Art and Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (review)

Pierre Francastel's most significant work, a book that had an enormous impact on French architectural culture, was first published in 1956 and, like most books on aesthetics of any serious interest, bears the scars of its era. As Bois notes in his foreword, Francastel is a chauvinist. He sees his book as correcting not just the intellectual and historical errors of such major figures in the study of technology and art as Siegfried Giedion and Lewis Mumford. He also wants to attack their Americanism. In the post-War period of reconstruction, as the Marshall Plan impacted so profoundly on Europe's sense of its identity and its fading hegemony, Fran-castel gives voice to a ferocious French nationalism. Only an Epistle Dedicatory to de Gaulle could make this any clearer.

In itself, this is not a problem. Fran-castel gives a powerful analysis of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. From Henry Cole, founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum, John Ruskin and Herbert Read, whose writings still inform the British art school tradition, through Giedion and Mumford, Francastel digs out a binary opposition that, he argues convincingly, structured modernism for a generation: it is the opposition between the technological-mechanical and the natural-organic. Design, art and especially the architecture of the period were formed over a period of a hundred years, from mid-century to mid-century, by the effort to make technology conform to organic principles. Yet, he argues, the organic is not a category without its own history and cannot therefore be taken as a permanent principle.

Moreover, the organicism of Mum-ford, for example, is grounded in an earlier, aristocratic disdain for trade, a disdain that finds its strongest voice in Ruskin, for whom Francastel reserves his finest rancor. "In these enlightened times," he writes, "it is unnerving to see the accumulation of archaeological errors that turn a book like The Stones of Venice into a veritable museum of scientific horrors," adding that the book "has a pompous, pontificating style and a strained poetic tone that has lost much of its appeal" (p. 40). On the other hand, he reserves a warm regard for Giedion, especially for his wonderful chapter in Mechanization Takes Command on the history of locks and of the entirely new principles of mechanics embodied in the innovation of the Yale lock.

Francastel's goal, beyond settling accounts with the U.S.A., is to analyze and then to attack the thesis, largely presumed as axiomatic, that art must elevate itself above commercially developed, machine-produced goods. Accurately assessing the origins of this belief in the thought that civilization is the art of leisure, not that of work, he sets out to name and shame those who have promulgated the ideology of art's elevation above labor, describing the antithesis at one juncture rather illuminatingly as that between "sensibility and reason" (p. 77). This he pursues through what is now a normative art history, in which the French Impressionists and the Cubists play egregious roles. That Fran-castel was well ahead of the field in noting the impact of current physical theories of light on these painters is not in itself enough reason to translate a book that is so often and so deeply of its own time.

What may perhaps rationalize the translation for contemporary readers is a second expression of the antithesis as "a confrontation between the concrete and figurative activities of our era" (p. 74). The meanings of "figurative" slip from page to page, as we can expect from a writer who just predates the turn to language in cultural analysis. More significantly, so does the term "concrete," which is anchored in an idiosyncratic and fluid definition of the plastic "object." What we do gain from this are sudden flashes-for example the realization that speed is a key category of contemporary experience that impacts on, for instance, the movement from raw...