Other titles of interest published by Thames & Hudson include: Mirror of the World: A New History of Art Julian Bell Art Since 1900: Modernism – Antimodernism – Postmodernism Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and David Joselit What Makes a Masterpiece? Encounters with Great Works of Art Christopher Dell (ed) How to Read a Painting: Decoding, Understanding and Enjoying the Old Masters Patrick de Rynck Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time Alexander Nagel Books: A Living History Martin Lyons See our websites www.thamesandhudson.com www.thamesandhudsonusa.com Contents PREFACE Richard Shone INTRODUCTION John-Paul Stonard CHAPTER 1 Emile Mâle L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: Etude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 1898 ALEXANDRA GAJEWSKI CHAPTER 2 Bernard Berenson The Drawings of the Florentine Painters Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art, with a Copious Catalogue Raisonné, 1903 CARMEN C. BAMBACH CHAPTER 3 Heinrich Wölfflin Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst, 1915 DAVID SUMMERS CHAPTER 4 Roger Fry Cézanne: A Study of His Development, 1927 RICHARD VERDI CHAPTER 5 Nikolaus Pevsner Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius, 1936 COLIN AMERY CHAPTER 6 Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Matisse: His Art and His Public, 1951 JOHN ELDERFIELD CHAPTER 7 Erwin Panofsky Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 1953 SUSIE NASH CHAPTER 8 Kenneth Clark The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, 1956 JOHN-PAUL STONARD CHAPTER 9 E.H. Gombrich Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1960 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD CHAPTER 10 Clement Greenberg Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 1961 BORIS GROYS CHAPTER 11 Francis Haskell Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque, 1963 LOUISE RICE CHAPTER 12 Michael Baxandall Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 1972 PAUL HILLS CHAPTER 13 T.J. Clark Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, 1973 ALASTAIR WRIGHT CHAPTER 14 Svetlana Alpers The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, 1983 MARIËT WESTERMANN CHAPTER 15 Rosalind Krauss The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 1985 ANNA LOVATT CHAPTER 16 Hans Belting Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, 1990 JEFFREY HAMBURGER NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES EDITORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX COPYRIGHT Preface RICHARD SHONE ALL BUT ONE OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS to this volume originally appeared in The Burlington Magazine as part of the series ‘Art History Reviewed’. The inspiration for this came from a set of articles The Burlington had carried some years previously about influential art critics of the past. The dozen or so essays came out intermittently between 1952 and 1975, an eclectic selection with little sense of order. Wishing to vary the more usual contents of the magazine, I had the idea for a series of articles that would reassess those books that, over the twentieth century, had significantly shaped the discipline of art history and influenced the wider appreciation of works of art. Each book was to be reviewed by a writer prominent in the field covered by the selected publication. Building on an initial list of about thirty volumes selected with the help of John- Paul Stonard, whose enthusiasm for the series ensured that it was finally launched, and aided by the other editors of the magazine, Jane Martineau and Bart Cornelis, a refined selection of sixteen books was produced, each of which in our collective view stands as a significant touchstone. Of the many worthy books first suggested, several necessarily had to be dropped: some appeared to repeat or be too close to the achievements of ones that had definitely made the grade; some belonged too much perhaps to the taste of a particular period. Reflecting the variety of the selected books, the essays in this volume cover painting, drawing, architecture and design, from the minutiae of connoisseurship to the broader canvas of theory and aesthetics. They tackle aspects of biography, reception history and patronage and include revealing descriptions of how and why the publications under review came to be written. All the chosen books, however, are characterised by a passionate engagement with and visionary interrogation of the subject, with, in many cases, a strong polemical intent. This, at least in part, is what has ensured their survival and continuing significance in the twenty-first century – why they are books that have helped to shape art history. Introduction JOHN-PAUL STONARD THIS BOOK IS A COLLECTION of essays on sixteen of the most influential books of art history published during the twentieth century. Written by a range of leading scholars and curators, the essays reconsider these major texts and, taken together, offer a pathway through the often daunting bibliographic maze of literature on art; a roadmap of sorts for reading art history. The books were chosen for their trailblazing qualities, for the way in which they forged entirely new ways of seeing the history of art. Their subjects range from medieval architecture to the work of Matisse, from Byzantine icon painting to postmodernism. Whereas many books introducing art history do so from the perspective of theories and methods, this volume alights rather on the landmark publications that have shaped the subject, as well as the personalities and stories behind those texts. Great books have lives of their own that grow over time, through translations, new revisions and editions, and above all through reading and re-reading by generations of scholars and art lovers. Re-reading is the crucial step towards grasping the character of a book, what it stands for, and what we think of it, be that a matter of admiration or antagonism. Re-reading can also bring to light the disputes and debates between books, intellectual conflicts that can consolidate positions as well as create completely new ways of seeing and describing. Re-reading may also remind us of when we first became fascinated by art, not just as a matter of visual pleasure but also of intellectual nourishment, and may in addition help us to recall our developing awareness of the strange and elusive concept of art itself. The earliest book considered in this volume is Emile Mâle’s magisterial study of thirteenth-century French art, L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: Etude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’inspiration, first published in 1898. The great innovation of this text, as Alexandra Gajewski writes, was to elucidate the meaning of the French Gothic cathedral by relating it to the liturgical texts of the time. Mâle pioneered an ‘iconographic’ approach to this task, which involved finding the textual sources for images and using these to unlock their narrative or their spiritual meaning. Although lurking in the background was the importance of asserting the French-ness of medieval art – thus his focus on the ‘glorious’ thirteenth century – the Geist of Mâle’s book is not overtly nationalistic, but rather Catholic, and the true works of art liturgical – the Stabat Mater, the liturgy of Holy Week, the Gospels, authentic and apocryphal – which find themselves naturally mirrored in the Gothic cathedral, that ‘encyclopaedia in stone’. At the end of his book, Mâle proposes the cathedral as a refuge, an indestructible ark, against whose walls ‘the storm of life breaks’; ‘no place in the world fills men with a deeper feeling of security’. Mâle’s book, as it went through multiple editions into the twentieth century, was to be a time capsule itself for his iconographic, literary method, from which he was unable to depart in favour of the broader cultural–historical approach of those such as Aby Warburg, or indeed any of the other scholarly–scientific methods that evolved in the new century. No greater contrast could be found to Mâle’s book than Bernard Berenson’s The Drawings of the Florentine Painters Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art, with a Copious Catalogue Raisonné, first published in two volumes in 1903. It had in fact been written at around the same time as Mâle’s volume, but was delayed by six years for publication. It remains a primary work of reference for Renaissance drawings to this day – a remarkable achievement considering the amount of books published in the area. This is in part because it was the first book on the subject, as well as being the first scholarly catalogue that had been written about a school of drawing. It was, as Carmen Bambach’s essay claims, ‘groundbreaking for the sheer novelty of its subject’ – simply put, nobody else had thought of compiling such an authoritative catalogue. It is very likely that at the time nobody else could complete so daunting a task. Berenson provides text and catalogue entries on a corpus of artists working in Florence, beginning with the achievements of the earliest Florentine painters such as Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli, through to a powerful description of Leonardo’s drawings and those of Michelangelo (one of the most problematic chapters, in Bambach’s view), and ending with a descent from Olympus, as Berenson puts it, to the Mannerism of Pontormo and Rosso. As Bambach writes, Berenson’s method of connoisseurship, which privileged the intelligent eye over the intelligible document, has by no means been eclipsed by more recent, more overly ‘intellectual’ approaches to the description of old-master drawings. Berenson’s heroic cataloguing efforts, applied to the relatively untouched and undervalued field of old-master drawings, may be set against the excitement of Mâle’s book and his strong belief in the importance and innovation of his comprehensive, accurate method. Both happily dispense with vast swathes of previous literature. The Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, in his 1915 book Kunstgeschictliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History), also gives the sense of a door opening onto a whole new epoch of study and thought – although his target is much wider, and his brief more philosophical. In his analysis of the transition of the formal language of art from the Renaissance to the Baroque, Wölfflin calls for a ‘descriptive art history’, scrutinising and comparing works of art on the basis of style, expressed in terms of fundamental concepts. Wölfflin’s may be the most challenging text in this volume for readers over one century later; even for the specialist, his abstract argument is frequently difficult to grasp. Yet in some senses Wölfflin was ahead of his time, particularly in terms of the technical tools at his disposal. He often laments the inadequacy of reproductions to illustrate his point – if only the photographer of Sansovino’s St James had stood five feet to the right, his point about the classic silhouette effect would be perfectly clear. Yet, as David Summers shows, Wölfflin’s identification of five incredibly simple paired concepts to demonstrate the transition to Baroque art had a universal relevance and powerful legacy, particularly for a type of art history based on hard sober looking and formal analysis. He is one of the great initiators of discourse in the field – prophetic even; much subsequent art-historical writing is in effect a selective reading of Wölfflin’s 1915 classic. Roger Fry once wrote that Wölfflin ‘begins where most art historians leave off’, examining the formal structures of works of art in relation to the ‘mental conditions’ in the mind of the artist who produced them.1 It is precisely this ability to see deeply into the creative process that makes Fry’s own study of the work of Cézanne ‘arguably still the most sensitive and penetrating of all explorations of Cézanne’s pictures’, as Richard Verdi writes. Cézanne: A Study of His Development was published in English by the Hogarth Press in 1927, after first appearing in French in the magazine L’Amour de l’Art. Fry was pioneering not only in his championing of Cézanne as a master on a par with Rembrandt, but also in his sustained scrutiny of his paintings and the refined nature of his formulations in describing them. Aside from its piercing intellectual qualities, it is a beautifully written book, a testament to the pleasures of looking and thinking about works of art. Although his earlier collection of essays, Vision and Design (1920), might also be considered a strong contender for classic status for its continuing impact, particularly on artists, the volume on Cézanne remains the most succinct statement of Fry’s formalist approach, and is the text that shows him most thrillingly absorbed by, and in tune with, his subject. The German-born architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner was more directly influenced by Wölfflin, having studied under the Swiss art historian in Munich before completing a doctorate in Leipzig. Pevsner emigrated to England in 1935 as a result of Nazi anti-Jewish employment laws, and it was there that he wrote Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), which, as Colin Amery describes in this volume, has been received as a ‘gospel’ of modernism. Pevsner’s genealogy of modern architecture and design, showing how the utopianism of William Morris became the utilitarianism of Walter Gropius, could not in truth be further from Wölfflin’s deeply felt philosophical relativism, and bears more the imprint, as Amery demonstrates, of Pevsner’s doctorial supervisor Wilhelm Pinder, whose notion of Zeitgeist, a spirit-of-the-times explanation of artistic style, dominates Pevsner’s volume. Pioneers is itself a pioneering book, the result of an extraordinary task of information-gathering that looks forward to Pevsner’s later architectural guides, The Buildings of England. Like many trailblazing books (and as such it may be compared with Alfred Barr’s monograph on Matisse), its value is due less to its definitive nature than to the freshness of its approach. Pevsner’s comments on Impressionism and Art Nouveau are now curiosities; the true value of his book lies in its discussion of nineteenth-century engineering and in the incisive nature of Pevsner’s architectural writing, capable as it is of characterising and animating the structures and façades of the buildings of Charles Voysey, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Peter Behrens. It is also representative of the study of modern architecture and design in the crucial decade of the 1930s. David Watkin’s attack on Pevsner’s moralising approach in the former’s 1977 book Morality and Architecture is well known, but from a later perspective it has become important to see Pevsner’s writing in context, particularly as the work of a German émigré with an ambiguous relation to his native country. For its authoritative and opinionated analysis, Pioneers remains one of the most readable and