A History of Art History
by Christopher S. Wood

Reviewed by Surya Bowyer

Despite what it says on the cover, this is not a history of art history. Not really. Part of the justification for not writing a history of art history, for Christopher Wood, is that that book would be much narrower in scope—and perhaps even a little boring: even by the sixteenth century, Wood tells us, there is no writer on art who transcends the “simple narrative of rebirth and constant modern progress”, no critic who sees beyond the fallacy of continual improvement. By thinking more widely about art’s relationship to time and history, Wood is able to form a richer and longer narrative, beginning in 800 A.D. and ending in the second half of the twentieth century.

That Wood would choose this approach is no surprise. His research is concerned with the temporalities of art, his work often interested in art that is anachronistic, or archaic, or which predicates itself on an earlier type or norm. He has also taken an interest in artworks that remain outside the mainstream of art history, such as folk art, votive objects, and relics. Artworks upsetting temporality is a key thread throughout Wood’s book: “Art history protects art as one of the few places in modern life where disparate ways of thinking about time are protected [...] All around art is linear time, directed and convergent, the time of mere experience.” Art gives us another kind of time.

Yet for all this unconventional focus on the temporalities of art, many areas of Wood’s book will be familiar. For one, the figure of Giorgio Vasari (1511 - 1574) looms large. In many ways Vasari’s work spells the beginning of art history: “Vasari lifts art out of worldly history; art now has its own history.” With his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects Vasari also established the feedback loop between art-writing and art-making, an insular relationship which has persisted ever since. Artists saw themselves as participating in the history being written by Vasari—they saw the trajectory of their own careers within the annals of the Lives.

Other key players are less predictable. For one, Wood sees Francis Bacon—the philosopher, 1561 - 1626, not the painter—as key to our modern conception of art. Bacon sets up observation and experiment as the only way to elicit knowledge from nature, with the end goal of distinguishing that fact from falsehood. Wood argues that modern art history has had to contend with the fact that the Baconian method, by not incorporating art-making, relegates art history to being “knowledge about a kind of non-knowledge.”

The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) provides a counterpoint to Bacon, in that the German philosopher argues that art can provide “at least a glimpse of the truth”, a glimpse that reality itself does not. And more recently the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 – 2002) provided a middle ground between Hegel’s and Bacon’s extremes by considering art’s relation to time: “Art eludes objective analysis because it is never fully historical. Even the art of the past is always pointing forward.” In many ways this quote could serve as a neat encapsulation of Wood’s broad thesis about art’s temporalities and its relationship to history. Nonetheless, neither Hegel’s nor Gadamer’s contributions have proved as popular as Bacon’s, and the partition of art apart from empiricist knowledge has, in the Western world at least, been accepted. For many of us, art opens a view “not onto what is, but only at best onto what is not.”

In some ways Wood’s discussion of Vasari, Bacon, and other earlier thinkers is a preface to the “moment” of modern art history’s “birth” as an academic discipline at the end of the 18th century. Wood communicates the 19th century’s importance to the history of art history even if he assures us that most of the “art historians of the early nineteenth century have faded from view and, in truth, are not very interesting to read.” It is in 1844, for instance, that we get the first monograph which is about “not an artist but an art historian”, signalling the discipline doubling back upon itself “almost as soon as it begins”. By the later parts of the century, the discipline has been incorporated into the academic system, and has taken on its “modern contours”. By paying attention to seemingly quotidian details such as the number of university lecturers employed in the field of art history at various points during the century, Wood avoids a common pitfall of the historian of ideas: detaching thoughts from the people and institutions that give rise to them. He is also sensitive to wider shifts, such as how the rise of historiography in the 1920s “signalled a turn away from collecting, custodianship, museums, and generally art history’s sensuous involvement with art”. From this point onward, art historians are less likely to be painters or collectors themselves.

A History of Art History is structured as a series of vignettes. The chapters split the book into unequal periods: the first chapter is 800-1400, the last 1950-1960. But each chapter is less about a period per se than about one, or a few, people. For instance, the 1910-1920 chapter begins briefly with Freud’s 1913 Totem and Taboo, but really this is preamble—the chapter’s real focus is the “most influential art historian of the twentieth century”, Heinrich Wölfflin. Wölfflin’s 1915 Principles of Art History earned recognition beyond disciplinary bounds, finding influence among historians of literature and music. The cornerstones of his analysis are four “unbalanced pairs”, of which the fourth, for Wood, is the most important: multiplicity and unity. One way of understanding the pair is through the difference between Renaissance and Baroque art: while the former retains the separateness of the parts which form the whole, the latter pulls these parts into an “endless flow”.

Yet even with this focus on art historians, Wood’s book never reads like a mere annals of great thinkers on art. His focus on the temporalities of art, on wider shifts in the field, and on the influence of academic institutions all temper the impact of the individuals he writes about. What we get, in Wood’s account, is the sense that art history has many starts rather than a single, definite beginning. Did it start with Vasari in the mid-sixteenth century? With Winckelmann in the mid-eighteenth century, or with the rise of the academic discipline in the nineteenth? To these canonical beginnings Wood adds another, less orthodox one, namely the moment in the later eighteenth century when a minority of antiquarians and collectors began to look again at previously disregarded medieval panels. With this reassessment, we see the rise of relativism, which for Wood has remained the central tenet of art history ever since: the idea that each work should be assessed in relation to its own time, rather than any fixed external measure or ideal.

In the 1950s comes a big shift. The discipline settles “on a basic consensus around form. Every painting, figurative or abstract, is read as if it were abstract.” This coincides with art history’s academic consolidation in the US university, finally taking an assured place in the realm of mass education. But then Wood’s book stops dead. There are no more vignettes. The reader is left to wonder what happens to art history after 1960. Wood mentions “the self-reform of the discipline in the 1970s” but does not provide an account of it.

It seems Wood doesn’t want to write about more recent developments. Contemporary art for him is “so self-reverential and citational that unless you are keeping up month by month you will not be able to assess it.” Perhaps more recent art history would befit a further book. But the sheer density of more recent art threatens to explode Wood’s own project. Contemporary art is so “telescoped” that to address it would threaten the balance of a book which is otherwise happy to tell a 1160-year story in barely more than four hundred pages. And moreover, Wood assures us that contemporary art history is too esoteric anyway. The cause of this? The influence of other fields such as philosophy and psychoanalysis, something that Wood refers to as the “non-historical”, “non-art-oriented” “hybridization” of the field. Given Wood’s happiness to summarise (and summarise well) esoteric thinkers from earlier periods, this criticism reads strangely, particularly if seen as a justification for the book’s endpoint of 1960.

But even if this book is not really a history of art history, or not just that, and even if it fails to look much beyond 1960, Wood deserves much credit for what he does do. This is a project made possible only by years, perhaps decades, of reading. The depth of Wood’s accumulated knowledge means this is a book that will appeal as much to veteran art historians as it will a more general audience.  And yet Wood wears his erudition rather lightly given the ton of pages he must have waded through. He is, for one, very happy dishing out acerbic criticism if he thinks it is justified. His sharp tongue is a delight, such as when he describes a seven-volume biography of Jacob Burckhardt as “by considerable margin the longest biography ever dedicated to a scholar whose life” beyond academia “was no more eventful than yours or mine, dear reader.” The man certainly knows how to line up a zinger.