Introduction

Many scholars in the fields of art history and art criticism, even after the debates of the last decades, see the value of applying a psychoanalytic viewpoint to certain problems involving not only individual but group psychology and not only living artists but ones long dead. One still hopes to combine the fields in such a way as to produce new perspectives and insights into the materials unavailable to either approach separately. Naturally, old problems remain (manifest in numerous failed efforts at “psychohistory”) of integrating psychoanalytic insights into history without reducing the richness and complexity of historical situations to psychological elements and without simplistically projecting the results derived from the behavior of individuals to social groups. Frequently both problems have originated from the uninformed ambition of specialists exploring unfamiliar materials. The contributors to this issue have both a specialized knowledge of an area of art history, and a good acquaintance with psychoanalytic writings relevant to their subject. Their studies of materials unlikely to be familiar to a psychoanalytic audience have a degree of clarity and freshness that will, I hope, expand the horizons of the readership of American Imago.

When, at the beginning of this century, the “Founding Fathers” of psychoanalysis analyzed art they did so as a metapsychological avocation from their clinical practice. They devoted their attention to the most famous (often Italian High Renaissance) masters; everything else they either ignored as uninteresting mediocrity or studied as the protocol of a psychopathological condition. In recent decades both the nature of the critics and their subject matter have changed dramatically in the U.S.: comparatively few of the psychoanalytic critics maintain clinical practices; and, following the examples set by minority and feminist critics, they have paid increasing attention to non-canonical art, art that falls outside the traditional definition of “fine-art” represented in the standard art history survey texts of Gombrich, Janson, and Helen Gardner. Here, they encounter art historians like those contributing to this volume (only two of whom have clinical practices) who increasingly find their material in “non-art” images such as scatology, pictographic cartoons, art by and for children, intentionally distorted self-portrait masks, technological schemata, and graffiti.

The determining influence on the new art history has come from critics concerned with the last two centuries, mainly modernist art, literature, photography, and film of France. French critics found novel ways to adapt the idealism of German thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger to their interest in linguistics and semiotics. In their work visual theory overshadowed the traditions of iconography and connoisseurship; and factuality (the Annales School) yielded to new theoretical concerns. Spreading from Johns Hopkins and the Ivy League schools who invited Derrida, Lacan and others, these new ideas powerfully influenced a whole generation of American scholars. Now—saturated perhaps with visiting French scholars—there is an increasing effort in the U.S. to engage in a dialogue between French semiotics (Saussure) and theory (Lacan, Derrida) and Anglo-American empiricist and positivist concerns: Peirce displaces Saussure and theory engages history, iconography, and connoisseurship. (But least of all in the Italian Renaissance where many entrenched scholars and most of the big museums maintain a predilection for “great art.”)

Psychoanalysis in its variations and reincarnations has been an important ingredient in the new directions of art history, especially of the eighteenth century and later: all the studies in this collection evidence this interdisciplinary turn. The eight articles assembled here fall roughly into two categories based on chronological emphasis, and will accordingly be published in two issues of American Imago, the first containing the articles of Gandelman, Spector, Ettinger, and Levine; the second those of Collins and Cowart, Knafo, Kuspit and Spitz.

Claude Gandelman ’s discussion of scatology during the French Revolution shows how aggressive anal humor was aimed at elevated and powerful targets like the King and Queen. (One could relate this to the political satire that served from antiquity on the aim of humbling authority.)

My own analysis of the monstrification of independent women overlaps Gandelman’s period, and shares with his article and that of Collins/Cowart a concern for showing that the icons representing the...