conditions of art making itself. where near the relic-rich cathedral town
This new tendency in scholarship like- of Santiago de Compostela, the western
wise sought to align an object’s formal hub of the routes followed by medieval
properties with the production of social pilgrims. For the postwar generation, it
meaning, turning even the defensive was Rome and its Italian tributaries. For
hostility toward theory and speculation the social history of art, it was surely
on the part of most American art histori- Paris.
ans into a means to this end. Walter Benjamin, in his studies of
The principal compensation for the Baudelaire, had memorably called Par-
paucity of explicit theorizing in art his- is “the capital of the nineteenth centu-
tory had been an obsession with empir- ry,” and a new wave of art historians
ical discovery–of unknown drawings, took this aphoristic dictum to heart. In
variants, contracts, recorded icono- this same moment began the belated
graphic programs, original locations process of publishing and translating
of objects–that had inculcated in gen- Benjamin’s own immense, un½nished
erations of art historians a strong set of project on the Parisian arcades, for its
skills in archival research. And a further time a profoundly idiosyncratic attempt
latent strength lay in the equally under- to correlate the most sophisticated art
theorized activity of connoisseurship, with the states of mind induced by an
that is, the concentrated attention to incipient consumer capitalism. But Ben-
objects in search of telltale clues to con- jamin, fortunately for the ultimate re-
dition, authorship, and quality. What ception of his work, had an American
counterpart of commensurable fore-
sight and scholarly energy in Meyer
19 As Kubler observes (The Shape of Time, 67), Schapiro, the Columbia art historian
“The work of many artists often comes closer with whom he shared a brief and poi-
to philosophical speculation than most aesthet-
ic writings, which retrace the same ground over gnant meeting in 1939. (Schapiro had
and over, sometimes systematically and some- sought out Benjamin with the aim of
times historically, but rarely with originality.” persuading the exiled German scholar

80 Dædalus Spring 2006

to seek safety among his old Frankfurt environment, the market and of industry The practice
to which he owed his income and his free- of art his-
School colleagues in New York; Ben- tory in
jamin declined and met his death while dom. And in the new Impressionist tech- America
fleeing toward Spain in the following niques which broke things up into ½nely
year.) discriminated points of color, as well as
Two years before their meeting, Scha- in the “accidental” momentary vision, he
piro had broached the connection be- found, in a degree hitherto unknown in
tween habits of consumption, particu- art, conditions of sensibility closely relat-
larly the newly intensi½ed marketing ed to those of the urban promenader and
of fashion and organized leisure, with the re½ned consumer of luxury goods.21
concurrent developments in the artis-
It would be dif½cult to overestimate the
tic avant-garde. Taking Barr to task by
degree to which this single passage anti-
name (and by implication his museum),
cipated the later development of the dis-
he disputed the assumption that the
cipline. It is a mark of the time in which
history of modern art could adequately
it was written (1937) that Schapiro was
be “presented as an internal, immanent
by vocation a young scholar of medieval
process among the artists.”20 Address-
art. And his ability to envision this sche-
ing the historical moment commonly
matic but prescient program for the in-
taken as the founding moment of mod-
terpretation of early modernism coin-
ernism in painting, he observed:
cided with his single-handed effort with-
It is remarkable how many pictures we in that sub½eld to counter the certainties
have in early Impressionism of informal of Porter and Morey with an alternative
and spontaneous sociability, of break- intellectual model.
fasts, picnics, promenades, boating trips, The Marxist pedigree evident in much
holidays and vacation travel. These urban of Schapiro’s vocabulary points to his
idylls not only present the objective forms preoccupation with conflict and change
of bourgeois recreation in the 1860’s and in the arts of Romanesque France and
1870’s; they also reflect in the very choice Spain, particularly as manifested in
of subjects and in the new aesthetic de- the dramatic expansions of trade and
vices the conception of art as solely a ½eld town life as countermovements to ec-
of individual enjoyment, without refer- clesiastical hegemony around the turn
ence to ideas and motives, and they pre- of the twelfth century. The dominant
suppose the cultivation of these pleasures approaches in the American art histo-
as the highest ½eld of freedom for an en- ry of his time tended toward the amass-
lightened bourgeois detached from the of- ing and cataloguing of ever more exam-
½cial beliefs of his class. In enjoying realis- ples in a given category of object with
tic pictures of his surroundings as a spec- the aim of establishing something like
tacle of traf½c and changing atmospheres, a statistical norm for the type–one in
the cultivated rentier was experiencing in keeping with the stable complex of be-
its phenomenal aspect that mobility of the liefs assumed to underwrite such a
norm. Projects of this kind were for all
intents and purposes boundless, end-
20 Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract lessly postponing the interpretative
Art,” Marxist Quarterly 1 (January–March 1937), challenge posed by any single work.
reprinted in Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: Nine-
teenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers
(New York: George Braziller, 1978), 188. 21 Ibid., 192–193.

Dædalus Spring 2006 81

Thomas Schapiro adopted a diametrically op- open question whether the discipline
Crow
on the posed method, advancing the hypothe- has yet caught up with his example.23
humanities sis that the most productive cases for When he turned to the genesis of
art-historical inquiry will involve ob- modernism, Schapiro reversed this ma-
jects that constitute disruptive excep- neuver, bringing to bear the medieval-
tions against the matrix of related works ist’s preoccupation with decoding ob-
that surround them. And here his com- scure symbolic subject matter–what
mand of the modernist critic’s alertness art historians designate as iconography
to innovation and internal artistic form in a technical sense. To the degree that
came to serve that enterprise: instead the realists and impressionists of mid-
of proceeding from the preponderance nineteenth-century Paris set aside overt
of examples that are most alike and de- literary and mythological content, mod-
½ning everything else as peripheral or ernism had been assumed by both its
exceptional, he began by analyzing what admirers and detractors to lack signi-
happens when the reassuring regulari- ½cant subject matter: its motifs were
ties of form break down, so as to posit deemed to be little more than pretexts
the operations of a larger signifying sys- for experiments in optical vividness
tem from virtually a single instance.22 or emancipated color, line, shape, and
In this wager, everything rested on physical gesture. Schapiro’s contrary
what the most searching internal anal- contention was that the artistic avant-
ysis of that chosen object could yield: garde was advancing another systema-
bringing to light the ½ssures, discrepan- tic account of subjectivity to replace
cies, and contradictions on which the the outmoded ‘of½cial beliefs’ of estab-
exceptional artist had to impose some lished religion and state power. He pos-
resolution, all without repressing the ited that the advanced artist, after 1860
fractious heterogeneity of the concepts or so, succumbed to the general divi-
and techniques with which he was en- sion of labor as a full-time leisure spe-
joined to work. A viewing intelligence cialist, an aesthetic technician picturing
schooled in the intricacies of Picasso and prodding the sensual expectations
and Braque’s Cubism could come to the of other, part-time consumers. In the
task with the requisite acumen. Scha- hands of the avant-garde, Schapiro ar-
piro’s articles of the late 1930s advanced gued, the aesthetic itself became iden-
the art history of the Middle Ages by ti½ed with habits of enjoyment and re-
more than a generation–it remains an lease produced quite concretely within
the emerging apparatus of commercial
entertainment and tourism–even, and
22 Meyer Schapiro, “From Mozarabic to Ro- perhaps most of all, when art appeared
manesque in Silos,” Art Bulletin 21 (4) (Decem- entirely withdrawn into its own sphere,
ber 1939): 312–374, reprinted in Meyer Scha- its own sensibility, its own medium.
piro, Romanesque Art: Selected Papers (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 28–101;
Meyer Schapiro, “The Sculptures of Souillac,”
in Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Por- 23 Remarkably, a tired and incoherent rehears-
ter, ed. W. R. W. Kohler (Cambridge, Mass.: al of all the old mainstream resistances to Scha-
Harvard University Press, 1939), 2:359–387, piro’s ideas has recently been published in the
reprinted in Schapiro, Romanesque Art, 102– journal of the discipline’s principal professional
130; see also Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of organization: John Williams, “Meyer Schapiro
Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina in Silos: Pursuing an Iconography of Style,” Art
Press, 1999), 1–23. Bulletin 85 (3) (September 2003): 442–468.

82 Dædalus Spring 2006

 But some three decades had to pass came close to an ultimate pulling apart The practice
of art his-
after Schapiro’s ½rst interventions be- of the disparate strands that an artist tory in
fore the kinds of resistance adumbrated maneuvers into an effect of unity.25 America
above could be overcome. Crucial in this Adding to the appeal of such an enter-
success was the building of a systematic prise was a new style of social history
iconography for Parisian modernism un- based in Britain, within which this same
dertaken by Linda Nochlin, then at Vas- body of French theory took its place
sar, and by Robert Herbert with several alongside equivalent commitments to
of his students at Yale.24 And, by the late neo-Marxist social theory and diligence
1960s, new tools of interpretation from in the archives. At the same time, the in-
beyond art history’s own store of tech- cipient British school of cultural studies
niques and practices came to hand, a kit was turning a similar set of tools toward
that proved particularly useful in render- contemporary society, making possible
ing analyzable structures out of the scale a new acuity in the dissection of vernac-
and fluidity of modern historical experi- ular culture, with an emphasis on the
ence. ways that disaffected subcultures were
That moment represented a cusp repositioning and creatively rede½ning
when French structuralism and semi- mass-produced products.26
otics had achieved suf½cient coherence The ½rst of these strands had a head
to be apprehended by a curious student, start in America, largely through the pre-
but still remained a minority interest, scient efforts of Annette Michelson, a
even in ½lm and literary studies, let scholar of avant-garde cinema who ex-
alone in art history. A work like Roland tended her reach to the contemporary
Barthes’s S/Z, his landmark anatomiza- visual arts in a way that has made her
tion of Balzac’s novella “Sarrasine,” one of its most formidable intellects.27

24 Nochlin’s contribution at ½rst centered on 25 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Éditions du

the rural and working-class imagery that dis- Seuil, 1970). The lesson of Barthes’s project for
tinguished the realism of Gustave Courbet in established literary-critical assumptions follows
the late 1840s and 1850s and that set the stage Kubler’s formula, written a decade before (The
for Manet’s more urban set of motifs. Two par- Shape of Time, 28), for unpacking the apparent-
ticularly important articles took up and extend- ly uni½ed work of art: “ . . . the cross-section of
ed the insights of Meyer Schapiro, “Courbet the instant taken across the full face of the mo-
and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and ment in a given place, resembles a mosaic of
Naïveté,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld pieces in different developmental states, and of
Institutes 4 (3–4) (April–June 1941): 164–191, different ages, rather than a radial design con-
reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art, 47–86. ferring its meaning on all the pieces.”
These were Linda Nochlin, “Innovation and
Tradition in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans,” in 26 The founding text was Phil Cohen, “Subcul-
Marsyas Studies in the History of Art, suppl. 2, tural Conflict and Working-Class Community,”
“Essays in Honor of Walter Friedlaender” (New Birmingham University Centre for Contempo-
York: Institute of Fine Arts, New York Univer- rary Cultural Studies, Working Papers in Cul-
sity, 1964), 119–126, and Linda Nochlin, “Gus- tural Studies 2, Spring 1972, 5–51, reprinted in
tave Courbet’s Meeting: A Portrait of the Artist Phil Cohen, Rethinking the Youth Question: Edu-
as a Wandering Jew,” Art Bulletin 49 (3) (Sep- cation, Labour and Cultural Studies (Durham,
tember 1967): 209–222. Herbert’s research is N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).
represented in Robert Herbert, Impressionism:
Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven, 27 See as an example Annette Michelson,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); see also “Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgres-
Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil (New sion,” in Robert Morris (Washington, D.C.:
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982). Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969).

Dædalus Spring 2006 83

Thomas Settled at New York University after an most obviously fall under this charac-
Crow
on the extended sojourn in Paris, she would terization, Clark gives pride of place to
humanities join with Rosalind Krauss (the leading a painting like Canotiers à Argenteuil by
scholar of modernist sculpture, who was Édouard Manet, the older artist who had
then guiding a small, insurgent program led the way for the larger impressionist
at the cuny Graduate Center) in build- group. In the summer of 1874, when Ma-
ing on this new foundation and encour- net fashioned this work, his friend Mo-
aging an impressively sophisticated cir- net was living in the suburban town of
cle of younger art historians and critics its title, then a transitional settlement
that had gathered around their jointly of weekend villas, boat basins, and in-
edited journal October. Accelerating the truding factories in search of available
incorporation of all three currents into land and river access. And the avant-
a uni½ed project was the arrival of T. J. garde painters who gravitated to such
Clark, a young British art historian who locations formed a marginalized sub-
spent an initial period at ucla during culture in themselves, one compelled
the mid-1970s, moving later to Harvard to improvise an identity in the as yet ill-
before settling at uc Berkeley. In his de½ned spaces of metropolitan pleasure
work on impressionism, Clark returned and consumption.
to the territory for which Schapiro had The granular degree of detail in
provided a rough map in 1937. Alongside Clark’s extended account of the painting
much archival research in the spirit of does not permit the succinctly summa-
Benjamin’s notebook citations for the rizing quotations supplied by Schapiro.
Arcades project, Clark brought to bear a The following passage, however, which
new analytical penetration of the inter- comes at the end of several pages of
nal workings of individual pictures, one analysis, has the virtue of moving rapid-
that made concrete and detailed Scha- ly from a set of totalizing propositions
piro’s acute but generalized characteri- to their anchor in the technical fabric of
zations of Parisian modern-life painting. the painting via minutely particularized
A striking example of this occurs in description devoted to a seemingly in-
his discussions of those motifs that signi½cant segment of its surface–one
most easily lent themselves to comfort- that the recreational art lover would in
ably brain-soothing harmonies: scenes all likelihood overlook:
of strollers and yachtsmen on the banks
Signs, things, shapes, and modes of han-
of the Seine’s great curves north and
dling do not ½t together here. Paint does
west of the city. “[H]ere was a subject,”
not make continuities or engineer transi-
Clark states, “which lent itself normal-
tions for the eye; it enforces distinctions
ly to simple rhythms and sharp effects:
and disparities, changing completely
sails bending in unison, rigging arranged
across an edge, insisting on the stiffness
in casual geometries, reflections laid out
of a pose or the bluntness of blue against
as counterpoint to the world above.”28
yellow. This is the picture’s overall lan-
While canvases by Claude Monet,
guage–this awkwardness of intersection,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, or Alfred Sisley
this dissonance of colour . . . . For example,
the hank of rope which hangs over the
28 T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Par- orange side of the boat towards the right.
is in the Art of Manet and His Followers, rev. ed. No doubt we decipher the flecked rope
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, and the fluffy tassel without too much dif-
1999), 167.

84 Dædalus Spring 2006

 ½culty, and proceed to examine the more lis Clayson and Carol Armstrong–now The practice
elusive trail of paint which starts down of art his-
at Northwestern and Princeton respec- tory in
from the gunwale, bends, and seems to tively–were later able to seize upon America
peter out into the orange–peter out for the impressionist rhetorics of ambigui-
no good reason. And in due course the ty and disguise as preeminently ½guring
eye makes sense of the situation: we be- relations between the sexes, where the
gin to see the wandering line as a shadow, centrality of these very qualities had
and realize eventually that the orange sur- defeated the old (male) art historian’s
face is not–as it ½rst assumed to be–sim- compulsion toward iconographic cer-
ply flat. It is curved, it is concave; and the tainty.31 This level of explanatory am-
curve explains the peculiar shadow and bition presented demands that led art
is explained by it–or, rather, is half ex- history, at least for a time, to an engage-
plained and half explaining: the broken ment with the material intricacies of its
triangle of brushstrokes is not mended physical objects of study that surpassed
quite so easily, and never entirely proves anything that the postwar establishment
the illusion it plays with. It stays painted, had ever contemplated.
it stays on the edge of a likeness.29 Nor did this achievement necessari-
ly depend upon the particular set of
Impressionism is conventionally cel-
tools that Clark and others selected
ebrated for its objectivity in rendering
for the job–nor indeed on the partic-
the play of light and color in the world
ular opportunity later nineteenth-cen-
as one sees it, but Clark identi½es in the
tury Paris offered as a subject. The ear-
studied ambiguities and discrepancies
ly 1980s, during which Clark’s The Paint-
of Manet’s portrayal of these two awk-
ing of Modern Life appeared, proved par-
ward urban pleasure seekers a higher or-
ticularly rich in landmark books by art
der of objectivity about the troubled and
historians. The book that launched the
uncertain transition of the traditional
wave was Michael Baxandall’s The Lime-
city to the modern one, an historical wa-
wood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany,
tershed experienced by old and new city
which contains next to no acknowledge-
dwellers as a continual succession of un-
ment that any new climate of theoreti-
resolved edges and illegibilities.
This marriage of scholarly object
and approach proved particularly fruit-
Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper and
ful for the discipline’s belated engage- Row, 1988), and Linda Nochlin, Representing
ment with questions of sexuality in Women (New York: Thames and Hudson,
general and the ethical imperatives of 1999).
the women’s movement in particular.
The redoubtable Nochlin, before and 31 Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution
in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Ha-
after moving to the graduate Institute ven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991; re-
of Fine Arts at nyu, had for some years printed Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
been extending the social-historical 2003); Hollis Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and
model in the service of an emergent Everyday Life Under Siege, 1870–1871 (Chicago:
feminism.30 Younger scholars like Hol- University of Chicago Press, 2002); Carol Arm-
strong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and
Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: University
29 Ibid., 166. of Chicago Press, 1991; reprinted Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2003); Carol Arm-
30 For representative collections of her work strong, Manet Manette (New Haven, Conn.:
in this vein, see Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Yale University Press, 2002).

Dædalus Spring 2006 85

Thomas cal speculation in the humanities even observing the weakness of postwar art
Crow
on the existed.32 Baxandall instead looked to- history, have stepped in to give the ½eld
humanities ward codi½ed forms of knowledge, all its new energy and place at the broad
strictly contemporaneous with the ob- humanities table. Any palpable bene½ts
jects of his study, in ½elds as far from the have largely accrued to the career pro-
practice of sculpture as the guild-lore of ½les of these outsiders, not to positive
the Meistersingers or the “chiromancy” gains for art history as a discipline.
of the alchemist Paracelsus (which has Among historians, lack of experience–
the salutary effect of demonstrating that positive or negative–with the protocols
interpretative theories are just tools, of the connoisseur has made for flat and
the sophistication of which does not de- unrevealing descriptions of works of art,
pend upon their date or upon the par- which too often amount to the visual
ticular vocabulary in which they are ex- equivalent of reading for the plot. Lit-
pressed). His approach yielded a level erary critics, for their part, have tended
of analysis applied to the inner workings to apply their resources of close reading
of form that set a standard for all those and armatures of theory without the
who came after, in any period or medi- clarifying resistance generated by sus-
um, a standard all the more impressive tained work in the archives, which is
because he was confronting exception- to say, without equal concern for how
ally complex ensembles of sculpture, works of art come to be made as for the
painting, and cabinetwork typically pro- ways in which these works can be con-
duced by a number of hands. sumed.
Baxandall becomes a part of this spe- But it is dif½cult to deny that the ener-
ci½cally American story when he began gy of that moment has diminished in the
during the 1980s to combine his old po- intervening couple of decades. From its
sition at the Warburg Institute in Lon- beginnings as a minority–and immedi-
don with teaching alongside Clark in ately embattled–position, the so-called
uc Berkeley’s ascendant graduate pro- social history of art has grown in the
gram. As such, his account of pre-Refor- meantime to constitute something of a
mation piety, with its acute attention to new default function for the ½eld: vir-
doubt, anxiety, and tension between the tually every contribution to the Art Bul-
sinful appetites excited by wealth and letin (seen as the scholarly journal of
the concomitant capacity of the new af- record) represents a variation on this
fluence to fund extravagant expressions approach, even when these components
of faith, brought up-to-date Schapiro’s are not explicitly acknowledged. The ex-
original insight that the greatest reli- pected level of competence is far higher
gious art arises from just such circum- than was the norm a generation ago, as
stances. is productivity, whether measured by
individual output or by the percentage
Attention to these strong forces of re- of actively publishing scholars within
the overall population of the ½eld. And
newal within the discipline can serve to
disqualify a common assumption that an increasingly complete picture of art
helpful outsiders from other disciplines, practices across a wide geographical
and chronological territory is conse-
32 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors quently taking shape–including territo-
of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, Conn.: ries outside of Europe and North Ameri-
Yale University Press, 1980). ca. Nonetheless, with a certain domesti-

86 Dædalus Spring 2006

cated version of ideology-critique now enterprise, one easily leveraged into an The practice
of art his-
the norm, the outcome of many studies aura of interdisciplinary glamour and a tory in
has become a fairly predictable affair. In comparatively effortless proliferation of America
one obvious sense, however, the center talks, papers, and books. To this end, it
has ceased to hold. From the preeminent has been a convenient conclusion drawn
position that it occupied a generation from ‘theory’ to say that any intelligible
ago, the study of later nineteenth-centu- pattern drawn out of historical data rep-
ry French painting has markedly receded resents an inherently spurious metanar-
in prominence, ceasing to promise any rative (even though the original ef½cacy
smooth path of professional success. of the turn to theory had precisely been
Baxandall, in his book on German to identify analyzable structures in the
limewood sculpture, documented the historical record). The component of
ways in which the fragile synthesis of art history that has required hard graft
nearly incompatible components–held in the archives then can be set aside–
together in the art of a Veit Stoss or Til- and disparaged in the bargain as a les-
man Riemenschneider but already on ser, if not misguided, pursuit.33 Indeed,
the verge of flying apart under the least “the Archive,” in the wake of Michel
added stress–was utterly dispersed by Foucault, has been isolated as a discipli-
the iconoclastic forces of the Reforma- nary social construction toward which
tion. In the various specialized genres the theorist can freely condescend.
to which sculptors then turned in a cli- This metahistorical pursuit has had lit-
mate of diminished expectations, one tle time for the recalcitrant physical im-
can identify the distinct elements ob- mediacy and uniqueness of an individu-
scured in their previous intertwining. al object of art. This distrust of close-
A similar unraveling has occurred with- range sensory evidence has passed into
in art history, which has suffered to a the broad, ill-de½ned tendency called
certain degree from this conspicuous ‘visual culture.’ From Schapiro to Her-
period of success. While impressive ad- bert, Clark, and Baxandall, the conduct
vances have continued in social-histori- of the most sophisticated art historians
cal documentation, elaboration of theo- has entailed a deep curiosity about the
ry, expansion into vernacular culture, varieties of vernacular expression that
and engagement with modernism, each inevitably enter into the synthetic imag-
of these pursuits has become increasing- ination of the artist. While never deny-
ly self-suf½cient and consequently less ing the independent fascination of that
able to inform the others. material, all nonetheless retained the
Shorn of reflection on the neo-Marx- perspective that Baxandall framed in
ian theories that originally framed the intentionally provocative terms: “On-
social-historical project, the new main- ly very good works of art, the perfor-
stream has not discovered any compa- mances of exceptionally organized men,
rable source of conceptual renewal. Lat- are complex and co-ordinated enough
er, competing claims to the semiotic to register in their forms the kinds of
and poststructuralist element of ‘theory’
have been lodged on behalf of distinct-
33 For a symptomatic expression of this mode
ly different interests. To put it unkindly,
of thought, see Norman Bryson, “Art in Con-
these lie in making a metaconversation text,” in The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultur-
about the possibility or impossibility al Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal and Inge Boer (New
of a history of art into a self-suf½cient York: Continuum, 1994), 66–78.

Dædalus Spring 2006 87

Thomas cultural circumstance sought here; sec- a growing scholarly limbo, despite their
Crow
on the ond-rate art will be of little use to us.”34 huge popularity with undergraduates
humanities His advised use of the masculine gender and the general public). A good guess
in this passage (there were no women would place the current median bound-
known in the relevant trades of the pe- ary (half of the graduate students before
riod) matters less than his insistence on it, half after) somewhere in the early
the cognitive value of aesthetic distinc- twentieth century, say 1912 or so. And
tion, which now runs against a prevail- the change may be more exaggerated
ing tide in which no special case can be than that ½gure might suggest, since the
made for one category of artifact against fastest growing area is better named
another.35 ‘contemporary,’ meaning art produced
from around 1960 forward.
The question remains as to what ½eld The drive toward the modern, then,
is in danger of shooting past the point
of study actually remains once one sac-
ri½ces its former core, its point of depar- where it can ½nd common ground with
ture and return, in self-conscious and the legitimate preoccupations of art his-
highly wrought objects of art. The pro- torians working in earlier periods. As of-
liferation of potential examples extends ten as not, the media favored by younger
to near-in½nity, and necessarily results scholars–½lm, video, reproduced texts
in a reduction of material speci½city to and photographs, assemblage installa-
the single plane of the image, which is tions–are impermanent, impatient with
phenomenal rather than actual. And, the layered density of the unique physi-
given that much of the art historian’s cal objects around which the discipline
brief has entailed accounting for pro- was built. The skills required to decipher
cesses of conception and manufacture the messages of those time travelers in
that are not strictly sensible in the ½nal their vast and largely unexplored num-
product, emphasis on ‘visual’ common- bers and then to speak on their behalf
alities imposes a drastic narrowing of will reside, it seems, in a shrinking num-
the aspect through which interpreters ber of scholars.
can grasp this newly vast ½eld of inquiry. That bifurcation of the available skills
A further tendency toward disaggre- within the discipline may nonetheless
gation lies in an unabated push toward carry within itself the potential for a
the modern. A rule of thumb applied to new synthesis at a higher level, much
new entrants is that roughly half of them as the paired fetishizing of documenta-
will concentrate in ‘modern art’; what tion and connoisseurship did among
is more, the dividing line between ‘the the immediately postwar generation.
modern’ and what came before it keeps One can read the recent preoccupation
creeping forward (which has left im- with ephemeral and time-based works
pressionism and postimpressionism in of art as saying something about the
larger brief of art history: the sample
34 Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors, 10. of objects from which art history fash-
ioned itself constitutes the merest frac-
35 See, as a representative example, the com- tion of the universe that an ideal form
ments of Keith Moxey, “Motivating History,” of the discipline would address, that is,
Art Bulletin 77 (3) (September 1995): 392–401,
reprinted in Keith Moxey, The Practice of Per-
all the artifacts of densely symbolic ex-
suasion: Paradox and Power in Art History (Ithaca, pression that have ever been made. For-
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 65–79. ever out of view are all those destroyed

88 Dædalus Spring 2006

by war, vandalism, demolition, renova- had looked to the gesticulating mum- The practice
of art his-
tion, neglect, and natural decay; as well mers of the Florentine street processions tory in
as the colossal if uncountable number as lying behind some of the most august America
that have been lost to time because they (to the eyes of posterity) rediscoveries
were never intended to be preserved in of classical prototypes in art.36 Even
the ½rst place (the sculptures of Michel- when elevated by a Botticelli to the most
angelo modeled in snow offer just the re½ned movement and costume of court
most spectacular instance of these sub- pageantry, the frozen gesture carried a
merged continents). deeper, unbroken inheritance from the
Other kinds of documents allow such ancient world, one of barely sublimated
works to be indirectly retrieved and hy- sexuality, violence, and magical thought,
pothetically reconstructed, so that the which lay beyond any merely bookish
actual survivors from the past can as- catalogue of mythological stories and
sume their places within a historically aesthetic canons. For him, the ½gure
comprehensive matrix of technical and in motion, derived from the direct ex-
expressive possibility. From everything perience of performers in the guise of
one can tell by such investigations, the ancient deities, constituted the true sub-
divisions observed in our own time be- ject of advanced Florentine mimesis in
tween high art and vernacular culture the 1480s (and his having discerned liv-
are far more dif½cult to maintain, such ing parallels to this history in the festi-
that a properly comprehensive art his- vals and artifacts of the Hopi, whom he
tory obviates to a signi½cant extent the sought out during an American sojourn
contemporary rationale for a visual-cul- in 1896, provides the strongest early ex-
ture alternative to the inherited ½eld. ample of the bridge building required
In this regard, it has been the push of to render traditional Western ½elds of
younger researchers–out ahead of the study commensurable with those devot-
preceding generation’s preoccupation ed to the diverse cultures of the wider
with avant-garde painting and sculp- world).
ture–into the unconventional art prac- Warburg’s legacy can, without dan-
tices of the twentieth century that has ger of anachronism, project the artistic
shown the way. recognitions of the present into art his-
tory’s old heartland of the Italian Re-
To the degree that one learns to ‘see’ naissance–and by extension into all old-
er bodies of material. Beside the com-
ephemeral events, happenings, perfor-
mances, ½lm, and video under the rubric pellingly affective character of surviving
of Art (which is where their makers have art objects, he had been able to discern
placed them), then a corresponding re- the equivalent value of their heuristic
ceptivity to the historical totality of art properties, which distribute networks
production should follow. Some con- of meaning over a much wider but more
½rmation for this proposition exists in elusive ½eld. These enduring works of
the renewed currency of one other art- painting or sculpture still provide an ir-
historical pioneer, the visionary German
scholar Aby Warburg, whose deep con-
36 See Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan An-
tributions from the 1890s to the 1920s
tiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of
had remained, until recently, unassimil- the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los
able within the normative discipline. In Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 161–
a compelling series of articles, Warburg 167.

Dædalus Spring 2006 89

Thomas replaceable opportunity for instruction
Crow
on the in historical interpretation, one all the
humanities more needed when even very recent art
works have left behind only a litter of
residual artifacts, documentary records,
and fallible memories. But each was
once a physical encounter of palpable
order and coherence, however fleeting
the moment of its particular Kublerian
“commotion” may have been. To recre-
ate that moment in the absence of the
work itself requires the trained imagina-
tion that comes from the encounter with
those objects that render their own long-
ago commotions in ½xed formations.37

37 I am grateful for the assistance of Alison

Locke and Doris Chon in the preparation of
this essay.

90 Dædalus Spring 2006