A History of Art History by Wood Christopher;

Author:Wood, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Art history in England, France, and Italy was less academic than in the German-speaking societies. Access to libraries was not yet the decisive factor it would later become. The gentleman or lady scholar with leisure and taste made real contributions. Art criticism flourished in mid-century France. Théophile Thoré-Bürger (1807–1869) wrote several books on Dutch painting and is especially remembered for having rediscovered Jan Vermeer, a painter held dear today but completely forgotten in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The pedagogue and scholar Charles Blanc was the first editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, a magazine pragmatic, materialist, and elitist, oriented to collectors, amateurs, and artists. Its run extended from 1859 to 2002. Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Champfleury; the reviews of the annual salons—the future president of the Republic Adolphe Thiers wrote about the Salon of 1822: this was the matrix of artistic modernism. An impatience with the past and with memory, a low tolerance for Romantic historicism, a nonphilosophical, anecdotal, subjective, sensation-oriented spirit of contradiction, an ease with the events of the day, all of this descended from Diderot.

The brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, novelists, wrote a series of monographs on eighteenth-century painters that appeared in periodicals between 1856 and 1875 and were collected later as Art du XVIII siècle. Their tone is conversational, a salon tone, easy on erudition, espousing a contextualism that does not go far beyond the idea of the painters “expressing, personifying, embodying” “an airy moment of history.” The history of art plays no greater role than it played for the artists themselves. One of Watteau’s figures is described as “posed as if by a pen-stroke of Parmigianino.” The Goncourts are doing more or less what the historians are doing, except with more grace. They do not go very deeply into form, but not because they do not see form. There is still no special language to describe pictorial form, so they draw on literary language, a parallel language. They believe in the person behind the artwork: the artist is the reality, the plenitude. This is the conviction behind the flourishing of the genre of the artist’s monograph in the nineteenth century.

The Goncourts took an interest in Rococo in order to ignore realist tendencies in contemporary art. Anti-moderns (and anti-Semites), they reassert the element of fantasy, planting seeds that will grow later in the century, in the Symbolist milieu. Subject matter is irrelevant for them. Christianity in the Renaissance had already accepted a leveling with paganism, a leveling of the subjects of art on the basis of the idea of fiction. Romantic medievalism had countered this, reasserting the primacy of subject matter. The Goncourts represent not so much a decadent royalist fantasy as a non-pious response to Romantic and ironic historicism. This is related to the enthusiasm for the forms of world art: one can like it all, because it is all just so many myths.

The canon of European art was virtually closed by this point, out of inertia. There were no Goncourts writing about sixteenth- or seventeenth-century art.

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