Number 7 December 2012

Milena Bartlová, ‘Czech art history and Marxism’ 7-MB/1

Jim Berryman, ‘Exhibiting Western Desert Aboriginal painting in Australia’s public galleries: an institutional analysis, 1981-2002’ 7-JB/1

Rachel Dedman, ‘The importance of being Ernst: a reassessment of E. H. Gombrich’s relationship with psychoanalysis’’ 7-RD/1

Eric Garberson, ‘Art History in the University II: Ernst Guhl’ 7-EG/1 Tables 7-EG/2

Francis Halsall, ‘Making and matching: aesthetic judgement and the production of art historical knowledge’ 7-FH/1

Amy K. Hamlin, ‘”A heuristic event”: reconsidering the problem of the Johnsian conversation’ 7-AH/1

Peter R. Kalb, ‘Picturing Pollock: Photography’s Challenge to the Historiography of Abstract Expressionism’ 7-PK/1

Jenni Lauwrens, ‘Welcome to the revolution: The sensory turn and art history’ 7-JL/1

John Mack, ‘Making and seeing: Matisse and the Kuba decorative “system”’ 7-JM/1

Jeanne Nuechterlein, ‘Location and the experience of early Netherlandish art’ 7-JN/1 Images 7-JN/2

Alina Payne, ‘Wölfflin, Architecture and the Problem of Stilwandlung’ 7-AP/1

Rebecca Rice, ‘Transforming the “unimaginative and literal” into an art for the nation: writing and exhibiting New Zealand’s art history in the twentieth century’ 7-RR/1

Francesco Russo, ‘Medieval Art studies in the Republic of Letters: Mabillon and Montfaucon’s Italian connections between travel and learned collaborations’ 7-FR/1

Jenny H. Shaffer, ‘Restoring Charlemagne’s chapel: historical consciousness, material culture, and transforming images of Aachen in the 1840s’ 7-JS/1

Barbara Stoltz, ‘Disegno versus Disegno stampato: printmaking theory in Vasari’s Vite (1550-1568) in the context of the theory of disegno and the Libro de’ Disegni’ 7-BS/1

Marja Väätäinen, ‘From Ringbom to Ringbom: The art of art history of Lars-Ivar Ringbom and Sixten Ringbom: A mythmaker and a myth-breaker in Åbo, Finland’ 7-MV/1

Ian Verstegen, ‘The “Second” Vienna School as Social Science’ 7-IV/1

Translations

Karl Johns (trans & ed.), ‘Alexander Conze, “On the Origin of the Visual Arts”, Lecture held on July 30, 1896 [in the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences]’. Originally published as ‘Über den Ursprung der bildenden Kunst’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Gesammtsitzung vom 11. Februar 1897, Berlin: Reichsdruckerei 1897, pp. 98-109. 7-KJ/1

Karl Johns (trans & ed.), ‘Alexander Conze, “Greek Relief Sculpture”’. Originally published as ‘Über das Relief bei den Griechen’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Gesammtsitzung vom 25. Mai, 1882, no. 26, pp. 1-15 (pp. 563-577). 7-KJ/2

Documents

Rachel Dedman (ed.), ‘“Art and psychoanalysis – 15 June 1988. Speakers: Professor Joseph Sandler and Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich”, part of the series “Dialogues on Contemporary Issues” hosted by the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the summer term of 1988’ 7-RD/2

Cecelia F. Klein (ed.), ‘“Theory, Method & the Future of Pre-Columbian Art History”, 100^th Annual Conference of the College Art Association – Los Angeles, California – February 24, 2010” Contributors: Cecelia F. Klein, Introductions; Esther Pasztory, ‘Pre-Columbian Art and World Art History’; Mary Miller, ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Pre-Columbian Art in the American Museum . . . and in the Academy’; Elizabeth Hill Boone, ‘What Do You Say When There Are No Words?’; Tom Cummins, ‘Looking Back at the Future of Pre-Columbian Art History’; Carolyn Dean, ‘The Elusive Future of Pre-Columbian Art History’; Claudia Brittenham, ‘Interdisciplinary, International, Indispensable’. 7-CK/1

Partha Mitter, ‘Ernst Gombrich and Western representations of the sacred art of India’ 7-PM/1

Stefan Muthesius, ‘The beginnings of the “Cracow School of Art History”’ from Jerzy Malinowski (ed.), History of Art History in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (2012) 7-SM/1

Griselda Pollock, ‘Unexpected Turns: The Aesthetic, the Pathetic and the Adversarial in the Long Durée of Art’s Histories’ 7-GP/1

Nasser Rabbat, ‘Islamic Architecture as a Field of Historical Enquiry’, AD Architectural Design, 74(6), 2004 7-NR/1 Reproduced by courtesy of the publishers John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Terry Smith, ‘Meyer Schapiro on style in art and science: Notes from a Theory and Methods of Art History graduate seminar lecture course, Columbia University, New York, 1973’ 7-TS/1

Reviews

Antonia Boström, ‘When sculpture became more than “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting”’. Christopher R. Marshall (ed.), Sculpture and the Museum, Ashgate 2011. 7-AB/1

Ute Engel, ‘Riegl on the Baroque’. Alois Riegl, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome. Edited and Translated by Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte. Essays by Alina Payne, Arnold Witte, and Andrew Hopkins, Getty Research Institute 2010 7-UE/1

Douglas Fordham, ‘Just what is it that makes English artwriting so different, so appealing?’ Mark A. Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The ‘Englishness’ of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century, Ashgate, 2012 7-DF/1

Eric C. Garberson, ‘Carl Justi: Modern Errors’. Johannes Rößler, Carl Justi. Moderne Irrtümer, Briefe und Aphorismen, Matthes & Seitz, 2012 7-EG/3

Mimi Hellman, ‘Interrogating interiors’. Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin (eds), Architectural space in eighteenth-century Europe: Constructing identities and interiors, Ashgate, 2010 7-MH/1

Ana Hernández, ‘”A special place at a special time”: Françoise Henry’s diaries on Inishkea North (Ireland)’. Janet T. Marquardt(ed.), Françoise Henry in Co. Mayo. The Inishkea Journals, Four Courts Press, 2012 7-AH/1

Carol C. Mattusch, ‘Archaeological, art-historical, and artistic approaches to classical antiquity’. Viccy Coltman (ed.), Making Sense of Greek Art, University of Exeter Press, 2012 7-CM/1

Catherine Oakes, ‘Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent’. Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent. Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Disciplina Monastica. Studies on Medieval Monastic Life 8), Brepols, 2011 7-CO/1

Spyros Papapetros, ‘Ornament and object—ornament as object’. Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernity, Yale University Press, 2012 7-SP/1

Matthew Rampley, ‘Aby Warburg, Images and Exhibitions’. Aby Warburg, Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen edited by Uwe Fleckner and Isabelle Woldt, Akademie Verlag, 2012 7-MR/1

Robert T. Soppelsa, ‘Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Côte d’Ivoire’. Monica Blackmun Visona, Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Côte d’Ivoire, Ashgate, 2010 7-RS/1

Arnold Witte, ‘Formalism in the first half of the twentieth century: ‘pure science’ or a case of effective rhetoric?’. Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler (eds),German Art History and Scientific Thought – Beyond Formalism, Ashgate, 2012 7-AW/1

Abstracts

Milena Bartlová, ‘Czech art history and Marxism’ 7-MB/1

Abstract: Czech art history in the 20th century has been strongly informed by the tradition of the Vienna School. After the Communist takeover of power in 1948, Marxism – or more precisely Marxism-Leninism – became a compulsory philosophical approach. After a brief Stalinist phase, an ‘iconologic turn’ was construed by Jaromír Neumann before 1960: iconology was reframed in terms of Dvořák´s ‘spiritual history’ and the result was labelled Marxist, as it enabled to provide a direct access to the ideology of the past without having to pay attention to class and social relations. Frederick Antal´s or Arnold Hauser´s social history of art was rejected, the main focus was on the noetic qualities of artworks and the main topic the debate of realism. As a result, Czech art history was pursued as an elitist discipline in the humanist tradition, but it did not need to participate in the search for ‘humanist Marxism’ or revisionism which was typical for the East-Central Europe in the 1960. Dvořák-type iconology combined with formalist approach and belief in a validity of the laws of develompent remained attractive for Czech art history up to the 1990s.

Key words: Marxism; Vienna School; Jaromír Neumann; Frederick Antal; Max Dvořák; Czech art history

Jim Berryman, ‘Exhibiting Western Desert Aboriginal painting in Australia’s public galleries: an institutional analysis, 1981-2002’ 7-JB/1

Abstract: This paper documents and analyses the exhibition history of Aboriginal painting in Australia’s public art galleries over a two-decade period. It concentrates on Western Desert acrylics but is not confined to this movement or region alone. Based on a review of catalogues from key exhibitions, it identifies three interpretative frameworks used by curators to validate the presence of Aboriginal painting in the contemporary art realm. These modes of interpretation are called the aesthetic, ethnographic and the ownership discourses. Despite being a problematic art at odds with conventional art-historical classifications, Aboriginal painting was elevated to a position of prominence in Australian art history. Institutionally, Western Desert painting found legitimacy in the dominant aesthetic legacy of modernism. This modernist art historiography overrode the minority interests of cultural pluralism and critical postmodernism.

Key words: Western Desert painting; contemporary Aboriginal art; art exhibitions; art catalogues; Aboriginal acrylic painting; art historiography; museums; public galleries; Australia; art curatorship; Aboriginal art

Rachel Dedman, ‘The importance of being Ernst: a reassessment of E. H. Gombrich’s relationship with psychoanalysis’’ 7-RD/1

Abstract: This study aims to explore and counter the assumption that Prof. Ernst Gombrich was wary, and even dismissive, of psychoanalysis as a discipline. Though renowned for his interest in the psychology of viewing, new research suggests that, from his earliest career, Gombrich’s work was also crucially psychoanalytically-inflected. An unpublished dialogue from the 1980s, between Gombrich and Dr Joseph Sandler, a distinguished psychoanalyst, is considered here. Archival research reveals that Gombrich was for many years a member of the Imago Group – a monthly conference of psychoanalysts. Furthermore, Gombrich’s relationship with Ernst Kris, and the unpublished manuscript on caricature and regression they developed together, is reviewed alongside later works tracing a sustained interest in psychoanalytic issues. Ultimately, the article is an attempt to rehabilitate psychoanalysis into Gombrich’s reputation and prove that, though his engagement with psychoanalysis was not universally positive, it was sensitive, nuanced, consistent and, ultimately, underestimated.

Key words:Ernst Gombrich; psychoanalysis; psychology; caricature; Imago; Joseph Sandler; Ernst Kris

Eric Garberson, ‘Art History in the University II: Ernst Guhl’ 7-EG/1 Tables 7-EG/2

Abstract: This essay continues the examination, begun in volume five of this journal, of the training, appointment, and teaching careers of nineteenth-century art historians at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin. It examines the extensive but little studied documentation for Ernst Guhl (1819-1862), the only new instructor with a primary focus on the history of art to join the university between the early 1840s and the later 1860s. After standard training in philology and archaeology, an extended stay in Italy, and several years teaching as Privatdozent, he applied four times for an extraordinary professorship (1851, 1854, twice in 1858). The successive reports assessing his qualifications demonstrate that while the historical study of art was becoming more sharply defined as a specific discipline, it continued to be assigned a minor role in the intellectual and pedagogical structures of the university. They also provide insight into the contested relationship between archaeology and art history.

Key words: Ernst Guhl; Eduard Gerhard, Theodor Panofka; Karl Friederichs; Gustav Friedrich Waagen; Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin; doctoral education; habilitation; teaching of art history; archaeology

Francis Halsall, ‘Making and matching: aesthetic judgement and the production of art historical knowledge’ 7-FH/1

Abstract: In this paper I argue that aesthetic judgement plays a key role in the production of art historical knowledge and that judgements of taste lie at the very heart of art historical practice. My key claim is that in their encounters with art the art historian makes parallel judgements. First, they make critical and connoisseurial judgments, which they may or may not choose to acknowledge. Second, further judgements are made on the particular discursive and historical models that they have chosen to use. My argument is that, even though they might not like to admit it, such discursive judgements are, also, aesthetic ones. In short, art historians are involved in a process that attempts to reconcile two things: on the one hand a mode of writing and on the other the art which that writing negotiates. My conclusion is that aesthetic judgements play a key role in this negotiation and hence in the genesis and structure of art historical discourse.

Key words: Kunstwissenschaft; aesthetics; judgment; writing; art history

Amy K. Hamlin, ‘”A heuristic event”: reconsidering the problem of the Johnsian conversation’ 7-AH/1

Abstract: The contemporary American artist Jasper Johns is notorious for being difficult to interview. Frustrated by his resistance to the kind of interpretive strategies his artwork seems to invite, critics and art historians have fueled the myth of the Johnsian conversation. This essay is based on a careful reconsideration of the many interviews that Johns has given in the course of his career and asks: what is to be learned from Johns’ interviews? It offers analysis of several interviews as sites of ‘a heuristic event’. A phrase borrowed from Leo Steinberg’s groundbreaking essay on Johns, ‘a heuristic event’ offers the reader an opportunity to reevaluate her interpretation of the interview, to learn from it something about how meaning is generated and operates in Johns’ work.

Key words: Jasper Johns; artist interview; heuristic event; Leo Steinberg; interpretation

Peter R. Kalb, ‘Picturing Pollock: Photography’s Challenge to the Historiography of Abstract Expressionism’ 7-PK/1

Abstract: In the summer and fall of 1950, photographers Rudy Burckhardt and Hans Namuth documented Jackson Pollock in his studio as he was creating what have become his iconic Abstract Expressionist paintings. The photographs quickly dominated the critical discourse of the new painting and initiated a crisis in the historiography of Abstract Expressionism. This paper argues that despite being produced to serve an illustrative role for the Art News series ‘An Artists Paints a Picture’, Burckhardt and Namuth’s photographs of Pollock provide a glimpse of the analytic complexity photography offered art criticism.

Key words: Abstract Expressionism; photography; Jackson Pollock; Hans Namuth; Rudy Burckhardt

Jenni Lauwrens, ‘Welcome to the revolution: The sensory turn and art history’ 7-JL/1

Abstract: Discourses concerned with the sensorially embodied subject have emerged since the 1990s in various disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, geography, film studies and literary studies. The purpose of this article is to bring the conversation regarding audiences’ embodied engagement in culture closer to art history by investigating the implications of what has been termed the sensory turn for this discipline. One of the accusations lodged against art history by supporters of the multi-sensoriality of embodied human experience is its alleged ocularcentrism, the implication of which is a detached autonomous subject. In this article, the sensory turn is defined and contextualized, particularly in light of the body of criticism targeted at art history’s emphasis on the visual. The proposed ways in which art historians might usefully deal with audience’s embodied experiences of not only immersive installation works of art, but also artworks in traditional media, such as painting and photography, are teased apart.

Key words: sensory turn; art history; multi-sensorial subjectivity; embodiment

John Mack, ‘Making and seeing: Matisse and the Kuba decorative “system”’ 7-JM/1

Abstract: Pattern has been consistently discussed and illustrated in art historical and ethnographic sources in linear terms. It is assumed that this is also how they are seen by their makers so that, if names are attached to them, it is as isolated figures abstracted from a total composition. In this essay these analytical assumptions are identified as a preconception inherent in modernist writings. Through a consideration of Matisse’s interest in the pattern-making practices of the Kuba of equatorial Africa – as he himself turned from drawing and painting towards collage – it is suggested that attention to processes of making invites a more nuanced approach to ways of seeing pattern: an architectonic model to set alongside a linear one. Furthermore, within Kuba culture – where making was originally gender-specific – men and women may have ‘seen’ pattern according to different models as evidenced in the earliest writings about their naming practices.

Key words: Matisse; linear; pattern-making; Kuba; textile embroidery

Jeanne Nuechterlein, ‘Location and the experience of early Netherlandish art’ 7-JN/1 Images 7-JN/2

Abstract: In The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, Michael Baxandall incorporated contingent site-specific observations into his interpretation of Tilman Riemenschneider’s Holy Blood Altarpiece (1499-1505). Where Baxandall typically linked such site-specific analysis to the processes of authorial intent, the present article expands this mode of inquiry to investigate how the contingent viewing contexts of early Netherlandish art could have affected viewers’ perceptions of meaning, in ways that may or may not have accorded with the artists’ or patrons’ expectations. This approach potentially yields new interpretations that cannot easily arise in a museum setting.

Key words: northern Renaissance art; early Netherlandish art; museums; Baxandall; perception

Alina Payne, Wölfflin, ‘Architecture and the Problem of Stilwandlung’ 7-AP/1

Abstract:This article argues that more so than style, it was the mechanism that caused style change that galvanized Wölfflin’s inquiry starting with his doctoral dissertation (1886) to the Principles of Art History (1915). The late 19^th century broadly-based discussion of style in architecture (that gathered Semper, Göller, Riegl and many others) provided him with the “laboratory” where he first developed the concepts of subject/object relationship and reception/perception that informed his mature work. This initial and very productive dialogue with architecture, also meant that Wölfflin had an effect upon architecture culture both in his own time and subsequently, through the work of his student Sigfried Giedion.

Keywords: Wölfflin; Giedion; style; empathy theory; objects, Semper; Riegl

Rebecca Rice, ‘Transforming the “unimaginative and literal” into an art for the nation: writing and exhibiting New Zealand’s art history in the twentieth century’ 7-RR/1

Abstract: This article analyses three cultural events associated with the opening exhibitions of New Zealand’s National Art Gallery in 1936 and the centennial celebrations of 1940: the Loan Exhibition of New Zealand Art, 1936; the National Centennial Exhibition of New Zealand Art curated by Alexander Hare McLintock, 1940-1 and Eric Hall McCormick’s publication Letters and Art in New Zealand (1940) to evaluate how New Zealand art was put to use in the construction of a national history of New Zealand art. In the case of McLintock’s exhibition and McCormick’s text, the employment of works from library and museum collections importantly ‘recovered’ more ‘historical’ works for New Zealand’s art history. But they also attempted to identify a modern element within New Zealand art, or ‘an art truly national’. Taken together, these exhibitions and associated publications provided the first attempts at a critical evaluation of New Zealand art and are consequently foundational documents for the writing of New Zealand’s art history.

Key words: New Zealand Art History; retrospective exhibitions; colonial art; national art gallery

Francesco Russo, ‘Medieval Art studies in the Republic of Letters: Mabillon and Montfaucon’s Italian connections between travel and learned collaborations’ 7-FR/1

Abstract:The Italian journeys of Jean Mabillon (1685-1686) and Bernard de Montfaucon (1698-1701), monks of the Congregation of St. Maur and fathers of diplomatic and palaeography, had a significant role in the early modern advancement of studies on Medieval art and antiquities. As regards their acquisition of art-historical information and direct experience of monuments, the position of Italian erudites was relevant. This is particularly clear with Mabillon’s surveys in churches, catacombs, archives and private collections made with the essential help of Italian scholars and through the exchanges of art-historical data between the French monks and several Italian colleagues, such as emerged from their correspondence. As a result, this article aims to illustrate this process and outline a context of mutual influences between French and Italian traditions of scholarship.

Key words: Mabillon; Montfaucon; Maurist; St. Maur Congregation; medieval; Italy; Bacchini; Bellori; Ciampini; Gattola

Jenny H. Shaffer, ‘Restoring Charlemagne’s chapel: historical consciousness, material culture, and transforming images of Aachen in the 1840s’ 7-JS/1

Abstract: The 1840s offer crystallizing images of Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen that continue to resonate. In this decade, the Carolingian building, restored in words and images by scholars, made an auspicious debut within the coalescing discipline of art history. Simultaneously, the well-known restoration of the extant medieval chapel, which began in the 1850s, found sure footing as the chapel’s columnar screen, which Napoleon had removed, was reinserted. While these co-existing, interrelated restoration movements – focused on the chapel’s dilapidated state and notions of its importance as an imperial, Christian, and German work – diverged in methods and results after mid-century, they remain central to understanding both the chapel in scholarship and the extraordinary monument in the town centre of Aachen today.

Keywords: Aachen; Charlemagne; Karlsverein; Kugler, Mertens; Schnasse

Barbara Stoltz, ‘Disegno versus Disegno stampato: printmaking theory in Vasari’s Vite (1550-1568) in the context of the theory of disegno and the Libro de’ Disegni’ 7-BS/1

Abstract: The aim of this article is to illustrate the quintessence of Vasari’s theory of printmaking, an issue that so far has not been clearly analyzed in the research literature. The questions are what kind of theory and theoretical principles Vasari created about prints, and what kind of definition Vasari basically gives to the printed image. The paper analyzes the first and the second edition of the Vite and views also Vasari’s theory of disegno, this means his remarks about his Libro de’ disegni and his main text about disegno. The examination demonstrates that Vasari was the first art historian to give a definition to the printed image and he does it not only in the second edition with the well known Life of Marcantonio Raimondi but already in the first edition of the Vite. The most important point about Vasari’s printmaking theory is that he doesn’t make a general valuation of printmaking, but he is aware of the complexity of this art and discusses its different aspects.

Key words: disegno/ disegno stampato; printed image; invenzione/invention; execution; original; Libro de’ disegni

Marja Väätäinen, ‘From Ringbom to Ringbom: The art of art history of Lars-Ivar Ringbom and Sixten Ringbom: A mythmaker and a myth-breaker in Åbo, Finland’ 7-MV/1

Abstract: When Ludwig Klages visited Åbo (a coastal city in Finland), in 1935, his host was Lars-Ivar Ringbom (1901-1971), an art historian and docent at Åbo Akademi University. In 1969, Ernst Gombrich visited the same city, and this time his host was Lars-Ivar Ringbom’s son, Sixten Ringbom (1935-1992), who soon was to follow his father as a professor in art history. I use the image of these visits as a starting point for my discussion about the change in the art historical interests of Lars-Ivar Ringbom and Sixten Ringbom. I will concentrate particularly on the impact that Ludwig Klages had on Lars-Ivar Ringbom writings. The polarity and the tension of rational and irrational that structured Lars-Ivar Ringbom’s work was later echoed in the work of Sixten Ringbom. Sixten Ringbom’s thinking is in dialogical relation and partly contradictory to his father’s studies.

Key words: Lars-Ivar Ringbom; Sixten Ringbom; Ludwig Klages; Lebensphilosophie; biocentrism

Ian Verstegen, ‘The “Second” Vienna School as Social Science’ 7-IV/1

Abstract: This paper addresses Kunstwollen, not as a historicized concept, but as a social scientific construct open to reinterpretation and input from the evolving sciences. Emphasizing especially the contributions of Hans Sedlmayr in his Introduction to Riegl’s Collected Works (1929) and Otto Pächt’s article on Riegl (1962), attention departs from Riegl to set the stage regarding the meaning of Kunstwollen. Emphasizing its roots in materialistic social history, inspired by evolution, the article undertakes vignettes of paired art historians and social theorists: Dvorak and Karl Mannheim, Sedlmayr and Alfred Vierkandt, and Otto Pächt and Wolfgang Metzger. It can be seen that Kunstwollen is interpreted with the tools of social science as the sociology of knowledge (Mannheim, Vierkandt) with refinements from Gestalt psychology (Metzger). As the career of Pächt progresses, the Austrian art historian looks for ways to stress continuous evolution, historical determinism and compulsion, and the super-individuality of artistic tradition.

Keywords: Alois Riegl, Hans Sedlmayr, Otto Pächt, Kunstwollen, social collectivism, historical determinism

Translations

Abstract: With the discoveries made by Schliemann, the increasing evidence from other cultures around the world and a subtle analysis as we have it in Riegl’s Stilfragen, one can now clearly see that the geometric style was not the earliest to thrive in Greece. The earliest impulses of art seem to have consisted in the attempt to capture the living image of an object or action ‘images precisely gathered in the memory’ (Joshua Reynolds), and not the urge to sit before something and make a picture of it. They had a common root in the language of sounds as ‘speech in terms of visible forms’. Together with the appeal of rhythm and symmetry this might well be inborn, but also included a technical aspect in which humanity differs from bees by further developing variations. Human and animal imagery did not arise in a naturalist vein but within the dictates of stylistic schemata with a linearity preventing plant forms and reminding us that landscape only arrived later. There was more than one source leading primitive art to geometric motifs.

Key words: origins of art; geometric style; plant ornament; geometric ornament; braid ornament; Gottfried Semper; Alois Riegl.

Abstract: On the basis of a corpus edition of Attic grave stelae, it becomes possible to make certain broad observations about the nature and development of Greek relief sculpture, a branch of the arts in which the Greeks are admitted to have excelled. Archaeology has added so much to our knowledge in the course of the 19^th century that we can dismiss the earlier assumption that these sculptures did not have colour. In fact they were painted, and the evidence shows that in spite of its severe technical limitations, Greek relief sculpture developed in an increasingly painterly direction, in tandem with the development of Greek wall and panel painting as we know it – more so than vase painting. St. Remy and Pergamon provide examples of the prodigious Greek application of the genre, where ‘there were no innovations left for Roman art to make’.

Key words: sculpture; sculptural techniques; relief sculpture; Neo-Classicism; painted sculpture; ‘painterly’ sculpture; Greek artists in Rome

Documents

Rachel Dedman (ed.), “‘Art and psychoanalysis – 15 June 1988. Speakers: Professor Joseph Sandler and Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich”, part of the series “Dialogues on Contemporary Issues” hosted by the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the summer term of 1988’ 7-RD/2

Abstract: The previously unpublished conversation between Ernst Gombrich and Joseph Sandler in 1988 constitutes an exciting meeting of minds in the field of art history and psychoanalysis, respectively. The two discuss ‘the artist’ as a term; the impulse inherent in the creation of art; taste; and the affective power of art, particularly in the light of the work of Freud and their shared friend, Ernst Kris. Gombrich seems both comfortable with the psychoanalytic theory they discuss, and also keen to steer the discussion in certain directions – quoting from Cicero, Van Gogh and I.E. Richards. At the point at which questions are opened up to the audience, the most interesting thing of note is the revelation that Gombrich was a member of ‘The Image Group’, which research has revealed was more accurately known as ‘The Imago Group,’ a society of psychoanalysts and dedicated analysands, of which Gombrich’s membership is unusual. As Gombrich is often considered reticent about psychoanalysis, this dialogue constitutes evidence that late in life he continued to engage in discussion about its application and interpretation in an artistic context.

Key words: Gombrich; Joseph Sandler; art; artist; psychoanalysis; psychology; Freud; Cicero

Abstract: Since the founding of the academic field of Pre-Columbian art history in the mid 20^th century, the training of and work by Pre-Columbianists have changed substantially. Whereas the first Pre-Columbian art historians drew heavily on their knowledge of art history, other disciplines, and theory writ large, younger Pre-Columbian art historians today tend to specialize in one area and one time period, and to write primarily for fellow specialists with interests similar to their own. Increasingly little effort is made to render Pre-Columbian art history relevant to a broader public, whether that public comprise scholars in other fields or laypersons. One of the last fields to have been fully accepted by college and university art history departments in the U.S., Pre-Columbian art history also has always been among the first to go during an economic downturn. During this session, following brief presentations by the speakers and the discussant, there will be a panel conversation in which the audience may participate. The goal will be to assess where the field might and should go in the decades to come.

Key words: Pre-Columbian; art history; history; historiography; future of the field

Partha Mitter, ‘Ernst Gombrich and Western representations of the sacred art of India’ 7-PM/1

Abstract: Lecture at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte, University of Vienna, 16 May 2012 on western representations of ancient Indian art aims at explaining the author’s relationship with his teacher E. H. Gombrich, and the intellectual inspiration behind his work, Much Maligned Monsters: History of Western Representations of Indian Art. The roots of western misrepresentations of Indian art in the 19^th century went back to the Middle Ages. The early travellers’ stereotypes of monstrous gods of India owed more to the medieval lore of classical monsters and Christian demons than to objective facts. However even with extensive documentation of Indian antiquities in the colonial period, the clash of two antithetical aesthetic standards – Indian and European – remained as exemplified in art history. Even though Gombrich was essentially a historian of European art his theory of schema and correction and the formation of stereotypes proved most fecund in helping to explain European inability to come terms with ancient Indian religious art.

Key words: Gombrich’s methodology; history of representations; stereotypes; schema and correction; monsters, colonial art history; many-armed Indian gods; clash of aesthetics; travellers

Stefan Muthesius, ‘The beginnings of the “Cracow School of Art History”’ from Jerzy Malinowski (ed.), History of Art History in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (2012) 7-SM/1

Abstract: Because Polish art history, that is, art history written by Polish scholars, has tended to be rather inward-looking as a whole, its first and most important school, that of Cracow, has not received the attention it deserves. The term ‘school’ is here used in a way akin to that of ‘Vienna School’. Cracow modern art history originated in the 1860s to 1880s in the small but culturally extremely vigorous capital of Austrian Poland, as a co-operation between the newly-founded art history section at the Academy of Sciences and the Department at the Jagiellonian University. It pursued two principal, interlinked aims: the investigation of Polish art and architecture and the use of new methods that were being developed in Western and Central Europe. What comes across most strongly is the constantly foregrounded ethos of scientific, empirical exactitude and the intense institutional togetherness. All are united in an absolute devotedness to their academic task. One of the results was the way in which recruitment has remained within the school until this day. It has to be remembered though that other Polish centres only started teaching the history of art after WW I. This article is a- preliminary attempt to characterise, firstly, some of the chief factors of institutionality and, secondly, some methodological aspects of the work of the two chief protagonists, Władysław Łuszczkiewicz and Marian Sokołowski.

Key words: Later 19^th century period; art history of Poland; empiricism; institutionalism

Griselda Pollock, ‘Unexpected Turns: The Aesthetic, the Pathetic and the Adversarial in the Long Durée of Art’s Histories’ 7-GP/1

Abstract: In a conference organized at the University of Birmingham in 2012, I was invited to reflect upon the current situation in Art History that is posited as being ‘After the New Art History’. What is this after-ness? Succession? Supersession? Replacement? Exhaustion? Erasure? Fashionability? Dare we ask what kind of ‘killing’ of the past or of Oedipal Feminist Mothers and Marxists Fathers is going on here? Or does this indicate simply that we need new directions in our discipline just to keep it alive? There is certainly a feeling around that we are in a period of transition. Former certainties about the tendencies within the discipline of art history have melted. Is this a sign of our condition as Liquid Modernity? There is a risk, however, of casting the recent past as being ‘over’, to be viewed nostalgically, or gratefully cast into the dustbin of has-been histories so that we can get back to business as normal or find new pastures exciting because they are different. Before I acquiesce to such a trend for newness per se, I want to reconsider what is being said to have come before and now is defined as being over. To do so, I shall argue for an understanding of the long-term nature of any one intervention seeking radically to change the ways we study art and the image, past and present. Equally, I suggest that such long-term projects are themselves subject to historical change, shifting in sensitive response to altered conditions and changed priorities, but also registering their own effects and opening new avenues of analysis. Finally this article performs a reading of the call for papers for the conference in order to tease out critical misrepresentations of the past that we are now supposed to come after. Displacing the model of old and new with notions of parallel trajectories and multiple settlements in the expanding, historically shifting but also deeply structured ‘landscape’ of the discipline, I propose as less phallic model of a field with many threads contributing to its complex engagements with art, with visuality, with subjectivity and with their forms of material and symbolic interaction.

Key words: Feminism, Art History, Warburg, Rancière, Psychoanalytical Aesthetics, the aesthetic turn, the pathetic turn, fidelity.

Nasser Rabbat, ‘Islamic Architecture as a Field of Historical Enquiry’, AD Architectural Design, 74(6), 2004 7-NR/1 Reproduced by courtesy of the publishers John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Abstract: Islamic architecture, a young field with a conservative scholarly lineage, has only recently begun to find its own theoretical bearings. After briefly reviewing the origins and formative stages of the field in the West, this article identifies a turning point brought about by the publication of Edward Saïd’s seminal book Orientalism in 1978. It then introduces three critical notions, dynamic periodization, multiculturalism, and dialogue, which offer a framework for the study of Islamic architecture as a tradition with a solid historical selfconsciousness.

Key words: Islamic architecture; Orientalism; periodization; multiculturalism; dialogue; reception; translation; representation

Terry Smith, ‘Meyer Schapiro on style in art and science: Notes from a Theory and Methods of Art History graduate seminar lecture course, Columbia University, New York, 1973’ 7-TS/1

Abstract: These notes were taken from the lectures and comments by Meyer Schapiro that constituted his course “Art History Theory and Methods,” offered at Columbia University, New York, during the Spring semester 1973. The introduction describes the immediate context of the course, briefly characterizes my own situation as a student and a member of the Art & Language group of artists, as well as the relation of these notes to materials in the Columbia University Archives. The only one of its kind then being offered in New York (and rare anywhere else), the course introduced graduate students to key texts in the history of art history, placing these in dialogue with relevant thinking from science, philosophy, linguistics (especially semiotics), and psychology. This dialogue was arranged around consideration of key topics shared by both art and science: objectivity vis-à-vis subjectivity, research methodology, definition and distinction, classification, taxonomy, form, hypotheses, interpretations, and value judgements. The course also addressed topics, such as style and expressiveness, which do not seem, on the face of it, to be shared between science and art. Offering an intimate glimpse of a major scholar teaching from inside the heart of the discipline, and thinking it forward as able to grapple with the most important questions of the times, these notes are intended to supplement the published writings of arguably the greatest American art historian.

Keywords: Art; science; style; art historical method; classification; style terms; form; interpretation; hermeneutics; knowledge; value judgement; imagination; universality; objectivity vis-à-vis subjectivity; time-space; diagnostics; schema; physiognomy; communication; information theory; cybernetics; signs; semiotics; pictorial meaning; abstraction; psychology; expression

Reviews

Abstract: This article is a review of a volume of essays based on the papers delivered at a conference on display held at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2007. The publication forms part of the HMI’s series, SUBJECT/OBJECT: NEW STUDIES IN SCULPTURE. The individual studies cover a broad spectrum of sculpture collections over a two-hundred-year period, and remind the reader of the importance that sculpture has occupied in museum displays since the advent of the public museum, whether installed in discrete sculpture galleries, or integrated into a contextualized installation together with paintings and applied art.

Key words: sculpture; museums; display; Possagno; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tate Britain; Tate Modern.

Abstract: Alois Riegl´s Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, published posthumously by Arthur Burda and Max Max Dvořák in 1908, is the last of Riegl´s major works, which was translated into English. This was achieved by Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte in a volume of the Getty Research Institute Publications Program in 2010. The volume also includes three introductory essays by the editors themselves and Alina Payne on Riegl´s notions on the Baroque, its position in historiography and the editorial history of the original book, and it is added by a detailed bibliography of Riegl´s publications and the wide-ranging secondary literature as well as a useful glossary of the German terms essential to Riegl´s theory of art history and their explanation in English.

Key words: Alois Riegl; historiography; Baroque art and architecture; Mannerism; Vienna school of art history; Kunstwollen; German – English translations

Abstract: Mark A. Cheetham examines three centuries of English artwriting in which he traces an enduring preoccupation with nation, nationalism, and Englishness. Emphasizing the theoretical nature of all artwriting, Cheetham seeks to recover the theoretical underpinnings of an English authorial tradition that frequently defined itself in opposition to Continental aesthetic theory.

Key Words: British art, theory, Locke, nation, empire, post-colonial, cosmopolitanism, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, John Ruskin, Clive Bell, Herbert Read

Eric C. Garberson, ‘Carl Justi: Modern Errors’. Johannes Rößler, Carl Justi. Moderne Irrtümer, Briefe und Aphorismen, Matthes & Seitz, 2012 7-EG/3

Abstract: The volume publishes for the first time selected letters to Charlotte Broicher and Wilhlem von Bode and the full text of Justi’s aphorisms on the errors of modernism in the arts.

Key words: Carl Justi; Wilhelm von Bode; modernism; connoisseurship

Abstract: Detailed accounts of the essays in the collection provide the basis for a broader exploration of some of the interpretative opportunities and challenges posed by the study of interiors. The review raises questions about the role of intentionality in decorative self-fashioning, the nature of sensory experience in historical interiors, and the scholarly conventions that may limit efforts to re-imagine the past.

Key words: Denise Amy Baxter; Meredith Martin; interior decoration; interiors ─ eighteenth-century; interior decoration ─ approaches

Abstract: The French art historian Françoise Henry spent four summers excavating at the remote Irish island of Inishkea North, where she searched for the remains of an early Christian settlement. This book reproduces her personal journals written during her excursions during the summers of 1937, 1938, 1946 and 1950, translated into English and complemented by clarifying notes as well as an introduction by the editor Janet T. Marquardt. Henry’s is an intriguing testimony of the landscape, folklore and daily life on the Mullet Peninsula, all seen through the eyes of a foreigner, facing the struggles of a woman carrying out investigations in a rural corner of the world during the first half of the twentieth century.

Keywords: Françoise Henry; art historiography; diaries; early medieval Irish art; archaeology

Carol C. Mattusch, ‘Archaeological, art-historical, and artistic approaches to classical antiquity’. Viccy Coltman (ed.), Making Sense of Greek Art, University of Exeter Press, 2012 7-CM/1

Abstract: Making sense of Greek Art is a Festschrift in memory of John Betts containing papers by ten of his students and colleagues. Their papers on Greek, Etruscan, Roman, and nineteenth-century topics reveal a wide range of methodologies. Two papers focus on subjects that might be covered in a course on Greek art and archaeology: one evaluates votive offerings in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta (Nicki Waugh); and the other compares archaeological and art-historical approaches to the study of Greek vases (Zosia Archibald). Three are concerned with Etruscan and Roman works: an Etruscan reinterpretation of a Greek myth (Vedia Izzet); Hellenistic and Roman versions of Aphrodite holding a mirror (Shelley Hales); and early Augustan uses of Archaistic art (Christopher H. Hallett). The other five papers illustrate the uses of classical artefacts during the nineteenth century: classical elements in Jacques-Louis David’s paintings (Ed Lilley); display of antiquities in the library of an English country house (Viccy Coltman); Tanagra figurines in paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Jean-Léon Gérôme (Genevieve Liveley); Alma-Tadema’s drawings for a theatrical production of Hypatia (Michael Liversidge); and plaster casts of the Elgin marbles exhibited in the Greek court of the Crystal Palace (Kate Nichols).

Abstract: This book explores the mental and physical interaction between female religious in late medieval Dutch convents and a group of manuscripts and artefacts created to assist their devotions as they travelled on imaginary pilgrimages.

Key words: pilgrimage; convent; compassion; Middle Durch; devotional art; somaticism

Spyros Papapetros, ‘Ornament and object—ornament as object’. Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernity, Yale University Press, 2012 7-SP/1

Abstract: What would be the relationship between the rich historiography of ornament in the late nineteenth century and ornament’s ostensible eclipse from early twentieth-century building practice? Alina Payne’s From Ornament to Object retraces the gradual shift in interest from the endless stylistic iterations of architectural ornamentation in fin-de-siécle culture to the unornamented artifacts of architectural modernism and argues that such plain yet highly sculptural implements carry over architecture’s rhetorical function previously allotted to ornamentation. While Payne’s “genealogy” is based on a carefully crafted polarity, this review-essay underscores the implicit analogies and correspondences between ornament and object and demonstrates how Payne’s intricate historical design corroborates that ornament is an object, a highly privileged but also an enigmatic one, whose loss and periodic recovery replicate the negative dialectics between art historiography and design practice.

Key words: Ornament historiography; object historiography; modern architecture; Semper; Warburg; Le Corbusier

Matthew Rampley, ‘Aby Warburg, Images and Exhibitions’. Aby Warburg, Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen edited by Uwe Fleckner and Isabelle Woldt, Akademie Verlag, 2012 7-MR/1

This article reviews the latest volume in the collected works of Aby Warburg published by Akademie Verlag. The volume consists of exhibitions and plates of images Warburg compiled to illustrate lectures in the period between 1925-1929. The review focuses on two key issues raised by the publication: the light it casts on the Mnemosyne Atlas Warburg was working on at the same time, and, in particular, how it helps shape perceptions of the broader intellectual direction of Warburg’s thinking in the final half decade of his life.

Keywords: Warburg; Atlas; Didi-Huberman; astrology; Hamburg; stamps; montage; photography; Franz Boll; Ernst Cassirer; Walter Benjamin; Siegfried Kracauer; Martin Heidegger

Abstract: This essay reviews Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Côte d’Ivoire, by Monica Blackmun Visonà. After reviewing previous publications and approaches to the study of art and culture from the lagoon region of southeastern Côte d’Ivoire, Visonà proceeds to discuss the arts of this region based on her field work during three field visits conducted during the 1980s, and attempts to construct a revisionist interpretation of these arts. The arts of healing and shrine arts, arts of leadership, age-set festivals and performance arts, and recent developments in the arts of the region are considered in individual chapters. The book is remarkable for its clarity of presentation, and for its frequent references to Western art history and its methodologies.

Key words:Lagoons; Côte d’Ivoire; comparative methodologies; Western/African arts; ‘tribal styles’; healing; leadership; prestige; age-set festivals; performance arts; global context

Abstract: German Art History and Scientific Thought – Beyond Formalism discusses the relation between art history and the human and natural sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All contributions in this volume highlight the way in which this exchange affected art history on a practical and methodological level, but at the same time illustrate how the quest for objectivity and scientific methods was accompanied by an irrational search for essential characteristics of art through race. Especially the exchange with psychology, physiognomy, and psychophysiology supported this kind reasoning in circles in which objectivity was related to holistic explanations. This led to a rhetoric of objective Kunstwissenschaft that spoke in terms of rational facts, but in which the concepts of character and evolution resulted in highly ideological interpretations, which became discredited after 1945. However, the post-war reaction to this in itself again affected another turn towards the ‘objective’ which goes to show how external, political, changes affected the relation between art history and the sciences.

Key words: Germany 1880-1955; biology; Kunstwissenschaft; physiognomics; Nazism; science

Books received

Jerzy Malinowski (ed.), History of Art History in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, 2 vols, Toruń: Society of Modern Art and Tako Publishing House, 2012 7-JzM/1

News

The Art Press in the Twentieth Century: History, criticism and the art market in magazines and journals – A one-day conference organised by Sotheby’s Institute of Art and The Burlington Magazine 1st February 2013 at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 30 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3EE Programme

Share this:

Like this: