Master Narratives and their Discontents

James Elkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135872564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art moderne

In this bracing engagement with the many versions of art history, James Elkins argues that the story of modernism and postmodernism is almost always told in terms of four narratives. Works of art are either seen as modern or postmodern, or praised for their technical skill or because of the politics they appear to embody. These are master narratives of contemporary criticism, and each leads to a different understanding of what art is and does.

Both a cogent overview of the state of thinking about art and a challenge to think outside the art historical box, Master Narratives and their Discontents is the first volume in a series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.

1. Modernisms

In keeping with the synoptic, preliminary nature of this inquiry, I approach the question of modernism by listing several variants, without at first considering how they might be compared. Before I do so, it is relevant to remark that the variety of ways scholars have construed the history and characteristics of modernism is measurably different from the way that other periods in art history, say Baroque or Byzantine, have been understood. If I were to name a Renaissance painting — say Titian's Diana Discovering the Pregnancy of Callisto in Edinburgh — and ask about its place in the history of sixteenth-century painting, I might be able to entertain half a dozen different possibilities (see Figure 1.1). In the first place, Titian's painting could be used to exemplify some traits of the Renaissance in general, such as the interest in istoria, or the use of painting as a vehicle for moralizing emblems. More specifically, the painting could be proposed as a characteristic middle period work in Titian's oeuvre. Or it could be seen as evidence of Titian's interest in what has come to be known as Mannerism. It would also be possible to see this painting as a

Figure 1.1

representative of the kind of Northern Italian work that Vasari contrasted with good Central Italian practice, and that would tie it to the discourse of colorito and disegno. At a stretch I might define the painting against one of several senses of transalpine art, as an Italian alternative to the practices described, for example, by Karel Van Mander.

This might seem like a wide range of choices, but in fact they are not so much choices as alternate and compatible models, well discussed in the literature and not in conflict with one another.

Figure 1.2

I could easily have chosen a Renaissance painting that does not even call up this many different readings. What I mean to point out here is that the historiographic issues for Renaissance painting are settled in a way that those for modernism are not. The working dates for the inception and effective ending of the disegno-colorito debate are well known, and so is the history of the idea that Titian had a Mannerist phase. Most of the interpretations are not the subjects of active discussion, and scholarship has turned to other kinds of questions.

Contrast that situation with a modernist painting, say Manet's Olympia (see Figure 1.2). Just mentioning it conjures a whole series of questions whose answers depend on widely different ways of construing modernism and modernist painting. Manet has been seen as a modernist in at least three very different senses, which I will enumerate later, and, just as significant, historians whose sense of modernism depends on yet other models have bypassed his work, and this painting in particular, as crucial moments in modernism. Modernism, I think, is contested in a way that Renaissance painting is not, and in particular, the alternate theories are not so much aspects of a coherent whole as pieces of different pictures.

It could be urged that new scholarship on Titian has created a set of interests as diverse as the ones that surround the Olympia. In the past twenty years historians have uncovered information about Titian's circle of friends and made connections to the sexual life of Venice, and we now know more about Titian's patrons and their political interests. But I do not think these interpretations amount to the divergence of interpretations that surround Manet. It could even be said that the late Renaissance is at stake in what Titian did around mid-century, simply because Titian is one of the principal artists of the period, but there is not, as far as I am aware, an active interest in formulating what “late Renaissance” might mean in this context. It is not a conceptual category that requires attention in the way that modernism does. In regard to Manet, by contrast, everything is at stake: he is a fulcrum of the modernist sensibility in painting, and that matters because it directly affects, or even determines, what counts as twentieth-century modernism and even what counts as contemporary practice.

Let me illustrate the difference with an example from contemporary academic politics. In the English and Irish university systems, there is a position known as an external assessor, which is a person engaged by a department to comment on the examination questions before they are given, and also to read and help grade the students’ answers to those questions. Part of an external assessor's job is to ensure that the examination questions proposed by the department's lecturers are well posed and set at the appropriate levels. Now when I first heard about that system, I was astonished. It seemed amazing that someone in another university could be trusted to understand what might be happening in classes I was teaching. After I learned more about the system, I began to see its strong points — among other things, it reveals inadequately prepared classes — but I also came to think that it fits premodern art history much better than modernism or postmodernism, because the large-scale historiographic issues are widely agreed on in Renaissance and other premodern art. If an instructor chooses to emphasize gender or patronage, it is understood that those issues lie in some measure to one side of the kinds of judgments that give the works their places in the traditions in question. Sexual practices in sixteenth-century Venice could be used as a way to introduce Diana Discovering the Pregnancy of Callisto, but questions of gender and sexuality would be understood to be at once independent of, and compatible with, existing narratives about Mannerism and northern Italian painting.

With modernism things are different. It is conceivable that a modernist in one university may wish to teach in accord with theories of high modernism and that the external assessor might subscribe to differing accounts. In that case, the external assessor would have to find the examination questions to be biased or effectively empty; the assessor would, if he or she decided to push the issue, be compelled to say that the entire content of the course in question requires rethinking. In the case of Manet's Olympia, for example, an assessor with an interest in postmodernism might find an account based on Manet's formal innovations to be more than merely incomplete; it might appear misguided because it omits the image's political and gender content. The theories are too strongly at odds to be posed as compatible alternates.

This example is the clearest way I know to introduce a fundamental property of the accounts I will be considering; each constitutes a choice that implies very different objects, artists, and movements, and strongly affects what is taken to be worth saying about a given painting, period, or problem.

It would be possible to employ any number of criteria to order and collate the theories of modernism. Theories of modernism could be distinguished, for example, by writing their histories. Such a strictly historiographic approach would make it possible to locate the genealogies of current ideas; Jürgen Habermas's critique of modernity, for instance, could be traced back to German romanticism. The drawback of a historiographic approach is that the order in which the theories appeared does not correlate with their interest for art history in the twenty-first century. To understand currently viable models of twentieth-century painting, it is not always relevant to know that a given approach began before or after another one. It would also be possible to arrange theories of modernism according to other criteria, for example, their politics, the biographies and institutions of the historians who proposed them, the effect they had on the market, their endorsement by major museums, or their degree of attachment to the disciplines of art history or philosophy. Here I am choosing a simple diagnostic criterion: the works and years that have been taken to be the inception of modernism, in particular in painting. That criterion has the double advantage of being relatively amenable to exposition in a brief format and also applicable to the question at hand — an inventory of the currently viable senses of the past century. Looking at the proposed starting points of modernism results, I think, in five distinct senses of modernist painting.

Before I list them, it is worth noting that I use the terms theories, strategies, and models to describe these accounts, even though few of them were proposed as such. They normally appeared in monographs on particular subjects, not in theoretical tracts about the concept of modernism in painting. Calling them theories posits differences between these texts that are as clear as they would be if the texts had been theories in the philosophic sense. The distortion, I hope, pays dividends in clarity even though it necessarily misrepresents implicit positions as argued ones.

It is also significant that these theories are rarely listed or even named, even though the differences between them are ingrained in current writing in art history. There are various reasons for that lacuna in the scholarship, which need to be inspected more closely than I can do here. One possible reason is a disciplinary resistance to large-scale theories; there is an understandable reticence, for example, about expanding beyond the limits of the individual works or artists under study. That is not just a matter of custom; it points to the structure of the discipline, which can be inimical to explicit conceptual exchanges outside of historically determined settings. That in turn means that the questions I am setting out here run against the grain of some current work in art history in ways that I will not be able to mend. The lacuna is also due to the common and reasonable conviction on the part of art historians that all true theories must coexist in the end, because they describe perspectives on the same material. That pluralist stance is one that I think needs to be regarded with extreme skepticism. As I will try to make clear, these five theories of the origins of modernism are often mutually contradictory.

1. Modernism Begins in the Renaissance

Proceeding chronologically, the High Renaissance is the first period that has been proposed as the beginning of modernism in painting. (I will be using the expressions modernism in painting and modernist painting interchangeably. Both are distinct from modern painting, which begs the questions I am asking here by proposing that the moment of “the modern” is known.) Several texts could be proposed as loci classici. Jakob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy would be one, in t...