The Essential Dürer

12. Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the Study of Dürer and Grünewald

12 Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the Study of Dürer and Grünewald Keith Moxey By way of a case study of the changing historiographic fortunes of Albrecht Dürer and Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1475/80–1528), this essay reflects on an important assumption underlying the disciplinary activities of art history— the idea of historical distance.1 The rich literature on this subject in the philosophy of history has prompted this consideration as to whether, and to what extent, the special circumstances of specifically art historical writing demand a different approach to its analysis. Art historical literature offers a number of ways in which the distance between the historical horizon under consideration and that of the interpreting historian might be conceived, and these ideas in turn have offered the discipline enduring models of methodological procedure.2 My purpose here is not to evaluate these paradigms of historical distance, but rather to consider their function. What is their nature, what purpose do they serve, and how do they change over time? The role played by the object that is the focus of art historical speculation cannot be ignored. The aesthetic power of works of art, the fascination of images and their capacity to dominate our response to them in the present, argues against treating them as if they were simply documents of particular historical horizons.3 Works of art can appear so present, so immediately accessible , that it is often difficult to keep in mind that they are as opaque as any Impossible Distance 207 other historical trace. Can we think dispassionately about objects that compel a phenomenological reaction? Is not the intensity of our confrontation with the art of the past such that we cannot easily articulate the nature of our relation to it?4 The present imperative of the objects of art historical fascination inevitably shapes the way in which we think about their role in their own historical location. This reminder is not to suggest that art historians can do without a concept of distance—far from it—but to propose that every attempt at definition betrays our incapacity to stabilize its meaning. My argument will depend for its force on remembering the historiography of German Renaissance art during the 1930s and 1940s. The use of the German past by the National Socialists, the conflation of historical horizons in the interest of nationalist propaganda, is an extreme example of the rejection of an objectifying distance between past and present. As a necessary reaction to the way in which the art of German Renaissance artists, such as Dürer and Grünewald, had been identified with the nationalist and racist doctrines of National Socialism, postwar historians emphasized the distance that separated the past from the present. The history of art had to be purged of its relation to the present so as to ensure an ‘‘untainted’’ view of the past. The success of this distancing project allowed postwar historians to imagine that they were separated from the historical horizons they studied by an absolute and unbridgeable gulf. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Before we delve into the historiography of Dürer and Grünewald, I want to frame the argument in terms of the role of memory in historical writing. How do we keep the objects of the past at bay, while simultaneously insisting on their contemporary relevance? An insistence on our access to the past is as important a feature of historical writing as an acknowledgment of its absence, especially if it is to be a cultural medium for enabling the present to come to terms with the past. Like remembering and forgetting, historical writing appears to depend on the paradox of asserting the presence of meaning in the past, while simultaneously recognizing that its articulation by the contemporary historian transforms that meaning beyond recognition. The inherent power of history seems to lie in its capacity to create the past as much as to document it. Since the work of Pierre Nora, Patrick Hutton, and others—especially those interested in the history of the Holocaust—the concept of memory has seemed to offer historians a notion more flexible than that of history, yet just as capable of suggesting the meaning of the events of the past.5 As Freud suggested long ago, memories are themselves recast every time they are called 208 keith moxey...