levi, kunstgeschichte als geistesgeschichte the lesson of panofsky

Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte: The Lesson of PanofskyAuthor(s): Albert William LeviSource: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 4, 20th Anniversary Issue (Winter, 1986),pp. 79-83Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3332605 .

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Levi: The Lesson of Panofsky 79

Obviously, entertainments can't reorient us the way truly avant-garde films can, but they don't aspire to. Rather, in the course of providing a good time, they occasionally introduce a sense of discord that disturbs the smooth pleasure of being merely entertained. We pause and reflect on just what was different about this movie. Sometimes what is different is the external or internal discontinuity which frustrates those expectations habitually triggered by the recognition of genre types. The avant-garde entertainment plays with these expectations in order to achieve some of its entertainment value. But in its playfulness it also encourages us, ever so modestly, to reappraise our movie-going habits and the norms of the genres that shape them.

NOTES

1. For those who sense a taxonomical gap, the following suggestions may be of help. Just as the truly avant-garde has its counterpart in the "avant-garde entertainment" film, so does the "regular" art film have its parallel in "artistic entertainments." Such films as Casablanca, High Noon, and Shane do more than simply entertain, though they certainly do that.

2. Morse Peckham, "Art and Disorder," Literature and Psychology 16 (Spring 1966): 62-80.

3. Thus, Michael Snow makes a film in which the camera's horizontal pan of a fixed scene speeds up until it's a blur, and then as it slows we realize that the pan has changed to the vertical. The panning itself is the "subject" of the film. When com- bined with the exaggerated graininess and dirt on the film and the clunking sound of the camera at the end of each pan, it demands a reorientation toward the medium of film. Snow's work doesn't channel "our consciousness into the work" by creating an alternative reality with place, people, and story.

In such avant-garde film "nothing" is going on, at least nothing that we have come to expect from films. Our own consciousness of this process of being frus- trated and challenged is supposed to become part of the aesthetic experience as "we run into the surface of such work and are thrown back upon ourselves." Richard Foreman, "Glass and Snow," Arts Magazine, February 1970, p. 22.

4. Julianne Burton, in Film Quarterly 39, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 31. 5. For good examples of the spoof of the musical romantic comedy, see Rustler's

Rhapsody, Mel Brooks's High Anxiety, or the musical minimovie in Movie-Movie.

Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte: The Lesson of Panofsky

Albert William Levi

The book which I have before me, Michael Ann Holly's Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), is interesting, competent, and scholarly. It traces the relations between Panofsky and W6lfflin, Riegl, and Cassirer. It shows how Panofsky finally arrives at his "Iconological Perspective." But it does more than this: it shows also how the celebrated figures of art history, Riegl, W6llflin, Warburg, Dvorak, and Panofsky, are interactive with the celebrated figures of history and philosophy, Hegel, Burckhardt, Dilthey, Cassirer, and Collingwood. And in doing so it not only demonstrates the close relation-

ournal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986 1986 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois



80 Journal of Aesthetic Education

ship between philosophy and art history, but also (to employ Max Dvorak's celebrated title) shows how in the last analysis "Kunstgeschichte" is only adjunct to, and part of, the wider area of "Geistesgeschichte."

This idea of Dvorak's is in fact the brainchild of Hegel, and anyone who reads Holly carefully will find that the specter of Hegel haunts the entire volume. Hegel is responsible for two crucial ideas: (1) the notion of cultural organicity and (2) its methodological corollary: contextualism as interpretive vehicle for the arts and humanities. Hegel was the first to insist that there is only one history-that of spirit-whose different aspects are social relations, ethical communities, political societies, art, religion, and philosophy. Any given stage in history is a totality in which the same spirit manifests itself in all these different modes. And it follows that art is more than mere form and style, that it has more than mere surface visual meaning, and that it is always charged with the basic attitude toward life of the civilization that produced it. This is the basic standpoint of DeWulf's Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages, Burckhardt's The Civiliza- tion of the Renaissance in Italy, and Panofsky's own Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism.

It is possible to chart the general development of modern art-historical scholarship by explictly connecting it with Hegelian cultural history. And here Panofsky is a crucial figure, for he early instituted a contextualist critique of the formalist approach to art. It is important to recognize that when Panofsky began to write in the second decade of the twentieth century, the discipline of art history was dominated almost exclusively by a preoccupation with form. Here is the Platonic legacy in its purest guise. For in essence formalism has always devoted itself single-mindedly to the bare aesthetic properties of the work and has deliberately, even brutally, wrenched the object from its historical situation and broader human sur- roundings. The vice of formalism is that it sees either a concern with content per se or with cultivating the viewer's sense that the work is the product of an identifiable cultural milieu as an impediment to the proper appreciation of its aesthetic essence. This implicates aesthetics in a web of high abstraction.

The precise opposite of this is to conceive the visual arts as part of a universe of culture, and this was the established nineteenth-century practice of Hegel, Burckhardt, and Dilthey. Art of past ages presents the pecu- liar problem of alienation and distance, and Dilthey's entire methodological concern was to make it (along with other elements of past history) acces- sible to current understanding and perception. For we must "restore life and breath to the dust of the past out of the depths of our own life," and we do this by a special act of the imagination-that of creative "re-experiencing" (Nacherleben). Creative re-experiencing outflanks empty formalism by insisting that style is form grounded in history and by asserting that nothing is more natural to art history than to see parallels between periods of culture and periods of style. Perhaps the high point of this perception appears (of all places!) in Oswald Spengler's massive The Decline of the West where he distinguishes the "Classical" from the "Faustian" culture: the former expressing finitude and limitation in space, the latter expansive- ness and infinity in time. Thus stylistically the Doric temple, an architecture rooted in the earth, contrasts with the cathedral and the skyscraper soaring up to heaven. The sculpture of the Erechtheum, with blank faces but all body, is compared with the sculptures of the north porch of



Levi: The Lesson of Panofsky 81

Chartres where the bodies, elongated and draped for concealment, are totally subordinated to its spiritual and suffering faces, and the flat, two- dimensional Greek vase painting in the simple earth colors of black, dust yellow, and brick red is to be contrasted with Renaissance perspective painting of great depth redolent of the blues and greens of the infinite sky and the infinite sea. Here the generalized "spirit" of a culture is to be found concretely reflected in the stylistic properties of its arts.

Spengler is, of course, only illustrating a theory already enunciated by the celebrated art historians Riegl and Dvorak. Riegl makes the application to the individual artist. "Geniuses," he said, "do not stand outside their culture, they are an integral part of it .... The great artist is nothing but the executor, the supreme fulfillment of the Kunstwollen of his age." And Dvorak, inspired both by Hegel and by Dilthey's Geistesgeschichte, came increasingly to emphasize the necessity of identifying the total weltan- schauung underlying the work or style in question. In Idealism and Natur- alism in Gothic Art (1918) he interpreted items of mediaeval art as the expression of a zeitgeist informing all of the cultural elements of the late mediaeval world. Thus in the history of ideas there is a direct tradition which runs from Hegel and Dilthey to Riegl and Dvorak, and from them immediately to Panofsky himself.

Of course there is one other mediating link-that furnished by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer and Panofsky were colleagues at both the University of Hamburg and the Warburg Institute from the early 1920s onward, and Panofsky's theory of art history soon reflected what he learned from Cassirer. Cassirer's debt to Kant is widely known. Less clearly acknowledged is his debt to Hegel. For Cassirer advocated a philosophy of culture which should strive to identify that "unity of spirit" in the multiplicity of cultural forms dominant in any historical period, that factor which "recurs in each basic cultural form but in no two of them takes exactly the same shape." This then becomes a canon of method for the entire field of art history.

The great ideological divide which splits those seriously engaged in the enterprise of art history is that between formalism and contextualism- between those who try to isolate the artwork from its environment, focus attention only upon its intrinsic nature, and evaluate it by the aesthetic category of pure form as opposed to those who wish to embed rather than abstract, who see the work as a relational entity with a date and a historical incidence, a creator with a biography and aesthetic intentions, and for whom cultural placement, the inference of creative intention, and situation in an ongoing artistic tradition are not irrelevant externals but, in fact, constitutive of the artwork itself. In this most crucial of all the philosophical issues relevant to art history Panofsky is clearly a contextualist, and his notable contribution, a reliance upon iconographic and iconological readings, obviously presents the art historian with symbols that demand cultural decoding. "The art historian," said Panofsky, "will have to check what he thinks is the intrinsic meaning of as many other documents of civilization historically related to that work or groups of works, as he can master: of documents bearing witness to the political, poetical, religious, philosophical, and social tendencies of the personality, period or country under investigation."

The commitment to contextualism also carries with it a restored emphasis on content to the practice of art history. "In a work of art,"



82 Journal of Aesthetic Education

said Panofsky, "'form' cannot be divorced from 'content,' the distribution of color and lines, light and shade, volumes and planes, however delightful as a visual spectacle must also be understood as carrying a more-than-visual meaning." Form is here viewed less as a geometric impulse than as a cultural emergent-as a "style." And, as previously stated, style can now be defined as "form grounded in history."

It is now, I think, possible to speak of the dominant trend in contemporary art history as that of contextualism-a trend that begins with Hegel, passes through Burckhardt, Dilthey, Riegl, Dvorak, and Cassirer before coming to rest in Panofsky. For Panofsky was a sort of cultural historian in the grand manner who simply took as his point of departure works of art.

It would probably not be going too far to say that contextualism is now the dominant methodological standpoint in the field. Of course, Platonic abstractionism dies hard, and there are always a few fanatical purists (aided and abetted by the theory of the New Critics of the last generation) who regard a work of art as merely a formal structure subject to strict analysis and evaluation, shut off from issues of meaning, content, and tradition. Clement Greenberg (not altogether successfully) tried to be such a critic, and since the school upon which he fastened like a leech was that of abstract expressionism for which the categories of portraiture, still life, and landscape were inappropriate, if not indeed inapplicable, he did man- age a critical procedure based essentially upon the theory of Kant's Third Critique. More central to art history proper is the curiously dissenting figure of E. H. Gombrich.

Gombrich's relentless anti-Hegelianism, his mistrust of any totalizing concept like "the Zeitgeist," his denial of the facts of cultural organicism, all are excessive, and they are probably due more to ideological reasons, to misplaced political bias, than to factual survey or rational analysis. It has been said that Gombrich and his close friends and fellow Austrians, the philosopher Karl Popper and the economist Friedrich von Hayek, all look under their beds every night before going to sleep to make sure that the threatening figure of Hegel is not lurking there. They refer to each other in their works constantly, and they share Hegel as common enemy, the deep mistrust of organicism, and a relentless bias in favor of an isolated individualism. Only, it is doubtful if Gombrich himself can totally avoid organicism and the concept of social milieu in his own critical work. Occa- sionally he himself relapses. "The form of a representation," he said, "cannot be divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in which the given visual language gains currency." These are the last words of part 1 of Gombrich's Art and Illusion. Inveigh as he may against Hegel, he himself cannot evade the contextualism which Hegel was the first to bring to the interpretation of the arts and the humanities.

The thesis of the organic unity of a culture, the participation of its elements in a single cognitive or aesthetic principle, has been urged not only by art historians, but also by philosophers of the arts. Forty years ago Ortega y Gasset in The Dehumanization of Art stated it succinctly. "It is amazing how compact a unity every historical epoch presents throughout its various manifestations. One and the same inspiration, one and the same biological style, are recognizable in the several branches of art. The young musician-himself unaware of it-strives to realize in his medium the same aesthetic values as his contemporary colleagues-the poet, the painter, the



MacGregor: Trends in Art Education 83

playwright-in theirs. And this identity of artistic purpose necessarily pro- duces identical sociological consequences." This is the unity which, as we have seen, Panofsky discerned in mediaeval architecture, mediaeval music, mediaeval sculpture, and mediaeval philosophy. However the Platonic for- malists try artificially to isolate the individual work of art, their efforts are bound to fail. For atomic individualism is a high abstraction. The world is in fact a relational universe, and this holds for the cultural as well as the physical world. This is why Kunstgeschichte must always be viewed as Geistesgeschichte. And it is the ultimate lesson of Panofsky.

Aesthetic Education and Current Trends Affecting Arts Education

Nancy Parker MacGregor

Arts educators, whether in dance, music, theater, or the visual arts, have an inherent concern for what happens both inside and outside the classroom that affects the health of the various K-12 arts programs. The health of these arts programs often has a way of shaping the attitudes of people who can make a difference. If a high school counselor, for example, thinks an art course is entertaining and without substance, then the recommendation to a student may be to take the course as a fill-in activity. The art teacher, in this case, is placed in the position either of accepting the counselor's point of view or demonstrating that the program has substance. The im- provement of the art curriculum and instruction might be needed before the counselor will change the recommendation.

Events that affect the arts in education occurring outside the school are also of concern. Such recent activity can be identified by the current excellence in education movement. The Reagan administration's national commission report, A Nation at Risk, is one activity. Another is the Col- lege Board's document, Academic Preparation for College: What Students Need to Know and Be Able to Do. Both documents discuss the arts in terms of general aims. For example, the College Board's statement on the arts indicates that appreciation, knowledge, and skills developed in the arts are valuable preparation for college study. The impact of the excellence movement on current trends is the call for more substance as a means to improve the quality of the arts curriculum.

All of the arts fields involved in education, in fact, have a long history of professional activity designed to address the trends of the day. Past activity has been designed to improve the content and instruction of the arts curricula as well as to react to events that occurred outside the schools. A kind of perspective can be given to the current excellence movement calling for more substance by reflecting on one past educational event. A similar concern was raised and addressed twenty years ago when the Aes- thetic Education Curriculum Program was initiated by the Central Re- gional Educational Laboratory in cooperation with Ohio State University.

The Aesthetic Education Curriculum Program was the outgrowth of literature on the concept of aesthetic education and the encouragement

ournal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986 1986 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois



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