By the
mid-1970s it was evident that a major shift in the political and social climate of
Western industrial countries was taking place. This new situation
produced stress in academia, especially in the humanities.i
In the
larger society the optimism that had accompanied an extraordinay thirty-year run of
economic progress yielded to deep foreboding about the future. Even
before, unrest provoked by the unpopular Vietnam War had begun to
erode the authority of Western governments, denying them the
deference that had allowed interventionist policies to be implemented
without public scrutiny. Advocates of third-world interests (and of
ethnic minorities situated within the industrial societies) became
more vocal. And demographic shifts reflecting new patterns of
immigration were making Western societies less cohesive. As the East Asian nations flexed their economic muscles, the centrality of
European-American civilization, which had almost been taken for
granted during the thirty years of expansion, came into question.
Indeed, continuing allegiance to this centrality elicited scorn in some quarters. Insurgents claimed that "Eurocentrism" was simply a device to shore up a
threatened status quo.
Academia
Responds.
In the
face of these changes the long-serene world of academia could not
remain what it was. A new cohort of researchers entered the ranks,
many of them eager to challenge the conventional wisdom of the
established disciplines. This critique emanated in part from the
programs in black studies and women's studies that had proliferated
in American universities. The older justification for the
humanities, that their assignment was to "civilize"
students, came under attack.ii
How in fact were students being changed by college instruction? If
its mission was a civilizing one, how did it happen then (critics
asked) that the humanities had contributed so little to the reduction
of racism and sexism? Rather it seemed to these observers that
culture, as defined by the academies, had simply bolstered the
existing state of affairs. As if this were not enough, the critics
claimed that university teaching and research had compromised
themselves through complicity with reactionary social elements, such
as militarism and class privilege.
Some in
academia found these claims exaggerated. They suspected, moreover,
that the radicals, unable to prevail at the ballot box, were seeking
to carve out an alternative realm in a politicized university. From
this base, it seemed, they were launching a new effort to transform
society by indoctrinationg students. However, this may be, the mass
of academics, true dwellers in the ivory tower, remained aloof. As a
consequence of this inaction, the passionate conviction of the
insurgents, abetted by many administrators eager to comply with
changes deemed progressive, largely set the agenda.
The
realignment was not felt uniformly: "hard science" and
engineering were little affected, with the humanities and the social
sciences the main theaters of action. At the heart of the struggle
lay literary studies. In North America the established methodology,
typified by the New Criticism, had been largely innocent of theory,
using a "seat-of-the-pants" procedure under the assumption
that literary texts lent themselves to an unproblematic, ad hoc
interpretation.iii
This approach, seemingly so well attuned to Anglo-Saxon empiricism
and pragmatism, quickly withered under assault. The rebels required
theoretical foundations for practice, a demand filled by importing
ideas from Germany and France. These ideas found their ultimate
rationale in the philosophical doctrines of such thinkers as Martin
Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. If those who
rallied to the new theories--often propounded simply in the singular:
"theory"--expected a simple set of invariant principles
they were quickly undeceived. The new approaches had a strong
relativistic (some would say nihilistic) component. Not only were
older assumptions about particular meanings ascribed to literary
works brought into question, but the possibility was broached that
there could be no ultimate interpretation, that we must live with a
radical indeterminacy.
At the
same time iconoclastic voices from the newly established programs in
ethnic and women's studies challenged the established canon of great
literature as prescribed in university curricula. Why is it, they
asserted, that the roster of great writers, from Plato to Joyce,
consists almost solely of dead white European men (DWEMs)?
Increasingly, demands were heard to expand the canon, to replace it
with a new one, or to abandon the canon principle altogether.
The
more radical attack on the canon meshed with an intense preoccupation
with popular culture, as seen in film, television, rock music, and
advertising. Younger scholars, whose had grown up in a new world
saturated by the electronic media, took the lead in this
reorientation. The contrast of high versus low culture came under
attack as elitist and dualistic, and the expanded roster of studies
was welcomed under a new rubric of "cultural studies."iv
This movement has a strong political thrust. J. Hillis Miller, an
older scholar of English and comparative literature sympathetic to
the cultural-studies insurgents, has characterized their project in
this way:
Their
goal is the transformation of the university by realigning present
departments and disciplines and establishing new ones. Through the
refashioning of the university they want to dismantle the present
dominant culture and empower ones that are at present
peripheral--minorities, women, gays and lesbians, all those
disadvantaged, silenced, without power. This empowering means not
just preserving the minority cultures as they are or have been, but
giving members of those minorities cultures the ability to transform
their own cultural forms and to repair the damage done to them by the
dominant culture in new self-determined and self-determining
creations.v
These
new currents--relativism, challenge to the canon, and cultural
studies--meshed with the ideal of multiculturalism, which would, it
was passionately urged, at last grant an appropriate place to
non-European cultures abroad and also to groups of non-European
origin encapsulated within the advanced industrial countries.vi
Implicit in this approach is a polar contrast between Western and
non-Western. For too long, the multiculturalists avowed, Western
civilization has been privileged; it is now time to give the rest of
the world a chance. Yet usually glossed over in the multiculturalist
project is that it confuses, usually implicitly rather than
explicitly, two quite different objects of attention: autonomous
cultures of non-European lands and minority cultures within
European and Europe-derived societies. Studying a Japanese-American
writer, however valuable for its own sake, tells us little about Lady
Murasaki, and vice versa.
In any
event, many teachers and scholars came to believe that the academy
was not neutral. If older structures persisted, then academia stood
condemned for its collusion with the corrupt established order. But
by rallying to the new approaches, and teaching them to students,
academics could make a contribution to positive social change.
New
journals, such as Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
Critical
Inquiry,
Representations,
and Genders
became established institutions. Even those who did not agree with
the programs espoused by these periodicals found them lively
reading.
All
this suggests that the shift in climate in the humanities was part
and parcel of a left agenda, and indeed it was often advocated and
perceived as such.vii
Yet the principle of relativism of reading was not in itself
leftist, and was even disdained by some advocates of social change as
eroding the common ground of discourse on which radical appeals
rested. In fact some who objected to the new approaches, such as the
Marxist historians Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, came
from the left. Others felt that the new program was being imposed in
an arbitrary and dictatorial manner, that its advocates, sure of the
rightness of their cause, were not playing fair. These opponents,
emphasizing the political aspect of the changes, termed them
"political correctness" or PC for short.viii
The PC controversy led to polarization and an alarming decline of
civility on college campuses, while exposing them to ridicule from
the outside world.
The
closing decades of the twentieth century witnessed winds of change
blowing in the humanities, sometimes with gale force. Although these
currents blew somewhat less vigorously and a little later in the
field of art history, blow they did. There was a sense that art
history must bring itself up to date to keep pace with its sister
disciplines. There was also dissatisfaction with the internal state
of art history, which was felt to be too confined to the ivory tower
and too formalist. The principles only recently deemed to have
reached their final perfection in the method of Erwin Panofsky came
to seem too smugly Olympian, selective, and formalist; they were
unsuited to examining the political and social issues that had
acquired, for some at least, great urgency. The classical tradition
embodied in the art of ancient Greece and the Renaissance now seemed
Eurocentric (perhaps even Germanocentric) and one-sided. Moreover,
the methods and interests this tradition embodied had proven unsuited
to the task of analyzing modern art, the distillation of our own
sensibility. Yet these charges were exaggerated. The claim that
established art history was exclusively formalist was refuted by the
iconological work of Panofsky himself and the Warburg school from
which he derived. As regards the charge of selectivity, earlier art
history had not restricted itself to classical eras but had made
important contributions to the study of medieval, Egyptian, and Near
Eastern art. Links with other forms of cultural expression, such as
literature and philosophy, had been forged. Furthermore, the
socioeconomic matrix had not been entirely neglected. In the young
Turks' indictment, the long history of art history itself, with its
many changing methodologies and interests, was neglected, encouraging
the myth that it started and remained locked into a kind of "one-note
samba" of Wölfflinian formalism. To suit present-minded
arguments the collective memory of the discipline, which this book
has sought to restore, was foreshortened and caricatured.
During
the 1980s postmodernism enjoyed the status of a vogue word.ix
It came to be commonly accepted that modernism had been superseded,
yielding to a triumphant successor. Yet there are two
postmodernisms. In architecture the word designates a
neo-historicism that feels free to raid the past to produce an
eclectic pastiche. The reasons for this new openness included
dissatisfaction with the austerity of the International Style, which
in debased form produced soulless slabs; reaction against the
devastation wrought by "urban renewal"; the positive trend
towards rehabilitation of old buildings (historic preservation); a
new understanding of neglected architectural styles; increased travel
and exposure to different traditions on the part of architects;
desire for variety, sentiment, and "fun" instead of
antiseptic purity. By contrast, contemporary painting and sculpture
negotiated no corresponding peace treaty with tradition. It was
assumed that visual art would continue the momentum of
"transgressive" innovations. Postmodern painting and
sculpture often took the form of a jumbled mélange of high and low
elements, which was thought to expose the "gauze of
representation"--the superficial understanding that the mass
media encourage. Social protest on behalf of women, ethnic
minorities, and gays, became common, often employing deliberately
crude means, as seen in a number of the Whitney Museum Biennials.
Despite
this conflict, the two postmodernisms shared common features. There
was a widespread reaction against the kind of purity and formalism
associated with the critic Clement Greenberg; this approach, which
had sought to provide sure touchstones of quality, came to seem
provincial and time-bound.
In view
of its diversity, there arose the question of whether the postmodern
phenomena really mark a break from modernism, or merely continue it.
One must guard against fetishing the term "postmodernism."
The popularity of the term may simply signal an undue preoccupation
with periodization, born of art historical study and an interest in
detecting breaks and discontinuities.
With
all these elements in ferment many art historians, especially new
recruits to the field, concluded that the time for change had come.
For some years they had been looking enviously at the exciting new
trends that seemed to be sweeping the study of literature,
philosophy, and mainstream history. Why should the study of art lag
behind? As agents for change, the potential of psychoanalysis and
Marxism, of structuralism and poststructuralism must, they held, be
assessed. More broadly, there was a strong sense that art and the
study of art must no longer linger in the sacred groves of ethical
neutrality, but should emerge to take stands on the burning issues of
the day. Such commitments came to seem more urgent as the
contemporary art world plunged into controversy. In the age of AIDS
and sexual frankness artists addressed issues that made many lay
people uncomfortable. As a result, the new art encountered a rising
tide of demands for censorship from such conservative activists as
the Reverend Donald Wildmon of Tupelo, Mississippi, and Senator Jesse
Helms of North Carolina.
Deconstruction:
Method or Mode?
The new
trends in art history take much of their nourishment from conceptual
shifts in the humanities generally. As has been noted above, the
forces conditioning these changes in the humanities are disparate,
impelled in part by differing social agendas. Still, the insurgents
have achieved a certain consensus in their aim of radically
reorganizing the humanities under the banner of cultural studies.
Central to the new approach are the following principles: denial of
the assumption that there are fixed, stable realities or truths that
reason can uncover; distrust of the "essentialist" belief
that there are transhistorical constants of human nature; skepticism
about the capacity of language to mirror the external world;
rejection of the ideal (and possibility) of objectivity and
neutrality in the realm of scholarship; scorn for models of influence
and development regarded as mechanical and self-generating;
questioning of accepted ideas of periodization and stylistic
sequences; denial that art itself is an autonomous category; and
rejection of the idea of a canon of accepted masterpieces and the
great figures ("geniuses") who created them. As these
points indicate, there is more agreement about what should be
rejected or questioned than about any doctrines to be positively
embraced. Still, one should not be too quick to dismiss such
approaches as simple negativism. Austere and ultraskeptical as it
may seem, renunciation of positive assertion has forebears in the
Dionysian tradition of medieval Europe and the Taoist philosophy of
the Far East.
Pervasive
as the climate of interrogation has been, one also discovers a
certain parting of the ways. Some adherents of these views are
radical skeptics, who believe that one must always doubt and
question. Others regard the work of challenge and destruction as
only a first stage; once the dismantling is completed, one can
proceed to the erection of a new structure of ideas that will both
accord with reality and serve to advance the cause of human
liberation.
The
bill of particulars just outlined owes much to European thinkers,
such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. Ideas
stemming from these Continental sources have been proffered as a new
theory of culture. Whatever the merits of individual components,
there remains the question of whether they add up to a unified body
of thought--the theory of deconstruction, to acknowledge the most
popular label. Indeed, many adherents of deconstruction insist that
it cannot be summarized; its power lies in the details. For this
reason any attempt to summarize the theory (including the one
presented in the following paragraphs) will be dismissed by
deconstructionists as inadequate. In the belief that the principle
of the unity of knowledge requires that all theories submit to
examination, that attempt is nonetheless essayed here.
What
are the sources of this much heralded movement? During the second
half of the twentieth century, American intellectuals eagerly
embraced three major imports, all from France, but finding great
success in North America: existentialism,
structuralism, and deconstruction. French provenance,
yes, but made in France?--that is not so sure. Behind the
first and third of these fashions stands the portentous figure of the
authoritarian German Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), whom some regard
as the greatest thinker of our age.
In a common pattern, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty crafted their own versions of existentialism from Central European sources. France has, after all, made little significant original contribution to philosophy in two-hundred years. At all events Francophile Americans jumped at the bait: the "new" thought was more appetizing in this Francophone version than in its Teutonic materia prima. After World War II the Nazi era had made Germany itself seem taboo; its intellectual products could only be assimilated if, in effect, they had passed through French customs. With its interest in such matters of ultimate concern as life, death, and human consciousness, existentialism contrasted with the more rigorous, but often forbiddingly austere and technical writings of the Anglo-American analytic school--as seen, for example, in the logical studies of Peter Strawson and Saul Kripke. The English and American thinkers seemed have sacrificed significance for the sake of precision. In the 1940s a pattern was set: one could go to France for prescriptions to remedy the perceived anemia of native thought.
In a common pattern, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty crafted their own versions of existentialism from Central European sources. France has, after all, made little significant original contribution to philosophy in two-hundred years. At all events Francophile Americans jumped at the bait: the "new" thought was more appetizing in this Francophone version than in its Teutonic materia prima. After World War II the Nazi era had made Germany itself seem taboo; its intellectual products could only be assimilated if, in effect, they had passed through French customs. With its interest in such matters of ultimate concern as life, death, and human consciousness, existentialism contrasted with the more rigorous, but often forbiddingly austere and technical writings of the Anglo-American analytic school--as seen, for example, in the logical studies of Peter Strawson and Saul Kripke. The English and American thinkers seemed have sacrificed significance for the sake of precision. In the 1940s a pattern was set: one could go to France for prescriptions to remedy the perceived anemia of native thought.
Structuralism
is an intellectual movement that analyzes the meaning of cultural
products as functions of their position in a system, rather than in
isolation.x
Stemming from the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (a
French-Swiss thinker trained in Germany), structuralism owed much of
its prestige to its promulgation by the psychologist Jean Piaget and
the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The insurrectionary events
of May 1968 focused interest on the French capital as a center of new
ideas--some hoped of revolutionary ideas. With its links to
semiotics, structuralism seemed, especially when it was first
imported in the 1960s, to offer promise of a unified-field theory of
the humanities--a welcome contrast to the atheoretical approach
that seemed to prevail in the literary New Criticism of Cleanth
Brooks and John Ransom and the formalist art criticism of Clement
Greenberg.
At a
1966 Johns Hopkins University conference, intended to celebrate
structuralism, the then-little-known French thinker Jacques Derrida
decided to "jump ship."xi
His paper, critical of structuralism, ranks as the opening salvo
of deconstruction, at least on our own shores. Apart
from the play on the root struct-, the neologism seems to harbor
residues of Heidegger's terms Destruktion
and Abbau
(dismantling or "unbuilding"). Deconstruction is a
literary and philosophical hermeneutics that adheres to a radical
relativism and indeterminacny of interpretation. The trend gained a
major beachhead at Yale University, owing in large measure to the
exertions of the Belgian critic Paul de Man. Yet De Man's reputation
was to be tainted by a major scandal that broke out shortly after his
death in 1983. The young De Man, it was revealed, wrote
pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic columns for two Belgian collaborationist
newspapers, an activity he successfully concealed throughout his
later career.xii
It is a
remarkable fact that since about 1985 deconstruction has been
abandoned
in France. Moreover, it has faded in almost every other country in
the advanced Western world to which it had at one point gained
entree--save the United States. What is the reason for this
American exceptionalism--one might better say provincialism--in
prolonging with such extraordinary fervor a fashion that has met such
rejection elsewhere? Part of the explanation may be that a
once-pragmatic cultural milieu, having discovered its appetite
for theory, is striving to keep some kind of theory rather than have
none. The seductive power of the "demon of progress"
makes many people--especially graduate students--receptive to
something that claims to be new and iconoclastic.
These
claims are seductive but dubious. In fact, deconstruction has
been misleadingly packaged as methodological radicalism, its
merchants finding shelter under the capacious tent of postmodernism.
This purported radicalism is also touted as politically
emancipatory--though some leftist commentators cogently
challenge this claim. The clouds of jargon generated by
deconstruction keep it an exclusive club unlikely to be offer
sustenance to those who are truly oppressed. To those
privileged souls who so profitably profess it at our elite
universities the ability to deploy the arcane patter sets them apart
from the common herd. This point leads to the final reason for
the spread of deconstruction in the United States; our decentralized
university system makes it possible for some departments (with
English at Duke University currently in the forefront) to be
colonized by some new trend while others resist it. The
pseudoimpressiveness of university acolytes of deconstruction seems
to sway tenure committees--and to facilitate the writing of
long-winded books--so the ranks of the faithful increase.
Let us
look at the other side of the coin. Why did the French desert
deconstruction? One would expect them to remain loyal to their own
creation, cult though it may have been. A prime document of the
shift is the book of Ferry and Renaut, a landmark of
disillusionment which shows that what united so many of these
thinkers (Derrida, Foucault, Althusser) was their contempt for
humanism.xiii
For a time this obsecration of humanism looked wickedly daring--not
unlike denying God in an earlier day. Yet eventually the
jettisoning came to seem profoundly disempowering, since one cannot
advocate human rights in the absence of humanism. The career of
one chef
de file,
the Marxist-structuralist Louis Althusser, who in a fit of madness
murdered his wife in 1980, stood for many as a salutary warning of
the real-life dangers of antihumanism.xiv
Moreover, knowledgeable observers noticed that in all their central
doctrines the "new" thinkers fed on older German thought,
which--through inadequate knowledge of the language and faulty
scholarship--they often misunderstood. Above all, they were
dependent on Heidegger, whose affinity with National Socialism could
no longer be hidden after the 1987 French publication of the critique
of Víctor Farías', a Chilean scholar living in Europe.
Martin
Heidegger.
Farías
and others have shown that Heidegger's involvement with Nazism
was not, in the convenient myth spread by his sympathizers, a mere
episode, but rested on profound sympathies and convictions.xv
Throughout the years of Hitler's Reich Heidegger never gave up his
Party membership. Moreover, this adherence was founded not on
simple opportunism or sentimental loyalty, but reflected
authoritarian currents present in his thinking from his first
publications onwards. Heidegger embraced Nazism because he
recognized a deep spiritual kinship. Yet, faced with the evidence,
many still hold that his merits are so formidable that they outweigh
his handicaps; fifteen years after his death, the Swabian pundit has
more adherents and interpreters than ever. Why? In a
nutshell the main elements of Heidegger's appeal are: antihumanism
in a post-Nietzschean mold; oracular pronouncements on objects
of ultimate concern filtered through a dense pseudoetymological
jargon; the claim to have opened the way to a return to a lost
paradise characterized by wholeness of being; the purported "radical"
break with Western traditions of metaphysics and logic; and
scornful disdain of technology and the consumer society.
For all
his wrongheadedness, Heidegger wrote at least one masterpiece, the
poetic meditation Sein
und Zeit
(Being
and Time;
1927). While this text refers only glancingly to the visual arts, he
addressed them in his 1935 essay "The Origin of the Work of
Art."xvi
Here the German thinker analyzed a Vincent Van Gogh painting of a
pair of worn shoes as witnesses of the earthbound life of a female
peasant. Commenting on this passage, Meyer Schapiro showed that the
shoes were in actuality those of the artist himself, so that
Heidegger's eulogy of them as attestations of the pathos of rural
life miscarries.xvii
Yet even in the oeuvre of Van Gogh this canvas stands out for its
revolutionary inversion of traditional Western hierarchies of
significance, so that Heidegger was not wrong to single it out.
The
"Origin of the Work of Art" also contains some perceptive
remarks about the Greek temple. In fact, the metaphor of
architecture pervades Heidegger's writings, and he has made a number
of perceptive--though characteristically sybilline--remarks about
building.xviii
On the one hand, architecture is "homely" because it
provides our dwellings, the abodes in which we abide. On the other,
as seen in temple precincts (though not only them), it declares the
invisible. In such reflections, Heidegger's characteristic wordplay
abounds. For example, he emphasizes the term Riss,
which means both "rift" and "plan," in turn
generating Grundriss
(groundplan) and Aufriss
(elevation)--the two graphic renderings architects need to produce to
have their structures erected. With a more general reference to the
environment, Heidegger's strictures on the abuses of technology in
the modern world have given encouragement to Europe's "Greens"
(ecology parties).
Jacques
Derrida.
Time
will tell whether Jacques Derrida, in many respects Heidegger's
successor, will achieve his staying power. How should one
characterize Derrida? Some admirers claim that the French thinker
is commonly misperceived as a literary or cultural critic, for he is
really a philosopher with a special competence in the thought of the
phenomenologist Edmund Husserl.xix
However, in a 1980 statement the pontiff of deconstruction averred
that his original focus was the principles of literary criticism;
subsequently he took on the study of Husserl when this first concern
required it. Two other influences are problematic.
Disappointing in this light is the defensive rhetoric which
Derrida--himself Jewish--has generated to explain the links with his
authoritarian mentor Martin Heidegger and his collaborationist
friend Paul de Man.
Adepts
insist that one must read all
of Derrida before one can criticize him (and then one can only do it
from within--as a believer). This demand is unreasonable, for
many of the "Derridada" texts are ambiguous in the
extreme, with excursions into wordplay so capricious that in some
instances no one can be sure of the meaning. Moreover, the
notion that Derrida must be swallowed whole or not at all is an
argument from authority:
because Derrida is such a great man, it seems, we must not subject
his statements to ordinary scrutiny. Yet this
canonization, this worship of a "great man" is supposed to
be one of the bad old habits that the theory deconstructs!
What,
then, is wrong with Derridean deconstruction? Here is a partial
catalogue.xx
1.
It situates itself on an Everest high above the ordinary rules of
logic--only to descend again to seemingly logical arguments in order
to rebut criticism.
2.
By programatically refusing to commit itself to state-
ments
that are testable and refutable, it opens the way to subjectivism.
Some find this subjectivism, replete with paradox and word-play,
beguiling, others boring. But the price that is paid is the
destruction of the common ground of intellectual life.
3.
Deconstruction veers towards solipsism by collapsing the realm of the
sign with that of its referent: "There is no outside."xxi
The text (or the work of art) becomes a self-sufficient cosmos
unrelated to anything else. Dismissing the correspondence theory of
truth, it abandons itself to a joyous "free play of signifiers."
4. The
notion of différance,
whereby any idea glides ineluctably towards its opposite, undermines
the Aristotelian principle of contradiction. This principle is not
only an essential tool of political analysis, allowing us to contrast
democratic societies with authoritarian ones, but a fundamental
resource of thought itself.
5.
Deconstruction fosters an arcane and barbarous jargon that makes it
easy to disguise banalities as brilliant insights. In some
adepts this jargon constitutes a kind of boilerplate obviating the
need for grappling with hard choices. Certainly many
deconstructionists seem to be first-draft writers, throwing a swarm
of words onto a computer screen or presenting a rambling sound
recording to be transcribed for immediate publication. In
practice, deconstruction is often a patter
discipline
with little real content of its own.
5.
Deconstruction's disdain for objective truth makes it possible to
cover up the anti-Semitism of the young Paul de Man--and even, in one
extraordinary démarche, to posit that de Man, a privileged and
protected inhabitant of German-occupied Belgium, was himself
somehow a Jew, a victim of the very tyranny with which he
opportunistically allied himself! At its worst, deconstruction is an
Orwellian maze of différance
in which war is peace, falsity is truth, and Nazism is Judaism.
For the
neophyte deconstruction is hard, but only at first; soon it becomes
all too easy. The apparatus of jargon opens the possibility
of turning oneself into a writing machine, cranking out "texts"
that are just subjective commonplaces clothed in arcane verbiage.
Research of the time-honored kind requires hard work and risk taking;
the deconstructionist takes no risks because any facile reflections
can be dressed up in the lingo and spuriously offered as a "new
contribution to knowledge." Granted that the miasma of
deconstruction occasionally lifts to reveal clumps of sense--useful
insights light the way through the writings of such lesser fry as
Roland Barthes and Jean-François Lyotard--but aren't there more
profitable ways of spending time than searching for rare
interludes of satisfaction in this wasteland?
To be
sure, when a system of thought appears that claims to be new, it is
well to give it a fair trial. But the honeymoon is over now:
the waiver granted by the trial period has expired, and
deconstruction must now submit, however unwillingly, to the same
critical scrutiny as that incumbent on any other system.
However much the acolytes may long for such protection,
deconstruction cannot be secured by any magic circle of fire.
As the process of interrogation inexorably proceeds no one should be
bullied into accepting an obscure and oracular system simply because
it is hard to understand. Obscurity is no virtue. If
deconstruction principles cannot be formulated with a clarity
sufficient to permit critics to weigh and test them, then they
deserve to be consigned in that particular dustbin of history that is
reserved for passing intellectual fashions.
The
question as to whether deconstruction is a method or a mode has
yielded an answer: it is the latter. Yet when all is said and done
the historian will be faced with the task of explaining the appeal of
such a fashion. Deconstruction's success may be seen against the
backdrop of the previous dominance of an idealistic concept of the
work of art as an autonomous icon, perfect in and of itself, and only
awaiting the intervention of the decoder. Deconstruction usefully
eroded this notion, shared by the New Criticism reigning in literary
study and the Panofskian synthesis of art history.
Deconstruction
emphasized the creative role of the reader/beholder. Works of art do
not simply "swim into the consciousness" of those who
contemplate them, but are assimilated in an active process of
reception. Emphasis on this reception process elevates the critic
and art historian from the lowly position of self-effacing servants
ministering to the great writers and artists to a status approaching
equality. Yet the deep skepticism inherent in the deconstruction
process has barred its adepts from stipulating criteria for
evaluating the relative success of different critical projects.
Surely, some notions, such as the idea that the anti-Semite Paul de
Man was really Jewish, are simply absurd. But deconstruction, in
some of its moods at any rate, seemed to advocate a kind of Dada
theory of knowledge in which "anything goes." In fact,
deconstruction could only arbitrate among critical theories by
covertly invoking a theory of hierarchy. Derrida's pronouncements
are superior in authority to those of his interpreter Christopher
Norris and these in turn superior to those of the reader. In short,
deconstruction has drawn attention to the creative role of
interpretation, but it has shirked the task of formulating
hermeneutic rules.
Another
contribution of the overall deconstruction trend was to question the
assumption of the harmony or integrity of the work of art, one of the
most persistent dogmas of aesthetic theory. Deconstruction showed
how things fall apart rather than how they hold together. Again,
though, criteria are lacking. In order to understand how works of
art may be complex and contradictory, we need a sense of the
conflicting systems
that inform them. But deconstruction poses as the enemy of all
systems.xxii
Michel
Foucault.
Standing
somewhat apart from the main currents of deconstruction but very
influential in his own right is the French historian and social
philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), whose interdisciplinary
contributions were quite various.xxiii
His multifarious writings are ambitious, but marred by vagueness and
errors of detail.
Foucault's
earlier work relies on the concept of "archaeology," the
notion that Western civilization had experienced a succession of
distinct eras, each characterized by its particular "episteme"
or style of thinking.xxiv
In fact, the French thinker had reinvented the wheel; he recreated
Hegelian cultural history with its discrete eras, each governed by
its distinctive time spirit, the progenitor of the episteme.
Foucault also emphasized discontinuities in cultural development, so
that he belongs to the general category of the catastrophists, who
see sharp breaks in cultural development rather than a steady flow.
Another concern was with total institutions, asylums, clinics, and
prisons, which he regarded as paradigmatic of systems of control.
Later, under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, Foucault advanced
a "micro-physical" theory of power (sometimes termed
"bio-power"), flowing through many small channels and
meeting resistances. That is to say, power is not merely a matter of
governments imposing rules from above, but is pervasive and
consequently harder to resist. Advocates for social change found
this concept depressing, as it showed that the enemies of
emancipation could no longer be located in a few citadels of
authority but were everywhere, perhaps even in ourselves. A surprise
to some, his last books were concerned with the history of sexuality
in ancient Greece and Rome; he completed reading the proofs of these
two volumes just before he died of AIDS. Finally, Foucault is
identified with the concept of discourse, a composite notion treating
verbal themes and modes of exposition as vehicles for the social
circulation of power.xxv
Foucault,
with his sense of the social situation of human culture, would seem
to have much to offer art historians. In fact in 1966 he seriously
considered writing a monograph on Edouard Manet; later he produced
texts on works of Diego Velázquez and René Magritte which many have
found insightful.xxvi
However, Foucault's theorizing of the total institution has little
applicability to art organizations, which are not coercive in the
sense he posited. The concept of discourse would require more
specific studies of rhetorical strategies to be useful for the
analysis of art writing.
The
Depth-Psychological Approach to the Creativity of Artists.
The
writing of artists' biographies had long been a major aspect of art
history. After the coming of the Winckelmannian program that
concentrated on the development of art as a kind of impersonal force,
biographies tended to take a back seat. Nonetheless popular demand
for them continued, and the late decades of the nineteenth century
saw the appearance of many examples with better information gleaned
from careful archival research. At the same time curiosity abounded
about the personal idiosyncracies of artists based on the romantic
idea that their personalities were odd, perhaps even "near to
madness allied."
This
interest in distinctive qualities of artists took a special turn with
the appearance of psychoanalysis, the movement that owes its start to
the ideas set forth by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twentieth
century. (Later, several parallel but different systems were
created, notably by Freud's former followers Alfred Adler and Carl
Gustav Jung; it is convenient to place all these modes of
interpretive psychology under the rubic of "depth psychology.")
Freud's
creation of psychoanalysis, marked by intense self-examination,
culminated in the major work Traumdeutung
(The Interpretation of Dreams), published at the very end of
1899--but issued by the publisher with the date "1900" as
if to inaugurate the new century. A series of papers followed,
extending such key concepts as the dream-work, the unconscious, and
sexuality into a variety of realms.
Even
for a cultivated Viennese, Freud's interest in art and art history
was exceptional. In an 1883 letter to his fiancée he disclosed his
"discovery" of art in a visit to the Dresden gallery, famed
for its outstanding Renaissance works. In 1898, during a visit to a
Milanese bookshop, he purchased a volume by the connoisseur Giovanni
Morelli. Morelli may have influenced him earlier, even affecting the
emergence of psychoanalysis. In any case, Freud clearly recognized
the affinity: "It seems to me that [Morelli's] method is closely
related to the technique of psychonalysis." Morelli's critical
method assembled seemingly minor clues in order to determine the
authorship of paintings; by this means the authorship of a work was
"unmasked." Similarly, psychoanalysis sought to strip away
the ego defenses, revealing the individual's true identity.xxvii
Thanks to the Morelli connection, Freud's tastes in art, which
placed the Italian masters of the high Renaissance at the summit of
achievement, achieved a particular inflection.
Freud
had another consuming artistic interest, one which found realization
in his own collection, consisting mainly of statuettes and other
small works from the eastern Mediterranean: Greece, the Levant, and
Egypt. To these cherished works he turned for relaxation between
analytic sessions; like household gods, some of them also presided
over his dinner table. They buttressed Freud's speculations on early
cultures, as seen in Totem
and Taboo
(1913) and Moses
and Monotheism
(1937-39). These archaic objects have been kept together in his last
establishment in London, which is now a museum.xxviii
Doubtless
conditioned by his Jewish heritage, Freud's curiosity about the
background of his antiquities led him to much serious reading in
archaeology. This involvement paid a dividend in his own theorizing,
for it helped to crystalize his concept of the three functions of the
psyche, the superego, the ego, and the id, which are conceived as
superimposed, horizontal zones, like archaeological strata, This
triple scheme, set forth in 1923, was not part of the original
repertory of psychoanlysis.
Freud's
1910 paper on "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of Childhood"
has become the touchstone of the psychoanalytic interpretation of
art.xxix
Although this paper mainly concerned a giant of the Italian
Renaissance, Freud managed to bring Egypt into it as well. He began
by disavowing any intention of belittling the great artist, seeking
simply to make a contribution to the understanding of his
personality. Despite his brilliant gifts, Leonardo was a dilatory
worker who had difficulty finishing his art works; he was often
diverted by scientific pursuits, including his fascination with the
possibility of flight. Leonardo's insecurities may stem from the
fact that he was illegitimate, and brought up not by his natural
mother but by his father's wife, who was childless.
Freud
saw the key to Leonardo's psychology in his unconscious preoccupation
with homosexual fellatio. In his view this preoccupation transpires
in a recollection the artist jotted down of his early childhood. "It
seems that I was always destined to be . . . deeply concerned with
vultures: for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while
I was in my cradle, a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth
with his tail and struck me many times with its tail against my
lips." Freud then entered on an enthusiastic archaeological
digression, centering on the vulture-headed Eygptian mother-goddess
Mut.
The art
historian Meyer Schapiro subjected the Leonardo essay to withering
criticism.xxx
He pointed out a key mistake in translation. Freud followed a
German rendering (imitated in the translation given above) in which
the bird, nibio
or "kite," was wrongly rendered as "vulture."
Since there was no vulture in Leonardo's original account, the
cultural comparisons with vulture lore are otiose. Schapiro also
noted that when Freud sought to extend his observations to works of
art he was hampered by insufficient knowledge of the field. He
assumed, for example, that the Anna Meterza theme, that is the Virgin
and Child with St. Anne, was an invention anchored in Leonardo's
mother fixation (which was in turn linked to his homosexuality); in
fact the theme was common in North Italian painting of the time.
Apart
from these missteps, this kind of analysis suffers from a basic
problem of logistics. When Freud wrote, Leonardo had been dead for
almost four centuries, and could not supply analytic material in the
usual manner. It is curious that those using the psychoanalytic
approach to art do not, for the most part, use material from living
artists obtained in the analytic session. (Whitney Davis has
suggested that Freud's case study of the "Wolf Man," an
amateur artist who made a drawing of an early memory of his own could
be used as a model, but the quality of the Wolf Man's art is so
amateurish that this does not seem a very inspiring prototype.xxxi)
In any event, modern psychoanalysts have followed Freud's lead in
the Leonardo study and directed their attention to dead artists, from
Michelangelo to Picasso.xxxii
A clearing house for these studies is the annual edited (from 1985
onwards) by Mary Matthews Gedo, Psychoanalytic
Perspectives on Art.xxxiii
Art
and Psychoanalysis
by Laurie Schneider Adams,xxxiv
who is both an art historian and a psychoanalysis, illustrates the
wide range such an approach affords. Instructively, the book also
abounds in instances of inherent problems. As her starting points,
Adams cites papers by Freud and those in his camp that are pertinent
to the visual arts, also noting major critiques, as those by Meyer
Schapiro and Leo Steinberg. She mingles these discussions with her
own psychoanalytic interpretations of paintings, sculpture, and
architecture, together with aspects of her clinical work with
analysands she deems pertinent. Rejecting the presentmindedness of
some psychoanalytically oriented art historians who address only
works produced during the last century--works that are products of
the same general cultural climate that gave rise to
psychoanalysis--her scope embraces examples from European prehistory
to the present. Adams leaves unargued the question of whether
psychoanalysis is universally applicable or whether it relates
essentially to our own age or our own culture. If psychoanalysis is
universally valid, then why not extend the method to interpret East
Asian or Pre-Columbian objects? Yet if it is limited to our own era,
clinical evidence from contemporary clients may not be relevant to
the interpretation of works by Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Adams
declines to evaluate the ongoing--and very lively--discussions of the
legitimacy of psychoanalysis itself as a discipline.xxxv
She simply assumes this legitimacy, permitting herself to set up a
kind of free-fire zone in which such problematic notions as the
Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, bisexuality as arrested
development, and the phallic woman are attached, almost casually, to
well known artists and works. No standards of proof or disproof are
adduced.
All
this is not to say that psychoanalysis has no relevance for art at
all. Freud's scientific status remains problematic, but his powers
of persuasion have proved formidable. His writings influenced many
contemporary writers and artists--surrealists in
particular--including some figures like René Magritte who rejected
his system as a whole.xxxvi
Still,
these connections do nothing to secure the ultimate validity of
psychoanalysis, any more than the statues of the Greek gods on the
East pediment of the Parthenon establish the ultimate reality of the
Hellenic religion. Ultimately the cogency of psychoanalytic studies
in art depends upon the adequacy of psychoanalysis itself, and that
is contested.xxxvii
The overarching question which one can and must ask of
psychoanalysis is: What is its logical
status
today? That is, apart from its role as a belief system held by
psychoanalysts and their followers, can it claim standing as a
scientific discipline? Broadly speaking, two approaches to this
problem have been followed.
(1)
The view urged by Sir Karl Popper is that its key propositions are so
framed as to evade the test of refutability. Popper, a major
philosopher of science, had shown that the key test of a scientific
proposition is not its verifiability, but its refutability. Many
appealing statements, which may have value in the realm of politics
or human affairs, illustrate the temptation to frame statements that
are not refutable. Take for example, the slogan "The people
united will never be defeated." If the people (however defined)
are in fact defeated, one can always claim that this disaster
occurred because they were not united. Thus the statement may be an
effective rallying cry, but it is not a proposition that has any
predictive value, precisely because of the fact that it always "comes
true." If Popper is right, psychoanalysis casts its
propositions with escape clauses of this type, so that they defy the
test of refutability. Hence it enjoys no scientific status.
(2)
However, other observers, including some sharp critics of
psychoanalysis, have contradicted Popper, asserting that its key
concepts are indeed properly formulated--though they may fail
empirical tests. The problem is that such testing has scarcely been
undertaken. After a rigorous review of the problem, the philosopher
Adolf Grünbaum has concluded that "If there exists empirical
evidence for the principal psychoanalytic doctrines, it cannot be
obtained without well-designed extraclinical studies of a kind that
are for the most part yet to be attempted." The sort of
free-association in the clinical setting that is commonly offered as
evidence is not persuasive. Grünbaum proposes that such therapeutic
successes as psychoanalytic treatment may have enjoyed can be
explained by its function as a placebo. Even assuming that
psychoanalysis harbors some propositions that can meet strict
standards of empirical testing, it may be that many will not. For
example, extensive studies have attacked the psychoanalytic notion
that paranoia is linked to homosexuality because the paranoid
represses his homosexual wishes. In this construct, homosexuality is
affirmed by overt behavior and sentiments, and also by their absence.
This "heads I win, tails you lose" argument functions to
evade the criteria of refutability.
Some,
though not all feminists, have been critical of Freud's male-centered
point of view. Others have questioned his ethical standards, his
social Darwinism, and even suggested that certain key doctrines were
created while he was addicted to cocaine.
If
after almost a century of existence, the value of psychoanalysis has
not been conclusively established, perhaps it should be discarded.
But its adepts resist doing so. Wherein, then, lies the attraction?
The ultimate roots of psychoanalysis lie in romanticism with its
conviction that feeling rather than logic is central to human
existence. In addition, psychoanalysis is a megasystem, or world
view, that seems to have all the answers; such systems have the
appeal of a religion or all-embracing philosophy. And indeed
psychoanalysis filled a practical void left by the recession of
religious practice: the analytical session served as a form of
confession. Authority figures were attracted by the potential for
social control: rebellious youths learned to "adjust." In
this light psychoanalysis functioned as an instrument of
regimentation posing as liberation.
Another
methodological caveat is in order. Even if the foundations of
psychoanalysis were perfectly sound, one would still have to assess
its value in relation to particular artistic problems. Even
employing a better-grounded methodology, such as that of semiotics,
some commentators have stumbled. And no system offers a universal
hermeneutic key. To continue the comparison with semiotics, several
gifted scholars have sought to apply this discipline to the study of
cubism, but with results that have left other specialists
unimpressed. Its triumphs in linguistics, anthropology, and popular
culture notwithstanding, semiotics may not be well suited to the
study of paintings.
Psychoanalysis
focused attention on the individual creator. Regardless of its
ultimate fate, a need for probing biographies of artists remains.
This does not mean that one should blithely accept the current
fashion for sensationalizing accounts of the sexual and excretory
behavior of such artists as Picasso and Pollock; this gossip should
probably be banished to the supermarket tabloids.
A very
different approach to art derives from the work of the Swiss analytic
psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), who was associated with
Freud from 1907 to 1912, breaking with him in the latter year. As a
medical student at the turn of the century Jung had encountered a
mental patient who produced a circular diagram. During World War I,
as a form of self-therapy, the psychologist began to produce such
diagrams himself. Recognizing their relationship to the cosmic
diagrams of Indian religion, he termed them mandalas.xxxviii
Subsequently, Jung's investigations of these forms acquired a
parallel in his fascination with the symbolism of alchemy, which he
regarded as the vehicle of an ancient mode of thought driven
underground by officially recognized philosophy and religion.xxxix
These delvings into then little known modes of visual expression,
found independently in many parts of the world, led him to conclude
that the imagery reflected a set of universals, the archetypes of the
"collective unconscious."
Such
followers as Marie-Louise von Franz, Aniela Jaffé, Erich Neumann,
and James Hillman have elaborated Jung's interests into a method of
investigating visual symbolism. To non-Jungians, however, all this
seems problematic. The Asian mandalas are probably better understood
as embodiments of specific Buddhist, Tantric, and Taoist cosmic
conceptions than as manifestations of some universal archetypal
system. Students of alchemy--admittedly a difficult subject--are
inclined to believe that Jung imposed a psychological content not
present in the originals on its imagery. Finally, the core concept
of the "collective unconscious" strikes many as mystical
and undemonstrable. Nonetheless, Jung directed attention to the
remarkable imagery produced by mental patients, an interest that
resurfaced in the 1990s as "outsider art." The formal
similarities of the work of these untrained individuals, working in
isolation at many different times and places, call for an
explanation.xl
Feminist
Art History.
It is
common knowledge that the first women's movement began in the middle
of the nineteenth century to secure suffrage for women and to combat
their exploitation in a male-centered society. What is less well
known is that the movement also sparked contributions to knowledge,
including knowledge of art's past. The first women's movement
fostered a number of surveys of the achievements of women artists.xli
After 1920 the movement ebbed, and with it the scholarship that it
had brought forth. So these studies had to be reinvented in our own
day.
The "Second Wave"
of political feminism beginning in the 1960s yielded a far greater
scholarly harvest. The first official program in women's studies
began at San Diego State University in 1969. By 1982 there were 350
such programs, and the number continued to mount despite the
conservative atmosphere of the Reagan-Bush years. In 1992 there were
620 women's studies programs.
The era
also witnessed a major intervention in the world of art, one that
proved intense and many-sided. Women artists organized in collective
bodies to demand more access to exhibitions and museums. Two of the
most prominent are the Women's Caucus for Art, a mainstream
professional association, and the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group
based in New York City that has dramatized continuing discrimination
against women artists through its "in-your-face" posters.
Periodicals such as Feminist
Art Journal
and Women's
Art Journal
came into existence, paralleling women's studies journals in other
disciplines. As there was already a large pool of women trained as
art historians, those who were inclined were well equipped to
contribute to the discussion--though it took time for the conceptual
armature to be elaborated.xlii
(A number of male art historians, some of them gay, have also
adopted a feminist methodology.)
During
the 1970s feminist art historians placed a priority on recovering the
works and biographies of neglected artists of the past, such as
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, and Louise Elisabeth
Vigée-Lebrun. Pioneering surveys were produced by Eleanor Tufts;
Karen Peterson and J. J. Wilson; and Linda Nochlin and Ann Harris.xliii
These surveys paved the way for the weighty monographs on individual
artists that distinguished the 1980s and 1990s. Recuperations were
not limited to makers of art; Claire Richter Sherman and Adele M.
Holcomb were able to present a substantial cohort of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century women art scholars.xliv
A vital
corollary to this activity was the conviction that women artists of
the present must not suffer the fate of their foremothers; in fact,
they are still engaged in a fight to obtain exhibitions and critical
attention appropriate to their numbers. At the same time, it was
recognized that the recuperative endeavor would never--for the past
at least--yield a roster equivalent to that of men. This imbalance
was the subject of Linda Nochlin's 1971 essay, "Why Have There
Been No Great Women Artists?"xlv
In this text, one of the most widely read contributions of all
recent art history, Nochlin pointed out that the creation of artists
is not an immaculate conception, but is conditioned by a host of
social factors. The exclusion of women from academies and art
schools, where drawing from the male nude was part of the curriculum,
served to deny women training and credentialing. Initially
controversial because it was regarded as mere sociology of art,
Nochlin's essay later came to be questioned by radical feminists who
dismissed the whole idea of greatness in art. Such are the perils of
being a pioneer in scholarship.
Much of
the activity of the 1970s focused on gaining and diffusing
information about the past and securing the acceptance of women in
the art world of the present. At the same time, radical voices began
to be heard asking whether women should be content with integration
into a male system. This contrast mirrored a long-standing conflict
between two types of advocates for social change: the reformers, who
believe that the present system can be corrected, and the radicals,
who wish to overthrow the system and replace it with another.
At all
events the radicals asked important questions. Could it be that for
the male canon a parallel female one was being assembled? Instead,
shouldn't one challenge the very notion of the canon? The contrast
between great and nongreat artists was questioned. Some writers
adopted a version of Roland Barthes' idea of the death of the author,
suggesting that "the artist" is just a metaphor for a
vortex of social forces flowing through this individual. This
concept is probably too self-denying for most artists, who
understandably seek recognition as individuals. Moreover, as Broude
and Garrard point out, "if followed to its extreme and logical
conclusions, the death of the author as subjective agent posited by
postmodernism may lead only to the death of feminism as an agent for
positive political--or, indeed, art-historical--change."xlvi
Finally, if greatness is rejected, do not all artists, male and
female, face the prospect of returning to the modest status of
craftspeople that was dominant in the Middle Ages?
Others
adopted a more specific focus. The possibility of a distinctive
feminist sensibility was explored, as well as the idea of the
presentation of female sexuality in art. Yet these discussions
exposed a dilemma. Women's distinctiveness in art seemed to require
commitment to "essentialism" which treated differences that
were probably as much cultural in origin as transhistorical.xlvii
On the other hand, if one gave up the idea of female
distinctiveness, then the aim of securing justice for women artists
and their concerns seemed less urgent.
The
imagery of the past has elicited the interest of many younger
scholars. Renaissance and Baroque prints offer a rich array: from
the Madonna and saints, through such heroines as Lucretia and Judith
to the temptresses Eve and Venus and women who usurp male
prerogatives.xlviii
Fortuna, often identified with inconstancy, was of course depicted
as a woman--but then so were such virtues as Justice and Victory. In
the nineteenth-century artists elaborated a more diffuse concept of
women's sphere.xlix
Inquiries into these and other themes disclosed a long record of
misogyny, a useful reminder that neglect, deplorable as it has been,
was often accompanied by open hostility. Some felt that these
examinations, though valuable in their own right, were more of a
contribution to social history than to the history of art.
As the
1980s advanced, fundamental assumptions of traditional
("patriarchal") art history came into question. Committed
scholars proposed new ways of interpreting all art. For example,
have women viewers looked at art in a different way from men viewers?
This question of gaze and the "viewer's share" became a
major concern in the 1980s.
During
this phase British feminist art historians made a major contribution,
drawing on a wide range of sources, including psychoanalysis,
Marxism, and French theory. Women film scholars, above all Laura
Mulvey, blazed a trail in the introduction of ideas from these
sources. Some British art scholars, such as Griselda Pollock,
asserted that art history itself had failed; as currently practiced
it remains "phallocratic" and complicit in the prolongation
of the unequal status of women.l
Art history must be dismantled and replaced by something better.
Significantly, Pollock used military metaphors: contest for
terrain; occupation of the enemy's territory.
As this
new work gained greater attention a difference emerged between
"social constructionist" and "liberal" feminist
scholars. The first group, including Pollock and her allies,
attacked the notion that art was produced for pure private
consumption by geniuses with special insights. They saw the existing
art system as deeply compromised by its embrace of consumer
capitalism, and its resulting contribution to the continuing
mystification of race, class, and gender. In the social
constructionist view, art and art history cannot be simply reformed,
but must be delegitimized and dismantled as part of a larger program
of social reconstruction. By contrast, liberal or centrist art
historians "continue to maintain the liberal or Enlightenment
notion that artists (of both sexes) have individual identities and
voices that are not solely the products of societal forces, and that
are not invariably anti-feminist. Like the other group ... liberal
feminists recognize art's historic functioning as a tool or residual
effect of oppression, but they would point also to its historical
uses as an instrument of dissent and resistance."li
In this way the discipline of art history will be gradually
transformed from within. As this discussion shows, there are areas
of overlap between the two groups and, despite some sharp exchanges,
women of differing theoretical allegiances have shown considerable
solidarity.
The
standard model of the way in which the production of the artist
relates to the work of the art historian and critic is a one-sided
one in which the former always precedes the latter. The acceptance
of this model has been complicated by an adversarial relationship
between those who make art and those who write about it. For those
active in the women's art movement this adversarial confrontation has
decidedly diminished. Such artists as Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly, and
Barbara Kruger have sought to incorporate into their works
information and insights gleaned from women scholars and critics.
The link between artist-feminists and writer-feminists has been
highlighted by the use of words within the art works. Interaction
between image-makers and word professionals has always occurred, but
it has recently been foregrounded through the sense that women
artists and women writers are engaged in a common struggle to create
a sphere of autonomy in a culture that continues to be dominated by
patriarchal discourse.
Feminist
concerns have encouraged research into associations of art and
architecture with sex differences--with "gendering" in
short. The Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius glossed the Greek
orders in terms of gender. "So the Doric column began to
furnish the proportion of a man's body, its strength and grace"
(De
architectura,
4.1.6). This order is particularly suited to temples dedicated to
male gods. But a temple of Diana requires the "feminine
slenderness" of the Ionic. The third order, the Corinthian was
supposed to be modeled on the proportions of a young maiden. During
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance buildings themselves took on
human attributes; the basilican plan, with its transepts (arms) and
chevet (literally head) was likened to a supine man, while residences
were thought of as being protected by a "skin" or outer
integument. In Roman baroque palazzi, sober historical analysis
permits the identification of distinctive women's apartments and
their function.lii
During the nineteenth century some associationist writers
characterized Gothic architecture as male and Renaissance
architecture as female.liii
An inappropriate combination of the two styles risked a charge of
"transvestism." A symposium held at the Princeton School
of Architecture in 1990 explored various aspects of the gendering of
space, including gay and lesbian perceptions.liv
The
metaphorics of gender inform other arts besides architecture. A
clear case has to do with categories of abstract nouns that in the
personification allegories of the classical, medieval, and humanistic
art traditions usually appeared as female figures. The reason for
this preference is that in Latin such abstract qualities as justitia
and libertas,
as well as names of countries such as Britannia and Hispania, were of
the feminine gender. Most European languages (with the principal
exception of English) retain this gendered grammatical
classification, hence the continuing female predominance in
personification imagery. Perhaps because recent art using such
personifications is generally academic, this iconography has been
neglected--though New York's Statue of Liberty is an exception.lv
Female personifications certainly go against the purported rule that
gendering in art always privileges the male. Sometimes it does, of
course. According to Patricia L. Reilly, the centuries-long contest
of form and color, whereby the latter (which, at one extreme point,
was even identified with the painted faces of prostitutes) tends to
be treated as the inferior, has often been enacted as a contrast
between the male and female principles.lvi
The
subtle (sometimes too subtle) methodology of gendering supplements
the older concern with explicitly erotic art. This interest brought
about a useful effort to gather and publish examples of material that
had been taboo, but the endeavor failed to bring forth an
interpretive foundation on which to build.lvii
The attack by some feminists on pornography has led to an effort to
distinguish visual pornography from erotic art; the discussion is
clouded by parti
pris
on both sides.lviii
Serious
study of erotic themes requires that they be viewed within their
historical context. A fascinating category is that of the droleries
in the margins of Gothic manuscripts, where the gross, often
scatological figures provide an ironic commentary to the sacred
images that commonly appear on the same page.lix
Such marginalia have their counterpart in the fabliaux
or ribald tales of medieval vernacular literature, but the decoding
of their secrets is a complex procedure permitting only piecemeal
progress.
A model
study is Leo Steinberg's examination of Renaissance motifs pertaining
to the sexuality of Christ.lx
The fundamental premise of this work is that it is not sufficient
simply to catalogue the erotic themes in a given sector of past art.
To leave the matter at this stage risks anachronistically retrieving
the works only to exile them into some present context, while
obscuring the necessity that commanded their appearance in the first
place.
In a
number of significant paintings and prints of the life of Christ the
New York scholar observed an emphasis on genitalia, especially in
infancy and death scenes. Steinberg shows that these manifestations
reflect neither Renaissance prurience nor age-old folklore invading
Christian subject matter. Rather, they reveal the intersection--one
might almost say the collision--of a traditional theological theme
that emphasized the integral humanity of the incarnate Christ with
the new striving of the Renaissance artist to achieve visual
wholeness. The Renaissance artists rejected the selective, symbolic
presentation of Christ's body favored during the Middle Ages,
replacing it with a holistic version obedient to its naturalist
imperative. In Steinberg's view, the significance of the genitalia
is not that they are visually present, but that they are shown
through hand gestures or other indicia--as irrefutable evidence of
Christ's human nature.
Viewed
in this way, the eroticism vanishes--or does it? The title of
Steinberg's monograph speaks of "modern oblivion."
Paradoxically, later generations, guided by the proverbial Mrs.
Grundy, actually eroticized this category of Christ images by seeking
to deeroticize it--by tabooing discussion of the matter or, in many
cases, by overpainting the works so as to minimize or obscure the
Lord's penis. This later history suggests that an account of visual
bowdlerism, the excision of motifs because they came to seem
unacceptable, would be fruitful. The story of the loincloths Daniele
da Volterra was instructed to paint by pope Paul IV (1558) on the
nudes in Michelangelo's Last Judgment is well known; moreover, the
recent cleaning has confirmed that the Florentine authorities in the
same period saw fit to disguise the genitalia of Masaccio's Adam in
the Brancacci Chapel in Florence--with a tree branch.lxi
Gay
and Lesbian Scholarship.
The
history of gay and lesbian studies is much older than many
assume--going back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century.lxii
Until recently, however, homoerotic aspects of the visual arts have
been relatively neglected, despite the emergence of vigorous gay and
lesbian movements in many countries.lxiii
Given the persecution and obloquy that have so regularly been meted
out to sexual nonconformists, disguise ("remaining in the
closet") was a standard personal strategy. Given this prudent
choice of self-concealment, the first task is simply to identify
those artists who were homosexual or bisexual. This effort requires
a return to a sort of biographical interest that has come to be
regarded as old fashioned by professionals, but which retains an
important place in the popular mind. Despite the flood of scholarly
admonitions about the "death of the author/artist," the
public still believes that artist's lives are important. Assuredly,
some individuals tentatively identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual
may not turn out to be such but, if circumstances indicate, the
question must be asked and pursued.lxiv
So it
is that research on gay and lesbian art begins with the same task as
that confronting the study of women artists: the gathering of a
roster of individuals to make up a "universe" of study.
However, there is a significant difference. Women are almost always
readily identifiable--the writers George Sand and George Eliot had no
real intention to deceive--while homosexual orientation has often
remained hidden, not only by the wish of the creative individual but
also through the behest of relatives and friends after his or her
death. (Even today some heterosexual admirers of Michelangelo,
Whitman, Cather and other major figures have difficulty coping with
the true character of their sexuality.) Providing that the seal of
secrecy remained intact, the reputations of such artists could
survive unblemished. That it has been possible, despite these
obstacles, to create a fairly large roster is shown by Emmanuel
Cooper's compilation, The
Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years,lxv
which records some 150 male and female artists for the period
covered. In addition to artists who are well known, the new research
has helped to revive the reputations of those who, like the English
painters Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein; 1895-1978) and Duncan Grant
(1885-1978), had slipped from view.lxvi
Still,
one may reasonably ask: what do the artists have in common? Given
the differences in personality structure, milieu, and period what
could, say, Donatello and Andy Warhol possibly share? One answer is
that down even to the present homosexual artists, like others who
share their orientation, have faced the problem of confronting
homophobia and shaping a personality that can cope with it.
Naturally, reconstructing this process of self-shaping is easier with
recent artists such as Romaine Brooks and Charles Demuth, where
plentiful biographical information exists which can then be placed in
the social and intellectual setting of the time.lxvii
In a
stimulating essay James Saslow has shown that this approach may also
be validly applied to one of the most complicated artists of all
time, Michelangelo.lxviii
Not a professional writer, Michelangelo nonetheless left behind a
body of letters and poetry. The letters occasionally contain veiled
references to relations with young men, but it is in the poetry, with
the background the genre contained of the neo-Platonic love ethic
together with inherent ambiguities, that Michelangelo wrestled--for
himself and a few intimate friends--with what we would now term his
sexual nature. In the course of this essay, Saslow grapples with the
then-fashionable (late 1980s) doctrine of Social Construction, which
decreed that modern homosexuals could have nothing in common with
Michelangelo; "homosexuality" came into existence in the
second half of the nineteenth century. Fueled by the
Counter-Reformation, however, homophobia was increasing in the
artist's day, and the problem of the closet perplexed him. At the
very least, we have this in common with him, so that the "Chinese
wall" of absolute separation between us and earlier eras, as
posited by the Social Construction theory, is not valid.
With
his book on the figure of Ganymede, Saslow contributed significantly
to another aspect of research in homosexuality-- iconographical
studies.lxix
In this volume he confines the study to two centuries of the Italian
Renaissance, so that a relation to the changing climate of opinion,
especially the advancing homophobia generated by the
Counter-Reformation can be shown. The changing treatment of the
Ganymede theme during this period shows what a complex pattern of
determinants these artist had to observe: these include stylistic
imperatives as the early Renaissance shifted to the high Renaissance,
information about the myth of Ganymede furnished by classical
scholars, and changing discourses about sexuality.
In his
study, "It's in the Can: Jasper Johns and the Anal Society,"
Jonathan Weinberg seeks to show that the prominent New York artist
has actually placed himself inside
his work.lxx
This is shown, according to Weinberg, by the artist's fascination
with certain words like "ring" and "fessus"
[Latin for weary, which he speculatively associates with faeces]
together with the well-known target motifs of the works of the
classic phase that made him famous. Unfortunately, Weinberg takes
Freudian analysis of the supposed anal character traits at face
value, reducing the impact of his study. Just as many women artists
have become interested in "central imagery" as a reflection
of defining vaginality, so it may be that gay men are attracted to
certain bodily parts that express aspects of their sexual being (note
also the penises found in some of Johns' target paintings). Examined
iconographically instead of psychoanalytically, this may prove to be
a promising area of investigation after all. It may ultimately
belong to an emerging realm of study of the body as metaphor.lxxi
Help in
the study of gay and lesbian art may come from film studies where
work is more profuse and more theoretically advanced. A good example
is a paper by the well-known English film scholar, Richard Dyer.lxxii
Here he tackles the problematic nature of the concept of the single
author/creator as theorized by Roland Barthes. On the one hand the
notion of the "death of the author" is widely accepted, at
least as a heuristic notion that helps to empower the reader (or
viewer, in the case of the visual arts). However, the gay/lesbian
creator does have a sense of self, precisely for the reason of the
frequent internalization of the identity. This paradox may be
bridged, in Dyer's opinion, by the concept of "performance,"
the sense that one is always potentially under scrutiny.
A
remarkable range of interests enlivened the work of the New York
writer Craig Owens (1950-1990).lxxiii
Having made his mark as one of the first to examine the fit of
postmodernist theory to contemporary art practice, Owens moved on to
a critique of the nexus of sexuality and power. He would address
sexual difference as well as gay concerns. Owens believed that art
history must make fundamental changes in order to address
contemporary reality. He also joined the discourse of AIDS, a major
theme in contemporary art and criticism. At the time of his death
from this disease, Owens seemed to be on his way to a new synthesis.
Examining the body of his surviving work, however, one notes with
regret how susceptible even a gifted representative of his generation
was to the intoxication of the Francophile soup blended from the
writings of the "usual suspects" of deconstruction:
Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard and company.
Few
have been as forthright about their orientation as Owens, with the
result that the question of art historians and critics who were
homosexual has received little attention. Winckelmann's personal
proclivities clearly contributed to his adulation of ancient Greek
art, where the male body is glorified. But what about his
contemporary Horace Walpole who chose the Gothic revival for his
house, Strawberry Hill? Perhaps this preference is to be explained
as personal taste--but not entirely, because another wealthy English
connoisseur, William Beckford (also homosexual) built his
home, Fonthill, in the Gothic revival style. The way in which art
historian Carl von Rumohr's homosexuality contributed to his
reexamination of early Italian art seems uncertain--if it did at all.
In the twentieth century, the "butch" persona of Gertrude
Stein enabled her to mingle on equal terms with Matisse and Picasso;
through her publications and transatlantic contacts, she played a
major role in promoting these artists in North America.lxxiv
In 1946 Betty Parsons opened her New York gallery, where she showed
the early work of the abstract expressionists. The role of
homosexual architectural historians in promoting advanced modern
architecture is clear; perhaps the "outsider status" of
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Arthur Drexler, and Edgar Kauffman, Jr.
permitted them to respond to the iconoclastic novelty of the new
style more easily than could others at the time.
A
popular belief, common to homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, holds
that gay people are endowed by nature or experience with special
sensitivity. This sensitivity (and not everyone agrees that it
exists) may foster artistic creativity. Efforts have been made to
substantiate this intuitive belief, but the yield is thin.lxxv
There is little scientific support for this assumption of gay
creativity, perhaps because the question is posed so broadly. More
specific propositions might be testable. Are gay male artists more
responsive to certain color gamuts than their heterosexual
counterparts? Do lesbian artists excell in space perception? The
empirical results of asking such questions might be negative or
inconclusive, but they should be posed.
Semiotics,
Structuralism and Beyond.
Semiotics
is the discipline that studies the use of signs across the entire
spectrum of human behavior, including gestures and language.lxxvi
It has even been extended to animals (as the "language" of
bees) and plants (as strategies employed by flowers to attract
insects). Modern semiotics derives from two major thinkers, the
Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and the American Charles
Saunders Peirce (1839-1914). Saussure's theories, which focus on the
relation between the signified and the signifier, derive from the
study of language and are applicable to visual phenomena only in a
general way. Peirce was more concerned with things seen. Although
he produced a number of variants of his theory in the course of a
long life, his triad of icon, index, and symbol has proven useful.lxxvii
To describe the matter in the simplest possible terms, an iconic
relation occurs when there is a morphological similarity between the
depiction and the thing shown, as in a picture of an apple. The
indexical relation occurs when one can infer the thing from some
visual evidence, as in the smoke coming from the chimney of a cottage
which shows that a fire is present within. Finally, there are
symbolic relations, as in an octagonal stop sign, which has no direct
connection with the action; the connection may be culturally learned.
Semiotics
embraces many modes of communication, ranging from simple systems
like Morse code to the complex genres of theater and opera. One
semiotic sphere of obvious relevance to the study of art is gesture.lxxviii
Some gestures, such as teeth baring and grimacing, are transcultural
and find analogies with our primate relatives, but most gestures are
culturally determined. Thus in some parts of Europe the display of
the joining of the thumb and forefinger to make a circle means
"success" (completion), while in others it means "failure"
(zero).
Greek
and Roman art demonstrate a rich variety of gestures of popular
origin.lxxix
However, writers such as Quintilian indicate that there was also a
refined system to assist orators in their techniques of persuasion.lxxx
Rigidly hierarchical, the Roman imperial system developed a system
of gestures as part of statecraft, and these appear in official art.lxxxi
In Asia Buddhism developed a highly codified set of religious
gestures, known as mudrā.lxxxii
Some
medieval art styles, such as the Ottonian and late Gothic, emphasized
hand gestures.lxxxiii
During the seventeenth century, scholars gave much attention to
gesture, a preoccupation that finds a parallel in the paintings of
such artists as Caravaggio and Poussin. However, the same time
witnessed the start of a trend to prune away the more flamboyant
gestures, a reductive process that gradually impoverished the
repertoire of gestures honored in northern Europe.lxxxiv
At the end of the seventeenth century the court artist Charles Le
Brun, whose authority long persisted in France, codified facial
expressions as a vehicle for displaying the passions.lxxxv
Two generations later his approach began to yield to another,
advocated by the critic Denis Diderot, who departed from Le Brun's
almost exclusive interest in the face as a vehicle for emotion with a
commendation that the whole body must be expressive. Diderot's ideas
were enthusiastically endorsed and vigorously exemplified by the
neo-classic painter Jacques-Louis David.lxxxvi
Much
has been accomplished, both historically and empirically, in the
study of gestures as such. Yet, apart from the examples given,
relatively little has been done to apply the information gained to
the work of artists. In the course of their career artists observed
the play of body language prevalent in daily life, adopting gestures
that were appropriate to their patrons' ideas of correct behavior.
During
the 1960s semiotics gained prominence in France under the name of
structuralism.lxxxvii
To name only two influential figures, Claude Lévi-Strauss applied
structuralism in dense studies of ethnological data, while Roland
Barthes deployed it in scintillating accounts of literary works.
Whatever the labeling, semiotics/structuralism was long ignored by
art historians, Meyer Schapiro being a prominent exception.lxxxviii
Semiotics has been successfully applied to architecture and cinema,
but it has yielded less in the study of painting, where the subtler
aspects of execution and communication seem to escape through the
interstices of the broad-meshed semiotic net. From a different
route, iconography broached some of these problems from the middle of
the nineteenth century onwards. Perhaps a combination of semiotics
and art-historical iconography would be useful.lxxxix
In any
event dissatisfaction with semiotics in its structuralist guise led
to the appearance of poststructuralism, interfacing with
deconstruction (see above). In the meantime semioticians are
pursuing their own work, and more may be expected from this quarter.
The
semiotic impulse continued in art history, but in a changed context.
Norman Bryson, an English scholar living in the United States, has
acquired the status of a beacon in this field. He came to art
history from the outside, from English studies, a background that
affords an independence of judgment if not always a deep knowledge of
the history and strengths of art scholarship as a discipline. In his
first contribution to the field, Word
and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime.xc
Bryson sought to replace the usual account of the subject as a
sequence of styles (from baroque, to rococo, to neoclassical) with a
new emphasis on narrative strategies. In analyzing paintings in
terms of a pattern of information he was influenced by communications
theory and the writings of Roland Barthes.
Vision
and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze
was Bryson's major theoretical statement.xci
He rejected Gombrich's perceptualist theory in favor of an
interpretation of painting as sign. However, he believed that the
linguistic model bequeathed by Saussure and his followers is
inadequate for the understanding of painting: "if we accept
Saussure uncritically we end up with a perspective as rigid and
unhelpful as the old one, a perspective in which the meaning of the
sign is defined entirely by formal means, as the product of
oppositions among signs with an enclosed system." That is to
say, the method engenders contrasts that exist for their own sake,
rather than to extend our understanding. The history of Western
painting is such that it systematically short-circuits efforts to
decode it according to simple binary contrasts of the kind encouraged
by Saussurean structuralism. This complexity is bound up with
changes in viewing practice. "Viewing is an activity of
transforming the material of the painting into meanings, and that
transformation is perpetual: nothing can arrest it." Insisting
on the viewer's role as dynamic and essential, Bryson joined forces
with the growing trend towards the aesthetic of reception in
literature, which stresses the reader's response. In order to
advance the study of viewing, he distinguished between the gaze,
which is cool, continuous and objective, and the glance,
which is fleeting and wilful, sometimes even furtive and voyeuristic.
In addition he held that studies of viewing must always be conducted
with an awareness of the social matrix: artmaking as presented by
Gombrich is too much an isolated set of researches detached from
their social moorings.
The
social dimension led, in the book's final chapter, to a somewhat
inconclusive handling of the positioning of painting in the Marxist
contrast of socioeconomic base and cultural superstructure. A 1991
essay offered a more satisfying treatment of the matter, suggesting
that paintings belong both to the base and the superstructure. Since
they are not mere mechanical transcripts of underlying forces,
paintings can play a role, however diffuse it may sometimes seem, in
social transformation. "The power of painting is there, in the
thousands of gazes caught by its surface, and the resultant turning,
and the shifting, the redirecting of the discursive flow. Power not
as a monolith, but as a swarm of points traversing social
stratifications and individual persons."xcii
Laced
with neologisms and borrowings from French theory, Bryson's works are
sometimes tough going. They also suffer from an insufficient
awareness of the "foundedness" of art history, its long and
rich tradition.xciii
Despite these handicaps, Bryson's writings convey a quality of
freshness and excitement that has drawn many readers.
His
work has been reinforced by the Dutch narratologist Mieke Bal, now
his colleague at the University of Rochester.xciv
In a sustained examination of the work of Rembrandt and our response
to it, she has courageously invaded the art historians' territory.xcv
Her work draws on the thinking of the Russian linguistic scholar
Roman Jakobson. Broadly, Bal sees the Jakobsonian model, in which
the essence of the artist's concept/intention is faithfully (or as
much as possible) transmitted to a passive "receiver," as
standing over against a Brysonian one, in which the viewer's
intervention ("voyeurism") is crucial. Asking "Is
there life beyond binary oppositions?" she holds that one must
not choose between the two, or try to find a middle way between the
two extremes, but hew to both simultaneously (at least this is our
situation in the 90s). At times her work assumes a playful quality
as she roams in an almost free-associational way among various
perspectives, psychoanalytic, semiotic, feminist, and personal.
Some
critics believe that Bal's emphasis on "reading" relies too
much on a literary model. Paintings are not read in the linear
sequence that texts require. In any event, there are many different
kinds of readings.
Another
more technical problem arises with Bal's study of the Dutch master.
For some years the Rembrandt Research Project has been laboring to
separate authentic works from those by pupils or associates.xcvi
The results of these connoisseurship studies, still incomplete, are
intricate and controversial. Thus it is easy for anyone but those
most intimately involved with the questions to stumble and to discuss
as a Rembrandt a painting or drawing that has been excluded from the
Rembrandt canon. Bal seeks to circumvent this problem by writing of
"Rembrandt." It might be thought that this difficulty is a
snare set in place by art historians anxious to protect their
favorite hunting grounds from the incursions of poachers. However,
the establishment of authenticity is a vital process, for it goes to
the very heart of the essence of each individual work. To be sure,
there is much more than attribution to be said about Rembrandt, a
supremely "interpretive" artist. But attribution is the
indispensable foundation for further study.
The work of Bryson and Bal demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses brought to art historical practice by those coming from another discipline--in their case, literary study. All individual contributions, of course, have their own qualities. Yet a larger issue is at stake: the status of the new approaches themselves.
The work of Bryson and Bal demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses brought to art historical practice by those coming from another discipline--in their case, literary study. All individual contributions, of course, have their own qualities. Yet a larger issue is at stake: the status of the new approaches themselves.
Initially,
resistance might have counted as a mere manifestation of the
"old-fogy" mentality. Now, however, that the advocates of
radical change have had a chance to exhibit the full range of their
wares, the fact that so many mainstream art historians remain loyal
to their "traditional" craft carries power of conviction.
Conclusion.
The
approaches discussed in this chapter are disparate. The attempt to
organize them into a single overarching theory, whether derived from
deconstruction or some other source, seems premature, to say the
least. In fact, a general theory of "postmodern" art
history may be unfeasible, because the very nature of postmodernism,
which acknowledges pervasive fragmentation and uncertainty, forbids
it.
Probably
the solidest results have been achieved utilizing the feminist
approach, where sustained hard work on the empirical data, combined
with a willingness to explore and debate underlying assumptions, have
produced an imposing body of scholarship. Gay and lesbian approaches
are still in the formative stage. As regards the psychoanalytic
interpretation of art, confidence has been undermined by doubt as to
the logical status of the parent discipline. Although progress has
been less than might have been expected, semiotics still shows
promise.
These
and other innovative enterprises have nourished the growing pluralism
of art history. New problems and perspectives have emerged. Yet
what has been happening is consistent with the following hypothesis.
The new approaches supplement "traditional art history,"
without replacing it: its methods, built up over generations, retain
their power and efficacy.
i
As it is the purpose of this chapter to discuss new approaches, it
is not possible to survey the advances made in the last few years,
some of them very significant, using more traditional methodologies.
For these, see the stimulating series of state-of-research reports
appearing in the Art
Bulletin
from volume 68 (1986) onwards. These articles (most of which are
cited at the appropriate place in this book) cover much of Western
art from classical antiquity onwards, though not developments in the
study of the arts of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the indigenous
peoples of the Americas. More catholic, though now dated, is the
supplementary volume (vol. 16) to the Encyclopedia
of World Art,
edited by Bernard S. Myers (Palatine, Ill.: Jack Heraty Associates,
1983); most of the articles were written in the 1970s. A further
supplement (vol. 17, 1987), edited by Giulio Carlo Argan and written
chiefly by Italian scholars, is without merit.
ii
This view was particularly associated with the English critic F. R.
Leavis; see René Wellek, " F. R. Leavis (1893-1978) and the
Scrutiny
Group," in his A
History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950,
vol. 5, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 239-64.
iv
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural
Studies,
New York: Routledge, 1992. Actually, the interest in the interface
of popular and high culture was not entirely new, witness Meyer
Schapiro's pioneering article "Courbet and Popular Imagery,"
Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
4 (1941), 164-91. For some pivotal episodes of confluence of high-
and popular-culture themes in the visual arts, see Kirk Varnedoe and
Adam Gopnik, eds., Modern
Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low,
New York: Abrams, 1990.
vi
For the roots of multiculturalism in the earlier tradition of
cultural pluralism, which it displaced, see Philip Gleason, Speaking
of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
vii
Lennard J. Davis and M. Bella Mirabella, eds., Left
Politics and the Literary Profession,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
viii
There is a very large periodical literature on this question. For a
balanced selection, see Paul Berman, ed., Debating
P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College
Campuses,
New York: Laurel, 1992. Some supporters of the new trends allege
that the very term political correctness is a slur invented by the
right. However, the present author can attest to hearing it
deployed in all seriousness in leftist gatherings of the early
seventies. At these meetings those labeled as espousing
"counterrevolutionary" views were urged to exchange them
for ones that were "politically correct." The term
politically correct circulated in left-sectarian groups before it
made its way into general discourse.
ix
An invaluable guide is Margaret A. Rose, The
Post-modern and the Post-industrial,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
x
The fullest account of the structuralist movement is François
Dosse, Histoire
du structuralisme,
2 vols., Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1991. Among older
introductions, see e.g. Oswald Ducrot et. al., Qu'est-ce
que le structuralisme?
Paris: Seuil, 1968; Jean Piaget, Structuralism,
trans. Chanina Maschler, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971; and
Robert Scholes, Structuralism
in Literature: An Introduction,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. For an "insider"
sketch, in fictionalized form, of this period and the ensuing years,
see Julia Kristeva, The
Samurai,
trans. Barbara Bray, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
xi
Christopher Norris, Derrida,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, provides a useful
introduction, sympathetic to the French thinker. For further
references, see William R. Schultz and Lewis L. B. Fried, Jacques
Derrida: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography,
New York: Garland, 1992.
xii
David Lehman, Signs
of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man,
New York: Poseidon Press, 1991.
xiii
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French
Philosophy of the Sixties,
Amherst: University Press of New England, 1990.
xiv
Recent scholarship has shown that Althusser's actual knowledge of
Marxism was superficial; see Yann Moulier Boutang, Louis
Althusser: Une Biographie. Tome I: La formation du mythe
(1918-1956),
Paris: Grasset, 1992.
xv
Victor Farías, Heidegger
and Nazism,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989 (revised version of the
text published in France in 1987). See also Gunther Neske and Emil
Kettering, eds., Martin
Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers,
New York: Paragon House, 1990; Richard Wolin, ed., The
Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader,
2nd ed., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992; and Tom Rockmore and Joseph
Margolis, eds., The
Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. For some further
developments, see Thomas Sheehan, "A Normal Nazi," New
York Review of Books,
40:1-2 (January 14, 1993), 30-35.
xvi
Translated by Albert Hofstadter in Martin Heidegger, Poetry
Language Thought,
New York: Harper and Row, 1971, pp. 15-87.
xvii
"L'object personnel, sujet de nature morte: à propos d'une
notation de Heidegger sur Van Gogh," in his Style,
artiste, et société.
Paris, Gallimard, 1982, pp. 349-60. This is the enlarged version of
a text that first appeared in English in The
Reach of the Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein,
New York: Springer, 1968; some further retouchings appear in Volume
Four of Schapiro's Collected
Papers
(New York: Braziller, 1994). The Heidegger-Schapiro exchange
occasioned of a characteristically diffuse meditation by Derrida,
The
Truth in Painting,
trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 257-382.
xviii
For a concise introduction, see Christian Norberg-Schulz,
"Heidegger's Thinking on Architecture," in his
Architecture:
Meaning and Place: Selected Essays,
New York: Electa/Rizzoli, 1988, pp. 30-48. The contribution
Heidegger's thought has made to Derrida's parallel interests is
assessed in Mark Wigley, The
Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.
xix
Yet J. Claude Evans, Strategies
of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pinpoints
deficiencies in Derrida's interpretation of Husserl.
xx
For a somewhat different approach to the weaknesses of this theory,
see John Ellis, Against
Deconstruction,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
xxi
It is true that Derrida and his followers subsequently sought to
qualify the full force this statement. But if, after all, there is
an outside, what innovation has deconstruction offered in this
sphere?
xxii
True to its Derridean origins, deconstruction has been mainly
influential in the study of literature and philosophy. However, a
school of architecture that flourished in the 1980s (at least on
paper, for few of the designs were built), took the name
"deconstructionist." Derrida himself collaborated with
architect Bernard Tschumi in designing the "follies"
adorning the Parc de la Villette in Paris.
For a
collection of efforts to import Derridean analysis into art history,
see Peter Brunette and David Wills, eds., Deconstruction
and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
xxiii
J. Q. Merquior, Foucault,
London: Fontana, 1985; Didier Eribon, Michel
Foucault,
trans. by Betsy Wing, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991;
James Miller, The
Passion of Michel Foucault,
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Though sympathetic, Miller's
biography implausibly links Foucault's fast-lane personal life (with
its quest for "limit experiences" through sex and drugs)
to a perceived intellectual nihilism, as witnessed especially by his
devotion to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. This approach
exemplifies the biographical fallacy, whereby an individual's ideas
are traced to his lifestyle and vice versa. To date, the fullest
and fairest biography is David Macey, The
Lives of Michel Foucault,
New York: Pantheon, 1993.
xxiv
Gary Gutting, Michel
Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
xxv
"On Foucault's Concept of Discourse," in Timothy J.
Armstrong, ed. and trans., Michel
Foucault Philosopher,
New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 99-117.
xxvi
Michel Foucault, The
Order of Things,
trans. by Alan Sheridon, New York: Vintage Books, 1973, pp. 3-16 (on
Velázquez's Las
Meninas);
idem, This
Is Not a Pipe,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. See Claude
Gandelman, "Foucault as Art Historian," Hebrew
University Studies in Literature and the Arts,
13:2 (Autumn 1985), 266-80.
xxvii
Carlo Ginzburg, "Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and
Scientific Method," in Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds.,
The
Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 81-118; reprinted in his
Clues,
Myths, and the Historical Method,
trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1989, 86-125, 200-14.
xxviii
Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells, eds., Sigmund
Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities,
New York: Abrams, 1989. For the relation of Freud's collecting to
his intellectual development, see Carl E. Schorske, "Freud's
Egyptian Dig," New
York Review of Books,
41:10 (May 27, 1993), pp. 35-40.
xxix
Freud revised the essay several times. For the final German
version, see Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte
Werke,
vol. 8, London: Hogarth Press, 1943, 127-211. The edition prepared
by Brian Farrell has a helpful Introduction: Sigmund Freud,
Leonardo,
London: Penguin Books, 1963.
xxx
Meyer Schapiro, "Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study,"
Journal
of the History of Ideas,
17 (1956), 303-36. An elephantine effort to rescue Freud's essay
stems from Kurt Eissler, Leonardo
da Vinci: Psychoanalytic Notes on the Enigma,
New York: International Universities Press, 1961; see also P. G.
Aaron and R. G. Clouse, "Freud's Psychohistory of Leonardo: A
Matter of Being Right or Left," Journal
of Interdisciplinary History,
13 (1982), 1-16.
xxxi
Whitney Davis, "Sigmund Freud's Drawing of the Dream of the
Wolves," Oxford
Art Journal,
15:2 (1992), 70-87.
xxxii
Robert S. Liebert, Michelangelo:
A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983; Jerome D. Oremland,
Michelangelo's
Sistine Ceiling: A Psychoanalytic Study of Creativity,
Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1989; Mary Mathews
Gedo, Picasso:
Art as Autobiography,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. A popular biography by
the journalist Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington,Picasso:
Creator and Destroyer,
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988, shows how psychoanalytic theory
can be "liberating" in the bad sense, furthering
speculations about sex and other subjects of curiosity.
xxxiii
For accounts of this accumulating body of research, see Ellen
Handler Spitz, Art
and Psyche,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985; and Jack Spector, "The
State of Psychoanalytic Research in Art History," Art
Bulletin,
70 (1988), 49-76. A sampling of recent work appears in Margaret
Iversen (ed.), "Psychoanalysis in Art History," special
issue of Art
History,
17:1 (September 1994).
xxxiv
New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
xxxv
Her neglect extends to carelessness as to what Freud originally
wrote. On p. 176 she attributes the terms "anaclitic" and
"cathexis" to Freud. In fact these expressions were not
used by him in the German texts, but have been propagated by his
English translators and interpreters.
xxxvi
Jack Spector, The
Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art,
New York: Praeger, 1973.
xxxvii
David E. Stannard, Shrinking
History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1980; Marshall Edelson,
Hypothesis
and Evidence in Psychoanalysis,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; Adolf Grünbaum, The
Foundations of Psychoanalysis,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; Frederick Crews,
Skeptical
Engagements,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
xxxviii
Carl Gustav Jung, Collected
Works,
translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 9, New York: Pantheon, 1959
(Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, part 1).
xl
Much of the stimulus for the recent interest stems from an ambitious
exhibition, "Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsiders
Art," organized by the Los Angeles County Museum and traveling
in 1993 to Madrid, Basel, and Tokyo. See also John M. MacGregor,
The
Discovery of the Art of the Insane,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; and the landmark study
(German original, 1921) by Walter Morgenthaler, Madness
and Art: The Life and Works of Adolf Wölfli,
translated by Aaron H. Esman, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1992.
xli
Ernst Guhl, Die
Frauen in der Kunstgeschichte,
Berlin: Guttentag, 1858; Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, Women
Artists in All Ages and All Countries,
New York: Harper, 1859; Ellen Creathorne Clayton, English
Female Artists,
London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876; Marius Vachon, La
Femme dans l'art,
Paris: J. Rouam, 1893; Clara Clement Waters, Women
in the Fine Arts from the 7th Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century
A.D.,
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904; Walter Sparrow, ed., Women
Painters of the World from the Time of Caterina Vigni 1413-1463 to
Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day,
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905; and Laura Ragg, Women
Artists of Bologna,
London: Methuen, 1907.
xlii
An invaluable conspectus is Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia
Matthews, "The Feminist Critique of Art History," Art
Bulletin,
69 (1987), 326-57; see also Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard; and
Gouma-Peterson and Matthews, "An Exchange on the Feminist
Critique of Art History," Art
Bulletin,
71 (1989), 124-27, A first harvest of research is Norma Broude and
Mary D. Garrard, eds., Feminism
and Art History: Questioning the Litany,
New York: Harper & Row, 1972; followed by a larger collection by
the same editors, The
Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History,
New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
xliii
Eleanor Tufts, Our
Hidden Heritage,
New York: Paddington Press, 1974; Karen Peterson and J. J. Wilson,
Women
Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to
the Twentieth Century,
New York: Harper and Row, 1976; Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda
Nochlin, Women
Artists 1550-1950,
New York: Random House, 1976 (published in connection with the
exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum). A recent example,
incorporating some of the results of further research, is Whitney
Chadwick, Women,
Art and Society,
New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990. For a comprehensive annotated
bibliography, covering research during the years 1970-88, see
FrauenKunstGeschichte-Forschungsgruppe Marburg, Feministische
Bibliographie zur Frauenforschung in der Kunstgeschichte,
Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1994.
xliv
Claire Richter Sherman and Adele M. Holcomb, eds., Women
Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979,
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.
xlv
Published in Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran, Women
in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness,
New York: New American Library, 1971, pp. 480-510, and in several
other places, the essay is now most easily accessible in Linda
Nochlin, Women,
Art, and Power and Other Essays,
New York: Harper & Row, 1988, pp. 145-78.
xlviii
H. Diane Russell and Bernadine Barnes, Eva/Ave:
Women in Renaissance and Baroque Prints,
Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990.
xlix
Tamar Garb, "'L'Art féminin': The Formation of a Critical
Category in Late-Nineteenth Century France," Art
History
12 (1989), 39-65.
l
Griselda Pollock, Vision
and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the History of Art,
New York: Routledge, 1988; idem, Avant-garde
Gambits 1888-1893: Gender and the Color of Art History,
New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992.
lii
Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century
Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
liii
George L. Hersey, High
Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
liv
Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality
and Space,
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. See also Daphne
Spain, Gendered
Space,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992; Leslie Kames
Weisman, Discrimination
by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-made Environment,
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
lv
An ambitious exception, citing literary as well as visual evidence,
is Marina Warner, Monuments
and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form,
New York: Atheneum, 1985.
lvi
Patricia L. Reilly, "Writing Out Color in Renaissance Theory,"
Genders,
12 (Winter 1991), 77-99. More generally, see the learned article by
John Gage, "Color in Western Art: An Issue?" Art
Bulletin,
72 (1990), 518-41.
lvii
See, e.g., Edward Lucie-Smith, Eroticism
in Western Art,
New York: Praeger, 1972; Robert Melville (with Simon Wilson), Erotic
Art of the West,
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1973; Philip Rawson, Erotic
Art in the East: The Sexual Theme in Oriental Painting and
Sculpture,
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1968. For further references, see
Eugene C. Burt, Erotic
Art: An Annotated Bibliography,
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.
lviii
Betty-Carol Sellen and Patricia A. Young, Feminists,
Pornography and the Law: An Annotated Bibliography of Conflict
1970-1986,
Hamden, Conn.: Library Professional Publications, 1986. See also:
David Copp and Susan Wendell, eds., Pornography
and Censorship,
Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1983; and Morse Peckham, Art
and Pornography: An Experiment in Explanation,
New York: Basic Books, 1969.
lix
Michael Camille, Image
on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. For a thoughtful
analysis of this book, which is a piece of scholarship in its own
right, see the review by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Art
Bulletin,
75 (1993), 319-27.
lx
Leo Steinberg, The
Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,
New York: Pantheon, 1984 (first published as issue 25 of October,
Summer 1983). The author has produced an enlarged edition,
addressing the commentary that this ground-breaking work has
elicited, and carrying the argument further.
lxi
Umberto Baldini and Ornella Casazza, The
Brancacci Chapel,
trans. Lysa Hochroth and Marion L. Grayson, New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1992, pp. 28-38. Cleaning campaigns in progress or recently
completed have provided valuable impetus for reexamination of
art-historical problems relating to a number of important Italian
monuments, including Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel; see William
Hood, "The State of Research in Italian Renaissance Art,"
Art
Bulletin,
69 (1987), 174-86, esp. pp. 176-79.
lxiii
For a roster of what was achieved up to 1994, see James M. Saslow et al., Bibliography
of Gay and Lesbian Art,
New York: Gay and Lesbian Caucus, College Art Association, 1994.
See also a pioneering collection of original essays on the subject:
Whitney Davis, ed., Gay
and Lesbian Studies in Art History,
New York: Hayworth Press, 1994, which also appeared as Journal
of Homosexuality,
27:1-2 (1994). Of the subsequent publications, the following are perhaps the most important. Pierre Borhan, Men for Men: Homoeroticism and Male Homosexuality in the History of Photography, 1840-2006, London: Jonathan Cape, 2007; Emanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1994; Dominique Fernandez, A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality.,Munich: Prestel, 2002; Harmony Hammond, Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History, New York: Rizzoli, 2000; Jonathan D. Katz, and David C. Ward, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010. [catalog of exhibition at National Portrait Gallery]; Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art,New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; James M. Saslow, Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999; Abigail
Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999; Claude J. Summers, ed. The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts, San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004. [reprints entries from http://www.glbtq.com]; Jonathan Weinberg, Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005.
lxiv
Two publications preceding the present phase of scholarship inspired
by the gay/lesbian movement (and produced by heterosexuals) showed
courage in candidly discussing the homosexuality of two Italian
masters: Horst W. Janson, The
Sculpture of Donatello,
2 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; and Donald
Posner, "Caravaggio's Early Homo-erotic Works," Art
Quarterly,
24 (1971), 301-26.
lxv
New York: Routledge, 1986; second ed., 1994.
lxvi
Diana Souhani, Gluck,
1895-1978: Her Biography,
London: Pandora Press, 1988; Simon Watney, The
Art of Duncan Grant,
New York: John Murray, 1990. The revival of Grant was boosted, of
course, by the general fascination with the Bloomsbury group to
which he belonged.
lxvii
In examining the problems of method in this section, I am indebted
to an unpublished paper by my student Craig Houser, "The Queer
Way: An Examination and Introduction of a Queer Methodology in Art
History" (May 1992).
lxviii
"'A Veil of Ice Between My Heart and the Fire': Michelangelo's
Sexual Identity and Early Modern Constructs of Homosexuality,"
Genders
2 (Summer 1988), 77-90. See also his annotated translation, The
Poetry of Michelangelo,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
lxix
James M. Saslow, Ganymede
in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. This approach was earlier
adumbrated in Wayne R. Dynes, "Orpheus without Eurydice,"
Gai
Saber,
1 (1978), 267-73.
lxxi
See also Weinberg, "'Some Unknown Thing': The Illustrations of
Charles Demuth," Arts
Magazine,
61:4 (December 1986), 16-18.
lxxii
Richard Dyer, "Believing in Fairies: The Author and The
Homosexual," in Diana Fuss, ed., Lesbian
Theories, Gay Theories,
New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 185-201.
lxxiii
See his collected writings, edited by Scott Bryson, et al., Craig
Owens, Beyond
Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
lxxiv
Carolyn Burk, "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters and the Puzzle
of Female Friendship," Critical
Inquiry,
8 (1982), 543-64; Brenda Richardson, Dr.
Claribel Cone and Miss Etta,
Baltimore: Museum of Art, 1986.
lxxv
A more optimistic assessment is offered by Janet Demb, "Are Gay
Men Artistic? A Review of the Literature," Journal
of Homosexuality
23:4 (1992), 83-92.
lxxvi
Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Encyclopedic
Dictionary of Semiotics,
3 vols., Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986; Winfried Nöth, Handbook
of Semiotics,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
lxxvii
See the useful collection of Peirce's writings edited by James
Hoopes, Peirce
on Signs,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
lxxviii
For general orientaion, see Nöth, Handbook
of Semiotics,
392-401. Essays illustrating the historical development in Europe
appear in the stimulating collection by Jan Bremmer and Herman
Broodenburg, ed., A
Cultural History of Gesture,
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.
lxxxi
Richard Brilliant, Gesture
and Rank in Roman Art: The Use of Gestures to Denote Status in Roman
Sculpture and Coinage,
New Haven: Connecticutt Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1963
lxxxii
E. Dale Saunders, Mudrā:
A Study of Symbolic Gestures in Japanese Buddhist Sculpture,
New York: Princeton University Press, 1960.
lxxxiii
Jean-Claude Schmitt, La
raison des gestes dans l'occident médiéval,
Paris: Gallimard, 1991. See also Moshe Barash, Gestures
of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art,
New York: New York University Press, 1976; idem, Giotto
and the Language of Gesture,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
lxxxiv
Peter Burke, "The Language of Gesture in Early Modern Italy,"
in Bremmer and Roodenburg, eds., A
Cultural History,
71-83.
lxxxv
Thomas Kirchner, L'expression
des passions: Ausdruck als Darstellungsproblem in der französischen
Kunst und Kunsttheorie des 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,
Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1991.
lxxxvi
Dorothy Johnson, "Corporeality and Communication: The Gestural
Revolution of Diderot, David, and The
Oath of the Horatii,"
Art
Bulletin,
71 (1989), 92-113.
lxxxvii
In addition to the references noted above, see Edith Kurzweil, The
Age of Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss to Foucault,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
lxxxviii
Meyer Schapiro, "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual
Art," Semiotica,
1 (1969), 223-42; idem, Words
and Pictures,
The Hague: Mouton, 1973.
lxxxix
Such a fusion was broached by Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky
and the Foundations of Art History,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984, pp. 42-44, 181-84.
xc
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
xci
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
xcii
Norman Bryson, "Semiology and Visual Interpretation," in
Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds., Visual
Theory: Painting and Interpretation,
New York: HarperCollins, 1991, p. 71.
xciii
This shallowness is evident in the comment and selections making up
his anthology, Norman Bryson, ed., Calligram:
Essays in New Art History from France,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
xciv
This alliance is attested by their joint survey article, Mieke Bal
and Norman Bryson, "Semiotics and Art History," Art
Bulletin,
73 (1991), 174-208.
xcv
Mieke Bal, Reading
Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
xcvi
Josua Bruyn et al., A
Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings,
3 vols., The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (for the Stichtung Foundation
Rembrandt Research Project), 1982-89.
xcviii
Professor Steinberg graciously shared with me the text of his
presentation: "Concerning the Doni Tondo: The Boys at the
Back." For any inaccuracies in representing his views in this
brief summary I, of course, am alone responsible.
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