Les historiens de l’art au pays des anthropologues. Emprunts de catégories et impasses disciplinaires

Abstract

Art Historians in the Society of Anthropologists : Borrowing Categories and the Limits of the Disciplins Around 1860 several French artists, architects and art historians started to join the two big Parisian societies : the Société d’Anthroplogie de Paris and the Société d’Ethnographie. What was their purpose in doing so ? At the time the field of art history was still in its infancy, and in the process of defining a methodology and creating its own institutions. Both physical anthropology and ethnography (understood in its more cultural aspects) seemed able to provide guidelines to this fledgling discipline, which aspired to the status of a science and set as its goal a comprehensive approach to art. The study of reviews, publications and exhibitions reveals the existence of informal intellectual circles reuniting the members of these scientific societies. The systems they devised together relied heavily on principles of causality and on racial or ethnic criteria. Their scientific model was no longer simply the scientism of Taine, but also, in a deeper sense, the construction of an evolutionist and hierarchical art history. This marriage of art history and anthropology paradoxically closed off for many decades the possibility of a new art history, which, breaking with traditional concepts, would have opened itself to other, non-Western cultures. It also encouraged in some respect an esoteric tendency in art history.