david carrier - review of the the end of the history of art by hans belting

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The End of the History of Art? by Hans Belting and Christopher S. Wood Review by: David Carrier Source: History and Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 1988), pp. 188-199Published by: for Wiley Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505142Accessed: 27-08-2014 13:01 UTC

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188 REVIEW ESSAYS ThE END OF THE HISTORY OF ART? By Hans Belting. Translated by Christopher S. Wood. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Pp. xiii, 120.

This short book by an extremely erudite art historian contains two essays: a discussion of the relation between contemporary art and art history and an account of Vasari and his influence. As Professor Belting correctly observes, for many art historians encounters with contemporary art play a small role in their profes- sional life. But this situation, he feels, is unsatisfactory, for it is no accident that the currently fashionable chiliastic belief in the end of the history of art comes at the same time as widespread dissatisfaction with the methodologies of traditional art history. An historical perspective, he believes, will help us to understand the origins and importance of these beliefs. In his account of this dilemma, the three crucial figures are Vasari, Winckelmann, and Hegel.

Vasari is important here because his way of thinking about the development of art is a model, still, for art history. Unlike the typical modern art historian, he both participated in the development of the art of his time and wrote its history. Winckelmann, who also is discussed in both of these essays, inherited Vasari's organic model of art history. For him too, art - like a living organism - is born, develops, reaches maturity and then perishes. The apparent problem for art history today with this model is that it provides no way of understanding the on- going history of art. For Vasari, Raphael and Michelangelo were the culmina- tion of the tradition that began with Giotto. But what then could remain for artists of the next generation to do? This is not a problem for Vasari himself; his goal is to explain the development of art up to his own time. And Winckel- mann effectively avoids this issue by concentrating on the cycle of the birth, development, maturity, and decay of art in antiquity; he had no developed theory of art of his own time, which interested him less than Greek and Roman art. But Belting's third key figure, Hegel, answers this problem by giving an altogether different turn to the analysis. Hegel offers an account of the art of antiquity, the Renaissance, and his own day, and concludes that in his own time the history of art has ended. It is this last claim which is of central importance for Belting.

For a decade or two, art critics have been fascinated with the possibility that perhaps now the history of art is concluded. The debates about what is fashionably called postmodernism centrally involve this conclusion. If art has now reached the end of its development, what follows is that present day artists are condemned to repeat the past, producing mere variations on the work of their precursors. Perhaps we live in what Clement Greenberg once described as "a motionless Alex- andrianism ... in which ... all larger questions [are] ... decided by the prece- dent of the old masters."' What gave new life to art in "Western bourgeois society," he adds in this account originally published in 1939, is something novel: "avant-garde culture." But if now that tradition of modernism, whose history he tells, is concluded, then indeed we may today have reached this condition of

1. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston, 1961), 4.


REVIEW ESSAYS 189

stasis. And such a situation, Belting adds, will in turn be reflected in the writing of art history. Modernists like Greenberg claimed that the art they admire con- tinued, and advanced the tradition. And if now art can no longer do that, then it seems that we have indeed lost our historical bearings.

Hegel wrote: "art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past."2 The classic modern development of this Hegelian theme is Edgar Wind's Art and Anarchy (1963), which draws attention both to Hegel's explicit concern, the loss of art's traditional social function, and to two more recent developments: the corrupting belief, as Wind thinks of it, that artworks should be perceived in a disinterested way and the vulgarizing influences of pho- tographic reproductions of artworks. "As art withdrew into itself and receded toward the margin of life," Wind writes, "it began to lose touch with learning, as it lost touch with other forces that shape our experience."3

I mention these anticipations of Belting's views because, as he himself recognizes, there is a tradition of prophecies that the end of art is at hand. These accounts have not stood the test of time. Hegel's experience of early nineteenth- century German art could scarcely have prepared him to anticipate Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and cubism; Wind's account of Abstract Expressionism gives no sense of the marvelous vitality of that movement. So why should Belting's account be judged as anything more than yet another variation on these now familiar Hegelian themes? One answer to this question is that he has a different, more measured view of what has ended. Today, he writes, "the artist and the art historian have lost faith in a rational, teleological process of artistic history, a process to be carried out by the one and described by the other" (ix). That sort of ending of art's history is compatible, he recognizes, with the creation of new art forms. Just as a reader of Vasari who knew Renaissance fresco cycles could barely have anticipated the storytelling devices our filmmakers have dis- covered, so perhaps novel art forms which are developed today will be difficult to understand as growing out of the art of the past. A second answer to this question is that Belting is concerned less with art alone than with art in relation to art history. And since his book contains neither a single reproduction nor a sustained account of any individual art work, his analysis of contemporary art relies almost entirely upon the claim that there is this link between the concerns of the artist and the art historian.

The very brevity of this volume means that its analysis is extremely sketchy, and so often involves easily questioned claims. The three paragraphs devoted to Gombrich give little support to Belting's conclusion that it is "an error to re- duce the entire problem of artistic form to an act of imitation. Imitation is only measurable when art imitates nature" (23). This distinction between imitating nature and imitating reality is really unhelpful; Gombrich has, after all, had much to say about the social function of imitation. Similarly, the brief discussion of such difficult figures as Riegl and Woelfflin will only make sense to someone who

2. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, transl. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), I, 11. 3. Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (New York, 1969), 58-59.


190 REVIEW ESSAYS has already studied them; and that reader is likely to have serious problems with Belting's claims. For example, he twice (14, 35) says that Woelfflin's principles appear simultaneously with the first abstract paintings; but since those principles were first presented in Woelfflin's Renaissance and Baroque (1888), while the earliest abstract paintings appear just after 1910, I am unsure what to make of this "connection."4 Apart from the discrepancy in dates, it is hard to see from Belting's account what Woelfflin's theorizing has to do with abstract art. Woelfflin did not write much about contemporary art; Roger Fry, who was heavily influenced by Woelfflin, did, but his account of Cezanne, originally published in 1927, shows how little connection he found between Woelfflin's formalist analysis and abstract art.5

At its worst Belting's historical summary is merely journalistic; nineteenth- century art, he tells us, "found itself estranged from ordinary experience and perception and so sought new ways of seeing reality" (25). His summary is always rushed. Hermeneutics is dismissed as irrelevant in two pages; the semiotic theories of Barthes and Nelson Goodman are mentioned in passing; and we learn that "psychology . .. cannot investigate the cultural communication of reality with its own means, because then it would have to define first what reality was" (22). It is easy to be bewildered by such an eclectic account, in which so many diverse theories are touched upon so briefly. While Belting's bibliography shows that he has read widely, the reader who seeks an analysis of present day art history will find his claim that Michael Fried, Wolfgang Kemp, and Norman Bryson (28) are three modern theorists interested in style as unhelpful as the tantalizing, undeveloped suggestion - it is made in the last sentence - that George Kubler's work provides a useful "anthropologically grounded conception of artistic produc- tion as a paradigm of human activity" (94).6

The problems with this book, furthermore, are not merely due to its brevity. The body of the text of Art and Anarchy is hardly much longer, but Wind's vivid examples permit him to present his thesis clearly. What, by contrast, is frustrating about The End of the History of Art? is the use of these art historical references without discussion of concrete historical examples. It is hard to have faith in an account which asserts that "art history's difficulties with modern art date back to the early nineteenth century, when art lost its traditional public functions" (40); surely, every reader of Diderot's art criticism would think that development dates back at least to the middle of the previous century and the development of the French Salon.7 Nor does it help when, three pages later, Belting instead locates this "major crisis" in seventeenth-century Protestant Europe (43). Even

4. See the discussion of Woelfflin and Riegl in Michael Podro, The Critical Historians ofArt (New Haven and London, 1982), 98-116. Woelfflin, Podro observes, does in his later work modify that account presented in Renaissance and Baroque; but Belting's account gives no reason to think that this change has anything to do with the development of abstract art.

5. See Roger Fry, Cezanne: A Study of His Development (New York, 1958). 6. The reference is to his The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, 1962). 7. The most complete recent account appears in Thomas C. Crow, Painters and Public Life in

Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London, 1985).


REVIEW ESSAYS 191

when Belting touches on the German literature, it is hard to gain from his book much of a feel for the philosophical issues.8 Hegel, he asserts, treated "art history as contemplation of past modes of human expression, modes which no longer . . .suggest a model for the future of art itself" (12). I am no Hegel scholar, but since Hegel's key claim, as I read him, was that the history of art was concluded in his time, I cannot understand what it could then mean to note that his account of art's past offers no model for the future of art.

Still, there is in Belting's book the sketch of an original, extremely important argument; and so, leaving aside these problems with his exposition, I want to concentrate my attention on three key claims. First, the ultimate goal of writing about art is to understand contemporary work in relation to earlier art; and if art history now fails to do this, it cannot achieve its real goal. Second, Renais- sance art has a privileged role in art history because in Vasari's account theorizing about art and art making are united. Third, the failure of modern art criticism to play a comparable role in relation to art today must lead to a loss of self- confidence within the discipline of art history. These claims, we will see, are closely connected.

What does it mean to understand contemporary art in relation to earlier art? The suggestion repeatedly made in Belting's account is that either contemporary art continues the tradition or it does not. In this all or nothing way of thinking, these are the only alternatives; either the tradition continues, or it is broken. But consider some examples. Giotto can be viewed both as the first great Renaissance master and as an heir to the Byzantine tradition.9 Leonardo seems an heir to the quattrocento traditions, but his belief that frescoes should not depict more than one scene on a single wall marks his rejection of the achievement of Piero della Francesca.10 Poussin in many ways looked back to the Renaissance, more so than did his baroque contemporaries; but his exclusive concern with easel painting and his interest in landscapes distinguish him from those Renaissance artists. Chardin's still life works could not have been made in the Renaissance, but his interest in illusionistic effects links him with the masters Vasari discusses. Manet's image-quotations have been viewed as both a continuation of a Renais- sance tradition and as a distinctively modernist innovation.1I Matisse formed his style prior to the era of cubism, and so in some ways seems an early modernist figure; but the late "cut-outs" from the early 1950s, which develop directly out of his earlier concerns as colorist, anticipate American color field painting of the 1960s. 12 Willem de Kooning is usually placed within the Abstract Expres-

8. Here his analysis compares unfavorably with Michael Ann Holly's Panofsky and the Founda- tions ofArt History (Ithaca and London, 1984) which, by focusing on one key figure, explores methodological problems in depth.

9. On his connection with Byzantine art, see Otto Demus, Byzantine Art and the West (New York, 1970), 225-230.

10. See E. H. Gombrich, Means and Ends: Reflections on the History of Fresco Painting (London, 1976), 10-11.

11. For discussion of both claims, see my "Manet and His Interpreters,"ArtHistory 8(1985), 320-335. 12. On this connection, see Lawrence Gowing, Matisse (New York and Toronto, 1979), 142-157.


192 REVIEW ESSAYS

sionist tradition developed in the 1940s, but his painterly female figures are recog- nizable descendants of works by Titian and Rubens.13

In short, everywhere in the history of painting from Giotto to de Kooning we find both continuity and discontinuity. Once we see that what is called "tradition" involves both continuity and constant change, then questions about whether new art continues the tradition will seem less interesting. The same point can be made about contemporary art. Much postmodernist New York art of the 1980s plays with ideas developed early in this century by Marcel Duchamp. Similarly, the recent much discussed rejection of the abstract expressionist tradition in favor of a return to work containing figurative images and the still more recent revival of abstraction show that right now artists both have new concerns and are involved in tradition. This is not to say that there is nothing new in contemporary art, but that today, as in the Renaissance, what is new can also be seen as developing the traditions of earlier art.

Historians are perhaps less likely to find this claim surprising than are art historians, for in dealing with political and social institutions it is clear that usually we can observe both continuities and discontinuities. When did the Renais- sance begin? What was the first capitalist society? Did the French Revolution destroy the system of centralized political authority established by Loiuis XIV? Adequate answers to these questions must recognize this fact. Sometimes, I grant, in both art history and history in general there are genuinely new developments or irreversible historical changes. Although landscapes appear in the background of Renaissance altarpieces, in Western art landscape painting as such appears only in the seventeenth century. 14 And it is hard to find any genuine pre-twentieth- century precedents for abstract painting. Similarly, barring unimaginable changes, we are no more likely to observe the rebirth of the Venetian Republic than we are to see a revival in Rome of the baroque paintings of martyrdoms. But in many cases relevant to Belting's analysis, such breaks with tradition are, I believe, less important than continuities.

How we understand such continuities and discontinuities essentially depends, I believe, upon how we choose to narrate our history. 15 For once we understand that continuity or discontinuity are not facts about the world somehow given by the events themselves, but are defined by the text which describes those events, then we can recognize that to talk about "tradition" or "a break with tradition" is, in large part, to refer to the structure of those texts. Harold Rosenberg's account of Abstract Expressionism focuses on its break with tradition; Clement Greenberg's discussion on its link to the tradition defined by cubism, early French modernism, and old master art. And since we are here dealing not with a matter of fact, but with two different ways of interpreting the same works, both these

13. A brief, very suggestive discussion of representation in his art appears in Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art: The A. W Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984 (Princeton, 1987), 348-353.

14. See E. H. Gombrich, "The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape," reprinted in his Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1966), 107-121.

15. Here I draw on the well-known work of Hayden White and upon Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1985).


REVIEW ESSAYS 193

accounts are worth considering.16 We can frankly recognize that the success of such an account, given that it is true to the facts, is measured by its plausibility, originality, and suggestiveness. '7 Belting hints at this point when he observes that just as visual art works "reproduce either something which was considered real ... or a truth," so the writer "was supposed to reproduce the work by describing its relation to the content or model it reproduced" (59). Like representational art, art history too is a form of representation; for as such paintings represent the world, so the texts of the art historian represent art works. And, to continue that parallel, just as there are different truthful ways of representing the world, so there is more than one correct way of representing an art work.

What does the argument tell us about the privileged role of Vasari's history of Renaissance art? What is unique about his account is that in Italy in 1550 it really was possible to narrate an account in which the story of painting from Cimabue to Michelangelo involved progress towards greater naturalism. This unity of theory and practice, it is important to observe, is hard to find elsewhere in the history of European art. Giotto's contemporaries had little to say about his work; van Eyck and his fellow Flemish painters also lacked a similarly gifted commentator'; and although their contemporaries presumably saw that Caravaggio and Rem- brandt were doing something new, their accounts seem to us hopelessly inadequate descriptions of what is original in this art.'9 Nor, to take examples from the history of modernism, do the discussions of Cezanne or cubism by art critics of their time explain what today interests us about this art.20 Only rarely have artists been able to count on intelligent contemporary commentators on their work. And once we recognize this fact, then we may be less tempted to follow Belting in concluding that today there is some special link between art and the situation of art history. If artists in the past have not been able to depend upon historians or critics to provide a theory guiding their practice, why should artists today expect, or need, such aid from contemporary art critics?

What was special about Vasari's account, then, was that because he focused on a period in which it was plausible to narrate art's development as a story of progress towards even better naturalism, he could describe all of the art he cared

16. See Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," Art News 51 (1952), 22-23, 48-50; and Greenberg's response, "How Artwriting Earns Its Bad Name," Encounter 18 (1962), 66-71.

17. This is a controversial claim. The postmodernists see in that movement a irreparable break with the past; for such an account, see Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1985). In his Painting as an Art, Woliheim argues that painting from the Renaissance to de Kooning manifests a common human nature.

18. On Giotto and van Eyck, see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 (Oxford, 1971).

19. On Caravaggio, see my "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: Caravaggio and His Inter- preters," Word & Image 3 (March, 1987), 41-73; on Rembrandt, E. Havekamp-Begemann, Rembrandt: The Night Watch (Princeton, 1982), which provides a summary of contemporary commentary and a history of interpretations of that work.

20. On Cezanne, see Richard Shiff, Ce6zanne and the End of Post-Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago and London, 1984); on cubism, Mark Roskill, The Interpretation of Cubism (Philadelphia, 1985).


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about in one unified narrative. Gombrich's Art and Illusion, I have argued elsewhere, is best read as an extension of that analysis; now the history runs not just from Giotto to Michelangelo but from Giotto through to Constable and Impressionism.2" But the price that Gombrich pays for thus extending the tradition is that his narrative must accommodate more diverse artworks. Whatever their other differences, Giotto and Michelangelo both are concerned with nar- rating sacred scenes; Constable is not, and so to compare his pictures to theirs requires a more subtle theory of naturalism than Vasari knew. The great achievement of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture is to extend such a narrative to encompass modernist abstraction, which for him becomes the latest stage in that tradition which begins with Giotto. And, just as Gombrich revises Vasari's analysis by developing further the concept of naturalism, so Greenberg is able to place Giotto, cubism, and Pollock within one narrative because the features common to their art are described in a still more general way. Now we are concerned not with naturalism, but with pictorial illusionism, a quality which representational old master works can share with Pollock's abstractions. Unfor- tunately Belting has nothing to say about Greenberg's very well-known account, whose claims are more relevant to his own than the account of Abstract Expres- sionism he does discuss, Harold Rosenberg's analysis. This perhaps is one reason why he fails to grasp this essential point about art historical narratives.

My analysis has borrowed from Arthur Danto's visionary essay, "The End of Art."22 Where for Gombrich the history of art is marked by the gradual perfec- tion of naturalism and, for Greenberg, by that self-consciousness which modernism achieves about the nature of artistic illusionism, for Danto the history of recent art is characterized by a succession of theories of art, each of which in turn becomes inadequate when artists produce "counterexamples" to those theories. Art need not represent, as the existence of abstract painting shows; nor be expressive, as the minimalist work of the 1960s demonstrates. Rather we recognize that any object, the bottle rack of Duchamp or the Brillo Box of Warhol, can be an artwork. When thus "the whole main point of art in our century was to pursue the question of its own identity while rejecting all available answers as insufficiently general,"23 then it became clear that the activity of making art had become so closely dependent upon developing a theory of art that art and the philosophy of art ultimately were indistinguishable. It is no accident that Danto too turns to Hegel's account of this problem. Once there is no longer a distinction between "knowledge and its object," in that stage of history in which Spirit contemplates itself, all that remains, Danto argues, is for the philosopher of art to reflect on its now completed history.24

21. The discussion in this paragraph and the next one summarizes the analysis in my Artwriting (Amherst, 1987), chap. 1.

22. Reprinted in his The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986), 81-115. 23. Ibid., 110. 24. Ibid., 113. Another question, which I cannot take up here, is whether this Hegelian account

is consistent with Danto's well-known view of historical explanation now republished in his Narra- tion and Knowledge. Including the Integral Text of Analytical Philosophy of History (New York,


REVIEW ESSAYS 195

Like Belting, Danto links the end of art with the crisis in art history. "It is possible that art history has the form we know because art as we knew it is finished."25 But in his account these are, possibly, independent developments; though he is "impressed" with this coincidence, it is with a certain diffidence that he links his Hegelian view of the end of art with Hegel's theory of art history, which he describes as "bizarre . . . in every possible respect."26 My own study of contemporary art, Artwriting, borrows very heavily from Danto, but my view of this particular problem, we will now see, is very different.

This account of the role of art historical narratives prepares us to answer our third question; does the failure of present-day modern art history to play the role which it could play in Vasari's culture lead to a loss of self-confidence within art history? "It is a sad fact; art history lags behind the study of the other arts."27 A number of commentators have recently made this claim, which is plausible. In the past several decades, literary criticism has been radically transformed by the influence of structuralism, poststructuralism, reception theory aesthetics, and a whole host of Marxist approaches; nowadays, a long discussion would be needed to explain the history of criticism since Northrop Frye. By contrast, most of the articles appearing in The Art Bulletin employ the methodology Erwin Panofsky and his generation of art historians created. When iconographers offer ever more elaborate interpretations of much discussed works and minor artists are written about at length, it is easy to feel that art history lacks that excitement which can come only when a discipline is engaged in actively seeking methodological innovations. On the other hand, such different art historians as Svetlana Alpers, Michael Baxandall, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Mark Roskill, and Richard Shiff- many but not all of them are mentioned in Belting's bibliography - are involved in thinking about art history in new ways. Maybe, then, art history has been slower to innovate merely because its traditional methodology was firmly established, because there are fewer art historians than literary critics, or because visual artifacts differ from texts. And perhaps in another decade or two, revi- sionist art history will be well established.28

What is unclear, still, is the relation between contemporary art and these developments within art history. In literary criticism, the primary emphasis upon methodological innovation has come, I believe, not through the study of recent fiction, but from the influence of French and German theory. What has mattered most to recent literary critics is not the need to develop an adequate account

1985), or with the epistemology developed in his Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1968). Danto himself writes: "it astonished me that I was accepting [Hegel's view of art history] since my ... Analytical Philosophy of History ... had pretty much taken a stand against its possibility in principle," Ibid., xiv.

25. Ibid., 114. 26. Ibid., 205, 204. 27. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven and London, 1983),

xi. 28. My discussion here is influenced by an important survey article by Richard Shiff, "Art History

and the Nineteenth Century: Realism and Resistance," to appear in the Art Bulletin.


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of the texts of Beckett, Pynchon, or Ashbery, but the realization that Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and other theorists challenge the traditional ways that the history of literature has been understood. In art history, similarly, most of the innovative writers mentioned in the previous paragraph are not primarily concerned with contemporary art. Need there then be any connection between contemporary art and art history? Maybe the techniques of the social historian and iconographer-originally adopted to study Renaissance art-are essentially irrelevant to postmodernism. Perhaps, also, the belief that there can, or should, be a unified theory of art of all times (and places) is an Hegelian idea which is best now discarded. Only the practice of art history-not, I believe, a philosophical argument - can permit us to choose between these alternatives. Still, a philosophical discussion suggests some ways of thinking about these questions.

The social role of art, the system of patronage, the beliefs about the function of representations, the view of pre-Renaissance art, religious ideals, all have changed so dramatically between Vasari's time and our day that it is reasonable to ask whether there is sufficient overlap between his conception of art and ours for there to be a theory of painting which deals with both the works he knew and all those works we preserve in the museum. Perhaps Panofsky and the other art historians who defined the present methodology of that discipline said most of what can interestingly be said about old master art; maybe, however, a semiotic analysis, or deconstructionist or poststructuralist account, or a theory which is as yet unimaginable will in the future utterly transform the way that we understand that art. Until such a discussion is presented and tested, it is hard to give more than a wildly speculative answer to these questions. What is difficult to understand, then, is why the success or failure of such a theory should depend upon what contemporary artists accomplish. Maybe art will continue to advance, and art history will stagnate; perhaps art history shall flourish and in another century the works of our postmodernists will be of merely sociological interest, as nineteenth-century Salon painting is today. The truth is, we can only wait to see what happens. But why should we think, as Belting does, that there is a neces- sary connection here between art history and contemporary art?

If I understand his book at all, Belting sketches an astonishing argument which answers this question. "The phrase 'work of art'," he suggests, "has come to sig- nify an understanding of the work as incomplete and thus historical" (67). This highly abstract claim becomes clearer if placed here, in context, in Belting's discussion of Vasari. What Vasari's cyclic theory implies, if we accept this argument, is that the understanding of Giotto's art necessarily remained incomplete until Michelangelo's work was created. Only when it was possible to see how Michelangelo finished the process which Giotto began was the full significance of the earlier master's art clear. Analogously, our understanding of Raphael is transformed by Manet's appropriation in Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe of a motif from his precursor's work; and our -understanding of Manet, in turn, is incomplete until we see how in the 1960s Robert Rauschenberg's collages deal with his con-


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cern, image appropriation.29 And if we are uncertain whether the history of art will continue, then we must also be unsure how to understand art of the past. For since one task of art today is to complete those earlier works, if art cannot advance, then our understanding of those earlier works will remain incomplete.

On this view, the art work is not merely something the artist makes and so gives a meaning which the historian seeks to reconstruct; rather, insofar as that art work influences future artists, it comes to acquire a new significance which its creator knew not. The individual art work, we might say, is incomplete until it is placed in relation to the history of art. Thus, just as, if we accept Hegel's view of "the cunning of history," it was only possible in 1900 to understand that one consequence of Napoleon's wars was the creation of a unified Germany, and only possible after 1945 to recognize that one consequence of Hitler's rise to power was the creation of a Jewish state, so art works too acquire meanings unforeseen by their creators.30

If we accept this holistic view, then the unit of discourse in art history is not the individual work, but the whole system of art works. My own belief is that this is a plausible view of history, but a confused view of art. To say that Michelangelo finished what Giotto began, the development of Renaissance naturalism, is to present Giotto's art as it was described by Vasari. Vasari's Lives would be incomplete did they not include both Giotto and Michelangelo. But this does not show that Giotto's works were somehow incomplete until they were so described. Rather, the problem with this argument is indicated by my movement, in the preceding two paragraphs, from saying that new works cause us to understand older ones differently to concluding that the older works are there- fore incomplete until related to the new ones. The former claim is correct, for Vasari does need Giotto to begin his cycle; the latter is not, for since Giotto could not know what his successors would accomplish, it is misleading to say that his works are only fully comprehensible in relation to Michelangelo's.

Here the differences between history and art history are important. We are interested in Napoleon's and Hitler's intentions; but we are also concerned with the ways in which they set in motion processes which brought about results they did not intend. Historians' narratives represent those processes, those events in the past; but all that exists today is the end product of those processes. By contrast, the art work, though also created in the past, is today a self-sufficient ar- tifact which we can contemplate. When visiting the Bardi Chapel, what I recall of Vasari's account of Giotto may, it is true, influence how I see those images. But I can also seek to understand Giotto's work unanachronistically. His paintings, unlike the events caused by Napoleon or Hitler, do not now exist only as represented in an historical narrative.

29. See Douglas Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins," reprinted in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash., 1983), 42-56.

30. The political significance of Zionist interpretations of the holocaust -an instructive example because of the partisan passions it arouses - is interestingly discussed in Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore and London, 1987), 77-81.


198 REVIEW ESSAYS

Once we thus recognize that there is a basic distinction between the art work itself and that work as it is represented in a developmental history of art such as Vasari's, then what follows is that the argument Belting gives for linking the history of art to the development of contemporary art is not plausible. Perhaps modernism or postmodernism will get us to see old master art differently. Influenced by abstract art, connoisseurs of the future, Greenberg suggests, "may . . . find in the concreteness of color and shape relations more 'human interest' than in the extra-pictorial references of old-time illusionistic art.""3 Even so, one essential task of the art historian will be to understand those old master works as they were seen by their creators. For unless we can understand them thus, how indeed could we even know that we understood them differently from earlier viewers? In a very brilliant discussion, Leo Steinberg has made a related, but different claim; perhaps a precondition for our capacity to articulate a correct interpretation of some old master works is our experience of contemporary art.32 According to his account, which is too elaborate to summarize here, only this experience of recent art gives us the interpretative skills needed to understand the old master works as they were intended to be seen. Steinberg's account gives reason to question the special authority of Vasari's history; but it provides no support for Belting's view of the relation between contemporary art and art history.

Still, even if Belting's argument does not support this conclusion, it is clear that it touches on a belief which is significant, if only because it now is so widely shared. As Noel Carroll notes in a highly suggestive account of postmodernism, this fascination with endings "has hit some sort of nerve" in our culture.33 Since he is as unwilling to take at face value the argumentation of the postmodernists as I am to accept Belting's claims, I welcome his appeal to a sociological explanation of the importance of such beliefs. "The fixation with postmodernism may be simply a poignant manifestation of latent anxieties about the decline of the American imperium." In fact, I believe, there need not always be such a tight connection between the development of painting and the culture in which it was created. The decline of the Venetian Republic in the eighteenth century may have had little to do with the work of Tiepolo and Guardi. But maybe the belief that the end is at hand, which in our culture is reinforced, ironically, by the apparent end of the tradition of Hegelian-Marxist visions of history, really does influence painters and art historians as well. Here indeed some further historical perspective is helpful.

Alexandre Kojeve, whose interpretations of Hegel is one source for Danto's "The End of Art," first thought, on the basis of his trips to America and Russia between 1948 and 1958, that "la period post-historique" was concluded by what he calls "l'American way of life"; in 1959, when he visited Japan, he came to "radicalement change d'avis sur ce point."34 But just as the prophecy that the

31. Greenberg, Art and Culture, 137. 32. For a discussion, see my "Art and Its Spectators," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti-

cism, 45 (1986), 5-17. 33. Noel Carroll, "Illusions of Postmodernism," Raritan 7 (1987), 154-155. 34. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Paris, 1947), 437.


REVIEW ESSAYS 199

world will end this year seems silly when life continues the next year, so now these claims seem merely amusing. For even if we believe that the post-historical phase of human history began some decades ago, still our historians of the present must find some way of telling the history of life after 1959.35 Eighteenth-century aestheticians were fascinated by those intimations of disaster provided by what they called the sublime; so we like to believe, it seems, that history is near its end. And whether this belief reflects awareness of the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe, as Danto has suggested, or just that weariness which comes from knowing too much about the history of the arts, this belief, with which it is hard to argue, plays a very real role in contemporary intellectual life. Vasari's contemporaries inherited from antiquity elaborate accounts of the history of art but very few of the paintings described in those accounts; perhaps Raphael was lucky to be unable to see the works of Apelles, since that permitted him to work without the burden of knowing the art of his precursors in antiquity. But in our museums, we can see all the surviving art from the past; and that may be unfortunate for our artists who want to do something new.

Just as even superstitious people are likely to think of New Year's Eve as a special occasion, though they know that this way of dating the beginning of the new year is arbitrary, so there is a collective need today, it seems, to believe that the end of many things is at hand. Walking in an unfamiliar city, many of us are more comfortable if we have a map in hand. Similarly, what was comforting about a developmental narrative like that provided by Vasari and his successors, Gombrich and Greenberg, was that they gave order to our experience of art, providing a map which placed each individual work within an historical frame- work. The present recognition of both the limitations and the ultimate arbitrari- ness of such narratives is thus likely to leave us feeling disoriented. We have learned that such texts are not records of an objective order which exists out there in the world, but are merely our ways of imposing an ordering on that world; but this knowledge does not comfort us. The real importance of Belting's confused, often confusing, book lies less in his argumentation than in his articulation of this elusive, highly significant feeling.

DAVID CARRIER Carnegie-Mellon University

35. Here I have learned from a review of Danto's The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art by Alexander Nehamas, forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy.


Article Contentsp. 188p. 189p. 190p. 191p. 192p. 193p. 194p. 195p. 196p. 197p. 198p. 199

Issue Table of ContentsHistory and Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2, May, 1988Front MatterFictional History and Historical Fiction: Solzhenitsyn and Ki as Exemplars [pp. 111 - 124]Metaphor and Historical Understanding [pp. 125 - 134]Critical Philosophy of History in Soviet Thought [pp. 135 - 145]Herder's Critique of the Enlightenment: Cultural Community versus Cosmopolitan Rationalism [pp. 146 - 168]Review Essaysuntitled [pp. 169 - 177]untitled [pp. 178 - 187]untitled [pp. 188 - 199]

Books in Summary [pp. 200 - 203]Back Matter

david carrier - review of the the end of the history of art by hans belting

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