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Revisionism Revisited Author(s): Kirk Varnedoe Source: Art Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1/2, Modernism, Revisionism, Plurism, and Post-Modernism (

Autumn - Winter, 1980), pp. 348-352Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776599Accessed: 08-08-2015 06:56 UTC

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Revisionism

Revisited Kirk Varnedoe

Kirk Varnedoe teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American art at the Institute of Fine Arts, N.Y.U.

The last decade has seen major changes in the aims and procedures of the art history of the nineteenth century. The previously dom- inant idea of a "great line" of stylistic progress towards formal abstraction, encom- passing as its heroes Courbet, Manet, the Impressionists, and Cezanne in succession, has been challenged by alternative method- ologies stressing iconographical and/or soci- ological interpretation and by widespread attention to artists outside the French and the avant-garde traditions. In 1974, coinci- dent with the centenary Impressionist exhi- bition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I wrote an article that considered changes in our view of Impressionism in light of devel- opments in academia, in contemporary taste, and in the art market.' The present essay, dealing with the art history of the European nineteenth century more broadly, will con- sider aspects of the situation that have changed or become more clearly defined since 1974.

Revisionism in nineteenth-century art his- tory seems an idea whose time has come and gone. The ferment that threatened to produce rebellious ideas in the early 1970s has instead been co-opted with astonish- ing swiftness and has produced a new establishment, with all the trappings of an arriviste class. "Alternative" auction houses such as Sotheby's Belgravia and "alterna- tive" galleries such as the Shepherd Gallery in New York have shed the taint of the flea market and have taken on their own snob appeal, gravely and expensively plying Bouguereau and Breton as if they were old masters. These sellers now feed revi- sionist "master" collectors such as Tan- nenbaum in Canada, Butkin in Cleveland, and Spivar and Forbes in New York; these collections in turn generate (in dim re-

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flection of the Duveen-Gardner-Berenson model of an interlocked market-scholar system) exhibitions, publications, and symposia duly imprinted with the cachet of specialized revisionist curators and scholars.2 Alternative methodologies in the field-notably feminist and/or neo- Marxist approaches-have at the same time not only made their impact felt in their own publications but have won en- dorsement from the very citadels of former conservatism, as is stunningly demon- strated by recent appointments to the faculties of Harvard and Princeton.3

All this acceptance clearly signals sev- eral positive advances. The ease with which revisionism in its various forms has tri- umphed bears witness to the inadequacies of the narrow, a-historical concept that had formerly annexed the nineteenth cen- tury to a certain formalist vision of the destiny of twentieth-century modernism. Liberated from that concept, we have seen gains in our awareness of the beauty and significance of whole spheres of nineteenth-century art, especially outside France. Caspar David Friedrich may in this regard be the outstanding "recovery" of the past decade; but the same tendency extended to reevaluations of Northern art in general, in Romanticism and Symbolism (Robert Rosenblum's Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition being a key text of this new awareness). We have also become more supple in our recognition of the complexities of develop- ments within France, in academic circles (hardly as monolithic as previously sup- posed), in equivocal areas such as Barbi- zon painting and the art of Puvis de Cha- vannes, and within the avant-garde itself.4 Perhaps most significantly, the study of

the century has become more responsibly historical, less deformed by hindsight, and more intent on searching for signifi- cant connections between the visual arts and the broader structures of social and intellectual life of the time.

But we have paid a price for all this. It seems increasingly clear that the expan- sion of tolerance in the past decade has left a map of the field whose polyglot fragmentation is as inhibiting, in different senses, as was the former orthodoxy. The rewards of new knowledge and flexibility are tempered by the discomforts of a certain rudderless feeling, since no viable new criteria of selection or broad con- cepts of organization have emerged to replace the discredited dogmas. The recent exhibition in London of Post-Impression- ism (a substantially altered version of which appeared at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, May-September, 1980) -a massive, vertigo-inducing compila- tion of late nineteenth-century European painting of every type and nationality-is a case in point.5

Like the earlier David to Delacroix show,6 Post-Impressionism ironically proclaimed a tide evoking the certainties of old art-historical ideas, only to subvert, in the selection of exhibited works, the very notions of unified stylistic evolution the title implied. David to Delacroix rather gently re-oriented Walter Friedlaen- der's version; but Post-Impressionism adopted a wholesale eclecticism totally at odds with Roger Fry's use of the term.7 The differences between the two exhibi- tions owed partly to broadened geograph- ical focus and to the difference in character of the beginning and end of the century: state-dominated salon patronage on the

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one hand and multi-national splinter groups of experimentally independent art- ists on the other. But the differences also owed to the respective organizers: in the first case, scholars such as Robert Rosen- blum and Pierre Rosenberg, trained in the "old school" and proffering a selec- tively revised approach; in the second case, much younger art historians (e.g., John House and MaryAnne Stevens), prod- ucts of the new dispensation and unblink- ingly permissive in their inclusive sweep of the period.

For all its delights of discovery, valuable information, and pleasures of the off-beat, Post-Impressionism brought to a head some nagging doubts about the validity of such revisionist endeavors. A true "cake baked by a committee," the exhibition was selected and organized in accordance with principles that vacillated from those of style to those of theme to those of geography. The viewer, even in the tight- ened and restructured Washington presen- tation, was hard pressed to find the rhymes and reasons in many areas and to find a consistent governing justification for the inclusions and exclusions of the ensemble. The breadth of the endeavor wound up seeming as artificial and willful, in its own way, as Fry's elitist narrowness. Fur- thermore, the urge to revolution seemed here enmeshed with some highly reac- tionary notions. Throughout the catalog and in the wall-label texts, oversimplified ideas of realism and naturalism were used as foils to define the works at hand. The will to stress the innovative complexity of the 1880s and 1890s led consistently by implication to a false picture of the preceding decades as an "Impressionist epoch" concerned with mere description of the world, in opposition to the idea- oriented subjective stylizations that fol- lowed. Such compartmentalization is an unworthy anachronism, not only philo- sophically but also historically indefensible.

Beyond its intended irony, the exhibi- tion title was thus symptomatic of the general malaise of revisionism today: we have the ambition to deal with a lot more painting and a more complex view of history, but we have not yet worked out a way in which to deal integrally with old values and new freedoms. For want of any innovative ideas strong enough to reshape the expanded field, shopworn nomencla- tures and categories stand. The lure of a label such as "Post-Impressionism" is used cynically to trade on the prestige of past thought, to draw the public into an effort to undermine, rather than to cele- brate or replace, the critical effort evoked by the phrase. Next year in Cleveland and Brooklyn we shall see a show entitled The Realist Tradition, in which Courbet, Manet, and Degas will figure only in token

form beside impressive accumulations of Bonvin and Ribot and Raffaelli.8 These shows are undeniably enlightening, and we have certainly not seen the last of their kind. Yet the disjunction between their banners and their content goes past irony into pathos. Increasingly impressive gov- ernment and corporate funding and gen- erous museum publicity cannot obscure the fact that our recipes are inadequate to the proliferation of new ingredients; in significant ways, interested tolerance be- comes a mask for our uncertainty about what to make of it all.

Apparent incoherency, the breakdown of rigid order, and the proliferation of diversity are characteristics, perhaps the characteristics, of the development of nineteenth-century art. This does not mean that an honest and responsible art history of the period need itself be characterized by the same features. Levelling alone is an inadequate replacement for a false exclu- sivity. It is stimulating to see new images, and it is certainly pleasurable to under- stand and enjoy more than a few Olympian artists. But a worthwhile revisionism should eventually portend more than simply a plethora of new information, new pictures, and lesser doctoral theses.

Happily, there are now signs that new paradigms of study, consolidating the gains of the past decade while accepting the challenge of the most difficult issues of judgment, are also emerging. These new studies depart from the concentration on subject matter and the enormous prolif- eration of iconographical studies that re- visionism has fostered. They point to a centering of the pendulum's swing and to a resolution of the dilemma of choice between stylistic emphasis (which had degenerated into an empty formalism) and thematic emphasis (which risks a- visual and indiscriminate relativism).

I refer specifically to the work of T.J. Clark and Robert Herbert.9 Though hardly in constant agreement, these two scholars have in recent years produced work that shares at least two significant innovative qualities: the imaginative use of an extraor- dinarily broad range of documentation from nontraditional sources and the ex- acting re-examination of painterly tech- nique. They have, furthermore, aimed their investigations in common directions: first, to establish a better idea of the historical reality behind the conception of a subject and thereby to find greater significance in artistic decisions previ- ously taken for granted; and second, to demonstrate how painterly technique and formal structures bear meaning not inde- pendent of but inextricably tied to the conception of the subject. The idea of "subject" is thus being broadened, re- fined, and merged with matters of style

into a more holistic conception of meaning than has generally been applied to Realist and Impressionist art.

Clark, author of the influential and con- troversial two-volume study of art around 1848, Image of the People and The Abso- lute Bourgeois, is the best-known repre- sentative of a neo-Marxist approach flour- ishing among younger scholars both here and in Europe. 1 Departing from the over- view methods of Hauser, Klingender, and Antal,1I this approach places heavy em- phasis on seeing the art work through the lens of contemporary responses and on analyzing those responses as psycho-polit- ically loaded texts in themselves. The basic insistence is the familiar Marxist tenet that, to the contrary of ideas of "enduring beauty," the meaning of art lies in its relationship to its immediate socio-political environment. The innova- tive impulse lies in the way in which this idea of "meaning" is extended more subtly and more specifically beyond the nominal depicted subject, by a semiotic probing of style, into the structure of the formal decisions of major artists. In Clark's article on Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere, for example, the space/surface ambiguities of the image are seen as signs for the class uncertainties of the cafe-concert environment.12 This new Marxism is ex- haustively particular in its zealous exami- nation of supporting texts and statistics and far more attentive to nuance than its generic predecessors. The problem some will find persisting-beyond the tendency to state some commonsense ideas in un- necessary ideological and jargon-burdened convolutions of style-is that the expanded stress on pictorial form as a quasi-auton- omous transmitter of socio-economic conditions leaves an equivocal, uncertain role for the artist's personal intentions in the work.

Herbert's writing is markedly different in this regard. He also brings forward far-ranging research into the historical conditions surrounding the artist, be it Millet in Barbizon or Monet at Sainte- Adresse. But his emphasis is far more centrally on the artist as constructor of a reality, actively selecting and determining a point of view in dialogue with his times. Hence, Herbert is more attentive to biog- raphy, and when he turns to close analysis of technique (in Monet particularly) he stresses not so much the transmission of a condition of reality as the artist's guileful magic of artifice. Symptomatically, Clark works from earlier in the century towards Impressionism, while Herbert sees Monet in his connections to later Symbolism.13 Clark thus tends to annex purportedly abstracting elements (such as Manet's spatial flattening) into social realist refer- ence, while Herbert shows that purportedly

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descriptive or "natural" elements (such as Monet's brushwork) are self-conscious- ly artificial and subjective.

Both of these authors will soon bring out books on the Impressionist period, and several of their students are already well along in important studies of other topics in nineteenth-century painting. The net gains from such work will likely be the revelation of deeper meaning in pic- tures-indeed, in whole spheres of art- where subject matter had previously been either ignored or too facilely attached to the idea of a "direct" response to everyday life. More generally, their methodology will help to belie over-simplified distinc- tions between representational and formal/ expressive painting that have often plagued attempts to trace the unities of nineteenth- century art. It remains to be seen whether either approach-and only the Marxists make claims in this regard-provides the model of a new "field theory" of meaning that would function as well in the domains of history painting, mythology, and the like as it does in confronting paintings of nature and modem life.

Articles like Herbert's "Method and Meaning in Monet" serve in any event as a salutary reminder that, even if Manet, Monet, et al. have been exaggeratedly exalted for specious reasons, and even though the history of art involves more than simply a "star" system, it is still one of the central challenges of teaching and scholarship to concern itself with the investigation and explication of exceptional artists. In that regard, it is instructive to note that traditional hierarchies of quality in painting have so far survived revisionism relatively unscathed. If several artists have justifiably risen in general estimation, there has as yet been no broad upset of inherited values as consequential as, for example, the earlier reassessment of Mannerism within the context of Renaissance art. It would seem that, even if we can look forward to new groupings and categories that offer clearer understanding of the linkages between artists of different styles and levels of achievement, the potential for change in our lists of the most weighty and compelling painters of the century may be near its limit.

Outside the area of painting, however, in the fields of nineteenth-century sculp- ture and photography, the situation is markedly different. Prior to the 1970s, these domains were afflicted not so much by biased attention and narrow ideas as by inattention and a lack of serious re- search. Hence, the past decade has seen in these areas not revision so much as construction of a raw and primal kind. Furthermore, the phenomenon of expan- sion in these fields has been perhaps the most direct evidence of historical views

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changing in concert with contemporary taste. On a simple level, sculpture and photography have come to seem more significant as these mediums have surged to exceptionally prominent positions in contemporary artistic consciousness since the mid-1960s. In a more complex ap- proach, the recent historical interest in these forms of art shows a willingness to deal with special problems particularly relevant to a decade characterized by Minimal and Conceptual art.

In nineteenth-century sculpture and photography, the questions of originality, authenticity, and personal style that so concern students of painting become highly problematic. The imagery in question comes down to us in multiple formats and sizes, in various materials via various processes, and often through diverse tech- nicians as intermediaries. Also, compared with sculpture's more constricting domi- nation by economics and politics (which distance it from life) and photography's more unwieldy involvement with mechan- ics and mass taste (which seem to enslave it to a base reality), painting seems to allow greater room for individual freedom of dialogue with the world and thus for the romance that pervades much of the appeal of nineteenth-century art. The in- creasing interest in the more difficult, ingrat, and seemingly impersonal arts of stone, metal, and chemicals does not seem imaginable without the change in general artistic sensibility that occurred, to the detriment of received ideas of freely expressed individuality-the grail of mod- ernism-in the early 1960s.

The study of nineteenth-century sculp- ture and photography seems particularly significant, too, because it embraces the first consistent attempts of art history to come to terms with the interface of art and technology that is one of the central phenomena of the century. In dealing with image-making systems so imperiously mediated by machines and devices and so directly prey to the effects of industri- alization, we confront the burgeoning mechanization and standardization that- from tubed paints to the Kodak-is the silent, anonymous, and omnipresent part- ner to the more familiar gains in individ- ualization and expressive liberty upon which nineteenth-century art historians have concentrated.

Sculpture before Rodin, little loved and generally ignored, has become the domain of a friendly coterie of historians, enamored of the pleasures of pilgrimages to weedy cemeteries and provincial town squares. Traditionally trained-many under H.W. Janson at the Institute of Fine Arts-these scholars have quietly untan- gled thickets of archival material and have patiently accumulated the catalogs

of variants, the lost critical literature, and the understanding of the training and commission system sufficient to produce a steadily more complete and informative picture of the century's production in such exhibitions as Ruth Butler's Monu- ments for the Middle Class; Jacques de Caso, Jeanne Wasserman, and others' Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture; and the Janson equipe's recent Romantics to Rodin.'4 Still to come, in 1981, is a thorough new exposition of Rodin, produced in collaboration with the Musee Rodin in Paris by Albert Elsen and a team of contributing scholars. 15

The situation in photography could not be more dissimilar. The whole range of photography's productions, from the daguerreotype to the present, has been these past years seized in a vogue that both surpasses and suppresses the histo- rian's concerns. If sculpture is an indus- trious new state peaceably settled in the land of nineteenth-century art history, photography is like some exotic Atlantis resurfaced volcanically from the sea. Amid the chaotic blossoming of prices, collec- tions, and literature that has celebrated this event, the most contradictory gambits of intellectual chic have found an open field (Susan Sontag's On Photography being the most prominent example), but the ar- chaeological contributions of the historian of art have generally been discouraged. 16

Because we know so little about the facts of older photography-who, when, why, where, and how much-the field is ripe for both dullards and imaginative theorists, and it will be a long time before consensual critical standards develop to sift through the current profusion. There are, nonetheless, some signs that the terri- tory is already being rather cruelly domes- ticated. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed that photography might be a radically volatile topic, a subversive chal- lenge to market economics and standard art history, and certainly the ultimate threat to formalist ideals of reflexive mod- ern art. Now, photographs turn out to be adaptable, more quickly than one could have imagined, to all the traditional ideas of "individual genius," "unique object quality," and rarity value that have sup- ported the painting and print markets.'7 We are furthermore, being called upon, by Rosalind Krauss in particular, to see that this medium, formerly imagined to be the ne plus ultra in transparent repre- sentation, is in fact anything but immune to formalist interpretation and that pho- tographers from very early on have been concerned not just with the external world but with the essential nature of photogra- phy as a causal trace of that world. 8 For those who looked to photography as a real alternative to art-world in-fighting,

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these developments must produce a dis- orienting sensation.

Photography is also, more slowly and less visibly, proving to be amenable to historical understanding within the larger context of the Western tradition of images and within the context of nineteenth-cen- tury visual arts in particular. With accu- mulating knowledge, the history of the medium turns out to be far more complex than previously understood: not at all a fitful conquest governed by chemical/ technological tinkering and peopled by a few lucky heroes, but a nexus of represen- tational nuances and conscious artistic decisions, connected to personalities, to patronage, and to the development of style in ways that transcend simplistic notions of photographic influence on paint- ers and that link up to fundamental issues of the century's expression. One of the broadest challenges of discovery remaining to historians of nineteenth-century art is to find out what photographers were really doing and to integrate developments in photography with the larger field. This process is already under way (the excellent session on Atget at the CAA annual meeting in 1980 gave a glimpse of it), and it promises to have a widespread effect. 19

At its best, the incorporation of photog- raphy into art history should not be to the detriment of the former, smothering it with old structures of understanding. It should be to the benefit of the latter, refining our notions of the syntaxes of representation and broadening our com- prehension of the modern period. The study of the oeuvre and the methods of an artist like Atget can take nothing for granted and must reconstruct intention by the most exacting statistical, material, and contextual research, more in the vein of modern anthropology and archaeology than in the fashion of usual nineteenth- century art history.20 The attempt to define a photographer's vision, furthermore, de- mands the most sensitive attention to nu- ance in the matters of light, framing, scale, distance, and so on. In these re- spects, such study dovetails with the work of Clark and Herbert and suggests ways in which modern realist representation may regain respect as a subject of study whose density, difficulty, and intellectual power are for the historian commensurable with the challenges of abstraction. Such a rearrangement of values, stressing the primacy of meaning as a simultaneous expression of form and content, could in turn open the way for additional probing of the continuities that bind the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the bound- aries of mediums and style and across the watershed of Cubism. Certainly, such a vision of new lineages of meaning is one of the major intentions, over and above

consideration of the particular artists and themes discussed, of Rosemblum's explo- rations in the neglected area of Northern contributions to modern art. There are other signs, too, that historians-partic- ularly younger ones, trained during the revisionist era-are finding it more natu- ral to deal with basic continuities and linkages (between centuries, between styles, between art and society) than with hierarchies and rigid categories. Here, rather than simply in the accumulation of variety, lies the potential promise of en- deavors such as the Post-Impressionist exhibition. If historians can move beyond inherited ideas and synthesize new unities from the chaos of newly discovered com- plexity, it may be that, instead of being dominated by narrow teleological ideas of twentieth-century art, nineteenth-century studies can provide the paradigms for powerful revisions within the central ter- ritory of modernism.21

It remains very difficult to say what effect conditions of contemporary taste and economics may have on such develop- ments in historical thinking. In the early 1970s, the taste for Minimalism and New Realism seemed to bode ill for the stand- ing of the painterly Impressionists and to favor the revival of academic art. In 1980, some developments in contemporary art -notably the importance of decoration and the resurgence of painterly abstrac- tion-seem to have the opposite import. Monet, far from being in retreat, has been revalued and redefined yet again, to stand more strongly than ever as an artist whose model of endeavor rivals that of Cezanne. The academic revival has mean- while succeeded only to the degree that, on a general level, some of the salon pompiers can now be respectably studied and appreciated on their own merits with- out undue guilt or fear of ridicule. Simi- larly, the steady increase in market values for the "stars" has not really been affected either by the massive boosts in prices for previously inexpensive forms of nineteenth- century art or by the emergence of a whole new market in photography. It seemed in the early 1970s that the inflation of Impressionist reputations and prices was soon destined to peak, but that prog- nosis underestimated the forces at work.

The art history of the nineteenth century is also still showing the signs of inflation. Inevitably, its growth, like that of the art market itself, will be strongly affected by economic realities. The seemingly unflag- ging increase in the number of people working in the field and the atmosphere of permissive eclecticism that has accom- panied the breakdown of cant will now meet the shrinking job market. Something must give, and the results may not be entirely negative. Though the swollen ec-

lecticism of the field may have encouraged atomized specialization, such specializa- tion will be increasingly impractical in academia. And though it has become far more difficult for any individual scholar to stay in touch with the breadth of devel- opments in the field, it should become clear that intellectual provincialism-such as exclusive Francophilia, or the long- standing mutual insularity of American and European studies-is now less justifi- able than ever. For these reasons, the economic squeeze tends to confirm what seems evident in principle: that the time has come for the tougher efforts of con- solidation and synthesis in the revisionist image of the nineteenth century. End

Notes 1 "Revision, Re-vision, Re: Vision; The

Status of Impressionism," Arts Magazine, November 1974. Reprinted, slightly short- ened, as "The Status of Impressionism in 1974," in Barbara Ehrlich White, ed., Impressionism in Perspective (Engle- wood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978). See also Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, "The Revival of Official Art," The New York Review of Books, March 18, 1976, pp. 32 - 39.

2 See for example the catalog of the Tannen- baum collection, The Other Nineteenth Century (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1978) and the catalog of Victorian paintings from the Forbes collection, The Royal Academy Revisited, 1975.

3 Among new periodicals, see especiallyArt History (British), Marxist Perspectives (American), and Histoire et critique des arts (French). The appointments to which I refer are those of TJ. Clark at Harvard and his student Tom Crow at Princeton.

4 In regard to the academic system, the key work remains Albert Boime's The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London: Phaidon, 1971)- through the book's idea of associating the academy with Impressionism via an official sketch aesthetic seems in retrospect a compromise strategy not entirely con- vincing. Robert Herbert has added to his pioneering work in Barbizon Revisited (San Francisco: California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1962) via the recent exhibition catalog, Jean-Franqois Millet (Paris: Grand Palais, 1977). On Puvis de Chavannes's special relation to revised ideas of modern art, see Richard Watten- maker, Puvis de Chavannes and the Modern Tradition (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1975).

5 The catalog of the Royal Academy exhibi- tion, Post-Impressionism, Cross-Currents in European Painting, edited by John House and MaryAnne Stevens, is distributed in the U.S. by Harper & Row. A review of the catalog appears in this issue, pages

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409. The selection committee of the exhi- bition was headed by Alan Bowness, and included House, Stevens, Frederick Gore, Anna Gruetzner, and Norman Rosenthal.

6 De David i Delacroix was the French title of the exhibition billed by the Metro- politan Museum as The Age of Revolu- tion (Paris: Grand Palais, 1974).

7 Walter Friedlaender, David to Delacroix, 1930, translated by Robert Goldwater and published by Harvard University Press in 1952. Roger Fry employed the term "Post- Impressionists" to describe the painters he selected for his exhibitions of modern French art at the Grafton Galleries, Lon- don, 1910 and 1912; see Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920).

8 The problem of The Realist Tradition- basically the problem of an inflated title for a show that does not contain much of the work of the major masters-is bound to be more and more pervasive. Given the rise in printing costs, it will continue to be the case that some of the best and most thorough scholarly work will find its outlet in grant-supported museum exhibition catalogs. Yet the increased funding for exhibitions, by the National Endowment as well as corporations, puts the pressure on curators to make a "pack- age" with public appeal, even when the actual content of the exhibition may be of more specialized interest. Major artists appear more and more in the form of "blockbuster" monographic exhibitions like the 1977 Paris-London Courbet show, while their work becomes less and less accessible to other kinds of loan exhibi- tions. Thus we seem destined to see mas- sive funding and energy sunk into exhi- bitions and catalogs that do not do justice to the larger topics with which they are concerned.

9 The articles especially considered are: TJ. Clark, "Manet's Bar at the Folies- Bergere," in The Wolf and the Lamb, Popular Culture in France (Saratoga: Anma Libre, 1977); TJ. Clark, "Un Realisme du corps: 'Olympia' et ses cri- tiques en 1865," Histoire et critique des arts, May 1978, and a subsequent ver- sion, "Preliminaries to a Possible Treat- ment of 'Olympia' in 1865," Screen, Spring 1980; and Robert Herbert, "Meth- od and Meaning in Monet, " Art in Ameri- ca, September 1979.

10 Work by other authors of this group can be judged in: Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Art History and Class Struggle (London: Pluto Press, 1978), and "'La Liberte guidant le peuple' devant son premier public," Actes de la recherches en sci- ences sociales, No. 28, 1979; Courbet und Deutschland, exhibition catalog, Hamburg, Kunsthalle, 1978; Michel Melot, "La Pratique d'un artiste: Camille Pissar-

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ro," Histoire et critique des arts, June 1977; and in the work of the Ulmer Verein-see Kunstgeschichte gegen den Strich gebiiurstet? 10Jahre Ulmer Verein (Giessen: Anabas-Verlag, 1969). See also the special issue of Histoire et critique des arts devoted to the question "Que faire de l'histoire de l'art?" Nos. 9-10, 1979.

11 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York: Vintage, n.d.) especially vols. 3 and 4.; F.D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (orig. 1947; New York: Shocken, 1970); and Frederick Antal, Classicism and Romanticism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

12 See note 9 above. 13 Ibid. 14 Ruth Butler Mirolli and Jane van Nimmen,

Nineteenth Century French Sculpture, Monuments for the Middle Class (Lex- ington: J.B. Speed Art Museum, 1971); Jeanne Wasserman, ed., Metamorphoses in Nineteenth Century Sculpture (Cam- bridge: Fogg Art Museum, 1975), with essays by Wasserman, de Caso, Arthur Beale, H.H. Arnason, Glen Benge, Annie Braunwald and Anne Middleton Wagner, Patricia Sanders, John Dryfhout, and Mi- chael Richman; Peter Fusco and H.W. Janson, eds., The Romanics to Rodin (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and George Braziller, 1980), with essays by Fusco, Janson, Anne M. Wagner, June Hargrove, James Holderbaum, John Hunisak, Ruth Butler, and Fred Licht.

15 Some of the Rodin material can be seen in advance of the exhibition, in: Albert Elsen, In Rodin's Studio (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

16 For the flavor of recent debate in the field, see Max Kozloff, "Report from the Region of Decayed Smiles," Art in Ameri- ca, April 1980.

17 See my article, "Artifact or Fact Art?: Transparent Problems in Photography," Arts Magazine, June 1975.

18 Rosalind Krauss, "Tracing Nadar," Octo- ber, Summer 1978; and "Steiglitz/Equiv- alents, " October, Winter 1979.

19 The Atget session was chaired by Joel Snyder. The participants were John Szar- kowski, Maria Morris, Margaret Nesbit, and Alan Trachtenberg.

20 I1 am referring especially to the doctoral thesis on Atget by Maria Morris, recently awarded distinction by Columbia Univer- sity. See also Barbara Michaels, "An In- troduction to the Dating and Organization of Eugene Atget's Photographs," Art Bul- letin, September 1979.

Harry Rand's decoding of Gorky in "The Calendars of Arshile Gorky," Arts Maga- zine, March 1976; and the whole vogue of Jungian criticism of Jackson Pollock, summarized and attacked by William Rubin, "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism," Parts I and II, Art in America, November and December 1979. An eccentric but lively offshoot of the same patterns in criticism can be seen in the proliferation of ideas regarding hidden imagery, es- pecially faces. See, for example, Sidney Geist, "Secret Life of Paul Cezanne," Art International, November 1975; and "What Makes the Black Clock Run," ArtInterna- tional, February 1978. Also: D. Lesko, "Cezanne's Bather and a Found Self-Por- trait," Arfforum, December 1976.

21 New methods of dealing with nineteenth- century art join, from the opposite direc- tion, the increasing tendency to find unsuspected representational content and/ or literal meaning in abstract or seeming- ly anti-naturalist art. See, for example,

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