Book review

Art of the Nineteenth Century :Painting and Sculpture By Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson
Published by Thames & Hudson, 1984

Reviewed by ROSS FRASER

Quite apart from its contribution as a work of scholarship, this magnificent new book on the painting and sculpture of the nineteenth century goes to prove what a long way we have come in our understanding of those momentous decades. Much art that in this part of the world still seemed irrelevant or even ludicrous in the 'fifties has had to be reconsidered in the light of research disseminated in the 'sixties and 'seventies. It is not necessarily that we have come to reconsider its intrinsic worth, but rather we have learned to understand it better in the climate of ideas and intentions that produced it.

An important endeavour of art history is to provide a retrospective meditation on the oeuvre's significance for life, to draw out the richness and diversity of the context. As Rosenblum says in the preface to this hook: `Works of art, after all, are made by people and, like people, should not be forced into a single perspective that views them only as functions of, say, aesthetic or economic or psychoanalytical systems. There is no end to the way we can understand human beings and no end to the way we can learn to understand the art they make, whether it he sublime or trivial.'

Readers may remember Robert Rosenblum for his interesting thesis of 1975, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (largely the fruit of his Slade Professorship at Oxford). This alternative reading of the history of modern art followed less well-beaten tracks through the period leading up to the Modern Movement. Rosenblum's argument in his earlier thesis was that `there is an important alternative reading of the history of modern art that might well supplant the orthodox one that has as its almost exclusive locus Paris, from David and Delacroix to Matisse and Picasso.' Rosenblum based his argument `not on formal values alone. . . but rather on the impact of certain problems of modern cultural history, and most particularly the religious dilemmas posed in the Romantic movement, upon the combination of subject, feeling, and structure shared by a long tradition of artists working mainly in Northern Europe and the United States.'

In the present book (written as part of a long-standing intellectual partnership with H.W. Janson, who contributed the pages on sculpture before his death in 1982) Rosenblum has similarly explored both the highways and by-ways of nineteenth century culture. The publishers announce it as `the first comprehensive and up-to-date view of the creative wellsprings of nineteenth century art and its achievements. All the latest knowledge 'and discoveries are reflected, including the revisionist attitudes that have been altering our preconceptions drastically ... And in contrast to most Francocentric views of the period, the fullest international representation is offered, ranging from Australia to the United States, from Mexico to Russia.'

Indeed this book has much to offer the general reader, written as it is in an urbane and accessible style, refreshingly free from art history jargon, richly illustrated and excellently produced and printed in Italy and the United States. Many of the sculptures were photographed especially for the book; and a number of the paintings have seldom before been reproduced.

The truth is that the power of the nineteenth century imagination in literature, painting, sculpture, music (arts even then often intertwined like some too-luxuriant jungle) was so great that an equally radical cutting away of all its presuppositions was necessary to make way for twentieth century impulses. One remembers Moreau's statement to Matisse, then his pupil, that he was `born to simplify art'. By the eighteen-seventies Cezanne had already made a beginning. Turning the pages of this book one is stopped two-thirds of the way through by the colour reproduction of a little painting, Still Life with Apples (c1860-70) from Kings College, Cambridge. It seems to have come from a different aesthetic world.

This superb proof of the irrelevance of mere subject-matter should not, however, make us forget the existence of an enormous body of painting and sculpture based upon almost opposite premises. In their new, indispensible book Rosenblum and Janson have put it most persuasively at our disposal.