Book review

The Critical Historians of Art by Michael Podro
Published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1982

Reviewed by PETER LEECH

Studies in the history of literature have been, of recent years, animated with antagonisms over the role and nature of theory and idea in literary understanding. Massive reappraisals have occurred, and there is no question that the gain in disciplinary self-consciousness has been both critically and creatively beneficial.

Alas, studies in the history of visual art remain generally depressed by a numbing intellectual complacency. Theory and idea are widely regarded as gratuitous ornaments - or graffiti - on the building of facts. It seems quite to be overlooked that if facts themselves form the repertoire from which the raw content of art history is drawn, it is only in the conceptually creative construction of those facts that they will fall out with an order or interest critically sufficient to the understanding of art, both in its particular manifestations and in its general humanisation.

Of three recent international works, Michael Podro's The Critical Historians of Art is perhaps the most central to the reanimation of art history. For m its exploration of a period of German art historical writing from 1827 to 1927, it clearly shows that the dull empirical - or as Podro prefers 'arch aeological' - tendency of much twentieth century art history is by no means the orthodoxy or model it may seem.

Against the archaeological art historians, Podro opposes and elaborates on the work of a tradition of what he calls the critical historians' of art: a tradition formed by such figures as Schnaase, Semper, Goller, Riegl, Wölfflin, Warburg and Panofsky. Probably just those last three names will be wholly familiar to English readers, but it is a matter of deep gratitude that Podro has undertaken to introduce the others. (At the same time - a point I shall come to later - both Wölfflin and Warburg seem to me less than truly critical historians of art in this company.)

Beyond their nationality and temporal succession, there is an interesting biographical feature common to most of these writers. Most were, in one way or another, students of the great tradition of nineteenth century German philosophy: in particular, the philosophy of Kant, Schiller and Hegel. (Even Wölfflin, one such former student, announces in a letter used by Podro as an epigraph to his book, 'What can be achieved through philological methods is shown by archaeology .... From philosophy I shall draw a stream of new ideas and inject them into history'.)

Podro himself, though a professional art historian, has already written of this tradition of philosophical aesthetics in his earlier book The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford, 1972), and many of the themes re-emerge in The Critical Historians of Art. But it should immediately be said that the intimidating, density of German philosophical theory does not, in the worst way, carry over in the new book: Podro is an exceptionally lucid, succinct and plainly sympathetic commentator on such issues.

Of the many themes addressed by Podro's critical historians, one in particular is persistent. It has its foundation in Kant's view of the autonomy of mind ,and imagination in aesthetic experience. This autonomy or freedom allows of two projections of thought: first, about the concept of art itself and how, as a cultural phenomenon, it ought critically to be understood; and second, how such a concept of art immediately focuses on the inner world of humanity: art, that is, comes to be seen as the objectification of our subjectivity.

Schnaase, Semper, Goller, RiegI and Partofsky are each richly elaborative on this theme. And it is worth suggesting the flavour of the writing in a beautiful passage from Riegl:
  All life is an endless altercation of the individual T with the surrounding world, the subject with the object. Man, in a state of culture, finds a purely passive role towards the world of objects by which he is completely conditioned impossible, and he sets out to regulate his relation to it, to make that relation one of independence and autonomy; he does this when, by means of art, he seeks another world which is his own free creation, to put beside the world which was none of his making.

Of more specific themes in critical art history, there is much to be discovered in Podro's company on such issues as transformation and change in art, on the retrieval and perserveration of the past, on metaphors of material and making, on spectator/painting relations, and on Kunstwollen (The intentionality of art, which is not to be confused with the intentions of artists). And as Podro introduces the flow of theory and idea he interweaves his text with some 75 thoroughly apt monochromatic illustrations. (Incidentally, the printing and production of the book, and its ordering of the illustrations, is of rare and unimpeachable quality.)

It is in coming to Wölfflin and Warburg that a sense of unease begins to emerge in the tradition Podro seeks to explore. For though two full chapters are devoted to Wölfflin - and though without doubt Wölfflin 's major works have been enormously, classically influential - there is (anyway, I find) a conceptual rigidity in his writing, a tendency to stark dichotomy which can often seem too crudely seductive. Panofsky himself, though acknowledging the descriptive force of many of Wölfflin 's concepts, was led to wonder about their real critical pertinence.

As for Warburg, it might be said that, not unlike Wölfflin, he stood almost too descriptively close to the paintings he examined. Even Podro suggests in the end that there is a question of how Warburg really 'conceived of the painting as something over and above its constituent motifs'. To have to ask that question is just exactly to doubt - beyond Warburg's iconographical brilliance whether he can genuinely be regarded as a critical historian of art.

To introduce Podro's The Critical Historians of Art to a New Zealand art readership may once have seemed an eccentric exercise. But last year, in a review in Art New Zealand 28 of Francis Pound's Frames on the Land, a disturbingly underlaid issue of the nature of art history emerged in the reviewer's extraordinarily and not unrepresentative anti-theoretical art historical stance. If Pound's work - delightfully quirky as it can sometimes be occasions important re-readings of early New Zealand landscape paintings, it is further to be hoped that it usefully initiates a debate which may find links with Podro's project. For the dismal fact is that until now, New Zealand art history has largely been conducted in the form of picture books and nursery-rhyme stories. In this respect, it might be relevant to conclude with Richard Wollheim's words in a recent savage attack in the Times Literary Supplement on that form of impoverished art historical fact-grubbing. Wollheim writes:
  Any serious attempt to rejoin the mainstream of art history must do two things: it must rediscover a place for theory in art-historical practice, and it must reinterpret this practice as a form of art-criticism.