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Not giving way on your desire: sublimation
and ethical action

Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation by Joan Copjec, Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 2002, 264 pp., 15 b. & w. illus., d19.95

Joan Copjec’s book Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation takes up
Jacques Lacan’s suggestion that his theory of feminine sexuality was a continuation and
revision of his earlier work on ethics and sublimation. In his 1959–60 Seminar VII,
Lacan reformulated Freud’s theory of sublimation, which was so underdeveloped as to
be almost incoherent, and established a link between sublimation and ethical action.
Thirteen years later in his Seminar XX, known as Encore, Lacan suggested a relation
between ethics and feminine sexuality. Copjec elucidates these complex relationships by
means of a number of artistic texts, including Sophocles’s Antigone, Cindy Sherman’s
Untitled Film Stills and Kara Walker’s silhouettes.

Lacan’s controversial proposition concerning the feminine was that ‘the Woman does

not exist.’ What he sought to cast doubt over here was less the noun ‘Woman’ than the
definite article that preceded it, denoting universality. For Lacan, feminine being lacks
wholeness or completion, and he used the term ‘not-all’ to signify this condition. He also
pointed out that it was not just feminine being, but being in general that resists
coalescing into a whole, finite entity; indeed this is what constitutes subjectivity per se in
Lacanian terms. However, Copjec explains that because of the way in which separation
from the mother and sexuation occurs differently in boys and girls, woman is privileged
in Lacan’s analysis because she remains closer to the status of the ‘not-all’. She is the
subject par excellence. Copjec describes how Lacan’s edict, not to ‘give way on your
desire’, is at the heart of his thinking on ethics. Rather than succumbing to societal
norms concerning the ‘good’, we are urged to follow through on our own desires. Copjec
explains how, for boys, separation from the mother involves an idealization that places
the mother out of reach; the ideal space she then occupies is the one in which the cruelly
censorious super-ego will flourish. The girl’s separation does not involve an idealization
and she is, therefore, less in the thrall of the super-ego and so less susceptible to its
normative injunctions. The ethical act is thus structurally feminine, in Lacan’s view.

Copjec’s readings of aesthetic texts are complex and difficult to summarize briefly,

and so I will focus on only two, each of which exemplifies both the strengths and the
problems in her argument. She presents a remarkably perceptive analysis of Sophocles’s
Antigone, whose eponymous heroine was introduced by Lacan in Seminar VII as a
paragon of ethical action. Antigone’s insistence that her dead brother be buried, rather
than simply left to decompose as a traitor as decreed by the king, Creon, prompts her to
take unlawful action in order to satisfy her wishes. While there has been much debate
regarding the relative merits of the positions adopted by Antigone and Creon, Lacan

Art History

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No. 4

September 2003

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sides exclusively with Antigone, who chooses to satisfy her own needs in opposition to
those of the state. He defends hers as the only ethical action. Copjec compares
Antigone’s perseverance and indifference to personal safety, together with her refusal to
justify her actions, with the compulsion of the unstoppable drive which always aims at
its own destruction. But the drive is always inhibited as to its aim, or sublimated,
according to Lacan, and so the circuit continues and is endlessly revivified. Antigone
experiences jouissance because she follows her desire beyond the law, the super-egoic
strictures that stand in her way, and is thus transformed by the event. She has, in
Copjec’s reading of Lacan, performed a positive act of sublimation and is purified as a
result. The notion of sublimation has always invoked the idea of purification, but while
Freud claimed that one would be purified of sensuous enjoyment, Lacan insists that one
is purged of fear and pity.

While one can see how Antigone represents the ultimate ethical figure in Lacanian

terms, a problem arises in Copjec’s reading when one considers the role of aesthetic
objects and texts in Lacan’s theory of sublimation. In Seminar VII Lacan talks much of
the startling impact that such objects have on the subject, thus emphasizing the
satisfaction afforded by the encounter between subject and sublimated object. The
sublime object, in Copjec’s terms, should somehow embody what she describes as a
‘teeming emptiness’, a tear in the symbolic order that tantalizes the subject who
encounters it and is drawn into a desiring, ethical relationship with it. But her reading
theorizes Antigone’s enjoyment, to the exclusion of that of the spectator who is
transfixed by this tragic tale and its protagonist’s ‘unbearable splendour’. This enjoyment
is also ethical, according to Lacan, yet it remains absent in Copjec’s analysis.

Copjec’s discussion of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills falls prey to a similar

problem. She carefully elucidates the entwined paths of narcissism, love and sublimation
in relation to the object, and conceives of the sublime object as the object of love, as it
induces a self-shattering jouissance in the subject comparable to that induced by the
experience of being in love. According to Copjec, the loving subject is located in this
structure in the position of objet a, cause of desire in Lacanian terms. She then goes on to
theorize Cindy Sherman’s face as functioning as the objet a in her series of Untitled Film
Stills. The endless repetition of Sherman’s face in the series prevents it from functioning
as a face normally would, to individuate its owner. Instead, it seems not to belong to the
diegetic space of the image, disrupting its visual field. Copjec proposes that Sherman’s
face, as objet a, should be read as ‘the perennial residue of her love for the cinematic-
photographic image’. Copjec thus privileges Sherman’s own love, jettisoning that of the
viewer, whose relationship to the image remains untheorized.

Copjec’s exploration of such issues as the ‘superegoic underside of ethics’, the dif-

ference between sublimation and perversion, Lacan’s critique of Kant’s ethical imperative
and the latter’s concept of radical evil, are all remarkable and make essential reading for
anyone interested in Lacanian ethics. Yet Copjec’s treatment of artistic texts is curiously
disappointing. In his discussion of sublimation in art, Lacan asked ‘what does society
find there that is so satisfying?’ He thus prioritized the relationship between the
sublimated object and the subject who is drawn to it. It was the dynamic of this
encounter that Lacan claimed most demanded analysis. While Copjec explores the
satisfactions secured by the artist or the protagonists of aesthetic texts, the central
question posed by Lacan remains largely unanswered.

Helen Delaney

University of Essex

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Reading T.J. Clark reading: critical perspectives
on Farewell to an Idea

Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism by T. J. Clark, New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2001, 460 pp., 80 col. plates, 210 b. & w. illus.,
d

25.00

The following piece grew out of discussions between a group of doctoral students, led
initially by Neil Cox, at the University of Essex. It is not so much a review of Farewell
to an Idea, as four individually written engagements – introduced separately
below – that have developed from and remain marked by long group discussion
and argument which revolved around the nature of the book as a work of art history.

Preliminaries

In a margin of a philosophical notebook Lenin realized that it was ‘impossible completely
to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly
studied and understood Hegel’s Logic’, the consequence being, he exclaimed, that none of
the Marxists of his generation ‘understood Marx!’

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Lenin’s jotting expressed something

of our experience of reading T.J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes in the History of
Modernism, a text, like Marx’s chapter on commodities, rich in many critical and
philosophical voices. We came to realize that it might be impossible completely to
understand this book without having thoroughly studied and understood G.W.F. Hegel,
Karl Marx and Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault,
Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, inter alia. We were concerned with the nature of
the social history of art and whether or not Farewell to an Idea seemed to fit our
conceptions and textual experiences of it, especially as it was articulated in Clark’s
manifestos of the early 1970s. We discussed the methodological and theoretical
continuities and discontinuities within Clark’s writing on the social history of art, with
regard to the job it was supposed to do, what its objects should be, and how those objects
should be conceived – in their ‘production and first use’ or their phenomenological ‘object-
ness’? From this starting point in disciplinary matters we talked much about materialism,
mechanism, historicity and subjectivity, all topics that, for us, seemed present in Clark’s
narrative or production of the history of modernist picturing.

First engagement

Anastasia Ladopoulou is currently working with a Heideggerian notion of art as
poiesis, with reference to art of the 1960s. In this text, she examines a particular strand of
Clark’s writing that is indebted to Foucault’s analysis of the ‘outside’. She maintains that
this is essential to understanding Clark’s construction of his ‘episodes of modernism’.

Farewell to an Idea is a beguiling piece of work. It is written with a theoretical openness

and freedom which gives the text vitality, but which also risks misinterpretation. I want
to isolate a certain strand of Foucauldian thinking (pp. 306–307), which I see as holding

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enormous sway over Clark’s text.

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This revolves around the difficulty of seeing Pollock’s

work between 1947 and 1950 ‘as belonging to a social body’ (p. 310). Clark maintains
that this is ‘the motor of the argument’ (p. 310); an argument that, unless made explicit,
will leave ‘the book as a whole y out of focus’ (p. 314). I am interested in the tension
that emerges between these ideas and his seeming belief or hope in the possibility of a
‘dialectical retrieval’ (p. 314). I want to show that this tension dissipates to reveal the
necessity of Clark’s debt to differential thinking.

Throughout his text, Clark emphasizes ‘artistic’ moments that take the form of sub-

versive alterity to the dominant ‘territory’ (power structures or bourgeois hegemonies)
(pp. 307–308). These moments exist at the heart of Clark’s ‘episodes of modernism’,
appearing as different and incommensurate to the dominant modernism. ‘Great art’ for
Clark, is art that stands ‘outside’ this territory and is incomprehensible to it. Clark uses
the Foucauldian idea of the ‘outside’ (pp. 307–308) from an artistic/art-historical
perspective. Put simply, the outside is a space that opens up and is incomprehensible for,
and incommensurate with, its own territory. For Clark, the art of Malevich (c. 1915–19)
and Pollock (1947–50) come to occupy this space in similar ways (p. 330).

In the chapter on Suprematism we come to understand the importance of Malevich’s

work through its reception by his disciples. El Lissitzky, for example, ‘misunderstood’
Malevich’s nihilistic intentions under the totalizing rubric of revolutionary Utopianism
and the pressure of the socio-historical circumstances. While Malevich’s art expresses
nihilism, El Lissitzky’s provides ‘answerability’ (p. 297). What El Lissitzky thought
Malevich’s art was expressing was the belief in the Utopian ideals of the revolutionary
cause. However, El Lissitzky’s art was about believing while Malevich’s was about
‘believing and not believing’ (p. 254) – contrariness. Clark says that the main
characteristic of Malevich’s art is ‘undecidability’ (p. 254). The reduction of Malevich’s
art to mere Utopian propaganda shows how it remained alien and incomprehensible;
outside its own time, we might say. By contrast, the stark modernism of El Lissitzky is
representative of a modernist myth that Malevich’s work was already in the process of
shattering post anterior.

Likewise, Pollock’s work from 1947 to 1950 occupies a space of subversion to the

‘bourgeois hegemony’ that provided its territory (including ‘Abstract Expressionism’).
For Clark, Pollock’s Number I 1948 (much like Malevich’s Black Square) ‘pushes our
understanding to the limit’ (p. 409) because it ‘contains contraries within itself’ (p. 314)
that remain irresolute. This painting, Clark claims, lays out most completely the
‘forms and limits’ of modernism. But it remained gloriously outside. This is the work’s
greatness – its incommensurability. Pollock’s project was against ‘settling down inside a
single metaphorical frame’ (pp. 338–9). It was about ‘crossing metaphors’ (p. 339).
However, modernist critics – Greenberg amongst them – and the Vogue magazine article,
for example, seek to lock Pollock inside a single metaphorical frame. El Lissitzky did not
understand or empathize with the nihilism of his master (p. 254), just as Pollock’s
contemporaries failed to comprehend the contradictions of his work.

But what of Clark’s repeated references to Hegel, and the allusion to a ‘positive

moment’ in Pollock’s abstraction which takes the form of a ‘dialectical retrieval’ (p.
314)? Are we to read Pollock in a dialectical sense, because this would seem to
contradict differential thought? If we were to read Pollock in a strictly dialectical sense,
then there could be no outside, because the dialectic synthesis would negate and
subsume the moment. Therefore the answer must be no. Despite Clark’s willing
acceptance of dialectical ‘push-and-pull’ (p. 314), his target here seems to be the
metaphorical ‘modernism’ of Pollock’s post-1950 work. The painting of Pollock’s great
period (1947–50) contains irresolvable ‘contraries within itself’ – non-synthesizable
difference, in other words. This is ‘simply no longer part of the y conceptual universe’

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of his later work. By 1950 the moment has passed, and with it the dynamism,
individuality and originality of the ‘great’ work. The outside is lost as the territory
reclaims the ground by subsuming the work into its own metaphorical frame. It is no
mere coincidence that the Vogue article (1951) and Namuth’s movie parallel the ‘demise’
of Pollock’s shining star.

However, Clark is still more hesitant towards the philosophy of difference (broadly

speaking, poststructuralist thought) than he perhaps should be. The confrontation that
drives the book, difference versus totalization (p. 310), continually begs the question of
how we reconcile art as difference with the ‘brute fact’ (p. 310) of the artist’s social
existence? This he achieves by reconciling the art as a subversive layer within a
determinate and yet diverse social nexus, one that is never an all-encompassing totality.
Thus rather than saying that Malevich and Pollock are outside the social as a totality,
Clark ‘defends’ his position by narrowing the scope of the artist’s social existence. Thus
the territory of Pollock and Abstract Expressionism is understood to be the avant-garde
petty bourgeois of post-1945 America. While Abstract Expressionism contained
elements of subversion (what Clark calls ‘vulgarity’), Pollock (1947–50) seemed not
even to belong to this territory. The sheer difference of his art work hangs like a
foreboding shadow over its own time, a shadow that cannot be ignored, and a shadow
that demands attention even to this day.

What, might we conclude, are the consequences of this reading for art in general?

Might we claim that Clark is attempting to redefine the very concept of ‘great art’ in a
way that, as he himself acknowledges, Foucault failed to achieve? That, following on
from Foucault, the extreme limits of artistic creation is something that lies outside
‘bourgeois consciousness’, something incommensurate with the dominating bourgeois
hegemony? As such, might we say that ‘great’ art would then be an event on the outside
of everydayness, a brief, unique and individuating moment?

Second engagement

Maria Konta is currently working on Mel Bochner’s early work (1966–1973), in which
she invokes Romantic Irony as a suggestive way to rethink painting’s continuation in the
late 1960s. In her Hegelian ‘reading’ of Farewell to an Idea, she argues that Clark’s
modernism unceasingly approaches its end, always recovering its own non-beginning.

‘I did not know how coming to see these paintings as epitomizing our and their time
would end up affecting how I saw the time.’ (p. 314) I take T.J. Clark’s uneasy under-
standing of the way Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings anticipated their appropriation by
capitalism as permeating Farewell to an Idea’s distinct episodes. Modernism is ‘the art of
‘‘the time that is not yet ripe’’’ (p. 160). Clark’s conception of art’s time is forced by his
conviction that modernism simultaneously congeals and mobilizes G.W.F. Hegel’s
dictum that ‘art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the
past.’

3

Despite Hegel’s assertion that in its Romantic dissolution art is sublated in

philosophy, Clark argues that modernism proves this surpassing to be impossible by
reworking this impossibility in its own subject matter (p. 372). Modernism, for Clark, is
already finished and always non-finishable. The Pollock chapter, with its three
conclusions and the invocation of Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness as a way of thinking
beyond the metaphorical division of ‘originally’ versus ‘only afterward’,

4

figures as the

unrivalled model of historical writing on modernism’s suspended ending. In my Hegelian
‘reading’ I will try to show that Clark’s modernism unceasingly touches on its end,
recovering and replaying its own non-commencement.

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Hegel’s Aesthetics posits only one proper end of art, namely classical art’s

dissolution. This is the ‘historical’ end of art. Hegel explicitly construes Romantic
art’s disintegration, namely the ‘teleological’ end, as the repetition of classical art’s
dissolution. ‘The last matter with which we now still have to deal y is the point at
which romanticism, already implicitly the principle of the dissolution of the classical
ideal, now makes this dissolution appear clearly in fact as dissolution.’

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Romanticism’s

origin is an a priori masked end, or, one could argue, a non-beginning. The inaugural
episode of Farewell to an Idea stages a similar paradox. In Clark’s words David’s The
Death of Marat resisted modernity’s designation of an historical beginning. ‘Technique’
did not let David make the old date vanish from Marat’s orange box. Stubbornly stuck
around the provisional ‘Year Two’ the numbers 17 and 93 anticipated anno domini
(p. 53). The Death of Marat’s end-and-beginning-of-the-world quality underscores the
chapter’s in-augural tone.

The ‘historical’ end prefigures Romanticism’s labour in the way art manifests in its

materiality an acceleration of this ending, finally consummating it with the exhaustion of
its own material resources. Classical art actualizes the beautiful in the ‘medium of
externality’, whose dissolution is taken over by Romanticism as ‘a mechanical external
tradition’ which ultimately declines into ‘a bad technique’.

6

Romanticism turns into a

site of a repetitious mechanical failure of a previously ‘beautiful’ moment. In similar
terms Clark concludes that modernism angered its opponents because it repeatedly
discovered ‘the beautiful as nothing but mechanism’ (p. 167).

However, Hegelian Romanticism is fastened both by art’s ‘historical’ and

‘teleological’ ending. Clark draws on art’s second ending to declare modernism’s non-
completeability, arguing that this temporal overturning is modernism’s nature that art
misrecognizes most of the time (p. 22). Modernism’s materiality is ‘the site of untruth’
(p. 48), being torn between knowledge and non-knowledge. In Hegel’s dramatic poetry –
art’s last moment – Oedipus exemplifies a fundamentally deceived consciousness. In so
far as his actions are intentional, he comes into conflict with unknown laws. In the
Phenomenology of Spirit, tragic consciousness issues from the experience of its own
oblivion. Tragic language becomes the medium in which art inscribes the ruin of its
capacity for cognition. Is not classical art’s dissolution a shameful secret that
Romanticism, like Oedipus, blindly reiterates in its lethal speech-acts? Similarly, Clark
argues that certain works of art show us the powers and the limits of a practice of
knowledge. ‘Representation’ in modernism ‘involves the artist in feeling for structures of
assumption y deeply hidden, implicit and embedded in our very use of signs.’ (p. 165)
In modernism the aesthetic becomes materiality’s repressed truth.

In the Phenomenology, the continuation of tragedy is carried out in comedy, which

leads to art’s dissolution.

7

In comedy the actor lets his mask drop on stage because he

knows that this mask, namely the gods’ individuality, is artificial.

8

No longer the agent

of the play, the ‘actual self’ is merely the play’s actor identifying himself with the
spectator. It has no power because it follows the whims of an empty subjectivity.
‘Wanting to be something on its own account’, the self becomes comic as it remains
‘entangled in actual existence’.

9

Yet, although the comic self is the ‘negative power’ that

‘crushes’ the gods exposing the Demos’ ‘ludicrous contrast’, it ‘preserves itself in this
very nothingness.’

10

Its preservation, though, is only a Pyrrhic victory, because the self

has even defeated its own substance. Likewise art, in its ‘comic’ dissolution, preserves
itself by holding to itself as nothingness. Comedy is the only art that realizes itself in the
devastation of art. Yet, if in its end art is supposed to reach absolute subjectivity, and if
comedy empties subjectivity, then art as comedy becomes the devastation of its own end.
Does not the end of art in comedy, despite Hegel, suggest the incompleteness of this
ending?

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Art’s suspended end cannot be conceptualized by any theory. Clark’s defence of it

asserts such non-regulation. As the Hegelian ‘actual self’, the petty bourgeoisie, in its
aspiration to an individuality no longer desired (p. 389), exposed its vulgar face (p. 376).
However, Abstract Expressionism’s ‘representation’ of the class’ ‘nakedness and
ordinariness’

11

proved to be modernism’s preservation. Like Hegelian comedy, vulgarity

resisted art’s ending by keeping ‘the corpse of painting hideously alive – while all the
time coquetting with Death’ (p. 390).

For Hegel, Unhappy Consciousness, ‘the tragic fate of the certainty of self that aims

to be absolute’, constitutes the counterpart of the ‘happy’ comic consciousness.

12

Accordingly, I take Clark’s ‘The Unhappy Consciousness’ as structurally related to his
last chapter, namely to modernism’s ‘comic’ endless end. Between Clark’s lines on
abstract art’s contradictions we might hear Theodor Adorno’s voice on art’s incomplete
ending: ‘A withering away of the alternative y between the tragic and the comic, almost
between life and death, is becoming evident in contemporary art.’

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‘Withering’ in

modernism means ‘anticipation’, a moment when ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ become the
‘endlessly irresolvable aspects of y art-making’ (p. 11). Clark’s understanding of these
contradictions could be the book’s lesson to art historians: ‘Wherever a historian senses
contradiction truly throttling an object or a practice, he or she can intervene.’

14

Third engagement

Jeremy Spencer addresses Clark’s effort to grasp the aesthetic specificity of modernist
objects through his appropriation of the work of Paul de Man.

Throughout Farewell to an Idea T.J. Clark invokes the terms materiality or materialism
to grasp the difference or specificity of modernist picturing. His use of these words, that
owes much to the later literary theory of Paul de Man, works to identify modernism’s
own belief in ‘the physical substance of painting’, its crude and literal definition of
painting as ‘essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order’
(p. 129). Although Maurice Denis’s description does not exhaust the historical
complexity of the modernist project or work adequately as art criticism, it remains
indicative, Clark believes, of the strengths of modernism’s kind of picturing.

An interesting question which Farewell to an Idea addresses, then, is the nature of

modernist materialism: a question of technique, of the kind of formalism painting
became sometime in ‘Year Two’. Clark understands materiality through its opposition to
phenomenality (an opposition found in de Man), but he posits a relationship that
inhabits modernist painting in which ‘we never can be sure when materiality ends and
phenomenality begins.’ Each, he writes, ‘thrives interminably on the other’s images and
procedures.’

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Does modernist picturing or idiom, Clark wonders, involve paint

analysing, manifesting or signifying the artist’s experience of the world – or is it
somehow ‘darker’, more mechanical, somehow inhuman, or ‘blind’? Did modernism
retain a place within human communicative life or did it make plain the autonomy, the
‘prosaic materiality’, the ‘uncontrollable power of the (brushstroke) as inscription’?

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Modernist materiality is the surface of Ce´zanne’s Bathers, or the empty upper half of

David’s Death of Marat, which Clark describes as ‘endless, meaningless objectivity’
produced by paint’s failure to represent, even symbolically, and by the necessity to make
‘do with its own procedures’ (p. 48), which became and persisted as the idiom of
modernism in all its extremity, ‘privacy, obscurity, autonomy’ (p. 255). The failure to
analogize or analyse ‘the people’ is shamefully marked by the technical display that
constitutes half of David’s work. This failure to phenomenalize is, however, the basis for

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the work’s formal success: modernism has thrived on the literalness of the signifier as the
foundation of its claimed autonomy. Through the materiality of its inscription modernist
painting could take its place within, but also declare its difference from, the world of
things.

As an arbitrary physical mark, in the Saussurian sense of the word, the modernist ‘sign

is characterised by thickness and opacity rather than transparency.’

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Modernism, Clark

believes, recognized the sign as both social – as fundamentally arbitrary, fixed and unfixed
in tune with ideological and class struggle – but also as an intimate mark, a synecdoche of
the body and its experience in the world. In other words, modernism knew the sign’s
materiality and phenomenality respectively. On the one hand, modernism was compelled
to recognize ‘the sign as the site of a resistance to meaning’, as ‘brute matter’; on the other
hand, it cognized it as a phenomenon, as an analogy of, or equivalent to, human
experience. Could modernist picturing realize a sign of the world that fully partakes of it;
could it ever translate experience or sensation; or does the modernist sign (merely) give
itself? If, as Flaubert wrote, ‘the finest works are those that contain the least matter’, so to
be as close to thought as possible, then modernism loses its ground.

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However, action

against metaphor is the nature of any painterly practice that develops as ‘an assertion of
medium against meaning, against likeness’.

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Technique, then, is modernism’s autonomy,

its success, and yet also its failure and shame (p. 48).

In ‘Freud’s Ce´zanne’, Clark makes Freud articulate modernist picturing’s ongoing

project to represent mind as matter. Clark agrees that Ce´zanne’s dabs of paint function to
analogize what happens in the artist’s eye in its relation to the world. However, this idea of
equivalence of sign to referent and the power of the optical, of paint, of sign, to analyse
and make plain is at odds with what happens in The Bathers. The body does not take
place in paint on the surface of the canvas, only our imagination of it in its ‘ultimately
inhuman, or nonhuman’ and inanimate consistency. Ce´zanne’s handling appears removed
from human subjectivity, personality or individuality and its experience. Thus, the
emphasis of Clark’s reading shifts from a phenomenalism to what de Man calls ‘formal
materialism’, which stresses ‘the sheer arbitrariness and intrinsic senselessness of the
material and signifying agencies of language’

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which, in their autonomy, stand for

nothing in the human world. Clark’s analysis leaves us with the suspicion or the threat that
modernism’s vision is stupidly, predictably mechanical and material ‘devoid of any
reflexive or intellectual complication’, and thus antithetical to any Hegelian aesthetic of
‘semantic depth’.

21

For Kant, material vision means ‘the materiality of what the eye sees prior to

conception and perception’, seeing nature ‘as poets do, merely in terms of what
manifests itself to the eye’.

22

Painting that shared Kant’s vision would be unthinking,

somehow shallow, a painting without knowledge of that which it represents, it would be,
‘painting as material y Aimless y detached from any one representational task. Bodily.
y

A kind of automatic writing’ (p. 45). Kant suggests, therefore, a kind of painting

distinctly opposed to the ‘phenomenalism of experience’ which, for example, Diderot’s
criticism had valued in the realism of Chardin.

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Modernism recognizes itself in Kant’s

‘pure aesthetic vision’ which refuses to ‘phenomenalize’ human experience, recognizes
itself as a ‘rigorously anti-humanist aesthetic practice’, as mechanism, as ‘matter
dictating (dead) form’ (p. 167). The Kantian concern with ‘inanimate’ form or empty
formality coupled with Diderot’s delight in the magic power of paint to give us the
world, (‘one has only to take these biscuits to eat them’), articulates modernism’s
continued commitment to, but disappointment in, the aesthetic, and also represents the
dialectical relationship that drives the book’s grasp of its objects.

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Fourth engagement

Jim Walsh is working on a genealogical approach to Abstract Expressionism and its
critical reception. Here he critically examines Clark’s articulation of modernism’s
intertwining with the forces of modernity.

In reviewing Farewell to an Idea, Mike Gonzalez draws attention to the use of Schiller’s

‘the disenchantment of the world’ as a ‘phrase that recurs throughout’ Clark’s text.

24

In

the art historian’s hands ‘disenchantment’ provides an arena for a bond to be established
between modernity and contingency, where we can encounter: ‘the turning from past to
future, the acceptance of risk, the omnipresence of change, the malleability of time and
space’ (p. 10). For Clark, though, the application of this arena always revolves around
perspectives on the social: ‘‘‘Modernity’’ means contingency. It points to a social order
which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a
projected future.’ (p. 7) Indeed, a part-qualification of the book’s agenda is dedicated to
determining the potential co-dependency of socialism and modernism (pp. 8–9).
Perspectives and ambitions such as these act as signposts to the social art historian
that exists within Clark and his thoughts on modernity and modernism, a position that is
signalled clearly when his views on modernism are observed.

In Clark’s manifesto-like proclamation of modernism’s ‘two great wishes’ we gain

access to an unnavigable teleology: ‘It wanted its audience to be led toward a recognition
of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was
the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/
Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed.’
(pp. 9–10) Such a demand for conflicting authenticities, however, is a burden of
responsibility that can never be attained outside an enchanted world, because there no
longer exists the ‘belief in a cosmic order whose immanent meaning guides human
endeavour’

25

and which can act as a bridge to the dissonant desires of those endeavours.

Thus fundamentally, it was the state of disenchantment that modernism was responding
to, which meant that the ‘two great wishes’ could never be simultaneously achieved.
Significantly, Clark comes to this same conclusion, but as a social art historian facing the
inherent inadequacies of the social, and not the underlying qualities of disenchantment:
‘Modernism lacked the basis, social and epistemological, on which its two wishes might
be reconciled.’ (p. 10)

Clark’s direction places him within a certain interpretive practice which Michael

Bell, in The Metaphysics of Modernism, articulates as ‘a coming to terms with the lines
of thought associated with Marx, Freud and Nietzsche’.

26

The separation of the

numinal presences allows Bell to pronounce that ‘each of the great triumvirate turned
human life into a fundamentally hermeneutic activity.’

27

So, without wishing to bracket

Clark’s text into a Marxian hermeneutic, it is evident that Marx operates as the primary
luminary for Clark to orbit and navigate his thoughts by. A position which is, in Clark’s
case, to be respected for the inner consistency providing integrity, but also noted for its
involvement within a specific hermeneutic activity. Perhaps this explains why Clark’s
chapter on Ce´zanne, whilst apparently a Freudian enterprise, resolutely avoids
succumbing to such an obvious alternative hermeneutic. Indeed, the utilization of Freud
is readily acknowledged as ‘the Freud before Freud’ (p. 142), who was still trying to
complete his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ where he strove to ‘represent psychical
processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles’ (p. 139).
Combined with an excerpt from de Man’s Aesthetic formalization in Kleist, ‘the Freud
before Freud’ allows Clark a ‘mechanistic-materialist’ (p. 166) reading of Ce´zanne that
concludes outside of any classic formulation of a Freudian hermeneutic: ‘Ultimately the

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horror in these pictures reaches beyond any recoverable or irrecoverable human content
to the sheer turning of the handle of the representational machine.’ (p. 167)

Though respecting the integrity of Clark’s position, then, I think it is prudent to

acknowledge first the priority given to the hermeneutical stance that permeates and
governs his text, and second, that alternatives to that stance can be argued for. Given
that I have already discussed the first, albeit somewhat superficially, I would at least like
to gesture towards an alternative reading to Clark’s, in an equally unfortunately brief
manner, if only to help defend my pronouncement of there being a hermeneutics at play
within the text. However, just as Clark is not purely a Marxian, then it follows that the
alternatives are not necessarily obligated to be Freudian or Nietzschean paragons in their
encoding. For example, I believe that the disenchantment of the world necessitates a
response that addresses a personal loss of meaning, and that such an activity, arguably,
can be captured in works of modernism. A fixation upon the self, as a fractured and lost
subject, also took place in response to the disenchantment of the world, with existential
ideas since Nietzsche and Dostoevsky increasing in volume and clarity. From Jasper’s
accusation, regarding the ‘loss of individual agency through the increasing mechaniza-
tion of economic and social life’,

28

in Man and the Modern Age at one end of the

spectrum of discussion on individual freedom, to Sartre’s declaration that ‘man is
condemned to be free’

29

in Existentialism and Humanism at the other end, how could

such statements and issues be ignored? The answer of course lies within one’s chosen
hermeneutics, and, as we have seen, Clark positions himself intractably elsewhere within
his own ‘melancholic’ (p. 13) hermeneutic of modernism.

Anastasia Ladopoulou, Maria Konta, Jeremy Spencer, Jim Walsh

Notes

We would like to thank our supervisor Dr Neil Cox for the opportunity to be involved in this project and for his
constant support and engagement in the writing of this paper.

1 Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works

Volume 38, Moscow, 1972, p. 180.

2 See T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes in the

History of Modernism, New Haven and London,
1999, pp. 306–307. All further references to this
book are in parentheses in the body of the text.

3 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2

vols, trans. Malcolm Knox, Oxford, 1975, vol. 1,
p. 11.

4 T.J. Clark, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction’, in Serge

Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in
New York, Paris and Montreal, 1945–1964, Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1990, p. 243.

5 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, pp. 593–4.
6 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 575.
7 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1236.
8 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.

Arnold Miller, Oxford, 1977, p. 744.

9 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 744.

10 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 747.
11 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 744.
12 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 752.
13 Theodor Adorno, ‘Is Art Lighthearted?’, in Rolf

Tiedemann (ed.), Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholsen, New York, 1992, p. 253.
The emphasis in italics is mine.

14 T.J. Clark, ‘Reservations of the Marvellous’,

London Review of Books, 22 June 2000, p. 7.

15 T.J. Clark, ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in

Ce´zanne’, in Tom Cohen (ed.) et al., Material
Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory,
Minneapolis and London, 2001, p. 99.

16 See Paul de Man, ‘Hypogram and Inscription’, in

Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis, 1986, p. 37.

17 Christopher Prendergast, ‘Modernism’s Night-

mare? Art, Matter, Mechanism’, New Left Review,
no. 10, July–August 2001, p. 144.

18 ‘Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 January,

1852’, in Francis Steegmuller (ed.), The Selected
Letters of Gustave Flaubert, London, 1954,
p. 131.

19 Gail Day, ‘Persisting and Mediating: T.J. Clark and

‘‘the Pain of ‘the Unattainable Beyond’’’, Art
History, vol. 23, no. 1, March 2000, p. 8.

20 Rodolphe Gashe´, The Wild Card of Reading: On

Paul de Man, Harvard, 1998, p. 71.

21 Paul de Man, ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in

Kant’, in Andrzej Warminski (ed.), Aesthetic
Ideology, Minneapolis, 1996, p. 83.

22 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans.

Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge,
1987, p. 130.

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Art, music and the cult of modernism

Music and Modern Art edited by James Leggio, New York and London: Routledge,
2002, 248 pp., 49 b. & w. illus., d60.00

Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage by Simon Shaw-Miller,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002, 290 pp., 49 b. & w. illus., $45.00

For the past twenty years or so, growing numbers of scholars have turned their attention
at one time or another to the complex and intriguing parallels between music and the
visual arts – not only critics and writers on art but also artists and musicians. Quite
often, this research has taken the form of studies originally published to accompany
major exhibitions, among them the fascinating Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk
(Zurich, 1983) and Karin von Maur’s Vom Klang der Bilder (Stuttgart, 1985). It was a
sadly missed opportunity that neither exhibition was shown at any venue in Britain or
North America, reinforcing one’s initial impression that the topic of music and art has,
for some time, been of interest principally to academics and audiences in the German-
speaking world. (Another, more up-to-date example is the exhibition on the theme of
music in European paintings 1500–1700, Dipingere la musica. Musik in der Malerei des
16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2001.)
Nevertheless, ever since the late Edward Lockspeiser published his pioneering study
Music and painting. A study in comparative ideas from Turner to Schoenberg (1973),
English and American scholars, too, have taken up this theme, even if somewhat
sporadically. Notable among them have been Andrew Kagan, who wrote in extenso
about Paul Klee and music and, more recently, authors such as Marsha Morton and
Peter Schmunk, editors of a useful anthology entitled The Arts Entwined: Music and
Painting in the 19

th

Century.

1

The publications just cited betray a striking unanimity of purpose inasmuch as they

are, almost without exception, concentrated upon the modern period – that is, the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reasons why this should be so are spelt out with
admirable clarity in Visible Deeds of Music. Indeed, an important part of Shaw-Miller’s
agenda is to demonstrate how some of the key concepts of modernist art and criticism
can be fully understood only if one takes into account that fascination with music that is
a dominant characteristic of nineteenth-century thinking and writing about the arts
generally. Romantic writers and philosophers from Schopenhauer onwards admired

23 See Denis Diderot, ‘Salons of 1761, 1763, 1765,

1767, 1769, 1781’ reprinted in Simon Eliot and
Beverley Stern (eds), The Age of Enlightenment
Volume 2, London, 1983, pp. 106–107.

24 See M. Gonzalez, ‘Is Modernism Dead?’, Interna-

tional Journal of Socialism, no. 85, Winter 1999.

25 Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays

on Contemporary European Philosophy, London,
1995, p. 1.

26 See M. Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion

to Modernism, Cambridge, 1999, p. 9.

27 See Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to

Modernism, p. 9.

28 N. Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of

Abstract Expressionism, Cambridge, 2000,
p. 66.

29 J-P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, London,

1948, p. 34.

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music primarily because of what they saw as its abstract yet inherently expressive
character. Thus, when it became necessary to justify or extol a form of visual art that
paid little or no attention to questions of narrative or representation, a model after
which such a justification might be formulated lay readily to hand. But it is important to
remind ourselves that, from antiquity onwards, throughout medieval times, well into the
Renaissance and even beyond, music was admired for quite different reasons: as an
image of cosmic order, as an essentially mathematical form of art and hence – precisely
because of its intimate relationship with mathematics and astronomy – as a ‘liberal’ art.
Music was a respected member of the quadrivium (those ‘arts’ that dealt, one way or
another, with quantity as opposed to the verbal ‘arts’ of grammar, dialectics and

5.1

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gypsy Girl with Mandolin (Portrait of

Christine Nilsson), 1874. Oil on canvas, 80 57 cm. Collection of the
Museu de Arte, Sa˜o Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Photograph Luiz
Hossaka.

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rhetoric), enjoying, as of right, an exalted status to which the ‘mechanical’ arts of
painting, sculpture and architecture could only aspire. However, apart from one or two
older studies – Rudolf Wittkower’s classic text Architectural Principles in the Age of
Humanism, for example – this aspect of the relationship between music and the visual
arts (its ‘pre-history’, so to speak) has not captured the imagination of modern scholars
in the same way that music and art of the Romantic and early modern era have done.

The two new studies reviewed here also belong to the same tradition of focusing on

the modern period and alluding only in passing – if at all – to anything that happened
before about 1750 (though Shaw-Miller’s book does contain a brief but useful discussion
of Greek views of the relationship between music, emotion and morality). They are,
nevertheless, very different in scope and intent. Leggio’s anthology does not really have
an over-arching theme or purpose other than, rather vaguely, to explore various aspects
of music and art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, it
contains a great deal of fascinating material, sometimes of the most intricate kind: for
example, Scott Messing’s penetrating account of Gustav Klimt’s exploration of the theme
of music in his painting Schubert at the Piano, even though Messing is not primarily
concerned with analysing in conceptual terms the nature of any possible relationship
between music and visual art. Rather, he is interested in the social and intellectual
background to Klimt’s painting and in such intangible things as Zeitgeist and the
prevailing climate of thought. In fact, the same is true of many of the articles that make
up Leggio’s anthology: that by Charlotte Eyermann on Renoir’s various treatments of the
theme of young girls at the piano, for example, which has more to say about the art
market in late nineteenth-century Paris than about music itself, or Donna Cassidy’s
account of race, ethnicity and national identity in relation to depictions of jazz
musicians. The essays that come closest to discussing how music might serve as formal
or conceptual model for the creation of works of visual art (and, indeed, vice versa) are
Leggio’s own piece on Kandinsky, Schoenberg and the ‘Music of the Spheres’ and James
Baker’s account of Aleksandr Skryabin’s Prometheus and the ‘Quest for Color-Music’.
Baker is, by now, a well-known authority on Skryabin and, to some extent, his essay
sums up or expands upon material already published elsewhere – for example, in his
monograph The Music of Alexander Scriabin (1986). It is nonetheless useful to have more
or less all the evidence for the composer’s interest in theosophy, in the phenomenon of
synaesthesia and in the creation of the ‘total work of art’ brought together in one place,
and this essay makes a weighty and valuable contribution to what is, in any case, an
extremely useful volume. (It is alarming, however, to find engineer Preston S. Millar’s
forename rendered as ‘Presont’; and, in general, one of the few negative things to say
about this book is that it is disfigured by some very poor proof-reading.)

Shaw-Miller also deals in some detail with Skryabin, albeit in the form of a lengthy

aside embedded in a chapter that, for much of its course, is concerned with the German
Romantic tradition and with major figures like Schopenhauer and Wagner. He then
proceeds via a discussion of theosophy and other mystical movements to a consideration
of less well-known Russian composers such as Nikolai Obukhov, whom he considers
part of the same tradition. I think I can see why he adopts this strategy – and, indeed,
there is much to be said for it. Ideas about the intimate relationship between colours and
musical notes, just like the widespread (and characteristically fin-de-sie`cle) preoccupa-
tion with the phenomenon of synaesthesia, make more sense set against a background of
mystical belief in a system of correspondences whereby colours could both evoke and
express emotional or even spiritual states. (The hugely popular book Thought Forms of
1901 by theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, referred to by Shaw-Miller,
was largely instrumental in persuading many artists that, alongside the physical world
known to us through our ordinary processes of perception, there also existed an astral

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world in which forms and colours and musical notes all mutually expressed and reflected
one another.) To try to account for Skryabin’s experiments simply in terms of physical
correspondences, based on the wavelengths of sounds and colours and their relative
proportions, would be somehow to miss the point. Moreover, Shaw-Miller is quite right
in seeing Skryabin and Obukhov and all those Russian composers who, in the early part
of the twentieth century, pursued this topic of the relationship between the musical and
the visual as heirs to the same Romantic tradition. (Vladimir Baranoff-Rossine´, inventor
of a strange optical-musical instrument called the optophone, is another example,
although Shaw-Miller does not mention him in this context.) But they are also, it should
be stressed, heirs to a much older tradition. From the late eighteenth century onwards,
many writers and artists were intrigued by the possibility of creating a visual equivalent
of musical sounds. Some, long before the advent of electricity brought such ambitions
within the realms of possibility, even tried to construct colour keyboards and colour
organs and instruments of that kind, whose ultimate progenitor was the clavecin
oculaire invented by the French Jesuit Louis-Bertrand Castel and discussed by Diderot
and D’Alembert in the Encyclope´die. The breadth and vigour of that stream of
experimentation, which continued unabated for much of the nineteenth century, is
vividly revealed, for example, in Barbara Kienscherf’s absorbing study Das Auge ho¨rt
mit (Frankfurt, 1996). It is, however, a part of the story that is summarized only quite
briefly in the context of Shaw-Miller’s argument.

Kienscherf, like Shaw-Miller, also sees the scenic experiments of Skryabin (and, to a

lesser extent, Schoenberg) as the culmination of that same bundle of ideas about a
‘synthesis of the arts’ handed down by Wagner to the French Symbolists and their early
twentieth-century followers. This means that one cannot really avoid having to deal with
Wagner himself, the extent of whose influence on turn-of-the-century thinking about the
arts can scarcely be overstated. Despite the immense quantity of critical writings about
him, Wagner remains pretty intractable not only as a personality but also as an artist and
theorist, and many commentators – both then and now – have found him a tough nut to
crack. Here, however, Shaw-Miller is at his best. While he does not devote a great deal
of attention to Wagner’s music, he provides a penetrating account of the composer’s
theoretical writings, steadfastly ignoring the dross (of which there is a great deal in
Wagner) and drawing from them only those elements that are essential to his own
argument; an argument that I find lucid, powerful and persuasive. He deals neatly with
Wagner’s ‘conversion’ to Schopenhauer’s philosophy – an event that took place at the
very moment the composer was working on the libretto of Der Ring des Nibelungen –
seeing Wagner, quite rightly, as a vital link in the transmission of Schopenhauerian ideas
to the artists and writers of Europe’s fin de sie`cle. Tellingly, that ‘conversion’ consisted of
acknowledging (for reasons that were inextricably bound up with Schopenhauer’s
somewhat peculiar epistemological system) the primacy of music over all other forms of
art, instead of regarding it as an equal partner in the creation of a new, ‘synthetic’ art
form. In the context of Shaw-Miller’s narrative, this privileging of music (along with all
the philosophical reasons for doing so) is treated not only as a phenomenon of interest in
itself but also as marking an essential step on the path that would subsequently lead to
the formulation of a new ‘modernist’ aesthetic, so that his chapter on Wagner and the
Romantic tradition becomes of crucial importance to the unfolding of his argument.

Unfortunately, Wagner’s own cause is not well served by the terrible nineteenth-

century translations that are still regularly cited by English and American scholars
simply because, for the most part, they are all that is available. (Interestingly, the partial
translations into French made at about the same time by dedicated Wagnerites like
Te´odor de Wyze´wa for the benefit of readers of the Revue Wagne´rienne are far better
and much more comprehensible.) Seen through the well-nigh impenetrable fog of

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5.2

Cornelius Cardew, Treatise, 1967. r 1967 by Gallery Upstairs Press USA r signed to

Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Limited, London. Reproduced by permission of the Publishers.

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W.A. Ellis’s ‘English’ renderings, it is difficult to comprehend how the composer’s
theories could possibly have captivated anyone, let alone a whole array of writers as
sophisticated as Gabriele d’Annunzio or Edouard Dujardin. What sense, after all, can
one possibly make of a statement like ‘until [art] makes intelligible appeal likewise to the
Eye, it remains a thing that merely wills, yet never completely can; but Art must can’?
(Visible Deeds, p. 14) Until some skilful translator is willing to sacrifice half a lifetime to
crafting new English versions of Wagner’s prose writings, the precise nature of the spell
those writings cast upon the European imagination must remain something of a mystery
to the solely English-speaking reader.

Shaw-Miller’s own style of writing, on the other hand, is easy to follow and his

argument is tightly and logically constructed. Even in the middle of chapters dealing
with a wide range of complex theoretical sources, the reader still has a clear idea not
only of where he/she is but also of the direction being taken. These, of course, are real
virtues. The only disadvantage is that, in order to guarantee a lucid and comprehensible
structure, Shaw-Miller is quite selective in the choice of artists and writers, examples and
case studies singled out for discussion. Moreover, he takes for granted not only a fair
amount of knowledge on the part of the reader but also a good understanding of the
wider field of inquiry within which his study is located. This would not be so much of a
problem, were there an easily accessible and more broadly conceived survey of the
various kinds of relationships and affinities between art and music during this period, to
which the reader in search of more information could turn. The fact that, despite all the
more detailed studies alluded to earlier, a general survey of this kind simply does not
exist (at least, not in English) is scarcely Shaw-Miller’s fault, but it does mean that at
least some important topics may strike the reader as conspicuous by their absence. Thus
Klee and Kupka, for example, both of whom were profoundly interested in music, are
discussed in detail – but not Kandinsky, who appears only quite briefly in this book and
who is treated, for the most part, as a theorist rather than as a painter. And broader
topics such as the widespread interest in music among artists at the Bauhaus, the
characteristically 1920s preoccupation with the music of J.S. Bach and the demonstrable
influence exerted by Werker’s idiosyncratic Bach-Analysen, which contained ‘graphic
translations’ of portions of Bach’s music (the source of inspiration for artist Henrik
Neugeboren’s extraordinary ‘plastic representation’ of bars 52–55 of Bach’s fugue in E
flat minor, eventually translated into sculpture) – none of these features in Shaw-Miller’s
account. One day, perhaps, someone will sketch for the benefit of the general reader
something more like a route map, showing – if only in schematic fashion – all the
various cross-linkages and interconnections between music and the visual arts from the
late nineteenth century onwards, including the mobile arts of theatre and dance and film.
But for the moment, we should be thankful for more specialized studies, such as the two
reviewed here – the more so as both provide an intriguing glimpse of a wonderfully rich
field of innovation and creativity that is still too little explored.

Finally, a small rap over the knuckles for both publishers. In a subject area

dominated by artists who were, almost without exception, preoccupied with colour
(Kupka, Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours; Klee, Fugue in Red), it is frustrating to turn
the pages of these two books and find not one single colour reproduction. Moreover,
neither contains a bibliography or list of illustrations and Music and Modern Art has no
index. These must surely have been the publishers’ decisions and I can scarcely believe
that they were met with approval by the authors. These are not mere quibbles, invented
just for the sake of finding something to criticize. In the case of a serious scholarly work
such as Shaw-Miller’s, the lack of a bibliography is genuinely regrettable, not least
because there is no way of identifying the underlying literature on which his study is
based (it is a book that relies heavily on a wide variety of source material), other than by

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laboriously reading through every footnote. Moreover, a number of questions remain
unanswered. For example, the fourth chapter of Visible Deeds is entitled ‘Quasi una
Musica’, which seems, at first sight, to be a purposeful allusion to Karl Schawelka’s 1993
monograph bearing precisely the same title and dealing with precisely the same period.

2

But I cannot find a reference to that book in the notes and, as stated, there is no
bibliography. Is Shaw-Miller’s chapter a deliberate and considered response to
Schawelka? Is the use of the same title intended, perhaps, more as a courtesy? Or is it
merely a case of coincidence? It is impossible to tell. But if university presses are no
longer concerned with upholding academic standards (which means allowing for things
like a proper bibliography), then who will do so? Or can we look forward to a curious
reversal, whereby commercial publishers are prepared to spend serious money on things
like colour illustrations and providing the full scholarly apparatus demanded by an
academic audience (as respected publishers like Thames & Hudson and Phaidon have
done on numerous occasions in recent years, bringing out – alongside their more
‘popular’ titles – books that meet the most exacting standards of scholarship), while
academic publishers, starved of funds, slide ever further into a slough of parsimony?

Peter Vergo

University of Essex

Notes

The Darwin/ist of art history

The Preference for the Primitive. Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art by
E. H. Gombrich, London: Phaidon, 2002, 264 pp., 12 col. plates, 230 b. & w. illus.,
d

35.00

Once upon a time Sir Ernst Gombrich’s story of illusionism was to art history what
Charles Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ was to evolution theory. Hence, to find this grand
narrator forsaking illusionistic evolution for ‘primitive devolution’ may seem incon-
gruous. However, the seed was planted as long ago as Gombrich’s 1953 Ernest Jones
Lecture on Psychoanalysis and the History of Art, when he first puzzled over the
twentieth-century rejection of Bouguereau’s saccharinely seductive nymphs for Picasso’s
brutal Demoiselles. Four years later, when compiling his A.W. Mellon lectures into Art
and Illusion, a twist of circumstance ensured that the seed took root. In order to prove
that John Constable’s view of Wivenhoe Park was the result of ‘a long evolution’ from
‘primitive modes of representation’ to a longed-for ‘conquest of reality’, Gombrich asked
an eleven-year-old girl to copy it. His experiment backfired. Art students did not hesitate
to inform him that they preferred the girl’s ‘primitive’ drawing to what Gombrich calls

1 A. Kagan, Paul Klee: Art and Music, Ithaca, NY

and London, 1983; Marsha L. Morton and Peter L.
Schmunk (eds), The Arts Entwined: Music and
Painting in the 19

th

Century, New York, 2000.

2 Karl Schawelka, Quasi una Musica. Untersuchun-

gen zum Ideal des ‘Musikalischen’ in der Malerei ab
1800, Munich, 1993.

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the ‘artist’s masterpiece’. This was the first of a series of catalysts motivating Gombrich
to write his last book, The Preference for the Primitive, published a year after his death,
at the age of ninety-two, in November 2001.

Drawing upon Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery, Gombrich maintained in

Art and Illusion that the history of art evolves through testing hypotheses and correcting
‘schemas’, from which ‘laws’ could be formulated. While his model of history was
Darwin’s theory of descent modified by natural selection, his model of the artist was a
male genius functioning as, in the succinct words of James Hall, ‘a disinterested
technocrat engaged in something akin to scientific research’.

1

Subsumed by schema, his

key exemplar, John Constable, saw ‘a Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree’, yet
corrected this by painting free from ‘manner’.

2

In Preference for the Primitive, his

hypothesis is to test scientifically whether the term ‘primitive’ can be justifiably applied
to ‘other’ discrepant phases in the development of European drawing and painting
techniques. In his empirical investigation of these phases, Gombrich finds a preference
for the ‘primitive’ not confined to Tribal art, but extending to archaic Greek sculpture,
catacomb and fresco painting, Romanesque reliefs, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Michelan-
gelo, Flaxman, Russian peasant woodcuts and what he calls nonsensical art, comprising
whimsical drawings and spoofs. In order to formulate a law for this phenonemon, he
goes back to Cicero. Although new pictures may, according to this Roman orator,
‘captivate us at first sight the pleasure does not last, while the roughness and crudity of
old paintings maintains their hold on us.’ (p. 7) That perfection leads to revulsion and
that the gratification of all the senses ends in disgust is what Gombrich terms Cicero’s
Law. It is the premise for Gombrich’s ‘primitive’.

Operating in accordance with the dialectical forces of Heinrich Wo¨lfflin’s Principles

of Art History, Cicero’s Law means that artists are caught between the opposing poles of
action and counter-reaction. Instead of Wo¨lfflin’s dichotomous taxonomy of the linear
and painterly, these poles are defined as the new and the revived, or the progressive and
regressive. Consistent with the ‘revisionism’ of ‘new’ art histories, as well as Renaissance
and Renascences written as early as 1944 by Gombrich’s contemporary – for whom he
had little time – Erwin Panofsky, Gombrich identifies the ‘primitive’ as a sign of counter-
reaction, regression and reversal in art’s progressive history. Telling an Other story to his
Story of Art, plotted according to technical progress achieved in the convincing
representation of nature, the preference for relatively ‘primitive’ art forms seem to
counter Gombrich’s progressivist arrow of time and disrupt his Darwinist evolution
towards perfection. Yet, wilfully blind to, or in denial of post-colonial histories,
including Edward Said’s Orientalism, Gombrich’s ‘primitive’ seems hermetically sealed
from the polemic on ‘primitivism’ ignited by William Rubin’s mummifying 1984
Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art exhibition and recently anthologized by Jack
Flam and Miriam Deutsch.

3

Caught in a time warp, such seminal texts as James

Clifford’s Predicament of Culture, Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive and Primitive
Passions and Sally Price’s Primitive Art in Civilized Places, let alone more recent
scholarship by Petrine Archer-Shaw, Annie Coombs, Sieglinde Lemke, Diane Losche,
Colin Rhodes and Nicholas Thomas, seem to have passed him by. Hence, while the title
of this book and its catalyst may signal a substantial revision to Gombrich’s model of art
history verging upon a Damascus, a close reading of its Eurocentric methodology, its
post-colonial absences and ethnocentric slips at the level of metatext may reveal
otherwise – aligning him more with Darwinism than Darwin.

Consistent with Euro-centred evolutionary chronologies, this seven-chapter book

opens in Ancient Greece and Rome. After hastily speculating upon whether the challenge
to the attainment of perfection in Antiquity led to the end of classical art, Gombrich
skips to the eighteenth century to chart a step-by-step progress or regress to twentieth-

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century ‘primitivism’. Not averse to generalizations, any more than universalizations,
Gombrich maintains in this book, as in his Story of Art, that the post-Reformation
rejection of the paradigmatic Catholic Baroque was more acute in Protestant countries
like England, Germany and Switzerland. Because Classical Greek sculpture and
literature appeared to act as an antidote to the hedonism and effeminacy of Rococo,
Gombrich argues that it became ‘the preferable primitive’ for artists, theorists and
connoisseurs in Protestant England and Germany, as well as Catholic France. The
classical ‘primitive’ is then positioned by Gombrich as a logocentric source from which a
network of causality flows, subjecting those in vastly different cultures to the same kind
of transformation. Like a virus, it crosses multifarious borders to infect those as diverse
as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Winckelmann, David, Giambattista Vico and Horace
Walpole. Consistent with Wo¨lfflin’s notion that different times give birth to different art,
another time displaces the ‘classical primitive’. Gombrich’s next ‘primitive’ is then
connected with the next generation’s fervour for Giovanni Bellini, Perugino, Sebastiano
del Piombo and Fra Angelico, as signalled by Friedrich Schlegel’s impassioned response
to these artists at the newly reconstructed Louvre.

Yet, as Gombrich points out, for Goethe imbued with the rumblings of German

nationalism during Germany’s war of liberation against Napoleon, the canonical primitive
did not lie outside his homeland but in German Gothic’s strength and roughness.

4

Inspired

by their discovery of the Old German Masters in the Vienna Gallery, Gombrich also points
out that the Nazarenes soon followed suit in 1808 (p. 115). However, because he wishes
to prove, like Wo¨lfflin, that the ‘preference for this primitive’ was not so much the product
of place but epoch, he then links Peter von Cornelius with his British contemporary
William Blake in their mutual rejection of oil-painting techniques and advocacy of fresco
painting. Goethe’s subsequent formulation of their position into a thesis leads to what
Gombrich calls the first manifesto of primitivism:

y

the savage shapes his coconuts, his feathers and his body with weird designs,

horrifying figures, loud colours – and yet however arbitrary the shapes
composition this creation, it will harmonize even without proportions for one
emotion fused it into a characteristic whole. It is this characteristic art that is the
only true art. (p. 75)

Whilst Gombrich is careful to point out that it would take another 140 years for this
manifesto to be taken literally, he sweepingly concludes that in the eighteenth century,
the term ‘primitive’ was always related to the absence of skill in representing the human
body with unerring accuracy.

Not until his last two chapters does Gombrich turn to the conjunction of

‘primitivism’ and formalism, warmly expressing his admiration for the breadth of
Bernard Smith’s Modernism’s History, while questioning the sufficiency of his
explanation for the ‘formalesque’: ‘I have read Modernism’s History with much profit
and admiration, but I wonder whether this theory offers a sufficient explanation for the
momentous change in orientation the very notion of art underwent in the period
concerned.’ (p. 177) Yet, ironically, his explanation seems no less bald, let alone
more tenable.

5

Affirming rather than contesting Rubin’s formalist theory from his

‘Primitivism’ exhibition – with its antecedents in Alfred H. Barr’s Wo¨lfflinean Cubist
exhibition and adherents in Greenberg – Gombrich claims that artists became receptive
to ‘primitivism’ and formalism because of a fundamental shift from perceptual to
conceptual art signalled by Manet (p. 203). The two main sources posited for this shift
are the decorative arts and the concept of truth to materials. As formalism and
illusionism are twined by Gombrich in a mutually exclusive binary, it was only after the

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quest for mimesis attained perfection that, he claims, craft art was no longer deemed
inferior. Impervious to Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s correlation of their
inferiorization with their genderization, Gombrich glibly explains their inequality as the
impossibility of masters, rather than mistresses, juggling irreconcilable demands.

6

‘You

cannot pay attention to two conflicting demands,’ he states. ‘While the rendering of
appearances monopolizes your thoughts you must leave the pursuit of formal values to
one side.’ (p. 177)

After fleetingly acknowledging Flaxman’s, Viollet-le-Duc’s and the Arts and Crafts

Movement’s fusion of the fine and decorative arts, he alights upon Hokusai and
Hiroshige’s Westernized forms of ‘Japonisme’ as the Nietzschean bridge linking Western
with Eastern consciousness. Like Smith, he singles out Paul Gauguin as the
Zarathustrian overman – or Shavian superman – whose leap into Asian and Oceanic
art broke, he claims, the ‘taboo’ of primitivism and, as a corollary, shook the entire
edifice of Classical and Renaissance art (p. 191). Due to this canonical destabilization,
Gombrich points out that Wilhelm Worringer, like Picasso, experienced an epiphany in
the Trocade´ro, not the Louvre, while plaster casts of French medieval monuments and
Angkor Wat began to be made for this new museum of mankind. With the advent of
Darwinism, he considers that this destabilization was only compounded by the
representation of the ‘primitive’ as the uncontaminated childhood of Homo sapiens.
While outlining its impact upon artists and the ensuing primitivist cult of childhood, at
the same time Gombrich does not shirk from exposing the ethnocentrism inherent in
George Boas’s reformulation of Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, that ‘the
development of the child mirrors the development of the race.’ (p. 200) Yet, while
quick to point out how downgrading ‘primitive’ culture to the childhood of evolution
inadvertently propelled Eurocentred ‘civilization’ into a position of superiority, he seems
less alert to ways his own theory supports rather than disrupts this impulsion.

Instead of pursuing the way Gauguin, following Stephen Eisenman’s Gauguin’s Skirt,

prized the ‘primitive’ as anti-colonialist devolutionism, Gombrich depoliticizes his
strategy as the expression of feeling.

7

Instead of contextualizing Picasso’s allegiance to

the primitive within anti-colonialist discourses long revealed by Patricia Leighten,
Gombrich psychobiologizes his ‘reversion’ as a cathartic shedding of obtrusive skills
(p. 237). Even though he perceives the irony inherent in this quest for an art without
artifice culminating in an art more artificial than any it replaced, he makes no mention of
theories deconstructing this paradox as the ‘primitivist unconscious’ and ‘expressive
fallacy’.

8

Even though he deplores Darwinism, he is no less Darwinist.

Just as it is the dominant gene with the greatest capacity for civilization that, in

Darwin’s Descent of Man, evolves from a struggle for survival amongst different human
races, so it is the dominant art form, in Gombrich theory, that evolves from struggle,
rivalry and competition amongst other art forms. Yet, instead of the ‘fittest’ art evolving
from the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century struggle for survival, Gombrich laments
that the opposite ensues, as manifest by the dominance of ‘the primitive’ (p. 261). By
remodelling the Wo¨lfflinean pendulum into what he calls the Law of Gravitation, he
attempts to explain this regression as a counteractive mechanism. However, his law
seems to operate more like the counterbalancing vertical forces in the Law of
Thermodynamics: whatever going or growing up, eventually falls down. This law
means that the upward thrust of progressive illusionistic art to the pinnacle of Constable
was inevitably counterbalanced by a massive downward slide into what Gombrich labels
in his last two chapters ‘the cult of regression’ (p. 261). To rationalize this further, he
draws upon the rudimentary tools of escapist psychology.

Unlike the lack of destination implicit in Wo¨lfflin’s irreversible pendulum, Gombrich

conceives of Western art before the twentieth century as teleological, forever travelling to

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a predetermined goal. It reaches its destination with Constable whom Gombrich,
following Roger Fry, placed ‘at the end of a long evolution’.

9

Because Constable’s

performance was supposedly such a daunting act to follow, what is covertly implied by
Gombrich in this book, but never openly stated, is that this increased the fear of failure.
It ignited Western artists’ flight into, rather than fight against, the comforting,
unchallenging art of tribes, children and pop culture at ground zero. As Gombrich
surmises, without a shred of orientalizing consciousness, ‘Base line art is safer.’ (p. 297)
Hence, while Paul Klee is identified as regressing to childhood days and Dada as
regressing into the ‘noisy tomfoolery’ of schoolboy days, so Duchamp’s urinal is not the
Tate Modern’s linchpin between modernism, conceptualism and postmodernism but ‘the
landmark’ in the downhill slide from mimesis (p. 268). From this, it is not difficult to
speculate upon the subterranean pit into which Gombrich would thrust Grunge at the
end of this regressive century. His infantalization of ‘primitivism’ is also crucial to its
ranking.

Gombrich is most insistent that nineteenth-century evolutionists should not have

correlated mimetic skill with mental growth and, as a corollary, primitive image-makers
should not have been classified as the primitive species of the human race – not even his
Viennese cook Elise. Nevertheless, he insists that not every human being is born with the
capacity for progressive mimesis (p. 279). He also insists that methods of representation,
like linguistic communication, can be arranged in an ascending scale or descending order
in which one art form is ranked as more primitive than an other. Applying this analogy
to ‘primitivism’, he argues that because its pictorial codes only contain nouns, not
adjectives, and reduce complex information to pidgin language, they are relatively
simplistic, less sophisticated and more schematic than mimetic art. On top of this, as
primitive art was the result of intuition, rather than the intellectual law of optics, it ranks
well below mimesis in Gombrich’s descending order of achievement, only reinforced by
its relationship to evolution.

Given Gombrich’s insistence that the complexity of mimetic skill is the result of

progressive evolution over generations, not overnight, it is unsurprising to find him
outrightly refuting the argument waged by Boas that the skills of mimesis were there for
the taking by most Indian tribes (p. 271). While aligning its long evolution with that of
aeronautics, he elevates the discovery of single-point perspective and foreshortening to
the invention of flying. That ‘the primitive’ could not even be considered in this ascent to
greatness is surmised by the patronizing quote Gombrich extracts from Ernst Von
Garger to clinch his point: ‘Gingerbread figures should not be regarded as great works of
art, even when they happen to be of stone.’ (p. 288) However, he does not come
completely clean on just why he inferiorizes ‘the primitive’ until his last paragraph, in
which he tellingly states:

I know there are plenty of people who deny that there are standards by which to
judge quality. I am not one of them. I believe that great art is rare in painting as
it is in music or poetry, but that where we find it we confront a wealth and
mastery of resources which transcends ordinary human comprehension. (p. 297)

Hence, although this book purports to test scientifically and objectively Gombrich’s

hypothesis, in keeping with Cicero’s Law that ‘the primitive’ became a desirable antidote
to perfection in European art history, it is nevertheless subjective and evaluative.
Although Gombrich positions the diverse eighteenth-century ‘primitive’ revivals as
constituting innocuous and occasionally profitable deviations in the Darwinian evolution
of illusionistic refinement, that they lead to the twentieth-century ‘primitive’, as foretold
by Goethe, seems far from harmless. It is positioned as perilous to the preservation of

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Gombrich’s ‘great art’, as the reversal of the ‘Australian bushman’s’ rank to the ‘fittest
survivor’ would have been to Darwinism. Rather than evolution, ‘the preference for the
primitive’ appears to spawn a disastrous devolution resulting in a ‘cult of regression’,
elided by Gombrich with a culture of regression. By positioning the ‘primitive’ as a
regressive, devolutionary culture incorporating the Tribal, Gombrich’s book then
resuscitates, rather than dismantles, the Eurocentric Darwinist binary in which non-
Europeans are positioned as the backward Other to superior civilization. It bolsters,
rather than disrupts, the trope of the Tribal as the childhood of evolution that, as Bill
Ashcroft points out, offered a ‘natural’ justification for imperial dominance over subject
peoples.

10

Instead of relativizing the values of illusionistic and ‘primitive’ art as it

promises to do, let alone characterizing them in terms of cultural difference, ultimately it
uses the ‘tribal primitive’ as leverage to elevate the European skills of mimesis, in order
to ensure that canonical white, male, European artists, remain what Gombrich
unashamedly calls the ‘gold standard’ of art (p. 191). By inferiorizing and infantalizing
‘the primitive’, while ethnocentrically projecting the superiority of Euro-centred art,
Gombrich’s last book may achieve notoriety and posterity for being more neo- than
post-colonialist. Hence, despite the encyclopedic dimensions of his scholarship and the
vastness of his historical scope, Gombrich’s last tome may ensure that he is remembered
less for his giant Darwin-like stature and more for his Darwinism.

Fay Brauer

The University of New South Wales

Notes

1 James Hall, ‘Older and Wiser: How Gombrich

cleared the ground for an appreciation of primitive
art’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 October 2002,
p. 4. I am grateful to Robert Dale for bringing this
article to my attention.

2 E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the

Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London,
1956, p. 328.

3 Jack Flam and Miriam Deutsch, Primitivism and

Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History,
University of California Press, 2003, see part 4:
‘The Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 Primitive
Exhibition and its aftermath’, pp. 311–409.

4 See The Preference for the Primitive, p. 72. Goethe’s

1772 essay, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, in which this
was written, was published in Herder’s anthology,
Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende
Bla¨tter, 1773.

5 For reasons why Smith’s theory of the ‘formalesque’

was untenable, see Fay Brauer, ‘Hegelian History,

Wo¨lfflinean Periodization and Smithesque
Modernism’, Art History, vol. 24, no. 3,
June 2001, pp. 449–56.

6 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old

Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London,
1981.

7 Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, London,

1997.

8 Hal Foster, ‘The Expressive Fallacy’ and ‘The

‘‘Primitive’’ Unconscious of Modern Art or
White Skin, Black Masks’, in Recodings: Art,
Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Washington DC,
1985; James Clifford, ‘Histories of the
Tribal and the Modern’, Art in America,
April 1985.

9 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 248.

10 Bill Ashcroft, ‘‘‘Primitive and wingless’’: The

colonial subject as child’, in On Post-Colonial
Futures. Transformations of Colonial Culture,
London and New York, 2001, pp. 36–53.

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Poussin and the archaeology of knowledge

Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism and the Politics of Style by Todd P. Olson, Yale
University Press, 2002, 316 pp., 77 col. plates, 291 b. & w. illus., d45.00

Let us give the term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local
memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to
make use of this knowledge tactically today.

Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/Knowledge

From the title of Todd Olson’s new book, the reader could be forgiven for thinking that
the author deals primarily with the problem of Poussin as a ‘French’ painter, which is an
issue that has engaged Poussin scholars before. But it would be wrong to see Olson as
being mainly concerned with Poussin’s ‘Frenchness’, whatever that vague label might
mean within an intellectual culture that was truly international. Olson is more interested
in probing beyond such easy definitions as ‘French’ in order to demonstrate the complex
relation between categories such as politics, philosophy, audience, and how the artist is
implicated within these.

It is this last category, audience, that is most relevant in Poussin and France, as Olson

quite rightly rejects the notion that the artist’s classical orientation is solely rooted in his
own temperament, which has led to the inhibiting label of peintre–philosophe being
imposed on the painter with overwhelming success by Blunt, following the early
biographers. The second great myth about Poussin’s art which Olson disposes of is that
the artist sought to empty ‘painting of personal reference and other signs of temporal
contingency’. Olson challenges the idea that certain themes and ideas within Poussin’s art
are unrelated to specific cultural and political events in seventeenth-century France, such
as the civil war or the Fronde. Some Poussin scholars have tried to connect Poussin’s
landscape allegories with the politics of the Fronde, concluding that Poussin’s ‘politics’ was
an anti-politics, an expression of Olympian contempt at the e´ve`nements happening in
France. Olson will have none of this, and he goes to great lengths to argue against the
notion of ‘Poussin in exile’ by probing the iconography of such works as Camillus and the
Schoolmaster of the Falerii, which allows him to show how the ideological positions of
Poussin’s French clients, the noblesse d’robe, is hinted at in these works.

Camillus is a good example of what Olson calls an ‘object lesson’, an artefact or

painting containing political and moral themes which help to teach values to the specific
community that beholds it. This invocation of a community is precisely where Olson
differs from other scholars, as he is opposed to the idea of Poussin working in isolation,
claiming instead that the artist had in mind a definite ‘public’ for his creations. This
community is the noblesse d’robe, who greatly relied on the literary and visual sources of
antiquity which helped to form its identity. Olson sees the humanist origins of this
community of beholders in the antiquarian culture of provincial France, arguing that
Poussin’s clients drew upon a tradition of scholarship that linked antiquarianism with
the rise of the early modern state. To my knowledge, Olson is the only Poussin scholar
who has consulted Arnaldo Momigliano’s seminal essay ‘Ancient History and the
Antiquarian’, in which interest in archaeological pursuits is related to the power of
individuals in political constitutions. Hence, Olson’s discussion of a Claudian tablet
discovered in 1528, which contained an inscription claiming that the emperor had
granted privileges to Lyons. This artefact inspired Claude

I

De Bellie`vre, a local

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magistrate and rising politician, to petition Franc¸ois

I

to found a parlement in Lyons, an

example of what Olson calls ‘institutional antiquarianism’. He argues that this kind of
archaeology is not only linked with knowledge, but also power, as most of this emerging
class were historians of ancient legislation eager to draw parallels between political
constitutions in ancient times and their own claims to status and political prestige.

One member of Poussin’s ‘emergent clients’ was Michel Passart, an enterprising

official in the Chambre des comptes, and therefore directly involved in fiscal and
legislative decisions. Passart is highly significant for Olson, as, like other members of his
class, he was an honneˆte homme, a cultured member of an elite, who, at the same time,
recognized his civic duties. The problem for Olson is that Passart’s antiquarianism was
only seen through the eyes of writers who wished to associate him and his class with the
centre of classical learning in Rome. This culture of interdisciplinary concerns, such as
archaeology, aesthetics, history and poetry, is not a phenomenon with which Olson is
comfortable, as he sees Passart and his confederates fitting uneasily into it. Instead, he
argues that Poussin recognized that certain subjects, such as the Camillus and the
Schoolmaster of the Falerii, would appeal to the emerging humanism of French travellers
to Rome who were outside this intellectual sodality. To Passart and his cohorts, these
paintings suggested certain ways of using archaeological material and literary sources,
which they welcomed because they had been educated in the way that these themes
related to their country’s history. Olson re-examines the iconography of the two versions
of Camillus and the Schoolmaster of the Falerii in order to argue that the lesson taught
within Passart’s version of the painting, that of exemplary moral conduct punishing
treachery and cowardice, can be related to the subjects taught in the colle`ge, the
institution which educated Passart and his class. At the same time, Olson sees more than
just an allegory of discipline and decency towards the young in this painting, because he
interprets the mixture of formal order and disorder as evidence of ideological tensions
within the noblesse d’ robe itself. Olson refuses to see this implied inversion of the
social order in Bakhtinian terms, but sees it as rooted in the tradition of the proces-
sional entre´e which is more ‘historically specific’; the exaggerated grimace of the
schoolmaster therefore implies knowledge of the way such official processions were
burlesqued.

So confident is Olson of linking the humanism of emergent clients with Poussin’s

paintings, that he has no hesitation in extending his argument to the paintings of the life
of Moses. His theory here is that works such as Moses Striking the Rock, known
through several versions, and destined for the picture cabinet of clients, marks a new
kind of easel picture introduced into France in which ‘prayer is displaced by
conversation.’ Thus, the development of an actio, a range of figurative gesture and
expression, suggests to Olson a situation in which narrative overlapped with the devout
image. He highlights Poussin’s use of Flavius Josephus, whose idiosyncratic account of
Moses’s actions determined his iconography, not least because Josephus had portrayed
Moses as a charismatic individual, rather than as an instrument of God’s will. Although
it is true that in works such as Moses Striking the Rock and The Crossing of the Red Sea
Poussin emphasizes the human dimension rather than the miracle itself, it does not
follow that this use of Josephus can be linked specifically with French humanism. If
anything, the emphasis on human agency, rather than divine intervention, reflects the
scepticism of Roman intellectual freethinkers such as Cassiano dal Pozzo and Gabriel
Naude´, who tended to approach miracles in a spirit of scientific inquiry. Although Olson
may be right to see Poussin creating a picture destined for the cabinets of Passart and
others, he does not draw attention to the fact that the actio in Poussin’s paintings
suggests a way of showing rational and sceptic reactions to divine theophanies, which
develops out of the neo-stoic thinking of intellectuals in Rome rather than France.

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Olson’s discussion of the Moses narrative is typical of a recent tendency in Poussin

studies which seeks to relate ideas and themes in his paintings to the French context,
specifically the ideological one. In much the same way, Judith Bernstock has recently
tried to argue a connection between the figure of Moses in Poussin’s paintings and the
dynastic ambitions of the French royal family in the seventeenth century. However, the
problem with this emphasis is that most of this antiquarian learning originates with
scholars within the circle of Cassiano dal Pozzo, and consequently it is difficult to
connect this erudition comfortably with a French circle of patronage. Admittedly, Olson
draws attention to Poussin’s use of motifs from the sixteenth-century Provenc¸al
antiquarian Guillaume du Choul, whose books on ancient Roman religious customs
were definitely consulted by Poussin, albeit probably under Cassiano’s direction. As
Olson points out, Poussin used the religious implements that appear in Du Choul in
order to give his pictures more of an antiquarian appearance, as in the canonical
example of the two sets of Sacraments painted for Cassiano and Chantelou. Yet, to
argue, as Olson does, that Poussin was placing the ancient, ‘already known object in a
shared conceptual field, thus registering an affiliation between the artist in Rome and a
community in France with common interests’, raises many problems, not least of which
is legibility. Given the evidence that members of this French community experienced
difficulties in reading the complex historia of Poussin’s paintings, as in the case of
Chantelou, who had to be told by an exasperated Poussin how to read the intricate
articulation of the Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert, it seems difficult to see this
sophisticated reading where Poussin’s French patrons are concerned. However, Olson is
aware of this problem of different audiences drawing diverse meanings from the artist’s
paintings and argues that the use of such material as du Choul should be seen as proof of
Poussin’s awareness of how archaeology could be manipulated to appeal to different
interest groups, or what Olson calls interpretive communities. Thus, Poussin was not an
archaeologist with a cataloguing tendency, but a shrewd manipulator of existing visual
sources, some of which, like du Choul, were linked to local antiquarian traditions in
France. But Olson goes much further than this and argues that the French-origin
antiquarianism demanded a different kind of reading of Poussin’s works than that
practised by Cassiano’s erudite, academic circle. This notion of different interpretive
communities is perfectly acceptable, but one has to wonder whether Olson is correct to
argue that the comparative religion that is present in the two sets of Sacraments has its
roots in the archaeological practices of sixteenth-century France. If anything, the
tendency to compare pagan and Christian religious customs in Poussin’s paintings can be
traced back to the pictures of the artist’s very early years, some of which contain strange
iconography that is unmistakably connected with the erudite interests of Cassiano. For
instance, the motif of the pagan philosopher in the landscape that appears in such
paintings as Baptism and Ordination in the first set of Sacraments almost certainly has
its origin in some of Poussin’s early paintings, and must surely be a sign of Cassiano’s
interest in the parallels between philosophy and religion.

It would be unfair to reduce Olson’s argument to a question of whether Poussin’s

sources or the use of them can be linked specifically to French or Italian scholars; the
author is more concerned with how these sources are received in a network of power
and politics. The issue of Poussin as a political painter has, not surprisingly, received
short shrift. Most Poussin scholars have preferred to view his time away from France as
a form of exile from both patrie and politics. This view of disengagement again brings
up the question of Poussin as a peintre–philosophe, especially as a number of his
landscapes painted for French clients in the 1640s and later have been seen as evidence
of an interest in philosophical introspection rather than political awareness. Of course
it was Anthony Blunt who equated the calm, organized landscapes of Poussin’s later

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periods with the stoic mentality of his French bourgeois patrons, who viewed the
workings of fortune with equanimity and detachment. For Olson, the class label
‘bourgeois is historically and sociologically imprecise’, and he argues quite convincingly
that this stratum of hard-working merchants and bankers would not have been so
separate from the nobility as Blunt maintained. Olson is reluctant to accept Blunt’s view
that Poussin allied himself with his French clientele because they were opposed to
outbreaks of political violence and civil disorder. If this view of the artist were true, he
would be hostile to the Fronde, seeing in it the rule of the mob from which he and his
clientele would flee, which was Blunt’s view.

As Olson rightly stresses, this social history can be directly related to the formalism of

the landscapes of the 1640s, such as the two Phocion paintings which have often been
taken as models of pictorial order. Blunt may have been right to see a new, intellectual
form of landscape evolving in Poussin’s art, but there is a problem with going one step
further and equating formal order with the desires of Poussin’s French clients for a stable
political condition. Indeed, Olson makes a very good case for the dismantling of the term
‘bourgeois’ and the rejection of what he calls the ‘mythology of a middle-class’, which has
hindered a convincing socio-historical evaluation of Poussin’s relationships with patrons in
France. All this is utterly convincing, but there remains the insurmountable problem that
hardly any documentation remains about Poussin’s attitude to French politics, except for a
few virulent comments on Mazarin and his regime in the artist’s correspondence. These
take the form of metaphors drawn from Homer or Virgil in which the arch villain
Mazarin is cast as some obnoxious mythological creature like Cyclops or Scylla, who
specializes in wrecking the careers and ambitions of Poussin’s virtuous patrons.
Admittedly, this is evidence of pronounced antipathy towards the new political order
that threw Poussin’s friends out of office, but can these metaphors of Homeric wandering
really be construed as political? Part of the problem of this idea of a politics in exile is that
Poussin also uses mythological references like Scylla to refer to his own pessimistic outlook
on life, and so one wonders if this imagery of displacement relates to more personal
concerns rather than to a broader politics. A close reading of Poussin’s use of these marine
metaphors in his letters of the 1640s leads to the suspicion that the Homeric theme is
nearer to neostoic writers such as Guillaume du Vair, who often invokes references to the
perils of sea voyages to illustrate his philosophy of neo-stoic Christianity. At best, one can
say that Poussin’s ‘politics’ is inexplicit and that political themes linked to social events,
such as the Fronde, can be read into the artist’s paintings, if one so desires.

Poussin in France is an incredible achievement. Not only does it offer fresh insights

into Poussin’s motivations and his relationship with his patrons, it also presents new
methodology used to explain the artist’s ideas on painting. For example, there is an
original discussion of reception theory and Poussin’s comments on the maison carre´e, an
example of classical architecture that he mentions in a famous letter to Chantelou.
Although he does not use the word, Olson seems to be hinting at the idea of Poussin as a
seventeenth-century flaˆneur, a painter–archaeologist walking through Rome who sees
monuments with heightened awareness, as opposed to the non-flaˆneur, who passes by
such buildings with hardly a glance. As I write, there are suggestions, mainly inspired by
Olson’s sociohistorical approach, to revise the notion of Poussin as a peintre–philosophe
and instead to re-constitute him as a peintre de la vie moderne. If such untraditional
strategies become part of future Poussin scholarship, in addition to connoisseurship and
iconographical analysis, then new debates could be initiated to the great advantage of all
in the field, and perhaps beyond. That is ultimately why Olson’s book is so important: it
encourages us to think of Poussin in new and exciting ways.

David Packwood

University of Warwick

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Prophecy, art, and Shaker ‘gift’ drawings

Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs edited by France
Morin, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 192 pp., 90 col. plates, 75 b. & w. illus.,
$34.95

The year 1843 was a pivotal one in the history of evangelical Christianity. Banner
headlines in the New York Tribune of 21 March 1843 lampooned the teachings of
William Miller (1782–1849), whose predictions of Christ’s Second Coming, taught
through the use of illustrated teaching charts, attracted thousands of followers. Although
Christ did not return as predicted, the ‘Great Disappointment’, as the Millerites called it,
ultimately led to the establishment of the Adventist movement and such denominations
as the Advent Christian Church, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s
Witnesses. Receiving far less fanfare in 1843 was the appearance of a small book of
prophetic signs, said to have been written by the Prophet Isaiah and filled with
enchanting drawings by a female medium named Miranda Barber (plate 5.3). Sixteen
pages of this book, reproduced in colour, introduce the text of Heavenly Visions: Shaker
Gift Drawings and Gift Songs, the catalogue to the exhibition of the same name, curated
by France Morin and organized by the Drawing Center, New York, and the UCLA
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2001. Illustrating more than eighty drawings, books
and song manuscripts originating in the Shaker communities of New Lebanon, New
York and Hancock, Massachusetts, between 1839 and 1859, the catalogue lavishly
displays ninety colour and seventy-five black-and-white plates and contains five essays.
Offering both an extraordinary aesthetic experience and a reasoned account of these
delicate ‘gift’ drawings, texts and songs, Heavenly Visions demonstrates that the
Shakers, best known for the austere functionalism of their crafts, were, if briefly,
extraordinary picture-makers, whose imagery is steeped in symbolism, rich in colour and
elegant in design. Like the illustrated teaching charts of the Millerites, Shaker ‘gift’
drawings, also testify to the convergence of prophecy belief and the art of image-making
in mid-nineteenth-century America.

1

The Shakers, or, more correctly, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second

Appearing, gained their sobriquet from the group’s charismatic worship practices that
featured twirling, dancing, singing and speaking in tongues. Originating in eighteenth-
century England, the sect believed in the imminence of Christ’s Second Coming. When
one of its members, a young woman named Ann Lee (1736–1784), reported that in the
midst of prayer she had been overcome by the presence of Christ, the Shakers interpreted
the event as the manifestation of the Lord’s long-awaited return.

2

Led by Mother Ann,

as she came to be known, in 1774 the Shakers moved to America where, by the
nineteenth century, they flourished. Renouncing the claim to private property and
embracing a life of celibacy, the Shakers advocated a strict and simple way of life,
combined with productive labour. At one time numbering more than five thousand, they
lived in self-sustaining, communal villages from Maine to Kentucky, where they designed
craft objects whose simple, purposeful forms have been seen as forerunners of the
functionalism characterizing much early twentieth-century mainstream American art.
Although the sect’s Millennial Laws (1845) forbid the display of art, including maps,
charts and ‘pictures or paintings set in frames’, the Shakers nonetheless created hundreds
of drawings of which more than two hundred, ranging in size from a few square inches
to several feet in length, survive.

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The key to understanding these puzzling creations is found within the context of

mid-nineteenth-century Shaker revivalism, when the sect sought to counteract its
dwindling numbers and revitalize its religious beliefs. For two decades, a charismatic
wind of spiritual fervour, known as Mother Ann’s Work and calling to mind the spirit-
possessed days of the sect’s early years, swept Shaker worship services. At New Lebanon,
the seat of highest authority, and nearby Hampton, some members experienced ecstatic
performances, including dance and pantomime, while others received spiritual presents
made tangible in the form of song manuscripts and drawings. These gifts were inspired
by holy visions, transcribed by (mostly) female mediums or what the Shakers called
‘instruments’. The songs and drawings, containing calligraphic texts and delicately
rendered images, were believed to have been sent from holy individuals in the spirit
world, such as Mother Ann, deceased Shaker leaders and other sacred persons, including
Bible prophets. Rather than being understood as art works, the ‘drawings’ were
perceived as manifestations of spiritual love and encouragement.

5.3

‘The Beasts of the Fields and Forests’, in Book of Prophetic signs

written by Prophet Isaiah, 1843. Ink, watercolour and graphite on lined
paper, 21.6 17.3cm. Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.

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Heavenly Visions functions as both an introduction to the distinctive creativity of

Shaker mediums and as a resource for the study of their visions. The book’s essays
highlight the increased scholarly focus on understanding art works from a contextual
point of view. In her essay, Sally M. Promey, who treated the aesthetic, religious and
social functions of Shaker drawings in her 1993 book Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and
Image in Mid-Nineteenth Century Shakerism (1993), explores how the drawings,
responding to a perceived need for the third generation of Shaker members to experience
the presence of Mother Ann, broke down the barriers between heaven and earth to unite
the Shaker community, spiritual and real. John T. Kirk examines the gift drawings within
the neo-classic environment so prevalent in mid-nineteenth-century rural America,
relating the drawings to a diverse group of contemporary non-Shaker art forms. Mary
Ann Haagen explores the realm of gift songs as spiritual expressions that sought to build
religious community, and Ann Kirschner takes readers into the world of early Shaker

5.4

First Father Adam (American Shaker), Inspirational Drawing: The

Holy City, 1843. Ink and watercolour on paper, 78.7 62.9cm. Philadelphia
Museium of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Zieget, 1963.

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dreams and visions, documenting the long history of spirit possession in Shaker belief
and providing the art’s spiritual context. Morin’s essay highlights the role of the Shaker
instrument as a transcriber of spiritual gifts, a conception of inspired authorship rooted
in history and still active today. His essay, like Promey’s consideration of the Shakers’
fundamentally iconoclastic outlook, leads to issues that span the history of art.

Heavenly Visions’ tour de force, however, is its reproduction of gift drawings.

Beautifully presented on buff paper, many with colour details and some with texts
transcribed, the drawings often simulate the actual objects. They are placed sequentially
thoughout the text (the only drawback being the lack of an index and list of plates and
illustrations, although the photo credits are thorough and a list of works in the
exhibition is included). The diverse designs of the drawings, their calligraphic writings,
and rich but muted colours call to mind a never-ending array of divergent artistic
counterparts that transcend time, including quilts and samplers, embroidery patterns and
Victorian valentines, scenes of Noah’s ark from medieval manuscripts, early twentieth-
century architectural and garden designs, the modernist paintings of Adolf Gottlieb, Paul
Klee, or Joan Miro, and even the apocalyptic paintings of contemporary self-taught
artists.

Lingering over the pages of Heavenly Visions can induce an aesthetic high. It can

also provoke a researcher’s rush, for the book provides scholars with an unparalleled
resource for the study of Shaker ‘gift drawings’. One of the most delicately rendered gift
drawings is a spiritual map, entitled The Holy City, said to have been inspired by the
spirit of Adam, which left heaven and visited New Lebanon, in 1843 (plate 5.4).
Transcribed by Polly Jane Reed, it is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Its circular
format lays out the plan of a delicately rendered holy city, which is traversed by
thoroughfares and coloured a pale yellow. Mounted with wooden mouldings at its top
and bottom and large enough to be seen from a distance, it could be rolled up or
displayed like a modern map, or, one might add, like the Millerite charts of the same
year that were specifically intended for public display. Although Miller’s didactic charts
feature the colossus of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 2:3) and are decidedly unlike Shaker
designs, both examples demonstrate how these two very different but contemporaneous
religious traditions forged distinctive artistic languages in response to Bible prophecy.

Carol Crown

University of Memphis

Notes

1 See Gail E. Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic

Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth Century American
Painting, University Press of New England, 2000.

2 Robley Edward Whitson, The Shakers: Two

Centuries of Spiritual Reflection, Paulist Press,
1983.

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