Toward a Geography of Art (review)

This is an ambitious but at times conceptually flawed, and unevenly written study, yet in two respects Toward a Geography of Art is a groundbreaking contribution: the historiography of German and central European art history from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries; and the discussion of early modern European collective identity formations. Kaufmann's main purpose is to extend the domain of art historical methodology to include geographical considerations, and he is prepared to consider what writing a "geography" of art history in 2004 entails from many different points of view. Though disappointing in that he provides only brief descriptive epitomes of the historical texts under discussion, so that readers seeking an analytical account — integrated into the broader history of race science, for example — will need to supply their own gloss, Kaufmann's study is useful as a sourcebook that will, one hopes, soon encourage other more critical historiographic studies of the role of racial thinking in art history.

The main lines of Kaufmann's argument is that geographical approaches of the past provide no epistemological or ethical foothold for a contemporary geography of art or any other kind of art history for that matter ("while the premises of geographical determinism and racial or ethnic essentialism may have been discredited"), yet these assumptions may still be found in current work (102). Furthermore, regardless of linguistic, institutional, or national setting, all writers before the twentieth century and many through and even beyond World War II share untenable assumptions about the relationship between visual appearances (in art and human physiognomy) and mental capacities. It was perplexing for this reviewer that Kaufmann does not always situate his own subject position clearly in relation to racist narratives (see 89, for example, where I am hard pressed to think what could be more discredited than the Nazi writings and their precedents under discussion). Yet elsewhere Kaufmann is critically alert in articulating the problematics of ethnic or racial identity as categories of historical analysis. The most valuable sections deal with "the periphery of Europe" (98), where he joins others in calling for a recognition of the political dimension of artistic geography along with a renewal of that concept in a framework of historical critique.

Benedict Anderson's notion of "imagined communities" is the primary touchstone for Kaufmann's discussion of collective identity formation. Part 2, beginning with an articulate consideration of the concept of identity informed by recent writings in cultural geography, analyzes dynastic alliances from the Netherlands to Poland before and after the treaties of Westphalia in 1648, particularly the role that Dutch art and artists played in the diffusion of representational styles (split along the stylistic axis of Italianate classicism and scientific naturalism) from urban metropolises that encouraged artistic innovation to artistic peripheries that received them.

Part 3, devoted to the legacy of Kubler's ideas on cultural interaction in the Americas — a legacy that has been extensively discussed by Latin Americanists in recent years — is problematic for these reasons. While Kaufmann (barely) acknowledges that "scholars have recently argued that the [center-periphery] model of artistic development represents the 'colonizer's model of the world'" (163), he rejects the majority of the recent scholarship for putting undue emphasis on indigenous sources (see for example 297). What is immediately at stake is Kubler's proposed solution to reconstructing cultural interaction in the visual realm, which has been largely eclipsed by relativist approaches with an interest in the ways that the same images and objects can mean different things to different people even at the same time. The final chapter, which deals with the exportation of European ideas to Japan, is an exception, and a fascinating study of the inadvertent effects of the Protestant Reformation in Asia, where ceremonial destructions of Christian icons (e'fumi) were practiced in early modern times. Kaufmann is right to stress that colonial situations do not usually offer examples of assimilation (339). Still, he does not sufficiently recognize the active...