Putting the Art Back into Art History

Leonardo, Vol. 9, pp. 63-65. Pergamon Press 1976. Printed in Great Britain PUTTING THE ART BACK INTO ART HISTORY Michael Levey** A distressing tendency in current art history is that it emphasizes history at the expense of art. It is far from my intention to attack history or historians, or deny the value of both in the study of art. For example, I hope I appreciate the paintings of Velasquez as warmly as anyone here, but I believe I would no less warmly recommend any would-be student of Velasquez not to rest entirely on his response to Velasquez but to delve into the nitty-gritty facts beginning with the baptismal entry in Seville and move to the more nebulous yet no less essential facts of the character of Philip IV, the nature of the Madrid court, collecting, patronage, attitudes to art in seventeenth century Spain-or any other evidence which is bound to illuminate this particular artist. Of course we need all the knowledge we can get, however oblique, however trivial-seeming. I never laugh at the equivalent of artists’ laundry bills being published; they may tell us a surprising amount. At worst they serve to remind us that the arist was someone who needed his clothes washed, being firmly rooted in place and time, set within particular circumstances, subject to the conditions of his own age: in a word, a phenomenon susceptible to historical study. Indeed, without such study rigorously pursued, we shall barely progress beyond art-fancying, drunkenly reeling up and down the garden of art, declaring everything in it is lovely, while unable to distinguish between dahlias and daffodils. So personally I do not need to have the virtues and values of history or historical awareness urged on me. Historical awareness happens to be completely within the English traditionof art history. If you consult, for example, the very first number of the Burlington Magazine published this month 72 years ago you may be surprised by how un-amateurish the approach of the best articles is: cool professionalism was already the magazine’s keynote and the editorial stressed the need for historical study and research. Yet it also sounded a first faint note of warning about another need: not to let the true end of art-aesthetic enjoyment-become atrophied. And there I feel it touched on something which time has made only more urgent and pertinent. Like the artist, the work of art is definitely a historical fact. The ‘Rokeby Venus’, let us say, is just as much something which has happened as is the battle of Waterloo or the Reform Bill. We all know we would not last long conducting historical studies on the basis of whether we are fond of the battle of Waterloo or find the Reform Bill beautiful. And I think we art historians worry too much about the analogy. Some people might say that the ‘Rokeby Venus’ too should be looked at without too many subjective preoccupations about whether one likes it or . * An address to the inaugural meeting of the Association of Art Historians in London on 22 March 1975. (It was first published in The Times Higher Education Supplement (London) issue of 4 April 1975. ** Director, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WCZN 5DN, England. finds it beautiful. Such reactions may be thought irrelevant -at least to any serious study-‘serious’ being a loaded word, often used, I believe, by art historians to characterize their own work as opposed to that of their rivals. Like a stiff upper lip among the upper or middle classes, suppression of aesthetic reaction easily becomes the hallmark of the man who knows how to behave. The ideally professional art historian then appears someone who would no more care to be caught openly admiring a work of art than a surgeon would wish to fall in love with the patient he was operating on. But, with the greatest respect to the greatest art-historical surgeons among us, the ‘Rokeby Venus’ is not our patient. And, though it has a historical existence and is within history, it is ultimately not of the same order as a merely historical event. Anatomize a work of art as...