Disciplining Art's History

MARK A. CHEETHAM Disciplining Art's History The nature and status of art historical knowledge is one of the most contested issues in the humanities today. Art history is a relatively young discipline - established in a systematic fonn by German scholars such as RiegI and Wolfflin in the late nineteenth century but widely taught in universities only much more recently - and perhaps for this reason, its · boundaries and methods seem to be in constant flux. Yet in certain constituencies within the discipline today, there is a premature selfconfidence about the field's proper objects and its methods of inquiry, a confidence often adopted in reaction to the field's current spate of selfreflection and the ensuing calls for change. Because this confidence is maintained in many quarters now - and because many art historians would therefore question the picture of a disclpline in flux that I will paint - the paradox arises that the field is contested not on]y by 'revisionist ' scholars but also, however unwillingly, by those who must now defend their established methods as central to what they construe as a difficult but ultimately mature and stable discipline. If there is a unifying trend in art history today, it is this widespread attention to the discipline itself, to its historiography and proper methodology. But as I will show, the vision of the field - the answers to questions about what art is, how to write its history, and what we know when we do write it - depends to an extraordinary extent upon whose point of view is solicited. My aim here is to give an introduction to the methodological and epistemological questions being asked in the field of art history now, and to suggest their import for the future of the discipline. Let me begin with two examples that display the deep-set assumptions about knowledge that are typical of art history and that remind us of the boundaries and points of contention that exist between would-be traditional and would-be revisionist views. For many art historians, the unspoken norm is the empirical study of monuments and the documentation of so-called 'primary' materials. 'The method of art history,' according to one recent commentator to whose ideas I will return, 'is essentially a process of elaboration and the seeking of detail for its own sake in the hope that something significant will come of it' (Johnson, 162). Other types of questions and issues - especially those concerned with 'theory' in its many forms - continue to be met with reUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1992 438 MARK A. CHEETHAM sponses ranging from perplexed forbearance to outright censoriousness. My first example of this situation is anecdotal, but I think its informality gives immediate access to the assumptions that continue to define much art history. A'senior colleague once told me that our professional society doesn't meet with'the Learned Societies because 'we' art historians are always in Europe studying works and digging in archives in late Mayor early June when this conference is held. The simplicity and finality of his answer could derive only from a secure sense of disciplinary mission, a picture of a self-sufficient field working with primary research materials to enlarge its empirical knowledge of art objects. Both the security and empiricist bias of a large constituency of art historians are underlined again by my second example, which I need to elaborate in more detail. In a recent study provocatively titled Art History: Its Use and Abuse, W. McAllister Johnson surveys the field from the traditionalist vantage point of what I would call the 'silent majority' of art historians. Through very learned discussions of topics such as art historians' research patterns, the use of bibliography, scholarly writing in the discipline, the field as defined within and outside academe, and cataloguing theory and practice, Johnson's magisterial narration relies on his analogous sense of a 'we,' a definite sense, I want to argue, of proper and widespread comportment in the discipline..He refers, for example, to 'the historiographic tradition we all know and ignore' (xii) and goes on to assert that art history as a 'field ... is nowhere addressed for its larger implications' (xv...