The Art Critic and the Art Historian

Leonardo, Vol. 13, pp. 139-142. Pergamon Press 1980. Printedin Great Britain THE ART CRITIC AND THE ART HISTORIAN* Quentin 8ell* * We have today no great critical figure of the stature of Ruskin, of Roger Fry or even of Herbert Read. This may or may not be a 'good thing', but it is I believe symptomatic of something else-a confusion and an infirmity of purpose and an inability to define the role of the critic, the reasons for which are my chief concern. Art criticism is of course bedevilled by other circumstances of our time. The character of much contemporary painting and sculpture is such that works ofart frequently defy description, and, more importantly, the descriptive function of the critic has been undertaken by modern technology so that the modern public needs, not so much an analysis of that which it cannot see as a commentary upon that which through reproductive processes is made visible. I think that it is fair to say that our most popular writers on art are those who provide this kind of commentary. Having the image itself, we are glad to be given facts concerning its date, its affinities, its symbolism, its allusions and, in fact, its history. In consequence this is the age not of the critic but of the historian. But although the information that the scholars can provide may and probably will help us to a deeper enjoyment of a work of art, it cannot be considered essential. The essential qualities without which the critic is impotent are sensibility and the ability to communicate his sentiments. And it is precisely his ability to proceed without external evidence which enables the art critic to venture into a field vaster and more various, more accessibleand more comprehensible, than that enjoyed by any other kind of critic. For the art critic is not hampered, as the literary critic must be, by the narrow frontiers and the mortality of language. He needs no translator to explain the beauties ofUtamaro or of the Maya sculptors. Nor is this all; I would claim, although perhaps with a shade less confidence, that our knowledge of the visual arts can have an intimacy which is seldom possible in the fieldofliterature. We may sometimes be fortunate enough to have several versions or drafts of a literary work, but it is surely very rarely that we can witness the actual operation of an author's mind. But a sheet of drawings by Raphael or Leonardo, a brief notation of landscape by Claude or by Rembrandt, any kind of pictorial or sculptural thinking in wax or clay or upon paper is sufficientlycommon. So that there is a sense in which we know Rembrandt better than we can ever know Shakespeare for we have the record of his idle, his half-conscious *Abridged version of the Leslie Stephen Lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge, 26 Nov. 1973. Complete text in pamphlet form available fromCambridge University Press; also in Critical Inquiry 1,497 (1975). **Historian and theoretician of art, Cobbe Place, Beddingham , Lewes, Sussex, England. 139 thoughts. Nor is it simply that such records can give a vivid idea of what was passing through an artist's mind; there is a further degree of intimacy, not easily described in words, but familiar enough I think to anyone who has handled a pencil or a riffler; it is founded upon a community of experience, that fellow feeling which enables us to know, or at least to imagine that we know, just what a Chinese painter who died two thousand years ago felt-in his fingers so to speak-as he described the silhouette of a bamboo, how the loaded brush responded to his pressure upon the shaft, the way in which the hairs stroked the paper as they expanded to form the belly of the leaf and contracted to achieve the final calculated flourish of the stem. The legitimate theatre of operations is, for the critic, much wider than it can ever be for even the most encyclopaedic of art historians, also the operations themselves are of an essentially different character. Take any picture, say a Titian, and imagine that I have talked about...