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June 2009

Vol. 151 / No. 1275

Art History Reviewed

THIS MONTH'S ISSUE of the Burlington publishes the first in a series of articles that re-review a selection of the most influential contributions to art history published in the twentieth century. A precedent of sorts was established at an earlier period in the Magazine by a series on art historians and art critics of the past. The dozen or so articles came out intermittently between 1952 and 1975, an eclectic selection with little sense of order but which included Anita Brookner’s notable essay on Baudelaire (1964) and studies of other, mostly nineteenth-century figures such as Stendhal, Thoré, Zola and Riegl. Art History Reviewed is more specific and, we hope, better regulated: the majority of articles will appear in a sequence ordered by the date of publication of  the books under review. Thus we begin this month with Emile Mâle’s great work on French ecclesiastical art and architecture with its profound implications for iconography  and methodology, published two years before the turn of the cen­tury and well known through many subsequent editions and trans­lations. Postponing for the moment Bernard Berenson’s Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1903), an article to be published later in the year to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Berenson’s death, we follow Mâle with a consideration of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History of 1915. The series will comprise eighteen contributions, closing with some significant publications from the 1980s.

Art History Reviewed has been long in gestation and the list of selected texts has seen numerous changes. Some books were immediately obvious candidates; others, a little more marginal, have been included for the questions they raise about changing attitudes to art and art history. The provision of variety has been a pressing factor in our choice as, of course, has the commissioning of compatible authors. The series covers painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture and design, from the minutiae of connoisseurship to the broader canvas of theory and aesthetics. But, no matter how varied our choice, we can safely say that all the chosen books are characterised by passionate engagement and lucid style and are inflected by the sharp sapid of didactic or polemical intent.

However, there are bound to be reproaches at our final choice: why on earth that book and not this one? An early consideration was to choose texts that are still easily available; another was to cover a wide range in the genre of art-historical writing; and a further one was that the books in question are still referred to and cited (if not always read) and are likely to be consulted by students of art history at various levels. While some of the chosen books have remained current within the confines of the discipline, others such as Kenneth Clark’s The Nude (1956) or Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936; familiar from its re-issue as Pioneers of Modern Design) reached a wide non-specialist readership. On occasion we have chosen a less obvious title to reconsider – some may have preferred Roger Fry’s Vision and Design, with its greater breadth of topics, to the highly concentrated Cézanne: a study of his development; and, while Gombrich’s The Story of Art is a brilliant exposition of a particular art-historical approach as well as being a publishing phenomenon, Art and Illusion has been more profoundly influential.

A further objection to our choice may be that we have not included contributions to the subject that have taken the form of an article or a substantial review. One thinks of crucial essays such as Erwin Panofsky on the Arnolfini portrait (1934) or Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1978). In certain cases the books under consideration are indeed anthologies of such material, although often much reworked. In defence of this restriction, it may be said that a book’s reach is always made greater from the fact that it has been translated into various languages (as have all the books we have selected), while articles, unless anthologised, are invariably not.

It is hoped that as the series progresses, more general patterns of the historiography of art during the twentieth century will emerge. The more recently developed contrast between art history as documentary scholarship and as interdisciplinary theory may be set in the broader context of the factual, biographical and interpretative approaches to the subject, which marked its nineteenth-century origins. The story is also one of a European tradition (largely Central European) that was transformed as a discipline by its journey West, a voyage gaining in momentum from the intellectual diaspora of the 1930s and 1940s, and carried forward by swelling numbers of professionally varied partic­ipants. It is frequently said that the intellectual and theoretical development of art history, with its now complex methodologies, has come about at the expense of an intimate and confident engagement with the objects of study (although in practice such a division is perhaps never as extreme as it might appear). Students more than any others may feel obliged to read the latest books on certain topics in order not to appear out of touch with the intellectual climate and thereby miss the opportunity to grasp where these theories originated and to understand how much the subject has changed. Books intended as introductory guides, invaluable as they may be, tend to focus on particular themes and approaches, privileging literature that is immediately relevant over many important but momentarily unfashionable books. These can so easily fall by the wayside. For these reasons at least, it is timely to reconsider some of those books that, during the past cen­tury, have helped to define the field of art history and have influenced, directly or through example, our multi-layered responses to works of art.