Sometimes we think of the whole panoply of art and artists as a fixed
order, with all the objects, artists, and movements firmly reposing in the
place they deserve. With their characteristic air of assurance, art-history textbooks tend to affirm this fixity. A little reflection, though, will show that
reputations fluctuate, so that phenomena that rate highly during one period garner less approval during another, and vice versa. This chapter
is about changing reputations, with particular emphasis on what might
be termed "redemptions," whereby artists and trends that had at one
time been neglected or disparaged come forward to find their place in the sun.
Earlier chapters showed how the Romantic movement, seeking alternatives to classical norms, fostered a new appreciation of Gothic architecture and of European "primitive" paintings. In their original setting, the clients of these two revival efforts overlapped chronologically while differing as to medium, the one focusing on architecture, the other on painting. In due course the twin processes of their recovery merged into a broader endeavor. The Middle Ages became a valued era. The return to favor of these treasures of European civilization that had been created between ca. 1150 and 1500 became a model for subsequent recuperations.
Earlier chapters showed how the Romantic movement, seeking alternatives to classical norms, fostered a new appreciation of Gothic architecture and of European "primitive" paintings. In their original setting, the clients of these two revival efforts overlapped chronologically while differing as to medium, the one focusing on architecture, the other on painting. In due course the twin processes of their recovery merged into a broader endeavor. The Middle Ages became a valued era. The return to favor of these treasures of European civilization that had been created between ca. 1150 and 1500 became a model for subsequent recuperations.
The
revivals encompassed not only previously disparaged styles but also
individual artists who had come to be neglected for a variety of
reasons. In keeping with the postulates of the sociology of
knowledge discussed in the opening chapter, an attempt will be made
to suggest reasons why the rehabilitations occurred when and where
they did. Since the scholars' motives for these efforts were often
unconscious, explanations must always remain somewhat speculative.
Not all
attempts at rehabilitation have succeeded. It is probably the case
that truly insignificant artists are not candidates for elevation in this way, but by the same token not every worthy neglectee has benefited from the rescue operation. A sensibility schooled by
contemporary art is the most common predictor of rehabilitations. In this way impressionism helped people to understand Roman art, expressionism provided access to
Grünewald, surrealism fostered the revival of Hieronymus Bosch, and so forth. In all likelihood, candidates for rehabilitation still wait in the wings; they have not yet emerged because the
conditions are not ripe. By the same token, though, some who deserve rehabilitation
will probably never attain it.
Ideology has played a role.i Many devotees of the Middle Ages felt that through this allegiance they were helping to bolster Roman Catholicism, or at least an older, purer form of Christianity. To some extent a religous subtext also underlies the revival of the baroque works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose emotionality could be understood within the framework of Counter-Reformation piety and mysticism, with their deliberate cultivation of religious ecstasy. Politics could also play a role. Watteau and the rococo generally came to be appreciated in France because it was believed that they embodied the French spirit. Curiously, rococo works were for a time also admired by the political left. More understandable is the enthusiasm of French progressives for the realistic and down-to-earth qualities of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings. Conversely, reactionaries like Maurice Barrès were drawn to artists like El Greco, whose intense spirituality contrasted, they believed, with the crass materialism of their own age.
Ideology has played a role.i Many devotees of the Middle Ages felt that through this allegiance they were helping to bolster Roman Catholicism, or at least an older, purer form of Christianity. To some extent a religous subtext also underlies the revival of the baroque works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose emotionality could be understood within the framework of Counter-Reformation piety and mysticism, with their deliberate cultivation of religious ecstasy. Politics could also play a role. Watteau and the rococo generally came to be appreciated in France because it was believed that they embodied the French spirit. Curiously, rococo works were for a time also admired by the political left. More understandable is the enthusiasm of French progressives for the realistic and down-to-earth qualities of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings. Conversely, reactionaries like Maurice Barrès were drawn to artists like El Greco, whose intense spirituality contrasted, they believed, with the crass materialism of their own age.
Many of
the most successful rehabilitations--of the baroque and the rococo, of
Vermeer and Botticelli--belonged to the nineteenth
century. This was the age, after all, when scholars became aware of the need to do justice to past eras and
personalities that had been unfairly obscured. However, the momentum
continued into the twentieth century, when relatively recent
phenomena, such as art nouveau style, the works of the architect Gaudí, and the later paintings of Giorgio de Chirico were
revived.
The Fundamentals,
If the
rehabilitation of medieval art was a model, it also retained its own
special quality. For the Gothic and the "primitives" could
be regarded as a necessary prologue to the main narrative of Western art,
rather than something remote from it. In other words, the act of
recovery widened an already unitary phenomenon, much as the extension attached to a telescope keeps the instrument a telescope. It was simply that
the story of the Art of the West (to use Henri Focillon's term) began
earlier than had been thought. To be sure, some enthusiasts were not willing
merely to leave it at that. Such cultural radicals as A. W. N. Pugin
and John Ruskin aspired to set Gothic in place of the Renaissance.
Yet by and large this substitution strategy did not succeed. A
compromise in which one ate one's cake and had it too prevailed: the
Middle Ages and
the Renaissance.
As matters turned out, then, the medieval revival offered reassurance: one could add new aesthetic pleasures without, so it would seem, abandoning the old ones.ii Hence those embarking on the rehabilitation of neglected European art of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries--what might be called the post-Renaissance--could take heart: there was an affinity between their labors and those of their medievalizing predecessors. Yet there was also a significant difference. Medieval styles struck classicizing taste as being deficient in naturalism and overstylized in form, while the post-Renaissance styles were typically found to have the opposite faults; they were too naturalistic and too undisciplined in form. The older era was deficient, the newer one excessive. Yet despite this contrast, a common denominator existed. The standard whereby both the medieval and post-Renaissance manifestations met resistance was their neglect of the principle of the juste milieu--the happy medium between extremes. Classical perfection was identified with balance: neither too little or too much. In this light, many rehabilitators came to recognize that the common property of the various styles they were advocating was their anticlassicism. Eventually such scholars as Wilhelm Worringer and Walter Friedlaender began to find their way to a general theory of the anticlassical.iii
As matters turned out, then, the medieval revival offered reassurance: one could add new aesthetic pleasures without, so it would seem, abandoning the old ones.ii Hence those embarking on the rehabilitation of neglected European art of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries--what might be called the post-Renaissance--could take heart: there was an affinity between their labors and those of their medievalizing predecessors. Yet there was also a significant difference. Medieval styles struck classicizing taste as being deficient in naturalism and overstylized in form, while the post-Renaissance styles were typically found to have the opposite faults; they were too naturalistic and too undisciplined in form. The older era was deficient, the newer one excessive. Yet despite this contrast, a common denominator existed. The standard whereby both the medieval and post-Renaissance manifestations met resistance was their neglect of the principle of the juste milieu--the happy medium between extremes. Classical perfection was identified with balance: neither too little or too much. In this light, many rehabilitators came to recognize that the common property of the various styles they were advocating was their anticlassicism. Eventually such scholars as Wilhelm Worringer and Walter Friedlaender began to find their way to a general theory of the anticlassical.iii
The new recruits into the realm of
European Art signaled a further extension of aesthetic pluralism. The expansion of the canon also promoted the idea of a kind of parliament of styles--many
styles rather than one Style.iv
And ultimately the identification of a plurality of styles in the European sphere
fostered similar investigations among scholars of, say, Japanese and
Islamic art.
As we
saw, the medieval revival began in the late eighteenth century. But
the ensuing revivals that occupy this chapter did not develop until
the middle of the nineteenth century. Why this time lag? In a
stimulating monograph, Francis Haskell emphasized the flood of works
released on the art market by the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic conquests.v
The appearance of this saleable merchandise had two results. (1) Replenished by political turmoil, the burgeoning stocks of the dealers offered abundant
specimens of previously little noticed types, above all the
"primitives." The still rather specialized taste for
medieval works was reinforced by a flood of previously unavailable pieces. (2) Initially, however,
the effect of the release of these objects was more
balanced and more conservative. By providing works by established artists such as
Guido Reni and Gerard Dou the enlarged art market served, for a time
at least, to reinforce established hierarchies of value. In this
way, the revival of the baroque and mannerism, of El Greco and Bosch
was delayed for many years.
Haskell
concentrated on taste as exemplified by dealers and critics and the
collectors they served. Viewed in this context, the concept of taste
is complex. It is to be distinguished from the work of the art
historians who austerely concentrated on particular eras and masters,
without regard to commercial considerations. In any event, Haskell
saw the 1840s and 1850s as years that were particularly open to a
variety of aesthetic experiences, the decades after as more
single-minded. Although the single-mindedness may be somewhat
overstated in this contrast, the concept of the "open decades"
as the immediate prologue to the more sweeping changes to be discussed in this
chapter is an appealing one.
The
tides of taste may be detected in various spheres. During the first
half of the nineteenth century, the sensibility of the great collectors
began to trickle downward through the agency of major public
collections such as those displayed in the Altes Museum in Berlin and the
National Gallery in London. Yet not all the enthusiasms of the rich
and powerful were destined to be adopted by the middle classes, who
came to make up an increasing proportion of the art-loving public.
From another social standpoint, perceptive critics and art historians
formed an avant-garde, singling out periods and artists that were
later to become famous. Sometimes, as with El Greco and Bosch they
were spectacularly successful. In other cases, as in the recent
effort to revive the Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century,
the effort has come a cropper. These soigné works now have honored places
in our museums, but few visitors linger before them.
Apart from their common strategic features and aesthetic background, the host of rehabilitations undertaken after the model of the medieval revival show a varied pattern. Sometimes the newly favored art falls chronologically within the bounds of accepted narrative, as in the cases of the baroque and of mannerism. These styles now had to be "inserted" in the great parade of European art. Then there was the double case of Roman and late-antique art, the successors of Greek art. But then if all these belonged in the sequence, how could these masses of objects and imposing building complexes have so long suffered disparagement? Were earlier generations that rejected them wrong? Or in reviving them are we simply being frivolous, obeying the caprices of the whirligig of taste?
Apart from their common strategic features and aesthetic background, the host of rehabilitations undertaken after the model of the medieval revival show a varied pattern. Sometimes the newly favored art falls chronologically within the bounds of accepted narrative, as in the cases of the baroque and of mannerism. These styles now had to be "inserted" in the great parade of European art. Then there was the double case of Roman and late-antique art, the successors of Greek art. But then if all these belonged in the sequence, how could these masses of objects and imposing building complexes have so long suffered disparagement? Were earlier generations that rejected them wrong? Or in reviving them are we simply being frivolous, obeying the caprices of the whirligig of taste?
Even
discounting such relativism, the rehabilitator has to ponder whether
one is simply doing justice to something wrongly forgotten, or
whether one is creating a new image of art history, a fuller one to
be sure, but perhaps also one that is obedient to contemporary needs. In
other words, is the new canon of accepted styles a natural one, properly supplanting its biased and inadequate forerunner? Or is it in reality a new arbitrariness, governed by
its own preferences and selectivities?
There
are also major problems that inhere in the ranking process. In the New World, for example, we see the tendency to
place "high cultures" such as the art of pre-Columbian
Mesoamerica and the Andes on a higher plane that American Indian and
Amazon art. And what of the arts of today's consumer society,
such as advertising and commercial television? In short, the problem
of rehabilations is part of the larger question of the "quotations
on the aesthetic stockmarket." Like its commercial counterpart,
the art world is always in flux. Largely invisible though it may be, the aesthetic
bourse does have one tangible projection, and that is the auction houses
where changing prices mark shifting patterns of esteem.
Neglect
and Obloquy.
For
rehabilitation to occur, neglect and obloquy must by definition have
previously taken their toll. Styles recede in our consciousness for
several reasons. In the case of, say, baroque music this process is
easily comprehensible. During the later eighteenth century musicians
began to play baroque compositions less and less, preferring the new
classical music. Before the advent of sound recordings, few
listeners could actually hear
baroque works. For buildings, however, the neglect is less
comprehensible; they cannot be made quietly to retire into dusty
libraries and archives. Gothic cathedrals and baroque palaces were
features of the built landscape that were difficult to
ignore and costly to eradicate. But the refined viewer could pass
quickly by such "unsightly" survivals. It seems in fact
that these structures were shrouded in a kind of cloak of
invisibility, essentially unseen and unpondered.
The
rejection of the visible required an intellectual support system; an
anti-Gothic ideology, an antibaroque ideology, and so forth. In our
own day we have seen a comparable process whereby the older beaux
arts buildings of our cities--the last heirs of the Renaissance
tradition--met scorn because they did not fit the ideology of the
Modern Movement in architecture as practiced by Walter Gropius and Le
Corbusier. Sadly, more than words and attitudes were involved, for in a
kind of architectural pogrom, Pennsylvania Station in New York and
many other such monuments paid with their lives. Opposed by architectural
conservationists, the demolition of these buildings was facilitated by the ideological contempt in
which they were enveloped. Thus the condition for disparaging earlier
styles is not simply a change in taste, but the ascent of a new
"monolithic" taste with an almost messianic self-assurance
that permits it utterly to reject alternative visions. Conversely,
eclectic tastes are less likely to neglect or condemn earlier styles.
Individual
artists tend to suffer occultation through their situation in taste
constellations. Figures regarded as all-too-characteristic of their
era go down with it: thus the fates of Borromini and Guarini were
bound up with the repudiation of the baroque. On the other hand,
artists like Bosch who did not fit the standards of an approved
era in which they worked (here the Renaissance) were also likely to
suffer.
The
Baroque.
In the
popular mind the term baroque still evokes connotations of extravagance and
flamboyance, of bewildering, sometimes grotesque ornateness.
Baroque, it seems, is a style that actively enlists the response of
the viewer, whether positively or negatively. In these respects it
is not unlike Gothic, though most would grant that the baroque arises
from a radically different social context.
Although a number of unlikely etymologies for the term baroque are still circulating, most lexicographers and students of historical semantics agree on a single origin. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese word barroco, meaning an irregular or misshapen pearl, made its way into French as baroque, whence the term spread, first as a jeweler's term and then in its extended or figurative meaning, to other European languages.vi It must be emphasized that rarely, if ever, was the term baroque used to describe the dominant style during its own era; the name was a later epithet transferred to it by those who disapproved of the style. In principle this semantic heritage need not be a handicap to study and appreciation, any more than the word Gothic hinders the understanding of a period in which it was not in fact used.
Although a number of unlikely etymologies for the term baroque are still circulating, most lexicographers and students of historical semantics agree on a single origin. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese word barroco, meaning an irregular or misshapen pearl, made its way into French as baroque, whence the term spread, first as a jeweler's term and then in its extended or figurative meaning, to other European languages.vi It must be emphasized that rarely, if ever, was the term baroque used to describe the dominant style during its own era; the name was a later epithet transferred to it by those who disapproved of the style. In principle this semantic heritage need not be a handicap to study and appreciation, any more than the word Gothic hinders the understanding of a period in which it was not in fact used.
In fact
the etymology of the word and the contexts in which it appeared
promoted a pejorative aura and this has tended to persist.
Discounting these negative currents, art historians (and some
cultural historians) seek to employ the term as a value-neutral
expression for the seventeenth century in Europe and Latin America.
The source lay in Italy, specifically in Rome, where the style
reached an early climax about 1630, spreading and continuing
vigorously until 1680--longer in some locales. Not all
seventeenth-century art fits the model derived from the Roman
baroque; problems emerge in fitting the naturalistic (Holland) and
classical (France) currents into the whole.
Turning to the posited original core, typified by the Roman practitioners
Bernini, Borromini, and Cortona, we find a curious anomaly; baroque
counts as the first dominant style in European history to elicit
strong dislike in its own day.vii
In discussions held at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in the
1630s the associates of the classicizing painter Andrea Sacchi
criticized baroque painting--above all that of Pietro da Cortona--for
having too many figures and appealing too broadly to the senses.viii
These views were also espoused by Poussin, the leading French artist
in Rome, who helped to transmit them to his native land. Thus when
Bernini trave;ed to France in 1665 to design a new Louvre palace, he was disappointed to find his baroque scheme rejected. Nor did his modified projects
carry the day.ix
These counterbaroque tendencies, fueled by the classicism of the
theorists, reached fullness in the work of the art theorist Giovanni Bellori, whose
idol was Raphael.
In the
Netherlands Rembrandt met criticism for not adhering to
"the rules of art," and for a time after his death minor
classicizing artists surpassed him in esteem. In the end the
antibaroque tendencies triumphed through a barrage of critical
writings culminating in the diatribes of Francesco Milizia, who
actually ascribed madness to Borromini and his followers. The
disdain for the baroque was also augmented by Winckelmann's criteria
which presented Greek art as a very different animal, serving as a
means to overcome contemporary "decadence."
French
writers particularly excelled in denouncing the gout
baroque,
sometimes as a general epithet for bad taste, but increasingly for
the period we term the baroque. A popular reference work, A. J.
Pernety's Dictionnaire
portatif de peinture, sculpture, et gravure
(1757) defined baroque as "that which does not follow the rules
of proportion but of caprice." In 1788 the influential
Quatremère de Quincy stated: "In architecture baroque is a
nuance of the bizarre. Of this it is, as it were, the refinement,
and even, if this is permissible to say, the abuse thereof. What
severity is to the wisdom of taste, the baroque is to the bizarre,
that is, it is the superlative. The idea of the baroque brings with
it that of the ridiculous taken to excess." (Dictionnaire
de l'architecture,
1788).
For a
long time German popular usage, under the influence of French taste,
endorsed these strictures. In his Cicerone
of 1855 Jakob Burckhardt noticed a number of Italian baroque
monuments but still struggled with the old negative concept: "baroque
architecture," he opined, "still speaks the same language
as the Renaissance, but a barbarous [verwildert]
dialect of it." In letters written in the 1870s, however, he
began to speak in terms of unqualified praise. It seems that
Burckhardt is also to be credited for introducing the more generic
idea of the baroque as a late stage of other styles, so that in due
course scholars began to speak of a medieval baroque, a Hellenistic
baroque, and a Roman imperial baroque. Acknowledging this pluralism,
baroque would rank as a recurrent phenomenon in art history.
Cornelius
Gurlitt, a diligent compiler rather than an original scholar,
undertook a trilogy on architecture: Geschichte
des Barockstils in Italien
(1887), Geschichte
des Barockstiles, des Rococo und des Klassicismus in Belgien,
Holland, Frankreich, England
(1888) and Geschichte
des Barockstils und des Rococo in Deutschland
(1889). This trio was part of a ten-volume series covering European
architecture from ca. 1400 to 1800. Gurlitt approached the
assignment objectively, paying attention to national differences
as well as religious demands.
The
true rehabilitator of baroque was Heinrich Wölfflin, whose
first book Renaissance
und Barock
(1888) offered a systematic set of comparisons of works in the two
styles, chosen from examples familiar to him in the city of Rome.
The Swiss scholar also held that the baroque style appeared in other media, such as literature and garden architecture,
thus paving the way for the use of the term to designate a whole
epoch in cultural history. In Wölfflin's later work the contrast
between the linear and painterly modes was self-evidently identified
with the contrast between the Renaissance and baroque.
Hans
Tintelnot has suggested that the achievement of German scholars in
rediscovering the baroque underwent three major phases.x
About 1887 there began the unveiling, through the work of Gurlitt
and Wölfflin, of the solid merit of the style. About 1907 a new
phase set in which enriched knowledge. Finally, a third stage
started about 1923, characterized by an "expressionist"
appreciation of the baroque as a vehicle for emotional intensity. To
these stages one could add a further one after 1945 set largely in
England and the United States. Denis Mahon sought to free the
seventeenth-century painters from the inherited amalgam of prejudice,
while Rudolf Wittkower emphasized the sculptors and architects, above
all Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Since that time there has been a tendency
to concentrate on painters. It must be conceded that the effort to
resecure the reputations of the Carracci and Guercino, of Guido Reni
and Andrea Sacchi as truly major masters has not taken hold, despite
tenacious efforts by gifted art historians. In an era too much
ravaged by totalitarianism of the right and left, an art in the
service of the absolutism of the Counter-Reformation papacy was bound
to seem less than fully sympathetic.
We may
pause to reflect on some of the leading traits and achievements of a
century of scholarship. The extension of the baroque into previously
neglected areas, such as Spain and Piedmont, was actively canvassed.
Less well studied, at least until recently, were baroque monuments overseas, in Mexico and the Andean region, in Goa and Macao.
The commanding role of great personalities was revealed: in painting,
Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Tiepolo; in sculpture, Bernini; in
architecture, Bernini (again), Borromini, and Guarini. Shifts in
iconography were carefully examined.
A still
vexing question is the symbiosis between the baroque and the
Counter-Reformation, more specifically the Jesuit effort to
proselytize. Holland, where Protestantism was dominant, makes one
hesitate to identify the baroque completely with resurgent
Catholicism.
Then
there is the question of the link between baroque art and other media
of cultural expression. Some connection with literature had already
been noted during the period of occultation, when the poetry of
Cavalier Marini had been condemned in much the same manner as baroque
art. In due course, the prestige of Wölfflin's work led to the
introduction of the concept as an organizing principle in the study
of literature, where it has been fruitful not only for German and
Italian works, but also for Slavic literature. In their own medium, musicologists developed a concept of the musical baroque
about the same time as the art historians did in their sphere.
Some
writers have stressed the element of rhetoric and persuasion,
particularly as exploited by the Jesuits. In this connection, it is
often said that illusion is the key to the baroque sensibility, but
illusion is but a part of something larger: a kind of enactment,
using many elements, to dazzle and, if possible, achieve a willing
suspension of disbelief. It is not surprising that the era saw an
immense development of stagecraft for spectacles and theater
presentations. Festivals were particularly lavish. Opera was born
at the beginning of the baroque period. Even more extended
comparisons have been proposed. A new sense of the cosmos emerged,
embracing such novelties as the Magellanic earth with all its
complexity, irregularities on the surface of the moon, and planets
moving in ellipses rather than perfect circles (Kepler). This last
discovery has an architectural parallel in that the ellipse often
occurs in plans of churches and chapels.
For
some, these various modes of the baroque merged into a grand
synthesis; these scholars detected a baroque essence in all the
cultural products of the seventeenth century, including statecraft
and lifeways. A particularly ambitious account is that of Carl J.
Friedrich, The
Age of the Baroque,xi
which not only examines many of the factors just discussed, but
finds that in the political realm the baroque created a new model of
the state. Such holistic approaches are less favored nowadays, if
only because the achievements of the period were so diverse.
As has
been seen, beginning in the third quarter of the nineteenth century
German scholars commenced the process of divesting the baroque of
its accumulated barnacles of prejudice and disparagement, restoring a nonjudgmental, sometimes even celebratory concept. Why did baroque begin to free itself of the incubus of disparagement when and where it did? The
architecture of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century had
largely followed the chaste models of the early Renaissance or the
Gothic. However, the material embodiment of later nineteenth-century
culture, especially in the "show architecture" of ensembles
like Vienna's Ringstrasse tended to favor an ornate, effusive style.
Even when, as was usually the case, the motifs themselves were not
derived from seventeenth-century baroque a kinship was evident.
This was more noticeable in southern Germany, Austria, and Italy
where the affinities with a vibrant historical heritage of baroque were more evident than in England and France, where a muted
seventeenth-century architecture had prevailed. From France,
however, came a new painting of light and color, Impressionism, and
the gradual triumph of this art throughout Europe fostered interest
in the color of the baroque painters. In another field of aesthetic
expression, the nineteenth century saw a revival of the works of the
great German baroque composers Bach and Handel--whetting the appetite
for understanding parallel achievements in the other arts and opening
the way for the "unified field" theory of baroque. Then,
too, especially in Germany the Kulturkampf unleashed by Bismarck--who
sought to limit the power of the Catholic church--evoked a
countercurrent that promoted the culture of Catholicism.
This German Catholic baroque interest contrasts with the situation in
England and France, where neo-Catholic sentiment concentrated on the
Middle Ages. Finally, the growth of long-distance railway networks
("grand trunk lines") encouraged travel to Italy, where
German-speaking visitors could find many impressive counterparts of
their own baroque. As has been noted, a new wave of baroque research
began in Germany in the 1920s, influenced by expressionism with its
emphasis on raw emotion.
Appreciation
of the baroque was slower to come to English-speaking countries and
to France, though the Sitwells did their best in England in the
1920s. The migration of Central European refugees certainly helped,
although few of them were in fact baroque specialists. Study of the
baroque never became truly popular, but had an appeal for English and
American art historians who were attracted by the idea of opening new
vistas.
Rococo.
The
inception of the rococo style is conventionally placed in Paris in
1715, when there was a reaction against the heavy and ornate style
favored by the court of Louis XIV, who died in that year.xii
The rococo is a style of small curves, gaiety, and daintiness. It is
prominent in architectural decor, furniture, and ceramics--and also
in painting. It owes much to the baroque that preceded it,
particularly that of Flanders and Holland, but is more intimate and
accessible.xiii
The gentle hedonism of the rococo, so often dismissed as frivolous,
in fact accords with the materialism of such philosophes
as La Mettrie and Sade, who emphasized the centrality of pleasure in
human motivation. Endowed with the cachet of French taste, the
rococo spread to Germany and Austria,xiv
and to a lesser extent to Italy and Spain.
The
later years of the reign of Louis XV witnessed a turning away from
elaborately curved furniture towards straight lines and simpler
motifs. At the same time, painters began to show a preference for
classical subjects with their subtexts of austerity and
self-sacrifice. Although rococo retreated from the foreground of
public interest during the latter part of the eighteenth century,
artists continued to practice it into the next century.xv,
Honoré Fragonard was active until he died in 1804. The older
generation was succeeded by a group of petits
maîtres
who, though they did not become famous, continued to receive a steady
supply of work. In this way the rococo survival joined hands with
the rococo revival during the July monarchy (1830-1848).
One of
the characteristic features of the style as it flourished under Louis
XV was rockwork or rocaille.xvi
It seems that this term was used before "rococo" itself,
as by the architect Jacques-François Blondel, who speaks in 1772 of
the fashion for rocaille as being over. The term rococo seems to
have arisen as a blend of rocaille and barocco, so that the link with
the former style was implicated. In any event neither the term rocaille nor
rococo enjoyed currency during the efflorescence of the style itself.
The rococo fare poorly during the French
revolution. The new model of the artist, exemplified by
Jacques-Louis David, the chef
d'école
of neoclassicism, portrayed him as a civic figure, contributing to
the advancement of the public weal. By contrast, the rococo artists
of the ancien
régime
were stigmatized as lackeys of a decadent and useless aristocracy.
As
the new concept of the artist entailed an elevation of
status, it naturally drew wide support. Some fanatics even went so
far as to decry those practicing the old manner as corrupters of
morals; in any event the latter found it best to keep a low profile
during the Terror. However, Napoleon and Josephine showed an
inclination for work in a gentler mode that could at least be termed
para-rococo.
When
the émigrés returned after 1815, the aristocrats among them
naturally sought to retrieve some elements of their former lavish
lifestyles. Accordingly, old mansions and chateaux were refurbished,
often in the old style. In their turn, the nouveaux
riches aped the nobility in order to lessen the apparent distance between
their parvenu status and the class they longed to merge with. Thus
the very association of rococo with the ancien
régime
that had hobbled it in revolutionary times now assisted it. Then the
fashion for collecting rococo furniture spread abroad, as seen in Sir
Richard Wallace's collection, now a public museum in London. Those
who could not afford original eighteenth-century pieces, had to be
satisfied with carefully produced copies. Furniture of this type became de
rigueur for American millionaires during the Gilded Age, as seen in
the Vanderbilt mansions.
After
1830, under the July Monarchy, a significant number of intellectuals
began to interest themselves in the rococo. Théophile Gautier, the
proponent of art for art's sake, lauded it in a poem of 1836.
Somewhat later Charles Baudelaire evoked with nostalgia the lost
world of fêtes
galantes.
The greatest supporters, however, were the brothers Edmond and Jules
de Goncourt, who wrote a series of short monographs on the
eighteenth-century painters, which were then gathered into a book,
L'Art
du XVIIIme siècle,
1881.xvii
By this point, when France was smarting from defeat at the hands of
the Germans, nationalistic motives had begun to play a role. The
rococo was extolled because it was the first original style to have been
originated in France since the Gothic; it had also flourished during
an era in which France had been culturally dominant over Germany. In
addition, rococo had some of the appeal of the baroque, but was
gentler and more ingratiating.
Towards
the end of the century, the rise of the art nouveau created a new
interest in the decorative arts, which also proved to be in accord
with the rococo. In advanced modern art a brief phase in the 1910s
was termed "rococo cubism."
Mannerism.
The
received view today is that mannerism was a phenomenon that
flourished in Italy and parts of northern Europe (especially Bohemia
and the Low Countries) from about 1520 to about 1600. Yet opinions
differ as to whether mannerism should be regarded as an outgrowth of
the premisses of the High Renaissance--but more elegant, refined, and
artificial--or conversely as a jarring shift towards anticlassicism
marked by tension, anxiety, intellectualism, and disregard of
previously established rules of art. More fundamentally, perhaps,
some remain skeptical that mannerism was ever a single unified style,
preferring to regard it as a cluster of tendencies unified only in
their diversity.
In fact
the status of mannerism remains more problematic than that of the
baroque and the rococo. To this day, a few skeptics deny that it is
an authentic period style in its own right, treating it as simply a
cluster of phenomena within the late Renaissance. Indeed for a long
time the major mannerist artists were regarded as part of the
Renaissance. For this reason mannerism was rediscovered as an entity
later
than the baroque and the rococo, even though it precedes them
chronologically.
The key
to the earlier discussions of the phenomenon is the Italian word
maniera,
"manner, way, style."xviii
(The word was probably borrowed from Old French manière.)
In the shop talk of the late Middle Ages the Italian expression was
employed in a fairly straightforward and general way, as the "manner
of applying colors." However, by 1390 Cennino Cennini was using
it to refer to the individual style of an artist ("una maniera
propria per te"). The Commentarii
of Lorenzo Ghiberti (about 1450) shows that in his day the word might
also serve to designate the style of a period or country ("la
maniera greca," more or less equivalent to the Byzantine style
and its derivative in Italy). But it was Giorgio Vasari, a century
later, who exploited the full semantic iridescence of the Italian
vocable. In his usage, maniera
could apply to the personal style of an artist, and also to a
national or historical style (maniera
greca,
byzantine style; maniera
tedesca,
German or Gothic style). Vasari also used the term in the "pregnant"
or absolute sense; maniera
(sometimes la
bella maniera)
is good style. Artists either have it or they do not. (Already at
the beginning of the century, the anonymous report on ancient
buildings sometimes attributed to Raphael indicates that there can be
buildings, constructed by the Goths, which are lacking in any manner,
"senza maniera alcuna.")
This
achievement of maniera in the absolute sense implied a process of
study, selection, and addition, with the necessary complement of the
intervention of imagination. This new quality distinguished, in
Vasari's view, the newly perfected art of the sixteenth century from
its fifteenth-century naturalistic predecessor. Implicit in the new
ideal, however, was a conflict between adherence to rules, and the
subjective powers of intuition, which must be called upon to surpass
the rules. According to Vasari, Michelangelo accomplished this feat,
thus excelling the hallowed models of antiquity. This height of
achievement signified a peak that could not be equaled; hence the
maniera of Vasari's own generation represented a descent.
The
full consequences of this sobering thought were not recognized until
a century later when, in 1672, Giovanni Bellori published his
resonant definition of the maniera as: "a fantastic idea based
upon studio practice and not on imitation [of nature and the appropriate
classical exemplars]." The artificial manner of the Cavaliere
d'Arpino was one extreme, the excessive naturalism of Caravaggio
another; the good artist will find a golden mean between these two
extremes. Bellori singled out artificiality and empty
intellectualism as key defects, and his critique echoed through
generations of later discussions. The context suggests that the
Roman art historian was thinking especially of the closing decades of
the sixteenth century, where the still regnant mannerism was
confronted with its antidote: he held up the Carracci as the rescuers
of Italian art who opened the way to a restoration of the balance of
the High Renaissance.
Writing
at the end of the eighteenth century, Luigi Lanzi underlined the
negative sense of maniera, understood as an inert repetition of
formulas. Lanzi pioneered in offering chronological markers as well.
In Rome the rot set in after the sack of 1527, in Florence after the
death of Vasari in 1574, in Venice not until the seventeenth century.
He echoed Bellori in perceiving salvation with the coming of the Carracci at the end of the sixteenth century.
Henceforth the painter might "divide his glances between nature
and art." In this way the negative mold was set, as reflected
in the terms ammanierato,
manierista,
and manierismo,
all disparaging.
In a
1695 translation from the French of Du Fresnoy, John Dryden
introduced the term "mannerist" as a pejorative designation
of an art style into English. Since the early nineteenth century
this negative influence has been reinforced by the common usage of
the words "mannered," affected, and "mannerism,"
a peculiarity of pose or action, a tic.
The
German founders of modern art history were naturally affected by
Italian usage. Jakob Burckhardt, still hostile in his 1855 Cicerone,
situates the period between 1530 and 1580. In 1887 Cornelius Gurlitt
described the architecture of this period as late Renaissance, while
Wölfflin in his pathfinding Renaissance
und Barock
of 1888 simply skipped over the era. Although various scholars noted
anomalies--what might be termed slippages--in the period, in 1920 Hermann Voss still titled his survey of the era
Die
Malerei der Spätrenaissance in Rom und Florenz--Painting
of the Late Renaissance in Rome and Florence, reinforcing the idea of continuity.
Broadly speaking, the art of the middle and the later sixteenth century--still
little examined for its own sake--elicited two standard responses. It could be disdained as a mediocre prolongation
of the Renaissance, perhaps harmless but unoriginal, or it could be castigated as decadence. This second, perhaps more
exciting view, however, had become problematic, for the cry of decadence suffered a serious blow from
Alois Riegl's rehabilitation of late-antique art. Here an art long
assailed as a decline from the high standards of Greece and Rome received a clean bill of health: it was actually an advance. To be sure, established canons of beauty suffered neglect, but there was a gain in expressiveness. A similar trade-off characterized a major trend in modern art, a trajectory extending from the post-Impressionism of Paul Gauguin and
Vincent Van Gogh to the Expressionism of Edvard Munch and Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner. Gradually, then, a kind of conceptual space opened
up in which mannerist artists could find a place, one in which the
anticlassical tendencies some showed could be rebranded in positive sense.
The
Viennese Max Dvořák was a major heir of Riegl. Working in the
circumstances of the defeat of the Austrian empire in World War I, he
took note of the revival of El Greco, which had started just before
the beginning of the century.xix
How was this artist, who so strikingly departed from the classical
norms of the Renaissance to be regarded? Dvořák found the answer in
the concept of mannerism, which now provided a lineage for the eccentric, multicultural artist. In "naturalizing" El Greco in
this way, Dvořák also drew attention to interesting qualities in
other artists long regarded as mannerist. Mannerism and the Middle
Ages concurred in their disregard of sensuous nature in favor of
spiritual concerns. Our own turbulent age, he held, is now experiencing an
affinity with those earlier eras. Dvořák sensed that
the neglected sixteenth-century artists, with El Greco as the
presiding genius, were coming into their own as a result of a major shift in the
contemporary Weltanschauung, a shift that was leading away from materialism and
positivism and towards spiritual absolutes. "In that eternal
struggle between matter and spirit, the scales are inclining towards
a victory of spirit."
In
Germany this challenge was taken up by Walter
Friedlaender, who focused on the Italian artists.xx Less interested in religion, he emphasized such formal aspects as distortion of anatomy and the
pressing of figures to the picture plane so the two-dimensional
patterns were prominent. Measured and cautious as his approach was,
Friedlaender developed a triadic ABA pattern; following the metaphor
of a triptych, mannerism was an anticlassical middle section, with the
classical panels flanking it on either side.
In the
1930s the rise of Surrealism pushed the inquiry in the direction of
the irrational itself.xxi
This led to a renewed appreciation of such bizarre artists as
Arcimboldo with his fruit and vegetable compositions simulating human
beings, as well as Hieronymus Bosch, as we have noted above.
After
World War II, amid the tensions of the Cold War, the concept of
mannerism as an art of crisis gained wide acceptance among
the general public. Tireless work by the Museum of Modern Art in New
York and other institutions made the classic cubist works of Picasso
and Braque, with their departures from mimetic reality familiar, and
also introduced the more adventurous to the abstract expressionism of
Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. In 1955 the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hosted
a huge, multinational exhibition called "The Triumph of European
Mannerism." The same year saw the appearance of Four
Stages of Renaissance Style,xxii
a widely read "quality paperback" written with
considerable panache by Wylie Sypher. This literary scholar turned
cultural historian used a Zeitgeist approach to show mannerism as a
period style in literature and music as well as the visual arts--a general cultural phenomenon
falling between the High Renaissance and the Baroque. Ten years
later the meme of mannerism-as-tension was consolidated in
a big, though somewhat facile monograph by Arnold Hauser.xxiii
Most ambitious of all, perhaps, was Hiram Haydn's idea of the
Counter-Renaissance as a whole climate of opinion, a spiritual
sphere, occupied by many of the leading intellectuals of Europe.xxiv
At the
same time a new cohort of specialist art historians focused on the
period 1540-60 , stressing such masters as Bronzino, Salviati, and Vasari.
The work of these artists no longer suffered under the burden of
being regarded as a watered-down version of mannerism, as
Friedlaender had suggested, but were given their own bailiwick under the
name maniera.
The ultrarefined art of this group, created for a cultivated elite of
aristocrats, stood in some contrast to the intensely expressive works
of Pontormo and Rosso that had fascinated the critics of the 1920s.
This shift of the center of gravity from about 1525 to about 1550
required a reappraisal of the whole notion.
Then John Sherman challenged the whole notion of mannerism as a
style of distortion, tension, and spiritual anxiety. He
reverted to one of the original meanings of maniera, style. The art
of the later sixteenth century was, Sherman maintained, simply a refined and elegant
version of the premises launched by the masters of the High
Renaissance. "There is little necessity or excuse for an
explanation of Mannerism in terms of tension or collective neurosis.
It was, on the contrary, the confident assertion of the artist's
right, which he seemed to have regained in the High Renaissance, to
make something that was first and last a work of art." Within
these boundaries he was able to include a whole range of accomplished
figures, from Pierin del Vaga to Joachim Wtewael, from Benvenuto
Cellini to Wenzel Jamnitzer, while giving short shrift to the early
Pontormo, Rosso, and El Greco as overintense.
A
balanced approach to the problem appeared in Sidney J. Freedberg's
weighty survey in the Pelican series, Painting
in Italy, 1500-1600.xxv
The Harvard professor agreed with the pioneering scholars in the
field that a profound break separated the High Renaissance from the
mannerist generations. However, he found that tensions were already
present in the later works of Raphael so that mannerism also
represents the continuation of a breakup that had begun earlier.
Freedberg detected a fundamental difference between the great "donative"
figures such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, and the mass of
artists. For this reason, all the lesser painters, whether contemporary with
those giants or later, must necessarily be different in kind. By
responding to the works of the mannerists in terms of formal
analysis, however, he paid them the compliment of examining them in
their own terms. In so doing, he exposed a "hidden" aspect
of the revival of mannerism: the modern age was comfortable with a period of
aesthetic formalism in part because of its own formalism.
A number of external features shaped the mannerist era. The sack of Rome in 1527 put an end to the confident unfolding of culture in the eternal city. The need to cope with the Protestant challenge and the difficult birth of the Counter-Reformation laid a heavy burden on Italy, the seat of Roman Catholicism. Outside of Venice political conditions remained uncertain in the peninsula. For their part artists, deprived of the support of the guild system, were more than ever dependent on the whims of aristocratic patrons, who had their own worries. This uncertain mood among artists led to a flood of highly intellectualized art treatises, such as those by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo and Giovanni Battista Armenini. Artists clung to the High Renaissance masters, but without being able to replicate their careful balance of adherence to nature and formal subtlety. Instead the practitioners of the maniera veered ever more towards artificiality and pattern for its own sake.
A number of external features shaped the mannerist era. The sack of Rome in 1527 put an end to the confident unfolding of culture in the eternal city. The need to cope with the Protestant challenge and the difficult birth of the Counter-Reformation laid a heavy burden on Italy, the seat of Roman Catholicism. Outside of Venice political conditions remained uncertain in the peninsula. For their part artists, deprived of the support of the guild system, were more than ever dependent on the whims of aristocratic patrons, who had their own worries. This uncertain mood among artists led to a flood of highly intellectualized art treatises, such as those by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo and Giovanni Battista Armenini. Artists clung to the High Renaissance masters, but without being able to replicate their careful balance of adherence to nature and formal subtlety. Instead the practitioners of the maniera veered ever more towards artificiality and pattern for its own sake.
Yet does all of this--and more evidence could
be marshalled--add up to a unified artistic style? Can it be that
scholars, and the general public for a time, were mesmerized by the
verbal power of a label? Because the term mannerism
suggests something unified and definite, the temptation to identify a
single essence of mannerism was a powerful one. To be sure, all
understanding of the past involves generalization, but some eras,
such as the Gothic and the rococo seem to lend themselves more to this generalizing approach than others.
Another
temptation confronted the enthusiasts for mannerism. Much modern art
rests upon the myth of the lonely genius, who defies society. To put
it in the vernacular, rebellion is "sexier" than conformity. As purported rebels against the tyranny of
classicism, the mannerists could fit into this pattern. But how
rebellious were the mannerists?
In
conclusion, perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from the quest
to understand the artists of the maniera is a certain skepticism with
regard to traits that come to the fore through being looked at through contemporary lenses. While this approach may provide useful tools for initiating and consolidating the rediscovery process, these helps must also be questioned and discounted
if they lead too far away from the historical truth of the phenomena
being studied.
Rehabilitation
of Individual Artists.
In
addition to period styles, individual artists also reaped the
benefits of rehabilitation. In the process artists who had been
relegated to the periphery were revealed to be major figures. There
were significant differences. The revivals of Vermeer and Bosch were
special cases, while the enthusiasm for Botticelli came in the train
of the pre-Raphaelite focus on the quattrocento and the fondness for
El Greco joined forces with the revival of mannerism. The changing
fortunes of these four masters will suffice to bring out the main
themes of the process of revival of individuals artists.
Jan
Vermeer.
In this
restricted gallery of individual figures, it is best to begin with
the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), for while he was not
chronologically the first of the quartet to have lived, he was the
first to benefit from revival. Today, much more is known about the
artist than in the days of his resurrection, when the very absence of
facts probably contributed to the aura of mystery
surrounding him. He married into a Catholic family and lived obscurely,
but not unprosperously in Delft. Vermeer was influenced by the
luminous realism of Carel Fabritius, who may have been his teacher.
In his early years he painted religious and mythological scenes, but
his mature work consists of the serene genre paintings that were his
particular forte. Less than forty genuine canvases survive.
Although
Vermeer's obscurity ranks as an archetype of the category of
neglected genius, he was not completely unknown before the
mid-nineteenth century when the Dutch master reemerged in splendor.xxvi
The artist was elected four times to the ruling body of the
painters' guild in Delft, and he was able to support his eleven
children quite adequately--at least until war with France disrupted the Dutch
economy. To be sure, his meticulous workmanship kept his output down. Few as they were, his
creations were sometimes attributed to other artists. The dispersal,
as it were, of his reputation made it hard to see him as a
whole. After 1780, this situation reversed, and the works of other
artists were commonly ascribed to him, showing that his star had
begun to ascend. As late as 1843, however, the English
dealer-scholar John Smith could offer but meager information about
him in his Catalogues
raisonnés.
Acceptance
of Vermeer's works suffered to some degree from the prejudice against
Dutch art in general. It is revealing to track the decline and
eventual disappearance of this prejudice in France, where the shift went hand
in hand with changes in contemporary production. In the early
nineteenth century Flemish genre paintings, with their picturesque
and turbulent action, were admired. By the 1840s, however, a shift
began towards the quieter Dutch works. This mutation in the taste
for Northern works reflected the rise of the realism of the Barbizon
school and the increasing interest in light found among the artists
who later would blossom as Impressionists. Thus the combination of
quiet realism and shimmering light prepared the way for the revival
of Vermeer, who from being an almost forgotten member of a lesser
school came to be regarded as the epitome of an admired school.
The
instrument of this transformation was a fiery journalist and critic
named Théophile Thoré.xxvii
Elected to parliament after the revolution of 1848, Thoré soon
earned exile through his uncompromising republican journalism. The
years he was forced to spend in England, Belgium, and Holland
deepened his knowledge of art, and allowed him to bring a wealth of
experience to his writings addressed to the French public.
On an
excursion to Holland in 1842, Thoré had been thunderstruck by
Vermeer's View
of Delft.
After that he was greatly to deepen his knowledge. During his more
extended travels, he employed the pseudonym of William Bürger in
order to elude the Belgian police. Since he also used that name in
his writings he is known as Thoré-Bürger. After he returned to
France in 1861 he spread his enthusiasm for Vermeer among his
friends. He summarized his findings in a series of articles in the
Gazette
des Beaux-Arts
in 1866. Placing Vermeer historically, he listed a canon of some
seventy-five works, about half of which modern criticism has
rejected.
Still,
the researches of the French savant provided the impetus for Henry
Havard's sober monograph of 1888. In 1906 Cornelis Hofstede de Groot
compiled the first true catalogue raisonné. In 1911 Eduard
Plietsch, offering new facts gleaned from the archives, was able
to present a convincing reconstruction of Vermeer's stylistic
development.
Since
his rediscovery Vermeer has commanded exceptional allegiance from
writers and intellectuals not professionally concerned with art. In
1902 Marcel Proust, who attributed a transcendental importance to the
artist, called The
View of Delft "the
most beautiful picture in the world." In Remembrance
of Things Past
Charles Swann, the hedonist who transforms himself into a scholar,
writes an essay on the Dutch artist. Like the melody of the Vinteuil
sonata, the radiance of Vermeer gradually spreads its luster through
the vast novel. The novelist Bergotte, another major character in
Proust's magnum opus, actually dies while contemplating The
View of Delft.
In the "little patch of yellow wall" that he singles out
in the picture Bergotte finds a talisman of the work that he should
have written.xxviii
Conversely, Proust uses indifference to Vermeer to show the lack of
culture of a number of characters, and in a more general sense to set
a boundary between sensitivity and unfeeling worldliness.xxix
In 1937
what appeared to be a remarkable new Vermeer canvas appeared, The
Christ at Emmaus.
Only after World War II did irrefutable evidence come to light that
this work was one of a number of clever forgeries created with great
patience and guile by Han van Meegeren.xxx
Vermeer had thus received a dubious, but significant accolade, the
attention of a gifted forger.
Vermeer
has also captured the admiration of modern artists who were not
tempted to forge his works. In 1935 Pablo Picasso remarked, "I'd
give the whole of Italian painting for Vermeer of Delft. There's a
painter who simply said what he had to say without bothering about
anything else. None of those mementos of antiquity for him."xxxi
Significantly, however, in all the reworkings Picasso undertook of
canvases by other artists--Cranach, Rembrandt, Delacroix and so
forth--Vermeer never figures. The English painter Lawrence Gowing so
revered Vermeer that he turned himself into an art historian, and an
excellent one, by publishing his monograph Vermeer
in 1952. As a rule, artists who admired him refrained from imitating
him in their own work--as if intuiting that the virgin serenity of
his world should not be violated. There was one exception to this generalization. Fascinated by The
Lacemaker,
Salvador Dali created several variations on this and other works by the master.
For the most part his Vermeer "homages" seem grossly
disfigured, as if Dali were both acknowledging, and reacting against
his admiration.
The
most significant contribution to Vermeer studies in recent years has
been made by an economic historian, John Michael Montias of Yale
University. In his book Vermeer
and His Milieu: A Web of Social History,xxxii
Montias has sifted the documents to produce a picture of the artist
and his circle of fellow painters, his extended family connections,
and patrons. Through the results of this research Vermeer has become
more human, but the pristine serenity that lies at the core of his
works remains.
Sandro
Botticelli.
Firmly
ensconced in the late fifteenth century, the work of the
Florentine Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510) nonetheless reveals a
marked individual stamp characterized by mellifluous line and a
mildly enigmatic atmosphere. His personality was neurotic and thrown
off balance for a time by the religious crisis at the end of the
century. The esteem Botticelli enjoyed is shown by the invitation he
received in 1481 to paint sections of the walls of the Sistine Chapel
in Rome. For the last twenty years of his life he made a good living
turning out Madonnas and other religious paintings of a gently devout
kind.
Why did
Botticelli's reputation fade? The "upstaging" of his
Sistina frescoes by Michelangelo's titanic later additions is one
factor. Other works, kept in private collections and seldom-visited
churches, were hard to see. Aesthetically, Botticelli adhered to a
linear expressivity that was alien to the High Renaissance art of the
sixteenth century, when artists sought to evoke mood through sfumato
and to achieve beauty through serene equipoise. During his later
years Botticelii had already come to seem old fashioned. Then the
ensuing Counter-Reformation was unsympathetic to Christianized
neo-Platonism, so that the paganism of his Mythologies seemed overly
celebratory. Although it served to keep his name alive, Vasari's
perfunctory biography of Botticelli confirmed the Florentine master's
marginalization by wedging him in with a group of naturalists marking
the end of the second of the writer's three major eras. Curiously,
Botticelli's homosexuality never seems to have been a factor in his
demotion--perhaps because so many noteworthy Renaissance artists were
homoerotically inclined.
The
Botticelli revival came only in the nineteenth century.xxxiii
In 1815 the Primavera
and The
Birth of Venus,
later to be ranked among the most famous paintings of the entire
Western tradition, were hung in the Uffizi, but attracted little
notice. The French neo-Catholic art writer Alexis-François Rio paid
some attention to Botticelli, communicating the interest to Ruskin in
the 1850s. The attention of the pre-Raphaelite painters, notably
Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was a significant
factor in renewing interest. However, the decisive turning point was the publication of
Walter Pater's eloquent essay in 1870, incorporated in his 1873 book The
Renaissance. Pater captured a mood of ambiguity exquisitely suited to
the late-Victorian period, where the rising Botticelli cult fit in
perfectly. For some his Madonnas are exemplary images of piety; for
others they show uncertainty. The turning away from literal meaning
in favor of qualities of line and mood suited the Aesthetic Movement.
For some who were drawn to Botticelli, the fascination with the
enigmatic character of Botticelli's work may reflect an uneasiness
about art itself. It is significant that the revival of Botticelli
took place mainly in England, a country still strongly embued with
distrust of Catholic religious art. That Botticelli could be
perceived as having himself internalized some of this reticence
increased his appeal. And this perception may not have been
altogether unjust, for late in life Botticelli had given support to
Savonarola's proto-puritan campaign against "vanities."
The
Pater concept was consolidated by a scholar who gave much of his life
to Botticelli, Herbert Horne.xxxiv
Like other English homosexuals of the day, Horne (following in
Pater's footsteps) was influenced by the Aesthetic Movement. If the
revival of Botticelli was a "gay taste," it was not
exclusively so. In his dissertation of 1892 the heterosexual Aby
Warburg offered a different reading in which Botticelli became less
important for his own sake and more a kind of vector for the
intersection of literary and other currents. By then, however, the
perception of Botticelli in terms of the values of the Aesthetic
Movement had become fixed, and the artist's reputation passed, with
this doctrine, into the orbit of twentieth-century formalism. That
Botticelli has continued to fascinate, even after the fading of this
critical doctrine, is probably due to the complexly coded messages of
his Mythologies, which still have not gained consensus
readings.xxxv
El
Greco
This
artist (1541-1604) was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos on the island of
Crete, where he seems to have received his early training. Moving to
Venice he made a major adjustment in his style; he gave up producing
icons in the Byzantine manner, and adopted an advanced style of oil
painting. After a stay in Rome, he moved to Spain where he resided
from 1577 until his death. El Greco's hopes of gaining royal
patronage were disappointed by the cool reception of his ambitious
The
Martyrdom of Saint Maurice
in 1583. Although he failed to achieve lasting success at the Madrid
court of Philip II, he blended in well with the intellectuals and
clergy of Toledo, where he enjoyed the status of a prosperous, if
provincial celebrity.
Even
though interest among professional art historians has declined
somewhat in the late twentieth century, El Greco retains his appeal
among the general public. More than any other feature in that
remarkable city, El Greco attracts visitors to Toledo. Despite the
fact that he was not native born, El Greco is thought to define some
inherent capacities of the Spanish temperament: mystical religiosity
and remoteness from ordinary worldly concerns. He is also regarded
as one of those artists who bridge the gap between his own era and
the modern one. He seems to prophesy the anxious temper of the
twentieth century.
Many of
his present-day admirers would be surprised to learn that he
encountered problems in his own day. He adapted well to Toledo, but
in the long run this was not an advantage. As the city became a
backwater his art came to seem old fashioned. After his death in
1614 the Cretan master fell into almost total oblivion.xxxvi
The response of Spanish art writers was muted: they respected his
technical mastery but found his taste wayward and hard to accommodate
to their own predispositions for it was neither naturalistic nor
classical. Fifty years after his death the Aragonese painter-critic
Jusepe Martínez was calling his work caprichosa
and extravagante.
The Cretan painter might have been almost totally forgotten had he
not found a place in Antonio Palomino's standard history (1724).
Palomino approves of his early works under the influence of Titian,
but claims that he perversely changed his manner so as to appear more striking. Yet the results, with their "disjointed drawing"
and "unpleasant color," were merely ridiculous. The spread
of neo-classical taste in Spain in the later eighteenth century only
served to confirm this negative judgment.
As
travelers from other countries did not usually visit Spain to examine
its art, they were not in a position to correct these opinions.
However, the appearance of the railway made the country accessible
and attractive, especially to French travelers. Influenced by the
romantic movement, individuals like the writer Mérimée and the
painter Manet helped to propagate the notion of Spain as a country
with a distinctive national character. The interest of these
observers in capturing "local color" accorded with a
parallel indigenous trend known as costumbrismo.
These interests prepared the way for the reception of an artist who
did not fit the mold of general European currents, but would offer
something distinctive. Thus in 1840 Théophile Gautier found El
Greco's paintings extravagant and a little mad, endowing these
conventional judgments with a new, positive connotation. In 1869 the
art critic Paul Lefort went further, denying that he was deranged and
singling him out, despite perceived mistakes, as "an audacious,
enthusiastic colorist." His originality was that of a genius
not a madman. However, even so well informed an art critic as the
German Carl Justi, who had a special knowledge of Spain, was
repulsed. In 1908 he claimed that El Greco was the prime example of
artistic degeneration. The acclaim that such a pathological type was
beginning to receive could only be regarded as a symptom of
fin-de-siècle perversity. In this way Justi brought the old charges
up to date by adopting the fashionable notion of degeneration so
successfully promoted by Max Nordau. However negatively, he granted
that El Greco had a special attraction for the age.
A
variant of the degeneration hypothesis was the "medical
materialism" of the Spanish physician and alienist Dr. Gregorio Marañón. El Greco
suffered from a defect of vision, an astigmatism. Therefore the
viewers are merely applauding a product of sundered sight.
The
turning point in the El Greco revival was an 1886 article by Manuel
Cossío, who was to emerge as the painter's great champion. In 1902
El Greco was honored by an exhibition at the Prado. Cossío's 1908
monograph offered the first serious and reliable account of the
artist's career. Cossío argued that only his residence in Spain
catalyzed the emergence of his original style, which was therefore a
quintessential expression of the Spanish spirit. His words, which
first raise the question of national character in relation to El
Greco, reflect the climate of critical patriotism typified by the
writers known as the Generation of 1898. Cossío also spotted for
the first time the link with the Spanish mystics of the
painter's time. Eloquent as these claims were, they neglected the
Greek and Italian elements in El Greco's formation, a point made by a
number of foreign critics. Others found in El Greco a forerunner of
the phase of modern art that began with Cézanne, with its
exploitation of apparent distortions for visual and emotional effect.
The
German critic Julius Meier-Graefe even elevated El Greco above
Velázquez, setting the stage for a rivalry that in some respects
recalled the Michelangelo-Raphael duel. Helped by Meier-Graefe's
praise, an almost feverish enthusiasm arose in a Germany that was
beginning to take up Expressionism as a contemporary style. In 1911
the museum director Hugo von Tschudi, a major proponent of modernism,
showed eight works to great effect at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.
The following year the master appeared with an almost talismanic
value in the Blaue Reiter Almanac, an anthology of articles and
reproductions collected by the painters Vassily Kandinsky and Franz
Marc. Marc wrote that "Cézanne and El Greco are spiritual
brothers," holding that, with their "mystical inner
construction," they both stood in the closest connection with
the new ideals in art.xxxvii
As has been noted above a
new positive interpretation of mannerism began in the wake of World
War I, emphasizing its purported anxiety and expressive distortions.
Wrestling with the problem of mannerism, the Viennese art historian
Max Dvořák offered--in a lecture originally delivered in October
1920--a new interpretation of El Greco that stressed his relationship
to a Europe torn by the conflicts engendered by the Reformation.xxxviii
He also explained the reasons for the painter's rehabilitation,
which are in his view rooted in the turning away from materialism.
The old world view is yielding to something different. "[L]iterature
and the arts have turned towards spiritual absolutes, as they did in
the Middle Ages and in the period of Mannerism. . . . There is a
uniformity in all these events, which the mysterious law of human
destiny seems to guide towards a new, a spiritual and antimaterialist
age."xxxix
Despite
the particular spin he proposed, Dvořák seemed to have
succeeded in anchoring the cosmopolitan Spaniard by adoption in an
artistic context so that for many art historians the matter was settled: El
Greco was a mannerist, to be discussed in the same breath as Pontormo
and Bronzino. The general public, however, more wisely continued to
regard him as a great original. Recent discoveries of writings by El
Greco suggest that he was more of a rationalist, in the Renaissance
tradition, than a mystic. Other studies seek to place him more in
the local milieu of Toledo.
In view
of these revisions, why has El Greco retained such a hold over the
general, art-loving public? Perhaps the explanation lies in the
general absence of the iconographical and source-derived subtleties
that make other works such a happy hunting ground for the
professional scholar. Despite their religious subject matter, El
Greco's paintings speak directly to the modern viewer--if not to the
learned. It may be that the disdain that is still felt by many
living art historians for avant-garde modern art spills over into a
dislike of an artist who, despite their efforts to press him into a
mannerist or local (Toledo) pigeonhole, so clearly foretells major
aspects of twentieth-century art.
Hieronymus
Bosch.
The
Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450-1516) lived and worked in
the town of s'Hertogenbosch.xl
Although the majority of his surviving works depict Christian
subjects, he lent a powerful element of fantasy to all of them, as
seen especially in the great triptychs The
Garden of Earthly Delights,
The
Haywain,
and The
Temptation of St. Anthony.
The meticulous detail with which he executed his scenes adds to
their phantasmagoric impact.
Bosch
was esteemed during his lifetime, and seems never to have been idle.
However, after his death the penetration of Italian classical
standards in the Netherlands relegated him to obscurity. Insofar as
he was mentioned at all, it was as a mere "concocter of
deviltries."
Oddly enough, Bosch's
fame lingered longest in Spain, where Philip II was devoted to his
work. Spanish collectors rescued a number of important paintings
from the Netherlands; regrettably many other works there fell victim
to Calvinist iconoclastic fury, or mysteriously disappeared later.
Theorists such as Felipe de Guevara and Argote de Molina sought to
justify Bosch's paintings by placing them in the tradition of
disparates,
descriptions or depictions of unequally mixed things presented in a
moralistic spirit so as to show the vanity of the world. But in
Spain, too, the growing tradition of classicism caused writers to
fall silent about him.
Appropriately
enough, it was in Spain that Carl Justi (1832-1912) rediscovered
Bosch in the 1880s. Preparing his great biography of Winckelmann,
Justi had spent the requisite two years in Italy, but he sought to
broaden himself by trips to Spain, which he visited eight times.
Looking at many neglected works, he sharpened his connoisseurship
skills and gathered the material for his book on Diego Velázquez.
Influenced by contemporary naturalism, Justi was not disturbed by the
picturesque detail of Bosch's works, and saw that they might convey
"coded" meanings, though he had no concrete suggestions to
illuminate their iconography, a problem that became central to
twentieth-century research. His Austrian contemporary Hermann
Dollmayr, who published the first catalogue of Bosch's surviving
oeuvre in 1898, emphasized their apocalyptic character in relation to
the Four Last Things of Christian theology. Other writers
interpreted Bosch as a recorder of the Dutch scene, seeking to
assimilate him to established ideas of the national character of
Netherlandish art. A new theme after the turn of the century was the
idea that he was a "sick personality" with sadomasochistic
tendencies. These notions betray the interest in psychosexual
aberrations initiated by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and continued by
Sigmund Freud, Albert Moll, Havelock Ellis and others. Along these
lines, efforts were made to link the supposed psychosexual
abnormality of Bosch's work with similar tendencies found in modern
art, inspired by Max Nordau's notions of degeneration.
Not
until 1936 was the first great retrospective exhibition of the Dutch
artist held, at the Museum Boymans in Rotterdam. From this
exhibition came the monograph of Charles de Tolnay (1937), which
stressed among other things the relation of Bosch's work to late
medieval visionary and dream literature. Clearly, a factor in the
new appreciation of Bosch was the contemporary art movement of
surrealism.
After
World War II Wilhelm Fraenger proposed that Bosch's most enigmatic
works were intended as the altarpieces of a heretical sect, the
Adamites. While this approach yielded a number of interesting
observations, it has not gained consensus. Another attempt to
find the key to Bosch lay in the field of alchemy. While there may
be a few such elements in Bosch's work, this does not seem to be the answer.
The
solution seems to lie in the insight that Bosch was an original
thinker, one working with traditional materials drawn from the Bible
and folklore, but one whose full message has not yet been deciphered.
Misunderstood or not, Bosch is now firmly ensconced as one of
Europe's greatest artists, his Garden
of Earthly Delights
being known to the entire educated public. The trajectory of his fame is
virtually a resurrection. Consigned to oblivion about 1630
throughout Europe, he was revived be specialists from 1889 to 1936,
and then achieved his triumph.
Twentieth-Century
Revivals: Women Artists.
The
preceding case histories are some outstanding examples of artists
whose "stockmarket quotations" have fluctuated. The
discussion has shown that the questions raised by these revivals have
continued to be discussed for decades, prolonging a
nineteenth-century endeavor through the twentieth century. Other
revivals have been launched in the twentieth century itself. Indeed
the process seems destined to be a continuing one.
In the
1970s the second wave of feminism fostered a vigorous upsurge of
women's studies. In art history this endeavor involved not only a
reconsideration of the varied contributions made by women as
producers of art, but more complex questions of the role of gender in
viewing and evaluating all art. These questions will be considered
more fully in the last main chapter of this book, which treats new
methodologies of the present.
Relevant
to the present context is the revival of women artists. Women
scholars noticed that even in styles that had been revived, such as
the baroque, the role of women in them continued to be largely
ignored. As Linda Nochlin observed in a widely read article, "Why
Are There No Great Women Artists," there were fewer women
artists because of professional barriers, such as not being able to
attend life drawing classes where nude models were used, that served
to restrict the number of trained artists who happened to be female.xli
Still there were some, and one of the first tasks undertaken by
women art historians concerned with these issues was to rescue women
artists from invisibility. The task was first approached
comprehensively, showing a variety of neglected artists
in
order to illustrate the richness of the field. In this first phase,
which may be termed "collective revival" there were two
major landmarks. In Our
Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists,xlii
Eleanor Tufts created a kind of women's Vasari, a set of exemplary
biographies of twenty-two notable women artists from the Renaissance
to the present, accompanied by scholarly references and
representative samples of their work. Then in 1976-77 Ann Harris and
Linda Nochlin curated a big exhibition "Women Artists:
1550-1950" at the Los Angeles County Museum which not only had
considerable impact on the general public but launched a number of
young art historians on a course that would bring much new
information to light and afford new insights.
A
second stage consisted of weighty monographs reconstructing the
oeuvre of individual women artists and showing their relation to
their time. Representative studies are the monographs of Mary
Garrard on Artemisia Gentileschi, Frima Fox Hofrichter on Judith
Leyster, and Ilya Sandra Perlingieri on Sofonisba Anguissola--all
seventeenth-century artists.xliii
The rich documentation afforded by these books supplants the meager
coverage available before. Still, one must not rush to the
conclusion that nothing at all was known about these artists before
the late twentieth century. Saluting them for diligence rather than
genius, Vasari mentioned a number of women artists, including Barbara
Longhi, Sofonisba Anguissola, and the sculptor Properzia de'
Rossi--though without honoring any of them with a biography of her
own. In Felsina
Pittrice,
chronicling the painters of Bologna, Carlo Cesare Malvasia actually
included two biographies of women practitioners, Lavinia Fontana and
Elisabetta Sirani. During the first half of the twentieth century
Dutch scholars conscientiously gathered data on Judith Leyster.
Still, the neglect was palpable, and the first task of today's
women's scholars has been to repair it.
Revivals
of Modern Figures.
The
cycles of neglect and recovery of fortune are not restricted to past
times, but have occurred virtually under our own noses. A
spectacular example is the English architect Edwin Lutyens
(1869-1944). Phenomenally successful as a builder of country houses,
Lutyens was commissioned to design and build a capital of British
India at New Delhi. Critics loyal to the International Style,
however, stigmatized him as a hopeless eclectic, virtually
obliterating his reputation. With the emergence of postmodernism in
architectural practice, however, Lutyens came back, so that today he
is regarded as one of the century's premier builders.xliv
The
great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852-1926), the
creator of the still-unfinished church of the Sagrada Familia in
Barcelona, has become closely associated with the nationalism of his
native region.xlv,
His highly imaginative work posed a challenge to the standard
teleological interpretation of modern architecture, which honored
Adolf Loos' severe admonition that "ornament is crime." With the
rise of architectural functionalism in the 1920s, it was felt that
Gaudí's "bizarre eccentricities" must be exiled far
outside the mainstream. However, the art nouveau revival in the
1950s compelled attention, and with postmodernism triumphing in
architectural practice itself his status now seems assured as one of
the major architects of our epoch. Despite many delays,
work on the Sagrada Familia proceeds apace, though a sharp debate has raged in Barcelona about the merits of some of the new work. During
the closing years of the century Gaudí's masterpiece even gained
admirers in far-off Japan--admirers who are contributing generously
to the completion of the building. With all the enthusiasm, one
aspect of Gaudí's makeup has largely escaped notice: his fervent
Catholism. Living a life of almost monastic asceticism, he adhered
to the Circle of St. Luke, a guild of artists inspired by the
Thomistic aesthetic of bishop Torres i Bages. These religious ideas
found their fullest expression in the visual symbolism incorporated
into the architect's "garden city," the Güell Park,
financed by a wealthy industrialist.xlvi
A
complex case is that of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). His notorious
Nude
Descending the Staircase,
with its fusion of cubism and futurism, achieved a succès de scandal
in the crowded field at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. Then
his "ready-mades"--including the urinal and the bottle
rack--posed the question of what is art. Few then recognized the
guiding principle in all his works, for he extracted from cubism the
sense that art is more concerned with concept than percept, providing
a range of applications not encompassed by the parent movement. For
the last forty years of his life Duchamp seemed to have retired from
the art world to practice chess. (He continued to work in private,
but this activity was little known). By the early 1930s his
reputation had paled almost to the point of invisibility, though his
inclusion in the 1938 Paris Surrealist exhibition showed that he
still enjoyed residual respect as a pioneer.xlvii
After World War II the triumph of abstract expressionism created a
visual sensibility antithetical to Duchamp's work, also earning him a
certain pariah status as an emblem of Parisian inconsequentiality.
Yet in the 1960s a new generation, inspired by Jasper Johns, Robert
Rauschenberg, and Pop Art, rediscovered him, based on his ironic
attitude towards art and its relation to life.xlviii
With its emphasis on concept rather than "retinality,"
minimalism further enhanced his status, while such literary
luminaries as Octavio Paz and Jean-François Lyotard pondered the
significance of his work. Contemporary artists, in full revolt
against the formalism advocated by the once-all powerful figure of
Clement Greenberg, treated Duchamp as their patron saint.
Sometimes
segments of an artist's career are subject to fluctuation. The early
work of Paul Cézanne, prior to his involvement in Impressionism in
1872, has long been neglected. In his influential monograph of 1927,
Roger Fry did discuss these early works with their dramatic subject
matter and heavy brushwork, while segregating them as products of a
kind of unbridled romanticism that was antithetical to the formal
subtlety of his later work.xlix
Thus these paintings came to be largely disregarded as embarrassing
apprentice work happily superseded by his mature manner. If granted
an existence in their own right, they were treated as, in effect,
"not Cézanne." After World War II, Meyer Schapiro and
Theodore Reff did discuss individual works of the early period, but
largely as indicators of the artist's psychological development. It
was only with the opening of the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition
"Cézanne: The Early Years 1859-1872" curated by Lawrence
Gowing in 1988 that these works came into their own.l
Why was this recognition so long in coming? As indicated these
works did not accord with the formal serenity stereotypically
attributed to Cézanne. The dramatic subject matter of many of them,
including such themes as The
Murder
and The
Orgy,
went against the high modernist prohibition of "anecdotal"
values in painting. As these bans were lifted a more positive
element came into play, for elements of the pluralistic orientation
of the contemporary art scene in the 1980s facilitated the
reemergence of these fascinating, atypical canvases by a great
master.
If the
early Cézanne had been neglected for over a century, more recently
this fate overtook the later work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978),
who in the 1920s began to produce works that look like pastiches of
the old masters, satirizing his earlier Metaphysical paintings by
occasionally producing weak copies of them.In the 1970s and 80s,
however, the later works enjoyed a certain favor among contemporary
Italian neo-Expressionist artists. They were then taken up by a kind
of camp taste that hailed the later Chirico work as "so bad it's
good." Time will tell whether a revival on this basis can last.
Some
other dismissals seem likely to prove final. Critical opinion,
without any great display of fireworks, accomplished the relegation
of the once-fashionable painters Raoul Dufy and Bernard
Buffet--though without persuading collectors to rid their homes of
them. An effort has in fact been made to rehabilitate Dufy, as seen
in a big monograph by Dora Perez-Tibi, which pleads for the
recognition of his "great qualities."li
Most critical opinion, however, persists in viewing him as a
lightweight producer of fashionable confections. A more mysterious
case is the slow and dignified fading of the reputation of Georges
Braque, which the 1989 Museum of Modern Art joint exhibition with
Picasso may have stabilized, but could not restore to its former
radiance.lii
Much--though not all--of Henry Moore's sculptural work is now felt
to be hollow and unrewarding. Perhaps this indifference stems more
from the "official" status that has attached to Moore as a
creator of public monuments than any intrinsic deficiency.
Why has
there been so little public discussion of these falling "stock
quotations" of artists' status? Is it fear of rocking the boat
in the art market itself? Perhaps commercial interests have little
to worry about here. Forgeries are an indication of continuing
demand--that Dufy is so often forged shows that collectors do not
always obey the ukases of critics and taste makers. Yet when
an artist, once fashionable, ceases to attract the attention of
forgers, one may assume that the individual's popularity has passed.
A cynic
would say that many revivals are engineered to bring in fresh
products for the art market. This lure may have played some role in
the upsurge of interest in art nouveau in the 1950s or in the boom in
Mexican folk art today. Surely, however, this is not what a
Burckhardt or a Cossío had in mind when they did their rethinking;
it was afterwards that the dealers descended. Also, buildings and
(usually) altarpieces in churches were not for sale, so that the
revivals of periods featuring these genres are unlikely to have been
driven by commercial considerations.
Problematic
Revivals of Styles.
Beginning
about 1970 a strong effort was made to revive nineteenth-century academic
("pompier") artists, who had been driven from their
pedestal and consigned to kitsch status by the exaltation of such
modernists as Manet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh. (In his youth--from
1885 to 1896--Proust regarded Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonnier as his
favorite painter.) Although prices paid at auction for these once
highly sought-after canvases have improved, they have not returned,
relatively speaking, to previous levels. Moreover, no general
picture of the pompiers as a group has emerged. Instead there is a
concentration on "swing" figures like Thomas Couture and
Jules Bastien-Lepage with a foot in both camps, and on the
Orientalist preocupations of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Henri Regnault.
The latter trend has recently drawn much flak from an anticolonialist and
multiculturalist standpoint--supplanting the former formalist
obloquy: one disparagement replaces another. Thus the pompiers
represent at best a case of partial revival.
The
ambivalent status of the pompier rehabilitation transpires from the
controversies over the establishment of a new nineteenth-century
museum in Paris in the 1980s. The Musée d'Orsay was installed in a
former railroad station of 1900, which was redesigned for the
purpose. The installations include both "progressive"
works and academic ones. The acceptance of the latter, while it had
been welcomed in theory, proved disconcerting to many visitors in
practice, showing that the stigma that these works had acquired in
previous decades had not been shed.liii
The
pompier question raises the matter of state patronage. Many of these
works owe their creation and preservation to the generosity of the
French state. The role of institutional intervention of this kind
clearly deserves careful study.
Public
support, though scarcely lavish, figured in a major American trend.
During the 1930s the most prominent school of American artists was
that of the regionalists, headed by Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri,
John Steuart Curry of Kansas, and Grant Wood of Iowa.liv
The regionalists created figural paintings with bright colors and
simplified forms usually depicting typically American scenes of
agriculture, industry, and entertainment. The work of this
triumvirate was surrounded by a large penumbra of muralists who were
subsidized by federal money to execute work in public buildings
throughout the land.lv
Collectively, this whole trend of Depression-era work was called
American Scene painting. Its chief protagonists, aided by critics
like Thomas Craven, posed themselves aggressively against the
European modernists and their New York allies, who were regarded as
effete formalists, lacking in social significance. Sometimes the
attacks reflected nativism; dislike of immigrants and "city
slickers" mingled with currents of anti-Semitism and homophobia.
Ironically, Benton had studied in Paris and had practiced a
distinctively modern idiom before being converted to the kind of
populist naturalism for which he is best known.
With
the coming of World War II, the regionalists faded from public
attention, to be succeeded by the abstract expressionists. Curiously,
Jackson Pollock had been a pupil of Benton.lvi
Regionalism enjoyed a kind of revival in the 1970s, conditioned by
several factors. First, pop art had made recognizable subject matter
acceptable again, and had helped to dissolve the boundaries between
high and low. (Many American Scene painters had done commercial art
to make ends meet, and the effects seeped over into their "serious"
work.) Then the New Left rallied to these artists as populists who
produced an art with social significance. The new outdoors mural art
of minorities, especially in Southern California, harked back to
regionalist message-bearing. Yet even some of those who wrote about
the American Scene phenomenon found the work hard to accept
aesthetically. And with the rise of the "political correctness"
trend at the end of the 1980s, the chauvinistic and nativist leanings
of the 1930s artists became harder to overlook. Publications timed
for the centennial of Benton's birth in 1989 encountered a mixed
response.lvii
Thus the revival of regionalism a.k.a. American Scene painting seems
to have enjoyed some initial success, and then got bogged down.
Closing
Observations.
Some
revivals encountered a smoother path than others. The spread of
pre-Raphaelite taste virtually guaranteed that eventually Botticelli
would be a beneficiary. By contrast the radical challenge of Bosch's
supposedly nightmarish scenes long hindered his resurrection. Then
there were different degrees of obnubilation. Mannerism was much
buffeted, but rococo never really went completely off the map.
It is
possible that some artists are willy-nilly mounted on the wheel of
fortune so that as they went down and then up, they are fated to go
down again. In fact there has been some recent fading of enthusiasm
for Botticelli and El Greco, though more among scholars than the
general public which continues to cherish them. The gap between the
educated lay public and art historians is often patent: some creative
writers would place Vermeer above Rembrandt, art historians
specializing in the Dutch seventeenth century do not. Apparently,
once an artist or group of artists gains status in the canon of
popular taste dislodgement is difficult. A comparable case is that
of the seventeenth-century poet John Milton: T. S. Eliot and F. R.
Leavis tried to demote him, but readers would not acquiesce.
However, if rehabilitation has not been completed, the benefits of
such a "heat shield" are lacking; the uncertain terms of
the recovery of mannerism have left its status uncertain.
The
moral of this gallery of rejected-resurrected styles and
artists may at first sight seem a relativistic one. It appears that
any style or artist, like some victim of deportation to one of
Stalin's Gulags, can go on a hit list, to be instantly, or almost
instantly demoted--to become a nonstyle (as Croce thought baroque
actually was) or a nonperson. Conversely, it seems that any decadent
old style or musty old artist can be trotted out and made exemplary.
In
reality, the process is less simple and arbitrary. Looking at past
evaluations through the eyes of those who made them, there is
considerable consistency in the rejection of styles and artists felt
to be wanting in adherence to classical norms. The centuries-long
success story told by Vasari was a hard-won affair, and to cast its
results aside for caprice or the momentary appeal of heightened
emotion was, in this view, to prefer titillation to quality.
Ultimately the whole question needs to be framed in a perceived
context of moral urgency--a utopian context, if you will. Does one
believe that there is essentially one style (with individual
variations) that is suited to foster the
realization of the good life? Or does one subscribe to the view that
our very humanity requires the affirmation of numberless cultural
forms?
Examining
the matter pragmatically, it does not seem that unsubstantial styles
and trivial artists can be effectively revived. To be sure, some
professionals harbor doubts about El Greco, and some more recent
candidates, such as Gérome and Dufy, seem dubious as long-term
prospects. Here the traditional concept of "the test of time"
still seems valid.lviii
Masters like Titian and Raphael, whose works have been tempered by
this test, are very difficult to dislodge.lix
One can inveigh at length against the cult of the old masters, but
the works of the artists themselves perdure. By contrast, figures
that have been insufficiently tempered by this process of annealing
cannot easily be restored to favor. Although prejudice can convert a
major artist into a minor one--sometimes even for centuries--it is
very hard, after the requisite phase of sorting has taken place, to
make a minor artist into a major one. Before the test of time has
been allowed to work, however, there may be oscillations--as seen in
contemporary or near contemporaries whose ultimate status is still
hard to predict. Moreover, it is always possible that the works of
unrecognized major figures lurk in the storerooms of museums and in
obscure private collections, one day to be rediscovered--or perhaps
never to be rediscovered.
As the
case studies above have shown, rehabilitating neglected styles and
masters is a complex and sometimes uncertain endeavor. On occasion,
present-mindedness has run rampant, and ideological axes have been
wielded. Still it would be unwise to give way to an easy cynicism,
concluding that all is relative. Rehabilitations have yielded a great harvest--much knowledge and much enrichment of the store of
objects worthy of our attention. Moreover, these local advances add
up: they contribute significant jigsaw pieces to the ultimate
construction of a history of world art. Starting with things that
one knows and loves, and persisting in the endeavor, is likely to
lead to increasingly higher levels of understanding.
i
Haskell, Rediscoveries
in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and
France,
London: Phaidon Press, 1976. pp. 42, 64-70.
ii
To be sure, some artists such as the Bolognese "eclectics"--the
Carracci, Albani, and Reni--did fall from favor, but their
dislodgement flowed more from the new cult of originality than from
a vengeful sense that in order for some works to rise others must
fall.
iii
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction
and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Styles,
trans. by Michael Bullock, New York: International Universities
Press, 1953 (first published in German in 1908); Walter F.
Friedlaender, Mannerism
and Antimannerism in Italian Painting,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1957 (translations of two
papers originally published in German in 1925 and 1928-29).
iv
Of course many observers, especially those concerned with
literature, continued to use style in an absolute sense, as a
particular quality of excellence that subsists regardless of its
particular vehicle. It is both an advantage and a disadvantage that
"style" can be used in three ways: as an absolute; as the
unifying features of a period or nation; and as the special
qualities or "idiolect" of an individual creator.
v
Rediscoveries
in Art. The neglect of
Germany and Italy in Haskell's purview serves to shortchange the
accomplishment of the art historians, who became concentrated in
those countries.
vi
C. T. Carr, "Two Words in Art History, I. Baroque,"
Forum
for Modern Language Studies,
I (1965), 176-90. Many examples of usage appear in Otto Kurz,
"Barocco: storia di una parola," Lettere
italiane,
XII (1960), 414-44; and René Wellek, "The Concept of the
Baroque in Literary Scholarship," in his Concepts
of Criticism,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963, pp. 69-127.
vii
For a synthesis of the contemporary understanding of baroque art,
and some account of the "internal resistance" to it, see
John Rupert Martin, Baroque,
New York: Harper & Row, 1977. It might be noted that the Amarna
style of the fourteenth century B.C. in Egypt evoked strong dislike,
if not during its brief flowering, then immediately afterwards.
With its naturalism and expressive distortions, the Amarna style has
some affinities with baroque. An even better parallel is the
mid-Hellenistic style of the second century B.C., which is often
termed baroque by modern scholars. There is evident in the art of
the first century B.C. (and in Pliny's commentary in the following
century) of a strong reaction, though it is not certain how far this
can be located in the period itself. The Roman baroque still seems
unique in engendering such contestation at its very height of
development.
viii
Rudolf Wittkower, Art
and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750,
3d ed. New York: Penguin, 1973, pp. 171-73.
ix
Cecil Gould, Bernini
in France: An Episode in Seventeenth-Century History,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
x
"Zur Gewinnung unsere Barockbegriff," Die
Kunsformen des Barockzeitalters,
Bern: A. Francke, 1956, pp, 13-91.
xi
New York: Harper & Row, 1962. This book belongs to the
prestigious "Rise of Modern Europe Series," edited by
William L. Langer.
xii
Still standard for the inception of characteristic decorative
schemes is Fiske Kimball, The
Creation of Rococo,
New York: Norton, 1943. Information on individual artists and works
is conveniently accessible in Wend Graf Kalnein and Michael Levey,
Art
and Architecture of the Eighteenth Century in France,
New York: Penguin, 1972.
xiii
Philippe Minguet, Esthétique
du Rococo,
Paris; Vrin, 1966; Anthony Blunt, Some
Uses and Misuses of the Terms Baroque and Rococo as Applied to
Architecture,
London: British Academy, 1973. Just as some hold that Mannerism is
simply the late stage of the Renaissance, others regard the rococo
as the final stage of the baroque. In the present context of
discussion, this tendency may be regarded as both prolonging the
neglect of the rococo (a neglect that has always been only relative)
or affirming its value by "hitching it to a rising star."
xv
Carol Duncan, The
Pursuit of Pleasure: The Rococo Revival in French Romantic Art,
New York; Garland, 1976.
xvi
C. T. Carr, "Two Words in Art History. II. Rococo," Forum
for Modern Language Studies,
I (1965), 266-81.
xviii
This discussion draws on the lucid account of Marco Treves,
"Maniera,
the History of a Word," Marsyas,
1 (1941), 69-88. See also Luisa Becherucci, "Mannerism,"
Encyclopedia
of World Art,
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, cols. 443-78; and Salvatore Battaglia,
ed., "Maniera [etc.]," Grande
Dizionario della Lingua Italiana,
IX, Turin: Unione Tipografico Editrice Torinese, 1978, pp. 676-84.
xix
"Ueber Greco und den Manierismus," in his Kunstgeschichte
als Geistesgeschichte,
Munich: Piper, 1924, 259ff. [trans. by John Coolidge in Magazine
of Art,
46 (1953), 14-23.]
xx
"Die Entstehung des Antiklassischen Stiles in der Italienische
Malerei um 1520," Repertorium
für Kunstwissenschaft,
46 (1925), 49-86 (English version in his Mannerism
and Antimannerism in Italian Painting,
cit).
xxi
Fascinating, though sometimes forced examples of this parallel
appear in Gustav René Hocke, Die
Welt als Labyrinth: Manier und Manie in der europäische Kunst,
Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1957.
xxii
Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1955.
xxiii
Mannerism:
The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.
xxv
New York: Penguin, 1971. See the stimulating review by Henri
Zerner, "Mind Your Maniera," New
York Review of Books,
August 31, 1972, pp. 25-28. More recently, see Hessel Miedema, "On
Mannerism and Maniera," Simiolus,
10 (1978-79), 19-46.
xxvi
Albert Blankert, Vermeer
of Delft: Compete Edition of the Paintings,
Oxford: Phaidon, 1978, pp. 60-67.
xxviii
Martin Pops, in the Preface to the special issue on Vermeer of
Salmagundi,
44-45 (1979), p. 4.
xxx
Marijke van den Brandhof, Een
vroege Vermeer uit 1937: achtergronden van leven en werken van de
schilder/vervalser Han van Meegeren,
Utrecht: Spectrum, 1979.
xxxii
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
xxxiii
Michael Levey, "Botticelli in Nineteenth-Century England,"
Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
23 (1960), 291-306; Frank Kermode, "Botticelli Recovered,"
in his Forms
of Attention,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 1-31.
xxxiv
Alessandro
Filipepi, Commonly Called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence,
London: G. Bell, 1908.
xxxv
See, inter alia, Ernst H. Gombrich, "Botticelli's Mythologies:
A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism of His Circle," Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
8 (1945), 7-60; Charles Dempsey, "'Mercurius
Vir': The Sources of Botticelli's 'Primavera,'" Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
31 (1968), 251-73; idem, "Botticelli's Three Graces,"
Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
34 (1971), 326-30; Mirella Levi d'Ancona, Botticelli's
"Primavera": A Botanical Interpretation Including
Astrology, Alchemy, and the Medici,
Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1983; Umberto Baldini, Primavera:
The Restoration of Botticelli's Masterpiece,
New York: Abrams, 1986; Lillian Zirpolo, "Botticelli's
Primavera:
A Lesson for the Bride," in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard,
ed., The
Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History,
New York: HarperCollins, 1992, pp. 100-09.
xxxvi
The following paragraphs benefit from the trenchant account of
Jonathan Brown, "Introduction: El Greco, the Man and the
Myths," in El
Greco of Toledo,
Boston: Little, Brown, 1982, pp. 15-33.
xxxvii
Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, eds., The
Blaue Reiter Almanac,
new documentary edition by Klaus Lankheit, New York: Viking Press,
1974, p. 59.
xxxviii
"Ueber El Greco und den Manierismus," cit.
xxxix
Kunstgeschichte
als Geistesgeschichte,
Munich: Piper, 1924, pp. 275-76. The essay on El Greco was
translated by John Coolidge in Magazine
of Art,
46 (1953), 14-23.
xl
This section mainly follows Marshall Neal Myers and Wayne Dynes,
Hieronymus
Bosch and the Canticle of Isaiah,
New York: Cabirion Press, 1987, pp. 133-86. See also Roger-H.
Marijnissen et al., Jheronimus
Bosch,
Brussels: Arcade, 1972, 525-42; and Walter S. Gibson, Hieronymus
Bosch: Annotated Bibliography,
Boston: G. H. Hall, 1983 (notices about 1000 items).
xli
The essay, first published in 1971, may be conveniently consulted in
Nochlin, Woman,
Art, and Power and Other Essays,
New York: Harper & Row, 1988, pp. 145-78.
xlii
New York: Paddington Press, 1974.
xliii
Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia
Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; Frima Fox Hofrichter,
Judith
Leyster: A Woman Painter in Holland's Golden Age,
Dornspijk: Aetas Aurea, 1989; Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, Sofonisba
Anguissola: The First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance,
New York: Rizzoli, 1992.
xliv
Lutyens had always had his conservative admirers, but they had been
isolated--outside the pale, as it were. A sign of the change in the
"advanced" circles heralding architectural postmodernism
was the article by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, "Learning
from Lutyens, Royal
Institute of British Architects Journal,
76 (August 1969), 353-54. The title anticipates the authors'
iconoclastic book Learning
from Las Vegas
which appeared in 1972.
xlv
George R. Collins and Maurice E. Farinas, Bibliography
of Antonio Gaudí and the Catalan Movement, 1870-1930,
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973; George R.
Collins and Juan Basegoda Nonell, The
Designs and Drawings of Antonio Gaudí,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. For the context, see
Marilyn McCully, ed., Homage
to Barcelona: The City and Its Art,
London: Thames and Hudson, 1986; and Robert Hughes, Barcelona,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. There seems to be no study tracing
the revival of Gaudí's fortunes outside of Spain.
xlvi
Conrad Kent and Dennis Prindle, Hacia
la arquitectura de un paraíso,
Madrid: Hermann Blume, 1992.
xlvii
Calvin Tomkins, The
Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-garde,
New York: Penguin, 1976.
xlviii
For the critical response see Joseph Masheck, Marcel
Duchamp in Perspective,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1975.
xlix
See Roger Fry, Cézanne:
A Study of His Development,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, new edition with
introduction by Richard Shiff. Note also the catalogue: Lawrence Gowing, et al., Cézanne:
The Early Years 1859-1872,
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988. See also Mary Tompkins Lewis,
Cézanne's
Early Imagery,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
li
Dora Perez-Tibi, Dufy,
New York: Abrams, 1989. See reviews by Ronald Alley, Burlington
Magazine,
132 (1990), 644; and Gabriel P. Weisberg, Arts
Magazine,
65 (October 1990), 127.
liii
See, e.g., Linda Nochlin, Robert Rosenblum, and Alain Kirili, "The
Musée d'Orsay: A Symposium," Art
in America,
76 (January 1988), 84-107.
liv
Mary Scholz Guedon, Regionalist
Art:Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood: A Guide
to the Literature,
Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982. For an incisive review of
the research context, see Wanda Corn, "Coming of Age:
Historical Scholarship in American Art," Art
Bulletin,
70 (1988), 187-207.
lv
See, e.g., Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to=Wall
America,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
lvi
Erika Doss, Benton,
Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract
Expressionism,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
lvii
Henry Adams, Thomas
Hart Benton: An American Original,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989; idem, Thomas
Hart Benton: Drawing From Life,
New York: Abbeville, 1990; Thomas
Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals: The Making of a Masterpiece,
Bloomington: Indiana Art Museum, 1989.
lviii
Anthony Savile, The
Test of Time: An Essay in Philosophical Aesthetics,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
lix A few scholars have undertaken an audacious
effort to demote Shakespeare, on the grounds that he is not
"politically correct." It is doubtful that this attempted
depreciation can succeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment