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| Piero della Francesca; The Flagellation of Christ |
In fact the first thing to say is that historians and critics tend to get a bit confused over their separate functions, that is they don't seem to realise that they have separate functions. The job of the critic is to discuss the merits and demerits of a particular work whereas the role of the historian is to construct a narrative to make a coherent story out of the history of art.
Now put like that it may well occur to the intelligent reader that I have set the historian an impossible task, and indeed others before me, most notably Gombrich, have declared that there is no coherent story, there is properly speaking, no art history as such, only artists. This view has much to recommend it. It is true that there are certain epochs in history, the Renaissance being the obvious example when there seemed to be a cultural zeitgeist influencing the whole art world, when artists seemed to be working towards a common goal, in this case of greater descriptive truth and technical prowess, and yet on closer examination even this view has flaws, so much so that the old terms of High Renaissance ' and 'Mannerism' for example tend to be eschewed.
I shan't go into detail on this particular issue here suffice to say that perhaps inevitably in our age of fragmentation, the view that there is a coherent thread running through art history is beginning to seem less plausible. The exception to this though is the history of modernism. Here there most definitely is an official narrative which quite firmly divides artists into sheep and goats, those who furthered, or at least accepted the rise of modernism and those who resisted. The former being praised to the skies, the latter cast into darkness. This is where the great confusion between the function of critic and historian lies and it leads to much mental turmoil for the honest historian and sometimes the adoption of an Orwellian mode of 'double think'.
The problem manifest itself in two complementary ways, both the result of confusing artistic merit with art historical significance. Now, if you construct a narrative which makes the rise of modernism the central cultural event of the last 150 years (and to be fair, you don't need to approve of it to recognise its importance) then that makes Cezanne an artist of great significance, the 'father of modernism' as he is often called, and he thus becomes at a stroke the most influential artistic figure of the modern world. Historians, confusing their function, thus have to market him as one of, if not the, greatest artists of the same period. The reverse side of the coin is that artists with no particular influence on modernism are relegated to 'also ran' status. The Pre-Raphaelites have long been the exemplar of this; they are dismissed as insignificant and as having been a cultural dead end and therefore of no merit.
The mistake made here is to take what is called (or at least was when I was a student) the 'Whig' view of history, which in short means reading it backwards. The great British historians of the 19th century regarded Britain as almost an ideal state, a peaceful prosperous democracy (in their terms) and asked themselves the question, 'how did we get from the barbarous past to the wonderful present?' and history became the story of that development. Art history, at least the last 150 years of it is now treated in the same way, 'how did we get from the ridiculous Victorian academic to the glories of Damian Hirst?' thus a canon of relevant artists has been created. Courbet begat Manet, Manet begat Monet, Monet begat Cezanne, Cezanne begat Picasso and so on down the line. If an artist is not on that family tree he is rejected by most and desperately tried to force into it by his particular supporters.
For fifty years after their deaths great Victorian artists such as Leighton, Millais and Burne-Jones were either ridiculed or ignored by art historians, their merits as painters deliberately traduced because they did not fit into the story of modernism and even now, when their skill and talent is more widely appreciated by the public, academic historians feel the need to justify their attention by trying to bring them into the canon. Thus Burne-Jones is praised because the young Picasso admired his work and Millais gains kudos because Van Gogh liked his landscapes as if who liked or disliked their work could have any retrospective effect on the quality of their work!
Possibly the most ridiculous example I have come across was in a book about Piero della Francesca which invited the reader to admire that master's work because his interest in geometric forms 'anticipated' Cezanne. As if the only thought in Piero's mind in his workshop in Borgo San Sepulchro as he worked on his marvellous 'Flagellation of Christ' ( see the image at the top of the post, you see it was there for a reason!) was "this is bound to interest some semi skilled painter five centuries from now" and as if Cezanne could have produced anything with an iota of its thoughtfulness and strange beauty in five lifetimes of trying! Having said that takes the prize, I did see a close contender in a review of the recent exhibition of the Glasgow Boys in London. The writer (who I would name and shame if only I could remember who it was) noticing that these painters lived and worked in the last decades of the nineteenth century criticised them for not being followers of Monet but only of another painter he had obviously never heard of, to whit Bastien Lepage. Knowing only the official canon of modern art it seemed positively wilful to this critic that anybody could ignore the giant Monet and take as an exemplar an artist no longer thus enshrined, rather as if a scientist of the eighteenth century had ignored Newton and tried to construct a model of the universe without gravity.
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| Jules Bastien-Lepage: Pauvre Fauvette |
