Meaning and Expression: Toward a Sociology of Art by Hanna Deinhard (review)

72 Books Meaning and Expression: Toward a Sociology of Art. Hanna Deinhard. Beacon Press, Boston, Mass., 1970. 120 pp., illus. $8.50. Reviewed by Hilde Hein* The title of Deinhard's book, despite its sociological qualification , is misleading. To a philosopher it sets up expectations of conceptual analysis or of descriptive phenomenology. In fact, the book is a provocative examination of cultural historical styles. All works of art, according to the author, include both meaning and expression as elements, but distinct societies at different historic moments tend to regard one or the other element preferentially. This preference also determines the critical attitude of that society-whether it will value as art a wide range of objects (because of their expressive quality) or restrict the designation 'work of art' to only those items that share a common meaning. Both terms, 'meaning' and 'expression', are defined extra artistically. as culturally determined features manifested in art. Mearring, which is variable, is independent of the visual aspect of a painting but is its particular iconic referent. The meaning of a work of art is not exclusively aesthetic-it may be a religious or philosophical dogma, a political conviction or a moral imperative. Expression, also characterized as 'potential content', is more directly identified with the visual features of the work itself. I t is manifested in the form relationships of those visual elements as they correspond to structural relationships of the social world outside the work. Expression is thus an objective, relatively unchanging property of the work of art; while meaning is variable, reflecting the extra-artistic values and beliefs of a particular society. Until the advent of modern art (ca. 1850) pictures were esteemed largely for their meaning; but contemporary critics have exalted expressiveness to a position of pre-eminence. While expression necessarily reflects the historic context of the artist. i t is also the means by which art conveys the 'timeless' qualities of general experience. Deinhard affirms that expression in the concreteness of its artistic embodiment reconciles the particularity of historicity with the universality and timelessness attributed to fine art. The paradoxical unity of these attributions provides the point of departure of her sociological inquiry. How, she asks. can works of art that are necessarily made within and for a particular society, also 'live for' and 'speak to' the concerns of totally different societies? This question, which is posed in the form of a classically Marxist dialectical puzzle, is commonly answered by a denial of history. Aestheticians seek ahistorical constants such as objective properties of works of art (e.g., 'significant form'), or as essential features of human appreciative consciousness le.g., archetypal patterns ) or as transhistoric canons of aesthetic excellence. But Deinhard is committed to the intact preservation of the dilemma: the timelessness of time-bound art. Her aim is to find and formulate laws that explicate the structural and formal interactions of works of art and their contemporary societies, their mutual influence and mutual illumination. Her answer to the classic dilemma is thus framed in terms of mobile, but lawful, patterns of human domination and subordination, socio-economic relationships and their ideological rationalizations. The structure of her argument takes shape and is revealed through the painstaking analysis of four paintings, three of them depictions of the same biblical event-the massacre of the innocents as commanded by King Herod in anticipation of his own deposition by the fore-ordained Christ. Each of these paintings (by Giotto, Bruegel and Rubens) is shown to express by means of the formal arrangement of its visual elements the structural features of the disposition of power and authority characteristic of its time. Each painting reveals as well the prevalent mode of acceptance (passive or resistant) that different segments of scoiety display with respect to that power structure. It is this expressive content that fixes the work of art in its historic moment but that may transcend documentation to merit the characterization of universality. The artist need not be merely a barometer of his environment (a passive measure of condensation) but may be a formative influence upon his own or future societies. The value of works of art to societies other than their own rests upon their...