Von Kunstworten und -werten. Die Entstehung der deutschen Kunstkritik in Periodika der Aufklärung by Margrit Vogt (review)

Von Kunstworten und -werten offers an archeology not only of the scientific discipline known today as art history—a term that is an invention of the nineteenth century—but also of an accompanying essayistic, aesthetic, literary, and narrative mode of writing that paralleled the process of discipline formation, but never became part of it. Interestingly both trends had their origins in reviews and criticism of the visual arts, although art criticism did also borrow important tools from literary criticism, the development of which was in some respects slightly ahead of art criticism. Diderot’s writings on art are but one prominent example; early German Romantics like the Schlegel brothers eventually would represent the epitome of this kind of synthetic contemplation of art. Von Kunstworten und -werten does not just trace the origins of art history, but also of art as a topic of contemplation in the eighteenth century’s public domain. With its interdisciplinary focus, Margrit Vogt’s book does more than trace the origins of art history as a discipline; it also looks at the interaction of the contemplation of the visual arts with many other artistic and intellectual discourses.

In order for art criticism to be possible, one needs museums, or at the very least somewhat frequent art exhibitions, and an infrastructure of journals and magazines that can serve as media for the publication of reviews. The beginnings of both in Germany can be found in the second half of the eighteenth century. The museum—the origins of which are often traced back to the opening of the Musée Napoléon in Paris in 1793, now known as the Louvre—in Germany had predecessors, for instance, in the famous Dresdner Gemäldegalerie (in existence since 1648), the Bildergalerie Potsdam (1764), and the Mannheimer Antikensaal (1767). In the eighteenth century increasingly aristocrats opened their collections for the public, and academies organized exhibitions as well. The second important development for the beginnings of a critical discourse on the history of art is the publication of periodicals specializing in art criticism. Leipzig, Augsburg, and Frankfurt were important regional centers where new periodicals with a focus on the arts start to appear. They often rely on French publications for information and also intellectual style, but simultaneously attempt to inform the public about German art and artists as well. They intended to be up-to-date in their information, aspired to be read by all German speakers, and subscriptions could be bought all over Germany—a necessity in order to be able to survive commercially—but the periodicals otherwise demonstrate a strong international orientation by reporting extensively on exhibitions in other European countries. They were in general not very successful in promoting German art abroad (128). In contrast to France, in German-speaking areas art criticism was not bound to specific institutions and, because of the geographical distance, not limited in its ability to criticize products of other national traditions. It is clear that French developments were important for Gottsched who was the editor of several periodicals published in Leipzig; this however neither leads to an uncritical copying of French models nor to an aversion against those same models. The relationship to France, as Vogt shows, is that of a deliberate cultural transfer and of a selective appropriation of what is useful.

It is because of the accessibility of museums, exhibitions, and periodicals to the public that a public sphere interested in art (kunstinteressierte Öffentlichkeit) could come into being. While early art history in the strict sense seeks to identify historical trends systematically and idealizes antiquity, the essayistic mode of writing about art is not only more dialogic, but also integrates the contemplation of the visual arts into thinking about the arts (and literature) as part of the schönen Künste more generally. Good taste is expected to be in line with reason; it prioritizes what our reason...