A History of Art History Quotes

“Riegl also solved a paradox of academic doctrine, wedded to the ideal: its tendency to summon its own subversion by reality, or by lowly life. Now that the story line is the movement from touch-based art to vision-based art, the future is open-ended, for art can always be further intellectualized without worrying about a surfeit of sublimity or transcendence, just as low subject matter does not threaten to drag art back into the weeds of practical life.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“The art academies had offered a story of art as the conquest, loss, and finally reconquest of nature through the mastery of illusionistic technology, improved by a grasp of ideal beauty. Romanticism replaced this with the story of art as an acquisition and then loss of wisdom, warning us not to mistake naturalism or technical skill for such wisdom. Historicism proposed that each period expresses its view of the world through its own forms; no art form can be preferred for they are all true registrations of the evolving mind. Materialism, finally, a version of historicism, told the story of art as a series of local responses to conditions, materials, tools, and functions. The immediate purpose of Riegl's teleology was to counter the crass reductionism of the materialist version. He did this by insinuating that there was something animating the history of form, a ghost in the machine, a will to form that overrode pragmatic needs. There is a tension in Riegl's art history between the anthropomorphic concept of Kunstwollen, which locates the motor of history in the individual, and the teleological shape of history, the inexorable dematerialization and intellectualization of art, a schema inherited from Hegel and never justified philosophically by Riegl. For Riegl, all art is naturalistic; it is simply that each epoch sees nature differently. What they see is the true object of art. This transforms art history into a history of seeing, and therefore of thinking.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“In breaking with history, art has broken with all primitivism. Art may still seek plenitude and participation, therapies and ceremonies, a repeal of the dissociation of sensibility, but not routed through the past. Today the challenge to an obtuse and callous classicism is no longer mapped onto a rejection of tradition, nor does it ironically re-embrace traditions previously rejected. Now classicism, or intellectual vassalage, is internal to the present. The ancien régime targeted by modernism is no longer found in the past but rather embedded within our own society: mass culture, entertainment, the superstitions and stupidities, the half-hearted democracy, the disguised cruelty of the modern economy. It is just as in the era of religious conflict: content provides the resistance. Art is a struggle against false content.
This struggle gives history its shape. Since the content of contemporary art is often topical, basically current events, there is a constant obligation to keep up the pace. This is consistent with the overall project of Enlightenment, whose successor is modernism. Within the project of emancipation, there is finally no tolerance for relativism. The Enlightenment was antirelativist; we saw that with Diderot, who did not allow historical perspective to deflect his present-tense opinions. Historicist relativism was allied instead with the neo-Christian reaction to Enlightenment. The Enlightenment critiques itself, of course, pointing out that the Enlightenment of the philosophes, or last year's enlightenment, was not enlightened enough. Ongoing self-castigation is the very shape of the Enlightenment project. However, anyone today who dares to revive the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment, namely, to take up again the illiberal call for remystification and recovery of trust in myth an ritual - anyone who dares to exit the Enlightenment - is vilified.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“A modernist is convinced not only that modern art is the most adequate response to modern conditions but also that modernity itself offers the best possible solutions, so far, to the enigmas of human nature and human possibility, even of societies and polities do not always avail themselves of those solutions. The project of modern life, modern life conceived a a project, believes in its own correct orientation. Sigmund Freud proposed not just a new account of human personality but what he was sure was the true account. Even Theodor W. Adorno. who repudiated the Enlightenment as a betrayal of philosophy, nevertheless believed that modern art was moving in the right direction. The 'emancipation' from the classical ideal in the twentieth-century, for example, is an aspect for Adorno of the 'unfolding of the truth-content of art.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Art is innovation, and its history cannot be written except from a distance sufficiently great to perceive form and form-ratio. One might answer that art today is still an incessant violation of codes. But how are those violations legible if no one code ever settles into common use, that is, starts to behave like a language or another convention-based system for getting things done; like a style, in other words? There can be no artistic innovation unless someone else is not innovating.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Art's relation to form, to the image, to the monistic fantasy that provoked its defense of its own dividedness is today, as Klein predicted, intermittent and embarrassed. There are modes of art now that resemble activism or protest, pure and simple; modes of art characterized by a refusal to structure themselves around subject-object relations. The visual itself, the image, is questioned as the normative framework of art. Art is often not a product, not a precious trace, not a singularity, but rahter a dynamic, multipular interaction that creates temporary publics who are public to one another. Art does not have to add anything to the world. for technology and entrepreneurship already do that. Art is an irreality opened up inside the world. Art is the refusal of complicity in any form of domination. You are not trapped by the collectivity, but you are not entirely free either, for freedom, even the anarchic mode of the artwork, is suspected to be a mode of evasion of responsibility. Art is a quasi-event: it is not there all the time (like a book), but it is also not there only at an assigned time (like a theatrical play). This has become a comparative advantage of art over the other arts, which have more trouble intervening in reality. Much art today is coordinated with long-term eschatological or emancipatory projects, with projects as such. Art aims at such positive goals as synchrony, participation, inclusion, and sympathy, concepts hard to reconcile with the once-prized, exclusive qualities of art.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“The main shift, and it has been obvious for decades, is that art history can no longer occupy itself in an innocent fashion with the biography of form because art itself is no longer preoccupied with form. The generation of classic art history, from the 1890s to the 1920s, as by no means out of tune with an artistic modernism that, for all its rhetoric of rupture, still reckoned in ratios of good form to bad form, form to non-form, form to content. That early twentieth-century paradigm has long since broken down as art redistributes itself in events, vectors, emotions, ideas, clusters or swarms of artifice. Art today is less about form than about the conditions of possibility of effective speech and action, the tension between enunciation and performance, the virtues of images. Today creativity itself is differently distributed in society: in the mass media and social networks, i amateur or outsider art, in fashion elite and democratic, in the proliferation of recognized but little-esteemed aesthetic categories - 'the zany, the cute, and the interesting,' for example. Even the sophisticated discourses of modernism that have dominated art-history departments over the last three decades - the 'classic art history' of our time - are not keeping pace. They are still organized by master-discipline chains reaching back into the 1960s, chains of psychic involvement that binds generations, despite everything, to the old courses of form.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Historians, theorists, and critics of contemporary art do not directly study the proliferation of non-art images and things in contemporary society, nor do they examine from a sociological or anthropological point of view the interactions of modern people with art. They do not need to because advertising, fashion, celebrities, television, tattoos, toys, comics, pornography, politics, iPhones, and stuff in general, as well as all the many modes of beholding and possessing are already the content of so much elite contemporary art. The images, thing, and practices have already been filtered and framed by art, absorbed into artworks whose autonomy - unlike the autonomy of the premodern works - remains unchallenged. The main task of the art historian of the modern and the contemporary is to justify the value of those works. The paradoxical result is that the art history of the present has nothing to say about mass culture that art itself doesn't already tell us. So-called mass or popular culture ought to be art history's topic, but it proves too difficult to grasp. The image-surfaces enfolding us will not take on density; they melt or disintegrate too quickly, such that art is everywhere but nowhere. How should art history, with its specialized conceptual toolbox, solve the puzzle of entertainment, when society itself has two or more minds about everything, admiring, for example, Hollywood movies that break box-office records on their first weekend and at the same time revering Vincent van Gogh because he was unappreciated in his own time - and yet not knowing exactly what, if anything, differentiates a painting by van Gogh from a well-crafted movie.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“The real reason that students and increasingly teachers of art history are ready to jettison the past, however, is that the refusal of the authority of the past is the very program of modern art. To invest in modern art existentially is to agree to carry out that program. The investment in modern art entails contempt for the past. The inverse is true as well, although some would deny it. I would maintain that it is only possible to say something insightful about contemporary art from a standpoint well inside the magic circle. The rest of us on the outside, who do not live but only look at contemporary art, always misrecognize it.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Humanism was not a loss of confidence either in art or in art's capacity to exceed historical scholarship. For Panofsky humanism meant dedication to a balanced ideal of human nature. As such, it was a formal concept. Humanism sees asymmetries and imbalances in human nature as deformations. Humanism is the form classicism takes after the discrediting of the Idea.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Symbol-laden and technologically-driven histories of building were historically interwoven and conceptually compatible. National Socialism adopted just this convergence of the symbolic and the technological as a program, and this made it impossible ever after to pursue such a program.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Klingender's book, striking notes both desperate and defiant, is not typical of the long British tradition of Marxist and Marxist-inspired histories of art that would extend into the 1980s. The so-called social history of art interpreted art as the expression of the interests of communities or classes. In the past, art was paid for and shaped by the elite and the powerful. In the future, art would express the vision and will of democratic collectivities. The reality that art delivered was the reality of economic relations. There was no need for any other origin.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Wittkower's response - which resonated for decades - to the manifest lack of robustness of modern civilization was to reassert the absolute difference between the past and the present: premodern societies were oriented, and they knew hierarchy. Wittkower argued, on the basis of the texts by Alberti and Palladio, that the architecture of the Italian Renaissance materialized a mathematical program: a system of ratios that pictured the invisible structure of the cosmos. Architecture placed the human body within this system. It is hard to see the difference between this and Sedlmayr's view except that the one believes that man's image was best framed by forms based on the divinely measured proportions of the human body, and the other believes that man's image was best framed by an image of divinity itself. Wittkower recovers a religious conception of architecture but detached from Christianity: the Renaissance church as a Hindu temple, as it were.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Art is the place where the points in time that reason holds apart are reunited.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“A discipline enter into a state of self-consciousness, writes its own history and theorizes its practices, when something is unresolved. A prehistory of good empirical practices would be of limited interest, a chronicle of false starts, of trial and error. The practicing physician has no need to know the history of medicine. That history is valuable only when profiled against an alternative history: Asian medicine, for example. The art historians proceed by importing attitudes alien to them, provincializing their own scholarship as a hedge against the possibility of their fatal detachment from possession and beauty.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“But Freud was also wary of art's tendency to confuse reality and unreality. If Leonardo was a neurotic, then he needed to be cured. Freud, like his near-contemporary Wölfflin, was biased towards order and composition: composition of the artwork, composition of the personality. This bias supported a sequestering and marginalization of avant-garde art, whose basic principle was mistrust of composition. But then Freud was not an avant-garde thinker. Like Aby Warburg, he saw the potential for disorder in the human personality but sought to contain that potential.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“As is so often the case, shapings of history designed to bring out lost sources of vitality call upon fictions of ethnicity or race as their medium.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“The historical relativist is the one who adopts an eagle's-eye view on the past, lofty enough not to need to prefer one epoch to another. Warburg was no such relativist. For him the European Renaissance, Burckhardt's Renaissance, the fifteenth century, held the keys to the present. He was fully absorbed by the epic of Europe. The 'Orient' figured for Warburg only as a mystifying threat to Mediterranean reason, a passive source of fascination, coded as female. The non-Western here is the image of a hidden weakness within the West. America, meanwhile, sheltered the remnants of the archaic societies it destroyed and at the same time promised a telecommunicational future of 'instantaneous electric connection' where 'mythical and symbolic thinking.' which once formed 'spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection,' would no longer be needed.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“History is not a conversation with the past, Instead, in Warburg, memory is carried forward to us, objectively, by the sequence of pathos-formulas. We do not choose our past, it chooses us. This was not an entirely direful story. The pathos-formulas register danger but they also ward it off, apotropaically. Art creates the psychic distance that gives mankind a chance in its struggle with hostile nature or with the gods.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Henry Adams, the reluctant tourist of 1860, pondering the forty-foot dynamos in the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris, sensed with alarm their 'moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.' He saw 'only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.' Physics was occupied with a 'supersensual world' of 'chance collisions' - physics was 'stark mad in metaphysics.' The pragmatic and human-scaled thinking that had sustained the fond narratives of nineteenth-century historians seemed feckless, disoriented.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Art is the direct confrontation between an irreducible individual soul, unreachable by society, and the facts of nature and human nature. The critic, not the connoisseur, reconstructs this confrontation.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“In mocking the modern business of art, including historical scholar ship, Wilde was striking back, as Nietzsche had done almost thirty years earlier, against the great accumulated pile of writing that loaded the burden of the past on the back of the present. The weight of learning in 1890 seems light when one struggles today, deep in the stacks of of an art-history library housing half a millions volumes, to part the mobile shelves creaking on their runners. Wilde's solution was economical. Both the judgment of value in the present and the shaping of a narrative pf the past would be entrusted to the critic. Historiography is reborn inside the critic's project, and so redeemed.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“This was Wilde's way of closing the gap between art and life. In Europe, art had been stripped of its central role in religious ritual and public life. Most nineteenth-century churches were outfitted with nineteenth century paintings. But the best nineteenth-century painters had no interest in painting for churches. The modern painter was on his own. The illusions of art were exposed to be the pitiless reasonings of commerce and engineering. The artist, dependent on the historians and critics, the authors of immortality, could only hope that his works would find refuge, one day, in the museum. Wilde understands that it is the writers who patrol the frontier between art and life. He strikes back against modern naturalism or realism by arguing that reality itself is generated by a combinatory artistic creativity. Art colonizes life. If life itself is already a work of art, then the artist will never find himself on the outside of life.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“The power of the mind over reality was expressed in a different way by Oscar Wilde, who called Pater's Studies in the Renaissance his 'golden book' and yet did not himself write poetic art criticism. Wilde is deceptive: his gifts for paradox and aphorism and the absence of philosophical reference points mask the radicality of his thought. Wilde identified the destination of Fiedler's and Hildebrand's doctrines, for once art is no longer evaluated by comparison to nature, there are no limits to the critic's power to shape the evolution of art. In Wilde's dialogue of 1890, 'The True Function and Value of Criticism,' the straight man Ernest contends that 'the Greeks had no art-critics': 'By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses, bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand.' The ironist Gilbert, who speaks for Wilde, contradicts him:
I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much as people do now-adays, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it.
According to Gilbert, the Greeks were in fact 'a nation of art-critics.' The critic is the one who filters art and literature through a sensibility and a prose style. The critic, for Gilbert and Wilde (and Pater), is anything but a parasite on art. The critic only completes the work of repetition and combination begun by the artist: 'I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer to Æschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added.' Art is secondary from the start. The artist is a critic, for does he not also dominate nature with his subjectivity, which has already been shaped by art? 'The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“It was the doomed competition with photography that had led painting to lose its ways in the mindless transcription of reality. Admittedly the scorn for realism had been a traditional theme of premodern art theory, often mapped onto onto a geographic distinction. The direct imitation of reality was the northern European weakness, a limitation to be countered by an idealism cultivated in the Mediterranean realm.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“In his essay on the hazards of historical consciousness, 'On the Use and Abuse of History,' one of the four 'untimely meditations' he published in 1874, Friedrich Nietzsche asserted that Europe was 'suffering from a debilitating historical fever.' Things would get worse before they got better. The machinery of academic scholarship was only beginning to bulk up in the 1870s. In the preceding decades the number of full professors (Ordinarien) in all disciplines, in all German universities, had risen only about 10 percent between 1796 and 1864, from 650 to 725. Then between 1864 and 1890 the sum increases by 50 percent; and then again by 50 percent between 1890 and 1920. The student population, meanwhile, reached 12,000 in 1835 and stayed at this level until the late 1860s. From this point on the number of students rose precipitously. By 1902 there 35,500 students; by the start of World War One 61,000. (Today the number of students enrolled in German universities is about two million; the population of Germany is only double what it was in the 1870s)”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Nietzsche asked in 1882: 'What is the point of all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals?' The brief moment of intoxication lures us off the via dolorosa. Such spectacles also asserted the underlying continuity of European society since the Renaissance, despite steam engine, trainm and telegraph. Such was the confidence in the homology between the present day and a supposedly integrated and self-assured sixteenth century that people were still willing, in donning costumes, to turn themselves into living works of art. (This was the bourgeois response to the fantasy of the socialist Fourier, who thought people could become living artworks if they disrobed.) The contrast between the costumes and the black-and-white everyday garb of 1879, a way of dressing as if designed to be photographed, was sharp. Fourteen thousand citizens took part in Makart's extravaganza, 300,000 more looked on.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History