Art History

Whatever we may think of the modern arts, we can hardly deny that our almost compulsive urge to innovate has brought along with it a criticism that is new. "New Criticism" is a term that ordinarily denotes the theories of a small but influential group of critics of literature. There is also a new criticism of the plastic and pictorial arts, quite as ranging and incisive as the new criticism of literature.

This suggests a second reason for the renovations in modern art-criticism: the fact that so many of our former judgments about the arts, especially about painting and architecture, were phrased by nineteenth-century art historians who were parochial or misinformed. It is surprising, for instance, how some of Ruskin's and Burckhardt's notions lingered on in the background of our minds long after the arts themselves had changed. Revision of such notions was long overdue. Perhaps the Cubists hastened this revision, and its effects on art history were sweeping. There have been radical changes in the interpretation of primitive art, Greek classicism, Early-Christian art, Romanesque and Gothic, the Renaissance, realism, and the relations between art and science, between art and madness, between art and society. The revision is still in process.

We are far enough along in this renovation to pause and take a quick inventory of some of the findings in this new art-criticism. The following selections are samplings from a range of material that cannot possibly be embraced in any anthology. Yet they indicate the directions in which art history has been moving, even if they cannot represent the full scope of its achievement.

We say art history rather than aesthetics because the aesthetician is first of all concerned with the philosophic problem of the nature and meaning of art, its purposes, effects, limits, and relation to reality. The art historians often prove to be our best critics, and some, like Focillon and Wolfflin, are not afraid of theorizing. So even if these writers are not aestheticians, they frequently deal with aesthetic questions. And because our art criticism is increasingly involved with psychological and social criticism, we should mention Ehrenzweig, Kris, and Boas, psychologists and anthropologists whose speculations are directly relevant to art history.

Is not the reason for this that under the changing and local aspects which give the arts their own character so decisively that one cannot mistake an Egyptian for a Roman statue or a Greek figure for a Gothic one, all are governed by certain general laws, and, there being a lasting opposition between them, by two fundamentally different artistic conceptions? This basic contrast, these "historical constants," have sometimes been noted by certain writers like Strzygowski, Wolfflin, d'Ors, etc., without, however, their drawing all the inevitable conclusions and without their seeing that they apply not only to some artistic periods but to the whole history of art from its origins to our day.

Nevertheless, it is not unrewarding for the art historian to examine the history of canons of proportions. There is a fundamental difference between the method of the Egyptians and the method of Polyclitus, between the procedure of Leonardo and the procedure of the Middle Ages - a difference so great and, above all, of such a character, that it reflects the basic differences between the art of Egypt and that of classical antiquity, between the art of Leonardo and that of the Middle Ages. The history of the theory of proportions is the reflection of the history of style; furthermore, since we may understand each other unequivocally when dealing with mathematical formulations, it may even be looked upon as a reflection which often surpasses its original in clarity. One might assert that the theory of proportions expresses the frequently perplexing concept of the Kunstwollen in clearer or, at least, more definable fashion than art itself.

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