The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-09-24)

20 The New York Review

observation made in 1936 by the Ameri-

can art historian Meyer Schapiro:

The racial theories of fascism call

constantly on the traditions of

art.... Where else but in the his-

toric remains of the arts does the

nationalist find the evidence of his

fixed racial character.... Only the

artistic monuments of his country

assure him that his ancestors were

like himself, and that his own char-

acter is an unchangeable heritage

rooted in his blood and native soil.

For a whole century already the

study of the history of art has been

exploited for these conclusions.

There is no doubt that, across dis-

ciplines, European thought of the

nineteenth and much of the twentieth

centuries was self- servingly racist, and

Michaud effectively illuminates art his-

tory’s own contributions to “Aryan”

aggrandizement. Wood’s book has no

such coherent thesis, and as a result the

two are helpful complements to each

other. While Michaud funnels every-

thing toward one conclusion, Wood

suggests the panoply of ideas that might

be derived from the same sources. Mi-

chaud anatomizes the discipline’s pre-

occupation with “peoples” and “races,”

while Wood reminds us that the eigh-

teenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth

centuries were marked by a fascination

with individual creative “geniuses.”

Wood’s chapter on the mid-

eighteenth century places Winckel-

mann in a quartet of contemporaneous

thinkers, including the eclectic En-

glish revivalist Horace Walpole, the

printmaker and historical fantasist

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and the en-

cyclopedist Denis Diderot, who, in ad-

dition to his other activities, “invented

modern art criticism.” Each represents

a different understanding of the rela-

tionship between art and history, rip-

ples of which still reverberate today.

The teeming cast of characters and

caroming arguments that fill Wood’s

pages can be confounding (especially

given the book’s baffling avoidance of

footnotes), but they offer a salutary re-

minder of how messy and inconclusive

intellectual history actually is.

The arguments batted around by long-

dead chroniclers of even longer- dead

artists may seem indulgent or immate-

rial in the midst of a global pandemic,

economic subsidence, and existential po-

litical jeopardy for our democracy. Who,

beyond the halls of academe, really has

any need of Winckelmann? If we learn

anything from these books, however, it

should be that systems and schema have

a way of leeching out from their origi-

nal domains into the actual world.

One of the monuments injured this

summer depicted, of all things, an elk.

Part of the David P. Thompson Foun-

tain in Portland, Oregon, the bronze

elk had been sculpted by Roland Hin-

ton Perry in 1900. It had been vandal-

ized during the Occupy Wall Street

protests and was removed in July of

this year after fires damaged its stone

plinth. The elk had taken no part in the

preservation of slavery or the slaughter

of indigenous peoples. It may just have

been in the wrong place (at the nexus

of government buildings) at the wrong

time. But its materials and manner of

execution, as well as its urban position,

testify to its origins in the white male

power- base of turn- of- the- twentieth-

century America. Had it looked like a

Tom Otterness sculpture—goofy and

friendly rather than Teddy Roosevelt–

epic—would it have been targeted in

the same way? Perhaps the protesters,

like Winckelmann, recognized a style

and, through it, an entire worldview.

The truth is, we are all making art

historical judgments all the time, and

it is worth giving thought to how those

judgments are formed and whom they

serve. For two hundred years now, each

generation of professional art historians

has proposed new metrics, elevated the

despised, and learned, in Wood’s words,

to “include ever more and censure ever

less.” But as he also acknowledges, ag-

nosticism about form is not the same

thing as indifference to content: “Rel-

ativism on the level of style is relatively

easy; relativism on the level of custom,

ritual, and belief is hard to achieve.”

Earlier this year, Yale University

became the latest prominent school

to announce changes to its introduc-

tory art history courses to make them

more globally inclusive. Conservative

critics rallied to the flag of Eurocen-

trism with outrage: Spectator USA

published an essay by the New Crite-

rion editor James Panero titled “Sta-

lin at Yale: Art History for the Age of

Identity Politics.” Stalin aside (Yale’s

art history chair, Tim Barringer, noted,

“Stalin murdered nine million people,

while our Department is offering four,

rather than two, 100- level courses. The

parallel is imprecise”), what is most

revealing about the title is its implicit

assertion that an art history focused

entirely on Europe and North America

is somehow not about identity politics.

Art history is, inevitably, a story

imposed on a selected group of arti-

facts by people who, consciously or

unconsciously, have predilections and

agendas. Ideally, the story grows from

the objects, and the question of which

objects is what animates both conser-

vative critics and the protesters in the

streets. As Wood and Michaud demon-

strate, the canon has never been static.

New things come in, old things get

weeded out and sometimes come back.

As for the current row over monuments,

memorials, and statues, a few things

are clear. We cannot limit public art to

works whose subjects and styles are in

lockstep with our own ethics; our muse-

ums would be empty if we did. Neither,

however, can we ignore the reality that

certain forms of public display act as en-

dorsements of the values of those who

erected them. Classical sculptures could

only be loved by Christians once the

gods they represented had died. Robert

E. Lee is not yet a dead god. Q^

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Roland Hinton Perry’s Elk in the

undisclosed location where it has been stored

during the protests against police brutality

in Portland, Oregon, August 2020

Brian Libby