book Spring 2006...coming up in Dædalus: David Bromwich A republic divided 5 Patricia Meyer Spacks...

coming up in Dædalus:

David Bromwich A republic divided 5

Patricia Meyer Spacks Revolution in the humanities 11

Steven Marcus From classics to cultural studies 15

Andrew Delbanco American literature: a vanishing subject? 22

Pauline Yu Comparative literature in question 38

Anthony Grafton History’s postmodern fates 54

Thomas Crow The practice of art history in America 70

Gerald Early The quest for a black humanism 91

Jack M. Balkin& Sanford Levinson Law & the humanities 105

Dag½nn Føllesdal& Michael Friedman The rise of American philosophy 116

Peg Boyers Unsent Dedication 127

Adam Braver A death in the family 130

William B. Quandt on Israel & Palestine 133

Norbert Schwarz on judgments of truth & beauty 136

on scientists as professionals, Social Security & the aging of America &c. 139

DædalusJournal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Spring 2006

Dæ

dalus

comment

on the humanities

poetry

½ction

notes

letters

Spring 200

6: on the humanities

U.S. $13; www.amacad.org

plus poetry by Kevin Carrizo di Camillo, John Kinsella, CharlesSimic, Lawrence Dugan &c.; ½ction by Dorian Gossy &c.; and notesby Michael Cook, Joel F. Handler, William Galston, Richard Morris,Robert J. Sharer, John Felstiner, Daniel G. Nocera &c.

Antonio & Hanna Damasio, Jerry Fodor, Carol Gilligan, GeraldEdelman, Jorie Graham, Raymond Dolan, Arne Öhman, MarkJohnson, Jacques d’Amboise, and William E. Connolly

on body in mind

Akeel Bilgrami, Wendy Doniger, Amartya Sen, Stephen Greenblatt,Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sydney Shoemaker, Joseph Koerner,Susan Green½eld, David A. Hollinger, Carol Rovane, Ian Hacking,Todd E. Feinberg, and Courtney Jung

on identity

William H. McNeill, Adam Michnik, Jonathan Schell, James Carroll,Breyten Breytenbach, Mark Juergensmeyer, Steven LeBlanc, JamesBlight, Cindy Ness, Neil L. Whitehead, Mia Bloom, and TzvetanTodorov

on nonviolence& violence

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Joan Roughgarden, Terry Castle, Steven Marcus, Elizabeth Benedict,Brian Charlesworth, Lawrence Cohen, Anne Fausto-Sterling,Catharine MacKinnon, Tim Birkhead, and Margo Jefferson

on sex

Joyce Appleby, John C. Bogle, Lucian Bebchuk, Robert W. Fogel,Jerry Z. Muller, Peter Bernstein, Richard Epstein, Benjamin M.Friedman, John Dunn, and Robin Blackburn

on capitalism& democracy

Anthony Kenny, Thomas Laqueur, Shai Lavi, Lorraine Daston, PaulRabinow, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Robert George, Robert J. Richards,Jeff McMahan, Nikolas Rose, and John Broome

on life

on the public interest William Galston, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Seyla Benhabib, Jagdish Bhagwati,Adam Wolfson, Alan Ehrenhalt, Gary Hart, and others

Abraham Lincoln said in the HouseDivided speech that this nation couldnot endure half slave and half free. Itwould become all one thing or all theother–all free or all slave. Then heasked, “Have we no tendency to the latter condition?”

Americans face a similar questiontoday. We cannot endure as an empirefeared and distrusted throughout theworld and as a constitutional republicfounded on liberty and governed by consent.

Lincoln, in his speeches of the 1850sand his debates with Stephen Douglas,pointed to symptoms of a degenerationof public opinion. He believed that thereason for the change was a growing passivity to the expansion of slavery. Hehad carefully laid the groundwork for hiscriticism, speaking out against the Mex-ican War, against the opening of the Ne-braska Territory to slaveholders, andagainst Chief Justice Taney’s opinion inthe Dred Scott decision, which held thatthe Negro was a form of property whose

possessor was guaranteed the rights dueto owners of other forms of property.

A remedy might come, Lincoln be-lieved, from law-abiding resistance todecisions like Dred Scott, and from elect-ing of½cials determined to put slaveryback on its old footing. Slavery wouldthen become an institution con½ned to alimited section of the country and treat-ed not as a social blessing but a tempo-rary necessity, a practice “in course ofultimate extinction.” The program wasradical, in that it envisaged an end ofslavery, but it was also conservative, forit aimed to return liberty to the centralplace it once had held in the feelings ofAmericans.

One difference in our present situa-tion is obvious. We have no party of op-position in matters of constitutional lib-erty. No politician of national standinghas offered an analysis of the loss of lib-erty to which many Americans in thepast ½ve years have resigned themselves–the kind of analysis that Lincoln initi-ated with the question, “Don’t you ½ndyourself making arguments in support ofthese measures, which you never wouldhave made before?”

Instead, we have had piecemeal de-murrals and episodic complaints aboutmeasures that range from barely legal tobluntly unconstitutional.

If we hope to revive public concernwith the fate of constitutional liberty, it is instructive to remember Lincoln’scourageous response to events of the1850s that carry distinct reverberationstoday.

Dædalus Spring 2006 5

David Bromwich, a Fellow of the American Acad-emy since 1998, is Bird White Housum Professorof English at Yale University. His publications in-clude “Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic” (1983), “AChoice of Inheritance” (1989), “Politics by OtherMeans” (1992), and “Skeptical Music: Essays onModern Poetry” (2001). He is currently workingon a study of Edmund Burke.

Comment by David Bromwich

A republic divided

© 2006 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

In a six-year campaign of persuasionthat began in 1854 with the speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and ended in1860 with the Cooper Union speech, Lin-coln argued that the nation’s foundershad considered slavery an embarrass-ment to the Constitution, an “excres-cence.” Though this was a controver-sial view, Lincoln insisted on its verac-ity; and Americans came to know theevidence better through his teaching. He liked to remind his listeners that the word ‘slavery’ appeared nowhere inthe Constitution. As Lincoln saw it, therecord of public acts hostile to slaverythat the founders supported in the yearsafter 1788 demonstrated the signi½canceof this omission. Those acts included a law of 1798 that prohibited bringingslaves from Africa into the MississippiTerritory, and the passage in 1807 of ameasure that outlawed all African slavetrade.

Propagandists today for an expandedAmerican empire or the global spread of democracy–different names for thesame thing–agree in citing as a precur-sor neither Washington nor Lincoln (im-possible models for empire builders) butthe international ‘idealist’ WoodrowWilson. And it is Wilsonian enthusiasmfor a permanent peace achieved throughwar, combined with a flattering and nos-talgic interpretation of the cold war, thathas underwritten the Bush administra-tion’s pursuit of a foreign policy basedon intimidation, war, and the threat ofwar.

Of the scattered reasons offered byJames Polk to justify the Mexican War,Lincoln observed: “First he takes upone, and in attempting to argue us intoit, he argues himself out of it; then seizesanother, and goes through the same pro-cess; and then, confused at being able to think of nothing new, he snatches upthe old one again . . . . His mind, tasked

beyond its power, is running hither andthither, like some tortured creature.” Adissenter from the Mexican War, Lin-coln thought the United States should be exemplary in its practice of freedom:we should epitomize a political idealrather than impose our practices on oth-ers. He agreed with John Quincy Adams,a president who was later to join Lin-coln’s own Whig Party, that America“goes not abroad, in search of monstersto destroy. She is the well-wisher to thefreedom and independence of all. She isthe champion and vindicator only of herown.” Adams’s warning suggests a truthhe did not live to see con½rmed. Eager-ness for foreign entanglements alwaysstands in inverse proportion to a regardfor liberty at home.

Lincoln noticed in the early 1850s thatarguments for slavery had grown bolder.A new species of religious apologeticshad arisen, and he called it “pro-slaverytheology.” There was likewise a newshamelessness in avowing the opinionthat the Declaration of Independencehad set the standard of equality too high.When John Pettit, a Democrat from In-diana, remarked on the floor of the Sen-ate that the maxim “all men are createdequal” was “a self-evident lie,” nobodychallenged the imputation. To Lincoln,this silence was scandalous. The coars-ening of political speech was bound toproduce, even as it was a product of, anew and reckless brutality of conduct.Had Pettit uttered those words in Inde-pendence Hall in 1776, he would havebeen thrown into the street.

One need not search far to discover a resonance with the present crisis. Wehave heard a president boast almost ca-sually of his unprecedented power tolegalize the assassination of personsabroad. “Put it this way,” he said of thetargets of secret killings he authorized:

6 Dædalus Spring 2006


“They are no longer a problem.” Hadany earlier president boasted of suchacts, the insolence would not have goneunrebuked. But today we lack a public½gure willing to take up the burden Lin-coln took up in the 1850s: to record, re-spond, reiterate, and sear the offensesinto the public mind.

From 1850 to 1857, the national moraleregarding slavery passed from compro-mise to retrogression. The ½rst great step backward was the repeal of the Mis-souri Compromise included in the Kan-sas-Nebraska Act–an action that effec-tively permitted slavery in new territo-ries north of the Missouri line. The DredScott decision took the next step. TheCourt gave legal sanction to the bringingof slaves to the territories when it arguedthat slaveholders had rights under theConstitution whereas Negroes did not.

Compare the disastrous slide of 2001–2006. Once again, we ½nd ourselvesmaking arguments we would never havemade before. Our version of pro-slaverytheology is pro-torture sophistry. We de-plore the atrocities at Guantánamo andAbu Ghraib, yet we refuse to acknowl-edge that they were a result of directivesby of½cials of our government, whichapproved forbidden methods of humil-iation and deliberate cruelty. As in the1850s, the change has been accomplishedby degrees, through encroachment on anold policy. This has required consider-able rhetorical and legal sleight-of-hand.Formerly discountenanced methodstherefore were not inculcated as doc-trine all at once. Rather, the Bush admin-istration introduced them as emergencymeasures–backed by Justice Depart-ment memorandums that rede½ned thewar in Iraq so as to exclude the UnitedStates from the Geneva Conventions,and by memorandums that narrowedthe de½nition of torture so as to permit

all abuse that did not openly intendmaiming or killing.

When Lincoln asked whether theUnited States had no tendency to thecondition of a slave republic, he wasinviting his listeners to consider themachinery put in place by recent legis-lation and court decisions. Behind theKansas-Nebraska Act lay a tacit deter-mination that power and influence andsheer numbers were going to decide theadmission or exclusion of slavery in new states. Lincoln believed it neededonly a second Dred Scott decision to ex-pand the new permissiveness towardslavery from the territories to the states.

Why did he call the Dred Scott deci-sion “an astonisher in legal history”?Because it nulli½ed rights that the Con-stitution implied and gave cash value to rights about which the Constitutionsaid nothing. A similar contempt for the common understanding of basicrights appears in a recent claim by Al-berto Gonzales, the former White Housecounsel and now attorney general. Gon-zales asserts that the president has an“inherent right” to authorize warrant-less searches of Americans. In assum-ing such a prerogative–acting outsidethe law and abridging the Bill of Rightsfor the declared purpose of protectingAmericans–this president and his at-torney general have produced an aston-isher in legal history.

All of Bush’s and Gonzales’s innova-tions in justice obey this maxim: changethe law if possible; if visible change isthwarted, change the law invisibly; ifboth tactics fail, break the law and ½nd a justi½cation afterward. Like PresidentPolk in the Mexican War, President Bushwas able to change the law visibly toauthorize the war he wanted in Iraq. To effect a demoralization of the law on torture, he had to solicit counsel to


A republic divided

change the law invisibly. In the case ofdomestic spying, he circumvented theexisting machinery and, when discov-ered, claimed authorization from ex-panded emergency powers.

Of all the equivocal utterances ofthe 1850s, the one that drew Lincoln’sdeepest scorn was Stephen Douglas’sremark that he did not care whether thepeople in the territories voted slavery up or down. This may seem almost a pre-dictable feature of Douglas’s argumentthat the popular will is the highest valueof democracy. But no event of the timeseems to have shocked Lincoln morethan this expression of indifference. Itmay have done as much as any other cir-cumstance to convince him to run forpresident.

Lincoln had assumed that Americansagreed that slavery was wrong–a neces-sity, perhaps, but wrong in itself. And yet if slavery was wrong, how could any-one not care whether the people voted it up or down? This looked like saying it was right not to care whether peoplechose right or wrong. Yet it ought to bemorally impossible to feel that some-thing is wrong while supporting a resultthat makes it legally right. By this way of thinking, the “miners and sappers”against equality–apologists for slaveryas well as indifferent conciliators likeDouglas–cheapened the value andmeaning of life for all people in all sec-tions of the country.

A comparable sign of degenerationtoday is our growing indifference to tor-ture. How many have gone from believ-ing that torture is simply wrong to con-ceding that the president may declare itright against certain persons in certainsituations, as determined by of½cials hehas chosen? What president before haspresumed himself virtuous enough todeserve such power?

We used to suppose that a personarrested for a crime has a right to con-front the charges against him. Withoutquite surrendering this idea, we haveallowed ourselves to entertain a newsuggestion: that by dictate of the pres-ident, certain persons may be picked out and imprisoned without charges. In Lincoln’s day, the miners and sap-pers excused themselves by saying theydid it to avoid a war. Now they say theydo it to prevent an attack.

“My obligation to protect you”–inrecent weeks President Bush has utteredthese words again and again. But withthese words, he both misquotes and mis-interprets his oath of of½ce. As speci½edin Article II, Section 1 of the Constitu-tion, the presidential oath commits theholder of the of½ce to “preserve, protectand defend the Constitution of the Unit-ed States.” A king protects his people. Apresident of the United States swears toprotect the Constitution, for a free peo-ple do not imagine they need any protec-tor better than laws. To address the peo-ple as if they required a personal protec-tor is to speak the language of kings.

In the House Divided speech, Lincolnsaid that he thought he could see the elements of a conspiracy to nationalizeslavery. He did not have in mind an or-ganization that met in secret, but ratheran unavowed design shared by well-placed persons:

When we see a lot of framed timbers, dif-ferent portions of which we know havebeen gotten out at different times andplaces and by different workmen–Ste-phen, Franklin, Roger and James, for in-stance–and when we see these timbersjoined together, and see they exactly makethe frame of a house or a mill, all the ten-ons and mortices exactly ½tting, and allthe lengths and proportions of the differ-



ent pieces exactly adapted to their respec-tive places, and not a piece too many ortoo few–not omitting even scaffolding–or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly ½ttedand prepared to yet bring such piece in–in such a case, we ½nd it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Frank-lin and Roger and James all understoodone another from the beginning and allworked upon a common plan or draftdrawn up before the ½rst lick was struck.

Included in Lincoln’s suspicious andcogent surmise were Stephen Douglas,who by opening the Nebraska Territo-ry created a legislative crisis that gaveurgency to the Dred Scott case; RogerTaney, the chief justice who wrote a con-stitutionally improbable majority opin-ion profoundly comforting to slavehold-ers; Franklin Pierce, the outgoing presi-dent, who said that the courts wouldsoon solve the slavery issue in the terri-tories; and James Buchanan, the incom-ing president, who welcomed the deci-sion when it arrived.

Compare their efforts to the present-day collaboration of the president, thedirector of the cia, and the secretary of defense, together with certain report-ers, in making the case for war with Iraq.Consider the joined timbers and ½ttedtenons and mortices of the president,the cia, and the Department of Defensein working out the policy of “extraordi-nary rendition,” the legalized kidnap-ping and transportation of foreign na-tionals for interrogation at hidden sites.Look at the collusion of the of½ce of thevice president and journalists in leakingthe name of a cia agent whom the vicepresident and his circle had determinedto put out of action.

A conspiracy is seldom a group of peo-ple acting in concert according to a set-tled plan. All that need be aligned are

their interests–both overt and tacit in-terests–and their knowledge of eachother’s presence and power. As Lincolnknew, the word ‘conspiracy’ means lit-erally ‘a breathing together,’ but in fewconspiracies are the actors found in ahuddle. It is more accurate to picture agroup of people standing far apart butsinging a tune with parts that nicely harmonize. They may catch their cuesfrom different places in a very large au-ditorium.

Lincoln diagnosed in the new accept-ance of slavery a “debauching” of pub-lic opinion. In his speech of July 4, 1861,he accused Southern propagandists ofhaving “sugar-coated” rebellion, so thatthey exposed the country to the one perilworse than civil war: destruction of thesentiments that form the basis of civilliberty.

The Patriot Act, hurried through Con-gress in the panic of 2001, gave the fisacourts a broad scope to authorize unde-clared searches and wiretaps. Now we½nd that even as Congress was passingthat law, the president was secretly arro-gating to himself the power to instigatewarrantless searches. Some Americans,suf½ciently drugged by the mystique ofthe war on terror, appear to believe thatthere are two sides to this question; thatit is right not to care much whether wevote up or down the Fourth, Fifth, andSixth Amendments. It may need only thepassage of a second Patriot Act to pro-duce silent consent to the continuouswarrantless monitoring of Americans.

Eventually, through the publicity from his debates with Douglas and pa-tient explanation of the emergent Re-publican doctrine on the expansion ofslavery, Lincoln in 1858, 1859, and 1860gave a character to the party whose can-didate he would become. Without that


A republic divided

record and without the national under-standing it set in motion, he could nothave assumed the strong position heoccupied in 1861. Without those earliersteps, his speech of July 4, 1861, whichdrew thousands of young men to enlistin the Union army, would have been in-conceivable. There had been a long workof preparation in the years when he edu-cated the public mind on the politicalnecessity of a constitutional opposition.A campaign of moral resistance had pre-ceded his campaign for the presidency.

To follow Lincoln’s pattern in this re-spect is to place a tremendous burden on the statesman as a reformer of publicopinion. Such a leader does not supposehimself either a protector or a followerof the people. Instead, he is their inter-preter, and there is hardly a momentwhen he is not explaining the choicesthey face. Nor does the task stop there.Lincoln believed–and his life illustratesthe principle–that a true statesman isalso concerned with the moral constitu-tion of man; a work that goes beyond in-terpreting the fluctuating opinions heldby the majority. Accordingly, Lincolncould not have been any sort of populist,just as, to remain a true republican, hecould not have been any sort of imperial-ist. He supported the American experi-ment as limited and exemplary. He didnot regard democracy, the idea or thepolitical arrangement, as a charmagainst the violence of misery and op-pression.

What would an opposition party looklike today if it could emulate the resist-ance of the Republican Party in 1860?We are a long way from that. In 2002, theDemocratic Party in Congress chose afast authorization of war over a seriousdebate that might have discharged itsobligation to educate the public. In 2004,the Democrats chose to dispute the tac-tical conduct of the war, and not the lies

and forgeries that launched it. At pres-ent, the opposition leaders and its prob-able candidates for 2008 endorse an es-calation of the war. They urge the addi-tion of more soldiers and more armor,and have backed away from a plan fordisengagement that came from theirown ranks. These acts of tactical lever-age have been pusillanimous: the weak-ness, almost bankruptcy, of principlethat underlies them is patent and easilyexposed.

Though we have an opposition party inname, we are now close to the conditionof the United States after the collapse of the Whigs in the mid-1850s. Where,then, do we ½nd ourselves?

After the fall of Communism, therewas an opening that passed. The UnitedStates never fully entered the world ofnations. The burden of a constitutionalopposition today must include educationin the signi½cance of this fact. For thesound part of the balance-of-power doc-trine always lay in the idea that no onenation can control the world. We maystill be the world’s best hope; it shouldbe a comfort that we are no longer itslast hope. But we cannot endure half em-pire and half republic. We will becomeall one thing or all the other: an empirethat expands by the permanent threat ofwar, and invents power after power toenlarge the authority and reach of thestate; or the oldest of modern republics,vigilant against the reappearance of tyr-anny and ½rm in repelling any leaderwho sets himself above the law.

–February 23, 2006




Some ½fty years after the political es-tablishment of the United States, theconcept of an American literature bare-ly existed–an absence acknowledgedwith satisfaction in Sydney Smith’s fa-mous question posed in 1820 in the Edin-burgh Review: “Who in the four cornersof the globe reads an American book?”The implied answer was no one. Anoth-er twenty years would pass before thisquestion was seriously reopened, alongwith the more fundamental questionthat lay behind it: whether a provincialdemocracy that had inherited its lan-guage and institutions from the moth-erland did or should have a literature of its own. Visiting in 1831, Tocquevillecould still remark on “the small num-

ber of men in the United States who are engaged in the composition of lit-erary works,” and he added justi½ablythat most of these are “English in sub-stance and still more so in form.”1

Yet in every settled region of the newnation voices were raised to make thecase that a distinctive national literaturewas desirable and, indeed, essential tothe prospects of American civilization.Literary production and learning wereconceived as an antidote to, or at least amoderating influence on, the utilitarianvalues of a young society where, as Jef-ferson put the matter in 1825, “the ½rstobject . . . is bread and covering.” By 1837,the most notable of the many calls forliterary nationalism, Emerson’s Phi Be-ta Kappa oration at Harvard, with its fa-mous charge that “we have listened toolong to the courtly muses of Europe,”was already a stock statement. By 1850,when Herman Melville weighed inagainst “literary flunkeyism towardEngland,” the complaint was a hack-neyed one.

During this ½rst phase of national self-consciousness, there arose a corol-lary critique of those few New Worldwriters, such as Washington Irving,

Andrew Delbanco

American literature: a vanishing subject?

Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Profes-sor in the Humanities at Columbia University, has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 2001. He has written extensively on Amer-ican history and culture, including books such as“The Puritan Ordeal” (1989), “The Death ofSatan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil” (1995), and “Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now” (1997). His latest publication is “Melville: His World and Work” (2005).


1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,vol. 2 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 55–56.

who had achieved international recog-nition by copying Old World models–writers who, according to belligerentdemocrats like Walt Whitman, imitatedauthors who “had their birth in courts”and “smelled of princes’ favors.” Theseoutbursts of nascent cultural pride tend-ed to take the form of shouts and slurs(Whitman spoke sneeringly of “the co-pious dribble” of poets he deemed lessgenuinely American than himself ) rath-er than reasoned debate. They were anal-ogous to, and sometimes part of, thenasty quarrels between Democrats andWhigs in which the former accused thelatter of being British-loving sycophants,and the latter accused the former of be-ing demagogues and cheats.

Literary versions of these political dis-putes played themselves out in the pagesof such journals as Putnam’s MonthlyMagazine and The Literary World (NewYork), The Dial and The North AmericanReview (Boston), The United States Mag-azine and Democratic Review (½rst Wash-ington, then New York), and The South-ern Literary Messenger (Richmond)–mag-azines that sometimes attained high lit-erary quality (in 1855, Thackeray calledPutnam’s “much the best Mag. in theworld”). Most contributors to thesemagazines had nothing to do with aca-demic life, such as it was in the antebel-lum United States. The literary cadres to which they belonged developed ½rstin Boston; slightly later in New York;and, more modestly, in Philadelphia,Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston.Only a very few writers or critics, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whomHarvard appointed to a professorship in1834, maintained more than a tangentialconnection to any college. There were asyet no universities.2

Then, as now, the chief business ofliterary journalism was the construc-tion and destruction of individual rep-utations, though at stake throughout the nineteenth century were also moregeneral claims about how and whatAmerican writers should be writing. The essays of William Dean Howells, for instance, published as columns inThe Atlantic and Harper’s and later select-ed for his volume Criticism and Fiction(1892), amounted to a brief for whatHowells called “realism,” as exempli-½ed by his own ½ction. Frank Norris(The Responsibilities of the Novelist [1903])and Hamlin Garland (Crumbling Idols[1894]) proclaimed as universal the prin-ciples of whatever ‘school’–“veritism”for Garland and “naturalism” for Nor-ris–they were committed to at the time.Perhaps the only disinterested critic still worth reading from this period isJohn Jay Chapman (1862–1933), whosework belongs to the genre of the moralessay in the tradition of Hazlitt and Ar-nold.

But even such minor novelists as theNorwegian-born H. H. Boyesen (1848–1895) contributed occasional criticismthat helped to enlarge the literary hori-zon. In Boyesen’s slight book of 1893, Literary and Social Silhouettes, for example,

Americanliterature: a vanishingsubject?

2 Several mid-twentieth-century literary histo-rians, notably William Charvat in The Profession

of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (a collec-tion of essays written between 1937 and 1962),Perry Miller in The Raven and the Whale (1956),and Benjamin T. Spencer in The Quest for Na-tionality (1957), have sketched the emergenceof the literary profession in these years as partof the larger construction of American nation-alism in the age of territorial expansion. Morerecent scholars, such as James D. Wallace inEarly Cooper and his Audience (1985) and Mer-edith McGill in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003), havedeepened our understanding of the econom-ic dif½culties that writers without patronage,and without much protection by copyrightlaw, had to overcome.



AndrewDelbanco on thehumanities

he approved such now-forgotten writersas Edgar Fawcett and H. C. Bunner forportraying “the physiognomy of NewYork–the Bowery, Great Jones Street,and all the labyrinthine tangle of mal-odorous streets and lanes, inhabited bythe tribes of Israel, the swarthy Italian,the wily Chinaman, and all the otheralien hordes from all the corners of theearth.” Novelist-critics like Boyesen andJames Gibbons Huneker (1860–1921), an advocate of impressionism in paint-ing and music, were among many whotried, with a mixture of anxiety and ap-proval, to come to terms with the im-pact of modernity on American life.Their critical writing, like their ½ction,was more descriptive than prescriptive,more inquiring than inquisitorial–andtherefore incipiently modern.

In short, forward-looking proponentsof American literary ideals tended to beoutside the academy. This has been sofrom the era dominated by the Duyck-inck brothers, whose Cyclopedia of Amer-ican Literature (1855) helped establish acanon of major writers, through E. C.Stedman’s Poets of America (1885), W. C.Brownell’s American Prose Masters (pub-lished in 1909 by Scribners, for whomBrownell served for forty years as liter-ary advisor), and Alfred Kazin’s On Na-tive Grounds (1942), a revelatory book bya young freelance book reviewer who,like his contemporary Irving Howe, did not take a permanent academic jobuntil late in his career. The author whoemerged in the twentieth century as thecentral ½gure of nineteenth-centuryAmerican literature, Herman Melville,was championed mainly by critics work-ing outside the academy, such as LewisMumford, Charles Olson, and, in Brit-ain, D. H. Lawrence. And a good num-ber of major twentieth-century critics–notably Edmund Wilson, whose Patrio-tic Gore (1962) did much to revise our un-

derstanding of Civil War literature–ex-pressed frank hostility toward academicsas hopelessly straitened and petty.

Probably the most signi½cant body of American critical writing to date isthat of a novelist, Henry James, in theprefaces to the New York edition (1907–1909) of his ½ction as well as in hisconsiderable body of literary journal-ism. “The Art of Fiction” (1888)–James’s riposte to the English critic Walter Besant’s prescriptive essay aboutthe Do’s and Don’ts of ½ction-writing–still has tonic power for young writerswho feel hampered by prevailing normsand taste. And James’s 1879 study ofNathaniel Hawthorne, the ½rst signi½-cant critical biography of an Americanwriter, brings into view in a few pagesthe whole moral history of nineteenth-century American culture. In that re-markable book, we see how theologicalideas were being displaced and how theartist-observer could take pleasure inwitnessing their displacement:

It was a necessary condition for a man of Hawthorne’s stock that if his imagina-tion should take licence to amuse itself, it should at least select this grim precinctof the Puritan morality for its play ground. . . . The old Puritan moral sense, the con-sciousness of sin and hell, of the fearfulnature of our responsibilities and the sav-age character of our Taskmaster–thesethings had been lodged in the mind of aman of Fancy, whose fancy had straight-way begun to take liberties and play trickswith them–to judge them (Heaven for-give him!) from the poetic and aestheticpoint of view, the point of view of enter-tainment and irony. This absence of con-viction makes the difference; but the dif-ference is great.

The American-born T. S. Eliot onceexpressed the view that “the only crit-ics worth reading were the critics who

practiced, and practiced well, the art ofwhich they wrote”–a statement that hasbeen almost universally true in America.

At the turn of the twentieth century,however, American writing was begin-ning to become a ‘½eld’ in the academ-ic institutions that earlier practitionershad, by and large, avoided. As early asthe 1880s, Dartmouth, Wellesley, andBrown were offering, at least sporadi-cally, courses on American authors,though the subject remained dispen-sable enough that nyu, which ran anAmerican literature course from 1885 to 1888, allowed it to fall into abeyanceuntil 1914.3 The scholar who ½rst in-stalled the subject in one of the newresearch universities was Moses CoitTyler, the child of Connecticut Congre-gationalists. While a professor at theUniversity of Michigan, he wrote the½rst serious history of colonial Ameri-can writing, A History of American Liter-ature, 1607–1765 (1878), based on closestudy of virtually all published primarytexts. In 1881, Tyler moved to Cornell,where he assumed the ½rst universitychair devoted wholly to American lit-erature and produced his Literary His-tory of the American Revolution (1897).

It is worth noting that Tyler beganteaching at a midwestern state univer-sity and concluded his career at thequasi-public Cornell, founded in 1865with a combination of private benefac-tions and public subsidies. Older, moretradition-bound private institutionssuch as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, all of which originated in the colonialperiod as seminaries allied with one oranother Protestant denomination, em-

braced American writing as a plausible½eld of study more slowly. Once its le-gitimacy had been established, though,professors of American literature settledinto defending the virtues of the (main-ly New England) ancients against whatBoyesen had called the “alien hordes.”In his Literary History of America (1900),Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, devotedvirtually all of its ½rst 450 pages to NewEngland writers, followed by a closingchapter entitled “The Rest of the Sto-ry.” In a preface to his new anthology of American literature (1901), BranderMatthews, Columbia’s specialist in dra-matic literature, followed Johann Gott-fried Herder and Hipployte Taine ininsisting that a national literature mustbe understood as the expression of the“race-characteristics” of the people whoproduce it. Writing nearly ten years afterthe death of Walt Whitman, Matthewscon½dently declared that the UnitedStates had “not yet produced any poeteven of the second rank.”4

With the consent of such ½gures asWendell at Harvard and Matthews atColumbia, the subject of American lit-erature became an instrument by whichthe sons of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ couldget better acquainted with their heritageand, presumably, protect it from the in-terloping hordes who were threateningto debase it. Here was the literary equiv-alent of the ‘Teutonic germ theory’ ofAmerican history: the idea that demo-cratic ideas and institutions had germi-nated in the German forests, from whichrestless tribes carried them to England,where they sprouted again (against theresistance of the Celtic ancestors of themodern Irish) and from which Puritanemigrants eventually transplanted them

3 Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and theAcademy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of aProfession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-vania Press, 1986), 110.

4 Brander Matthews, “Suggestions for Teach-ers of American Literature,” Educational Review21 (January–May 1901): 12.





to the New World.5 Seen as a branch ofthis kind of race thinking, the academicstudy of American literature arose, atleast in part, as a defensive maneuver by Anglophile gentlemen who felt theircountry slipping out of their control in-to the hands of inferiors.

As a more miscellaneous blend ofstudents began passing through the uni-versities, these gentlemen hoped thatthe study of American literature couldbe a means of sweetening and enlighten-ing them before they presented them-selves for positions of power no longerreserved exclusively for the Brahmins.Some professors went further, claimingfor themselves the moral authority oncereserved for the clergy. Consider IrvingBabbitt, who specialized at Harvard notin American but in French literature,and who became a public commentatoron issues of the day by waging war ingeneral-circulation magazines againstwhat he considered the American ten-dency toward vulgarity and self-indul-gence. Here, in a 1928 essay on H. L.Mencken, with a nod to Sinclair Lewis,Babbitt writes his own version of howAmericans had fallen away from themoral realism of their forebears. Jameshad told the tale as the story of Haw-thorne liberating himself from the sup-pressive weight of his ancestors, butBabbitt tells it as a moral descent fromself-knowledge into self-deception, asexempli½ed by Mencken:

If the Protestant Church is at presentthreatened with bankruptcy, it is notbecause it has produced an occasionalElmer Gantry. The true reproach it hasincurred is that, in its drift toward mod-ernism, it has lost its grip not merely on

certain dogmas but, simultaneously, onthe facts of human nature. It has failedabove all to carry over in some modernand critical form the truth of a dogma that unfortunately received much sup-port from these facts–the dogma oforiginal sin. At ½rst sight Mr. Menckenwould appear to have a conviction ofevil . . . [but] the appearance . . . is decep-tive. The Christian is conscious above allof the “old Adam” in himself: hence hishumility. The effect of Mr. Mencken’swriting, on the other hand, is to producepride rather than humility . . . [as he] con-ceived of himself as a sort of morose andsardonic divinity surveying from somesuperior altitude an immeasurable ex-panse of “boobs.”

Yet even as it served social ends, thestudy of American literature remained a secondary or even tertiary (after clas-sics and English) part of the program for making boys into gentlemen. To read through the ½rst scholarly history,The Cambridge History of American Liter-ature (1917)–a book more encyclopedicthan discriminating–is to be reminded,as Richard Poirier has remarked, thatinto the third decade of the twentiethcentury, American literature “was stillup for grabs.”6 As classics departmentscontinued to shrink and English depart-ments to grow, even books by the NewEngland worthies were still treated withcondescension. As late as the 1950s, Har-vard graduate students in English couldpropose American literature as a doctor-al examination ½eld only as a substitutefor medieval literature, which was com-ing to seem arcane and archaic, even totraditionalists.

With the continued decline of philolo-gy and of Latin and Greek as college pre-

5 See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The“Objectivity Question” and the American Histori-cal Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1988), 87–88.

6 Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature:Emersonian Reflections (New York: RandomHouse, 1987), 19.

requisites in the 1930s and 1940s, thestudy of American literature ½nally at-tained a certain academic respectabili-ty. Yet the Harvard English department,which preserves in its name, “Depart-ment of English and American Litera-ture and Language,” a trace of its originsin philological studies, did not add thephrase ‘and American’ until the 1970s.My own department at Columbia, the“Department of English and Compar-ative Literature,” to this day does notinclude in its of½cial name the term‘American’–and, as far as I know, has no plans to add it.

Today, though some professors ofAmerican literature still feel outnum-bered and even beleaguered, the ½eld is populous. Since the founding of theAmerican Literature Section of the Modern Language Association in 1921,the professional status of American lit-erature has been secure, and members of the guild now designate themselvesby the term ‘Americanist’–a word that,like ‘orthopedist’ or ‘taxidermist,’ im-plies an arduously acquired training for a useful trade.

It is an unfortunate word for variousreasons, not least because it obscures the fact that for many years after theirsubject achieved academic acceptance,Americanists were among the least pro-fessionalized of professors. Especially at a time when English departments stilldevoted themselves mostly to philologi-cal research and to the recovery of reli-able texts, the ½eld of American litera-ry studies was something of a mis½t. Itattracted students with current politicaland cultural problems much on theirminds and scholars who seemed unableto rid themselves of what detractors re-garded as chronic presentism. For exam-ple, the immensely influential Main Cur-rents of American Thought (1927–1930), by

V. L. Parrington, an English professor at the University of Washington, was an effort, as tendentious as it was ambi-tious, to trace the genealogy of demo-cratic populism all the way back to dissi-dent Puritans. Perry Miller’s great revi-sionary works on the Puritan mind, con-ceived in the 1930s partly in response toParrington, ran parallel to the writingsof such neo-Calvinist theologians asReinhold Niebuhr, who retrieved fromdeep in the past an account of humanpsychology that might still serve as acompetent description of contemporaryreality as the horror of fascism engulfedEurope.

As American literary studies gained in prestige, it became apparent that itsleading scholars did not trust, and werenot to be trusted with, the ways andmeans of the English department. Manyof the vanguard ½gures were openly andovertly concerned with the world out-side the college gates. Some forged atleast a tacit partnership with such histo-rians as the senior Arthur M. Schlesing-er, who, as early as 1922, had insisted inNew Viewpoints in American History that no serious history could be written with-out attention to the experience of wom-en and that “contrary to a widespreadbelief, even the people of the thirteenEnglish colonies were a mixture of eth-nic breeds.”7

Yet the originating ½gures of Ameri-can literary studies have been describedin recent years as narrow-minded men(until the 1970s and 1980s, they werealmost all men) with retrograde mindsoccluded by the sexual and racial preju-dices of their time. This is, at best, a cari-cature and, at worst, a slander. F. O. Mat-thiessen’s ½rst published book was a

7 Arthur M. Schlesinger, New Viewpoints inAmerican History (New York: Macmillan, 1922),3, 126–127.





study of the ½ction of Sarah Orne Jewett(1929). In The New England Mind (1939–1952), Miller showed, long before the‘New Historicists,’ how close scrutiny of what most of his colleagues consid-ered subliterary forms could reveal analien culture. Constance Rourke, whonever held an academic post but exertedformidable influence on academic liter-ary studies, anticipated in her AmericanHumor (1931) the ‘anthropological turn’of forty years later by breaking down thedistinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cul-ture and reveling in the mix.

American literary studies in theseformative years was emphatically un- or even anti-academic. There was a nat-ural af½nity between professors interest-ed in the history of their own literature–a short history, after all–and under-graduate writers who hoped to make aplace for themselves in the literary his-tories of the future. Richard Wilbur, who was a Junior Fellow at Harvard inthe 1940s, recalls that F. O. Matthiessenwas always alert to “any stirrings of thecreative spirit” in his students (he taughtundergraduates almost exclusively) andmade himself available to read manu-scripts by the hopeful young poets andplaywrights who passed through hiscourses.8 Lionel Trilling, though he nev-er carried a portfolio as an Americanist,wrote extensively about American writ-ers past and present–Fitzgerald, Twain,Dreiser, Hemingway, and Frost, amongothers–and took a special interest in hisgifted and eccentric Columbia Collegestudent Allen Ginsberg. When Trilling’scolleague Mark Van Doren wrote his ex-uberant critical biography of Hawthornein 1948, it was as if he had just heard the

young Hawthorne reading in a collegecommon room and had rushed away to report his discovery of a new talent.

Professionalization, of course, wasinevitable. By the 1940s, New Criticismwas the reigning orthodoxy in literarystudies. Among Americanists, it wasdeployed to best effect in Matthiessen’sAmerican Renaissance (1941) and in thebooks and essays of Newton Arvin, who spent his career at Smith College.The techniques of New Critical analy-sis revealed that at least a few Ameri-can works had a density and complex-ity comparable to the most dif½cult, and therefore (according to the criteriaof the New Criticism) most rewarding,modernist poems. Matthiessen made his case for Melville by setting Ahab’sspeeches in verse and presenting them as every bit as intricate as the soliloquiesof Hamlet or Lear. He brought to his wri-ting the kind of formal scrupulosity as-sociated with F. R. Leavis and WilliamEmpson in England, and along with fel-low travelers Robert Penn Warren andCleanth Brooks (who eventually con-verged at Yale), he inaugurated a tradi-tion that continues today in the work of such adept close readers as RichardPoirier and William Pritchard.

Although Matthiessen and the best of his followers were never doctrinaire(½fty years after its publication, DanielAaron described American Renaissance as“fully cognizant of the social context” of its subject), the vogue of explication detexte threatened to become a formalistdogma.9 Matthiessen himself was never

9 Daniel Aaron, review of H. Lark Hall, V. L.Parrington: Through the Avenue of Art in the NewRepublic, September 5, 1994. By the early 1960s,one of Matthiessen’s successors at Harvard,Howard Mumford Jones, faulted Ralph WaldoEmerson for writing essays that amounted to“paragraphs on a string” and thereby failed theNew Critical test of formal coherence. H. M.

8 Richard Wilbur in F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezyand Leo Huberman (New York: HenrySchuman, 1950), 145.

narrowly a ‘New Critic.’ He was a man of the Left, who after the war was towrite a naïve report, From the Heart ofEurope (1948), about how impressed hewas with life and spirit in the solidifyingSoviet bloc. And in his preface to Amer-ican Renaissance, he declared that whatlinked his ½ve authors (Emerson, Tho-reau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whit-man) was their “common devotion tothe possibilities of democracy”–an oddassertion about Hawthorne, though onethat helps explain the absence of EdgarAllan Poe from Matthiessen’s book. Bythe 1950s, the turn inward away frompolitics was in full swing, and testing an author’s literary signi½cance by anypolitical standard was coming to seemeccentric.

One dissenter from the aesthetic turn,Henry Nash Smith, who was among the½rst recipients of the Ph.D. from theHarvard Committee on the History ofAmerican Civilization–and whose dis-sertation became a remarkable book,Virgin Land: The American West as Symboland Myth (1950), a study of the frontiermyth in pulp ½ction, James FenimoreCooper’s novels, Wild West shows, andthe writings of Jefferson and Twain–complained in 1957 that “the effect ofthe New Criticism in practice has beento establish an apparently impassablechasm between the facts of our existencein contemporary society and the valuesof art.” Smith, who by then held a pro-fessorship in the Berkeley English de-partment, lodged his objection not onbehalf of a historicist understanding of

the context in which works of the pasthad been produced, but on behalf ofwhat would soon come to be known as ‘relevance’ to the present. Here wasthe keynote of the American studiesmovement, which flourished in the post-war years as an eclectic alternative toboth English and history at a number of universities, including Pennsylvania,George Washington, and Case WesternReserve, as well as at Yale, Harvard, andBerkeley.

On many campuses, American stud-ies seceded, in fact if not always in name,from the English department. Americanstudies scholars sometimes clusteredwithin English as a quasi-independentsubdepartment or broke away into de-partments or programs of their own.They were impatient with the parochial-ism of what they regarded as Anglophileliterary studies, but also, as Smith wenton to suggest, with the empiricism oftraditional historians: “We are no bet-ter off if we turn to the social sciencesfor help in seeing the culture as a whole.We merely ½nd society without art in-stead of art without society.”10 At itsbest, American studies was a hugely am-bitious enterprise that aimed to lay barethe heart of “the culture as a whole” byexposing myths and metaphors that op-erate below the level of consciousnessand by which, according to Smith’s de½-nition of culture, “subjective experienceis organized.” To these ends, it assumeda wide mandate, taking into its purviewnot just literary monuments but monu-ments of all kinds–there is a direct linefrom Lewis Mumford’s Sticks and Stones:A Study of American Architecture and Civi-lization (1924) to Alan Trachtenberg’sBrooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965).Jones, introduction to a new edition of W. C.

Brownell, American Prose Masters (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), vii.This sort of opinion mongering in the guise ofobjective judgment was not a healthy develop-ment for the ½eld.

10 Henry Nash Smith, “Can ‘American Stud-ies’ Develop a Method?” American Quarterly 9(Summer 1957): 203.





Even in its more strictly literary mani-festations, such as R. W. B. Lewis’s TheAmerican Adam (1955), the Americanstudies method was to look through and beyond particular literary texts to½nd what Lewis called the “recurringpattern of images–ways of seeing andsensing experience” by which Ameri-cans apprehend meaning in their lives.11

Leo Marx, in The Machine in the Garden(1964), showed how writers such as Tho-reau and Twain tried to chart a path be-tween rapacious capitalism and radicalutopianism–a via media that Marx de-scribed as a uniquely American versionof pastoral. Smith’s Virgin Land andLewis’s The American Adam disclosed anational dream of recovering a prelap-sarian condition in which the worldcould begin anew–a dream painfullylost when the dreamer awakes.

The patterns that interested Ameri-can studies scholars tended to be ex-pressions of progressive hope, and it is perhaps a measure of their intensepersonal investment in the promise of America that a striking number ofleading ½gures in the ½eld fell into dis-appointment and even despair. LikeMatthiessen, John William Ward, a lead-ing member of the ‘myth and symbol’school (who, during the Vietnam era,became an outspokenly antiwar presi-dent of Amherst College and later a pol-itical activist on behalf of public hous-ing), died by suicide. Perry Miller has-tened his own death at age ½fty-eight

by poisoning himself with alcohol a fewweeks after the assassination of Presi-dent Kennedy.

The range and imagination of thesescholars were far-reaching, but their in-tellectual force was centripetal. Theywanted to penetrate through a great va-riety of texts to some unitary core ofAmericanness. (They construed broadlythe word ‘text’ long before the ‘cultur-al studies’ movement of the 1980s and1990s discovered the semiotics of fash-ion, advertising, or sports.) The titles of their books commonly included whattoday’s scholars would dismiss as ‘total-izing’ or ‘reifying’ phrases, like ‘Ameri-can character’ (the subtitle of ConstanceRourke’s book on humor was “A Studyof the National Character”) or ‘Ameri-can mind,’ as in Alan Heimert’s Religionand the American Mind (1966) or RoderickNash’s Wilderness and the American Mind(1968).

Recently, their movement has comeunder sharp attack as a collection ofinsouciant dreamers–men who elidedethnic, racial, class, and gender differ-ences and confused the fantasies ofelites with the experiences of ordinarypeople. In a recent retrospective essay,Leo Marx, now in his eighties, vigorous-ly defends the American studies move-ment as having always acknowledgeddiscontinuities between America’sclaims to egalitarian democracy and the realities of life in a brutally compet-itive society, where equality of oppor-tunity, much less equality of condition, has never been fully achieved. There wasalways, Marx insists, an emphasis on the ‘un½nishedness’ of American socie-ty as well as a sense that scholar-teacherscould contribute to the tradition of “dis-sident social movements, including, forexample, the transcendentalist, feminist,and abolitionist movements of the ante-bellum era; the populist movement of

11 A cogent critique of the ‘myth and symbol’school is Bruce Kuklick, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” American Quarterly 24 (4) (October 1972): 435–450. Kuklick doubtsthat we can apprehend anything so vague as‘popular consciousness’ by elucidating thestructure of artifacts, such as books or paint-ings, or even political events, such as speechesor elections.

the 1880s and 1890s; the pre–World WarI progressive movement [of which Par-rington’s Main Currents was a belatedexpression], and . . . the left-labor, anti-fascist movements (and Cultural front)of the 1930s . . . . ” By and large, Americanstudies scholars looked for inspirationnot to the mainstream academy, but towhat Marx calls an “uncategorizable co-hort” of “deviant professors, indepen-dent scholars, public intellectuals, andwide-ranging journalists and poets”–among them, Constance Rourke, Thor-stein Veblen, Alexis de Tocqueville, D. H.Lawrence, and W. E. B. Du Bois.12

Amid the enormous upheaval of the1960s to which Steven Marcus alludes inhis overview essay in the present issue ofDædalus, American literary studies, likevirtually every other activity in Ameri-ca’s universities, was profoundly trans-formed. A series of traumatic assassina-tions (John Kennedy, Medger Evers, Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy,Malcolm X) and the spiraling disaster ofthe Vietnam War inevitably darkenedthe myths and symbols that drew Amer-icanists. The individualist frontiersmanof Smith and Lewis became the maraud-ing Indian-killer of Richard Slotkin inhis Regeneration Through Violence: TheMythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973)–a book that read the Viet-nam War back into the nineteenth-cen-tury Indian wars. Henry Nash Smith is-sued a mea culpa in a late essay (1986) inwhich he wrote that when he had com-posed Virgin Land as a young man, hehad been under the spell of FrederickJackson Turner and had already “lost the capacity for facing up to the tragicdimensions of the Westward Move-

ment.”13 By the 1970s, Perry Miller’sprotoexistentialist Puritans, who hadstruggled to preserve their Calvinist pi-ety in the face of Arminian rationalism,were giving way to Sacvan Bercovitch’sPuritans in his The Puritan Origins of theAmerican Self (1975) and The AmericanJeremiad (1978)–millenarian crusaderswho proclaimed themselves a chosenpeople charged by God to seize the “wil-derness” from the heathens and erect init a New Jerusalem.

A leader of what might be called sec-ond-wave American studies, Bercovitchtried to come to terms with the ½rstwave by dissociating himself from the“tribal totem feast” at which a new gen-eration of scholars was feeding on Mil-ler’s corpus. In 1986, having moved fromColumbia to Harvard, he dedicated toMiller and Matthiessen an edited col-lection of essays by a number of youn-ger scholars whom Frederick Crews, in an unfriendly essay-review, groupedunder the rubric “New Americanists.”14

But reconciliation was elusive. The NewAmericanists accused Matthiessen of“silencing dissenting political opin-ions,”15 by which they seemed to meanthat he had been locked into a binary

12 Leo Marx, “Believing in America,” BostonReview 28 (6) (December 2003–January 2004):28–31.

13 Henry Nash Smith, “Symbol and Idea in Virgin Land,” in Sacvan Bercovitch and MyraJehlen, eds., Ideology and Classic American Liter-ature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1986), 28.

14 Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing Ameri-can Literary History (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1986). Crews coined the termin “Whose American Renaissance?” New YorkReview of Books, October 27, 1988, and carriedhis critique further in “The New Americanists,”New York Review of Books, September 24, 1992.

15 Donald Pease, “Moby-Dick and the ColdWar,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered,ed., Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1985), 119.





view of the world that pitted Americanindividualism (of which Whitman’spoetry and the free consciousness ofMelville’s Ishmael were his prime ex-amples) against repressive totalitarian-ism (as exempli½ed in Captain Ahab).Bercovitch himself made a potent argu-ment, similar to that of Louis Hartz inThe Liberal Tradition in America (1955),that America lacked any political alter-native to a property-oriented, individu-alist liberalism. His implication was thatAmericans were peculiarly impoverishedin the realm of political ideas, and werecondemned, by their inheritance fromthe millenarian Protestantism of the Pu-ritan founders, to live with the illusionthat the American Way is God’s Way.

For the generation of New American-ists who followed Bercovitch, the failureof earlier critics such as Matthiessen(who was often dubbed a ‘cold-war in-tellectual’ even though he did his majorwork before the United States enteredWorld War II) was in having erased“potentially disruptive political opin-ions” from what amounted to a sani-tized account of American culture. Mat-thiessen and his ilk had left conflict out of the story–or so the charge went. AsCrews put it, the New Americanists re-pudiated their predecessors as “timidlymoralizing” scholars in thrall to a “ge-nially democratic idea of the Americandream and its gradual ful½llment in his-tory.”16

The patricidal assault took place ontwo fronts: by trying to show how themajor (according to Matthiessen & Co.)works of American literature obscuredthe oppression of racial minorities aswell as America’s history of imperialistexpansion, and by recovering from theputative prejudice of the Matthiessenschool what Crews called “an ethnic-

and gender-based anticanon”–literaryworks by racial minorities and women,who had been ignored and who revealedin their writing that the American dreamhad always been an American night-mare.

By the late 1990s, the heat of the po-lemics was subsiding, and the NewAmericanists were starting to sound old. They fought with their predeces-sors, after all, mainly over texts whosesigni½cance both parties assumed. Af-ter the sound and fury of the 1980s–the decade in which the 1960s collegegeneration came into tenured positionsand Ronald Reagan came into the WhiteHouse–a heightened awareness of sexu-al as well as racial and ethnic differencenow almost universally informed Amer-ican literary criticism. A number of newanthologies, notably the Heath Antholo-gy of American Literature (½rst edition,1989), edited by Paul Lauter, and well-researched literary histories, such as Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations:Race in the Making of American Literature(1993), synthesized the work of the pre-ceding two decades and presented a new narrative of American literary his-tory. Previously marginal writers (Mar-tin Delany, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hur-ston, Nella Larsen) were now key ½guresin the story; writers who had long beencentral, such as Cooper and Melville,were revealed as struggling with unre-solved racial and sexual preoccupations.

In 1983, while the Heath Anthology wasstill in progress, Lauter could write that“only a few syllabi meaningfully inte-grate the work of Hispanic-American,Asian-American, or American Indianwriters.”17 His choice of verb was tell-

16 Crews, “New Americanists,” 32–34.

17 Paul Lauter, ed., Reconstructing American Lit-erature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues (Old Westbury,N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1983), xiv.

ing. Representation is one thing, butintegration is another. The con½nes ofwhat had once been regarded as Ameri-can literature had been exploded. Therehad once been a more or less of½cial lit-erature, in which writers from John Pen-dleton Kennedy (Swallow Barn [1832]) toMargaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind[1936]) portrayed black people chiefly asplantation darkies. And most critics hadpassed over such representations of theserving-class–the sort of people whomEdith Wharton blithely referred to inThe House of Mirth (1905) as “dull andugly people” who must, “in some mys-terious way, have been sacri½ced to pro-duce” her delicately bred heroine, LilyBart. But now the reviled and exploitedmoved to the center of the story–andtheir voices were heard strongly in theclassroom for the ½rst time.

“The changes in our profession,”Lauter wrote, “ . . . are rooted in themovements for racial justice and sexequity. Those who worked in the move-ments came to see that to sustain hopefor a future, people needed to grasp ameaningful past.” In this sense, the re-vision of the American literary canonwas what the Yale cultural critic DavidBromwich, playing on Clausewitz’s fa-mous de½nition of war, has called “pol-itics by other means.” The good newswas the enlargement of the canon–anexpansion that was, in fact, consistentwith the spirit of openness characteris-tic of American studies from its begin-nings. The bad news was the implica-tion that progressive-minded people–people committed to diversity and in-clusiveness–could ½nd nothing ‘mean-ingful’ in what had once been the main-stream American tradition.

But even the changes that made read-ing lists unrecognizable to students whohad attended college just twenty yearsearlier did not tell the full story of what

had happened. Leslie Fiedler, a proli½ccritic who participated in both waves ofthe American studies movement, issued,in 1982, what amounted to a farewell tothe whole business of academic literarystudy. “Literary criticism,” he wrote,“flourishes best in societies theoreticallycommitted to transforming all magic in-to explained illusion, all nighttime mys-tery into daylight explication: alchemyto chemistry, astrology to astronomy.”18

This was a restatement of the call for the“grass-roots anti-hierarchical criticism”(Fiedler’s phrase) that Susan Sontag had made in the famous title essay of herbook Against Interpretation (1967), whereshe proclaimed an end to pleasure-dead-ening literary analysis and called for an“erotics of art.”19

Fiedler went further. Always a mar-ginal ½gure with respect to the academ-ic power centers–his teaching postswere at Montana State University andthe State University of New York atBuffalo–he had his ½nger on the pulseof the larger culture. In the age of televi-sion and video, he saw that literaturewas being permanently demoted, at leastas a category to which only certain aca-demically certi½ed books were allowedto belong. (Consider the valedictory titlehe gave to his 1982 collection, What WasLiterature?) In Love and Death in the Amer-ican Novel (1960), Fiedler had long agoventured into sexual and racial themesthat previous critics had evaded; forhim, popular culture was where oneheard the heartbeat of America. If onewere to pay attention to novels, it was

18 Leslie Fiedler, What was Literature?: ClassCulture and Mass Society (New York: Simon andSchuster, 1982), 37.

19 Ibid., 117. Sontag’s essay was itself a restate-ment of an argument against argument putforth around the same time by Roland Barthes.





best to focus on such disrespected (byacademics) books as Harriet BeecherStowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or George Lippard’s Gothic potboiler The QuakerCity–in which sadism and secret crav-ings are unmodi½ed by literary re½ne-ment. Fiedler was interested in prose½ction not for the modernist virtues of intricacy or allusiveness but for itsdemocratizing power as an early form of mass art. The popular novel, he saw,was the precursor to Hollywood moviesand tv soap operas; it had, he thought, a power of democratic leveling compar-able to the ‘ready-made garments’ that,in the early twentieth century, “made it impossible to tell an aristocrat from a commoner.”20

While younger Americanists were settling scores with their predecessorsover such issues as the proper interpre-tation of Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter,or whether Margaret Fuller should berescued from Emerson’s shadow, Fied-ler recognized that the commercial pro-ductions of popular culture–mass-mar-ket movies and television, but also com-ic books, advertising, and fashion–wereentering academia as legitimate subjects,and that the old academic disputes overliterary classics were devolving intoquibbles. It was not surprising that bythe 1980s there had arrived onto coursesyllabi such nineteenth-century best-sellers as Susan Warner’s Wide, WideWorld (1850) and Maria Cummins’s TheLamplighter (1854)–now championed by feminist critics such as Jane Tomp-kins (in Sensational Designs: The CulturalWork of American Fiction [1985]), whomade the case for exactly those booksthat Nathaniel Hawthorne had dis-missed more than a century earlier asdrivel by a “damned mob of scribblingwomen.”

Today, students of American literatureare still working out these issues: Whatkinds of cultural artifacts allow access to the inner life of the culture? Whatrole, if any, should aesthetic judgment(and according to what criteria) play inthe study of written texts? New lines ofinternal relations within American liter-ature have lately emerged with the riseof a movement known as ‘ecocriticism’–lines that run, for instance, from Tho-reau through Aldo Leopold to RachelCarson and up to Barry Lopez.21 Thehistrionics and name calling of the ‘cul-ture wars’ are gone if not entirely for-gotten–yet literary studies seem likelyto remain divided for a while betweenthose who follow the Frankfurt Schoolcritics Theodor Adorno and Walter Ben-jamin in regarding mass culture as a kindof soft propaganda by which the publicdegenerates into the mob, and thosewho celebrate popular culture as a roil-ing scene of imaginative liberation–asdoes University of Pennsylvania Ameri-canist Janice Radway in her influentialbook Reading the Romance: Women, Patri-archy, and Popular Literature (1984), and,more recently, in her Feeling for Books:The Book-of-the-Month-Club, LiteraryTaste, and Middle Class Desire (1997).

Today, the situation seems strikinglysymmetrical with that with which thisessay began. In the early nineteenth cen-tury, a case had to be made for the exis-tence–not to mention the signi½cance–

20 Ibid., 99.

21 The impact of environmentalism in Amer-ican literary studies is well represented in twobooks by Lawrence Buell, The EnvironmentalImagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and theFormation of American Culture (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), andBuell, Writing for an Endangered World: Litera-ture, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Be-yond (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 2001).

of American literature. In the early yearsof the twenty-½rst century, this case hasto be made again.

There is reason to feel a certain senseof déjà vu. For one thing, the legitima-cy of the very idea of the nation-state isunder siege in academic circles, whereperhaps the most cited book of the lastthree decades is Benedict Anderson’sImagined Communities: Reflections on theOrigin and Spread of Nationalism (1983).Shocked by the resurgence of national-ism in a century when Marxist intellec-tuals expected it to decline before theadvance of international worker solidar-ity, Anderson de½ned nationalism as akind of atavism for which deluded mil-lions have been willing to kill and die. Inthis context, the idea of a national litera-ture seems, at best, to furnish an oppor-tunity to expose the mechanisms (suchas the literary creation of patriotic myth)by which the nation-state maintains it-self and, at worst, to be complicit withthe criminality of the nation-state itself.

Another way to see what has happenedis to recall Robert Bellah’s famous Dæda-lus essay written in 1967, in which Bellahaccurately predicted that the Americannation would split apart into factions of“liberal alienation” and “fundamental-ist ossi½cation” with respect to the “setof beliefs, symbols, and rituals” that hecalled “civil religion.”22 Among aca-demic humanists, who are overwhelm-ingly liberal and alienated from religionin both its civil and fundamentalistforms, it is hardly possible today to usethe term ‘American’ without irony orembarrassment.

We all recognize the gestures of dis-avowal. Scholars in many ½elds are go-ing through the same motions; here is

an example from a recent book on a sub-ject that once would have been calledChinese art:

This book is very deliberately called Art in China, and not Chinese Art, because it is written out of a distrust of the existenceof any unifying principles or essences link-ing such a wide range of made things,things of very different types, having verydifferent dates, very different materials,and very different makers, audiences, andcontexts of use.23

In 1999, Janice Radway, in her inauguraladdress as president of the AmericanStudies Association, suggested that thephrase ‘American studies’ be deletedfrom the name of the organization infavor of the term ‘United States stud-ies’–an act of puri½cation that wouldsave its members from implicitly en-dorsing the hegemonic ambitions ofthe United States to dominate (at least)the north and south ‘American’ conti-nents.

Without embracing the strategies ofself-acquittal these scholars propose,one may share their wariness toward the nation-state as an object of vener-ation. Quasi-genetic ideas of race soli-darity have always polluted feelings ofnationalness (as late as 1934, one ½ndsEdith Wharton blithely remarking onthe “boyish love of pure nonsense onlyto be found in Anglo-Saxons”24), and no one who has come of age since WorldWar II can dissociate such ideas from thehideous consequences that have some-times followed from them.

Moreover, there is no blinking the fact that American literary studies mustnow make their way in a postcolonial

22 Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in Ameri-ca,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper and Row,1970), 183.

23 Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1997), 10.

24 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (NewYork: Scribners, 1934), 157.





world in which we are perforcedly con-scious that nations are fragile works ofarti½ce; we have lately witnessed bloodystruggles over just what sort of nation is (or was) Kuwait, Israel, the formerYugoslavia, a future Palestine, Iraq, andUkraine, to name just a few–and Amer-icans, as citizens of the sole superpower,must continually consider what sort ofobligation these and other nations ex-ert upon us to preserve what used to becalled their ‘right of self-determination.’

It is hardly surprising, therefore, thatthe legitimacy of American literary studies, narrowly–that is, nationally–construed, is under skeptical scruti-ny. Ever since the Vietnam War, manyAmerican intellectuals have been moreor less ashamed of America, and the re-cent Iraq War, with its unilateralist andmessianic rhetoric, has only made mat-ters worse. In 1963, the Voice of Ameri-ca organized a series of radio lectures on American literature in which thescholarly authorities of the day, includ-ing some who held strong Left views,participated: Henry Nash Smith, Wal-lace Stegner, Daniel Aaron, Carlos Baker, Irving Howe, Kay House, David Levin,Richard Poirier, John Berryman, amongothers. It is simply impossible to imag-ine such a collaboration between thegovernment and the academy today.

Nor is it surprising that what is some-times called America-centrism has be-come an embarrassment to today’sAmericanists. To use a prevalent term,the ½eld is being ‘decentered’ throughstudy and translation of texts written in America in languages other thanEnglish (one doubts how far this move-ment can go, since our educational sys-tem is almost entirely monolingual) bysuch scholars as Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez,Lawrence Rosenwald, Werner Sollors,and Marc Shell. In 2000, Sollors’s andShell’s Multilingual Anthology of American

Literature presented a host of hithertounknown texts in more than a dozen Na-tive American, European, and Asian lan-guages, with English translations on fac-ing pages. There is, as well, a movementafoot–inaugurated some twenty yearsago by Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari La-guardia, the editors of Reinventing theAmericas: Comparative Studies of Litera-ture of the United States and Spanish Amer-ica (1986), and lately forwarded in suchbooks as Anne Goldman’s ContinentalDivides: Revisioning American Literature(2000)–to reject the nation’s borders as impermeable lines dividing ‘Ameri-can’ literature from the literature of ad-jacent and overlapping cultures.

In January 2003, a special issue ofpmla, devoted in a skeptical mood to“America: The Idea, the Literature,”included an essay asserting that “Amer-ican literature should be seen as nolonger bound to the inner workings of any particular country or imaginedorganic community but instead as in-terwoven systematically with traversalsbetween national territory and inter-continental space.”25 And there are ef-forts under way to ‘redraw the map ofAmerican literature’ by pushing back its boundaries in time as well as space.The Yale Americanist Wai Chee Dimockhas proposed a new set of coordinates by which she would redraw Emerson’sliterary af½liations and see him in rela-tion not so much, say, to Bronson Alcott,as to the Vishnu Parana or the Koran.“Deep time” is Dimock’s name for thistemporal reorganization, and, she adds,“deep time is denationalized space.”26

25 Paul Giles, “Transnationalism and ClassicAmerican Literature,” pmla 118 (1) (January2003): 63.

26 Wai Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: AmericanLiterature and World History,” American Liter-ary History 13 (4) (2001): 760.

So far, these attempts to develop post-national ideas of American literature aretoo diffuse to bear much weight. And, asis often the case, transformations in theacademic humanities tend to be second-ary to more basic transformations in the world. Once a province of Europe,America has become the power center of a planet convulsed by a variety of re-sistance movements–armed and other-wise–against it. Yet accompanying thesense of America as a center of consoli-dated power is a sense that any coherentnotion of American identity is comingapart. Can we call American a businesscorporation whose employees work infactories in Sri Lanka and whose assetsare deposited in Caribbean banks? Is an illegal immigrant who crosses fromMexico into Texas in order to ½nd me-nial work an American? With suchquestions in the air, why should the ideaof an American literature escape interro-gation?

As for what kind of answers mightemerge, the old ones will clearly nolonger do. At the beginning of our sto-ry, the proponents of an American litera-ture proclaimed its distinctiveness chief-ly with respect to the burdensome prece-dent of the literature of England–but to dwell on that distinction today wouldseem to participate in what Freud calledthe “narcissism of minor differences.”Matthew Arnold’s point is again oddlypertinent: “I see advertised The Primerof American Literature,” he wrote in1874. “I imagine the face of Philip orAlexander at hearing of a Primer of Ma-cedonian Literature! . . . We are all con-tributors to one great literature–Englishliterature.” These sentences, quoted byMarcus Cunliffe at the opening of hisThe Literature of the United States (1954),would have once pleased only cultural-ly conservative Anglophiles; but today,Arnold’s words (if not his tone) are per-

fectly consonant with the view from thecultural Left, for whom the hyphen in‘Anglo-American’ marks a trivial divi-sion between two barely distinguishablenations driven by the same imperialistaims. The idea of an American literaturehas come to seem provincial again.

Yet if one looks beyond the insularacademy to a new generation of youngAmerican writers, one encounters a sa-lient–and historically recurrent–dif-ference in tone and attitude that contin-ues to divide academic critics from ac-tual practitioners. To read, say, GishJen’s novel Typical American (1991) orChang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) is to be struck by how a few changes inthe scenic incidentals, or a few substi-tutions of Yiddish for Chinese or Kore-an phrases, would render these works,with their historically recurrent tale ofOld World parents versus New Worldchildren, almost indistinguishable inplot and structure from the Jewish im-migrant novels of Abraham Cahan (Yekl,1896) or Anzia Yezierska (The Bread Giv-ers, 1925). Writers present have alwaysfelt the parental presence of writers past.They register their debts with large actsof homage, as when Ralph Ellison hon-ors the man after whom he was named,Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Invisible Man(1951), or with small allusive gestures, aswhen Philip Roth opens The Great Amer-ican Novel (1973) with a Melvillean sen-tence: “Call me Smitty.”

The work of rede½ning, and therebysustaining, American literature has al-ways been mainly carried on by writerswho aspire to become part of it, not byprofessors who dismiss its validity ordoubt its existence. In that respect, notmuch has changed.




“ . . . the moment just past is extinguishedforever, save for the things made in it.”

–George Kubler, The Shape of Time1

As the name for a discipline, ‘art his-tory’ enacts a syntactical clash everytime it is uttered or written. Which is the principal term, which its modi½er?The two elements in their coupling con-front one another in an undecided hi-erarchy. The more decorous substitute,‘history of art,’ puts the weight on theobject that history is called upon toserve, but its currency is less–and in the shorthand of everyday speech, vir-tually nil.

There is, of course, a large measure ofconvention, common to most European

languages, in the particular use of theterm ‘art’ to designate painting, sculp-ture, drawings, prints, and (more dis-tantly) architecture. In any event, it pri-marily denotes a range of physical ob-jects. Its true, much wider application to any creative practice or product gen-erally requires some explicit indication–an odd reversal of the general and theparticular. Is this anomaly a mere acci-dent of usage? Or does it point to someactual eccentricities in the term’s his-torical formation that bear on the posi-tion of art history in the American con-stellation of humanistic disciplines?

The fact that the visual arts success-fully lay claim to a general, honori½cdesignation as Art may lie–and this is speculative–in the physically endur-ing nature of the artifacts that fall un-der such a description. Literature canmanifest itself in any legible transcrip-tion, and the performing arts of musicand theater can conjure physical actu-ality from a score or script, but ½delity to any original enactment can never be secured–dance is even less traceablebeyond living routine and memory. Bycontrast, the intricate physical remainson which art history concentrates its

Thomas Crow

The practice of art history in America

Thomas Crow is director of the Getty ResearchInstitute at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, andprofessor of art history at the University of South-ern California. His publications include “Paint-ers and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris”(1985), “Emulation” (1995), “The Intelligence of Art” (1999), and most recently “The Rise ofthe Sixties: American and European Art in theEra of Dissent” (2005). He has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 2001.


1 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks onthe History of Things (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversity Press, 1962), 79.

attention are the actual things fashionedand handled by the subjects of historythemselves.

Therein lies a rightness in the obdu-rate pair of nouns that name the disci-pline. George Kubler (1912–1996), thegreat specialist in both colonial Spanisharchitecture and pre-Columbian art, wasone of the rare American scholars of hisgeneration to address the theoretical un-derpinnings of a discipline operating un-der this designation. He likened the gazeof the art historian to that of the astron-omer, “concerned with appearancesnoted in the present but occurring in thepast . . . . However fragmentary its condi-tion, any work of art is actually a portionof an arrested happening, or an emana-tion of past time.” The “initial commo-tion” entailed in the making of an artobject survives–as does no other crea-tive act–as a unique, physically sensiblepattern.2

In comparison, the textual materialsrelied upon by the profession of histo-ry can seem, despite their profusion,thin and remote. The object of art, bycontrast, allows its maker to speak in the present with the full vividness of anunforced creative act, one that can pre-serve a signi½cant, if not absolutely com-plete, inventory of its particular traitsand structural complexity. By this I donot mean to say that artists and crafts-men do not operate under a con½ningseries of stipulations and constraints,but these are the standard conditions of all human activity, within which artproduction is exceptional in the scope it provides for nuanced emotional ex-pression as part and parcel of its socialutility.

The dif½culty, it hardly needs stating,lies in interpreting this physical com-motion from the past that arrives in

our midst like a traveler through time.Kubler observes in The Shape of Timethat there is nothing in the cultural rec-ord so resistant to analysis and interpre-tation as the single work of art.3 Hencethe necessary recourse to schemes ofgeneralization and comparison aroundwhich arise the endless disputes that, in effect, constitute the history of thediscipline. But the unique material ob-ject also beckons as a place of refuge and safety from any spirit of controver-sy. It is what it is, an epistemologicaldif½culty readily inviting redescriptionas a quasi-mystical presence. The cura-tors of museum collections and mer-chants of the art trade–most of whomunderwent the same training as art his-torians in academia–frequently resortto claims of superior knowledge basedlargely on physical proximity and famil-iarity. Beyond the work of descriptionand classi½cation, the work of art is pre-sumed to ‘speak for itself.’

Subtending the mutual suspicion be-tween museum and academy is the pat-ent reality that art history’s objects ofstudy cross over into the category of ob-jects of desire. The rarity, technical dis-tinction, emotional intensity, and for-mal beauty that variously characterizethese survivals of Kubler’s distant “com-motions” have made them among themost sought-after possessions in themodern world. (A scholarly interpreta-tion is, in its way, as much a claim on the object of art as any other.) As mar-ket prices are continually bid up to lev-els incommensurable with virtually anyother category of human artifact, pow-erful players in the system–public andprivate–can impose demands for flat-tering af½rmation that run counter tothe requirements of historical and in-terpretative probity that the discipline

The practiceof art his-tory in America

2 Ibid., 19–20. 3 Ibid., 36.



ThomasCrow on thehumanities

shares with its sisters in the humanitiesat large.

At the same time, the operations ofdesire that drive the circulation of artobjects, along with all the perturbationsthat their movement sets off in subse-quent art practice, constitute a key cate-gory of research in modern art history.For example, one cannot set apart theantique fragments incorporated into thebasilica of San Marco in Venice, spoils of predation on Constantinople, fromany other element of its design historyand meaning. And the same spectaculardesire for possession has resulted in thereproduction at a reduced scale of theentire Piazza San Marco, with all of itslayered accretions of form and symbol,as the facade of the largest hotel in theworld, the Venetian in Las Vegas. Thisgambling and entertainment resort ad-ditionally boasts a joint branch of theGuggenheim and Hermitage museums–the latter collection itself the plunderof the monetary raids by the CzarinasElisabeth and Catherine the Great on the artistic trophies of western Europe.

Such phenomena already lie ½rmly onthe agenda of ‘visual culture’ studies, ahybrid category embraced by a numberof art historians to whom the cult of ½neaesthetic discrimination appears an un-sustainable relic of the past. The globalentrepreneurship of the GuggenheimMuseum, of which the Las Vegas fran-chise is just one part, has thrived on the disdain of museum traditionalists,which has only served to enhance itsintended aura of postmodern glamourand friendliness toward popular cul-ture. But these latest episodes directlyecho the process by which the great ex-emplars of European ½ne art came tothis country in the ½rst place. Selectionand promotion by entrepreneurs like the Duveen brothers placed this legacyin the hands of Gilded Age magnates

who had grown staggeringly wealthy onthe leading industries of the era–rail,oil, and steel–but were still short of therequisite cultural polishing. The Amer-ican discipline of art history would beunthinkable without the public collec-tions subsequently endowed by thesedirect ancestors to a ½gure like hotelierSteve Wynn of Las Vegas, whose person-al museum of art at the Bellagio hotel ri-vals the institutional weight of the Gug-genheim-Hermitage effort.

Both of these new institutions of artstrive to present objects of art in a man-ner that is as deracinated, as divorcedfrom the circumstances under whichthey arose, as human ingenuity can con-trive. Paintings that satis½ed the courtlyaggrandizement of Russian potentatescome to stand in perfectly isolated splen-dor against the pitted reddish-brownwalls of industrial steel stipulated byarchitect Rem Koolhaas. In no environ-ment could the visitor be less encour-aged to probe the internal complicationsof any one of them, that is, to search outthe telltale imprints of the particularpast commotion that brought each oneinto being. The cult that surrounds thedisplaced objects in all of America’s mu-seums reach a kind of pure extreme inthis, their ultimate desert outpost. A lay-ered, intricately worked physical artifacthovers before the eyes as an ‘image,’ thatis, a mental event; and its promise pointsexclusively toward the realm of pleasure–the single-minded purpose of the en-tire built environment in which they ½ndthemselves.

Elucidating fully the sources and wideeffects of this phenomenon would re-quire concentration on the anthropolo-gy and psychology of the fetish. For thepurposes of this essay, taking some mea-sure of its distorting effects is suf½cient.Among these are an exaggerated sense

of possession and a blindness to the par-ticular and contingent circumstances inwhich these fascinating works are expe-rienced. Colleagues in the cognitive sci-ences–lately the most vocal commenta-tors to set their sights on art from out-side the ½eld–have tended to adopt theLas Vegas mindset as their idea of a uni-versal human norm in the experience of art objects. Linguistic psychologistSteven Pinker, summing up the lessonsof recent research into what he calls“evolutionary aesthetics,” informs usthat “art is a pleasure technology, likedrugs, erotica, or ½ne cuisine–a way to purify and concentrate pleasurablestimuli and deliver them to our senses.”4

It follows for him that any form of artthat might irritate or confound the view-er’s perceptual faculties must be a per-verse and willfully unnatural deviationfrom the path dictated by our commongenetic predisposition.

Foremost among such deviations havebeen the formal experiments of twenti-eth-century modernists, who cast asidewith startling abruptness “all the tricksthat artists had used for millennia toplease the human palate” in favor of“freakish distortions of shape and colorand then to abstract grids, shapes, drib-bles, splashes . . . . ” Such behavior Pinkercan only comprehend in terms of someimposed, partisan agenda: if art holds a mirror up to nature, then modernismrepresents a willful campaign to assertthat the social world itself had lost allharmony with just human needs and as-pirations.5 But any scholar of art could

inform him that artists and their patronshave, over those millenia, just as oftensought to elicit somatic and emotionalresponses that lie far from the loci ofpleasure. The entire gamut of humanfeeling and knowledge has been fairgame for artists since the advent of the½rst “man-made object to which we as-sign a more than utilitarian value” (cit-ing Erwin Panofsky’s degree-zero de½-nition of art).6 As often as not, the de-cidedly unpleasant experiences of in-timidation, guilt, exclusion, taboo, anddread have been the intended effect ofthe objects that come under the scruti-ny of the art historian. Take the colossalstone block bearing the ferocious like-ness of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue/Cihuacoatl, with her monstrous coun-tenance of opposed rattlesnake pro½lesemerging from her severed neck, whichtoday constitutes one of the artistic glo-ries of the National AnthropologicalMuseum in Mexico City. Consider therange of emotions likely to have beenfelt in its presence by any potential vic-tim of the priest’s obsidian knife, andthen try to equate that with the hedo-nist’s menu of sensory grati½cationsadduced by Pinker.

Surely wiser in this regard is Kubler,who had a profound knowledge of theMesoamerican traditions from whichthe Aztec ef½gy arose. No particular partisan of modern avant-gardism, hedescribes the same European aestheticrevolution circa 1910 in these terms:

4 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The ModernDenial of Human Nature (New York: VikingPenguin, 2002), 405.

5 A further weakness in this assertion lies inthe fact that many assiduous scholars on theLeft, devoutly wishing that Pinker could be cor-rect, have spent at least a generation attempting

to demonstrate such conscious political lean-ings in the practice of exemplary modern art-ists–and have usually come up empty.

6 Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art,” inThe Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America, ed. W. R. Crawford (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953; re-print, New York: Arno Press, 1977), 83.





The fabric of society manifested no rup-ture, and the texture of useful inventionscontinued step by step in closely linkedorder, but the system of artistic inventionwas abruptly transformed, as if large num-bers of men had suddenly become awarethat the inherited repertory of forms nolonger corresponded to the actual mean-ing of existence . . . . The nature of artis-tic invention therefore relates more close-ly to invention by new postulates than tothat invention by simple confrontationwhich characterizes the useful sciences.7

A postulate on the order of the heliocen-tric planetary orbits, the movement oftectonic plates, or, indeed, natural se-lection itself can force as abrupt (and tomany as freakish) a reordering of cog-nition as the eruption of a new, antinat-uralistic set of criteria for success inpainting.

In fact, over the millennia evoked by Pinker, naturalistic depiction hasbeen the exception rather than the rule(though the technical barriers to itsachievement are quite low) because it is not, on the whole, what human be-ings have desired from their art. One key element in any explanation for thedrastic artistic transformations of theearly twentieth century, as Kubler con-ceives them, lies in the grafting of trib-al and non-Western formal sequences in all their historical concreteness ontoan otherwise played-out European linethat had lost, by any objective measure,most of its capacity for fresh invention.The new African, Oceanic, and archa-ic models offered, in addition to an ex-panded range of expressive intensity, an advanced capacity for rendering vol-umes into linear patterns transferable to a flat surface, in a way that acknowl-edged with a new realism the painting as a two-dimensional thing. Any single

object in this new sequence captured forthe future its concrete moment of activetranslation between two symbolic tech-nologies.

The task of understanding such amoment necessarily entails a patientunpacking of a process, many layers ofwhich are only partly visible or indeedentirely obscure to the immediate, un-tutored glance. Picasso’s Les Demoisellesd’Avignon, perhaps the prime moment inthis process of translation, has enjoyedjust such an unpacking by Leo Steinberg,the recondite scholar of Leonardo daVinci and High Renaissance art.8 Thework’s legions of admirers share withart historians like Kubler and Steinberg a fascination with the moment of inven-tion and with the creative act itself, intowhich this prime modernist work ½ndsways to draw its spectators–and thesame could be said of an equally foun-dational object for a previous tradition,say, Leonardo’s cartoon for his Virgin,Child, and Saint Anne. This higher orderof communication virtually necessitatesthat the artist confound comfortablehabits of viewing, pushing aspects ofform toward or beyond the limits ofwhat might be comfortable or even legi-ble at any given historical juncture. Theevolution of what is heard as a ‘disso-nance’ in European music provides aninstructive parallel almost too obviousto mention.

It is not the case, however, that thescholars who established art history in American universities necessarily re-sisted the temptation to regard the ap-parent immediacy of visual art as a re-lief from the more laborious demands

7 Kubler, The Shape of Time, 70.

8 See Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Broth-el,” pt. 1, Art News 71 (5) (September 1972): 20–29; Ibid., pt. 2, Art News 71 (6) (October 1972):38–49.

of historical interpretation. In an essayof 1929, Charles Rufus Morey, the mostinfluential ½gure in the development of the ½eld at Princeton, lamented theabsence of historical depth in the en-vironment surrounding American stu-dents compared to the palpable sense of tradition enjoyed by their Europeancounterparts. To amass a commensu-rable awareness through the study oflanguages or history consumed yearsand, even then, might yield only unco-ordinated fragments of knowledge: “the disiecta membra of the history ofhuman action and thought.” In the history of art, however, “the student isconducted to the spirit of an epoch byhis most direct sense, the eye . . . [which]provides a history capable of expositionwithin the narrow limits of time and ef-fort which have been left for such inte-grating disciplines by the multiplicity of the modern college curriculum.”9

No hint here that the proper unpack-ing of even one representative object re-quires no less elaboration of philologi-cal and historical knowledge than thatrequired by any cognate discipline–in fact, one could argue that it requires a good deal more. Morey’s own scholar-ship, in particular his founding and useof the monumental Index of Christian Artas a comprehensive guide to the visuali-zation of doctrine over the entire bodyof medieval art, belies his own proposi-tion. The achievements of medievalistslike Morey and Arthur Kingsley Porter,his equally forceful and accomplishedcolleague at Harvard, had been impres-sive enough to elicit the admiration ofjealously nationalistic Europeans.10 But

both of these founding ½gures also pro-fessed in their teaching and polemics an avowedly conservative social agen-da, wherein the perceived hierarchy anddogmatic certainties of the Middle Agescould be held up as an alternative mod-el for Americans, one to be set againstthe democratizing forces of advancingindustrial technology, mass immigra-tion, urban growth, and materialisticconsumption. As Morey wrote in 1944:“There is revealed in every work of me-diaeval craftsmen, from the macrocosmof the cathedral to the microcosm of theminiature or ivory carving, an elementbitterly missed in the modern scene, an element whose restoration would domost to integrate a new and more hu-man civilization, in a new and more reasonable world. And that is unity offaith.”11

A good deal of faith, in fact, underliesthis pronouncement, as it sets aside thedistinct possibility that the eclectic cor-pus of medieval objects present in Amer-ican public collections could themselvesappear as so many disiecta membra, cutoff from one another and divorced fromtheir inspiring original contexts. Portersimply gave up the struggle, retiring to a castle on a remote Irish coast, there to shut out the modern world amid hispious rural clients. The more practicalMorey sought a less drastic solution; hechampioned the fashioning of an archi-tectural pastiche from the architecturalremains of ½ve French monasteries–½nanced by the devout John D. Rocke-feller, Jr.–in order to create the Cloistersmuseum in New York, where the bulk of the Metropolitan Museum’s medie-val objects have come to be housed. TheCloisters, he wrote,

9 Charles Rufus Morey, “The Value of Art asan Academic Subject,” Parnassus 1 (3) (March15, 1929): 7.

10 Panofsky, “The History of Art,” 85–88.

11 Charles Rufus Morey, “Mediaeval Art andAmerica,” Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes 7 (1944): 6.





represent the maturity of American mu-seum planning towards the evocation ofthe mediaeval scene . . . . The rugged heightof Fort Tryon park provided a typical mo-nastic site, and the cloisters, halls, and de-tails of ½ve French monasteries furnishedthe core of the architectural complex,which was brought to consistency by judi-cious copying of necessary elements fromother South French abbeys . . . . In the land-scaping, most dif½cult of all mediaeval as-pects to recapture, a great deal of diligentresearch resulted in a convincing lay-outof monastic orchards, and even included a garden of medicinal herbs conformingto a Carolingian list of the year 812.12

The yearning of fantasy is palpable inthis passage. The Cloisters can boast the actual stones of the Middle Ages,and the intervening decades have lentthe complex its own patina of age, butthe conceptual difference between its re-creations and those of the Las VegasVenetian have remained more a matterof degree than of kind.

As the Cloisters opened in 1938, theunfolding political catastrophe in Eu-rope was surpassing the worst fearsthese American medievalists may haveharbored for their own culture. Touch-stones of European artistic achievementhad been arriving in America piecemealover the previous half-century; in aburst, the cream of Old World scholar-ly achievement in interpreting those ob-jects followed, as a wave of Jewish arthistorians sought refuge across the At-lantic. The Institute of Fine Arts, housedwithin New York University, establisheditself in a few short years as the peer ofany Ivy League program by incorporat-ing the largest number of refugee Euro-peans. Its director, Walter Cook, likened

his initiative to the acquisition of physi-cal objects, frequently declaring (with a somewhat disturbing insouciance):“Hitler is my best friend. He shakes thetree and I collect the apples.”13 That an-ecdote was reported by Panofsky, one of Cook’s chief recruits, who went on to occupy the ½rst chair in the disciplineat the Institute for Advanced Study. Sim-ilarly, by gathering in Rudolf Wittkover,a commanding authority on Renaissancearchitecture and humanism, Columbialifted the ambition and performance ofits already established program. Nor wasthe exodus limited to Jewish refugees.Yale’s program did not really exist priorto the arrival of Henri Focillon, a poly-math with a strong theoretical inclina-tion toward autonomous formal devel-opments in art, who migrated in 1940from occupied France.

Because the discipline’s traditionalcore in the study of classical antiqui-ty and the Italian Renaissance had re-mained under recognized German dominance, the one ½eld of conspicu-ous American investment and prestigeto that date had been in early Christianand medieval art. This influx of talentfrom the German-speaking sphere wasbound to undo the medieval idyll of arthistory in the United States. It furtherset the stage for a marked expansion ofthe ½eld in the aftermath of World WarII. Within the elite universities, the in-creasing ease and frequency of overseastravel had begun to stimulate a need fortraining in the history and meaning ofsigni½cant European monuments. Asmore meritocratic admissions made thispreoccupation less socially exclusive, arthistory began to assume its habitual po-sition as a favored elective, and the char-ismatic survey teacher became a campusstaple. For the proportionally smaller

12 Ibid., 2. 13 See Panofsky, “The History of Art,” 95.

number of majors who chose to contin-ue in the ½eld, relatively plentiful op-portunities existed in two sectors (dou-ble that generally offered in the otherhumanistic disciplines): there was thecontinuing higher-education expansion,which was feeding on itself and spread-ing the discipline into state schools andsmaller colleges; at the same time, therewas an equally growing museum sectorin need of curators and administrators.

But this climate of postwar optimismand opportunity did not at ½rst alter theconservative tendencies of the Ameri-can discipline. The ½rst wave of Euro-pean professors, as they stepped in tomeet the demand for trained personnel,found their new American charges lack-ing the level of erudition they wouldhave assumed in their European coun-terparts (and cultural misunderstand-ings doubtless led these professors toexaggerate both the norms they hadknown and the de½ciencies they werediscovering). Thus they tended to pruneaway many of the more complex andspeculative elements of art history infavor of conceptually simple and oftenmechanical tasks: decoding iconogra-phy, tracing fragments of dispersed en-sembles, identifying hands, dating. As-certaining points of fact that Europeanscholars–and other humanists in Amer-ica–would regard as just the startingpoint for interpretation became suf½-cient justi½cation for a successful re-search career. Irving Lavin, until recent-ly the long-serving professor of art his-tory at the Institute for Advanced Study,has been forthright about the pedagogyoffered by “those miraculously translat-ed Elijahs bringing the good word fromthe Old World to the New,” going so faras to celebrate as a lost golden age thetimes when “Panofsky would hand overto every member of his seminars a spe-ci½c new idea or discovery of his own,

just waiting for the enterprising graduatestudent to work up into an article.”14

Not to underestimate the dif½culty of detective work frequently entailed in these endeavors, but they had in com-mon a ful½llment in some de½nite con-clusion. This pedagogically reduced ver-sion of European art history largely setthe limits for the entire discipline in itspostwar American translation. An inher-ited social conservatism thereby joineditself to a structurally generated intellec-tual conservatism, both reinforced bymaterial rewards that could go well be-yond comfortable salaries and tenure.

Here, the unanalyzed power of thephysical art object worked once again to set the discipline apart from its text-based counterparts in the humanities.Because of the inherent charisma of Eu-ropean masterpieces, generous patronswere willing to provide an exceptionallevel of ½nancial support for fellowshipsand study centers abroad. As the centerof the ½eld shifted, thanks to the émigréinflux, toward the Italian Renaissanceand Baroque, Rome and Florence be-came regular destinations for summersand whole years of leave. What wasmore, the resulting exclusivity bene½teda signi½cant number of art historianswho could present themselves to the artmarket as the sole experts in the attribu-tion of works by a particular artist–feesfor this kind of expertise could mountinto six ½gures.

Even if many art historians steeredclear of overt dealings in the market, the mindset that naturally followed fromthis activity, the identi½cation with theinterests of wealthy collectors and theirmanner of living, ½ltered widely throughthe ½eld and became internalized as a re-

14 Irving Lavin, “The Crisis of ‘Art History,’”in Mieke Bal et al., “Art History and Its Theo-ries,” Art Bulletin 78 (1) (March 1996): 14.





quirement for professional acceptance.For those who were bene½ting so abun-dantly from this system, the stigma ofthe soft option, a certain disdain fromcolleagues outside art history, was aprice worth paying. Their ½rst line ofdefense became the mysti½cation of anintuitive ‘eye’ that allowed the expert toperform feats of connoisseurship that nomerely bookish historical scholar couldaccomplish. Even the close connectionsto Europe and to foreign scholars, a po-tential boon in an American academicscene prone to a certain parochialism,fostered the imitation of a high-handed,authoritarian treatment of students outof keeping with the more collegial styleof graduate training that characterizedthe contemporaneous development ofother disciplines.

The foregoing picture, despite itslargely unflattering character, repre-sents an attempt to describe a systemaccording to what might be called itsdefault functioning. While much sin-cere and valuable work was accom-plished in the 1950s and 1960s, the sys-tem nonetheless worked against this collective acumen coming together insuch a way that it could take the study of visual art to the next intellectual lev-el. This has in fact happened over thelast three decades–and Anglophone art history has in the process come to set the pace for the world. But the sys-tem had to change before what was stillan immature body of thought and pro-cedures, too long diverted to noncogni-tive ends, could truly grow up.

The persistence of the old systemdepended on conditions that could be maintained for only so long. Chiefamong these was keeping the researchagenda of art history close to the cen-ters–both geographical and chronolog-ical–that the ½rst postwar generation

commanded. Of the many forces thatundid that restricted compass was theprogressive shift of interest among newentrants to art history toward the mod-ern period, meaning roughly Western art since the mid-nineteenth century.During the same years that John D.Rockefeller, Jr., was ½nancing the me-dievalists’ dream at the Cloisters, his forward-looking wife, Abby AldrichRockefeller, planted the seed of thisdevelopment. In 1929, with the supportof two female friends, she establishedthe Museum of Modern Art in NewYork. They chose a young art historyinstructor from Wellesley College, Al-fred Barr, as the museum’s foundingdirector. And Barr used his growing col-lection and landmark special exhibitionsto stamp a historical schema on the artof the very recent past where none hadexisted before.

The early program of the museum in-cluded gestures toward native artists and vernacular forms consistent with aphilanthropic mission in Depression-era America. But the heart of its activi-ties, like those of the Gilded Age collec-tors and academic medievalists, lay inthe imported culture of Europe. The dis-tinction of Barr’s enterprise resided inthe fact that the Europeans themselveswere not producing a competing body of scholarship or museology. Writing inthe early 1950s, Panofsky acknowledgedthat a systematic history of modern Eu-ropean art had required the interventionof Americans. On their home ground, he opined, the immediate impact of theEuropean avant-gardes “forced the lit-térateurs into either defense or attack,and the more intelligent art historiansinto silence. In the United States suchmen as Alfred Barr . . . could look uponthe contemporary scene with the samemixture of enthusiasm and detachment,and write about it with the same respect

for historical method and concern formeticulous documentation, as are re-quired of a study of fourteenth-centuryivories or ½fteenth-century prints.”15

Those art historians then devotingthemselves to such objects did not, inthe main, share Panofsky’s sympathy forthis development. “Modern art,” Moreydeclared, “is on the whole an art of disil-lusionment, struggling to free itself fromthe ruins of abandoned shibboleths . . . .Hence its emphasis on the material as-pects of our civilization, and especiallyon those more sinister ones of economicstress and social injustice, which stir themodern artist, writer, musician, to con-scious or unconscious satire.”16 Thesewords, written during the mid-1940s,appeared in a leading scholarly journal,at a moment when Barr’s prestige hadreached something of a peak. Indiffer-ence or active resistance on the part ofthe established academy was such thattraining in the history of modern art re-mained distinctly marginal compared tothe established subject areas from classi-cal antiquity to around 1700; even theeighteenth century lay near the edge ofthe discipline’s zone of chronologicalcomfort.

This self-imposed restriction had ef-fects on the study of all periods. The dis-cipline’s principal intellectual tools hadevolved from a preoccupation with sta-ble symbolic systems as yet untouchedby the secular tumult and corrosion ofmodernity. There was next to no intel-lectual equipment available for gaugingthe impact of conflict, disruption, oreven of change itself, the raison d’être ofany historian. In the same essay citedabove, Morey gave passionate voice tothis assumption of stability, implausibly

declaring, “The forms in which the con-cepts of Christianity were cast showedremarkably little variation throughoutthe Middle Ages and throughout the me-diaeval world.”17

In contrast, the increasingly indepen-dent, disenchanted, and rapidly chang-ing art of modernity impelled its inter-preters to begin comparing an arrange-ment of pigments in an oily emulsionwith rapidly evolving phenomena likethe Industrial Revolution or mass urban-ization. The two phenomenal orders–aesthetic and historical–could at ½rst be made only tenuously commensurablewith one another because few, if any,ready mental maps existed that wereadequate to both.

In the face of such a challenge, the ½rstplausible explanatory strategy, adoptedfrom the aesthetics of the Bloomsburygroup in England and promoted by Barr,was to steer art history in a directionparallel to that of New Criticism in lit-erary studies, giving pride of place to an artwork’s internal relationships andtransformations of acknowledged pre-cedents and prototypes (thereby brack-eting historical determination and theconsequent need for wide research). The new power of American abstractpainting in the postwar period seemed to con½rm criteria of value that requiredno justi½cation outside the formal char-acter of any individual work, and this in-tensional approach came to have its hey-day during the early 1960s under the ae-gis of New York critic Clement Green-berg and his followers in the academy,chief among them Michael Fried ofHarvard and later Johns Hopkins.18

15 Panofsky, “The History of Art,” 91.

16 Morey, “Mediaeval Art,” 5.

17 Ibid.

18 Fried’s principal work in this vein has re-cently been collected in Michael Fried, Art andObjecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1998).





The historiography of art has habitu-ally shadowed the expanding self-con-sciousness of the advanced art practicecontemporaneous to it (which has hadfar more to contribute than the well-meaning efforts of the aestheticians indepartments of philosophy).19 As Amer-ican artists moved away from formalabstraction toward the context-depen-dent strategies of Minimalism and Con-ceptual Art, this narrow set of formalpreoccupations largely ceded the ½eld–or, better, found itself incorporatedinto a more comprehensive brief. Theemerging direction in studies of themodern period bore the imprint of thosedevelopments in advanced art around1970 that brought to the fore the deter-mining conditions of art making itself.This new tendency in scholarship like-wise sought to align an object’s formalproperties with the production of socialmeaning, turning even the defensivehostility toward theory and speculationon the part of most American art histori-ans into a means to this end.

The principal compensation for thepaucity of explicit theorizing in art his-tory had been an obsession with empir-ical discovery–of unknown drawings,variants, contracts, recorded icono-graphic programs, original locations of objects–that had inculcated in gen-erations of art historians a strong set ofskills in archival research. And a furtherlatent strength lay in the equally under-theorized activity of connoisseurship,that is, the concentrated attention toobjects in search of telltale clues to con-dition, authorship, and quality. What

came to be called, in misleadingly reduc-tive shorthand, ‘the social history of art’succeeded to a signi½cant extent by tap-ping this unique and underexploitedcombination of pursuits. The two halvesof established art history–the mania fordocumentation and the cult of ½ne dis-crimination–had both represented asilencing of the demand for interpreta-tion. But when these categories of anal-ysis were put back together, they were to spark a collective release of pent-upenergy and a recovery of lost time.

Each phase in the development ofAmerican art history appears to requirea privileged geographical locus. For the½rst phase, it probably hovered some-where near the relic-rich cathedral townof Santiago de Compostela, the westernhub of the routes followed by medievalpilgrims. For the postwar generation, itwas Rome and its Italian tributaries. Forthe social history of art, it was surelyParis.

Walter Benjamin, in his studies ofBaudelaire, had memorably called Par-is “the capital of the nineteenth centu-ry,” and a new wave of art historianstook this aphoristic dictum to heart. Inthis same moment began the belatedprocess of publishing and translatingBenjamin’s own immense, un½nishedproject on the Parisian arcades, for itstime a profoundly idiosyncratic attemptto correlate the most sophisticated artwith the states of mind induced by anincipient consumer capitalism. But Ben-jamin, fortunately for the ultimate re-ception of his work, had an Americancounterpart of commensurable fore-sight and scholarly energy in MeyerSchapiro, the Columbia art historianwith whom he shared a brief and poi-gnant meeting in 1939. (Schapiro hadsought out Benjamin with the aim ofpersuading the exiled German scholar

19 As Kubler observes (The Shape of Time, 67),“The work of many artists often comes closerto philosophical speculation than most aesthet-ic writings, which retrace the same ground overand over, sometimes systematically and some-times historically, but rarely with originality.”

to seek safety among his old FrankfurtSchool colleagues in New York; Ben-jamin declined and met his death whilefleeing toward Spain in the followingyear.)

Two years before their meeting, Scha-piro had broached the connection be-tween habits of consumption, particu-larly the newly intensi½ed marketing of fashion and organized leisure, withconcurrent developments in the artis-tic avant-garde. Taking Barr to task byname (and by implication his museum),he disputed the assumption that the history of modern art could adequatelybe “presented as an internal, immanentprocess among the artists.”20 Address-ing the historical moment commonlytaken as the founding moment of mod-ernism in painting, he observed:

It is remarkable how many pictures wehave in early Impressionism of informaland spontaneous sociability, of break-fasts, picnics, promenades, boating trips,holidays and vacation travel. These urbanidylls not only present the objective formsof bourgeois recreation in the 1860’s and1870’s; they also reflect in the very choiceof subjects and in the new aesthetic de-vices the conception of art as solely a ½eldof individual enjoyment, without refer-ence to ideas and motives, and they pre-suppose the cultivation of these pleasuresas the highest ½eld of freedom for an en-lightened bourgeois detached from the of-½cial beliefs of his class. In enjoying realis-tic pictures of his surroundings as a spec-tacle of traf½c and changing atmospheres,the cultivated rentier was experiencing inits phenomenal aspect that mobility of the

environment, the market and of industryto which he owed his income and his free-dom. And in the new Impressionist tech-niques which broke things up into ½nelydiscriminated points of color, as well as in the “accidental” momentary vision, hefound, in a degree hitherto unknown inart, conditions of sensibility closely relat-ed to those of the urban promenader andthe re½ned consumer of luxury goods.21

It would be dif½cult to overestimate thedegree to which this single passage anti-cipated the later development of the dis-cipline. It is a mark of the time in whichit was written (1937) that Schapiro wasby vocation a young scholar of medievalart. And his ability to envision this sche-matic but prescient program for the in-terpretation of early modernism coin-cided with his single-handed effort with-in that sub½eld to counter the certaintiesof Porter and Morey with an alternativeintellectual model.

The Marxist pedigree evident in muchof Schapiro’s vocabulary points to hispreoccupation with conflict and changein the arts of Romanesque France andSpain, particularly as manifested in the dramatic expansions of trade andtown life as countermovements to ec-clesiastical hegemony around the turn of the twelfth century. The dominantapproaches in the American art histo-ry of his time tended toward the amass-ing and cataloguing of ever more exam-ples in a given category of object withthe aim of establishing something like a statistical norm for the type–one inkeeping with the stable complex of be-liefs assumed to underwrite such anorm. Projects of this kind were for allintents and purposes boundless, end-lessly postponing the interpretative challenge posed by any single work.

20 Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of AbstractArt,” Marxist Quarterly 1 (January–March 1937),reprinted in Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: Nine-teenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers(New York: George Braziller, 1978), 188. 21 Ibid., 192–193.





Schapiro adopted a diametrically op-posed method, advancing the hypothe-sis that the most productive cases forart-historical inquiry will involve ob-jects that constitute disruptive excep-tions against the matrix of related worksthat surround them. And here his com-mand of the modernist critic’s alertnessto innovation and internal artistic formcame to serve that enterprise: instead of proceeding from the preponderanceof examples that are most alike and de-½ning everything else as peripheral orexceptional, he began by analyzing whathappens when the reassuring regulari-ties of form break down, so as to positthe operations of a larger signifying sys-tem from virtually a single instance.22

In this wager, everything rested onwhat the most searching internal anal-ysis of that chosen object could yield:bringing to light the ½ssures, discrepan-cies, and contradictions on which theexceptional artist had to impose someresolution, all without repressing thefractious heterogeneity of the conceptsand techniques with which he was en-joined to work. A viewing intelligenceschooled in the intricacies of Picasso and Braque’s Cubism could come to thetask with the requisite acumen. Scha-piro’s articles of the late 1930s advancedthe art history of the Middle Ages bymore than a generation–it remains an

open question whether the disciplinehas yet caught up with his example.23

When he turned to the genesis ofmodernism, Schapiro reversed this ma-neuver, bringing to bear the medieval-ist’s preoccupation with decoding ob-scure symbolic subject matter–what art historians designate as iconographyin a technical sense. To the degree thatthe realists and impressionists of mid-nineteenth-century Paris set aside overtliterary and mythological content, mod-ernism had been assumed by both itsadmirers and detractors to lack signi-½cant subject matter: its motifs weredeemed to be little more than pretextsfor experiments in optical vividness or emancipated color, line, shape, andphysical gesture. Schapiro’s contrarycontention was that the artistic avant-garde was advancing another systema-tic account of subjectivity to replace the outmoded ‘of½cial beliefs’ of estab-lished religion and state power. He pos-ited that the advanced artist, after 1860or so, succumbed to the general divi-sion of labor as a full-time leisure spe-cialist, an aesthetic technician picturingand prodding the sensual expectations of other, part-time consumers. In thehands of the avant-garde, Schapiro ar-gued, the aesthetic itself became iden-ti½ed with habits of enjoyment and re-lease produced quite concretely withinthe emerging apparatus of commercialentertainment and tourism–even, andperhaps most of all, when art appearedentirely withdrawn into its own sphere,its own sensibility, its own medium.

22 Meyer Schapiro, “From Mozarabic to Ro-manesque in Silos,” Art Bulletin 21 (4) (Decem-ber 1939): 312–374, reprinted in Meyer Scha-piro, Romanesque Art: Selected Papers (NewYork: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 28–101;Meyer Schapiro, “The Sculptures of Souillac,”in Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Por-ter, ed. W. R. W. Kohler (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1939), 2:359–387,reprinted in Schapiro, Romanesque Art, 102–130; see also Thomas Crow, The Intelligence ofArt (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1999), 1–23.

23 Remarkably, a tired and incoherent rehears-al of all the old mainstream resistances to Scha-piro’s ideas has recently been published in thejournal of the discipline’s principal professionalorganization: John Williams, “Meyer Schapiroin Silos: Pursuing an Iconography of Style,” ArtBulletin 85 (3) (September 2003): 442–468.

But some three decades had to passafter Schapiro’s ½rst interventions be-fore the kinds of resistance adumbratedabove could be overcome. Crucial in thissuccess was the building of a systematiciconography for Parisian modernism un-dertaken by Linda Nochlin, then at Vas-sar, and by Robert Herbert with severalof his students at Yale.24 And, by the late1960s, new tools of interpretation frombeyond art history’s own store of tech-niques and practices came to hand, a kitthat proved particularly useful in render-ing analyzable structures out of the scaleand fluidity of modern historical experi-ence.

That moment represented a cusp when French structuralism and semi-otics had achieved suf½cient coherenceto be apprehended by a curious student,but still remained a minority interest,even in ½lm and literary studies, letalone in art history. A work like RolandBarthes’s S/Z, his landmark anatomiza-tion of Balzac’s novella “Sarrasine,”

came close to an ultimate pulling apartof the disparate strands that an artistmaneuvers into an effect of unity.25

Adding to the appeal of such an enter-prise was a new style of social historybased in Britain, within which this samebody of French theory took its placealongside equivalent commitments toneo-Marxist social theory and diligencein the archives. At the same time, the in-cipient British school of cultural studieswas turning a similar set of tools towardcontemporary society, making possible a new acuity in the dissection of vernac-ular culture, with an emphasis on theways that disaffected subcultures wererepositioning and creatively rede½ningmass-produced products.26

The ½rst of these strands had a headstart in America, largely through the pre-scient efforts of Annette Michelson, ascholar of avant-garde cinema who ex-tended her reach to the contemporaryvisual arts in a way that has made herone of its most formidable intellects.27

24 Nochlin’s contribution at ½rst centered onthe rural and working-class imagery that dis-tinguished the realism of Gustave Courbet inthe late 1840s and 1850s and that set the stagefor Manet’s more urban set of motifs. Two par-ticularly important articles took up and extend-ed the insights of Meyer Schapiro, “Courbetand Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism andNaïveté,” Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes 4 (3–4) (April–June 1941): 164–191,reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art, 47–86.These were Linda Nochlin, “Innovation andTradition in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans,” inMarsyas Studies in the History of Art, suppl. 2,“Essays in Honor of Walter Friedlaender” (NewYork: Institute of Fine Arts, New York Univer-sity, 1964), 119–126, and Linda Nochlin, “Gus-tave Courbet’s Meeting: A Portrait of the Artistas a Wandering Jew,” Art Bulletin 49 (3) (Sep-tember 1967): 209–222. Herbert’s research isrepresented in Robert Herbert, Impressionism:Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); see alsoPaul Hayes Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982).

25 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Éditions duSeuil, 1970). The lesson of Barthes’s project forestablished literary-critical assumptions followsKubler’s formula, written a decade before (TheShape of Time, 28), for unpacking the apparent-ly uni½ed work of art: “ . . . the cross-section ofthe instant taken across the full face of the mo-ment in a given place, resembles a mosaic ofpieces in different developmental states, and ofdifferent ages, rather than a radial design con-ferring its meaning on all the pieces.”

26 The founding text was Phil Cohen, “Subcul-tural Conflict and Working-Class Community,”Birmingham University Centre for Contempo-rary Cultural Studies, Working Papers in Cul-tural Studies 2, Spring 1972, 5–51, reprinted inPhil Cohen, Rethinking the Youth Question: Edu-cation, Labour and Cultural Studies (Durham,N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).

27 See as an example Annette Michelson,“Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgres-sion,” in Robert Morris (Washington, D.C.:Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969).





Settled at New York University after anextended sojourn in Paris, she wouldjoin with Rosalind Krauss (the leadingscholar of modernist sculpture, who wasthen guiding a small, insurgent programat the cuny Graduate Center) in build-ing on this new foundation and encour-aging an impressively sophisticated cir-cle of younger art historians and criticsthat had gathered around their jointlyedited journal October. Accelerating theincorporation of all three currents into a uni½ed project was the arrival of T. J.Clark, a young British art historian whospent an initial period at ucla duringthe mid-1970s, moving later to Harvardbefore settling at uc Berkeley. In hiswork on impressionism, Clark returnedto the territory for which Schapiro hadprovided a rough map in 1937. Alongsidemuch archival research in the spirit ofBenjamin’s notebook citations for theArcades project, Clark brought to bear anew analytical penetration of the inter-nal workings of individual pictures, onethat made concrete and detailed Scha-piro’s acute but generalized characteri-zations of Parisian modern-life painting.

A striking example of this occurs in his discussions of those motifs that most easily lent themselves to comfort-ably brain-soothing harmonies: scenesof strollers and yachtsmen on the banksof the Seine’s great curves north andwest of the city. “[H]ere was a subject,”Clark states, “which lent itself normal-ly to simple rhythms and sharp effects:sails bending in unison, rigging arrangedin casual geometries, reflections laid outas counterpoint to the world above.”28

While canvases by Claude Monet,Pierre-Auguste Renoir, or Alfred Sisley

most obviously fall under this charac-terization, Clark gives pride of place to a painting like Canotiers à Argenteuil byÉdouard Manet, the older artist who hadled the way for the larger impressionistgroup. In the summer of 1874, when Ma-net fashioned this work, his friend Mo-net was living in the suburban town ofits title, then a transitional settlement of weekend villas, boat basins, and in-truding factories in search of availableland and river access. And the avant-garde painters who gravitated to suchlocations formed a marginalized sub-culture in themselves, one compelled to improvise an identity in the as yet ill-de½ned spaces of metropolitan pleasureand consumption.

The granular degree of detail inClark’s extended account of the paintingdoes not permit the succinctly summa-rizing quotations supplied by Schapiro.The following passage, however, whichcomes at the end of several pages ofanalysis, has the virtue of moving rapid-ly from a set of totalizing propositions to their anchor in the technical fabric ofthe painting via minutely particularizeddescription devoted to a seemingly in-signi½cant segment of its surface–onethat the recreational art lover would inall likelihood overlook:

Signs, things, shapes, and modes of han-dling do not ½t together here. Paint doesnot make continuities or engineer transi-tions for the eye; it enforces distinctionsand disparities, changing completelyacross an edge, insisting on the stiffness of a pose or the bluntness of blue againstyellow. This is the picture’s overall lan-guage–this awkwardness of intersection,this dissonance of colour . . . . For example,the hank of rope which hangs over theorange side of the boat towards the right.No doubt we decipher the flecked ropeand the fluffy tassel without too much dif-

28 T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Par-is in the Art of Manet and His Followers, rev. ed.(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,1999), 167.

½culty, and proceed to examine the moreelusive trail of paint which starts downfrom the gunwale, bends, and seems topeter out into the orange–peter out for no good reason. And in due course the eye makes sense of the situation: we be-gin to see the wandering line as a shadow,and realize eventually that the orange sur-face is not–as it ½rst assumed to be–sim-ply flat. It is curved, it is concave; and thecurve explains the peculiar shadow and is explained by it–or, rather, is half ex-plained and half explaining: the brokentriangle of brushstrokes is not mendedquite so easily, and never entirely provesthe illusion it plays with. It stays painted,it stays on the edge of a likeness.29

Impressionism is conventionally cel-ebrated for its objectivity in renderingthe play of light and color in the world as one sees it, but Clark identi½es in thestudied ambiguities and discrepancies of Manet’s portrayal of these two awk-ward urban pleasure seekers a higher or-der of objectivity about the troubled anduncertain transition of the traditionalcity to the modern one, an historical wa-tershed experienced by old and new citydwellers as a continual succession of un-resolved edges and illegibilities.

This marriage of scholarly object and approach proved particularly fruit-ful for the discipline’s belated engage-ment with questions of sexuality in general and the ethical imperatives ofthe women’s movement in particular.The redoubtable Nochlin, before andafter moving to the graduate Institute of Fine Arts at nyu, had for some yearsbeen extending the social-historicalmodel in the service of an emergent feminism.30 Younger scholars like Hol-

lis Clayson and Carol Armstrong–nowat Northwestern and Princeton respec-tively–were later able to seize upon the impressionist rhetorics of ambigui-ty and disguise as preeminently ½guringrelations between the sexes, where thecentrality of these very qualities haddefeated the old (male) art historian’scompulsion toward iconographic cer-tainty.31 This level of explanatory am-bition presented demands that led arthistory, at least for a time, to an engage-ment with the material intricacies of itsphysical objects of study that surpassedanything that the postwar establishmenthad ever contemplated.

Nor did this achievement necessari-ly depend upon the particular set oftools that Clark and others selected for the job–nor indeed on the partic-ular opportunity later nineteenth-cen-tury Paris offered as a subject. The ear-ly 1980s, during which Clark’s The Paint-ing of Modern Life appeared, proved par-ticularly rich in landmark books by arthistorians. The book that launched thewave was Michael Baxandall’s The Lime-wood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany,which contains next to no acknowledge-ment that any new climate of theoreti-

29 Ibid., 166.

30 For representative collections of her work in this vein, see Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and

Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper andRow, 1988), and Linda Nochlin, RepresentingWomen (New York: Thames and Hudson,1999).

31 Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Ha-ven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991; re-printed Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,2003); Hollis Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art andEveryday Life Under Siege, 1870–1871 (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2002); Carol Arm-strong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work andReputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1991; reprinted Los Angeles:Getty Research Institute, 2003); Carol Arm-strong, Manet Manette (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2002).





cal speculation in the humanities evenexisted.32 Baxandall instead looked to-ward codi½ed forms of knowledge, allstrictly contemporaneous with the ob-jects of his study, in ½elds as far from thepractice of sculpture as the guild-lore ofthe Meistersingers or the “chiromancy”of the alchemist Paracelsus (which hasthe salutary effect of demonstrating thatinterpretative theories are just tools, the sophistication of which does not de-pend upon their date or upon the par-ticular vocabulary in which they are ex-pressed). His approach yielded a level of analysis applied to the inner workingsof form that set a standard for all thosewho came after, in any period or medi-um, a standard all the more impressivebecause he was confronting exception-ally complex ensembles of sculpture,painting, and cabinetwork typically pro-duced by a number of hands.

Baxandall becomes a part of this spe-ci½cally American story when he beganduring the 1980s to combine his old po-sition at the Warburg Institute in Lon-don with teaching alongside Clark in uc Berkeley’s ascendant graduate pro-gram. As such, his account of pre-Refor-mation piety, with its acute attention todoubt, anxiety, and tension between thesinful appetites excited by wealth andthe concomitant capacity of the new af-fluence to fund extravagant expressionsof faith, brought up-to-date Schapiro’soriginal insight that the greatest reli-gious art arises from just such circum-stances.

Attention to these strong forces of re-newal within the discipline can serve todisqualify a common assumption thathelpful outsiders from other disciplines,

observing the weakness of postwar arthistory, have stepped in to give the ½eldits new energy and place at the broadhumanities table. Any palpable bene½tshave largely accrued to the career pro-½les of these outsiders, not to positivegains for art history as a discipline.Among historians, lack of experience–positive or negative–with the protocolsof the connoisseur has made for flat andunrevealing descriptions of works of art,which too often amount to the visualequivalent of reading for the plot. Lit-erary critics, for their part, have tendedto apply their resources of close readingand armatures of theory without theclarifying resistance generated by sus-tained work in the archives, which is to say, without equal concern for howworks of art come to be made as for theways in which these works can be con-sumed.

But it is dif½cult to deny that the ener-gy of that moment has diminished in theintervening couple of decades. From itsbeginnings as a minority–and immedi-ately embattled–position, the so-calledsocial history of art has grown in themeantime to constitute something of anew default function for the ½eld: vir-tually every contribution to the Art Bul-letin (seen as the scholarly journal ofrecord) represents a variation on thisapproach, even when these componentsare not explicitly acknowledged. The ex-pected level of competence is far higherthan was the norm a generation ago, as is productivity, whether measured byindividual output or by the percentage of actively publishing scholars withinthe overall population of the ½eld. Andan increasingly complete picture of artpractices across a wide geographical and chronological territory is conse-quently taking shape–including territo-ries outside of Europe and North Ameri-ca. Nonetheless, with a certain domesti-

32 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptorsof Renaissance Germany (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1980).

cated version of ideology-critique nowthe norm, the outcome of many studieshas become a fairly predictable affair. Inone obvious sense, however, the centerhas ceased to hold. From the preeminentposition that it occupied a generationago, the study of later nineteenth-centu-ry French painting has markedly recededin prominence, ceasing to promise anysmooth path of professional success.

Baxandall, in his book on Germanlimewood sculpture, documented theways in which the fragile synthesis ofnearly incompatible components–heldtogether in the art of a Veit Stoss or Til-man Riemenschneider but already onthe verge of flying apart under the leastadded stress–was utterly dispersed bythe iconoclastic forces of the Reforma-tion. In the various specialized genres to which sculptors then turned in a cli-mate of diminished expectations, onecan identify the distinct elements ob-scured in their previous intertwining. A similar unraveling has occurred with-in art history, which has suffered to acertain degree from this conspicuousperiod of success. While impressive ad-vances have continued in social-histori-cal documentation, elaboration of theo-ry, expansion into vernacular culture,and engagement with modernism, eachof these pursuits has become increasing-ly self-suf½cient and consequently lessable to inform the others.

Shorn of reflection on the neo-Marx-ian theories that originally framed thesocial-historical project, the new main-stream has not discovered any compa-rable source of conceptual renewal. Lat-er, competing claims to the semiotic and poststructuralist element of ‘theory’have been lodged on behalf of distinct-ly different interests. To put it unkindly,these lie in making a metaconversationabout the possibility or impossibility of a history of art into a self-suf½cient

enterprise, one easily leveraged into anaura of interdisciplinary glamour and acomparatively effortless proliferation oftalks, papers, and books. To this end, ithas been a convenient conclusion drawnfrom ‘theory’ to say that any intelligiblepattern drawn out of historical data rep-resents an inherently spurious metanar-rative (even though the original ef½cacyof the turn to theory had precisely beento identify analyzable structures in thehistorical record). The component ofart history that has required hard graft in the archives then can be set aside–and disparaged in the bargain as a les-ser, if not misguided, pursuit.33 Indeed,“the Archive,” in the wake of MichelFoucault, has been isolated as a discipli-nary social construction toward whichthe theorist can freely condescend.

This metahistorical pursuit has had lit-tle time for the recalcitrant physical im-mediacy and uniqueness of an individu-al object of art. This distrust of close-range sensory evidence has passed intothe broad, ill-de½ned tendency called‘visual culture.’ From Schapiro to Her-bert, Clark, and Baxandall, the conductof the most sophisticated art historianshas entailed a deep curiosity about thevarieties of vernacular expression thatinevitably enter into the synthetic imag-ination of the artist. While never deny-ing the independent fascination of thatmaterial, all nonetheless retained theperspective that Baxandall framed inintentionally provocative terms: “On-ly very good works of art, the perfor-mances of exceptionally organized men,are complex and co-ordinated enough to register in their forms the kinds of

33 For a symptomatic expression of this modeof thought, see Norman Bryson, “Art in Con-text,” in The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultur-al Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal and Inge Boer (NewYork: Continuum, 1994), 66–78.





cultural circumstance sought here; sec-ond-rate art will be of little use to us.”34

His advised use of the masculine gender in this passage (there were no womenknown in the relevant trades of the pe-riod) matters less than his insistence onthe cognitive value of aesthetic distinc-tion, which now runs against a prevail-ing tide in which no special case can bemade for one category of artifact againstanother.35

The question remains as to what ½eldof study actually remains once one sac-ri½ces its former core, its point of depar-ture and return, in self-conscious andhighly wrought objects of art. The pro-liferation of potential examples extendsto near-in½nity, and necessarily resultsin a reduction of material speci½city tothe single plane of the image, which isphenomenal rather than actual. And,given that much of the art historian’sbrief has entailed accounting for pro-cesses of conception and manufacturethat are not strictly sensible in the ½nalproduct, emphasis on ‘visual’ common-alities imposes a drastic narrowing ofthe aspect through which interpreterscan grasp this newly vast ½eld of inquiry.

A further tendency toward disaggre-gation lies in an unabated push towardthe modern. A rule of thumb applied tonew entrants is that roughly half of themwill concentrate in ‘modern art’; what is more, the dividing line between ‘themodern’ and what came before it keepscreeping forward (which has left im-pressionism and postimpressionism in

a growing scholarly limbo, despite theirhuge popularity with undergraduatesand the general public). A good guesswould place the current median bound-ary (half of the graduate students beforeit, half after) somewhere in the earlytwentieth century, say 1912 or so. Andthe change may be more exaggeratedthan that ½gure might suggest, since thefastest growing area is better named‘contemporary,’ meaning art producedfrom around 1960 forward.

The drive toward the modern, then, is in danger of shooting past the pointwhere it can ½nd common ground withthe legitimate preoccupations of art his-torians working in earlier periods. As of-ten as not, the media favored by youngerscholars–½lm, video, reproduced textsand photographs, assemblage installa-tions–are impermanent, impatient withthe layered density of the unique physi-cal objects around which the disciplinewas built. The skills required to decipherthe messages of those time travelers intheir vast and largely unexplored num-bers and then to speak on their behalfwill reside, it seems, in a shrinking num-ber of scholars.

That bifurcation of the available skillswithin the discipline may nonethelesscarry within itself the potential for anew synthesis at a higher level, much as the paired fetishizing of documenta-tion and connoisseurship did among the immediately postwar generation.One can read the recent preoccupationwith ephemeral and time-based works of art as saying something about thelarger brief of art history: the sample of objects from which art history fash-ioned itself constitutes the merest frac-tion of the universe that an ideal form of the discipline would address, that is,all the artifacts of densely symbolic ex-pression that have ever been made. For-ever out of view are all those destroyed

34 Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors, 10.

35 See, as a representative example, the com-ments of Keith Moxey, “Motivating History,”Art Bulletin 77 (3) (September 1995): 392–401,reprinted in Keith Moxey, The Practice of Per-suasion: Paradox and Power in Art History (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 65–79.

by war, vandalism, demolition, renova-tion, neglect, and natural decay; as wellas the colossal if uncountable numberthat have been lost to time because theywere never intended to be preserved inthe ½rst place (the sculptures of Michel-angelo modeled in snow offer just themost spectacular instance of these sub-merged continents).

Other kinds of documents allow suchworks to be indirectly retrieved and hy-pothetically reconstructed, so that theactual survivors from the past can as-sume their places within a historicallycomprehensive matrix of technical andexpressive possibility. From everythingone can tell by such investigations, thedivisions observed in our own time be-tween high art and vernacular cultureare far more dif½cult to maintain, suchthat a properly comprehensive art his-tory obviates to a signi½cant extent thecontemporary rationale for a visual-cul-ture alternative to the inherited ½eld. In this regard, it has been the push ofyounger researchers–out ahead of thepreceding generation’s preoccupationwith avant-garde painting and sculp-ture–into the unconventional art prac-tices of the twentieth century that hasshown the way.

To the degree that one learns to ‘see’ephemeral events, happenings, perfor-mances, ½lm, and video under the rubricof Art (which is where their makers haveplaced them), then a corresponding re-ceptivity to the historical totality of artproduction should follow. Some con-½rmation for this proposition exists inthe renewed currency of one other art-historical pioneer, the visionary Germanscholar Aby Warburg, whose deep con-tributions from the 1890s to the 1920shad remained, until recently, unassimil-able within the normative discipline. Ina compelling series of articles, Warburg

had looked to the gesticulating mum-mers of the Florentine street processionsas lying behind some of the most august(to the eyes of posterity) rediscoveries of classical prototypes in art.36 Evenwhen elevated by a Botticelli to the mostre½ned movement and costume of courtpageantry, the frozen gesture carried adeeper, unbroken inheritance from theancient world, one of barely sublimatedsexuality, violence, and magical thought,which lay beyond any merely bookishcatalogue of mythological stories andaesthetic canons. For him, the ½gure in motion, derived from the direct ex-perience of performers in the guise ofancient deities, constituted the true sub-ject of advanced Florentine mimesis inthe 1480s (and his having discerned liv-ing parallels to this history in the festi-vals and artifacts of the Hopi, whom hesought out during an American sojournin 1896, provides the strongest early ex-ample of the bridge building required to render traditional Western ½elds ofstudy commensurable with those devot-ed to the diverse cultures of the widerworld).

Warburg’s legacy can, without dan-ger of anachronism, project the artisticrecognitions of the present into art his-tory’s old heartland of the Italian Re-naissance–and by extension into all old-er bodies of material. Beside the com-pellingly affective character of survivingart objects, he had been able to discernthe equivalent value of their heuristicproperties, which distribute networks of meaning over a much wider but moreelusive ½eld. These enduring works ofpainting or sculpture still provide an ir-

36 See Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan An-tiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (LosAngeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 161–167.



replaceable opportunity for instructionin historical interpretation, one all themore needed when even very recent artworks have left behind only a litter ofresidual artifacts, documentary records,and fallible memories. But each wasonce a physical encounter of palpableorder and coherence, however fleetingthe moment of its particular Kublerian“commotion” may have been. To recre-ate that moment in the absence of thework itself requires the trained imagina-tion that comes from the encounter withthose objects that render their own long-ago commotions in ½xed formations.37


37 I am grateful for the assistance of AlisonLocke and Doris Chon in the preparation ofthis essay.


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