Showing papers in "The Journal of Art Historiography in 2011"

Historical ironies: the Australian Aboriginal art revolution

Abstract: First published bilbiography of works relating to crafts, design and decorative arts in Australia, mainly items pre 1994, based on McNeil's MA Thesis Australian National University 1994

Reverse perspective: Bernard Smith's worldview and the cosmopolitan imagination

Abstract: Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way ... The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country ... In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations ... National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848)

Moving the body painting into the art gallery - knowing about and appreciating works of Aboriginal art

Abstract: Western art history has developed with two complementary sides: a history of art objects in their own right and art as a source of information about people’s lives and worlds — artworks as sources of historical information.1 The former history is linked to the value creation processes that elevate certain objects to the category of fine art, evaluate them according to qualitative criteria and provide the basis for connoisseurship. The latter can leave the object, and the art in the object, far behind, focussing on its evidential value or even morphing into social theory. Until recently these differences in approaches to art objects have been associated with an opposition between two kinds of institutions — art galleries (or art museums in the USA) on the one hand and museums (of ethnography or social history) on the other. The distinction between the art gallery and the museum can be simplistically summarised as a difference of emphasis between appreciating and ‘knowing about’ the work of art. But it has also been associated with the very definition of things as fine art or non fine art. To simplify things significantly, art galleries have been associated with connoisseurship and have developed as privileged venues for viewing fine art and the appreciation of objects on the basis of their form. Museums have provided less privileged and more crowded viewing places for material culture including ethnography, and have tended to emphasise an interpretative perspective that places the object in its social and cultural context. The value creation processes involved in the creation of fine art have affected art historians, anthropologists and archaeologists in different ways. They have all had to engage with the process of classification that has divided their data into different sets collected by different institutions on the basis of whether it is or is not held to be fine art. Fine art in this sense is a western category of relatively recent origins that until recently was largely centred on the history of western art.2 Other works were included within the category of fine art on the basis of their relationship with western art history. Art historians as a profession, because of their focus on western fine art, had a closer association with art galleries than social history or ethnography museums, but were none the less often constrained by its definitions and connoisseurial requirements. Anthropologists and archaeologists of art found that the majority of the works they were interested in were excluded from the art

Women artists as drivers of early art historical activities and alternative art historical narratives in Australia

Abstract: Heather Johnson, in an article for the anthology Past/Present, suggested that one of the phenomena of women’s art in Australia is the manner in which it appears and disappears from view.1 She did not see this slipping from public view as cause for complaint as had second wave feminists, but as a de facto tribute to the power of an art-form which like installation and performance art may be too powerful, challenging and complex to be captured by the mausoleum of the museum or critical acclaim. The elliptical comet-like orbit of women’s art, in and out of critical acclaim, poses questions about the nature of how historical memory and institutions work in relation to Australian art. This paper delves into a diverse range of case studies to trace unfamiliar instances of the early understanding and practice of art history in Australia prior to the understood foundations of the discipline in the 1940s and 1950s. Given the manner in which much of the supporting and contextual narratives of women’s art in Australia have slipped out of the accepted metanarratives, it collates examples of women engaging in a range of art historically inflected activities. These activities include what can be termed – perhaps ahistorically given the close association of that term with the 1970s in both the popular and professional mind – as ‘feminist’ art histories centred upon women artists. Other examples that are documented here are conscious attempts to discuss or explain art’s histories, rather than its present, both from an Australian perspective, but also with a particular emphasis on Northern Hemisphere material, in order to indicate an Australian sense of connectedness with the broader narratives of classical art history. Documentation has particularly emphasised lectures and other publicly visible attempts to set visual art in its historical and theoretical context during the period 1900-1940 including formally published texts and also the more ephemeral and romantic fora of tableaux and pageants.2 All this material predates the often accepted emergence of art history in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s.

Reading the Stars of the Renaissance. Fritz Saxl and Astrology

Abstract: In the introduction to the volume of lectures by Fritz Saxl, which Penguin published in 1970, Ernst Gombrich remarks that ‘it would be misleading to see in Saxl’s career principally that of a devoted follower’.1 We can sense behind these words the exceptional dilemma that confronts all students of Saxl’s work – how to assess the contribution to art history of one of the finest scholars of the twentieth century without shifting the focus to that of his so much more famous mentor, Aby Warburg. This dilemma is perhaps most pronounced in the case of Saxl’s studies on the pictorial history of astronomy and astrology, a subject which he might never have delved into seriously had it not been for Warburg’s promptings.2 Yet, while Warburg’s shadow undeniably looms large, Saxl’s successive publications on the topic also reveal how he developed an approach to some of the problems and questions originally set by Warburg that became progressively his own. In the present paper, I hope to show a little of this development through a brief comparative analysis of Saxl’s principal theories on astrological images, with an emphasis on what is perhaps his most mature achievement in the field, his theory of the transmission of constellation iconography.

Setting the scene: early writing on Australian Aboriginal art

Abstract: In its Australian application, the term ‘Aboriginal art’ has come to mean a vast range of things in differing forms, from rock art to new media, drawn from all parts of the continent and dating from 40-60,000 years to the present. By tracing the use of this term through the archive, more specific information is revealed about its origin, development, and range of past meanings. This process of investigation and contextualisation contributes to an historical understanding of the basis of a number of preconceived notions about this mutable category some of which continue to apply in the present day. Between then and now lies a complex web of connections and networks where information is circulated, augmented and changed. By closely examining published writings on ‘Aboriginal art’, it is possible to demonstrate that when secondary accounts relay first encounters to wider audiences, sometimes the initial interpretation is copied forward; sometimes it is modified and sometimes discarded entirely. Perhaps the most logical place to start the exploration of the origins of the term ‘Aboriginal art’ is with the exhibition, Australian Aboriginal Art, staged in Melbourne at the combined Public Library, Museum and National Gallery of Victoria in 1929. This event signifies a critical moment in the European understanding of this genre. It was the first systematically organised exhibition of ‘Australian Aboriginal art’ in a public gallery space in the world, taking place in the printroom of the National Gallery of Victoria. It was an incredibly popular event, drawing large crowds, producing a booklet and providing a forum for public lectures given by noted experts. The Argus, which was the morning daily newspaper for Melbourne between 1846 and 1957, noted: “The exhibit represents much careful arrangement and study on the part of those responsible. Rock paintings, drawings on bark, cryptography, tracings from various examples of primitive art, objects of domestic and ceremonial significance, and weapons and shields are attractively displayed.”1

What’s the Matter?: The Object in Australian Art History

Abstract: The place from which designs originate renders them distinctive and connected to the global and the local in specific ways. This paper outlines a series of historiographical issues that inflect the ...

Inside out, outside in: changing perspectives in Australian art historiography

Abstract: Alertness to the foundational character of historiography, and to the innovative potential of that alertness, may be more pronounced among art historians working in Australia than in many other places––most evidently, the United States. For art historians of my generation this is a fact of experience; for those of a younger generation, the difference of approach may be less obvious. An anecdote might help make the point. When I began graduate studies at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in the fall of 1972, I followed my interests as an art critic and a graduate student writing on Abstract Expressionism and ethics by enrolling in the courses on modern and contemporary art offered by Robert Goldwater (‘Twentieth Century Sculpture’), Robert Rosenblum (‘Friedrich to Rothko: Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition’) and William Rubin (‘American Art since 1945’). I also attended some of the Wrightsman lectures on the Renaissance in Eastern Europe given by Jan Bialostocki, and occasional talks by other luminaries such as Donald Posner, Gert Shiff, H.W. Janson and Henry Russell Hitchcock. But when I asked for guidance on art theory, on art historical methodology even, in some desperation, art historiographymy adviser Goldwater looked puzzled, smiled then shook his head, sadly: ‘We don’t do that sort of thing here.’1 He did, however, arrange for me to audit the only such course available in the New York university system at the time, G6001Y: Art History Theory and Methods, taught by Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. This series of lectures compared the role of practices of classification within a variety of art historical approaches with those then current in scientific thinking, mostly cybernetics and semiotics. Given in a constantly changing form from the 1960s until the 1980s, it remains a touchstone of my own thinking, as it does for many others. What led me to expect such instruction? Every honors student in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne would have had the same presumption. A strong sense that art could be understood in utterly different ways flowed from the striking contrasts between the approaches of the main lecturers.

Art Museums in Australia: A Personal Retrospect

Abstract: From 1958 to 1990 I worked in art museums — first at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney as a multi-purpose curator, then at the fledgling National Gallery of Australia in Canberra as head of Australian art, and finally at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide as director. The art-museum world that I entered was very British, and rather unaware that it was run largely by artist directors and artist trustees for a small world of artists and collectors. Only the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne produced a good quantity of scholarly art-historical research; only the University of Melbourne then had a department of art history, and thus harboured colleagues for museum-based scholarship. All art-museum buildings were then poorly equipped for anything except collection display.

Saxl’s approach to Spanish art: Velázquez and El Greco

Abstract: The bibliography of his writings does not identify Fritz Saxl (1890–1948) as a historian of Spanish art. Only the titles of two short texts allude to his preoccupation with El Greco and Diego Velázquez.1 One is a review of August L. Mayer’s ‘El Greco’, that appeared in Kritische Berichte, 1927; the other is a lecture on ‘Velasquez and Philip IV’, given in 1942 at the Courtauld Institute, and published in the volume of Lectures in 1957.2 The research on Aby Warburg’s ingenious iconographic interpretation of the Hilanderas by Velázquez as an ‘Allegory of Weaving’ in 1927, more than two decades before the analysis of Diego Ángulo Iñíguez, reveals that Saxl had played an important role in the process.3 From March to April 1927 Saxl was researching in Spain and his work on Velázquez and the painters of the Siglo de Oro during that trip was an essential prerequisite for Warburg’s interpretation, as can be shown from the correspondence between the two men in spring 1927.4 Apart from these letters, it has also been possible to locate in the Warburg Institute Archive a whole file of, until now unaccounted for, ‘Spanish notes’ by Saxl in which Velázquez and El Greco play an important role, which indicates that he intended to do more work on Spanish projects.5 Further research revealed in addition photographic material of Saxl’s studies on El Greco, ten bound sheets of brown cardboard with numerous photos of paintings, wall paintings and engravings on

Art Historiography in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract: The papers in this journal were presented at a symposium organised by the initiative to establish an Institute of Art History at the University of Melbourne and the Australian and New Zealand Association of Art Historians (AAANZ) on 28 and 29 August 2010. The symposium was conceived in conjunction with the residency of Professor Emeritus Richard Woodfield (University of Birmingham) as a visiting international fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. It was the first ever symposium on the subject, and reflects the growing international interest in Australian art historiography, which has always flourished locally, but has increased globally following the Melbourne CIHA congress, held in January 2008, Crossing Cultures Conflict, Migration and Convergence.1 Art historiography has always been a subject of central importance to the teaching of art history in Melbourne and elsewhere in Australia. Initially when the department of art history was founded at Melbourne in 1946 the syllabus was predominantly European in origin, but gradually developed to reflect Australia’s geographical location in the world. An early passionate attempt to analyse the development of art historiography in Australia is Terry Smith’s Writing the History of Australian Art: its past, present and possible future 1983. When we read this historical document we realise we have come a long way since the 1980s in the presentation of indigeneity and other matters. Terry Smith continues this argument in Inside Out, Outside In: Changing Perspectives In Australian Art Historiography, where he sees art historiography as being more Australian than American. The contribution by Charles Green and Heather Barker focuses on the figure of Terry Smith and the role he played in the development of the Power Institute in the 1970s. In the 1970s Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg made it fashionable to discuss the roles of the centre and the periphery in the construction of Italian Renaissance art history.2 Well before that date the collecting institutions of Australia developed policies that reflected our global situation, knowingly as a centre at the periphery, irrespective of theoretical concerns, as shown in the contribution by Benjamin Thomas on one of the most important museum directors of the National Gallery of Victoria, Daryl Lindsay. As Terry Smith explains being provincial is a matter of choice not geography (The Provincialism Problem, 1974). There are many ways to narrate the development of art history in Australia and New Zealand as shown in these diverse papers, depending on the subjects chosen. Peter McNeil makes a witty and profound plea for the importance of design and fashion from the 1920s in any account of Australian art history in What is the matter? The object in Australian Art History. Helen Innis Other Histories: Photography and Australia

Colin Rowe: Space as well-composed illusion

Abstract: It seems almost certain that space-talk made its decisive entry into the critical vocabulary of American and English architects with the publication of Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture in 1941, and Nikolaus Pevsner’s An Outline of European Architecture in 1943. Certainly, before the early 1940s, English-speaking readers appear to have been relatively underexposed to the analysis of buildings in terms of space and, since then, have come to accept such analysis (Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space, 1957, might be an instance) as a relative commonplace; and, quite possibly, Le Corbusier might be taken as a representative of something to the same effect related to French usage. For, while Le Corbusier’s publications seem to be distinctly ‘dumb’ as regards space-talk, with him too the new critical vocabulary (‘ineffable space’) seems to insinuate itself during the course of the 1940s and to become explicitly advertised in New World of Space (1948). However this may be, when AngloAmerican usage is considered, there remain two, possibly three, exceptions to what has just been stipulated: Bernard Berenson; his disciple Geoffrey Scott; and, maybe, Frank Lloyd Wright.1

Other histories: photography and Australia

Abstract: Photography’s history is constructed in varied public forums, including exhibitions and publications that range from magazine articles, monographs and scholarly essays to exhibition catalogues and books. This essay focuses on only one form of publication – the survey history book. It considers photography’s doubled history, through its inclusion in broader histories of Australian art (three of which were published between 1997 and 2008) and its own specific histories (four have been published since 1955). It examines the writers’ different methodological approaches and their concerns and considers recent paradigmatic shifts in thinking and writing about Australian photography’s history. Photography was not included in the first attempt to write a comprehensive history of Australian art, William Moore’s two volume The Story of Australian Art, published in 1934. Nor did it receive any attention in Bernard Smith’s Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art Since 1788 (1945) or Robert Hughes’ The Art of Australia: A Critical Survey (1966). It made its first appearance within a history of Australian art – albeit one based on a particular collection – in the book Australian National Gallery: An Introduction, published on the occasion of the Gallery’s opening in 1982.1 The reasons for this delayed incorporation are of course complex and numerous. Photographers had been producing self-conscious works of art in Australia since the late nineteenth century but their public profile waxed and waned during the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s contemporary photographic work, by Harold Cazneaux, Max Dupain and others, was regularly featured in art magazines but by the 1950s art photography was mostly confined to a medium specific realm, rarely penetrating the larger art world. A strict hierarchy operated in which the traditional art forms of painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, were regarded as most important, followed by drawing and printmaking. This view prevailed in Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting 1788-1960 (1962), which considered painting as the primary form of visual art. Furthermore, for much of the twentieth century a distinction was made between the fine arts and the applied arts which encompassed design, different branches of the decorative arts (ceramics, furniture, textiles), as well as photography. The shift to a more inclusive understanding of Australian art, which began in the late 1960s, was dependent on a variety of inter-related developments in art, culture and politics. Of particular importance was the rise of conceptual art

Discovery or invention? The difference between art and communication according to Ernst Gombrich

Abstract: This paper addresses an issue raised, though never fully discussed, by Ernst Gombrich in many of his studies: what conditions need to be satisfied for a form of communication to become art? Gombrich’s interest in the image as a form of communication is well known.1 He never identifies art with communication, nor does he create hierarchies. Therefore, what are the ‘symptoms’ of art? That is, the distinguishing features and modes whereby art can be recognised as such.2 The difference is not one of principle: Gombrich would never have dreamt of separating the creation of art and advertising in ontological terms, based on provenances, corporations, materials and target audiences. The difference is not dictated by the self-proclaimed identity of the ‘artwork’ compared to that of the ‘advertising poster’, but is decided on ‘local’ grounds, taking into account the internal dynamics: a poster may thus also be artistic. What I aim to do here is to disentangle and consider more generally some properties that appear to connote the artistic text in Gombrich’s epistemological world. In several of his interpretations of the effectiveness of the visual image, Gombrich raises the issue of how communication works in artistic processes. Distinguishing between a ‘poetry of images’ and ‘the artistic use of visual media’, he places the accent on the ‘arousal functions’ in the field of art, which he believes to be ‘observable in more complex interaction’.3

Epitaphs in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives

Abstract: When Michelangelo died in Rome in 1564, his body was transported back to his native Florence for an honourable state funeral. The event was an extravagant multi-step affair because of the deep sentiments many Florentines genuinely felt for the master and also because of what Michelangelo—regularly identified as ‘il divino’—had come to symbolize to the artistic and cultural superiority of the Florentine state which only the year before had launched the Accademia del Disegno with Michelangelo at the spiritual helm. The funeral involved a procession and a rapid formal burial in Michelangelo’s own parish of S. Croce followed by a lengthy public mourning over an elaborately decorated catafalque set up in the Medici parish of San Lorenzo.1 Both the sepulchre and the catafalque received the attention of letterati in the form of verses in the Latin and Italian. About the S. Croce sepulchre, Vasari wrote,

The dialectics of vision: Oskar Kokoschka and the historiography of expressionistic sight

Abstract: First delivered in January 1912 as a lecture at Vienna’s Akademischen Verband für Literatur und Musik, Oskar Kokoschka’s canonical essay ‘Von der Natur der Gesichte’ (‘On the Nature of Visions’) speaks to the decisive role of visions – both optical and inner, conscious and unconscious – in the development of modern art. Although only twenty-five years of age at the time, Kokoschka spoke with the authority of an artist who had long recognized the stakes involved in defining one’s art (and one’s self) as avant-garde within the milieu of fin-de-siècle Vienna. As a burgeoning young expressionist painter and playwright, he equally understood the importance of establishing a theoretical basis in which to root the iconography of

Henri Frankfort, Aby Warburg and “Mythopoeic Thought”

Abstract: This is the text of a lunchtime lecture given at the Warburg Institute in the spring of 2004. It formed part of a series given by current members of staff which were devoted to the work of past Warburg scholars, and was intended to introduce the audience - fellows, students and readers at the Warburg - to the work of Henri Frankfort, Director of the Institute from 1949 to 1954. Since Frankfort's interests were very distant from those of the Institute today, his life and work had largely been forgotten by modern Warburgians, and the first third of the lecture was of necessity a rapid account of his career. The remainder of the lecture is an analysis and criticism of the concept of 'primitive thinking' in the work of Frankfort and Aby Warburg. To have rewritten the lecture as an article, taking into account the voluminous literature on Warburg, would have taken more time than I currently have available, and I thank Richard Woodfield for allowing me to publish it in this unrevised form. While the Warburg literature continues to expand apace - see Warburg 2010 for recent references - Frankfort is still undeservedly neglected; the most substantial study to date is Wengrow 1999.