Critical Discourse in the Formation of a Social History of Art: Anglo-American Response to Arnold Hauser

Abstract

Written a year and a half after the publication of Hauser's book, Gombrich's lines are particularly significant. For he not only claimed that a social history of art had yet to be constituted, he also repeated an essential distinction which ran through most of his predecessors' reviews: a distinction between two conceptions of such a history of art. I want to examine these conceptions as they emerged in the critics' initial reading of Hauser, which I will confine to their reception in England and the United States between November 1951 and March 1953 .3I will locate their presence in other discourses, and suggest how this distinction was, in the end, dominated by certain political confrontations of the Cold War. But first, I will begin much closer to the field of art history itself, and describe its limits at the time of Hauser's first reading. A social history of art was, as Gombrich affirmed, nearly non-existent. Its absence is particularly apparent in the Ph.D. theses underway between 1950 and 1952. Of the ninety dissertation topics surveyed by the College Art Journal,4 almost half comprised strictly monographic studies of an artist's 'technique' or 'stylistic development', or of one art work's 'influence' on another. As for the remaining, a third treated conventional arthistorical categories within traditional styleperiods, without the slightest reference to either social, historical or cultural factors. Another third, while confronting the questions of patronage, art theories, artistic training or criticism, once again made no apparent recourse to fields outside art history. Finally, in no more than five of these ninety theses, do we find the concepts 'society', 'history' or 'context' employed. A similar pattern emerges among the already 'established' art historians. Taking, for example, the articles published in the Art Bulletin at this time,5 we find that over 80% focused on the 'problems' of dating and attribution, formal description and iconographical analysis. While only two, of a total of nearly sixty, dealt with art theory, and four treated either patronage, literature or technique, not one attempted a social interpretation of art. Moreover, neither the titles of articles appearing in the other 'establishment' journals,6 nor the programmes of the annual meetings of the College Art Association,7 make any explicit connections between art and social context. Clearly, AngloAmerican art historians showed little interest in developing a social history of art. Yet, a more historical conception was emerging. As early as 1944, the C.A.A. 'officially' demarcated the field from art 'appreciation' studies, identifying the former's interests to be the 'contemporary cultural and social patterns ... [the] historical context'8 in which the work of art was produced. By 1949, Frederick Antal could characterize as 'severely historical' the recent publications of as diverse a group as' Herbert Read, Richard Krautheimer, Meyer Schapiro, Anthony Blunt, Millard Meiss, and Gombrich himself.9 He perceived a unity in their common interpretation of art through some consideration of social, political and economic history. Indeed, by the early 1950s, even the concept of immanent formal evolution was being displaced by more advanced art historians for whom the artist's historical and cultural 'environment' played a substantial role in stylistic development. 10 Iconological studies were increasingly practiced,1 and sessions seeking relations between art, literature and philosophy began to appear at the annual C.A.A. congresses. 12 Combined, such factors reveal the emergence of a conception which would dominate the field throughout the 1950s: the idea of art history as cultural history. This notion, which situated the art work and artist within selected cultural practices of a given historical period, was largely stimulated by the reemergence of the 'humanities' in American postwar scholarship. Learned societies and academic associations, the C.A.A. among them, stressed the reassertion of 'man' as the object of diverse studies.'3 The College Art Journal ran numerous articles throughout the early 1950s, declaring the importance of art within the 'humanities', and