Reflection on How We Write History
Christopher S. Wood. A History of Art History. 458pp, 6X9”, 24 b/w illustrations, hardback. ISBN: 978-069115652-1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
*****
Since I frequently jump between centuries in my research, I can imagine how difficult it was for Christopher Wood to compile this comprehensive history of art history from the period between 800-1400 to 1950-1960 in the last chapter. The leaps require as much research perhaps per chapter as a scholar focusing on a single period might do for an entire book. And the research compiled here does not stumbled into abstractions that the topic invites, but really delivers an accurate history of the changes in this culture-defining field. Having read many histories, and several art histories, it is curious to see these two fields combined. The combination is strange enough that this book is really needed, whereas a repetition of either of these two fields alone would not add much to scholarship. The overlap between these two fields demonstrates how politicians, cultural institutions (such as universities), intellectuals, and other powers have changed what the public perceives as great versus inferior art. When art historians fail, they command bananas that sell for hundreds of thousands because of nothing other than this monetary value. Other impactful fails of art history include the exclusion of all human depictions based on religious laws. Ever greater fails occur every year as art historians fail to find the best art that is never sold or published in favor of pop or highly-priced art, even if the latter is artistically, intellectually and otherwise inferior. Thus, understanding how the study, criticism and the narratives of art history have been executed previously can help us alter our trajectory from our current course headed for fields of rotten bananas to one that future historians might recognize as beneficial for humans that follow us.
The blurb reaffirms my assumption that this study is “the first of its kind in English”. Wood commences by “synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities”.
It “shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance—Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari—measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times.” This is a curious premise, but I don’t know if it is an example of progress in this field. I personally wish art critics would return to defined “standards of quality”. This might be difficult to achieve given the capacity of photography to capture a far more precise image than the best painting techniques. If art is not a matter of precision, as it was in part in the Renaissance, what can be used as markers of quality? Originality and experimentation clearly have to be rewarded, but how can something untried before be quantified against old technique that approaches perfection after centuries of adjustment? Every page in this book inspires similar reflections on what art is all about and what makes it great. “The major art historians of the modern era, however—Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich—struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline.” I took a course in art history in college and I recall that the instructor held “modernism” in high regard as did most of the critics we read, so it would be interesting to read a few critics that find “modernism” to be as morally and artistically bankrupt as it has started to look to me. The author, Wood, is part of the art scholarship establishment as he teaches at NYU; he does appear to share some of my own negative perspectives as his past books have been about “forgery”, “replica”, and the “origins of landscapes”; it is difficult to contemplate the same types of rectangles modern artists repeat without questioning if replication has come to the extreme, and every year brings new forgery scandals that even the top museums barely manage to notice. Wood’s interests underline that he has some experience with practical evaluation of art rather than mere academic observation of it; the more one looks at art’s realities, the more one develops suspicion there is fraud on every canvas.
Aside for the philosophical and theoretical implications of these histories, the facts of what forgotten artists have done are also interesting to read, especially if no other evidence other than historical descriptions have survived. For example, Wood describes Zhang Yanyuan ‘s hyper-specific “account” of “famous artists” with “dates” and “anecdotes that reveal the character of the artists; he names more than 350 artists and man notable works; he describes the sculptors and painters’ techniques and the different kinds of metals, stones, bricks, and pigments…” (60). It is engaging to read more about these artists as “dark ages” without documented proof suddenly have the light of knowledge shown on them. Given the centuries this book covers, these 350 artists might be the equivalent of the best-known and appreciated artists today, who in a thousand years might be equally strange and unknown. Jumping to the latest century, the narrative changes as for example, the “1930-1940” chapter begins by explaining the growth of academic departments dedicated to art history in Germany and Austria, noting: “A quarter of them were Jews”, which caused them to lose these relatively new positions as the Nazis took over running their institutions (329). Some passages digress into abstract ponderings without practical usefulness or clear logic, such as the ponderings on the “neo-annalistic approach that” implies “reversals of historical perspectives, to the pastoral or ironic switching of the signs, the parodies… on the grand scale…” but on the “local… scale there is plenty of historical consciousness” (388). History is not something that disappears due to the approach applied to the study of art, so this is a very convoluted bit of nonsense in the middle of very useful factual lectures. I think the problem here is Wood is attempting to attain the “Conclusions” the chapter title promises, but the breadth of the subject does not allow for simple conclusions. Either one ends up making very radical statements about this history, or one can digress into abstractions to avoid these radical outcries, and it seems Wood decided on the latter. The chapter’s end reinforces this conclusion by finishing on these digressions: “protecting the troubling unknown from a premature translation into a narrower existence” (408). Is “existence” narrowing or is the “unknown” the problem? I think there is a chasm in modern art criticism; as Wood mentions elsewhere publicists have been allowed to direct what art the public is led to believe in superior in our modern world. The “unknown” artists are those poor, starving artists that can never purchase the services of these publicists and thus remain obscure, while we are fed the inferior hack-jobs of the class-privileged “artists”.