‘O Lord, how bored I am with it!’ cried Roger Fry as he pored over the draft of his book on Cézanne. ‘It seems to me poor formless stuff and I should like to begin it all over again’. Good on Virginia Woolf for including this episode in her biography of the art historian. Scholars spend so much time analysing the great critics’ works that they easily forget the doubts which bred them, as The Books That Shaped Art History shows.
Art historians find it difficult to dodge the lofty lineage of earlier scholarship. As a case in point, here I find myself reviewing a book of 16 reviews of books which shaped art history in the 20th century. Among the 16 art historian authors of Shone and Stonard’s volume are the professors who imparted to me the knowledge they took from the movers and shakers of 20th-criticism, the Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss of this book’s subtitle.
The Books That Shaped Art History hammers home that point with subtle force: Art History is little else than received wisdom. It’s as much about theorizing and re-theorising other theorists’ theories about art, these days, as it is about looking at pictures.
It wasn’t always this way. As Paul Hills says in this volume of Michael Baxandall’s book, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972), ‘Unlike the practice that has become dominant in subsequent decades, there is no proliferation of footnotes, no scholarly namedropping, no parading of scholarly allegiances’.
The books of Roger Fry, Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, E.H. Gombrich, and all the other famous art historians discussed in this collection of essays certainly shaped Art History today, but one can’t help thinking that in doing so they might also have zapped it of its own voice.
In a point Courtauld Professor Susie Nash puts particularly well in her essay on German scholar Erwin Panofsky, for 20th-century criticism to be great it didn’t always have to be right.
Many of his arguments were ill-conceived, some of them glaringly so, since he was frequently hindered from accessing primary material. But it was Panofsky’s vibrant, big-guns approach to his discipline that makes his work so engaging, and therefore so enduringly important. Above all, what continues to make Panofsky’s ‘big Flemish book’, Early Netherlandish Painting (1953) such a fun read is the unexpectedness of the allusions; Hans Memling, perhaps best known for his exquisite altarpieces, is compared to Mendelssohn and characterised as ‘the very model of a major minor master’, a formula as Nash notes he borrowed from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.
Panofsky was equally unabashed (one feels he did so consciously) about allowing contemporary politics to infiltrate his descriptions of art. So Flanders and Italy were dubbed the ‘Great Powers’ of European painting. All of which appeals as much to the browsing reader today as it did to the post-War American audience that first experienced Panofsky’s book as a series of lectures at Harvard.
In general, in fact, the art historians who have found a worthy place in Shone and Stonard’s volume were all ambitious risk takers. Take Nikolaus Pevsner, the great architectural historian. The aim of his Pioneers…(1936), as Colin Amery explains in his excellent essay, was to show that the Modern Movement, ‘the genuine and adequate style of our century, was achieved by 1914’ and sprung from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, and Victorian engineering. Few today would couch a hypothesis in such staunch terms, but it is partly this confident approach that marks Pevsner’s book out as influential.
The Books That Shaped Art History is a thought-provoking reflection on a century of brilliant Art Historical scholarship. To the Art Historian it offers still more. Praising the masters while accepting and assessing their errors, this volume sets the bar for the next generation. It heralds a bold approach.
The Books That Shaped Art History, Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard (editors). Thames & Hudson. £24.95.
• Daisy Dunn is a trustee of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers, which promotes the study of Greek and Latin in schools across the UK. She writes widely about the Renaissance and the ancient world.
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